[Podcast] Industry Spotlight | Joel Lalgee – Hirewell – Branding Your Staffing and Recruiting Business for Success

You’ve got to show that you know your prospects, you’ve got to be able to deliver value and you’ve got to be excellent at building relationships and hitting pain points and really, really selling yourself. And then when you’re getting into those conversations, being open to have conversations that don’t lead anywhere and just continuing to follow up with people. Follow up with people.

Hi, I’m Kortney Harmon, Staffing and Recruiting Industry Principle at Crelate. This is The Full Desk Experience’s Industry Spotlight series where we are talking with the top leaders and influencers who are shaping the talent industry. In this series, we’ll be shining a light on popular trends, the latest news, and the stories that lead the groundwork for their success.

On today’s episode, we’ll be talking with Joel Lalgee. Joel is a current business development consultant, former lead recruiter, host of a podcast Recruiting is No Joke, and also a social media influencer with over 330,000 followers on LinkedIn and TikTok combined. He has over eight years of experience in recruiting and really helped talent organizations find top talent and grow their business through their social media strategies. Currently, he’s helping to lead all outbound business development strategies at Hire Well, which is a recruitment firm that offers managed recruiting services, on-demand recruiting and other recruitment solutions for various industries. Joel, thank you so much for joining us today. How are you?

I am doing well. We were chatting beforehand. It’s unseasonably warm here in Wisconsin, so I’m enjoying that, but how are you?

I’m good. I’m looking forward to the 67 degree weather tomorrow. It’s better than the tornadoes that went through Ohio yesterday and my house wasn’t spinning and I didn’t land on any witches with red shoes, so we’re good.

No, that’s good to hear.

I love it. So for our listeners, just to give us a foundation for today’s conversation, we’re going to be discussing business development, the processes around developing strategies that really lay the foundational blocks to building success within your organization and taking that one step further by using your social platforms to expand your reach within your prospects and your clients. Our normal conversation is really based on building foundational building blocks, Joel. I talk a lot about that and we’re still going to talk about that, but I want to bring your unique perspective. You really feel the pain points of those hiring authorities, the good, the bad, and the ugly from working with them. And I want to talk about what our talent businesses can do. What our agency owners and operations leaders can do to meet that resistance that you guys may be feeling. The challenges in which we’re seeing from those hiring authorities in a different way.

So how can our leaders and our agencies do better? How are they not meeting this the right way and what we need to change in our operations? So is it the touch plan, is it this messaging? Is it the use of automation versus human intervention? And we have to be able to diagnose those symptoms of what’s wrong. So I’m excited to dive in.

Yeah, I love that. I think that’s there’s a lot here and I think there’s been a lot of changes too over the last couple of years, which I think we’ll be able to dive into.

I love that. Now I’ve gotten the privilege to know you nearly three years to the nose. I’ve gotten to see your transformation over the past few years in the talent industry. I’ve gotten to see your growth on your social media platforms to boost your social presence and really use that for your career. So Joel, with that being said, can you elaborate a little bit more about you, your experience and what industry you’re in here at Hire Well as well as what keeps you in the talent industry itself?

Yeah, absolutely. So I started in the recruitment field about eight years ago, and like most people who get into recruiting, I fell into it. I had a friend who founded a company that really ran a unique operation. I wouldn’t consider them a traditional agency. It basically like an hourly RPO solution for companies. And I worked with them for about five years. It was an interesting way to get into the agency business because I wasn’t really having to sell anything. I was literally just jumping on projects. And then I guess the sales would come in with just relationships with clients. And then obviously you execute on one search, you’re able to ask for more searches. And so I spent about five years at that agency focused initially just on general recruiting. So it was just whatever role was open. And after two years I started focusing on the construction industry.

So working with general contractors across the US that were doing anywhere from 50 million a year to a billion a year I think was our biggest client. So not the big, big boys, but they were definitely larger organizations we were working with. So I did that for about five years. And really I loved the company, I loved the culture, I loved the training, loved a lot about that model except for the fact that as a recruiter you were just capped because you were paid on how many hours you could bill as opposed to a commission on how much you could fill. So you just capped earning wise, right? So that was about the point where we would’ve met. I decided after about five years that I wanted to just go into contingency full desk recruiting. And so I made a switch and I went to an agency and it was honestly, the timing was just terrible because it was March 2020, yes, right at the start of the pandemic.

And I remember I was actually in training with you and I remember just like… I think a lot of people in the training were brand new to recruiting, but I remember just thinking, “Wow, this is super bizarre.” The timing was crazy. Obviously I had a bunch of non-competes, so I couldn’t really go off to any of my current clients, so I knew that it was just going to be really challenging next six months. So I did that. And right around that time too, I had really started to get into this idea of how do you start attracting people towards you, both clients and candidates. I just noticed that so much that we do in recruiting is outbound, outbound, outbound, but how do you begin to start to attract new business? How do you start to attract candidates to you so you’re not just always chasing people down?

