Why 20% to 30% Of Your New Hires Won't Actually Show Up On Day 1

Hey everybody, it's Richard Milligan here with 4C Recruiting, and we're about to go live on a podcast. That podcast is coming from a conversation I had with a coaching client recently around a problem that they were trying to solve in reference to the number of people that were falling out from the time that they actually got a verbal acceptance or an acceptance in writing to the time that they actually onboarded them. And so what I found in my own research is that somewhere between 20% and as high as 30% of the people that say yes, specific to the experienced salesperson type role in the mortgage industry, this could be a loan officer, it could be a producing branch manager, In insurance industry, it could be a producing agent. In the real estate world, it could be a real estate agent, an experienced real estate agent. One of the things I found is that even after getting someone to accept an offer, somewhere between 2 and 3 out of 10 will actually not show up on the first day of work. I think there's a lot of reasons why that is. We'll talk about some of that in the podcast, but it is definitely something that you should be analyzing, you should be evaluating, because Huge opportunity here for you to actually capture some of that fallout that you're having by having a better process that starts from the moment the person says yes, the moment that they actually join your organization. I think we don't lend enough credence to how difficult that actually is to have to leave a company and go to another organization. So we're going to talk about that today and give you some insight and some ideas on how we actually do solve this problem. I would encourage you to have a couple of key takeaways of this, of what you're going to actually implement yourself. And you can do this as an individual recruiting leader. If you're not the president, CEO, recruiting head, you should still have a plan around this. This is not for, you know, the, you know, the company itself. This is for you, the recruiting leader. So make this very actionable for you and some things, some ways that you can do this. Okay. We're going to go live on the podcast here in just one second, so bear with me now while we get this set up. Going live now in 3, and in 2, and in 1. Hey everybody, welcome back. It's your host for this podcast, Richard Milligan, and you are listening, I think, to episode 38. What I wouldn't give to be 38 years old again. I don't know, there's no connection here, but man, I tell you what, now that I'm in my mid-40s, I'm realizing 38 was pretty sweet. And for those of you that are in your 20s, you're like, wow, 38's old. I think we realized pretty quickly, like, that isn't that old. I remember when I was looking at my parents who were in their early 30s thinking, oh my goodness, Mom and Dad are so old. Truth is that they weren't. And the truth is that we are only We're getting started here at episode 38. Our goal here as we look into 2020, which I love that 2020, year 2020, our vision, which is connected to 2020. See what I did there? I talk about vision a lot, so I can't even help myself but connect the dots on that. As we look into next year, our goal for next year is to break the 100 mark for podcasts. And so we're here to stay. We're committed to bringing you value through this podcast. I hope that you found value, and if your first is if this is your first podcast to listen to, which every single week we pick up several, it seems we pick up several hundred new listeners with this podcast. Then you'll you'll what you need to know is that this podcast is directed to the recruiting leader. Now what that means is that in a lot of industries there is this. individual role that is a leadership role, but this role is also responsible for growing and building the team. Most times, I have found that most times this individual does not have great recruiting support. They typically are on their own in this area of recruiting. If they do have recruiting support, what I found is that somewhere around 8 to 9 hires that they make will still come directly from them. They will not come from the recruiting department. What the recruiting department typically does for an organization is recruit for the organization, not for you, the recruiting leader. So, if you're in a market leader role, you're in a sales manager role, you're in a branch manager role, some sort of area or regional or divisional role, you— if you're a company president or company CEO, this podcast is really directed to you. A lot of the insight we have is applicable in that range from just someone who's a sales manager. And I say just, that person tends to be one of the most critical positions inside the organization. So that position all the way up to the CEO, there are actionable items here every single week that you can apply. The topic we're going to talk about today comes from a recent conversation I had with someone that just, it wasn't an intentional conversation, but I was asking a question, trying to verify their process that they were— that they had internally, and just was trying to get clarity