How To Move Content Cold Recruits Using The BAM Zone. Every Recruiting Leader Needs To Understand What The BAM Zone Is!



Hi everybody, it’s Richard Milligan welcome back to another recruiting conversations, and if you haven’t seen my video version of this, you really should check it out, because I’m coming into this already having given away like three minutes of great content, and so I would encourage you, go check out my YouTube channel, go check out my video channel, go find me in social media, some somewhere you can actually find I actually manage a closed Facebook group for recruiting leaders, and it’s a recruiting leader mastermind group, that’s close group. If you go there and you say, “I’m recruiting leader and I’ve seen I’ve heard you talk about this close Facebook, Facebook group on the podcast” guess what if you knock I’ll let you in how’s that and we I deliver some content there as well in addition to the things that we talked about here so it’s a great place to get an advantage, if you’re looking to get an advantage in this area of recruiting. With that said, today I’m going to talk about something that will make zero sense to you, when I initially lead with it but it’s something that everybody needs to be aware of it, everybody needs to know and it’s what I call the BAM zone. So, I know all of you right now are having these incredible epiphany moments, and you’re like oh my goodness, oh well I haven’t died ever a thought of the BAM zone when I’m recruiting, and no one’s doing that, right? Because no one even really understands what the BAM zone is. So, we share with you what the BAM zone is and how it relates to your recruiting out first now when we take you back into really what I spent the time I spent as a recruiting leader which was close to 25 years, I spent almost a decade in one industry transition into another industry for 15 years, and really didn’t have success recruiting, what I would consider success in recruiting until the last three and a half years. I always had wins on the recruiting side, and in fact you know a lot of people would have looked at me as being ultra-successful with my recruiting efforts, but in terms of the amount of energy and effort that I invested in that, and what I got out of that, I didn’t see a direct correlation in the two, until going into 2014 when I did some things really dramatically different. One of the things that I became aware of it just really just literally kept me awake at night because I realized that I was doing my recruiting wrong was how I was approaching people, and one of the ways that I was approached and recruiting people was that I was leading with things like money, compensation, sign-on bonuses, and you know it’s difficult to win at scale when you are leading with things like sign-on bonuses, compensation, things that are ultimately in what is really the lowest forms of human motivation. One of the ways that I would actually recruit and recruit it for most of my career into the last three and a half years was I would recruit through the lens of what I would consider the company toolbox, what are the things that the company offers support, culture, what tools, right? and if you’re a salesperson, you understand you need some tools, right? You need to be competitive in the market, you need to probably have a CRM for staying in front of your potential and past clients so there’s tools that you need the company toolbox little level but I lead with. Those were my primary tools that I recruited with and so what I would do is I would develop a sales pitch, and that sales pitch was what I would lead with if I could get you into a face-to-face meeting or into a phone conversation, what I would do is I would lead with my company value proposition quasi sales pitch. What I begin to realize is that that is not how you move content called happy candidates, right? Think about this if you are leading with your company tools, and you’re leading with compensation as the primary conduit to get people to your organization, you really are nothing more than an improvement over the current opportunity. It gets very difficult to convince someone to join an organization when you’re simply offering an opportunity improvement. It doesn’t matter whether it’s 10% better, 30% better, a hundred percent better the opportunity improvement offer if someone says to you I’m happy where I’m at, I’m content where I’m at, it gets pretty close to impossible to motivate someone who says that through anything other than large sign-on bonuses, significant improvements in compensation, right? And one of the things that I know, is that if I recruit someone through that lens then I will lose someone from my team through that exact same lens. So, if I win them over with comp, and I win them over with my toolbox, what happens when another organization shows up and offers more comp and a better toolbox? then I will lose that individual, but if I recruit correctly, and I recruit through the lens of the BAM what I call the BAM zone which I’m gonna leave with my values, my convictions my beliefs, with my vision, I am no longer an opportunity improvement offer, I am now what I would consider a new opportunity. The reason why is that no one can duplicate your vision, your core value system, your convictions, and your beliefs, and if they do duplicate that, it’s seriously you know it’s not stealing like an artist, it’s just straight-up thievery, alright? If someone takes all of that on that’s yours they just straight up, straight up stole it, and don’t even care to hide it, and so you know they will lose that’s you know they will lose because they’re not authentic, and people will figure that out, but at the end of the day if you will present yourself through the lens of being what we call an attractive leader, who has a clear vision, clear values, clear beliefs, clear vision, and articulate around those, you move out of that zone that I always call the opportunity improvement offer zone and you move into the new opportunity. So, how do you get there, how do you have, how do you create more framework than just this idea of vision values right beliefs, one of the ways to approach this is through what I call the BAM zone now what BAM stands for is belonging, affirming, and meaning.