And so that’s when I got really active on LinkedIn. Started really basic, just posting regular content once a day and mostly written content and then started doing more video. I worked at this agency for about six months and then I just got to a point where honestly just saw a big need in the agency recruiting space for people to manage and help manage marketing and content. And I just noticed that within our industry, most organizations are built very sales focused. So it’s a lot of activity on the phones, it’s a lot of outbound emails, it’s all just a ton of outbound. And there wasn’t really too many people that I thought were doing an amazing job with branding and marketing, I could count them on my hand. And the ones that do it are really good at it. But I just went, what I think I could help smaller agencies with this.

So I spun off and created a business that was just all around helping smaller agencies show up on LinkedIn, show up on social media, and I was essentially like a ghost writer, helping them develop a strategy on LinkedIn. So I did that for a couple of years and then back in 2021, we had just a boom in recruiting and I thought, you know what? I’ve been doing this ghost-writing, it’s fine. Wasn’t really actually what I thought it was going to be. It was a lot different than I thought it was going to be. And so I got back into recruiting with Hire Well, had made a connection through my old podcast that I ran with one of the partners at Hire Well, and I just went, what I want to get back into recruitment. And so I joined Hire Well in November of 2021. And so it was just like in the middle of this big boot recruiting boom, and I spent all my time recruiting recruiters and HR people and whilst doing all this showing up on LinkedIn consistently and growing a pretty sizable following on LinkedIn and TikTok, like you already mentioned.

I love that. And it’s funny, none of our journeys are linear. We don’t say, hey, I’m going to grow up and I’m going to be a recruiter. I’m going to be a kick butt recruiter, I’m going to go run a sales team. But once you’re in it, I think truly people get into it for people and you get away from that and it’s like, “Okay, I know why I’m in here in the first place.” So it has a way of just having that magnetic pull to pull you back in. So I’m happy you’re back. I love to see your growth through this process, which is pretty amazing. So I have a question for you. As a former lead recruiter and really focusing on business development consulting, our industry, you mentioned it is consistently changing and evolving. How do you stay up to date with latest trends development in our talent industry? Not only for your candidates but also for your clients? How do you keep up with it all?

Yeah, look, I think being involved in as many conversations as I can and really on social media, because I think social media, for me it’s a pulse. And I think we’ve got, to me, there’s three social media platforms that I’m most active on. It’s Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok. And I think each one is unusual because LinkedIn’s definitely the more buttoned down of them all. You get the news, they’re always a little bit late. I think TikTok is really interesting because you start to see what are the upcoming mindsets of people who are in the workforce. It’s obviously a platform that attracts a lot of younger users. So you get to really understand how are we seeing this paradigm of work shift from what it was and what is it becoming? And then Twitter, I enjoy because you just hear things in the moment.

So the reason I say a great way to stay on top of things is to be involved in a conversation is because I don’t think you necessarily have to be creating content. I wouldn’t really advise any recruiters to start creating content at the level that I’m creating content, unless you want to be an influencer or content creator. And that’s something that you are really passionate about, you enjoy. But I think all of us, we can comment, we can stay up to date, we can spend 45 minutes to an hour each day engaging on these platforms, being involved in conversations both from an industry standpoint and then from an HR and recruiting standpoint as well. I think when you’re able to do that, then you’re able to do the research for your clients. So they don’t have to do it, they don’t have to do it themselves. So you can go into a conversation with an HR leader, a TA leader, an industry leader, and you already know the trends in your market so you can sound intelligent about it.

And then when they start to follow you on social media and they see that you’re actually having these conversations and you’re a voice in the space, then you’re able to gain the respect and you’re able to win the business with it.

I love that you already answered almost my next question. My second question was how do you incorporate that into your work? But you’re already talking, you’re already saying that you take that and then you’re the consultant. It’s that consultative approach versus the transactional. So many times we look at our space and it’s like, you need a guy, I got a guy, or you need a girl, I got a girl. But it’s really removing yourself from that. Let me tell you what I know because there is no better person to have a conversation with in this space than someone that runs a desk because you’re having hundreds of conversations if not a day, a week. And you have such unique insight that those TA leaders or HR leaders don’t always hear about. Because let’s face it, that’s not what they do every single day like you do.

