Waz up everybody, Its Richard Milligan, welcome back to another episode of recruiting conversation. So, I apologize for the annoying intro, but you know what every once in a while you just got to change it up right? Gotta keep it interesting. And my natural personality is to actually be that annoying guy anyways, so, there you have it. Red flag alert, podcast being done by the annoying guy who remembers the old Budweiser commercial “waassuuup” okay there you have a blast from the past. So, now that I got that out of my system, I am hopeful that today, I can actually do this podcast justice. And the reason why I hope that I can actually get this point across, is because one of the key factors in my own journey of becoming the best recruiting leader possible was identifying the power of storytelling, and the influence that being a great storyteller actually has inside your ability to recruit. So, with that said, here is what I know, no matter what I tell you about storytelling, it’s more powerful, it’s more dramatic, in terms of the implications and the impacts that you can have, than what I’m going to be able to translate with you today, that’s just the truth. So, the important thing that you need to get is this, is how most people recruit is through highlight real stories, and so when I say “you need to become a better storyteller” a lot of people think they need to become a better salesperson because highlight reels are typically the way that sales people sell things, right? What’s the best thing that product will do, what’s the best thing your organization can do, and we tend to move people to organizations through the lens of that. That is actually wrong lens, and so I am going to give you some new framework today for correct storytelling, going to give you some framework for, why storytelling is actually critical to your success as a recruiting leader and hopefully this would challenge you to go back and actually do more work in the space because if you said “Richard, from this, I got the important thing was becoming a professional storyteller and now I’m gona go home my storytelling skills and my stories and where and when can I present those to people”. Now I say that, I have done this justice, but most people who will live here just thinking, I need to become a better storyteller, they won’t really take this as seriously as the 1/10 of the 1 percent well. And those were the once that will experience the traumatic effect in their recruiting efforts that I have. Which if you know my story, look I spent well over a decade struggling to recruit. And typically when I had my wins inside recruiting it was simply from the surmount of energy that I put into moving the needle in building my team. So, there was no direct correlation between the amount of effort I put into it and what I got out of it. But in 2014, beginning of 2014, some things change very dramatically for me. In fact, in 2014, I launched several branches inside the mortgage world and that came from connecting the dots and just the handful of things, and storytelling is one of those. So let’s just talk about this, why storytelling so critical? Most people when they recruit or well I will call left brain recruiters, now the left brain recruiter is typically recruiting through the lens of the company toolbox and they’re overselling overhyping or even if they are not over selling and over hyping, they are hyping when they are selling what the company has to offer. And that could be a number of things that might include support, compensation, how you position yourself in terms of your pricing structure, it could be something as simple as benefits, could be something that center around the marketing pieces that you offer, it could be a number of things. But all of that can be measured, in other words if you tell me what that is, then I will go to another organization and they tell me what they have to offer, I can actually compare one to the other and say this company is better, this company is stronger. And because of that I can vet you, and if I vetch you I am using left brain, actually process through whether this is a good opportunity for me or not. I measure against my current opportunity, it is how we buy a vehicle, right? If we go out measure Ford versus Chevy, by the way I am a Ford guy. So, whether that matters or not I don’t, it doesn’t really apply. The fact is this, is that if I measure a vehicle against another vehicle, what I can do is say what are the amenities? what is the price? what’s the gas mileage? right? what’s the warranty? these are all things that I can measure. When I do that I am using my left brain to actually process how I am going to make a decision. The power in storytelling is this, is that we are now swing the pendulum from left brain thinking to right brain thinking, tell me a story and you can change my perspective without changing a single fact. That is true, if you don’t believe it’s true, go stand outside a movie theatre and it could be really any movie but let just choose a dramatic movie, a good drama, okay? Stand outside that movie theatre and you will see men and women alike coming out at the movie theatre wiping tears from their eyes. And the reason why is that, the story was told correctly, the story change perspective, while this moment we know it’s a movie. Like, those aren’t real people behind the screen, we realize that cameras were used, then actors were used, and props were used to tell the story, so why do we believe it? Well because the story told correctly, can change perspective without changing a single fact, okay? So now that we’ve established the basis for this, you have to understand that there is a lens that you should be telling your stories through. How I originally told stories for a long season was