Thomas just talked about some amazing recruiting practices and you had time to put ideas on paper of how to recruit great talent.
Now What?
You have some resumes that look promising and you're excited that all your prayers might be answered with one of these resumes.
Now it's time to start interviewing.
This is the recruit's first impression of you and your organization. This sets the tone for everything from this point forward.
Are you professional?
Are you organized?
Are you intentional?
Are you mission-driven or chaos-driven?
If you are professional, well organized, and intentional, then the recruit knows you mean business. They will either get scared and run or they will show up and show off for you because they want the job.
Wouldn’t you want to scare them off now, instead of 3 months from now when they have cost you over $10,000 to $25,000 in your time and resources, and then you have to do this recruiting, hiring and onboarding all over again?
So, How are you giving the first impression to recruits of your business?
You should be doing this with your 6-Step Hiring Process.
Step 1 Phone Interview
Do you have this mapped out with the specific questions you ask at your phone interview? Is this replicable so anyone in your organization can get on the phone and do a phone interview?
Step 2 1st Live Sit Down Interview
This is the time where you share vision/mission/values/culture to allow the candidate to determine if this is even the type of business they want to be a part of? Do you have this spelled out so you don’t have to think when the candidate comes in for the interview.
Step 3 Due Diligence (My favorite)
This is where we are calling the candidate to tell them we want to move forward and we want to do personality profiling, call their references, and assign homework.
Have you decided on a Personality profiling tool to use?
How about calling on references? Do you have your questions written down on what questions you will ask when calling references?
What homework do you have for the candidate?
For a bookkeeper maybe reconcile a mock bank account, for an estimator, estimate an old job, for a marketing specialist design a logo.
Step 4 2nd Live Interview preferable with other team members
Here you are deep diving into the role and seeing how they act with the other team members.
Again, do you have this written out and documented so you cover everything from their ideal weekly schedule to going over your MPR?
Step 5 Spousal/Friend Dinner/Lunch, social
In his 2011 book “EntreLeadership,” Dave Ramsey recommends that companies vet spouses to make sure their hire is not “married to crazy.”
Dave says, “When hiring someone, you are employing more than just the person. You’re taking on the whole family. And when they are married to someone who is domineering, unstable or simply full of drama, you’ll end up with a team member who can’t be creative, productive or excellent.”
Go to lunch or dinner with your candidate and their spouse to find out if crazy lives at home.
Step 6 Phone call and email with Offer.
Some of you are saying “Patrice we got this, we have been interviewing & hiring for years” Great then how can you systemize it and make it better so anyone can take your hiring process and run with it.
Alright, your Hiring process is complete and the candidate accepted your offer
Yeah!! They start on Monday and all your problems are going to be solved.
Let me tell you a story, Becky. Becky sent her resume to XYZ realty as a marketing specialist. She had all the qualifications for the role and was hired. Her first day she was shown her desk, given her laptop, set up on email, and then voila! She started marketing and it was the best marketing ever done for XYZ realty.
I wish!! Becky isn’t her real name because honestly, I don’t remember it. XYC Realtry was the Miles and Smith Real Estate Group which I owned. Becky was my new recruit. She was going to change everything for our real estate group. We would start getting more leads now then ever with a part-time marketing specialist, right!
Within two weeks I was wondering what in the world she was doing. I saw a post or two on social media, but besides that….I had no clue what she was doing. I sat down with her to ask and she showed me a couple of things but nothing substantial. I asked where her marketing calendar was, where her content creator checklist was, how was she keeping track of analytics so we knew what was working and what wasn’t, what about a newsletter or updating the website, I mean she is a marketing specialist she should know all these things.
How many times as business owners have we said “They should know this, they did bookkeeping before, they did project management before….They should know what to do, why do I have to tell them everything?
Because what is common to you is not common to them. What is common to you is not common to me. What is common to you is not ever common to your spouse or your best friend who knows you inside and out. You have to train, set expectations and hold people accountable so what is common to you can become common to them.
To do this you need an Onboarding Process, Checklist and Training Schedule
Your Onboarding Process will set the tone for the future accountability and performance of your new employee.
Is your Onboarding Process clearly defined?
Your onboarding checklist allows you to list everything you want to go over during the training and who in your organization is going to do the training. Do you have an onboarding checklist with all the Admin/Tech/Projects/Software/Processes and General Company policy and procedures that you want to go over with your new employee during their training time.
Your onboarding weekly training schedule will map out in timeblocks what they are going to be trained on from your checklist. Do you have a weekly training schedule spelled out for at least the 1st week.
So what part of Onboarding do you need to create or perfect?
Breakout.
2. Second 10 minutes spend on your Onboarding.
3. Talk to your team and collaborate on best practices and be prepared to share a few ideas to the group when we come back.
