Welcome back to another recruiting conversation, it’s your host Richard Milligan and today I’m going to share a recent conversation that I have with a leader, that was losing time. Now I’m sure no one else has ever done that, like me, has made a decision that cost you time, right? We’re I mean, when I think about especially the older I get how many places I have wasted my time gosh I really don’t want to look back on that because I realized that time is the only commodity that matters to us, yes or yes? Like I can replace money, right? That replenishes itself, I can make more money, but the one thing I’m realizing at the ripe old age, olds always relative, right? But 46, I remember when my mom and dad turned 30, and I thought my mom and dad were old, and now I’m rooting for 46, to be quote and quote middle-aged, time is something that’s very precious to me. A part of that is that you only have four kids, you know and I look at the next decade and I map out my six-year-old be 16, my nine-year-old be 19, my 12-year-old be 22, my seventh year I’ll be 27, and this seasonal life is gonna pass me like that. I just know it, and so a time is something that is really precious of something we want to actually be very considerate of, and so recent conversation I had was this, a recruiting leader that had had five appointments in a week with recruits, and now you look at them you go when, fist-pump win, right? Five meetings in a week, that’s a huge win, and for most people that would be considered a huge win, but as I dug beneath the surface of that we begin to talk about those five appointments that they had, four of the five appointments with four or with highly unqualified candidates, let me repeat that highly unqualified candidates, not qualified, unqualified. So, begin to back into this and ask even deeper questions which was where were the meeting set in relationship to where your office is located, how much time did it take to get there, how much time did you time block for, how much time was involved in the meeting, right? What we came up with was a loss of an equivalent of two and a half days for that particular week, simply because we were meeting with unqualified candidates. So, the conversation really becomes this quality or quantity, now I know most of you that are here are probably like me, you ended up in this space of being a recruiting leader because you were a great salesperson, and most great salespeople spent a season really focusing on quantity, number of dials that you make, and so we come from these environments where you know people talk about having this power hour, or you know this these contests of how many connections can you make in a certain wind of time. Like, I remember one when I as a salesperson dialing for dollars, now there’s one that a lot of you have probably heard of or something that’s focused primarily on what I would call muddying the waters. Now, if you haven’t if you haven’t heard that term muddying the waters then let me explain to you what I mean, a lot of times when we focus on quality versus quantity, what it means that we reduce the number of calls that we make but when we focus on quantity over quality, we increase the number of calls that we make and our mindset which I think is the wrong mindset is let’s just go make contacts, let’s go create some energy, some synergy around our business, and while it’s right, it’s also wrong, and the reason why it’s wrong, it’s specifically for the recruiting leader, now, what is the recruiting leader? If this is your first podcast, and you’re showing up on the scene of this, just now for the first time, the recruiting leader is someone who manages a team but is also responsible for recruiting to that team, if that’s you, and it may not be you, and this is there’s lots of nuggets here that our recruiters, but if that recruiting leader is you what you know is this, you wear fifteen hats, almost every day that you’re alive, Monday through Friday, well sometimes probably Saturday and Sunday, but you wear about fifteen hats and so you’re leading the team, you’re responsible for everything around the team, and sometimes this is someone who’s off get actually also producing, right? This podcast gets heard by primarily real estate insurance and mortgage people that are in those roles, and so if you’re in that role in one of those industries one of the things that I know is that you are extremely busy and so the amount of time you can dedicate to recruiting is actually very small, you can’t recruit 8 to 12 hours a day to recruit because you already have these pre-existing responsibilities that you have to manage, and manage well. So, you have to be very concise, you’re a sniper, when it comes to recruiting and so what does that mean, we’re not gonna focus over, we’re not gonna focus on quantity, we are going to focus on quality, okay? So, let’s have that conversation because this is the conversations I had recently with the individual whose story I just shared, how do we get to the quality? So, here’s what I know about the three industries that I just mentioned insurance, real estate, and mortgages.
