Richard Milligan explains why recruiting leaders must block time for hiring or churn will outpace growth. He tried cardboard signs and an hourglass before a whiteboard easel finally worked to protect his recruiting blocks. The key: make recruiting time non-negotiable on your calendar and defend it by any means necessary.
Hey everybody, it's Richard Milligan here with For C Recruiting, and I'm coming to you today in a really cool t-shirt, right? Like, anybody that is drawn on the front of a t-shirt should feel really special. And so kind of as a making light of myself and not to take myself too serious, we actually went out and bought the URL The Recruiting Life, and we're going to start actually traveling across the United States and meeting with individual recruiting leaders, interviewing them, and posting this information These videos on our website, and so we've now become gangsta. We are now the recruiting life. And so if you'd like a free t-shirt from us, the front of it's got the recruiting life according to Richard and my photo. But then on the back, what we've got is a number of things that I believe as to why you as a recruiting leader can be successful. And so if you want to hit me up via email, just do so at rmelligan@4crecruiting.com, and I will ship one of those out to you no cost. Otherwise, I come. I've come to you today to talk about one of the larger issues inside the recruiting leader, which is we know we need to recruit and build our team, but very rarely do we prioritize it. Now I get this, okay? I spent almost 15 years as a recruiting leader myself, and if you haven't heard that terminology before, the recruiting leader is someone who actually manages a team, but then is also responsible for recruiting and building that team. Now here's the struggle with this. You wear— already wear 12 to 15 hats every single day. Recruiting tends to be the last hat that we put on and wear. It just is. And so because of that, so few recruiting leaders ever get any rhythm with it and ever see the largest stage of success with it. So here's what I know. We always protect what's a priority. If we're not time blocking and we're not protecting this specific time around recruiting, then what are we saying? It is not a priority. Now, if you've ever gone through a season where you've lost people, and in any business there's always churn, you're always going to lose people. People will move, people will go through life struggles and need to move on. At times you will not be the best fit for everybody. And so because of that, as recruiting leaders, if we're going to maintain success, we always have to be recruiting. Otherwise, we recognize that there will come a day We will lose more people than the value that our brand brings, and we will force our other leaders to make tough decisions around us. So as a recruiting leader, you always are recruiting. Okay, so how do we do this? Well, let me give you a simple story as to how I did this. And when I say simple, there's a bit of sarcasm in this because I go back to a time and a place where I knew I had to recruit if I was going to accomplish my goals. And the struggle for me was this: at the time, I had 5 different offices that I was managing. I actually had an office inside the largest office that I managed, and so my door was constantly turning. It was a rotating door. Someone would come in and someone would walk out, and that happened most days all day long. One day I said, you know what? I'm going to have a conversation with my team around time blocking and the importance of recruiting and ask them to honor this space. And so I met with my team and I said, look at my calendar before you come into my office moving forward or before you call me to see if I'm in a meeting, and if I am, I'm asking you to respect this. Well, guess what? I time-block my recruiting efforts. I'm actually— my back is to my office door and I hear a knock. I was on the phone with the recruit. I didn't answer the knock. I spin around in my chair to see my door opening and someone standing there waiting for me to get off the phone. And in a moment of frustration, I walked over to a cardboard box in the corner of my office and I cut the edge off of it. And I pulled out a Magic Marker and I wrote on it, in meeting. I walked to my door with a piece of Scotch tape, I slapped it to the door, I showed Shut the door and guess what? It didn't work. People would see the cheesy cardboard sign, they would still knock on my door, or they would just open my door and they would come in. And so out of this urgency and understanding that I had to time block, my wife went out and bought me this beautiful hourglass. So it was a clear hourglass, had red sand in it, and I could turn that thing upside down. And if it was staged outside my office door, people would see, right, that I was in a meeting and they would respect that. So I had a conversation with my team. Here's the hourglass. I set up a chair, I set up a table beside my door. If it's getting close to the hourglass being empty, you can sit there and you can wait, and when it's over, you can knock. And guess what? It didn't work. People would walk right by the hourglass, right by the sitting area, right by the sign, knock on my door, walk right in because they felt like what they had was more urgent than what I had going on. And so out of this need to To protect this space and understanding the importance of it, I went up the street to an Office Depot and bought a 3-foot by 5-foot whiteboard easel. I brought that 3-foot by 5-foot whiteboard easel, sat it in front of my office door, and across the top of it I wrote, in meeting. If you have something urgent, write below the line. And I put it as a physical barrier in front of my office door. And guess what? What? It finally worked. So I tell you that story to do this. I wanna encourage you, you have to solve this problem. In business, there's always 2 narratives. Is there a problem to be solved or is there a tension to be managed? In this particular case, there's a problem that you have to solve. I don't care if you have to get outside the office to make your recruiting efforts happen, get outside the office. I don't care if you need to sit the team down and create some physical barriers or put yourself in another office location during the time that you're recruiting. In order to make it happen, do it. Because the important thing is that, that you get from this is this: if we will protect this, we can go out on our calendar 12 months from the date that we decide to protect it, and life becomes very dramatically different because we will win inside the lane of recruiting when we decide to prioritize it. I hope this video has been helpful to you. You can see more videos like this on my website at 4crecruiting.com. And remember, If you're going to win in the land of recruiting, you're going to have to protect your time.
