The Quickest Way To Build A Team

So the big question is this: how do recruiting leaders like us who have 12 to 15 other job responsibilities win at this game of recruiting? How do we build a system that allows us to recruit effectively in a minimal amount of time while motivating recruits towards meaningful change? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Richard Milligan, and welcome to Recruiting Conversations. What's up, everybody? Hey everybody, hope you're doing amazing. Welcome to Recruiting Conversations, the podcast with your host, Richard Milligan. Okay, so if you're not familiar with who I am, um, you've been lost in the dark ages. No, I'm just kidding. If you're not familiar with who I am, I am a recruiting coach who runs an organization. I'm the president and CEO of a company called 4C Recruiting. And we don't recruit, so it's a bit confusing to some people that we call ourselves 4C Recruiting. What we actually do is we teach people to recruit. Specifically, we specialize in the area of recruiting leaders. So if you haven't heard of a recruiting leader before or had that terminology used before, to me, a recruiting leader is someone who actually leads a team but then is also responsible for building the team. That's a unique spot in a lot of different industries where you're responsible for managing a group of people, and that can take 12 to 15 different job responsibilities in one given day where you're taking one hat off and putting another hat on nonstop. Sometimes it means that you're even in production. You're also a salesperson yourself, and then you also are required to wear that recruiting hat. So it's unique in that you're not a corporate recruiter, but you are a recruiter. And in studies, we have found that the most important recruiter inside the organization is that recruiting leader. And so what we bring to you each week is a conversation that we've had with another recruiting leader that we believe will bring insight to your job and to what you do. And then we're going to dissect that conversation. And hopefully bring some value to you that makes you a better recruiter. There's very little training that I've been able to find, and I've spent from the age of 25 to the age of 43— that was 18 years if I got my fingers and toes out and counted that correctly— I wore the recruiting leader hat for that window of time. I never came across a recruiting resource that was about training me Beyond a couple of simple tactics. So there are some what I would consider tactics out there that you can use to become a better recruiter. What I'm most interested in is a recruiting system. Now there is a way that the world's been created to work, and systems are at the heart of that. So anything that has made it to the largest stage of success in any industry has always had fine-tooth system around it, and that's what I coach to and what I teach. And so, what I'll be bringing to you each week is a conversation around a system or an idea that was discussed with somebody. So, today's conversation that took place was with an individual that I've got to start by saying I'm going to give mad props to this guy. Okay. Came into my coaching here over the past couple of weeks. And anytime someone comes into my coaching, one of the things that I encourage them to do is to check out my life calendar. Now, I have a life calendar out there at bookrichardnow.com, 3 different words, the word book, the word Richard, and the word now, and then .com on the end of that. And that's where I keep my life calendar. So, it keeps me from having to have these conversations about, will this time work? Will that time work? I'm Central Standard Time, you're Pacific Standard Time, or whatever that conversation looks like. So when someone comes into my coaching, I always advise them that they have full rein of that calendar because I time block everything, which by the way, if you're a recruiting leader and you don't time block everything, there's your best tip of the day. Start with time blocking everything. So if I have a time slot available on that calendar, it's available to the entire world. Now I'm putting this out there on the worldwide web and via podcast. I might have to change that, but for the time being, that calendar is available to the entire world. If I have a time slot available, you have access to it. In week 1, this gentleman scheduled 3 different coaching sessions with me. So I got to give him my— I take my hat off to him and just say, this is somebody that is going to be successful in this lane of recruiting because he's a high-end activator. So being an activator is a key component to being successful inside recruiting. I remember being in my early 20s and hearing Brian Tracy say, That an idea not implemented in 24 hours or not acted on within 24 hours is a dead idea. So early on in my career, I became an Activator. So this gentleman's an Activator. But the question in the conversation that I want to share with you today is centered around something completely different. The conversation that we had was around him having fast success. So he wanted to discuss a fast way, and the conversation kind of went like this: I don't have a lot of time. to have success. All of my compensation is going to be based on the wins that I have inside of recruiting, and so I can't wait to be successful. And what my response to him was, this is that I totally appreciate the fact that you can't wait to be successful inside the lane of recruiting, but we don't get to determine everything that takes place on the other side when we're recruiting. And so We do have some assets that we can scale, but we don't have the ability to take a blue pill, swallow the blue pill, and then automatically go win in the land of recruiting. Look, if I had these 3 steps that you took and then you automatically won inside recruiting, I wouldn't be doing a podcast. I'd be sitting on a beach somewhere, okay? And I'd be selling the 3 magic pills for something well north of 7 figures, right? So, let me give you the right framework for this. We are not recruiting, especially if you're a recruiting leader, meaning that you are sitting in a smaller geography that you're going to probably reside in forever. I mean, if not for a really long time, right? So, as an example, I built teams in the Midwest. And so, specifically Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, that was the larger part of where I built. That's a small pond in comparison to the corporate recruiter who may go across the entire United States. And so as I came across good producers, good recruits, good candidates that I wanted to bring into my team, I had to build relationships with them. This wasn't a quick sell. I'm not trying to convince you to join my team in 3 days or less. What I'm trying to do is build relationship with you first. So I love to insert that term relationship building Instead of recruiting. Okay, so if you'll think about this in terms of building relationships, we all know that building relationships can take time. Now, with that said, I can tell you a lot of stories of people that came to my team in a short period of time. I mean, one that comes to my mind immediately is a young man that from the first time I had a phone conversation with him to the time that he was actually sitting inside one of my teams, it was less than 2 and a half weeks. Okay, and so that