Welcome back, it’s another recruiting conversations with Richard Milligan, and I’m excited to share another idea with you here today. You know, these ideas that I share with you, the topics of these podcasts, a lot of times aren’t premeditated or pre-planned they’re really spontaneous, and that the intention is to actually share a recent conversation with you around some of the coaching that I do. And so it’s typically relative to the moments, relative to an individual, and a lot of times that means it’s relative to you as a podcast listener because you’re in a season that anyone that I would coach would be in. So, let’s just talk about that season right now what I’m finding is that a lot of people are saying I’m having a difficult time getting people engaged in the conversation, sometimes that can be just an initial conversation, and sometimes that can be just getting people across the finish line because of an issue called busyness, Okay? So, one of the things that I know in society today is that we overuse that term busy, a lot of times it becomes a badge of honor to some degree of I’m busy, right? It’s like we wear that very proudly, it’s like our brand, it’s our reputation, it’s like I remember there being a long season of my business where I actually felt guilty if I wasn’t busy, and then I came to a place where I realign and redefined what was important to me, and in that next season, business was not a badge of honor, other things were a badge of honor, like spending time with my family, more than I spend invested into my business. So, we all have to deal with the tension of that in our own unique way but if you are recruiting leader, one of the things that you’re gonna bump up against again and again is sometimes this can just be a season, sometimes this can be forever. You’re gonna bump up against people being difficult to get in front of because they’re so busy. Now, with that said one of the things that I did well as a recruiting leader was I was able to use creative what I would call creative marketing ideas to cut through the noise of the busyness. A lot of times the busyness is just a cadence, it’s our it’s a rhythm to life right, it’s like your rhythm to life is that you’re always busy, and so because of that as a recruiter if you can’t cut through that rhythm that people have in terms of busyness, you won’t succeed at scale as a recruiter. So, this is some problem that you have to solve and the people that solve it best, tend to think creatively in how they approach people and so we want to talk about some of those ideas today, but first and foremost I want you to understand this a large part of your success is going to be predicated on your ability to break patterns, okay? So, when I talk about business being a rhythm kind of being cadence you have to break that pattern of busyness, you have to break that that cadence of having a lot going on with people if you’re going to actually cut pass break through that initial I’m not interested, I don’t have time to talk, I’m happy where I’m at, you get to break through that, a lot of times you have to break people’s thought patterns, and how you do that, is to creative marketing ideas. So, I’m going to share some of these ideas with you but the one I want to establish this piece of why this is more relevant today than it’s ever been for a recruiter because I do believe it’s more relevant today than ever. I think in the past there were certain rhythms to recruiting that were more successful, right? Just dialing people making the phone call, having a phone conversation, that was more successful in the past, having a rhythm to even just messaging, however you message might have been email, right? As technology moves so it announced text messaging, right? there’s other places like direct message where you can DM people, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, there are all these places to reach people but there are a lot of times a recruiter uses a rhythm of I make a phone call, I connect on LinkedIn, I send a message, I didn’t follow up with a text message, and you have to break that rhythm a lot of times to actually cut through the pattern of how people are used to being pursued.
One of the things that we know okay like Microsoft did it did a study, where you know a lot a lot of people are familiar with this study because Simon Sinek is has brought it up in some of his and some of his speeches that he’s given here in the last couple years, where he says that the attention span of a human being is now shorter than the attention span of a goldfish, right? The goldfish has a nine second attention span humans are now at eight seconds or less, and now that information comes from a study that Microsoft did where what they what they did was they hooked up a hundred and twelve people, to you know, these electrodes and in that what they determine is that the average attention span of the course the last whatever decade or so, they were measuring it from 2000 to the to the current moment is that our average attention span is dropped from 12 seconds to eight seconds, okay? And part of that why that’s relevant is that we are multi-screen users today, right? You’ve got a smartphone, you’ve got a tablet, you have a laptop and a desktop, and got multiple screens on that desktop, like we’re heavy multi-screen users, and so we’re finding it difficult to just filter out stimulus, right? I read a book recently that said that we are now in what they called the arena culture, and the arena culture is this is that we walk