100%. And hiring managers especially, I think this is where the value can come in and you can be an expert in your industry. And I think when you look at our approach as an agency Hire Well for example, it’s not just me that’s creating content, A lot of people on our team are creating content. One of the partners at Hire Well that I built a relationship with before I came over to work for them, he’s extremely active on LinkedIn as well. And we’re kind of a yin and yang type of deal on LinkedIn where I’m a lot more, have a lot more of relatable content, definitely lean on the humor and the funny side of recruiting, but as well as looking at a lot of the pain points that we see. And his content is a lot more, I would say more in depth with different topics. But again, he’s been in recruiting for 20 years, I’ve been in recruiting for coming up to a decade. It’s almost like both of us put together. It really helps brings everything together.

And I think having that team approach as an agency that has helped exponentially. So it’s not just one voice at the agency, it’s lots of voices. We’re talking about lots of things. And look, we get together as an agency and we plan and we talk about what are the issues that our clients are seeing right now? What are the problems in the market that they’re experiencing? What are the problems that candidates are experiencing? And then we’re able to create content based on that. So we’re all keeping each other accountable with what’s trending and what are the problems. And when you show up in that way you’re showing up in a way that is bringing value because you’re talking about things that people are talking about, whether it’s candidates, clients, and then we’re able to provide solutions. And maybe it’s not even solutions, maybe it’s just insights and thoughts that create conversation, which again is valuable because people want to talk about these things. That’s what social media’s all about. It’s about conversations, creating those conversations.

I love that. Now you mentioned with your business development consultant, you’re there to build that process, not only bring in new logos, but what is your approach going forward based on our previous conversation? Now, many talent businesses like we just talked, are really focusing on that sales and BD space. Let’s face it, times have changed, it’s not as much of maybe that recruiting book.

Very quickly times have changed.

But let’s face it’s hard to get calls back. It’s hard to catch the attention of prospects, it’s hard to find information or keep the ball rolling as you’re developing that relationship. Now with that being said, you just talked about challenges. What have been some of the biggest challenges with hiring managers, since you talked about those pain points, that you’ve seen in your industry and how you overcame them?

I think the biggest challenge that we consistently run into right now is a lot of hiring managers and a lot of companies as a whole, they’ve tightened their belt. There’s not a ton of optimism in the marketplace, at least in some of the sectors that I’m working in. We’re seeing a little bit of a slow-down with just sense of urgency. So really that’s what we’ve just been seeing. And it doesn’t mean that there aren’t clients that are moving and then it’s not industries that are moving. And I think that’s part of the challenge. Being in TA like you or being on the agency, you’ve got to be able to adjust really, really quickly. So that’s part of the nature of our role. If we see one industry maybe having some issues, we move to another industry. But I think right now the big challenge that’s coming back is we’re seeing a shift to an employer market or the perception of an employer market.

And so a lot of companies are thinking, “Well, there’s a lot of talent on the market now we can slip back into old habits.” Which a year ago people could move through interview processes quickly. It was within a week you’re seeing offers go out and they knew that they had their work with a sense of urgency. Now it’s starting to see things slip back. So you’ve got to be a lot more intentional with setting some accountability with hiring managers. You’ve got to really stay on top of hiring managers, you’ve got to stay on top of candidates, you’ve got to constantly be reassuring them. And so again, I think we’re just seeing a shift in mentality from a year ago. And my personal prediction with that is that it’s going to be short-lived and as soon as optimism, which is what we need is just optimism in the market as a whole and I can’t really see it getting slower.

If anything, I’d see it going back to where it was in 2021 with maybe not as much demand, but even with 50% of the demand that we saw in 2021 for hiring, we still are going to experience a talent shortage. So I think right now just staying on top of hiring managers is key, making sure that they’re accountable. And from a BD perspective, I think you just got to work a lot harder right now to develop business. You got to work a lot harder to make those connections and stay on top and follow up and follow up and follow up. Whereas 12 months ago, 18 months ago, everybody had incoming business. They were, like you mentioned, they were chasing you. I listened to a podcast from a year ago from someone and they said, “And this is why because a year ago there was for every recruiter that was 12 recruiter openings.”

So every website you went on, every career page, they had recruiter openings. That means everybody was hiring because everybody was really optimistic about the future. Now if you go on a lot of career pages, there isn’t as many recruiter hiring openings. Companies aren’t in that growth mode in the same way. And there’s obviously industries that doesn’t apply to, I think of manufacturing seems to be pretty strong, logistics and supply chain, healthcare, but those aren’t necessarily the companies that everybody’s dying to work with either because we all know that just the challenging positions. So that’s what I’m seeing as a challenge. And I would wager to guess that most people are finding particularly like cold outreach. Cold outreach as always is a challenge, but it’s getting more and more challenging and I think it’ll continue to get harder too, by the way. I don’t think it’s not going to get easier.

