Welcome back to Recruiting Conversations! I’m Richard Milligan, and today we’re diving into three crucial questions every recruiting leader must ask to truly motivate recruits. These questions will help you connect with recruits on a deeper level and tap into their real motivations for making a change.
Episode Breakdown
00:00 - 01:00 - Richard introduces the topic, sharing a common struggle among recruiting leaders: motivating recruits to take the next step. He highlights the importance of understanding what really drives people to make a career change.
01:01 - 02:30 - Richard explains the mistake many leaders make: trying to recruit based solely on a company’s value proposition, which falls short because most people are satisfied where they are.
02:31 - 04:00 - The discussion shifts to the real barriers to change, like switching insurance, learning new systems, and adjusting to a new environment. Richard stresses that offering a slightly better opportunity isn’t enough to motivate most people.
04:01 - 05:00 - Richard introduces the concept of understanding a recruit’s "why"—their deeper motivation beyond compensation. This is where real recruiting happens.
05:01 - 06:30 - The first essential question: What do you want? Richard explains how asking this opens a conversation about both professional and personal goals.
06:31 - 08:00 - The second key question: Why is that important to you? Understanding why someone’s goals matter helps you connect on a more meaningful level and gain insight into their true motivations.
08:01 - 09:00 - The third critical question: Are you saying...? Richard emphasizes the importance of clarifying what recruits are saying to ensure you're truly understanding their goals and desires.
09:01 - 10:30 - Richard compares recruiting to mediation, where both parties have different needs and the goal is to find common ground. As a leader, your job is to demonstrate that you can help recruits achieve their personal and professional goals.
10:31 - 12:30 - Richard shares a story of a leader who kept a recruit’s dream front and center by creating a dream board and offering tangible reminders of their goal, reinforcing their commitment to that person’s success.
12:31 - 13:30 - Recruiting isn’t just about getting people onto your team. Leaders must follow through on their commitment to helping recruits achieve their goals, even after they’ve joined.
13:31 - 14:30 - Richard concludes with a call to lead from a place of authenticity and focus on what the recruit wants, rather than what the leader wants.
Key Takeaways
- Ask What They Want: Focus on a recruit’s professional and personal goals, not just their job role.
- Understand Why It Matters: Dig deeper by asking why those goals are important, and connect with their true motivation.
- Clarify with 'Are You Saying?': Reconfirm what the recruit is telling you to ensure full understanding and alignment.
Recruiting becomes easier when you truly understand what drives people. By asking these three questions, you position yourself as a leader who cares about your recruits’ success, making it easier to attract and retain top talent.
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#MotivatingRecruits #RecruitingQuestions #UnderstandingMotivation #RichardMilligan #RecruitingLeadership
So the big question is this, how do recruiting leaders like us who have 12 to 15 other job responsibilities win at this game of recruiting? How do we build a system that allows us to recruit effectively in a minimal amount of time while motivating recruits towards meaningful change? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Richard Milligan and welcome to Recruiting Conversations. Hey everybody, it's your host Richard Milligan here with Recruiting Conversations and if you haven't ever tried cutting a podcast by yourself, you don't fully know the struggle of trying to come up with something original for an intro every single time. I'm laughing because there are times where I will cut this three, four, five times just to get some basic intro down to make it different and so that struggle is real for those of you that have ever tried to launch a podcast or do a podcast, that struggle is real. Well I'm glad to have you today and I think I can bring you some value through a framework of some questions that you as a recruiting leader should be asking. Recent conversation with one of my coaching clients, they were struggling motivating their recruits, the people that they were recruiting to take any next steps and so as we got into the conversation, one thing I became very aware of is that they had very little information around what actually motivated the recruit and I think it's a mistake that a lot of recruiting leaders make and that's what I want to talk about it here with you today and that mistake is this is that we typically try to recruit and motivate people through the lens of our company value proposition. That's a huge mistake in my opinion because that falls into what I would classify as what I call the opportunity improvement offering which is that we just say we're a little bit better and what we know from data is that most people say when surveyed that they're satisfied or very satisfied where they're employed at. So if you show up and say your opportunity is a little bit better, there's not enough motivation for the majority of people to make a change. When you go back and think about all of the things that are wrapped up in a change, man there's a lot there that's required of someone to actually make a change, right? If you just take it down to some of the basic elements of changing insurance, changing doctors, the lag in paychecks from one company to the next company, if they're on the sales side reestablishing the pipeline, learning the new operations platform, operation system, the new point of sale, the new CRM, these things begin to pile up and we've only just begun in what is required of someone to move from one place to the next place. So we're asking a lot of