The 9 Recruiting Tools That Will Improve Your Recruiting System

Hey everyone, it's Richard Milligan with 4C Recruiting, and I'm back to cut another podcast today. I am just gonna give a ton of stuff away today. Over the last couple years of my coaching, I have coached around about a dozen different tools And today I'm going to just— we're going to give away the secrets to a lot of those tools. When I say the secrets, just what tools are we using? Like, if you're a recruiting leader and you want to build a strong system and you're tired of like working from your notepad, how would you do that? And so I'm going to give you every one of the things that we're using inside my coaching. We're going to talk about those briefly today, and then we're going to actually put a document up. on our Recruiting Conversations website that you'll be able to access that will give you links to be able to get to each one of these as well. So we're going to give away a lot of great information today that's going to be very practical for you as you go to build your systems as a recruiting leader. So we're going to go live to the podcast starting right now. 3 and 2 and 1. Hey everybody, it's Richard Milligan. With 4C Recruiting and your host to Recruiting Conversations, the podcast. I am always excited to be with you. Very excited to be with you today because I love giving stuff away. And when I say giving stuff away, I mean my content, my best ideas. I actually love giving those things away because what do they say? 1%— the activators are 1-percenters, right? That's why I always call them the 1 percenters. So if there's 1% of people that, you know, if there's 3% of people that are looking to grow and there's 1% of people that are actually activating inside the 3%, whatever I give away here is actually really safe in terms of you will be in the minority if you go act on the things that I actually expose you to today. And so with that said, I love giving it away because the people that activate, they are in my core. They are my kind of people. And so I'm here to help you. And what we're going to do is this. We're— I'm going to go through the list of recruiting tools that I coach to. Now, I'm not going to go through every single one of them, but what I am going to do is go through about 10 of these tools. Now, here's what I'm going to do. If you'll go to recruitingconversations.com/tools, So T-O-O-L-S. Make sure you get the S on the end of that because there's multiple tools that I'm going to cover today. If you will go to that, we will actually have a one-sheet there PDF that you can download, and it will have links to each one of the tools that I'm going to go over today. And what I'm going to do is this: we're going to go fast, but I'm going to talk about the things that are available to you as a recruiting leader that you can go get on your own. You don't need your company to sign you up for a CRM. There's a very inexpensive easy-to-use CRM that's available out there, and I'm going to talk about today. You don't need your company to do things like sign you up for LinkedIn, right? You can go get that on your own. And so as we go through these different tools, I'm going to talk about why I use them and how I use them. It will be 50,000-foot view of this for the sake of time and crunching all this into a relatively meaningful podcast, but you will have access to each one of these. And so with that said, this is a little bit different of a podcast, but let's go. Let's get off into these. Okay? Let's just start with the principle that I have spoken of in my podcast again and again and again, which is that your social leadership brand matters. Okay? So if we come to a consensus here that your social leadership brand matters, what tools do you need at your disposal to make your leadership brand work well. Okay? Right now, 2019, here's what I can tell you. You are crazy if you're not maximizing LinkedIn. You're just passing up opportunity after opportunity because you're just not activating on having a leadership brand on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is a prerequisite. You have to have it. In fact, if someone asked me, What social platform would you start with? I would always start with LinkedIn. I would be all in on LinkedIn. In my opinion, LinkedIn right now is what LinkedIn was around 2010, 2011. It is a sweet spot for you if you understand how to navigate this platform, which means that you're running it through the 4 C's, right? You're connecting, you're delivering content, you're communicating to people as though they are the audience of one, as though you're communicating to one person. You're not spamming people, and then you are actually looking creatively how to overdeliver value so that you can make a conversion. If you're operating in that, you will win on LinkedIn. Now, with that said, LinkedIn Business Premium or LinkedIn Sales Navigator? And what I would say is LinkedIn Sales Navigator all day, every day, forever. And the reason why is that the filters on LinkedIn Sales Navigator Hands down are better than LinkedIn Business Premium. I get asked about Recruiter Lite, and what I say is this, that Sales Navigator is the tool you need because it will allow you to drill down, drill down, drill down. Today, if I wanted to find a loan officer that had between 3 and 5 years experience in Las Vegas, Nevada, that