through I would call a highlight reel of storytelling. So, it was what’s the best thing that are going on, the best things inside my leadership, the best things inside the organization, the best things for someone who has just joined the company that’s winning, how we support our people, over support our people, how we are moving towards bigger and better things and all those things are what I would call highlight real stories. Now, I do not know about you, when I set down and say what are my favorite movies? And I identify some key elements inside those movies, those movies always have conflict and struggle, yes! They can have a happy ending, sometimes not all movies have a happy ending, okay? Some of those endings are almost debatable whether they are happy or not. But there is always conflict and struggle, there is always a beginning, and those are some things that are actually make the story a legitimate story that we trust. So, if you leave off conflict and struggle, and leave off the beginning like where does this story start? It’s almost as though you are putting somebody, inserting somebody into the movie theatre in the midway of the movie or the very end of the movie and they have no clue what the full story is. There is no way to fully engage me in the story, so when you tell a story correctly it does have a beginning look, the bible which is the greatest book ever written, starts with the “in the beginning” and it is full of stories, it’s written in a story format. The other thing is this, if you even to a fairytale, how was the fairytale written? A fairytale written “once upon a time”. Movies, while some movies may not start at the very beginning, it may start midway of the story or at the end of the story, they always take you back to the beginning. Where does the story start? That gives you context, right? That makes the story relatable, it makes the story trustworthy. So, the correct way to tell your highlight real story, if you wanted to start with the actual highlight real, will be simply add a statement. And that statement would be “but it hasn’t always been this way” that simple statement “but it hasn’t always been this way” forces you to go back to the beginning, forces you to talk about conflict and struggle. So tell me about how awesome the things are underneath your current leadership, or the direction of the company is headed, and then take me to the beginning and tell me why it hasn’t always been this way. And now you have a story done correctly that I would trust. Think about this, if you tell me a story incorrectly, the wrong context, I won’t trust your story, that story is not trustworthy. The fact there’s conflict and struggle, it relates to my life, and I don’t know about you, but my life has had conflict and struggle on it, it’s part of everybody’s life. Like nobody lives in the fairytale it just doesn’t exist. A great man once told me, he said “anything worth having in this life, you have to fight for it” and the truth is that when I look at my relationship with my wife for twenty years that’s been true. It’s an incredible and beautiful relationship right? But we’ve had to fight for the relationship. My children, like the relationships I have with them, where they are in life, just the context of being a parent, like I have to fight for those relationships. Like my finances, it hasn’t been easy, I had actually fight through like bad habits, fight through home hurdles that I didn’t see coming, right? For that to be something of significant, I had to fight for it, okay? Tell me a story where there’s conflict and struggle and now you are relating to me. It makes you relatable and makes you trustworthy, so you got to get this, okay? So tell your highlight real story and then you can take me back even if you start there. Now, here is what I want you to understand, the important of story is this, is that it’s how we relate to the entire world. Like everybody has a story. Today, corporations are beginning to understand the importance of telling the organization’s story, the how they’re impacting their employees, how they got to where they are, how they’re impacting their customers, the larger part that they’re playing in their community. When these are the stories that corporations have tapped into that they are now telling because they understand the importance of story. The truth is that, stories critical to us because we all want to play a part in a larger story, okay? A story can actually uncover this larger desire to be a part of something bigger and we’ve intrinsically been created to be on a journey to something bigger. I think, we all do at some point say man I ‘d love to have some peace, some contentment, just like in this moment, let me be where I am at and I don’t want necessarily to be challenged every moment of the rest of my life. But if you spent the season in this content place, where you’re actually settling for something less to what you could be, when somebody shows up and tells a story correctly, they can actually plant a seed of discontentment. Because I want to be a part of the larger story. I want to be better than who I am today. I want to grow into something bigger and better. So story can actually uncover this larger desire for me to be a part of that, okay? So this is important, here is what you have to do, you first and foremost, need to understand the key stories of your life. Now if you’re going to meet with the candidate, meet with the recruiter, face-to-face as a leader your most important value proposition is your leadership value proposition. It is not the company value proposition, so if you understand your leadership value proposition, you understand your beliefs, you understand your core values. You got a clear define vision for your team, and for your market