people, we're asking a lot of them when we ask them to move from where they are to where we are simply for something that's a little bit better. So it's got to be bigger than that and when you understand that, it's got to be bigger than the company, we understand that we have to figure out how we motivate that individual through the lens of what's important to them. No, in a recent survey, they said that 95% of Americans said that they preferred culture over compensation and I think that the epiphany to having that is that compensation while it is important, it's not the most important thing in recruiting. So I want to give you three questions that help you get to the most important thing. So we're talking about the most important thing, I think that this idea around why, what is their why, what is their largest motivator, I think that's an important part of this and how I classify why it's its purpose, cause or belief that inspires you to become more, right? So for me, I had this epiphany in 2007 when I was going through difficult season. My why is actually my family, it's my wife of 21 years, it's my four kids that range in age today from seven to 18 and I would, that is that purpose, cause or belief that inspires me to become more. But most, what I know is that when I reflect back on my career, the people that recruited me and the companies that I joined, I never had anybody while recruiting me get to that. No one ever asked me the questions that led to that place where they could motivate me through the lens of that and if they had, they would have had a much greater chance at recruiting me. What most people recruited me too was their platform, whatever that was, it might have been their better operational team, their better support system, their better compensation model, you have more control. If you're in this position with our organization, then you have where you are now and those were all peripheral things, they weren't at the highest forms of motivation for me. So one, we have to establish that there's this larger piece in play that goes beyond money and we have to be able to hack into that, right? As a recruiting leader, ultimately what we're doing is the most difficult thing on the planet. We're trying to motivate, unmotivated people to make a change. This isn't like selling something, right? The assumption is that when we go to sell something, that there's already an understanding where there's a need there. If I walk into a furniture store to buy a lazy boy, I've already identified that I need a lazy boy. If I walk onto a car, I'll have to buy a car, I'm already interested in purchasing a car. We arrive on the scene and no one has any interest in what it is that we have to offer. So this is the most difficult thing on the planet to do, in my opinion, is to motivate someone who's unmotivated to make a change. So we have to get to something that's much larger in terms of motivation. There's three questions that will help you do that. Number one, ask this, what do you want? What do you want? What do you want from your career? What do you want from the next 10 years in this industry? What do you want personally outside of work? What do you want takes us to a better conversation? If someone would have asked me that question when they were recruiting me, I would have said, I want more time with my family. I've got all four kids at home this season, this wind is going to be small. I want to take advantage of this time. That's what I want. And if someone could have convinced me that they were going to offer me more of that over more compensation, over a better system, over a better operations team, over a better more control, that would have been a better way to motivate me. Now the next question to ask as part of this series of questions is not only what do you want, but why is that important to you? If you don't understand why it's important to them, you don't really fully understand the context of this. Someone might say, and I'll just, we'll just pontificate here for a moment. Someone might say, you know what, my 20 year wedding anniversary is coming up and I want to take my wife to board because when we got married, I promised her that on our 20th wedding anniversary that we would do that. Why is that important to you? I need to know that, right? Not just what do you want, why is that important to you? That's important to me because my mom and dad were married for 50 years. I saw how beautiful the relationship was. I want to be able to look at my wife at the 50 year window for both still alive and celebrate that moment. That's why that's important to me. I'm getting to a better place here in terms of motivation. Here's a critical part, this is the third question that I'm coming to. A lot of times when people are speaking around this, depending on their personality and depending on our personality, depending on all the things going on around us, wherever the environment is, whether we're hearing them correctly or not, is something that is important. There have been times when I've had meetings in a Starbucks and my ADD kicks in and I can barely focus on the meeting or I'll go to a restaurant and I happen to sit at a table where on the other side I'm facing the sports bar on the other side of the restaurant and there's 17 TVs going on and my ADD kicks in and I have a really difficult time focusing. Now, that's just to me. It may not be you, but that's what's going on with me. I found the third important question was, are you saying and I would rearticulate what I heard? Here's what's interesting to this. One of the reasons why this is coming up recently is that a good friend of mine is actually in mediation in something and we were having this conversation around the questions that the mediator was asking. One of the things in the mediation of what was going on in his business and what I found was striking was that the mediator was asking similar questions as these three questions. What do you want? Why is that important