had 10 years experience or more in the industry, Like, I could— I mean, I can drill down, drill down, drill down to get to a place where I have a bullseye for who I want on my team. If I want to go find real estate agents that have military experience, I can go find them. If I want to go find loan officers that have military experience, if I want to go find insurance agents or realtors or whoever, if I like, you know, something that's random, like, I don't know, rugby. You like rugby? Guess what? Sales Navigator will actually allow you to search and drill down to loan officers to realtors, to insurance agents that like rugby. That's how cool LinkedIn Sales Navigator is. And so because of that, you can get into these conversations that are to the audience of one because of that information. So I would recommend Sales Navigator right now. It's $79.99 a month, and you will, you will be so glad you paid the price of admission if you will just listen to the things that I'm asking you to do and activate them. Okay, now here's another component to it. That's an extension of LinkedIn. Okay, I coach to a CRM that's called Pipedrive. We'll talk about Pipedrive in a second, but you can actually connect LinkedIn to Pipedrive with a little Chrome browser plugin called LinkMatch. Huge fan of LinkMatch. Why is that? Well, because I can click a button on my Chrome browser plugin and I can map all of the information— phone numbers, websites, email addresses, titles, full name, locations— I can map all that across into my CRM by clicking one button. I open up someone's profile, I click a button, it automatically maps it all the way across to my CRM. So we'll talk about the CRM in a second, but LinkMatch is $9.99 a month right now. Okay, it's just a Chrome browser extension. So what does that mean? You got to be on a Chrome browser for this to actually work. It's a plugin that will show up on your toolbar once you load it. Now, you'll get your first 30 days for free. I would recommend you go try it out because every single time you click that little button mapping all that information across, guess what? You just saved yourself 3 to 5 minutes at least. I'm not a fast typer. Maybe it's more than 3 to 5 minutes, but LinkMatch is another tool. On the one sheet that I've given you the location, right? Recruitingconversations.com/tools. There'll be a link to LinkMatch. You can go find that and you can, and you can test that out. Okay. Now the progression of this is then going to be what CRM are you using? And I'm using Pipedrive. Why am I using Pipedrive? Pipedrive is something I picked up as a tool all the way back in 2009. At the time, I think it was $6 a month to have, so it was extremely cost effective. It was whiteboarded in that I could actually map out all of my next steps. And today you can get their basic plan on Pipedrive for $24.90. And I think the best CRM is the CRM you will use, and that may be too obvious to everybody. Look, there are, there are better CRMs out there than Pipedrive, but guess what? If you won't ride that pony, then what's the purpose in having the pony? So PipeDrive is easy to use. 5 to 10 minutes, you will understand how to use PipeDrive, and it's whiteboarded. So let me, let me give you, as part of this free offering today where we're just giving away the insight to a lot of tools that we use, I actually have a, um, a map that's 32 steps That's built inside of PipeDrive. I'm happy to give those to you if you will shoot an email to my team at support at fourc recruiting dot com. Guess what? They will respond back and they will actually map PipeDrive for you. Okay. So if you'll respond to that support at fourc recruiting the number four the letter c recruiting dot com, my team will map that for you. No strings attached. Okay. So Pipedrive is your CRM. It has workflow automation, which means that by simply moving someone from one step to the next step, it will automatically trigger activities for you. It's a place for your conversation logs. It's a place that you can actually very easily map people from LinkedIn into the tool. And so I see, I mean, I would say 85% of the people that I see recruiting today are working from, from a, from not even a spreadsheet. They're literally working from a notepad. God bless you for working from a notepad because that is one— that's a step removed from not working from a notepad. But I would dare say 85% of the people that enter coaching with me are working from a notepad and then they've gotten their system down, which is that they've got a yellow highlighter, they've got a pink highlighter, they've got a black ink pen, They've got a blue and a pink ink pen, and every single one of those things means something different. And they can open it up and go, yeah, the pink means I need to call people today. And when I highlight over it with the yellow, it makes a different color. And I know that whatever it is is what's next. And so there's a better way. There is a better way than a notepad. And here's what happens when you begin to improve your system. You begin to expand your pipeline. And while I say this is not a numbers game, right? And that's the reason why I say it's not a numbers game to most people is that I want you to improve your system before you start thinking I need to be making more phone calls and connecting to more people because it's not about quantity. It