That’s an ebb and flow in our business. Every time we’ve had a recession we’ve seen business development focused, recruiting focused. And honestly we’ve been in this position for the last few years that merely the whole concept behind revenue growth was just finding the talent that was beating down your door and placing them quick enough. So we’re getting to that point. You’re obviously focusing on business development and developing those processes within your organization, you’re like stay consistent. I love that because I think in what I’ve seen, and I’m interested to know your opinion, now is the time that I see organizations going back to their processes because it’s been an underutilized process. Their business development process is an underutilized process. It’s like an unused muscle that they haven’t had to use in the last few years that they’re going back to say, “Hey, let’s revisit this. Is the most efficient way to get it done?” So are you seeing that same thing, are you developing that for your teams?

We’ve definitely done that as a company as a whole. Just massive focus on referral business, checking in with accounts, looking at which accounts are we generating some revenue from, what are some other areas we can help them. We’ve invested in tech tools to where we can see what openings there are at current clients so the account managers can reach out. So I think definitely looking at that business as a whole, whether relationship is already established and then on the cold side when getting back to the basics of… Honestly, it’s not enough nowadays to just throw somebody in a three step sequence and think that that’s going to do it. I think when sequences were new on the scene and whatever, 2016, ’17 you could do that, and probably 12 months ago you could probably do that. You could just throw a lot of people in the three step sequences and because there was such a demand, you’re going to get responses. If you were doing outbound we just discussed and you weren’t just focused on inbound and servicing the clients you have.

Now it’s really I think we’re coming into a time where you are doing outbound, you’ve got to be thinking about inbound strategy, you got to be thinking about content, social media, your marketing. You can’t rely purely on just cold. You’ve got to show that your prospects, you’ve got to be able to deliver value and you’ve got to be excellent at building relationships and hitting pain points and really, really selling yourself. And then when you’re getting into those conversations, being open to have conversations that don’t lead anywhere and just continuing to follow up with people. Follow up with people. It’s classic BD. I think we’re also seeing a lot more events coming back as well. So I think events has to… doesn’t have to be, but it could be a good strategy too to go and meet people. I think we’ve gotten away from that.

I know Greg Savage, who probably a lot of people know, he talks about this a lot where it’s like we’ve gone into this Zoom culture where everything’s online and everything’s Zoom and a lot of us have good just gotten away from client visits and client lunches and meeting people. And so I think we’re going to see that as making a comeback and it’s a challenge to do that. I think it’s we’ve all gotten into mindset of just everything online. So to me I think you’ve got to be personalized, you’ve got to be creative, you’ve got to try a lot of different things. And again, cold calling is something which I’m not a huge fan of. That’s why I started building an online presence so I wouldn’t have to do as much cold calling. But I think cold calling in there as well. Cold calling, outbound email, doing whatever it takes right now.

And honestly it’s balance. I mean nothing in our industry works 100% all the time. Right?

Exactly.

It’s really like you’re building your proactive approach via social, you’re building your proactive approach, whether it’s a call, but then you’re also developing using AI. But just to get us on the phone, just to establish a connection, you really hit on the idea of in-person events, I have literally seen in-person office visits or in-person site visits fall off the face of the earth because we are in the Zoom culture. But what we’re missing is, again, that’s the symptom of something because we’re going to see that in metrics. We’re not getting as many new logos, we’re not getting as many new logos because we’re not going out and finding the business. We’re not going out and visiting these people. We’re not out there establishing trust then therefore creates influence within those industries.

So I love that you said that, speaks near and dear to my heart. So I love that. And I’m going to switch gears a minute. So I know you’ve seen growth over social media platforms in the last three years. How do you incorporate, and you talked about this a smidge already, but how do you incorporate the social aspects into your business development endeavors? You said you have to have a presence. How does that equate into new business? How do you get people to come back to you? How does that equal dollars for you?

Yeah, I think there’s multiple ways and there’s a lot of different ways that you can approach this. I think the first thing that being active on social does is it just creates awareness. What I like to think of a passive, almost passive income, really it’s a good way to think about it. Where if I put a post out on social, you put a post out on social, you putting work in initially, maybe it’s 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes, whatever it takes to write something or create a video and you’re putting that out and then once it’s out it works for itself. So you just got awareness going on now it’s harder to measure. It’s not necessarily an easy thing to just measure and you can’t say, well these people looked, obviously you could see the people who engaged that liked and commented, but there’s a whole bunch of other people that are just seeing your name, they’re seeing your profile picture, they’re just getting familiar with you.