for where you are going, these are all things that are true about you. If you don’t have those, you need to identify those, start there. But then if you identified your core values, your core beliefs, so things that are true about you, authentic about you, go back to a place where you can identify the story, the experience, the moment, or your identified that as being true. As an example for me, one of my core value, this is personal development. I can take you back the age of 19, and I can tell you a story of why personal development became very real, very true, became a lifelong pursuit for me and I can take you to that journey. I told that story many, many, many times that story takes me eleven minutes to tell and this is how end up with this idea of story being important. Takes me eleven minutes to tell a story and when I told that story to recruits that I was working to attract to my team, there were a number of times were people actually well-up with tears or just fly out crying when I tell those story because it connected with them on unbelievable level. Now personal development, if I said personal development is something that’s true about my core value system, yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot of people about growth, a lot of people about you know the personal growth thing, that yes I get that’s important. I read about the book, listening to podcast, right? But if I told you my story, and would take you all the way back to why it’s important to me and how it played out through the course on my journey and now as a leader that I am today, and what it looks like underneath my current leadership. That story leaves you went to places, that story leaves you either highly connected to my personal value system or going nah! Not a big deal or you know what there probably some people that would actually say like “personal development is not my thing. Right? I’m at an age right now where I’m just kinda cruising through the last five year of business, I’m really not about growth, I’ve spent my years growing, building, achieving, you know all of those things that is just not me. So if told you that story, I may not pull you in and that’s okay because that’s who I am. I might actually push you away, that’s called polarization. Telling a story, telling a meaningful story that’s tied to your core value system can actually push and can also pull. And the truth is that if it pulls people, it can pull them very quickly. I can tell you dozens of conversations about people that were pulled in very quickly by my core values system, they said within a two or two and half week one of time, want to align with you, I want to partner with you, I want to be a part of your team, and that came from me honing my skills in this area of storytelling. Here’s why a storytelling is bigger than what you think it is, there’s actual science in storytelling. There’s actual science in this, the truth is that there’s a portion of our brain called the hippocampus, hippocampus is responsible for taking information in and then disseminating it throughout the brain and storing it, okay? Science says that when you tell me a story you tell it correctly and you tell it well, that you actually emit things like dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, the hippocampus goes out and pulls these other experiences and makes them relative to your story connected to your story and through simple storytelling what you do is you actually bond with somebody, you actually build trust with someone you emit things like empathy and if I told you that through storytelling correctly that you could bond, you could have people empathize with you and you could actually have people trust you, because they were clear and who you were. You would be in agreement that that would be a pretty good method for recruiting people, that’s why storytelling is critical to him. So let me give you what I called the three P’s, these are the three P’s of storytelling, a lot of people will actually take this idea go craft a couple of stories and they’ll insert them into the recruiting efforts and they won’t fully maximize the impact that they can have. You really need to become a professional storyteller there are things that professional speakers do, that when you’re telling a story, makes your story more impactful, so let me give you what I call the three P’s of storytelling, okay? Number one you need to practice your story, like literally write this out script this story out and then begin to practice your story. One way to do that would be to break it up into segments, maybe break this up into three segments, your intro, your ending, and the middle part of it. So that you can then get dissect and memorize and perfect the different segments separate from each other but you need to practice your story. The way that I looked at this was look if someone said Richard you’re going to speak in front of 10,000 people tomorrow, immediately, I wanted to have a story in place that I could pull up and use and relate to my audience. 