is about quality. How many quality conversations can you have? And a lot of people are still stuck in old sales mentality, which is that I need to be smiling and dialing. I need to be making 50 phone calls a day. I need to be time blocking 2 hours to recruit. And the truth is this, the people that go through my system can recruit effectively in 30 minutes a day. Why is that? Because they have a system. Anytime you have a system, your ceiling for what you can accomplish goes up. And the better your system, the higher that ceiling is. When you bump up against that ceiling, it's now time to reevaluate How do you improve and how do you expand and grow your system? Because that's how you actually improve your opportunities for growth. Okay, so Pipedrive is the tool that I would recommend that you use if you don't already have a tool that you're using. And again, look, there's other tools out there. Salesforce Automation is one of those. It's a— I would tell you hands down it's a better tool, but you aren't going to spend the 80 hours necessary to learn That tool in order to use it. Go with something simple to get you started. I get asked questions like, does it text message? Does it matter? You're working from a notepad right now. Okay? So it doesn't matter if you're working from a notepad, right? We want you in a better system because this will help you exceed in this arena, in this area of recruiting. Okay? So Pipedrive, yes. There'll be a link on the document that we'll have loaded there. Let's talk about a couple of tools that will help you with your content. So you've bought in by now to the fact that your leadership brand matters. And if you haven't, then just, I can spend an entire podcast going over the hundreds of data points that say that it does matter today. Okay, but let's just assume you've bought into this. Your content and the delivery of your content is going to matter. Okay, so you should be documenting, like identifying— I call it social ID. You should be identifying and documenting, like, your value system, your core convictions, your beliefs, where you're acting in alignment with those value systems. You should be identifying those moments and documenting those. Now, you can do this via video, you can do it with a photo and then the written word. You can do this in short form, written form on LinkedIn. That's 1,300 characters or less. You can do it long form as an article on LinkedIn. Yes, you can do it Instagram. You can do it Facebook, Twitter. Okay. But, but before you bring that content to any platform, please do yourself a favor and put it through a process. Okay. Again, a system. So let's just talk about that system here. Our freelance writers that on this side, like I actually have 2.5, if that's possible to have a half of a freelance writer, I have 2.5 freelance writers on my team. We actually have a system and a process that we go through. What does that system look like? The creative idea gets expanded on and written. Okay, now right now short-form written content is what is working best on LinkedIn. We try to skew more short-form written content than anything. Now, once it's written, we put it through the next tool that I'm going to give you, which is Hemingway App. Okay, so Hemingway and then app and then just put a .com on the end of that. This is not actually an app. Now, you could actually download the Hemingway App if you wanted to on a desktop, but this is actually a website. So, www.hemingwayapp.com. Again, I'm going to give you that link on the document that you're going to go download. It is a free app. I love free because I can get $9.99 per month to death by all the software that I have today. So this one's a free tool. What you will do is once you're done writing your content, you'll take that content and you will place it in this website. Again, it's free. It's just a website. You go there, you cut and paste your material in there, and what it's going to do is it's going to run a language alchemy over the content that you put in there? Are you using passive voice? Are you using adverbs? Too many adverbs? Is it a difficult sentence to read? And it will rate it. Is it hard to read? And is it very hard to read? And so, and then it will give you a grade level as to how you've written. Now, most people that I've seen tend to write somewhere around 6th to 10th grade. Okay, that's a normal tendency. And that's— and when I first 2 years ago when I started writing like this, the one thing that I thought was, oh great, I'm writing pretty simplistic, pretty simplistic, right? It's, you know, 6th to 10th grade or 6th to 9th grade or whatever it was. What I found is this: if you want better engagement with your content, you have to make it very simple for people to understand. So what we've worked on internally is this: getting our content To no higher than 5th grade. I would prefer 3rd grade writing, and that may say counter— that may seem counterintuitive to what you want, but the easier it is to understand and comprehend, the easier it is for me to read it and respond to it, the more likely I am to engage with it. If it's difficult for me to read and engage with, guess what? I won't engage with it. So we want to skew towards 3rd to 5th grade. We want to make sure that this thing will actually measure and will highlight sentences for you, and you're simply going to go through and