around seeking out stimulus, and we measure everything according to being entertained, okay? So, this is the air that we’re in, and so as humans if we’re if we’re having a difficult time filtering out, your relevant stimulus then what that means is that we’re always busy right our pattern is now not filtering out anything, and now we are just overly whelmed, right? So we’re overwhelmed in the business of the day-to-day, so what we understand as part of this is that we’re overly marketed to, okay? I saw a recent stat about Facebook there’s 7 million, ok, get this 7 million advertisers on Facebook there’s over two million advertisers on Instagram, right? Like so when you start to just wrap all this around us as human beings you realize this isn’t just relevant in a season in my business, this is now something you’re gonna deal with forever. So, it is a problem they solved, and I love that framework in business, there’s either attention to be managed or there’s a problem to be solved, this is a problem that you have to solve. So, as part of this I you know let’s just let’s just establish this fact as human beings were being marketed to approximately 5,000 times through 5,000 ads per day, that was a marketing firm that did some research, and found out that in this current era as a human being, we’re being marketed to at a level we’ve never been marketed to before, right? So, that’s the “why” of this, okay? Now let’s talk about the “how” of this, how do we break this this in beyond this initial you know crust of the individual and get get past the busyness, I go back to a book that I read early in my career, and it’s an old book I think the book was written, it well old is now relative let’s just establish that, you get to your mid 40s you know young and older, you know are interesting how everything’s relative to your age, but I remember reading a book in my early twenties by Donny Deutsch, and the book was titled “Often Wrong Never in Doubt”. So, Donny built a really large marketing agency, and the media agency, and that in that agency he developed their success model on the premise of these creative marketing ideas, and one of those things that stuck with me that I remember reading and just like my maybe early to mid-twenties, was this him getting his first multi-million dollar transaction which was like a tri-city car dealership, don’t ask who I remember these things there’s just certain things that my brain remembers, I remember this, and in that story that he shared in the book, what he did was he was the first person to present their agency offering, and it was out of like four or five maybe six seven different companies, but I believe he was the first one to present he knew he was at a disadvantage because the last person recent is the one that’s most memorable. So, he immediately began to strategize over how he became more memorable so he identified the day that they were actually going to make a decision around this multi-million dollar you know budget that they had for media, and on that on the morning of that day, he had actually went and purchased a vehicle from a from a wrecker service, from a, from a lot work you know vehicles are they go when they die, right? And so he bought this car and he had someone take that car apart in pieces, and then he painted a delivery company to deliver the car that was announces and kind of staged it to where it was actually put back together, and so as they did this different pieces of the vehicle had tag lines on them. So, maybe the front bumper of the car you know how to tag along on it “said go with us will point you in the right direction” the steering wheel was delivered with the car and said “go with us we’ll steer you in the in the right way” right? They sent the bumper of the vehicle as part of how to map a message mapped on it put on it was “go with us we’ll always have your back” right? So, and what happened in that is that he actually got the got the deal because of the creativity that he used to break through in what would be a creative marketing idea.
Now how is that relative to what we do today, well you need to put in your toolbox some creative ideas, some creative marketing ideas, that actually break patterns for your recruits, that actually captured their attention, okay? This is this is bigger than what you think it is, this is more powerful than what you think it is, the reason why I know this is because I did this, let me give you some examples here, some very practical examples and I’ll give you kind of a list of things here at the end. One of the things that I did, okay? You know I almost inside the mortgage industry, one of the things that I did when I was recruiting someone if I couldn’t even get engaged in a conversation, was I would take a creative marketing idea to try and engage them. So, I would I went to GoDaddy okay and I defined several URLs that were short URLs that people would think were cool, so for example loveslending, right? LovesLending.com and I could put a first name in front of that RichardLovesLending.com and I would buy those websites in bulk, based off the first stands of my recruits. So, I would say I took words like love’s lending, the local lender, your lender, and I simply would stack first names in front of that. So Richard loves lending, Richardthelocallender, Richardyourlender, and I would send that to loan officers and branch managers, with it with a little note a little text message could have been a text message could have been an email could have been a handwritten note but the