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Hey everybody its Richard Milligan with recruiting conversations and I’m back, and I’m a little excited to be here today, and I’m a little bit excited to be here every day. But especially excited to be here today because, I’m coming fresh out of a conversation with a recruiting leader and there was a little bit of a debate back and forth, of where they should be putting the majority of their efforts in this area of recruiting. And I think part of the tension in that why I’m here today to talk about this topic is that, inside the area that I coach, which is mortgage recruiting leaders, there is a large group of executive leaders, inside that industry that are still pushing an agenda that’s a dying agenda. And my challenge is to break a false belief system that is out there, and I’m here to challenge people to innovate inside this area of recruiting, not for the purpose of just innovating but for the purpose of winning. Think if you want to win, then you should probably listen the podcast today this is a great podcast for those of you that like winning, if you don’t like winning go ahead and click off the podcast and I don’t know go, go watch a cooking show or something else that soothes your soul.
Today I’m here to kind of get you fired up I really want to challenge you to make some changes in this area and this area is your personal leadership brand. The reason why is because your personal leadership brand matters not just kind of matters today, it matters more than it ever has in the history of the world. Now how’s that for a statement, but it does it matters more now than ever, and this isn’t Richards opinion this is data, ladies and gentlemen this is data, like I’m talking about relevant current information that says “that this is more important than pressing the agenda of you making more phone calls”, okay? And I say that because I hear this a lot, and I don’t mean just like now, I mean over the last year. If you knew the number of times I had a conversation with someone on coaching and they come into the coaching session and the conversation goes along the lines of our big initiative right now as an organization is to make X number of phone calls, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and fifty, and what we’ve done with the best leaders that we have, these are the most influential, the most impactful leaders that we have in the workforce is we’ve turned them into tele prospectors, we’ve turned them into telemarketers, okay? So I guess if you want to pay someone that kind of money to dial and to get 1 out of 11 people on the phone and actually that’s gonna happen if you dial repeatedly, right? Because people are statistics you can just go look at some general statistics from anybody, go look at a recent article from anybody and it’s everywhere, the phone is dying, marketers have run the phone, right? like you can go and leave me a voice message and I feel no tension there, I feel zero tension when you leave me a voice message now. If you leave me the voice message and you follow with a text message now you got my attention. Right? But just simply dialing on the phone or even just simply text messaging, you are really putting yourself in a very small bullseye to go win at recruiting. Look inside the mortgage industry specifically one out of four recruits now comes through direct solicitation, that’s not my data but somebody else’s data, one out of four, so if you’re gonna focus 90% of your energies and efforts and being a telemarketer and being a tele prospector well I wish you luck, but the person that invests their energy and efforts into this 75%, they’re the ones that are gonna win, and guess what they’re the ones that are winning right now. Like this isn’t I’m not guessing the wind the direction of the wind for tomorrow, I’m telling these the people that are winning right now are the ones who have built their leadership branding piece, their personal leadership branding piece on social media, that are out there being what I call the attractive leader. If you listen in my podcast, you understand the attractive leader is someone that has a vision, is clear in their core value system, is able to articulate it extremely well, and then lives and acts and alignment with the core values with the vision. And where else is there a more perfect place to actually live that out? Hello, social media! So you can’t not have a presence, it’s just unacceptable, if you can’t have a presence in social media today as a leader and brand yourself with your core value system, then you really shouldn’t be in the position, you really shouldn’t be in the role. The expectation is that this has to be in play, this has to be in place, okay? So my rants now over, I do want to talk about data because I’m a big numbers guy. I’m gonna follow the data and the data says that this is a relevant conversation and that you should tune in. So I’m gonna go through some of the boring data here, but I challenge you as I go through this think of the narrative that it’s creating, okay? so let’s just start here inside the mortgage industry ninety-seven point eight percent of loan officers say that engaged and responsive executive management is important to them. Almost 98%, now if I’m not inside your organization, how would I have a clue that you’re engaged and responsive, if you’re in the executive management role, I would have zero clue unless you had a personal leadership bran, and social media is key to reflecting this to people outside your organization. yes or yes? Yes, it is it’s the only way you’re gonna reflect that, unless you plan on text messaging or voice mailing a few million people, like this is, this is the only way you’re gonna do it, the only get there, right? Inside the mortgage industry, here’s an interesting stat 45% of loan officers said they were referred to the next mortgage company to their next employer, they were referred almost 50% of every loan officer that goes to the next company is referred, you can make a direct conclusion there, that the leaders vision, leaders core values, their beliefs and being able to see those from a distance and being able to create alignment with those, is critical it’s not just critical the person that’s being this transitioning, but to all the influence around them, the real estate agent, the title company, The I rep, like the other loan officers in the market but this isn’t just inside the mortgage industry gang. Like data goes on and on about this 92% of people trust today, trust recommendations from individuals over companies, that’s in direct correlation with that statistic I just gave you the prior, even if they don’t know them, even if they don’t know the individual. Here’s one for you the personal leader that actually shares something on social media, gets 561% more engagement and more reach than when the company shares it. The power is in