Today we’re talking about a common mistake many recruiting leaders make: operating in a silo. In this episode, I’ll explain why working alone in your recruiting process is limiting your success and how you can boost your results by involving others.
Episode Breakdown
00:00 - 02:29 - Introduction to the concept of silo recruiting and why it's a broken model. Richard shares insights from recent coaching sessions where leaders are operating in isolation.
02:30 - 05:59 - Why recruiting in a silo often fails: lack of involvement from others limits the potential for meaningful connections and high-level recruiting success.
06:00 - 08:29 - The power of getting more people involved in the recruitment process, increasing the likelihood of success from single digits to as high as 70%.
08:30 - 11:29 - A deeper dive into Maslow’s theory of human motivation and how getting more people involved taps into higher levels of belonging, affirmation, and meaning.
11:30 - 14:59 - Why you should target the 80% of satisfied individuals, rather than focusing solely on unhappy people. How to leverage your team to appeal to those who are open to better opportunities.
15:00 - 18:29 - The importance of time management and the need for recruiting to be a consistent part of a leader's responsibilities. Richard emphasizes the role of the sales leader as the "product" in recruiting.
18:30 - 21:29 - The value of identifying 7 key individuals who can contribute to your recruiting process and the importance of sharing their stories and values with recruits.
21:30 - 23:59 - Using virtual environments to expedite the recruitment process and get multiple people involved in a shorter time frame, thereby accelerating the timeline for success.
Key Takeaways
- Involve More People: Don’t go it alone. Getting others involved increases the chances of success, with the ideal number being 7 people.
- Tap Into Higher Motivation: Appeal to human needs like belonging, affirmation, and meaning by involving your team in the process.
- Recruit Consistently: Recruiting is not a task to be sidelined. It’s a glass ball—treat it as a priority and keep it part of your daily rhythm.
Stop operating in a silo! Involve more people in your recruitment process and you’ll see a dramatic increase in your results. Recruiting should be a consistent focus for any leader, and by utilizing your team effectively, you’ll accelerate success.
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#DontOperateInASilo #RecruitingLeadership #TeamInvolvement #RichardMilligan #RecruitingProcess
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 Meligan and welcome to Recruiting Conversations. Another one, welcome back, it's Richard Meligan with Recruiting Conversations, your hosts. We're back with another podcast today. Hope you're doing well. Spring is in the air where I'm at right now as I'm recording this, so maybe there's an extra bounce in my voice. I want to talk to you today about a framework that I coach to that comes up very regularly. The framework is based on what I see most recruiters and most recruiting leaders doing. And that is operating in a silo, so let's talk about that. I recently had this conversation with the coaching client. They were operating when I say operating in a silo, what they were doing was operating on their own. They didn't have anyone around them in the process of recruiting, meaning that when they were the one that did the research, they were the one that made the first call, they were the one that built the relationship over a long amount of time, and no one else was ever introduced into the recruiting process. And for most recruiting leaders, recruiting leader being someone that is typically a sales leader that manages the team, but it's also responsible for recruiting to that team. For that recruiting leader and for recruiters, it's highly likely that they're operating in a silo today. And I think that there is a number of reasons why that actually takes place, but the biggest part of why it's taking place is just a lack of education. Because if people knew that by getting more people involved, that they would have a much higher likelihood, we're talking about significant changes in the likelihood that someone joined your organization, then they would be doing this. So if the only thing you did was listen to the first minute of this, what you need to get is don't operate in the silo. Our data supports, now, when I say our data, we do a lot of what I call recruiting audits. So we come alongside an organization, we come in as a strategist, and we unpack everything that is going on as it relates to their sales recruiting process. And in that we do live interviews of all the key people. We do online interviews through surveys of people. And as we start to map out, like what is currently taking place, what is almost always taking place is that the recruiter is acting it on their own as a full cycle recruiter. And the recruiting leaders operating on their own as a full cycle recruiter. And the full cycle recruiter operates in the silo. They're responsible for everything, from end to end, finding the person, creating first contact with them, and maintaining the relationship until the person raises their hand and