correct those sentences. So it's very easy to use, hemingwayapp.com. Okay, now once we go through the— we put our material through the Hemingway App to make sure that our content meets that requirement, that prerequisite, we then move into Grammarly. Now most people are familiar with Grammarly, grammarly.com. Grammarly is a free tool up to a certain point. Now we want the Language Alchemy portion of Grammarly. What does that mean? Well, when I take my content from Hemingway App and I move it into Grammarly, if I have the paid version, which is $99 I think per year right now, then what it will do is it will ask me 5 questions and I'll answer those 5 questions. And as I answer those 5 questions, you know, where am I actually going to be distributing the content? What type of domain? Is it a general domain, a business domain? How do I want the tonality of this to read? Do I want it conversational? Do I want it optimistic? Do I want it joyful? There's a lot of options there you can choose. Do I want to be seen as knowledgeable? Do I want to be seen as expert? Do I want this to be written formally or informally? These are all questions you're going to get asked. Once you answer those questions, what's going to happen with your content is that it's going to take it through and it's going to highlight it, and you're simply on the right-hand side of the screen going to click through. You're literally just going to click through. It's going to say you missed your apostrophe, you missed your comma, that you misspelled a word, that this sentence structure needs to be corrected. It's going to give you suggestions. By the time you get that through Grammarly, you've written it, you put it through Hemingway App, you've now put it through Grammarly, you have something that you'll be proud of and you will have something that you will get more responses to, you'll get more engagement with because you've taken it through those 2 apps. Okay, so I think now we're up to five different tools that we're up to. The next tool is this: BombBomb. Now if you're not familiar with BombBomb, it's just the word bomb B O M B and then the same word again bomb B O M B dot com. Now what BombBomb is is BombBomb is a video texting email software that will integrate. It'll integrate with your email. It'll integrate with your texting. It'll integrate with LinkedIn. A lot of people don't know that. And if you've listened to any of my prior podcasts, you know I use the terminology pattern breakers. I like to use pattern breakers. I like to do things that haven't been done before. So I like to leave a voice message on Facebook Messenger. Why? Because very few people have ever gotten a message, a voice message on Facebook Messenger. And so it's a little disruptive. In terms of like patterns, it breaks normal patterns and so people will listen to it. Well, guess what? BombBomb integrates with your LinkedIn inbox and so you can actually send video messages to people through BombBomb on LinkedIn. And again, it's a pattern breaker. Now here's the big reason why I use BombBomb. BombBomb gives you analytics. Okay, so through text message, could I record that video? Could I text it? Yes or yes? I could. I could text it. Or could I use BombBomb and record that video and send it through BombBomb? And then I get the analytics portion of this, which is that I actually get how many— I get to see how many times you played the message. I get to see those things. And those things are important. Whether you're cold, warm, or hot matters in how I should be recruiting you. So if I send you a BombBomb video via text and I see that you actually played that message 5 times, guess what? My next steps are going to be different than if you didn't play it once. BombBomb.com, that's another tool. It's $59.99 per month. Again, obviously these things change, and so this is 2019. If you're listening to this a year later, it might be more, it might be less, who knows? But I would use that tool specifically because it streamlines your communication. Again, system's important. Anytime you start talking about streamlining your communication, if I can record 10 videos in a matter of 7 minutes for text messaging, that's better than going through this process of trying to record it on my phone, then trying to search through the actual files that I have or the videos that I have on my phone and moving it across and trying to text it to you and then tracking what I've sent to you in the past. BumBum will do all those things for you. So BombBomb is that next tool. I'm going to give you a tool. I'm going to caution you a little bit with this tool, but this is one that we've been able to use and has really lifted that ceiling again in terms of our system. It's a Chrome browser plugin and it's called Multiple URL Opener. So it'll be on the sheet at recruitingconversations.com/tools. Okay, what does Multiple URL Opener do? Well, here's what it does. In a process, let's just kind of walk out a process here. In a process where I have access to data, okay, let's just say that data tells me who are the top producers in my industry, who are the top producers in my market. If you're in the mortgage industry, that's MobilityRE. That's a great tool that you should have. And if you don't have access to that tool, drop me a line. I'm more than happy to point you in the direction to get you access to that tool. But