Now, if you go back and you remember maybe in high school college you probably learned to some degree a part of this through what’s known as Maslow’s you know the hierarchy of human motivation, and what Maslow the conclusion Maslow came to is that there you know if you if you’ll remember the pyramid there were ultimately five stages of that pyramid, right? and the lowest forms of human motivation fall in the zones of safety and security protection and provision. So safety and security protection and provision mean that like if my 90 day paycheck is intact, and I feel comfortable that the companies say, and I feel comfortable in my position with the organization, right? If that’s in place I then I’m going to think about other things that matter more and those things actually fall in the zone of belonging, affirming, and meaning. Now, here’s what we wit on, when someone says I’m happy when someone says I’m content where I’m at, no I’m good I’m not interested, what we failed to realize is that that’s actually a very viable opportunity, a lot of times I find that recruiting leaders kind of put a check in the check mark in that box, that says this purse I talk to them this person says they’re happy, I’ll follow up in six months, wait, wait, wait, if 94 to 95 percent of the market is content and only five to six percent of the market is discontent, you have really taken your recruiting efforts and you’ve diminished anything that you’re going to do like you’re only going to pursue the people that are already actively looking, like you can’t win a scale when you’re only looking for the needle in the haystack. So a problem to solve is how do you move cold content talent, how do you move them, one of the ways you move them is through the BAM zone, and that’s in that higher top three zone of motivation for us as human beings. This is how we’ve been designed God designed us to want to belong, and to want to live in community, right? We’ve been designed to want to be or to not just want to be but to actually require affirmation, like psychologist will tell you, like if you go back to the early stages of boys and girls, the most important thing that they that will determine whether they become a healthy adult or a wounded adult is the affirmation piece are they affirmed, okay? Specifically, by the mother and the father are they affirmed so we’ve been designed to need affirmation, the other part of this is the meaning zone, right? So, we’ve got belonging we’ve got affirmation and we’ve got meaning and meaning is the highest form of your motivation what does that mean, it means that we want to be a part of something bigger than the next transaction, it means that I want to play a larger part than just helping the next customer across the finish line, that falls into that lower form of human motivation, that’s safety, security, protection and provision. When I close the deal I get paid, right? when I do a good job, I get paid, I’m safe, I’m secure, I’m protected, I’m provided, for when we flip the script and we begin to focus on these pieces of belonging affirming and meaning what we actually will find is that people that will say they’re cold in their content, can actually have a seated discontentment planted with them, where a leader shows up and represents at those three things correctly, okay? So, inside you know my organization inside my coaching, inside my teaching, a big part of where we go back to you and focus on everything around recruiting efforts, when we’re helping an organization build a better recruiting model, where we’re helping an organization build a recruiting model that we’re the one didn’t exist, we’ll go back to this BAM zone again and again how do we represent this, what’s the messaging, what are we doing inside the organization to ensure that people see that they can belong to a strong community of tribal people, what are we doing to show that this is an organization that affirms people how do we affirm them through the recruiting process, what are we doing to show that if you come here you will be a part of something bigger than the next deal, something bigger than the next transaction, right? Something larger than you something larger than this organization, something that’s in that meaning zone, will wrap, we wrap this around everything I’ll give you a perfect example of how we wrap this around everything here recently had an executive level leader come to me someone that since I’m coaching and say look we’re as an organization, we’re going to cut some recruiting up put my quotations around recruiting videos here, over the next couple of weeks, we’ve all written scripts, I wrote my script I’m not sure if it’s the right script, and so what I would ask is would you review the script, that I’m going to use to be on video reviewed the script as I reviewed the script the script was really nothing more than a sales presentation, and um what I found out later on is that every other executive leaders inside the organization that went on video, actually recorded a sales presentation type video. Which talked about why people should be joining the organization, okay? When I looked at that script, the first thing that I asked myself was, how do I help this leader represent something as critical and important as belonging, okay? That if they come here they belong to something bigger than what they currently are part of, how can I show in this short two-minute video that we’re creating that this person if they came to this organization would be affirmed their leadership, and how can we reveal that this organization is all about something that’s much larger than money, than sign-on bonuses then compensation, and so we wrote a beautiful script, and I can’t give the details of that script, because we signed non-disclosure agreements, when I would tell you at a very high level is that we took this piece and we wrapped it around, the entire script we recreated the script and what that script did was it aligned the leader and these three components directly to the organization and these three components, when we this is a true story when we’re done, they recorded the videos as they were leaving the studio the video crew that was not part of the organization stopped this specific executive leader, and just said want to let you know we had tears in our eyes, when you were actually speaking your script the camera, it was the best script hands-down that we heard, and the reason why is because we as human beings are intrinsically designed to want to be a part of these three components, okay? So anytime you’re looking at, what you’re going to do on the recruiting side