happened quickly, but that is not going to happen all the time. And I don't want to set the expectations that that will even happen that often because building relationships can take time. We have to have the mindset that we are going to play a long game. Okay. Now, if you're a recruiting leader today, one thing that I can tell you is this, is that your leadership brand, your attractive leadership is something that you need to focus your efforts and energies on. One place that you can go that is the perfect environment to go represent yourself as what I call an attractive leader— and one of our podcasts talks about this, The Attractive Leader— the place that you can go and represent being an attractive leader is LinkedIn. LinkedIn really is a place where you can build relationships quickly. Now, the mindset for most people on LinkedIn Is that it's a recruiting platform. In fact, it's such a big mindset that you can use it to your advantage when you're on the platform, because as people show up on the platform, a lot of times they're actually leaning in because they believe it's a recruiting platform. So they're looking for opportunities. So that's a great, great— understanding the mindset around that is critical. But LinkedIn is a place where you can absolutely build relationships quickly if you do it correctly. And we'll do a podcast in the future on how you do that. I'm not here to discuss that today, but understand that you can. You do not do this through the lens of connecting and then asking to meet, or connecting and talking about the 10 things that your company does well and why they should come join your winning team. Okay? Because we want to build relationships first over what I would call is a right hook. Okay? Now, here's how you have success quickly, if there is a way to have success quickly, and this is what I advise this gentleman. The average recruiting leader can only invest about 30 to 60 minutes per day, and these are people who are being intentional. Get this, if you're wearing the 12 to 15 hats of managing a team, of actually doing your own production, I get— because I've been there— I get the fact that you can only carve out an additional 30 to 60 minutes per day and then do everything else well. It has to be sustainable. Recruiting cannot be this P90X mindset. And while I've done P90X and have had a lot of success on it, um, inside the lane of business, you have to do things that are sustainable. If I said go wear your 12 to 15 hats and then go, um, invest 4 hours a day inside recruiting, you would actually lose momentum in a lot of areas inside your business model. And then eventually you would decide that you couldn't recruit because it requires too much of you. And you would lean back into, I just won't recruit anymore, or I'll recruit minimally, okay? But here's where you can win and where this gentleman will win big time. He does not currently have a team underneath him, okay? So if I take 30 minutes that the average recruiting leader can invest in recruiting each day and I multiply that out over 20 days per week, we'll just assume that there's 5 working days in a week, if there's 4 weeks in a month, that's 20 working days. If I multiply that out over the course of the year of 12 months, end up with 240 working days that I can invest minutes per day. When we work that math out, and I'm no genius, but I think the math is 120 hours. Okay, you know, if I, if I don't have a team, I can invest 40, 50, 60 hours a week in this area of recruiting. If I invested 60 hours a week, I can accomplish in 2 weeks what someone can accomplish all year as a recruiting leader. So my biggest scalable asset, if I want to win quickly, Is my time. Okay, so understand this. Now, if you already have a team underneath you and you're going, I can't do that, what I would encourage you to do is start thinking about how you can maximize your time. What things are you doing that you should not be doing or that you could delegate? Because if you can carve out and go from 30 minutes to an hour or from an hour to 2 hours, you can do some pretty simple math around this and figure out how people go and build teams quickly like I did. At one point, I built 9 teams in a space of 18 months. Okay, the way that I did that was scaling my time. Okay, I looked at this as a season where I was going to have to invest a lot of me, a lot of my resources in terms of effort and energy, and I was able to build quickly. Okay, but in the end, there are no shortcuts. Your advantage is this: few are willing to put the time in, few are willing to invest into this craft. of recruiting to become an expert at it. If you will take this part serious of, I want to perfect my craft around recruiting, then you will win because few are willing to do it. Look, I'll share this often when I stand on stage and I talk to people. One of the things that I talk about is this: I have people that stroke sizable checks for my coaching and then will miss over and over and over again. We'll take a 12-week coaching course and push it out to easily 20 weeks Because they keep punting on showing up, or they put— make other things a priority over the getting better at recruiting piece because it's not that important to them. Okay, we protect what's a priority. Okay, get that. We protect what is a priority. Okay, so if you are going to become better at recruiting, make it a priority. And by making a priority means that we're going to time block. We're going to put this on our calendar, and I'm going to carve out as much time as I can To not just get better in this space, but actually go activate on these principles. Okay, so if there's a call— if there's a few key takeaways I want you to have here: have patience. This is going to be critical to your success. If you try to take even something that somebody else is teaching you and, and try to take something that is in the end and move it to the beginning, then you're not having the right mindset to be a successful recruiter. If I lean on somebody really heavily that has already told me they're cold, that they're happy where they're at, but that they're willing to let me stay in touch, I can actually throw a hand grenade on that bridge because I'm emotionally unintelligent. Okay, emotional intelligence is critical when we're recruiting. Where people say, I'm happy, I'm content, we need to honor that and respect that through the lens of integrity, meaning that doesn't mean that I can't stay in touch with you, and I will. If I have a system, I will touch you every single month. Okay, that I'm going to figure out some creative method to communicate to you in a system. Okay. The other part is outside of being patient is you have to have a system. Okay, be willing to work that system if you have it. Okay. And the last part is this is put in the time. Okay, if you want to get there quickly, your time is the one thing that you can scale and you can move that finish line up in terms of goals, in terms of the Things that you want to accomplish. Okay, so hopefully there was some value in this to you today. I appreciate you listening to Recruiting Conversations with Richard Melligan. Until next time, have fun recruiting. Want more recruiting conversations? You can register for my weekly email at 4crecruiting.com. If you need help creating creating your own unique recruiting system, you can book a time with me at bookrichardnow.com.