So that’s one way, it just creates an awareness. And again, when you look at cold calling versus warm calling, the difference is if someone’s aware of you, they already have a little bit of trust because they’ve seen you, you go from being cold to warm. So the first stage is the awareness and then outside of that, you can just start to build and connect with people through comments and not just on your own content. And this is getting back to what we were talking about before with commenting within the industry that you’re in being a voice in the industry, showing up. And so the first stage is awareness and then it’s the connection. And that connection can be in comments, it can be in conversations through comment threads. And it can also be DMs, right? So you start DM’ing, people start fostering that relationship. And again, really what you’re doing is you’re showing up to them in a non-intrusive way initially building some rapport, almost like in public with them.

If you look at LinkedIn and Twitter and maybe not as much TikTok because it’s not really a social media platform, but definitely LinkedIn and Twitter, you start to engage with people, they start to be familiar with you and then you can take things to DM and you can start to have offline conversations. So I think for me, my strategy has with how much engagement I get on my content, it’s a lot easier because I get 100 people commenting, I can just send all of them DMs and the response rate is a lot higher. But I think if you’re going to start off with this, you just keep it simple. Always aim to be connecting with 50 to 100 people within your industry a week and start to aim to just comment 10 times a day, post three times a week. I think if you can get into the habit of that, what you’ll start to see is the people that you connected with, they’ll start to see your comments and they’ll start to see your content and you’ll have some familiarity with them.

And then either you DM them on the platform because they engage with you or you just start to email them. And what you find is as you email them, as you call them, as you do the outbound and you add them into your outbound activity, they’ll have that familiarity with you. And sometimes it’s easier to track, yeah, if someone’s viewed your profile can obviously know, oh, they’re aware of you if they’ve engaged with your content. But I think a lot of people don’t engage still, it’s not a huge majority of people. So you’ve got to just trust that as you connect with people and as you’re showing up, they’re going to see you, they’re going to have that awareness of you and see you. You’re building that trust. So that’s my process, that’s how it’s worked. And I’d say one thing too, the more known you actually are within your industry, the quicker you see results as well.

So I know a lot of more experienced recruiters, they’ve heard this over and over and over again with social media and sometimes they’re like, “Oh, I don’t need to, I’m fine with the way that I’m doing things.” But what I’d say is the more known you are offline and within your industry, if you’re not creating content and you suddenly start creating content, you start to get results really, really quickly. And honestly, it’s a lot of people that you’ve worked with in the past, people you’ve placed in the past, old business connections. And I’ve heard it time and time again where people start to post and then they get some inbound and they get some conversations going in and they stop.

But I think the recruiters that stick with it over time, you’ve got to think, where are you going to be in five years, 10 years? That’s how I’ve been thinking. So I’ve done it, I’m four years into my journey, but I’m still thinking where am I going to be in 10 years and the longer, this is how my trajectory is, it’s up here. And the longer people don’t do it, they’re just going to remain flat. And so I think more and more recruiters are getting onto this. It’s never too late to start again.

Well I think your office is in a unique position. You just said your yin and yang with the other person, the leader in your office that is also posting content. It’s different. So I want you to take that, maybe a different view. So if you are someone that has an agency, how are you creating this as a roadmap or how to guide for all your new people coming in? Or are you even developing that for your organization at Hire Well, how does this become the actionable plan? How does it become, I’m successful at this? How do you get your same trajectory going forward versus staying on that flat line?

You mentioned one thing like having leadership at a company involved, that’s a prerequisite. You don’t create any social strategy for your company without having at least one core leader, somebody in leadership getting behind it. If that’s not there, you are never going to get people to do it because they’re just going to be like, well, you’re not doing it. Why would I do it? It’s just obvious. Sometimes this is what can happen is when you start leading a company, you expect people to do things but you’re not really willing to do it yourself. And what’s really powerful is when leaders, they get and do a cold call. If you want to prove to somebody that cold calling works, show them that cold calling works. And it’s same with social media. So I think if you’re a leader, you’ve got to get behind it. At Hire Well, one of the things we do is we incentivize people to post.

So even if they’re just posting a couple of times a week, they can get cash bonuses for doing that. If they go more in depth than they do a podcast, I’ve run a podcast, they can get quarterly bonuses and we’re not talking about million dollars, we’re talking… But it’s something, it’s more than just a pat in the back. It’s like, hey, we really appreciate what you’re doing. And then again, it’s the conversations that we have as an agency. It’s every two weeks we’re getting together and we’re having these conversations. People are pairing up, they’re working together. So I think you’ve got to foster those conversations and you’ve got to have the conversation. You’ve got to encourage people, you’ve got to work together and can’t just be an activity that you’re hoping happens. You’ve really got to foster that culture.