come back to this piece, let me give you an example of how you can do this, when I’m doing surveys anytime I do an audit for an organization and the recruiting efforts, when I’m doing it audit for them one of the things that I assess is, who all inside the organization is involved in the recruiting process, and so we will follow that process from the time that a recruit gets initially contacted all the way through the end to where they cross the finish line, and we want to map this out whiteboard this out who’s everyone that plays a role in this, as we’ve done this again and again here’s the piece, a data piece that just jumps off the charts at me organizations that involve five or more people when a scale inside their recruiting efforts organizations that are limiting the number of people that are involved in the recruiting process lose at scale when they’re recruiting, okay? Think about this, if I’m going to recruit you, and I wrap the people the amazing people inside my organization around you, in this process of recruiting you, what am I showing to you, well I’m showing you, that you would belong to something bigger than yourself, right? I’m revealing to you what it looks like to be a part of what it looks like to be part of a tribe, right? While I’m doing that I can have more people affirming you, it’s actually affirming to have more people involved, right? I feel important because you know versus one person being involved eight people are involved, right? If a CEO and executive level leaders involved then I feel absolutely affirmed, in this recruiting process and so if your executive level leaders are not involved in the recruiting model you’ve got to get them involved okay this isn’t Richards opinion, data supports this like I mean when I talk about data in one industry a survey of 13,000 top producers, top producer said one of the key factors in them making a decision to join the organization, to join the organization they went to, was that 98 percent said they saw engaged and responsive executive management. Think about that, top producers are saying that because executive management is involved and they’re engaged and they’re responsive in this process that they’re more likely to join the organization, okay? So, data supports this, not just my data, the larger data supports this, getting more people involved equals more success, more wins, right? And it makes sense I get a larger sense of what I’m going to belong to, I’m a firm through the process. And here’s the last part of this, the meaning zone can be revealed in a much larger scale when you get more people involved, okay? So let’s just talk about this meaning zone for a lot of you you’ve got to solve this problem a lot of you have not identified the meaning zone, okay? The meaning zone is, if I join your team if I join your organization, what else am I going to be a larger part of, what else is there for me to be a larger part of. Now if you’re at a local level let me just reduce this down to some very practical things that you can do if you’re a local leader in a market, okay? One of the things that you can do is you can very easily bring meaning into the organization that you’re creating. One of the ways that you can do this is that Christmas go partner up with some organization that finds needy families and then generates Christmas lists for them, and then sponsors trees to corporations, into individuals and so you can sponsor a tree, for a needy family, and buy all the gifts that they need, and buy the tree that they need and that can be part of the team’s meaning zone, okay? So, one of the things that I did as a leader not only did we do that, but the week of Christmas we always invited these families in we would stage this reason in inside our local office, we’d invite the families in we’d have a Santa Claus come in, and that Santa Claus would actually do pictures with the families, would then give them the gift so we made a big presentation okay the entire team was a part of that, okay? There’s larger meaning and being a part of that that’s now not transactional, it’s not about the next deal, the next contract, the next customer, it is actually more fulfillment right so we would do that, at Thanksgiving, it wasn’t uncommon for us to get together as a group and deliver it delivered turkeys, and Thanksgiving meals the morning of Thanksgiving, wasn’t uncommon to be serving at a homeless shelter to be serving meals together, once a quarter, wasn’t uncommon to be partnering with in building a HUD home, okay? I’m taking the team out for an entire day of the office, these weren’t and very normal things it was very normal for me to actually push my team into these opportunities and the reason why is because when we were aligned in doing these things together, we were actually creating a larger meaning and what we do as a unit there’s more cohesiveness connectedness, this unity in doing this is something that everybody wants to be a part of, I don’t want to just show up at work, right? Think about this, this is such a large investment of time why do I want to just show up to just turn on a paycheck, right? Why don’t want it to show up to every two weeks, end up with money in my account give me something more than that. Now, this should be something at the highest this should be a problem solved at the highest level of every organization, but where this is solved at that level a lot of times there’s a disconnect at the local level, where you may have a larger nonprofit entity that you’re donating money to that represents some sort of large you know piece of what is ever at the top of the organization but it doesn’t filter down well. So this has to happen at a local level and the reason why is because the local leader the one that the recruits going to go work immediately for, is the one that needs to represent this. So, if there’s a disconnect there, create a connection to that and if there’s not something available for you at a corporate level go create it yourself, because meaning is the largest form the highest form of motivation for us as human beings, so getting more people involved matters, right? and so here’s a couple questions you should be asking yourself how many people are involved in my recruiting process, if it’s less than five then you gotta solve that problem, if it’s more than five, what I would tell you is that it can’t be more than twelve, because my data supports that more than twelve it actually diminishes the results, okay? So a sweet spot is somewhere in that five to twelve range, get that many people involved and it makes it easier for you to represent this BAM zone.