I can go into a market and I can take my specific location and I can find the top real estate agents. I can find the top loan officers. I can see their production. I can see their production split as it pertains to purchase volume, refinance volume. These are all things that I can do inside a tool like MobilityRE. Well, as I'm actually seeking people out on LinkedIn, A lot of people don't know this, but if you went to my profile on LinkedIn, Richard Milligan, you know, 4C Recruiting, went to my profile on LinkedIn, that URL at the very top is a unique URL. If you captured that URL, moved it to any browser, and you entered it, it would actually pull up my profile. Well, as I'm actually doing my research on the top candidates in my market, I want to be grabbing that link, right? Because I want to make sure I can go back to them again and again and again. I'm grabbing that link and I'm putting that link into a Google spreadsheet, a Google Doc, an actual Excel spreadsheet. I'm capturing it in some way, shape, or form, and for good reason. If I build a list, and let's just say over the course of the next year you build a list of 700 people, I don't know, 1,000 people, whatever that arbitrary random number is that I come up with, I can then take that list of those URLs and I can take, let's just say, 50 at a time. I go down through that that Google Doc, highlight 50 at a time, and I can cut and paste that into this Chrome browser plugin, okay? And enter that and click one button, and what it will do is it'll open all 50 profiles. Now, why would you want to do that? Well, a lot of reasons that you would want to do it. One, it's an easy way to view profiles, right? And viewing profiles shows up in notifications, which means that it's an alert they get to see that you looked at their profile. I do think that that's a great way for you to stay visible and relevant in front of them. And if you're already doing the work and looking at their LinkedIn profile, why wouldn't you just take it, capture it? Right? So as part of this, when you're on their profile, here's what I would encourage you to do. If they're posting and if they're engaging on the platform and you just scroll down past summary and you see their activity, click on that. It will actually open up another portal inside LinkedIn. And inside that portal, you'll see their activities, which is what have they liked and commented on. And at the very top of that, that's a unique URL. If you moved over to post, again, that's a unique URL. Anytime they post, if you had that URL, it would actually open up their content directly to their content. It would pass go and go directly to the content. You don't have to go to the profile. You don't have to click activities and then click post. It literally is a URL. And if you'll capture that, Here's one of the things that will help you do. Put that into your spreadsheet of whatever that random number I come up with, 700, 1,000 people, and in groups of 20, 30, 40, 50, whatever you decide to do, I can cut and paste those into a multiple URL opener. And what will it do? It'll open every single one of their posted content immediately on every one of those, which allows me just to go to tab across my entire browsers to like and comment, like and comment, like and comment. Now, why would you want to do that? Here's why you'd want to do this. LinkedIn controls your newsfeed. Like, here's a newsflash: just because you connect to me doesn't mean you see my content. Just because you begin to engage with my content doesn't mean that it's going to show up in your newsfeed. So if you've got a top recruit, you, you're going to want to capture that unique URL where they post and where their activities are So that you can come back to those and engage with their content. By engaging with their content, you're staying visible with them. That's important. So an easy tool for this is, as you're grabbing this information, is Multiple URL Opener. And that's just a Chrome browser plugin. And guess what? It's free. So it happens to be a free tool. I would highly recommend that you get it. There's a paid version of it if you want it. I think it's $29 a year to have the paid version of it. But that's another tool that I would use. I'm gonna leave you with one more tool, and it's a text messaging app that I coach to, and it's a text messaging app called Reach. And that's like I'm reaching my arm, okay? I'm reaching my hand to grab for something. It's R-E-A-C-H, okay? It's a text messaging app, okay? I am an iPhone user, so I know it works on Apple. I'm not sure on Droid. So if you're a Droid user and you don't have this, I'm sorry, but there's probably a version of something like this inside the Google Play Store. The Reach text messaging app is free. Now, what is Reach and what does it do? It allows you to create user groups inside the app. So I can add my cold recruits list, I can have a warm recruits list, I can have a hot recruits list. I can break this up in terms of stages that people are in, people that I haven't reached before, people that I'm in conversation with. And if I create one text message, I can actually put that into the Reach text messaging app. And while it will send it individually, so it's not a group, it will send it individually. Okay. And then what I only— what I have to do is basically push one button to get that message to send