And that’s what we’ve seen. I definitely think me coming into the organization and having the following that I have and the engagement and all that type of stuff, and seeing new hires come into the organization because they’ve seen content that speaks a lot because then they’ve been like, “Oh yeah, that’s the whole reason I’m here because I saw some of Joel’s content.” So that helps encourage it. But James, who’s the partner that creates content, he’s also been doing it a long time and he’s gotten a lot and a lot of business himself inbound. So that also speaks to people.

So I think you’ve got to have a leader, you’ve got to have regular communication. And then maybe there isn’t anybody at your agency that has a social media presence, that’s okay, find somebody that’s interested in it, like I was. That enjoys writing, that enjoys doing the videos and get behind them and support them in doing it. I think the worst thing that you can do is be fearful and worry and go, oh my god, I’m going to be helping this person build their brand and then they’re going to leave big fear of mine.

And honestly, that’s the thing that I see the most in all the offices that I’ve ever worked with. It’s like, it’s such a taboo thing because in the leader’s eyes, “Yeah, I’m going to help them gain their own audience share, not the companies, and they’re going to leave. They’re going to leave me and I’m going to get nothing from it.” And in reality, I love that your leaders are setting not only the lead of how action should go, but they’re rewarding the right behavior. That’s really what our business is about, is understanding metrics, understand where we need to go, understanding that it’s something that we’re building upon to not only make our individuals more successful, because when our individuals are more successful, we’re more successful as a group or an organization. So I think that’s really what I see leaders in the agency space really put up their guard on social media is the tracking.

Any agency leader that really has a grip on their business should and probably is looking at their system of record, they’re ETS to give them that holistic view of the business and it’s telling them the metrics of how their teams are doing, what they should be doing better on. How are they forecasting business and what’s happening in the weeks to months to come. But social’s hard, people are doing things outside the system. Metrics aren’t always tracked. Your leaders don’t always have that holistic view of your business. So Joel, what are your thoughts? Do you think that these metrics are different now maybe than when you were recruiting? Now that you’re focused on business development, what do you think about the whole concept of metrics and where it goes and how do you as a individual, make your leader be able to see that you’re making an impact and doing the right activities?

Yeah, look, it’s great question. I think this is part of the reason why marketing is really difficult for a lot of agencies to grasp business. Because the constant thing that you hear from leaders, and I don’t think it’s just recruitment agencies, I think it’s just across the board of small businesses, but it’s what’s ROI. But I do think in recruiting, that’s what people say, “What’s ROI?” Because we’re so used to say… You could pick up the phone, make a cold call and land a piece of business, the ROI of that, hey, if I do 100 calls, it’s this and this turns into this. With social, I think part of it is that you’ve got to… can’t almost, have to like trust that it’s working. That sounds crazy. But there’s certain metrics you can look at. You can look at how much somebody’s posted, you can look at how many views they’ve got.

LinkedIn has analytics where you can look and just see, well what’s the impact? They’ve gotten this many views. And then you can obviously just track inbound activity when it comes to an outbound conversation. I have my own metrics, I’ve got new contacts that I’m adding in the system, I’ve got sequences that are going out, I’ve got outbound calls that I’m making, I’ve got new deals created. We’ve got a whole tracking system. So you definitely want to track outbound, but I think if the only thing that you’re tracking is cold calls nowadays, I’m going to have… That’s why I’m going to have a little bit of a challenge with because I think there’s other things that make an impact. So looking at social strategy with people I know who have done it really, really well. Joe Mullings for example, I’ve had him on my podcast a bunch of times and the guy’s just legendary when it comes to content.

His content’s far beyond where my mind’s at. Like quality-wise I probably get more eyeballs, but he definitely gets high quality, high value. One of the things he told me a couple of years ago on the podcast is what he does with his team is he just tracks the social posts and he starts with written posts and he looks at the views and so he is tracking it. And that’s the mindset I’ve adopted for myself. That’s the mindset that we approach with our team. But I will say too, as an agency Hire Well I don’t know, 38 million was our revenue last year. There’s 120 of us I think on the business side. So we’re a successful business that’s growing. The only metrics that we’re really tracking when it comes down to it is like send outs, that’s it. We’re not tracking any of the outbound activity really, but that’s a culture thing too.

And it’s not a micromanaging culture, but people are still getting a job done and they’re still executing on it. I think the only time we really start to track things is if somebody’s not performing, if you’re not getting the send outs, then you start to diagnose it. I think the mindset of a lot of agencies is we’ve got to track the outbound because outbound guarantees results. And I think that’s true, but I think you should be tracking things to coach people and where they can improve, not hold them to a standard, especially nowadays where there’s so many ways that you can reach out to people.