your hands today, thank you social media, right? You go back ten years ago and the company could have dominated radio TV and print, and could have had oh it could have been the only person to afford to have the influence. Today where attention is so diversified across so many platforms, like we have the power as leaders, we have the power, proof of that is this, every single week I get three to five people on my calendar I’ve never met before, I’ve never spoken before, I have no clue who they are, but they end up on my life calendar, because I have influence in some of these areas. Here’s one for you, content shared by an employee is re-shared 24 times more frequently than when it’s shared by a company, there’s power in that, Here’s one for you 82% of people are more likely to trust a company when senior executives are active on social media. It’s pretty obvious that social media and leadership brand matters, 77% of people say they’re more likely to buy from a company, when the CEO that business uses social media, and look this doesn’t just impact like that single piece of people purchasing your product, it actually influences whether people stay with your brand, whether people stay with your organization, right? And while I teach about recruiting a part of what I believe recruiting is reverse recruit and reverse recruiting, being that you should be working really hard to retain the people that you bring on board. Data says that almost 7 out of 10 people don’t even decide the company that they transition to is a good fit, if you leave one company and go to another company it’s almost 7 out of 10 say they will give they won’t even give them up to a full year before they decide with their good fitter or not, okay? So we’ve got to have some good ideas and how we retain our people, well here’s some statistics you’re having that a why social media even matters to that. Companies that invest in the personal branding of employees found three things, one the employees were 27 percent more hopeful about their company, there were 20 percent more likely to stay, and there were 40 percent more likely to book to believe in the competitiveness of their employer, this even matters in retaining our people today. So a big focus that I put on people when they come into my coaching is LinkedIn specifically because well I think that LinkedIn is a relationship building platform, a lot of people see LinkedIn as a recruiting platform, and to some degree LinkedIn in the early stage has really promoted itself as a recruiting platform, and I see a transition now where it’s now becoming more of a business social media platform. And so building relationships is really critical on that specific platform today in the United States alone there’s 150 million users, 80% of those users say that professional networking is important to their career success, well what does that mean? Well that means that if you ask someone to connect with you they’re highly likely to actually follow you, connect with you because they see that that connection is important to actually having success in their career, eight out of ten say that, 89.7% of those 154 million users say they find it extremely useful in growing their network. So, if you have a narrative of “gosh this platform is just full of people throw in the right hook bomb”, they connect with you and then they’ve got something that they want to push or sell and look there is a lot of that, like my inbox is full of that, I know your inbox is full of that. That’s why we got to have a strategy and how we use the platform, okay? And there’s multiple layers to that strategy, the first layer is becoming an influencer which means that you have connections, you can’t influence the platform unless you have connections right the average CEO on LinkedIn, has a whopping 930 connections. Now probably made a lot of you feel really good about yourself. But the truth is that, that shouldn’t be the measuring stick, if someone comes to your profile and they’re in your market and you’re trying to build relationship with them so that you can attract them to your team, when they come to your profile you either appear to be an influencer or you appear to not be an influencer. And there’s some things like number of connections that you have that matters, the tone of what you’re posting or if you’re posting for a lot of you that matters, and if you’re vacant there and if there’s nothing there, you miss out on a big opportunity to move people towards you, and to who you are. So you’ve got out connections, you’ve got to be posting daily, and when I say posting daily, I know some of you’re gonna get a big eye roll, look I’ve seen those eye roll before when I tell people this. If you post every single day only 60 percent of your audience is gonna see you one time per month, that’s LinkedIn data, so yes you’ve got a post daily look if you follow someone like a Gary Vee, Gary’s getting you’re he’s gonna tell you to post five to seven times per day on the platform, if you want to hit your entire audience and you want to start saturating it. I’m just saying, you got to be relevant, because if you’re the recruiting leader and your name comes up in a conversation or I see you in my newsfeed, or you call me or you text me or I bump into you too in a networking event, then I’m immediately gonna go over to your LinkedIn profile and I am going to see who you are. So you have to have a summary built LinkedIn calls in the summary, I call it the about me, you’ve got to have that built out. So you got to go touch your summary, you got to be building your connections, and then you’ve got to be posting the platform daily, that is minimal, okay? That’s minimally what you got to be doing, that’s gonna literally get you to the start line, okay? So you start there and you start there because you understand we aren’t on the platform to get likes and comments and shares. We’re on the platform to be relevant, to influence, and to build relationships, and if you’re not doing the things that I just mentioned you can’t do any of that, and all of that is in the 75%. The 75% of people that are going to move to the next company will move to the next company because of an attractive leader somewhere, that attractive leader can be you, or it can be somebody else, doesn’t have to be you somebody will fill that void in some way shape or form. So it’s important that you do that now there’s other pieces of this, one piece of this is, how good’s your content? There’s a lot of noise that’s being created on the platform today simply because people think they’ve got to create noise in order to be relevant and the truth is that, like in the business sector in general, if you get to any social media content, you’re going to see that we are literally drowning in noise. All kinds of bots are posting on individual’s behalf, you see that, you see a lot of really corporate type marketing materials that