There are some tools available to you that will help you get to a place where you can determine is this a quality individual that I should be investing my time with, and we’re going to talk about those tools today. Now, I saw some recent research from an organization inside the specific to the mortgage industry let me just give you a stat as to why quality is important to you in this industry, and this is really true of most industries, okay? The staff that I saw is that 60% of all loan officers, loan originators, loan consultants, loan advisors, whatever you want to call them that 60% of loan originators actually create almost 90% of all production, let’s reverse engineer that, 40% of all loan originators creates about 6% of all production. So what does this mean, well wouldn’t you rather focus your efforts and your energies on the 60% that are delivering the 94% of all production, again yes or yes? And this is true about most industries, this is not an anomaly, the mortgage industry is not the golden unicorn in the sales universe, okay? Most industries have very similar data that speaks to this, the top producers are generating the majority of the business, right? The Pareto principle says there’s this 80/20 rule, right? Where it’s like 80% of all production comes from 20% of the people in the business. Now inside that you know a Perry Duncan wrote a book called 8020 marketing, and one of the things that he studied inside that book is, the Pareto principle inside the Pareto principle, which is that there’s actually an 8020 rule inside the 80/20 rule, and what I just kind of gave you was that data right like 94% of all Productions coming from a handful of people inside this industry. So quality matters because I could take if I focus my energy on just generally every loan originator in this industry, what would happen is I would chase my towel on the 40% to find out that I don’t want them on my team. If I was to focus on quantity over this quality, okay? So, I’m gonna give you three questions that you should be asking yourself before you make contact, what does this mean we’re gonna do some research, okay? These three questions are really going to qualify some places that you should be going and doing research prior to actually making contact because I do think that there are some places that you can go and see, is this summer that you would like to have on your team. Now, let me pause here for a second, okay? Some of this, I’m not gonna qualify any of this as in you know HR compliant, okay? I’m not going to dive off into that you need to do that at an organizational level, but one of the things I’m going to teach you is how to have the eyes to see, whether this is someone that makes sense for you to go and pursue, okay? I’m not qualifying people on you know things that are going to fall under an HR umbrella, but what I’m saying is that as having spent more than 20 years as a recruiting leader myself, and almost 15 years of that in one industry, what I know is that there are some indicators out there that I can see, for example on social would be one area, right? I can see things that would tell me is this person going to be a fit, is this person going to actually be someone who is delivering production has influenced some things that actually matter to my brand. So, we’re going to talk about those things, okay? So, here are three things three questions I want you to ask yourself prior to making contact. Number one, do they have a social presence, okay? why does this matter, well what I know is this is that those that have the strongest social presence and the three industries that I discussed are the ones that have the most influence if I go back and I look at that data was specific to the mortgage industry of these top originators that are creating almost 94 percent of all production, what I know is that majority of them, if not all of them, it’s a really high percentage of them have strong social brands, okay? They get, I mean if you’re gonna be a professional day it is 2019, like I mean we go back and it’s social you know Facebook really got strong like 2009, so we’re a decade into Facebook over you know overtaking you know our environment terms of social presence, and so a decade into this, does social presence matter, yes it does, if you’re in a front-facing business, where you know for real estate insurance and mortgages the consumer relationship matters, and matters a lot, your referral partner relationships matter, and matter a lot. What’s the easiest way to maintain that will having a social presence one of the things that we’ve seen on this end is that as you look at producers that have no social presence, now it’s all not always true, but at a high percentage this is true, there’s a lack of social presence those people fall into the category of low-end producers. So, if I’m gonna focus on quality over quantity, then social presence is going to matter, now, let’s go one step beyond that, and say what are some of the things that we can see through social presence, a lot of organizations are now incorporating a review of social presence before they hire someone. Why is that, well I can tell if someone’s involved in the community from their social presence, I can tell if someone’s got focuses that are in alignment with my business simply through their social presence, some of the things I can see are not positive or negative, like someone who’s spilling negativity, look it’s not my, not my kind of person. Like one of our, in one of our mantras that we abide by that’s one of our core value statements is, no jerks allowed, how do I figure out you’re a jerk, gosh! If you spend any time on social media, you know there’s a lot of hateful things that get big, that gets spewed out there. I can tell in just a few second class that your social profile whether you’re going to be positive or whether you’re going to be negative, that’s an easy way for me to say you know quality conversation is this my tribe is this, my person, you know is someone look one of the things that I’ve seen is a little people posting videos of themselves and getting drunk at the lake every weekend, right? Like that’s not gonna fit into my professional, you know presence, especially if I’m recruiting leader because recruiting leaders are fishing in small ponds, are fishing in markets, or they’re fishing in estates, or at most a regional, you know is fishing in a multi-state area, brand is important, and you get that the people you’re bringing into your team is an extension of your brand, right? And so I’m gonna look at the contextualization of things that you’re talking about, I’m going to look at the videos that you’re posting and if you’re someone right now is going, oh gosh! I thought about someone being able to see that, and you don’t want people to see that guess what, you can protect that, and you can go from having a public you know setting, to having a private setting, so people can’t see that, and so that actually can shield some of this, so I can’t see it, and that’s up you to do that, but if it’s available to the public, I’m going to go look for that, and I’m going to identify this person as being someone in terms of social of being a quality conversation I want to have, or being a conversation that I don’t want to have, okay? So, the first question you ask yourself is do they have a social presence can I find them on social media and if I can what does that brand look like, okay?
