Why Having 6 people Involved In Your Recruiting Process Matters

Welcome to another recruiting conversations, it is your host Richard Milligan, and you know what I think I probably overuse the I’m excited to be here with you today. So you know what I’m just here today, but I’m excited, and so there’s no harm in saying that, right? I am excited today we are bringing you a topic that comes up quite often in my coaching and is a number, the number six, and it is the importance of the number six in recruiting. So, it’s going to be kind of a unique approach that you know that’s actually more micro than it is a macro, but it is so, it critical to whether you’re going to win or lose when you’re recruiting. So, one of the things that I have learned the more time that I have spent recruiting, and the more time I’ve spent coaching recruiters, is that recruiting is a lot a lot of little things, right? A lot of people want to know like what’s the secret formula to a phone script, they want to know like give me the one big nugget that I, you know I haven’t uncovered yet, that if I change this one thing will dramatically impact my recruiting results, and while there are a lot of those that exist in your recruiting efforts, and when I’m coaching I’m trying to identify those big things first, so that we can move the needle quickly, at the end of the day it comes down to a lot of little factors that most people don’t consider when they’re recruiting.

So how does the number six play into one of those little factors well we have a statement here that we use which is a simple framework that helps us remember the importance of this number, and for those of you that this may mean something, for those of you may not mean anything at all, but when I was a kid growing up, we would use this terminology who’s got your six, right? And so, if you know anything about that statement, what you know is that that framework, that statement means who’s got your back, right? So, I think you know this goes back, I didn’t really even know what it meant as a kid, I just knew what it really meant as a kid, which is that you got my back. If I’ve got your six, I’ve got your back but how does the number six play into our recruiting efforts, this is how it plays into it, okay? One of the things that I have learned as we’ve done what I call recruiting audits for organization now let me just pause here and explain, what a recruiting odd it is we get hired from time to time to come into an organization and to actually look at a just a holistic a 50,000 foot view of their recruiting efforts, and when we’re doing that what we do is we interview anyone that’s involved in the recruiting process, and so a lot of times that they’ve got a recruiting department which not everyone does but if they’ve got a recruiting department we start the recruiting department, we then move out to every person that actually impacts or plays a part in the recruiting efforts, and what we do is we interview them, and we figure out you know what role they play, the capacity of that role, how that role plays into the specifics of everyone else that’s actually got a role in the recruiting efforts, and we start at the top we begin to roll this down to every single person all the way out to really what’s the most important person which a lot of times is that market leader. So, that market leader ends up being someone that’s a you know a you know a market manager, a team lead, a sales manager for each manager, an area manager, whoever that whatever that title is that person when we get to that person what we what we’re really interested to find out is how many people at their level are they involving from the entire organization in the recruiting efforts, what we have found is this, is that most local market managers have a very small number of people involved in the recruiting efforts until what I would define as a trigger event takes place, okay? So, as we’re doing these and the triggering event for one of the wanted to find that that would be something I’m happens with a recruit that causes the recruit to lean in, could be consolidation of their company, could be the elimination of a position, it could be an elimination of favorite leader, it could be a change in compensation structure, change in benefits, you know lots of things play into a trigger event, but a lot of times that local market leader, when they’re recruiting, has a trigger event happened and they’ve been building relationship and then once that trigger event happens then they move that individual into having other people engage in the recruiting conversation with them. so most market leaders don’t have anyone besides themselves and maybe one max, two people involved in the recruiting process at a local level, until the trigger event happens, and when the trigger event happens then we wrap other people into the recruiting process, and that is something that’s been a big mistake for most market leaders, and here’s why, you know our recruiting audits what we have found is this, is that where someone gets six or more people involved in a recruiting process that our data shows a significant increase and the number of people that are now willing to join the organization. So, why is the number six important, well let me let me tell you this is just this is just data, so I’m going to have to interpret some of this for you and I’ll take it to the lens of what I’ve been coaching for a long time, and that lens is what I call the BAM zone.

So, if you were here in the studio with me you notice I was taking my pen and kind of drawing a triangle, almost like a pyramid and what I know is that they’re at the bottom of the pyramid, if there’s five levels of human motivation, like Maslow’s theory says that the lowest form of humanization there’s a couple of things like safety and security, and protection and provision that are important to me, but if those things are in place, then there are other factors that play a much larger role in my motivation. One of the things that we know is that belonging, affirming, and meaning, which of what I call the BAM Zone, that’s it, that’s the top part of that pyramid, the top part of that triangle, but those are the higher motivators for human beings, well when you take a step back and you why is the number six so important? What we know is that if you’re involving six people, that there is a larger sense of what the culture of the organization is there’s a larger feel for right what the belonging would look like if as a part of this team, right? The other part that I understand is this that is that if you get more people involved in the recruiting process, what are you doing, you’re affirming the individual, yes, or yes, right? If you get you’re a market leader, and you now get a regional or divisional ,or a head of sales involved, or ahead of another department involved what are you doing, you’re actually affirming me, by selling me too, I’m important right so here’s what I believe but why I think we see a dramatic increase not when I say dramatic, what I’m saying is more than 50% increase the number of people that cross the finish line if six or more people are involved in the recruiting process, one of the reasons why I believe that that is so, is that people have a larger sense of belonging, and fill a larger sense of affirmation being affirmed if you are intentional about making that happen, okay?