on where there were issues or where there weren't issues around this area of recruiting. The question that I asked was this: Do you measure the follow-up that you have from the time that you get an accepted offer, whether verbally or in writing, To the time that someone actually joins your team. Now, it's very typical that organizations do not measure this. If you are an individual recruiting leader, you should measure this as well because you influence this possibly more than anybody else inside the organization. I love what Tony Robbins says. Tony Robbins says that the greatest resource we have is our own resourcefulness. So as someone who's a market leader, you kind of fall in that middle management role. And in a middle management role, the tendency is that we always wait for someone else to create policy, to create procedure, to solve some of these larger problems, or even just to identify some of these larger problems. As a recruiting leader myself, one of the things that I became aware of Is that I was losing 2 to 3 out of every top recruit that I made an offer to that verbally accepted the offer. What I found is that I am not, I was not an anomaly. At an organizational level, that is a typical number for an organization to lose, is from the time they make an offer. And look, let's just backtrack on this. How much effort and how much energy Do we have to put into someone to get them to a place where we just even make them an offer? Throw out the getting the acceptance of the offer. Let's just talk about making the offer. When I make that offer, I have an incredible amount of time and effort, thought, people, human capital, time resource, all of that wrapped up in that individual. So the reason why I am elevating the noise on this is that Look, if we can capture 1 or 2 people out of every 10 that we're likely to lose simply by elevating the noise around this and creating a process around how we handle this timeline between someone accepting my offer and someone crossing the finish line, that process can influence in a large way the production that I have at a market level, The number of hires that I have on an organizational level. And this is a, over a long window of time, is a mega influencer. Because once you get someone inside your culture, inside your organization, I find that most companies are actually pretty good at retaining them. So let's dive into this and let's just make this assumption. Most people have this problem. If you're a recruiting leader that's here and you're just like, I'm just now Beginning to recruit, or I'm just now in a recruiting leader role, then now's the perfect time for you to actually create a process around this so that this does not become a problem in the future. So let's just look and analyze this moment in time, the moment that someone actually accepts the offer. At this moment, this is the easiest decision that they will have. Over the course of that window of time of making the transition. Now, most people that are in an experienced sales role, and that's typically what we're hiring here. If you're a recruiting leader, you're typically in some sort of sales role. If you're in the mortgage industry, you're hiring another producing branch manager, branch manager, loan officer, loan originator, mortgage banker, loan advisor, whatever you call them. That is going to be a sales role. If you're in the real estate community, You're hiring a new real estate— another real estate agent. If you're in the insurance community, you're hiring another insurance agent. These are all producers. Most times, these individuals have influence in their book of business. And so, when they go and make this decision to join your organization, the decisions have only just begun because behind that, now what they have to determine is, when do I resign? Who do I resign to? When do my benefits end with my current company? When do my benefits begin with you? The holiday season's coming up. What's good timing around that? What influence am I going to have coming at me in a reverse recruiting model? Which, by the way, companies are very wise to have a reverse recruiting model because if you think of this from a different perspective, Companies are influencing out of every 10 they're going to lose, they're potentially influencing 2 or 3 with this particular reverse recruiting process. And so, let's just not think about how do we actually recruit someone and get them across the finish line. Let's actually think, look, if someone turns in their resignation today, what is my plan as a leader to work towards retaining them? Now, if you don't have a larger retention plan, around how you plan to keep people long-term and not just in this moment, then I would say shame on you. Okay, now I'm not a big fan of saying shame on you, but what I would say to you is this: this has to be something that organizations evaluate not just at this moment where they tender a resignation, but as a larger holistic perspective of how do we actually retain our people. And I encourage you at an organizational level, at a team level, To look at and analyze what your average level or percentage of churn is over a 5 to 