note would say something along, the lines of hey came across this cool website, and thought of you so I bought it for you, what’s a good email address that I can reassign it to you at, okay? and that little technique right there, was one of the most powerful techniques that I had in my arsenal because it broke a pattern, people would then contemplate, wait a second like I know he’s we talked on the phone once, or I know he’s been trying to call me, I know he’s messaged me three or four times on LinkedIn that’s pretty crazy that he thought of me and bought this website and one of the reasons why that particular idea was powerful is that most loan officers had a very generic website, it might have been you know www dot the name of the lender you know ABC mortgage company Forge slash, Richard Milligan Forge slash app, ford slash, loan officer one two nine seven six, right? Those are some of the websites, that they were using us so when I gave them this website, they were able to redirect the Richardloveslending.com to that website, but now they’re giving a much easier framework for people to remember or their application is, or how to actually connect with me when I was buying these and I’ll go Daddy this is still true today, when you buy websites in bulk you can buy them for around three to four dollars apiece, okay? So fifty of these would cost me a couple hundred dollars max, to break through some patterns. So it’s worth pausing here and just saying what are some creative ideas that I can incorporate into my recruiting efforts to break patterns for recruits, so that I can actually engage in a conversation, okay? Let’s just run through some of these ideas, the website that’s a phenomenal idea no matter what industry you’re in. That’s a great idea, now that I’ve given an idea out there’ll be a couple hundred people that will do it, so let’s go onto some other ideas because you’re going to have to have some additional tools in your toolbox, here’s a great idea, a Starbucks QR code for coffee, great idea, what’s it what’s a cup of coffee cost the Starbucks, five dollars, okay? So, I can get I can go to Starbucks if I’ve got five of my top recruits, I’m trying to have a conversation with and for $25 I can get five $5 Starbucks cards, and I simply take a picture of the QR code, and I can text message that, I can email that, I can direct message that, through any social platform and say “Richard thought of you today as I was grabbing my cup of coffee wanted you to have a cup of coffee on me tomorrow morning hope all as well” okay? That’s a pattern breaker, look one of the things that I used well that I still recommend using today is books, I do think books are pattern breakers for people, like there’s something about a book, I don’t think I’ve ever thrown a book away, like if you came and you looked at my library and you looked at the boxes of books that I have, I just don’t have the heart there’s something about a book that I just can’t throw away, and so one of the things that was a pattern breaker for me is that when I’m flying places most times after if there’s only a handful of airports I can I fly out of Oklahoma City, because I live on the north side of Oklahoma City. So, I’m going to regularly go into places like the Denver Airport and in the Denver Airport, if you’ve been there you know there’s a bookstore there. So, any time I went through an airport that a bookstore, I was skimming the front of that, of the front of that bookstore, looking for books that I could actually take a cool picture with someone, and then send it to him. So let me give an example this a great book that I’ve picked up and I would recommend the book to, to most leaders is a book that’s titled “lead your tribe love your work” it’s a book by an entrepreneur that built a multi-million dollar organization sold that any talks about the journey of that, and so there’s some things in there that are definitely aligned with my value system, my belief system, right? Having a vision, the importance of that understanding your values, the importance of that, treating people the way that you want to be treated and he really walks through contextually very practically how he did that in his business. So, that book, I took a picture of that book in the Denver Airport, now if you’re at Denver and you’re not from the mountains like, having a Mount a mountain backdrop, when you’re up against the windows kind of a cool backdrop to have, so I would go take a picture with me of the book in the mountain backdrop and I now had that photo, and I could send that book to someone, and I could also text message them a copy a text message him a picture, that I take him with the book to say “hey I picked up this book when I was in Denver recently what did you have a copy of it” and I would buy that buy that book buy the cases and then I would send it to people that I was trying to have a conversation with. It was a pattern breaker, sending a book was one thing but when I sent the photo of me with the book in the mountain the mountains in the background being in Denver, I was breaking patterns with that. So, a lot of people they only focus on the creative marketing idea, they don’t really understand the why of this, when you send that photo, it causes people to pause, wait a second he thought of me, you actually took a picture of a book he’s in Denver, I now have the book, he signed the front of the book, that’s a more powerful breakthrough idea than just phone calling somebody, text messaging somebody, direct messaging somebody.