And you are where my mind is, obviously I’m a little passionate about this and I understand people, they have harsh feelings about metrics. I completely understand. Most people agree they don’t like the micromanaging, broker, transactional KPIs that keep recruiters on that hamster wheel. A lot of leaders don’t like it and you know as well as I do, recruiters don’t like it. They feel like its Big Brother.

Exactly.

Only there to watch you. But I will tell you it does stay that way for two main reasons. Number one, it’s maybe their ATS or core platform isn’t giving them that holistic view of their business to know what’s actually working or actually broken. But number two, and I almost think more importantly, they haven’t done the critical thinking to get away from the mere idea of what kind of easy to get transactional metrics can they pull from their system today. Versus what they should be measuring to truly understand and improve effectiveness of their teams so they can scale so they can grow, they can increase the ROI. Metrics that would actually get you off the hamster wheel of just make more calls and that’ll solve it. That’s old school mindset.

What we need to do is get to the point of coaching, understand those ratio reports. Hey, you know what Joel, I noticed that you’re making more of this type of call or having more of these kind of meetings, but what I really noticed that those calls and meetings aren’t translating to the outcome that we really care about or the ratio that you’d expect. So that’s where I think us as leaders of agencies need to talk about the approach here to see if we can get better outcomes by helping them with they’re changing their script, their touch plan strategy, better social post. It’s all within the coaching there. And I think honestly, firms are going to struggle to increase that or improve that because of siloed technology, siloed processes that don’t frankly talk to each other. So it’s where we really need to improve and expand on what your firm sets it apart.

As a talent organization, you have to change the mindset and start to think critically about the processes in play now versus where you need to be and making it better for each individual versus staying on that hamster wheel, for metric’s sake, that’s awful. So reflect scale with what makes your firm special, but what makes you worth working with and really deeply listening to your team and understanding before you prescribe more transactional KPIs or automations or something new when frankly it could have been working better for you in the first place. So I love that. Rant over, I apologize.

No, I think it’s great and I think again, metrics were always designed to help, you can’t lose that. I think if the mindset is to hold people accountable for something, that’s where it starts getting on the micromanaging. And I think one of the things you just got to understand about people, frankly, people who are just coming into the workforce, they just don’t want environments like that. One of the biggest… Some of the posts that I do that really speak to people, because we hire a lot of people from other agencies, just want to say, we take a lot of people. A lot of other companies do training and then after a year we come in and we get them, when we don’t even go out and get them, they just come to us. And some of the posts that I’ve seen that produce the most inbound from just a candidate perspective, so just inbound candidates for the actual agency.

Some of the biggest stuff that really resonates with people is when I start talking about I love working at Hire Well because they treat me an adult with respect and there’s no micromanaging. Posts like that they produce so much. And now obviously if I was lying and then they get into Hire Well then they’d be like, oh, this is not what I’m talking about. But when I actually meet with the new hires and had it happen a lot where they’ll be like, “Yeah, you posted something about Hire Well and it resonated with me.” Maybe it was a picture of good kits, whatever. It was like I’m just talking about life at Hire Well, and then they get here and that’s what life’s like. And so that’s been really huge for us.

And even more experienced recruiters. Look, there’s a lot of recruiters who they might not even be happy, but because they’ve built up a solid book of business, they’re tied to your agency. But there’s a breaking point sometimes where if you continue treating people in that way where they’re not feeling more micromanaged, especially if they’re a top performer. Hey look, then a company like Hire Well goes, we’ve got to build a whole team which has really experienced consultants that just got tired of that hamster wheel because it can just become just holding people accountable for the sake of it, instead of using those metrics to help them get better. And you should be wanting to help them get better so they can make more money.

And in turn your performance.

And then you’re going to make more money. So if you have that mindset, it’s not looking at it going, well, you didn’t do the 20 calls, that’s why you’re not making money or you didn’t do this and that’s why you’re not making money calls. Okay, let’s take a look at what you’ve done and how you can become more efficient? How can you become better? How can you do this quicker so you can make it [inaudible 00:39:53]

How can you make less calls but be more effective, ever thought of that? I love it.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

And that’s why the social really comes in. And my big thing is I think we’re just done with the mass, just unintentional outreach. I just don’t see that being as effective, especially coming into the time that we’re in as well.

I 100% agree. I’m going to switch gears. Can you tell me about your podcast? I think it’s called Recruiting is No Joke, and how it helped you to build your personal brand and establish yourself as a thought leader in the recruitment industry?

So I did another podcast, you were actually a guest on another podcast. It was called The Headhunter Hideout. And it was at the time I was really selling into agencies because I was coaching and I was obviously at that business where I was helping people with content. But for me, the way I’ve always approached any podcast is for me, I just love learning. So I’ve used it to actually just learn a ton. I’ve had some really, really just high level guests who have accomplished a ton within internal talent acquisition, which is a focus of the podcast. That’s why it’s called Recruiting is No Joke. It’s internal talent leaders, a lot of startup talent leaders in a tech space, and then also just people who manage massive global teams. One of my guests recently, she’s managing 20,000 openings and a team of 500, just big, large scale, internal operations.