10 year window of time. And that is an identifier of where you're doing things right or where you're doing things wrong. A lot of times we just move towards growth and we don't actually think of this from the perspective of retention. But I do think you're wise to have a reverse, what I would call reverse recruiting model, which is the moment someone tenders their resignation, if it's someone that you actually want and you want to keep them on your team, then who gets involved? How do they get involved? What conversations take place immediately? Because you can influence people to stay. And if I'm in the organization that is recruiting the individual to come to me, Then I'm going to have a process as well, understanding that most organizations are going to have a process that they follow when someone tenders a resignation. It could be an exit interview that they have, and something as simple as an exit interview can be a reverse recruiting model. It could be in that exit interview, having that individual sitting in front of someone who's of influence. Okay, we'll accept your resignation, but what we ask of everyone is that you sit in front of the divisional president and do an exit interview with him. And he would love to do that with you in the next 4 hours, 24 hours, but in a short window of time from the moment that resignation gets given. That should be part of your reverse recruiting process. On the recruiting side, here's what I would tell you. When most sales positions give resignation, And look for a start date, it's very rarely a week out, 2 weeks out. Most times it's 30 to 45 days out. There are times where I've seen this 90 days out. And the longer the window of time from when they say yes to the time they actually are going to start, the less likely that individual is to actually cross that finish line. It's just difficult to have enough synergy Enough fuel in the recruiting tank to get them across that finish line. So immediately when someone says, look, it's October 30th or November 1st or whatever that date is, I'm gonna join on January 1st or February 1st, I'm already immediately game planning out how do I move that timeline up if that's possible? And if it's not possible, how do I create an incredible, what I would call pre-onboarding plan? So a lot of organizations have an onboarding plan, but what I've found is that few organizations have a pre-onboarding plan. So what does a pre-onboarding plan look like? I think there can be multiple layers to this. And again, this depends on your organization. This will depend on your position inside the organization. Look, I spent 15 years inside the mortgage industry in really what I would consider a middle management role. an area manager, regional manager, divisional manager role. But I built my own pre-onboarding plan. This was not something that the organization did for me. I built this for myself. So what I did was this. The moment that someone said yes, I wanted to begin solidifying that decision in their own mind. Now, if you've listened to many of my podcasts, from time to time you hear me bring up this idea of what I call the BAM zone. This is this concept that people are motivated through a higher lens called belonging, affirming, or affirmation, and meaning. So I can take that BAM zone— belonging, affirmation, and meaning— and I can wrap it all around this process that I'll build, that I'll create, that when someone says yes, the moment that they're on board, this is not a game of I just got someone to say, yes, I'll marry you. Okay, this is— I gotta date this individual all the way to this finish line. And guess what? Some industry data suggests that almost 70% of people don't even make a decision whether you're a good fit till they get to the end of year 1. So this dating concept doesn't go to when they start, it goes on forever. Not just the end of year 1. If you know what the worst thing that a guy can do when he's dating a girl is pursue, pursue, pursue, and pursue well, and then get the girl. And then stop pursuing. Okay, that's such a letdown. For all the married women out there that are listening to this, they're high-fiving each other and going, yes, exactly, it is. So I'm not here to teach marriage, but what I am here to talk about is how this affects our recruiting efforts. So this dating game goes on forever. This pursuit game goes on forever, right? The whole reverse recruiting thing that I mentioned prior, when someone gives a resignation, At an organizational level, if I'm having to reverse recruit a lot, then I can actually look and say, I'm not dating my team the way— I'm not pursuing my team the way I should be pursuing them. I'm not giving them a larger sense of belonging. I'm not affirming them. I'm not an affirming, encouraging, inspiring, motivational leader. Okay? I haven't created a larger sense of meaning for what we do and how we do it. That's that BAM zone. I haven't done that. And so I can follow this all the way back to that and say that matters way before recruiting. But for sure, when I get a yes from somebody on the recruiting side, I am strategically thinking, how can I give them a sense of belonging