It’s an interesting time to hire right now, right? It’s changed in so many ways because the people we are trying to hire have changed!
So let’s throw out a few fun facts about Gen Z, the group of people entering the workforce. Were born between the late ’90s and about 2008
3. Value Spectacle over substance
This past year, the university of Louisville got more 4 and 5-star recruits on campus than ever before because of this…
They asked their high-income donors to bring sports cars, drive them onto the field and let recruits come take pictures in them and sit in them. They flew in on private jets and let the recruits climb all over them taking pictures. And it worked. They got talent on campus and were able to pitch to them on their football program.
But here was the problem, they had the spectacle, but not a ton of substance. It was a flash in a pan with no championship culture to back it up.
The University of Georgia spent 3.6 Million dollars on recruiting in 2021. And that’s not even including the Name, Image, and Likeness money that was promised. That’s just on attracting, recruiting, entertaining, and marketing to high school student-athletes and convincing them to come to play football at Georgia.
Let’s break that down a bit further, the average recruiting class is around 25 ppl, so you do the math…that comes out to spending $144,000 per student-athlete that signs to play at UGA. That is OUTRAGEOUS.
It is an insane spectacle…but for them and schools like Alabama, there’s also substance behind it. You walk the halls of their recruiting centers and there are massive pictures of their athletes that have gone on to play in the pros, there are trophy cases full of conference championships and national championships. There are detailed meetings with recruits of how they would be used on offense or defense and the plan for them when they come.
Here’s what they don’t say. Just sign on and we got it. Just trust us, here’s what we think we’ll have you doing.
And yet isn’t that what we do? Most of our hiring and prospecting looks like this. We put out a half-hearted ad on Facebook or indeed, that’s vague at best. And we cross our fingers and hope!
Maybe we have an interview process, but not a recruiting process. There’s very little spectacle and if that’s what Gen Z is looking for, we are simply missing the boat. And if we’re missing the boat, then we’re missing the talent that could be added to our teams.
Here’s where I’ve seen that recently. With Ward Edwards engineering. They dared to ask, “What is something we could add to a new engineering grad, that no one else is doing?”
We sat down and talked it through, even went to some of their staff and asked them what some of their frustrations were upon graduation and they came up with this. There’s no plan for an engineer that’s hired. It’s just come on board and do engineering and we’ll eventually get you where you need to be.
And here’s where Allen and Greg and their team took this. They built out a plan to go from Designer, kind of the entry-level position to Professional engineer in 4 years. To actually getting your certification and being ready to be a project manager in 4 years. Now to some of you that sound like eternity, but to an engineer that is unheard of. To look a grad in the eyes and show them the plan and how you’re going to get there, puts substance behind the spectacle.
For us, it was knowing that we want to hire 8 new coaches in the next 3 years. So we have to have a training plan in place. SO it was recording almost 50 videos of how to coach and our mindset and practical tips on working through our roadmap and coaching clients and prospecting and selling. All of it! And then beyond that scheduling out a mentor coach to work with them and putting times on the calendar to get them going and offer support.
It’s not all fluff! There’s substance and intentionality every step of the way.
So here’s what I want you to hear. People no longer show up just to receive a paycheck. The game has changed. How can we start thinking about recruiting like a D1 College football team as they chase after new talent?
So here’s what we’re going to do.
We’re going to workshop some stuff with your team. If you’re one of the younger ones on the team, here’s where we will lean on your wisdom…YES your wisdom. Dr. Tim Elmore calls it “reverse-mentoring”.
We are going to let you build out a recruiting system in two parts, ideation, and process. The first 10 min will be throwing ideas out there. How do you attract the right people? How can you add some spectacle to how you recruit people? And then process, what does that look like year round?
Because here’s the thing, it’s not an IF you are going to hire it’s a WHEN are you going to hire. And the economic impact for waiting on the need is staggering. Thousands in lost revenue and wasted time being behind the 8 ball.
You know the ABCs of selling? Always be closing? Right? Well, what if we changed that to ABI, Always be interviewing. Recruiting is a year-round job that someone needs to have in your business. So, let’s figure out what that needs to look like for you!
You have 10 min to throw out ideas and then we will build out the process for the second 10 min.
Workshop Action: Custom-build the elements of a SPECTACULAR recruiting system. Two sections: Ideate (set timer), then document process (set timer)
WORKSHOP:
“ONE Thing” Around The Room: What was your one big idea whether you implement or not
Remember the days where windows showed up like clockwork in 3 days? Chemical arrived the next day? Subcontractors called you back? Schedules held true? Material budgeting was straightforward? Clients had empathy, patience, and treated you as the expert?
Remember the days when your biggest headache was, “how do we find new business?”
The British playwright Michael McMillan said, “You can't start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading the last one.”
As you come into this final 12-Week Plan LIVE event of 2022…this final opportunity to think deeply through the new challenges you will confront, the new mountains you will climb, the new opportunities you will pursue… you have a choice.