So, as I’ve studied hundreds I mean talking about hundreds of individual recruiting models by leaders, what I found is that on average most incorporate somewhere between two and four at most, okay? There’s a lot that actually only involved themselves in the recruiting process and what I would say to that is that that is a mistake so what do we have to do well we have to have a better process of being intentional about getting others inside our organizations involved in our recruiting method, in our recruiting model. So, when I’m talking about the number of six let’s just say this what that means is that if you are an individual leader, that you need five other people right a total number of six, you need five other people that need to play a part in your recruiting efforts, okay? So, what does this mean for some of you it means you’ve got to get really creative, this may mean you want to get other people inside your team, this may mean that you’re asking people that’s part of your corporate team to become involved this may mean that you’re asking executive level leaders to get involved, look at one I remember in my own career actually my spouse, okay? That was actually part of the six people that got involved, and when I say that what I mean is that one of the key factors in our in our in our recruiting efforts was that when we had someone that was of interest to me, me and my wife I’d actually take them out to dinner. So, my wife played part of that six I was doing that creatively because I understood that getting more people involved would actually create synergy, that would actually create clarity, would actually give them a larger sense of belonging, and a larger sense of what my culture was like, a larger sense of who I was as a leader, okay?

So if you want to map this out, and you’re beginning to think now how what does this look like, if I’m gonna involve myself and five other people. So there’s a total number of six, what I would encourage you to do is to lay this process out, okay? Where do you incorporate the other five people, so a lot of times you’re starting identifying somebody on LinkedIn, making an initial phone call, right? Your that introductory call setting up a, 15, minute introduction over the phone, you’re then trying to move them to a face-to-face meeting a lot of times, where that’s relationship building only if you’re smart it’s not trying to sell your company, it’s trying to build relationship, and so I teach four stages or four different steps that you follow in that meeting and that face-to-face meeting, but if you follow that and you make the call or somebody else is making a call for you, and you’re doing an initial introduction over the phone, and then you’re meeting face to face a lot of times there’s only you or one other person involved, beyond that what you have to do is you have to identify the most powerful next step that you can create. For a long time in my recruiting career or what I would say is that my most powerful next step was I’ll send you a corporate presentation via email, and nobody ever joined my team, because of that beautiful 31-page corporate presentation I said via email. It just never happened, so when I say we got to create a powerful next step, here is where you would insert those other five people that you have determined would be willing to play a part in your recruiting efforts, okay?

So, next steps one you have to identify the six, who’s got your six, who are your six your one, what are the other five, so if you’re trying to figure this out and at some level you don’t have the ability to identify another five, what I would do is look at your corporate support, I would look at your immediate leadership, and then I will go beyond that to say who inside my organization do I trust to actually share the vision and the culture of the or this organization with someone else, take this podcast send it to those five people and ask them to play some part. The reason why we do this, is what we is it because we know that when we involve five other people in this process, you’re twice as likely to land that particular recruit as part of your team. So identify your five, get buy-in from your five, those are your next steps apart is podcast and you will be a static that you did because what you’ll find is that as you bring people into conversations around who you are as an attractive leader, I’m bill during the building relationship with them, and then you create next steps of introducing other people inside the organization to have conversations with these people that you’re recruiting, is that you will create synergy, you’ll create confidence, you will Tran, you will transfer who you are as an organization or who you are as a culture, and part of that is affirming people, right? You will transfer all of that to the people that you’re trying to bring your team, and because of that you’ll be twice as likely of getting those individuals into the team, and so that’s why we want to do this, okay? So again send this podcast is someone that you’re going to ask to play a part, so they understand what you’re trying to accomplish, get on the same page. I go back okay and I spent 15 years almost 15 years inside the mortgage industry, when I go back and I and I remember a time in this in my business, as a recruiting leader, when I was actually moving through this, I was identifying people that were in other regions, they weren’t even in my region, but people in other regions that were conduits of what the company really believed, right? These were people that spoke the company vision, these are people that lived out the company culture, these were servant leaders, these were encouraging leaders sometimes those were people that were on my team, and sometimes those were people that were not on my team, okay? But if you’ve got a small team, you’re gonna have to get creative and you’re gonna have to solve this problem. If you’ve got a larger team you have more assets that you can actually bring into this, but regardless, figure out who are your six, and you will be glad that you did. So there you have it, who’s got your six, another podcast is in the books, if this has brought value to you, I would encourage you to share this with somebody else on your team, and I encourage you to share this with another recruiting leader, who you know is intentional about trying to grow, and until I see you again on our podcast have a great week everybody, and enjoy this incredible summer weather, I talk to again, all the best.

 

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