when they're not here yet? So here's a couple ideas for this. In the pre-onboarding, what I like to do is actually have a pre-onboarding team. Now, this doesn't have to be a specific team that's designated for this, but this becomes just part of a role and responsibility that someone may play. For example, one of my top salespeople would be on this pre-onboarding team. One of my top operational people would be on this pre-onboarding team. Someone from my HR department would be on this team. I'm on this team. Okay? My admin, if I have someone that's a personal assistant, would be on that team. I'm going to have around 5 to 6 people on this team that would be part of the onboarding process. And I want engagement over the window of time from when they said yes to when they actually crossed the finish line. So get creative with this. I'll share with you an idea that I used for a long time. The moment someone said yes— now, I went to the trouble of having company t-shirts printed. These were just generic t-shirts. They were nice t-shirts, but they were just generic company logo t-shirts. I would have those t-shirts autographed. So, I would get a t-shirt pen. Yes, there is such a thing, a t-shirt pen where it shows up on the t-shirt well and it doesn't wash out. And I would actually have every department head that I could get to sign these t-shirts. And I would have them do it at one time. It might be a generic message. It might say, you know, might be signed, you know, John Davids. And that's just the name I made up. But so if your name's John Davids, I'm not speaking to you. But John Davids, and would be, heard you just joined the team. Excited to have you on board. If I can ever assist, don't hesitate to contact me. Okay? And he would sign that. And that would have department heads all over this t-shirt. I would take that t-shirt that was designed by the CEO, the company president, department heads, and it was signed by me. And at some level, it might have been signed at certain stages of my career, signed by some of my team members at my immediate level that were underneath my leadership. And I would send that. I would actually overnight that to the home address of the individual who had just said yes. Okay? What I was trying to do was I'm trying to pull them into this commitment. I'm trying to pull them into this larger sense of belonging. You now belong over here. We're excited to have you join here. I'm affirming you in this process. The CEO signed this t-shirt. And I would take these t-shirts to a sales rally and I would walk around the room because that's your sales rallies. A lot of your department heads are there if you have sales rallies or you have some sort of reunion event that you invite people to. So I walk the t-shirts around, everybody signs those, and then I overnight these to my recruits. Now that's just one thing of many things would transpire in this process. When someone says yes, the next thing I say is, look, we do a pre-onboarding call. We want to address any concern or questions, additional questions that you might have. And so in this meeting, it's going to be a ConferenceBridge or a Zoom meeting, or, you know, maybe I can just even do it on my smartphone and merge everybody in. But I want to get these 5 to 6 people together, and every person is going to speak kind of what their role is in this onboarding process so that you know who they are, what they do, and specifically you have their contact information should a question or concern come up during this timeline of when you've joined the organ— of when you said you joined the organization and when you actually crossed the finish line. Got it? Got it. That's an important component to this. This is your onboarding team because most corporations don't have this. And so you self-select. If I'm in the mortgage world, it might be a regional underwriting leader that just comes in and says, hey, I'm here to support you if you have any questions about this or concerns about things that come up as it pertains to loans that you've got questions on how we underwrite. I'm here for you. Here's my cell phone number. If it's the HR department, I want you to have a direct line to me. If you got questions about benefits or questions about when does your insurance begin or when does your copay start or when does your deductible start? I'll use the right vernacular here. What is your copay on a doctor's visit? Do we cover this? Okay, I'm here for you. Someone on my team, right? I'm a direct extension of Richard. If Richard's not available, I want you to have my cell phone number. I want you to be able to call me. Here's a top producer on my team. Look, you may have questions around our sales process, or you may have questions around some for instances that come up between now and then. Here's my cell phone number. I want you to call me. But every single person is going to articulate on this pre-onboarding meeting the role that they play, the fact that they're available, the fact that they're excited, and they've heard great things about this individual who's decided to join the team. So, I'm going to affirm them. I'm going to allow them now to start