to the next person. So if I've got a message, I've got, let's just say for example, a cold pipeline of recruits and I connect with them every single month to find out how they're doing and just to stay top of mind, then in this app I would have that list. I would have all their cell phone numbers there and I could type up one message and that message would be, hey, wanted to check in on you and see how you're August was, right? I want to let you know that you're in my mind. I was thinking of you. And then once I put that message in there, I just have to press one button to send it. And so it goes quicker. It'll go much faster. What I've found is that over the course of an hour, I can send somewhere around 150 to 200 text messages inside this app. Okay, so there'll be a link to the Apple Store where you can actually go find this. Again, it's a free tool. There's a paid version of it if you wanna get it, but again, a lot of people just use the free version of it. If you have a large database, one of the things that you can do is you can upload it directly to Reach's website and it will auto-populate inside your app. So it's also a great way if you already have a database that exists, it's a great way for you to capture some of that work that you've already put forth inside, you know, an app so that you can actually make this easy to text message. I highly recommend it. It's got to be part of your system if you're going to grow beyond whatever that number is. A lot of people have a top recruits list where they max out at maybe 50 people. That ceiling has to be higher, and it only gets higher when you build a system. Now, there's one more tool on the list. I'm not going to discuss it. It's an unlisted tool. It's a coaching clients only tool. It's $14.99 a month. It's only available to the few, the proud, the Marines. It's only available to a few of the proud coaching clients of Richard Milligan. But I've just given you 9 or 10 tools here, and those are going to be available on a one-sheet on the link that I've given you. And so that's it. That's my podcast today. Go back over this again and again and again. It's a 30-minute podcast roughly. You've got access to some great tools I've just given to you. If at some level you want help, you need coaching around any of these, you want some insight around these, you want me to go more in-depth on some of these, shoot me an email. Richard at 4C recruiting dot com, and I'm happy to go in more in depth on some of these things. If I triggered some key thoughts, you're already on your smartphone. You can actually speak email to me. Do that. I love feedback. I love hearing that you know these podcasts are benefiting you all and that you're winning. I hear a lot of that feedback. Look, this podcast is growing, and so I'm excited for that. And one of the things that is a prerequisite for me every single time I show up to do one of these is to bring enormous value. And so I don't want to just be noise, right? There's a great quote that we're drowning in noise while starving for wisdom. I want to be the wisdom. And so hopefully there's some wisdom here for you today that will help you grow in your systems using some of these recruiting tools. And so thanks for listening. If there was value here, pass this on. Look inside multiple industries. Like, I know real estate, I know insurance, I know mortgages— there are no recruiting resources for you. You're on your own. And so as you look around you at your teammates, you know that they're struggling as much as you're struggling to put the pieces together and to try and build a recruiting system and try and have wins in this area that ultimately will determine how high you go in your career and how much success you have. So do someone a favor and pass this on if you found value in it. And until I talk to you again on the next Recruiting Conversations, thanks for listening, everybody, and have a great week. There you have it. Another Recruiting Conversations in the book. In the books. I don't know what the books is. I mean, that's just a— yeah, it's— I guess there's a place, there's a book somewhere where these things go. Right? These tools will literally change how you approach recruiting in every way. And so I encourage you to lean into this. I encourage you to download that list. I encourage you to share the list, have conversations with your, you know, with your counterparts, with your cohorts around the list. What, which pieces of this are you going to use? You can print that list off. And I'm a big fan of high activating. High in activating, right? Activate, activate, activate. Hard deadlines, hard deadlines, hard deadlines. I'm a big fan of that. It's the only way things happen in my own life and in my own business. So as you print this off, you can actually just start putting dates beside some of these tools that you're committed to actually activating on, and go through a process where you hold yourself accountable to learning the tool, understanding the tool, activating on the tool, Right. Starting to build your system. This is not something that happens overnight. Okay? It's just not. It's a process, right? It's a journey to becoming better. And so you've got some great resources now that will take you on the journey. So until I talk to you again on my next video or my next recruiting conversations, have a great week, everybody.