to you and are you saying this? When you think about mediation and you think about recruiting, there's a lot of similarities between those two things in mediation. What are you trying to do? You're trying to take two parties that are in different places and you're trying to gain agreement on how you move forward and recruiting is very similar to that. You have someone on this side that statistically is happy where they're at. They're not interested in making move and you're trying to motivate them to make a move. There's the similarity. How do you get that person to make a move? You figure out what is most important to them and then you as a leader are it's your responsibility if you can help them accomplish that to convince them that you above all other leaders will not only help them accomplish that but make it your life's mission to accomplish that. There's all kinds of stories of leaders who have done this in my coaching. I give you examples of leaders who have talked to someone on their team and ask this question, what do you want out of this time here? Why is that important to you and are you saying where someone might say, look, it's been our lifelong dream as a family to actually have a lake house? The next thing you know, this leader has a dream board up in their office with a picture of a lake house cut out of a magazine up on that dream board and when that person's employee walks into the office and says, what's that? I want that on my dream board every single day to remind me that's what you want and I'm here to help you accomplish that. And then when Christmas rolls around they go out of their way to go get a lake magazine on the lake that they actually want to actually buy and have a house one day and give it to them as a Christmas present with a little note saying, I'm all about helping you accomplish this in 2021 or whatever the next year is for you, right? So for us as leaders, this has got to become not just something we do on the recruiting side, but it's got to become very practical, something that we actually live out. I can't just convince you to get to my team and then not live that piece out. So this has to come from a hard centered place. This has to come from a place of authenticity that me as a leader are others focused, not me focused. And I think that's the difference between two types of recruiting leaders. One is primarily focused on accomplishing what I want to accomplish. And then there's the other leader that is primarily focused on accomplishing what that recruit wants to accomplish. So one's me centered, the other is other centered. And as leaders, we have to move to a place in recruiting where we actually revealed to people, if we are, that others centered leader, that's who we are. And when we do where there's a lack of a others centered leader where they currently work, then it's easy to convince them to come across to your team. Because ultimately what people want is they want to align their core values, they want to align their talents and their energies and efforts with a leader who wants to help them accomplish what they want to accomplish. And so as a leader, if you can authentically look in the mirror and say that's me, then it is your job to figure out how you convince people that you are that leader. A leader has this enormous impact that goes beyond the walls of their business. When you impact an employee, when you impact a mom or a dad or a child inside the walls of your office, when they go out, they influence other people for the good, not just around them in terms of families and friends with their communities. This is how we change our communities is that we have leaders who want more than to close the next deal, to close the next transaction, to put out the next fire. We have leaders that are centered on things that are bigger than their outlook, that are bigger than their voicemail. This is, if that's you, then it is your calling, it is your purpose. To walk through a framework that helps people understand that's who you are. And when you convince them about it, I truly believe this. When you can convince them that you above all other leaders in their market will help them accomplish what's important to them, then the game is over. The game of recruiting is over. In their mind, it's not a matter of if they will join you, it becomes a matter of when they will join you. The next part of that becomes, you've got to have a follow-up system, right? Because if you're not relative in a conversation when the season for change comes, then you can be forgotten. So not only do we need to be asking three similar questions to this, then we need to have a follow-up system that's built around us continuing to stay in front of people again and again in an authentic way that reveals that we are that kind of a leader. And if you do that, recruiting gets simple. In the long-term, recruiting gets simple, right? We can't be focused on tomorrow or next week or next month. This is something that, this is who we are, this is what we do. This is how we recruit, this is how we lead. So the game is over in your market if that's you, because there's very few leaders that actually lead like that, live like that, and recruit like that. I hope you found some value in this today. There's plenty of things to apply here. If you need access to me in my calendar's live, I do hours of coaching with people without any strings attached all the time. If I can bring you some value on the outro, my calendar is listed live there. Would love to pour into you for an hour if there's something that I can do to support you in the mission of being a great leader in your market and growing and building your team. Until the next episode of everyone, have a great week. We'll talk to you soon. If you want more recruiting conversations, you can register for my weekly email at Dorseyrecruiting.com. If you need help creating your own unique recruiting system, you can book a time with me at bookrichardnow.com. (gentle music)