developing connections, meaningful connections on this side before they actually ever show up on day 1. And this is going to be that springboard they need to get across that finish line. Think about it. If I turn in my resignation, immediately the flag goes up the pole inside the organization that I'm in and all hands are on deck to try and reverse recruit me. To try and get me to stay. And the fact is that if you've got any loyalty at all, or if you've got some strong relationships there, and you're not walking out the door just beside yourself mad because someone did you wrong, okay, then you will most likely have some tension here. So what we have to do is, if we're the organization that's losing the individual, create the tension. And if I am the individual that's recruiting this person, Then I actually have to help eliminate that tension by affirming they've made the right decision. Do you get that? Like, we're actually— the decision, yes, has been made, but they aren't here yet. In fact, they haven't even gotten in the car yet to start driving toward that destination. Okay, they've simply said, yes, I'll show up to pick up the car, right? That's kind of the analogy here. And so we want to make them understand More clearly, you made a great decision. You coming here was the best decision you made. So let's get creative in this space. Look, bring your team together and say, what are some of the ways that we can actually help solidify that once someone says yes, that they've made the right decision to join the team? It could be, let's go out to dinner together as a team. It might be inviting them in to a potluck luncheon, a potluck luncheon that you're having at your office. It could be your CEO calling them and saying, hey, congratulations. I heard that you're joining us. Man, I've heard a lot of great things about you. What questions do you have about our organization? Or how can I help? Could be specific department heads doing the exact same thing. I'm going to lay a timeline out. Okay? So if you— I've got my hands up in my video because I'm also shooting this on video right now, but I'm gonna lay a timeline out. And if it's a 45-day window, I'm going to actually have intentional spots on this timeline so I don't have long windows of time where the individual can go dark. I don't want them to get stuck in their own head. So I encourage you, I implore you, if you're serious about growing, this is something you have to do. And even if you're a sales manager in a local market, you are equipped To do this. I encourage you, go ask someone at your corporate headquarters, would they be willing to be on this team when you bring people on board? Go ask the people in your local office if they're willing to play a part. If you are an influential leader inside your organization, you should lead this. You should lead it in both directions. What's our plan when someone says, I'm leaving? And what's our plan when someone says, I'm joining? Define those, implement those, create a process around those, teach those to the people inside your organization so that everyone understands the importance of this. This is an important component at every level inside any growth-minded organization. And I'm assuming you're here because you're growth-minded, right? Yes or yes? Yes. So, I applaud you for having spent 20-some minutes with me here. to walk through this. If there is any way that I can help, my calendar's live at bookrichardnow.com. You can always reach me there. I'm happy to give insight. Look, I don't think I have a single appointment over the next couple of weeks, but I'll be doing a lot of traveling and speaking. But as I look into that 3rd week of November, there's a time slot or 2 on there. You are welcome to that. And by the way, I'm going to plant a seed here. As we look over the next couple of weeks, one of the things that we're going to actually be launching Is a coaching model that's very simplistic for people to get involved. Look, one of the things I talk about in my coaching is that my coaching, which I typically coach in a 12-week system, it's like P90X. Like P90X is 90 days long and it's 90 days to the body you love. My coaching is very similar to that. In 12 weeks, it's very intensive, but you get— if you'll do what I ask you to do in 12 weeks, You'll come out of the 12 weeks and you'll get to a place where you actually have a recruiting model that you actually are in love with. That's a system that you can take action on for your entire career. So it's literally 90 days to the recruiting system that you love. But the truth is that not everybody has the time and the capacity or even the funds to actually do the P90X version of my recruiting training. So one of the things that we're going to do is we're actually going to start doing large group training for individuals who are recruiting leaders that want to hone their recruiting skills, but don't have the commitment of an hour per week for the next 3 months and an hour plus of homework every single week for the next, you know, 90 days or the next 3 months. Okay? So what we're gonna do is we're gonna break— we've broken this down into 15-minute increments. 