Let me rephrase, you have to make a choice.
Will you gripe, moan and mope about those mean clients, those non-committal subs or vendors, those irritating shipping delays, or those increased prices?
Or will you cut the strings of excuses, limitations, and barriers, and be free from the sludge and the mud of what Zig Ziglar calls “stinkin’ thinkin’”.
We are in a cesspool of negativity right now. I hate my job, I hate my town, I hate the people I work with, I hate the government, this head coach, that team, this policy, that country and on and on. It reminds me of George Strait’s song “I hate everything”.
We are not called to falter and we are not called to fade…we have been called and built to FLOURISH! To flourish, we must intentionally control our mindset.
And in order to flourish in 2023 we are going to have to rid ourselves of stinkin’ thinkin’ and embrace a new attitude of Fortitude: the ability to display courage in pain, to go into new opportunities with a mindset of strength, believing we CAN do something rather than swimming in the cesspool of “can’t”.
Mrs. Jones is being an email bully? We CAN learn to speak to her with truth and thoughtfulness.
Your partner, sub, or vendor is not pulling their weight? We CAN influence and bring value to their operation in a way that serves everyone around.
Tough conversation needs to be had with team members? We CAN plan conversation in an appropriate way that brings value to everyone…a Win/Win mindset.
Hard-pressed to find new team members? We CAN build a thoughtful, powerful, spectacular recruiting, hiring, and onboarding process that WOW’s recruits and supplies them with a substantive opportunity.
We CAN do those things…but not with our current attitudes.
Never in the history of the American workforce have four separate generations worked so closely and communicated so seamlessly than what is happening right now.
You have Boomers who are remaining in the workforce longer, and Gen Z’ers who are entering into higher-level roles earlier. The Boomers, X’ers, Millennials, and Z’ers are interacting everyday.
It’s like a cocktail of Dockers pleats, meets peglegs, meets skinny pants, and now everyone is confused.
You can throw your hands up and protect your generational brand…OR you can make a decision to ignore the stinkin’ thinkin’ and embrace the generational diversity, and the value that comes with.
The values of new generations are in the questions they ask of our institutions, our methods, our systems, our policies, our norms and nuances.
The value of older generations are in the standards they hold for their work product.
There is exponential value in merging those two schools of thought.
Stinkin’ Thinkin’ creeps in and will corrupt all of it so that very little of the cross-generational value is pulled out and instead we spend our days griping, moaning, and moping.
We grumble about the Karen’s, and take pot shots at the bro’s.
There is a better way! A more HUMAN way.
We live in a world where some, seemingly opposite things can be true at the same time
Each of us comes into this room with convictions, norms, and beliefs.
I challenge you to question your convictions. If your convictions are too weak to withstand questioning…then your convictions are not foundations by which you have confidence to stand.
Let’s build and reinforce a new belief, a new conviction…a belief that hard things CAN be done, rocky decisions CAN be navigated, and they will lead to powerful outcomes that will bring the satisfaction we desire.
The generational realities in our modern workplace will challenge us and will be a massive growth opportunity for all of us to retire our stinkin’ thinkin’.
What are some of the ingredients for this needed mindset?
Allow yourself the freedom to have your mind challenged. Some of my greatest learning as a man, living in the south, who identifies as an apprentice and student of Jesus…some of my greatest learning has come from friends outside of that tribe.
As soon as we wrapped up the September Live Event, our team sat down to a delicious taco lunch at the La Poblanita food truck and we knew exactly what our agenda was going to be for this entire morning.
The feedback was overwhelmingly positive for the workshops we had, and yet still some wanted more deep dive time for workshops. We are moving from 4 workshops down to three, and you as a business team are going to walk out of here with a map…a plan on how to recruit, hire, and onboard new team members that takes into account the generational realities, and also the process you are inviting them into.
Thomas will lead our first workshop: Creating The Spectacle: Employees Want To SEE Something Special
Patrice will lead our second workshop: Stirring In The Substance: Backing Up The Spectacle With Your Process
I will lead our third workshop: Bellied Up For The Long Haul: Building an “Unleavable” Experience
During each workshop, we will have some opening thoughts, and then we will guide you through a two-part discussion with your own team.
Part One will be devoted to generating as many ideas as possible.
Part Two will be to the mapping and implementation of the best of those ideas.
Some of you already have existing elements of one or all three of the pieces: recruiting, hiring, and/or onboarding.
This is to go back to the garage and take time to refresh your process, and ask yourself, “what if we changed this up to meet new demands?”
Also, allow your minds to go places that are uncomfortable and a bit squirrely. This is a safe place to dream, to wonder, to invent, and to create. Some of you will be uncomfortable there…get over it…come into the dreams world if only for a few minutes.
Let’s get started.