Here’s one that I’ve used extremely well, and one that someone actually used on me recently which is this take a snippet, okay? If you don’t have snippet, you really should have snippet because with snippet you can actually just take a snip of someone’s face by just dragging and dropping an arrow crossed you know, their link their LinkedIn face, or their Facebook picture, and you can save that you can add what I what is known as a call-out or I call it a thought bubble, where you add a message so I recently had somebody do this to me they went to my LinkedIn page, my profile picture they took a snippet of it, they added a call-out to it, and it said the call-out said “hey Milligan I left you message call me back” and I was like whoa, wait a second that’s me, hey I got the text message like that’s a picture of me it’s got a thought bubble or call it on it with a message to me, I’m like that’s kind of cool, what were they doing they were breaking a pattern for me, I was busy they’d left me a voice message and now guess what they got a phone call back immediately. Here’s a couple of other ideas, a lot of people don’t know and Facebook messenger that you can leave a voice message, they most people realize you can leave a video message there, but what about a voice message, again that’s a pattern breaker, most people don’t know, you can do that a lot of people don’t do video message invested messages on LinkedIn, they’re like video message what do you mean yeah you can sync up a tool called Bom Bom with your Linkedin, and now I can record a video message, and I can message you direct message, you have video message on Bom Bom, great idea, the moment that your face pops up and somebody’s messaging box they’re going to wait a second how’d they do that? It’s a pattern breaker, Okay? So, in this there are lots of ideas one of the things once, I got someone to a place where that they knew me, I knew them, if things begin to stall out, I would then reach for some very creative and non cost-effective pattern breaker. So, let me give you an example that, I would send a chicago-style pizza from Peoria Illinois, in dry ice, it wasn’t crazy expensive to do it 35 to 40 bucks to do it, okay? But it was a Chicago style pizza, wasn’t just a regular piece of Chicago style pizza, I found a place in Peoria Illinois, if you want the address to that you message me, I’ll give you the name of the company and the address of the of the company that does this, but it’s actually a pizza shop, a real Chicago style pizza shop that does pizzas and will actually ship them in dry ice for you. Had a barbecue place in Kansas City, same thing could actually prepare a meal put it in that this company puts prepares it and ships it in dry ice to somebody, and so I would intentionally send some of these things out on a Friday, especially if I knew a little bit about their situation, working mom, working dad, kids in the house, you know something about frying it’s kind of a finish line, and I would make sure those things would arrive on the front porch, on a Friday, because basically they were eating dinner on me. I was a pattern breaker, as much as it was anything okay so there’s some stretches on some of these things, I mean I recently saw a marketer who said one of their pattern breakers was going to Amazon and finding people’s wish list, so, if you didn’t know that, if you don’t have your privacy settings set up correctly if I have your email address that’s tied to your Amazon account, I can actually see your wish list and this marketer was buying things for c-level executives off their wish list, and sending it to them saying hey I thought of you when I saw this, right? And the in the end it’s just kind of one of those moments where it’s like God are you speaking to me, because I was looking at that, I was thinking about getting that, and someone bought that for me, and sent that to me. So that’s a pattern breaker, here’s a really great idea what cool pattern breaker would be to go find the top 10 TEDx talks, that the specific title of the purse that you’re trying to engage should watch, okay? If you’re in the mortgage industry and you’re trying to get in front of branch managers what are the top ten TEDx talks that every branch manager should view, if you’re in the real estate community what are the top ten TEDx talks that every real estate agent should see, if you’re in the insurance industry what are the top ten TEDx talks at every agent should say, great that’s a pattern breaker. One of the things that I’ll leave you with is this, I read and I use that contextually now reading is no longer reading is listening, I listen I listen to a lot of books, Okay? So, I’m listening to three to seven books a month depending on the length of the book that link the length of the books, I’m listening to audible.com is my go-to for that a lot of people don’t realize that inaudible at that when you’re listening to a book in the top right-hand corner, there’s a little box that arrow on it, when you tap that box it will give you an option for sending that book to someone. So, a great pattern breaker is to use that I have used that, I would steer say 10,000 times, where I’ve actually read a book thought of someone that that book would be interesting to, and have clicked that little button, and it says and it greets a message that says that this book it’ll give you options to email it, to text message it, you put it into any of these other platforms, and it’ll pre-form a message there and the message, says “here’s a link to this book this person’s this person just listened to you’re entitled to a free copy of this book if you don’t have audible.com download it now” but regardless it was a pattern breaker, okay? People would get a book via text message, they’d be like wait a second how I’ve never seen that before, how’d that happen, okay? All of these ideas will work for you, if the if you will use them, and they will help you engage people into a conversation where you haven’t yet. So, if you find yourself in a in a in a rhythm where everyone’s set busy where no one’s available, move towards this as one of the tools in your toolbox, okay? It will work, I know it will work, I coach people to this, they’re there they’re blown away by how these strategies actually work. So identify three of these, I always love this idea of having an action plan identify three of these that you will from a Lean Startup mindset try, I want to say lean struck mindset try, try 50 of these and then determine whether it worked for you or not right, but as Brian Tracy once told me when my early 20s, an idea not activated on a 24 hours is a dead idea, this is only a good idea right now. If you make it practical and you apply in your business, it will change your ability to engage more people in a conversation that’s what we’re all about. So break through people like breaking patterns through creative marketing ideas, if you want more information around this podcast, you can actually find more podcasts like this, at recruitingconversations.com, I do a lot of LinkedIn content, so every single day, I’m active on Linkedin at least one if not as many as three to four times, a lot of my content gets dropped there in short form, which is 130 characters or less, and daily post, love to have you follow me there as well, and so hey if this brought value to you shoot me a line, drop me a direct DM somewhere, and would love to just know that you’re finding value and the ideas that we’re sharing here on recruiting conversations, so until I talk to you again in the next podcast, have a great week everybody.