So for me it’s a really big learning opportunity just to learn from people and just understand more about what are the challenges that they’re really facing and what are the challenges nowadays with salary transparency and this remote hybrid and how are you managing expectations through interview process? How are you managing the shift in work culture that we’re seeing? So it’s a big learning experience. And then the other side of it is I’m getting to connect with people and I have something to offer them. So if I’m reaching out someone, “Nah, we’re not interested in your recruitment services.” “Well hey, I’ve got a podcast. I run it live on LinkedIn, I got 100 thousand followers.” Typically, people are reaching back and going, that sounds interesting, let’s have a chat about it. So it’s a great way to build relationships and to be able to give back and learn build a relationship.

And then obviously on the backside of that, it’s helping build my brand because I’m associating myself with different brands, different companies. It’s also providing a lot of valuable insight for other agency recruiters, internal recruiters, job seekers, talent leaders. So it’s really helping develop that. So I think with the podcast, it’s a lot of work. I do it all myself. I don’t have a scheduling team, I don’t have any, I literally do it all myself, do everything editing, and maybe I should outsource some of that. But I do the scheduling as well, I have it all scheduled out. I pick the guests, I get to know the guests. But what I’d say with the podcast is I’ve gotten a lot better at podcasting and just having conversations. I do it live so I don’t have to do as much preparation, but just gotten good at having those conversations and I think it builds trust with people at the end of the day. And it’s just a great way to give back.

When you’re building a podcast and you’re having these conversations. It’s not like I have the conversation with them and the next day we’re doing hundreds of thousands dollars worth of business, but it just opens up that door for referrals and business down the line and just relationships. And that’s how we win business. You win business with trust, building relationships, credibility, and then once you get some business executing really, really well, and that’s where I don’t handle that, Hire Well team comes in and executes. See I think it’s been huge. And I think if you’re thinking of starting a podcast, the only thing I would think about is, and this is the same with any sort of content, you just have to be consistent. I think a lot of times when people think about content or podcasts, they think there’s this point that you get to like, oh, when I get to 100,000 followers, when I get to get to episode 50 of the podcast.

The truth is, these things are things that you just have to commit to and be like, this is part of what I do now. This is part of my strategy. And there’s sometimes where it’s tough and maybe you don’t feel like it’s making an impact, but it’s only once you’ve gotten past that point and you’ve really got consistency with any of this stuff, that’s why you see the results. Similar to cold calling. You don’t just do a week’s worth of cold calling and God didn’t get anything. You go back into the room and you make some more because you know that you’re going to get better. You’re going to reach somebody and it’s the same ideology with content.

Joel, I love that. You highlighted so much, much for us. So I’m going to wrap up here. I thank you so much for joining us. This was great. I loved your perspective, your unique insight, so thank you so much for joining us.

You’re welcome. Great to be here. And I enjoyed catching up. Hopefully this won’t be the last time.

No, absolutely not. Now for our audience, Joel gave us some key information to show you what good looks like as we learn from hiring authorities, what you can do to change the mindset of our agencies, how we can improve those foundational processes internally. And you also got a great framework when it comes to your teams developing and leveling up their social presence around whether it’s gaining new prospects, social selling, and frankly just how to keep them right. Remembering all of these strategies could and should be easy to execute. If they’re not easy, your teams aren’t going to do them. Build them into your foundational processes and make those tracking of metrics easy so your leaders are able to have the holistic view. And remember all of these things that you’re seeing is a learning opportunity. So take those, build upon them and look at all of these things as a symptom and really get to that root problem so your teams are better at everything in the future, to gain more success, not only individually, but for you as your organization.

So thanks so much for joining us today. Keep an eye out for our next workshop and live events on March 21st. Note, that podcast will drop on the 30th, but feel free to join us live. We’re going to be talking about all things consolidating your tech stack because let’s face it, processes in your talent development business are siloed, not talking to each other or straight up missing. Even with name brand ATSs because it got built through either an acquisition, a bolt-on process. So we’re really going to talk about the ability to see that holistic picture measured and presented within that your platform and what you can do to start on your journey. Thanks so much for listening to our industry spotlight.

I’m Kortney Harmon with Crelate. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Industry Spotlight, a new series from The Full Desk Experience. New episodes will be dropping monthly. Be sure you’re subscribed to our podcast so you can catch the next Industry Spotlight episode and all episodes of The Full Desk Experience here or wherever you listen.