The other question you gotta ask yourself is, how can I best represent this idea that someone will belong to a tribe, someone belong to a community, how can I best represent this this idea that we are in affirming leadership group. Like very simply while you’re recruiting people, like you can affirm them like crazy, right? Here’s a very easy way to do it, engage another leader in the conversation with the person you’re recruiting, and you simply lead in a conversation with, I was talking to Richard, and wow Richard speaks extremely highly of you, I’m excited to have the opportunity to meet you. That’s affirming somebody right here’s another way to affirm him do a little research on them “hey Richard Wow did a little research on in my research I see that you are just an incredible father like you’re leading in putting your family over work I applaud you for that well done” you just affirm me and if you do your research you can find lots of space to affirm people. Here’s the thing that’s changed inside recruiting even five years ago, if you would have gone and looked at their Facebook page, looked at their Instagram page, study their LinkedIn, you know research them through just an organic Google search, and connect to the dots in the individual, it might have been considered stalking, okay? Not always, but if you got the wrong individual my tip against that are stalking, guess what, it’s an expectation today the rules of the game have changed, if you haven’t done your homework then you’re missing out a huge opportunity to connect with somebody. The other thing is this is that they’re gonna do their homework on you, if they know you’re meeting with they’re meeting with you, they will do their homework on you and that goes to some of the other podcasts that I’ve already produced which is that your leadership brand matters on social media today, and so you need to go back if you haven’t listened to one of those and listen to one of those because it matters because this is now fair game, your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, snapchat, whatever it is all of that’s fair game, okay? And so you need to ask yourself go back to the question of how can I best represent the BAM zone, right? and you’re going to break down those three pieces inside your entire process one of the things that I work with my clients on is that of one of the most powerful things you can do is taking a recruit and bringing them into the local office, I call a local site visit, now some companies do these larger corporate site visits, and those are great and those can definitely play a critical component to it, but when you bring the local office in, right? And you the people that this individual is going to actually work alongside, and they have an opportunity to interact with them, and you wrap the longing affirming and meaning around that particular local office visit, there is some secret science / sauce in creating that and building it right. And if you want to see around how that can be done, shoot me an email, it’s [email protected] I’ll shoot you back an actual document that will show you the breakdown of the things that you can do inside just a simple local office visit. Where you say “hey I’d love to host you at our local office would you be willing to come by and grab a cup of coffee” not everyone’s willing to do that but the people that are will this will allow you to wrap this BAM zone all the way around them, and they will leave that place knowing that that’s an organization that they want out that they want an alignment with it they want to work for it, okay? So the BAM zone has now been revealed, go to this again and again and again and constantly ask yourself what are we doing to represent this BAM zone in all of our recruiting efforts, and if you do this what you will find is that you’ll have more wins on the recruiting side, because we as human beings want more than money, compensation, sign-on bonuses, whatever you want to call it we want more than that that’s how we’ve been designed and so build a better recruiting model that actually is designed around getting to the highest forms of human motivation, which are going to be in that belonging, affirming, and meaning zone. Excited to have been able to share this with you, we will come back to this again and again, this is something that that is that important we’ll talk about how you can actually create scripts at some point using this idea we’ll talk about some more specific things in how you connect the dots the BAM zone even after you’ve given someone offer, because one of the things that I know is that somewhere between 25 and as high as 40% of people that receive an offer, actually don’t show up for the first day of work, okay? That’s real data and so if this beam zone gets wrapped around that process beyond the signing of an offer letter you can actually take that 25 to 40% that you’re losing and you can reduce that to 5 to 10%, I know this, I’ve seen it, I’ve worked to make sure that organizations are executing in the space, and so you can take this part that I’ve just given you today, and implement this in every aspect, every part of what you’re doing, as a recruiting leader or an organization and it will make your process better. If it values to a day I’d be honored to have you share it, you can find more podcasts like this on my website, you can also find more podcasts like this on iTunes, Google play, Spotify, or in a lot of places, and so look forward to coming back next time and sharing more ideas with you around this recruiting conversation piece, which is this ongoing conversation that I have on a daily basis or with recruiting leaders like yourself. So until it happens again until next time have a great week everybody and we will look forward to hosting you again, here on recruiting conversations.



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