Here’s the second question, you’re going to ask yourself, what are their production numbers, now you can’t always see this in every industry, but guess what I’ve got a partnership with a company called Mobility RE, I know Ben Teerlink, it was the CEO over there, and if you’re not familiar with mobility Mobility RE, what it does is for the mortgage industry, and for the real estate industry, it actually creates the data in terms of production numbers.
So, I’m going to drop a link here, that you all can go to, which is an overview of this particular tool, that will just show you how I coach to the tool, because it is something I coached to, how I coached the tool and why having this data matters. So here’s a link you can check out its recruitingconversations.com that’s the website that we drop all of our all of our podcasts on, there’s actually some other content on that website as well, but it’s recruitingconversations.com/datamatters, okay? So, what we’re gonna do in that, so I’m in that video, it’s gonna model me actually using the tool, it’s a short video me using the tool and showing you how you can actually extract data, to actually have quality conversations versus focusing on quantity of conversations, okay? Production numbers matter yes or yes, like going and focusing my energies on low end producers is a waste of my time, okay? Now, I get the fact that you know if you’re one year into the industry you haven’t yet arrived, and you’re still looking to trying to build your book of business that’s different, okay? But production numbers matter, get your hands on some production numbers that will light have a better conversation. Your time is the only commodity that matters, I’ll repeat that again, your time is the only commodity that matters. If you can recruit in 30 to 45 minutes per day, guess what, you’ll recruit every day, but if this is a conversation about smiling and dialing, this conversation about just making contact with people, it’s a waste of your time, so know the production numbers so the second question here you’re gonna ask yourself prior to making contact is what are their production numbers.
Third question, how long have they been employed, what is their average tenure, look length of time employer matters, right? And there’s places where you can get that data, places where you can get that information, right? LinkedIn is an easy place. Now, look LinkedIn can be bluffed, right? Like, I can go make up whatever numbers I wants, you in to some degree linkedin’s a little bit like a resume for people and that it is bluffed, if you’ve ever gone to the process of verifying dates of employment most people extend the resume by a month or two either direction. Now and I get it no one must have a gap in employment, right? Some people will disqualify immediately because of that, so they’re covering their bases and some of that, but look length of in a general term, length of time an employer in a larger wind of time matters, okay? I can get that at length, I get that on LinkedIn, and look in the three communities I coach insurance, real estate, mortgages, you’ve got licensing portals, right? Like the in NMLS consumer access licensing portal is an incredible portal to go find and look and see what tenure actually is, okay? Like length the time at employer matter, someone this transition it’s got seven employers in two years, look if you’re gonna make that many bad decisions in a two-year window of time I don’t want to be the eight, right? Like that’s not, that that’s not going to be a quality conversation for you, okay? So what I’m gonna say is this, length of time an employer matters, I’m going to figure out how I can get that information, and I’m going to have some prerequisites around that, I’m working with a company right now, that says three-years average tenure over the last 10 years is what they’re looking for, right? Now is it a disqualifier, if you’re at two point you know two years and ten months, no, there’s other things that they evaluate and production matters, that’s another evaluation and another piece of the evaluation equation, that they’re looking at social presence is another part they’re looking at. All these things matter to you okay so figure out your licensing portal if you don’t understand what that is in the mortgage industry that’s simply the nmls consumer access get comfortable with that portal because you can see the length of time an employer, and you can qualify better, okay?