says, "I'm interested." And that process is broken, and there's a lot of reasons why. Now, I want to teach you the tactic of this, I want to go through that, I'll give you what's very tactical, the strategy itself. But what I really also want you to get is I want you to get why this takes place. I'd rather teach you how to think than what to think. I'm going to give you what to think today in this podcast, but I want to teach you how to think. And so how to think is like, why is this taking place? Why would you go from, here's what the data says, why would you go from being in the very low single digits for someone that you engage in a conversation to joining your organization, to going to as high as 70% of the number of people that are in your process that you're talking to, converting and joining the organization? How could you go from low single digits to 70% in this process just by involving more people? Why does that take place? And the reason why it takes place is that this process of involving more people actually taps into how we've been designed as human beings. So let's just go to something that is universal. Most people know Maslow's theory. Maslow's theory was that there are five layers of human motivation at the lowest level. It was safety and security. And most when you operate in the silo, what most people are doing is only operating in the lowest forms of human motivation. Here's why. They believe they're searching for unhappy people. So say, I don't feel safe. And so I'll leave the organization. I don't like my leader. My comp got changed. The company just got acquired. I don't feel safe. And so most recruiters operate in the lowest form of human motivation. We've got to get out of that. Because the best recruiting operates in the highest forms of human motivation. What is that? We go from safety and security. The next thing that's most important is provision, right? Can I? Where's my two week paycheck? Do I have money in the bank? That becomes the next essential thing. And once you get past that, you get into and I'm going to creatively present this to you, but we call it the BAM zone. What's the BAM zone? People want to belong. That's the next level. People want to belong. They want to belong to a group of people that is their tribe. We're headed in the same direction for the same reasons, with the same values. Okay. So belonging is the next piece. And so think about this. If we were to ask this question, as I get more people involved in this process, do they get a better sense of belonging to the organization? And the answer to that is unequivocally yes, and we'll unpack some of that today. The next layer up is affirmation. So again, we ask the question, if I get more people involved, is it the process more affirming than if I'm the only person involved? And then once again, that question is easily answered. It's yes. I would love to have my regional speak with you for 15 minutes. That's actually affirming. A lot of people involved their executive leadership, a divisional or a head of sales or a CEO. That person being available is directly connected to whether this person continues through this process. The data says this, 78% of people say that engaged executive management was a key reason why they joined the organization. But why affirmation is a big part of this? It's affirming to have that person involved in the process. And then the highest form of this is meaning, what we call the meaning zone. That's the BAM zone, belonging affirmation and meaning. At the highest level now, it's the meaning zone. And meaning is simply defined as, is there more value here available that meets my needs? And it's not transactional value. It's transactional value is we close deals quickly, you'll make more compensation. Our support is better than your current support. Our benefits are better than your current benefits. That's transactional, transformational is different. Transformational is when someone in this process shares the story of how they join the organization. And this organization is now a part of their family, how this organization has changed their life, how when this thing happened that was catastrophic in my life and this organization came alongside me as those stories get told multiple over and over again, right? We want to get more people involved. The secret number in this is seven, but more people, if you just got three, you'll triple the number of people that you actually cross the finish line. But when you get to seven, that's where it competes. If you get more people involved, those people are sharing their stories. How did I get to this organization? The impact this organization's had on me, how I love my position and what I get to do here. All those are the stories that begin to aggregate, and it's the aggregation of stories that leads to people creating, defining their own meaning zone. Will I have more meaning here at this organization? Meaning is more than transaction, okay? So let's just, that's why this matters. I'm teaching you now how to think, now let's go tactical on this, okay? So one of the things I said is that we're not searching for unhappy people. In most industries, the data looks like this, about 80% and give or take. I