15 minutes a week, you apply one simple idea, and over the course of Of the next year, 2020, we'll launch this for January 1st. Over the course of 2020, what will happen is that if you will take action on the 15 minutes of homework that we've asked you to do over the course of 2020, we're casting a vision to influence 2,500 recruiting leaders who would actually be able to move the needle significantly on their recruiting efforts. Our goal is to influence 2,500 recruiting leaders in 3 industries. That would be the mortgage arena, the insurance arena, and the real estate world. So if you happen to fall in any of those 3 and you're like, that's me, I would be interested in that, stay tuned because over the next couple of podcasts we will talk more about this and invite you into this opportunity to play a part where we will actually very simply break down for you in 15 minutes a week how you actually improve your recruiting efforts. Our belief is this: if you motivate before you actually have someone move towards something, you can actually discourage them. We believe that motivation, if someone's uneducated, equals actually discouragement. We have to move that equation, that education piece, all the way to the very beginning. It's education plus motivation plus application. equals transformation. But if you motivate, that's simply what you do is you motivate and you ask somebody to apply, it actually equals discouragement. There's no wonder why people actually think that recruiting's hard because few have been educated in this area. So, you've got to educate yourself first. And then if you are motivated, that's part of what we do here. We want to educate with this podcast. We want to motivate with this podcast. Then if you will apply it, then you will be transformed. Okay, so it's education plus motivation plus application equals transformation. That's what we're after here. Look, our 10-year vision, when we started this organization in 2017, which we just crossed the 2-year mark this week. So, rouse the applause for me and my team, my small team of 8 people here. But we crossed the 2-year window. Our 10-year vision was to get to a place where we can influence 10,000 recruiting leaders in one year, one window of time. With this message of education, with this message of motivation around recruiting, because we do believe that if we can get people to apply, they will be transformed. So more information to follow on that. But in the meantime, if I can do anything to help, you know how to reach me. Great ideas here today. Take 1 to maybe max 3 ideas that you're going to go apply. There's some very practical stuff here, and then do that. Apply it to your business, apply it to your company. And because of that, you will make incremental improvements that will influence you at a team level and at an organizational level. Thanks for listening today. You've been listening to Richard Milligan here with Recruiting Conversations. I look forward to returning next week with another one of these for you. We'll be talking about vision soon, and with 2020 coming up, this is something that's near and dear to my heart. So stay tuned. In the next podcast, we will go deep. This will be a longer podcast. I might actually break it into 2. We will go deep into this idea. Why is vision critical to you being a successful recruiter? I look forward to sharing that with you on the next podcast. Have a great week, everybody. We'll see you then. There you have it. I get kind of excited about this stuff. I'm sorry, guys and gals. This is something I'm crazy passionate about. You find your gifting, you find your lane. And then you go forward 110%. That's where I'm at today. So I love this. If there's anything I can ever do to help you, look, we record this for multi-reason— for several reasons. One, we love to break the video up as part of our content strategy, but it's also a way for us to actually point people back to some of the resources we're creating on my Vimeo channel, my YouTube channel. And look, if you don't know this, on YouTube and on Vimeo, once you get inside a channel You can actually search that channel for specific words. So if you're seeing this now and you're like, hey, vision, something that he just talked about that's important to me, inside this particular channel you can search that word vision and it'll pull up every single video that I've done that's actually related to vision. That's really important. Vision is in everything you're going to do as a recruiting leader. So I implore you, That's a great tool to actually go find some additional information I've already provided around this. You struggle with phone scripting, enter phone scripting. You're not sure what you should be doing in a face-to-face meeting, enter face-to-face meeting. I mean, all those are some great topics that I talk a lot about that will be beneficial to you on your journey to becoming the best recruiting leader you can become. Thanks for watching. I appreciate each and every one of you for partaking and being part of my And until I see you again on another video or you hear me again on another podcast, have a great week, everybody.