10,000 people is a lot of people, I don’t know about you but I might just get a little nervous at the thought of standing in front of 10,000 people. So I want to make sure that my story is right on, spot-on. So, I’m gonna practice it so one of the ways that I did this was, I’ve wrote out my stories, and then I began to memorize them I started by actually reading them into a simple iPhone app where it actually just records the audio and then when I was driving to work I would listen to my stories. I begin to practice my story so the first P is practiced. The second part of this is polished the story, and the reason why what why polishing the story is important is that you want to be able to tell the story well a story that’s not told well, I would rather that story not be told. I want the story to be told well and so yes do break the story down into parts, begin to begin to really again and again and again listen to your story, re-record your story change the story where you feel like you can too increase the effect of the story, so you want to practice it you want to polish it and then you want to perfect it, here’s where the perfecting part comes into play. There are things like pitch and tone that matter, there are things like speed and pace that matter, like if I’m telling a dramatic part of the story and then I pause, for four or five seconds, you’re checking your phone right now right because you’re like the tap tap tap is it still working. I mean, I was only three second pause but a pause like that increases the dramatic effect of that moment in time, it increases the emotions that are felt around a moment in time. Me telling something faster, me telling something slower those are critical pieces, me increasing my tone decreasing my tone escalating de-escalating those things all matter. So the people that get this at the next level understand that pitch and tone speed and pace these things do matter when we’re telling a story, okay? I hope this brought some value today, challenge yourself to story tell your core values that is a huge leap for most people because they’re typically leading and recruiting with the company value proposition, this is next-level. This is how people become great recruiters pause go through your life, identify key stories you have them and if you’re challenging yourself right now to go I can’t think of any great stories, one of the things that I do when I’m coaching people is if someone says I need help identifying key stories, I ask questions like take me back to the beginning, how did you get into the business? Like I just one of the things I told you earlier was that the beginning is a critical component to every story, when I say take me back to the beginning, let go almost always we met a good story people will say things like I remember when, look this is a true story working with a gentleman had a really hard time identifying key stories he was convinced that he didn’t have any great stories to tell. So I said take me back to the beginning and I won’t remember full context but I’ll give you the generality of this, he said I’ll never forget, like that’s how he started, I’ll never forget, this was a gentleman that was having a hard time identifying stories I simply said take me back at the beginning of how you got into the business and he said I’ll never forget and then he began to tell an incredible story in a hilarious story a story that would hit every element of best storytelling. Takes me back to a time where he was working in his first office in this industry, and in that particular office he had no support everybody around him seemed to be being successful, they gave him no training they basically gave him a desk and said go get it. And he struggled, he jumped in his car one day, because he was struggling and there was nobody there to support him, was trying to get clarity, as he was driving around and as he as part of him driving around his community, pulled up to a carwash and as he pulled up to the carwash, he forgot that the actual convertible top was down because he was so deep and thought his wheels gets locked in he gets drugged through the entire automatic car wash with the top down he comes out the other side sudsy wet and limb blown, and I’m going this is an incredible story and as we identified that story and then went to his core values, part of his core value system came directly out of that moment but yet for whatever reason, he wasn’t able to go back and say I remember, I’ll never forget it started here. So go back there, that’s one of the best tips that I can give you, okay? So I’m hopeful that you will do this, okay? do this, will make you a better recruiter, I promise you it will make you better recruiter I’m here to help where I can, we’ll continue bringing insight around you the recruiting leader. If you’re listening this you’re most likely a leader who manages a team, and then it’s also responsible for building that team. I’m here to bring value to you in every way shape or form that I can. You can check out my youtube channel you can find me on all the social media platforms. I actually run a facebook closed Facebook closed group if you’d like to join that more than welcome to find me there, it’s under it’s under recruiting masterminds by Richard Mulligan. There’s lots of places to find, there’s lots of resources that I provide one of those is the podcast. I always am appreciative to hear great stories, people saying thank you for delivering this. Our goal is to do two of these a week through all of 2019 and to celebrate October by having over a hundred episodes. So we will continue doing these, pass this on, if there’s something of value here to you, the biggest compliment that you can pay me, is by telling somebody else about it, sharing it, with somebody else and heaven knows that there’s very little support in the area of honing your recruiting skills specific to the recruiting leader, because it is such a unique position most people assume because you’ve been successful to getting to this role into this position as a leader that you automatically know how to recruit, and how to recruit well, and the truth is that I didn’t know how to do it for well over a decade, and the truth is that every business is full of this particular position struggling and trying to glean what information they can to become the best that they can be, so pass it on and until I hear until you hear from me again on recruiting conversations have a great week and all the best to you thanks so much everybody.