looked at a recent, I looked at one industry specifically recently with 78% of people. So we're in this 80% ballpark range, give or take 5% typically, about 80% say they're satisfied where they're at. About 5% say, and then the data that I looked at was 4.6%, about 5% say that they're dissatisfied where they're at. And then you have this other 15 to 20% depending on the data that say they're very satisfied. So the industry I looked at if I gave you general numbers was 80, 15, 5, 80% satisfied, 15% very satisfied, 5% dissatisfied. Now here's what I want to challenge. The unhappy people, I mean, I don't want to put everybody in a basket here. But I would say most of the unhappy people in that survey are most likely always unhappy. You know what I'm talking about. These are transitionary people. They stay somewhere for 18 months and they leave. They stay somewhere for 11 months. They leave. They stay somewhere for nine months. They leave. They stay somewhere maybe two years. That's like a big deal. And then they leave. And that is normal in the 5%. So where are we? The very satisfied are hard to recruit. Almost impossible because they love, they adore, they're, these are some, these things that they're experiencing in our next level, they're hard to recruit. But you've got this massive audience here, eight out of 10 people or yeah, eight out of 10 people, 80% out of 10 people that are satisfied. And I get excited about that. Why? Because when I say things are okay, which is what's satisfying, things are okay. How was that satisfying? When things are just okay, there is a ton of opportunity to motivate people, to inspire people. That's what recruiting is. Recruiting is a transfer. It's a passion. I want to motivate people, I want to inspire people, transfer my passion to them. So as we get more people involved, the 80% are in play. So we are not searching for unhappy people. We are searching for the I'm okay people and we put them through a better recruiting process, a better recruiting system. So that's the big ahas. Now in all of this, here's what I hear a lot. A sales leader says, look, you like, I don't have time to involve more people in recruiting. A lot of them will say, I don't have time to be involved in recruiting. I need my corporate recruiter recruiting for me. And the truth is that there's like, let's unpack that a little bit because the truth is that if you're a sales leader, if you're on the sales side, is very normal for sales teams experienced 20 to 30% attrition every single year. If you're a sales leader, one of the balls that you juggle every single day must be a recruiting ball. It just is. I realize that you got 12 to 17 of these in the air, I've counted them. But the truth is that we always make time for things that are priorities. It's just the truth. Take a moment and look at the things that you're making time for in your life. You will have a sales executive that has a crazy life that plays on a flag football team that plays on a coed softball team that has these things. We make time for things that are priorities to us. So that's the truth in this, is that recruiting a lot of times for really relational leaders isn't a strength. No one's ever taught you how to recruit. Let's just say that there's really not any type of corporate recruiting training around recruiting. So one, most aren't that good at it because they haven't been taught. The first premise and being good at something is that you had a teacher, you had a coach, you had someone that actually helped you get good at this thing, anyone who self taught. If you self taught yourself to sew, that is not a great product you're going to produce. If you taught yourself to play basketball, you are not going to play in the NBA. You need a coach. You need a teacher. So the truth is that most people avoid this because they know they're not that good at it. But in truth, the reason why we're cutting these podcasts is so that you can get better at it. The reason why you should be connected with me on LinkedIn and Instagram and Facebook and in my close Facebook group and looking at our forcing university and those things is because you can get better at this. There's other, there's information available around you to get better at this. And so as you get better at this, it's easier to embrace it. It feels more comfortable to do this. It then becomes easier to prioritize this, but you have to treat this like it's a glass ball. It is not a rubber ball. Okay. You don't throw this up in the air and let it bounce for three weeks. And then for two hours, you recruit. It is a glass ball. And if you do that rhythmically, you lose. I don't want to be a drama mom about this. But if you've got, if you're in an industry where you know, it is very normal in a sales role, you have 20 to 30% attrition every single year, I don't have to map out. But three or four years, you don't have much of a team left. And you could say, look, that's on my corporate recruiter. What I would say is that the data supports that about eight out of all 10 hires come directly through the sales leader. Why? Because you're the product. It's not the company. And when the recruiter tries to represent the company as the product, it's complex. The