Let’s someone else chase the low-end producers, right? Let’s be if you’re part of my audience and you’re listening to the thirty fourth podcast, please do me a favor take some of the content that I’m delivering to you, and use it, okay? Your time is extremely precious today to you, and if you’re in a season like me, where you have small kids, right? And they’re not so small anymore but six and nine is still small enough, okay? That’s still cool, that’s still cool with the 12-year-old, right? So somebody asked me that question of the day, like what age do you get uncool, I’m not quite sure I know with my 17 year old there was a specific moment where it’s like, hey Dad I don’t want to be seen with you, and that actually happened but you know, I’m still in a stage with three my kids where I’m extremely cool, and I value my time and so if I can put quality time into this, and I can disqualify on people that would just be based off of sheer numbers trying to get in front of sheer numbers, then that we can get to a better conversation because look, and the conversation that I had where someone had wasted two and a half days in one week, this isn’t just about wasting the time on the phone, this is about wasting time in the three major components, right? Yes, we have to identify talent so as I’m identifying talent I’m gonna disqualify people based on these three parameters, the other thing is this is that I’m going to look at my initial contact and there’s a lot of energy that goes into initial contact, that may be on LinkedIn, that may be through phone, that that’s then going to progress along into a face-to-face meeting, there’s an enormous amount of time that gets wrapped up in that, and then beyond that, we’re the great recruiters actually Excel is in the third component, which is going to be in the follow-up. Why in the world would we follow up with someone that’s an unqualified candidate, right? So this becomes a multiply time, multiplier for you this isn’t about just making phone contact and wasting your time they’re multiply, multiply, multiply when you’re done this is a very large equation in relationship to your time.
So let’s be recruiting leaders that focus over quality and not quantity, so look here’s one thing that you’re going to be up against, if you’re at a market leader role a lot of times you’re in middle management and you’ve got layers of management over, you might have an area, you might have a regional, you might have a divisional, what I have seen to a fault now if you’re a divisional, divisional original and area this is a great this is a great piece for you what happens when organizations stop growing, or they churn more, than they’re actually growing, a lot of times the noise starts at the top, which is we need to grow. And so the natural knee-jerk reaction as that message comes from a CEO or a president to a divisional at regional or an area, is that they immediately begin to move toward some these things I’ve already mentioned let’s do a Power Hour, two times per week, and we’re gonna have contests, okay? I get that you’re working to try and motivate but the concept of this if you’re missing quality and it’s simply quantity that concepts broken, and what you’re doing, is you’re motivating your people towards in a broken model which means that they’re just gonna lose more. So you’ve got to educate, one of the things that we say here is that you educate before you motivate, or you discourage, and say that again, educate before you motivate or you discourage. If you if you’re in the divisional, regional area role and you’re not educating your people to this particular space, that quality conversations matter over quantity then what will happen is you’re just accelerating the rate they will actually lose. The rate of the time that they’re investing that they will lose, okay? So, this is important for you to get here’s how here’s an equation for success, okay? It’s education, plus motivation, plus application, equals transformation. So, you start with educating people and then you motivate them, and if they will apply that then their business will be transformed. So, there’s some great content for you today, take this, apply it to your business and what it will do is it’s a multiplier for the number of wins that you will have, it’s a reducer for the amount of time that you actually have to invest into this to win, and so share this with somebody that needs this because there’s a lot of people out there like me that came from a sales background that simply focus on muddying the waters and making contacts and they think because they’re doing that they’re winning, be better than that, right? Like one of the things that I tell my son all the time they play basketball, we got to play better than the refs because he plays basketball, like we got to be better than the underlying factors in our markets, and we all have a lot of candidates in our markets that are people that will not bring value to our team, let somebody else recruit them, don’t let the listeners of this podcast be those.
So, until we meet again our next podcast, share this with someone, that this will bring value to and would love to hear your feedback. I got several messages here of the course last week, from people that said, awesome, love what you’re doing, great content, keep it up, appreciate the positive feedback, you know we invest, somewhere between 1200 and 1500 dollars every single time we kick off a podcast, because that’s what it actually takes for us to produce these. So, you know, share this with somebody that will bring value to them, and drop me a line let me know it’s bringing value to you. The Nugget, the additional nugget of the day is check out that link recruitingconversations.com/datamatters there’ll be an extra video there, you want to see what it looks like to actually have access to some great information and if you, if you want additional information around that, Ben over at mobility RE has given us the ability to provide this to our to our clients, or to even people listen to our podcast, at a much reduced rate, most organizations that are getting access to that are actually having to have it at an organizational level, and Ben allows us to offer it to our coaching clients on an individual level. So, if you like what you see then you want access to it, will definitely give you access on that link to get more information around that.
So, until next week, enjoy your week everybody, and we look forward to sharing another podcast with you then, all the best!