just don’t resonate with the audience most people don’t connect with that on any level, especially if they are searching for an attractive leader, it doesn’t connect with them on any level. What I’m looking for is, what is your truth? who are you authentically? Like what some of the things that you believe, talk about those things, okay? I came into this podcast maybe with a little more energy than I needed to, but there’s something here today, that I believe all I believe have some really firm beliefs around, so I’m pretty passionate about this. So what things are you passionate about like what makes a successful sales person in your business in your industry? What makes you relative to your consumers in your market? What are some of the things that you believe as a leader? Like what makes great leadership? What are some of the things that you value in leadership? What are some of the things that you’re actually trying to deliver to your team as a leader? all that’s great content. There’s a quote that says “we’re drowning in information while starving for wisdom”. If there was ever a moment in history, where we’re drowning in information and starving for wisdom, it’s now, as the noise begins to increase where people are trying to get attention while they’re trying to attract people. So live out your truth and the beautiful thing is that, I’m giving you permission to be you, that’s what I’m doing, I’m giving you to be permission to be you. There’s nobody wins when they’re neutral, when your content is neutral nobody wins, if you’re trying to be Switzerland, nobody ever gets recruited as Switzerland, okay? So understand that whoever you are, live that out! Now I think there’s a difference between being polarizing in who you are, and creating polarization that actually triggers conflict, and so in this case, I’m saying live out your truth, who are you outside of work. Like me I’m a father of four been married for twenty years, I got two dogs, I love the outdoors, my family loves the outdoors, we hunt and we fish in our spare time, that’s who I am, so not gonna hide that. I’ve got a methodology of how I operate in life, I put God first, my family next, my business next, okay and so that’s part of my truth. I have a family purpose statement, that I live out I have 19 statements that I hold myself true to and I can go to those at any moment, and I can live through the lens of those, and so I’m very clear and that clarity gives me ability to create content very quickly, and so as part of this maybe one of the things that is a take away for you today is get clear and what you believe, get clear and who you are, get clear on what is your truth. When you have that content will flow a lot of people think that being relevant on the platform is being a thought leader, no one’s asking you to be a thought leader no one’s asking you to become a marketing creation team, move away from the idea of creation and move towards identification, identification says that you’ve got moments all around you that you could document that are your truths, and if you simply identified those moments and then documented those, you’re living in alignment, right? It’s part of the attractive leadership piece I said, that I mentioned earlier, right? What’s your core value system, what’s your vision, being able to articulate around that, and then the living and acting alignment with that, when you document the moments, we are already living in alignment with what your truth is you become an attractive leader and that content is relative on the platform. So it’s not about getting likes, I’m off about getting comments and shares those things are great, and as you do this consistently, you will attract an audience. But for a season, you’ve got to be okay, with being a guy or a girl, with a single lit candle in a dark room. Look I could go back, a handful of years ago and that was me, okay? Like I remember posting consistently and getting one likes, or is no likes and feeling the tension of that like, like my voice hasn’t changed any today, right? but this podcast will get 500 downloads on it, so the truth is that, live, by it by living out, who I am what I believe and what I’m doing over a season, my the people that are in my tribe, the I bring value to will lean in, and so then it becomes consistency. Will you do this forever? if we make that commitment like I’ll do this forever, this is part of the game and I’m gonna do this forever, and if that’s true then you gotta have a system, you see what I did there to you? I always talked about the importance of the system we never rise the level of our goals we always fall a level or systems, so I started talking out talking about leadership branding now I brought you all the way full circle to, like if you’re gonna create content you’re gonna do this on an ongoing basis, you’ve got to have a system, and so here’s what I’ll do. The next podcast I’ll talk about that, how do you break some of this down into something that’s more systemic to where you’re not waking up every single day and going oh my gosh I gotta create more content, what am I gonna talk about today, okay so I’ll share with you some of the things that I do, that I’ve kind of grown through over the past few years and hopefully there’s some value in that to you, and we’ll talk about that in the next episode, okay? So we’re gonna talk about this a lot here the next coming weeks I’ve got some it’s a really cool data that comes from social listening that I think it’s gonna really surprise you. I’ve done a study on a handful of leaders that are in general that have been on the edge of leadership branding for the last five to six seven years, and the and what it’s done for their organizations. these are CEOs so I’m going to share some of that data with you over the next few podcasts. So if you’re listening to this one first, stick with me in the next few podcasts, let you even get more clarity around this, right now I’m trying to motivate you and inspire you but also educate you on why I’m saying what I’m saying. I’m not just making this up, like this is legitimate, this is real you got to move towards this, if you’re gonna win in a space of recruiting. okay? So with that said, and all on my exulting energy, I wish you a fun afternoon, and lots of wins in the area of recruiting and I say this from time to time, but I really mean this, have fun with this, like I think we’ve taken the fun out of recruiting simply because we’ve turned ourselves into telemarketers, and there’s a big grind in the space of that, where it’s like I gotta just smile and dial, I gotta just smile and dial, and yes there’s an element where you got to pick up the phone and you got to talk to people, but at the end of the day the game has changed. So, until I talk to you again next time on recruiting conversations, use your time wisely and have fun recruiting, all the best to you have a great week everybody.