recruiter done doing this right is representing you as the product. So that's a big aha for you as a recruiter. If you're listening this, you've got to know your market leaders at such a level that you can articulate who they are well, make them the most interesting person in the world to the people that you're recruiting. Okay. So this is not a rubber ball. It's a glass ball. Okay. So you have to prioritize this. The other part of this is so you've got to, you've got to be involved. If you're a market leader, if you're a sales leader, you have to identify who are the other people that you're going to get involved. Some of these can be on your team. Some of these can be at a corporate level, right? But you need to involve other people. Look, I have been involved in this. I've had people that are like, Hey, I want to bring you in and let people know you're my coach. Not if we hire them that you'll be their coach as well, because we're going to offer that up to them. Like they're counting me as one of their seven. You have vendors that could be part of that audio in part of this number that you're using to recruit. So you got, I think creatively around this. Okay. Here's the other part of this. If you're an executive leader and you're listening to this, well, I find over and over again is that there is a clear lack of communication to a sales leader that this is their role and responsibility. We surveyed, I think it was around 700 sales leaders last year. And as in those surveys, what we found is that most of them don't see recruiting as a major part of their roles and responsibilities. You would be blown away. How many sales leaders say that they see their role as around 1% I was in a room last week and asked that question. And in that room, about half of that room said 1% or less of their role was recruiting. These are sales leaders that is a broken model. Now why is that happening? Because we as executive leaders aren't setting the correct expectations. There's an expectation gap and as an executive leader, you've got to cover that expectation gap. Okay. And how do you do this? It's not hard. It's break down. What percentage of their role is recruiting? Is it 20%? Is it 35%? Some organizations say it's 60% of that sales leaders role is recruiting. That's a growth-minded organization that says that the sales leaders role is 60% recruiting. Okay. Anytime I get introduced to those organizations, they're growing. That's the bottom line. They're growing. Okay. So executive leaders, you've got to cover the expectation gap. A leader underneath you needs to know what percentage of their role is recruiting. Okay. Now, let me give you a simple framework. If you're not setting expectations on this, but have expectations yourself for them to do this, expectations without a great agreement are poisoned to relationships. Okay. I'll say that again, expectations without agreements are poisoned to relationships. If you don't want to have long-term sales leaders, then don't communicate this to them and arrive on the scene one day and say, "We're now going to press hard to grow because we're in a season where we've lost 20% of our sales force last year and now my expectation is where are your recruits?" That is poison to a relationship because now you've changed the game. You never set that expectation in the beginning. And so you've got to gain agreement on this now. You should know what percentage of the role of your sales leaders is recruiting. Okay. On the flip side of this, if you're a sales leader and you're like, "I don't have any clear expectations. I set those expectations myself." You need to ask for clear expectations. This is unhealthy in middle managers where there's a lack of expectations. It is destructive. So as a middle manager, if you're a sales leader, a market leader, you're in middle management, you have got to ask executive leadership for clear expectations around your role so that you don't end up in some weird position a year from now, six months from now, three years from now, whatever, where someone says, "60% of your role is recruiting now." Everyone's ever communicated with either 1%. So this has to go both ways. Executive leaders set those expectations. If you're in a sales leader role and you don't have these expectations, you need to ask for these expectations. That's healthy. Okay. Now, the next part of this says you need to find who's on the list, who's on the list? Who are the seven people? You're one of them. Maybe your recruiter's one of them. That's two who are the other five people. And this can be a collaboration. It can be a blend of anyone. It can be operations. It can be one of your top salespeople. It can be vendor. It can be anyone that can communicate their story. So here's the key part. Anyone who has a story around the organization, it can be a story of how they came to the organization, how they've been involved with the organization, how they've been impacted by the organization, but they have to have a story around the organization. And that story has to align with the organizational core values. If you're a leader in a market, these values need to align with you, your values. So they have to have a story because the first thing they're going to do in a short conversation is let me tell you my involvement here. Let me tell you how I've been impacted here. Let me, it's their story, right? The story of how they came to this organization. So if you're an executive leader, now you need to coach your people that are a part of the seven to this. You need you to share your story. As you're coaching, I want to hear the story. In fact, I'm going into a meeting later today where I'm actually coaching an organization's group of leaders around their stories that they're going to be used. So why do you love the organization, needs to be part of the organization, a part of the story, and your values need to be in that. What are the values that are aligned with the story? The other part is this, where do they can actually bring value to this conversation? But operations leader, it's easy, head of ops, that makes a lot of sense. This is what it looks like behind the scenes on the operations side. Someone who's a top salesperson on your team makes a lot of sense. This is my experience as a salesperson, okay? A vendor that may, like myself that's in a coaching role, here's the role that I play as a vendor, okay? Where do they bring value to the conversation to the organization? And then you've got to give them a timeline to operate in. It's very important because if you don't give them any guardrails here, that could be an hour, it could be five minutes. But ideally it's in the 15 minute framework. I found that 15 minutes is a nice framework to get peak energy. And then what I would tell you is I would be thinking about doing this in a virtual environment where I can condense, I can expedite getting seven people involved. Because if you're over zoom doing this, I can have 10, 15 minute rhythm and over the course of an hour, I can get anywhere from four to six people into this meeting. And time is always essential to getting people across the finish line. Time kills opportunities. We know this. Other opportunities come up. People lose motivation, they begin to contemplate, transitions are hard. When you have momentum, we work hard to keep it. So if I can put four or five or six people in a virtual meeting, I can condense this timeline. I can accelerate this timeline. Look, I had this question earlier this week from a coaching client. How long should it be taking me to close someone? What's a normal rhythm to timeline to closing someone? And what my response was, I've seen it as short as 62 days as an average and I've seen as long as 2.1 years. And the person who has the better process for getting more people involved is the person that accelerates the timeline. The person who doesn't has fewer people involved lengthens the timeline. Recruiters operating in a silo, long wind is a time. It's why most people are convinced that it takes a long time that you have to have this forever follow up and that's important. I'm not diminishing that because I coach to that. But they believe it has to take a long wind of time to actually recruit people. What I would say is that most likely your process is broken. You're not getting enough people involved fast enough. So think in this virtual because it accelerates it. It's easier to get people on your team involved. They don't have to block off a day or even hours through this. They're only blocking off minutes to do it. So more people will say yes and it's easy to get your recruit to say yes. It's easy to get a recruit to participate. How do you define a collaborative environment? You define a collaborative environment by more unknowns than knowns. It's like there are some things here that are impacting you as a recruiting leader and recruiter that you need to understand have people more willing to meet. That's a collaborative environment. More unknowns. What are you experiencing? Are you experiencing what I'm experiencing? What are your thoughts on what the environment is going to look like in a year from now? That's collaborative. So when you get someone into your process and you can accelerate this process and get more people involved, you can shorten the timeline that it takes to get someone across the finish line. So this is powerful. Action item in this, a key takeaway is start thinking right now, who are the other people that need to get involved, shoot a text, make a phone call, shoot an email, ask for people if they would be willing to get involved with the expectations of what the involvement looks like. I'm going to ask you to share your story. Why do you love the organization as it applies to our core values? What value would they bring to the conversation with the recruits so that they know what lane they're going to operate in? Okay. And that would be a key takeaway that will get this started. An idea not activated on within 24 hours is a dead idea. We want to be activators. So that's it. Go get seven people involved in your recruiting process. And I will talk to you again here on another recruiting conversation soon. Have a great week, everybody. Want more recruiting conversations? You can register for my weekly email at 4crecruiting.com. If you need help creating your own unique recruiting system, you can book a time with me at bookrichardnow.com. (upbeat music)
