Bill Humbert
The Recruiter Guy
Attracting Top Leadership Talent
Episode Summary
How do you get the best leaders in an organization? Sometimes they are developed internally. At other times you have to look outside. When you look outside your organization, how can you know what to look for so you’re not just throwing a dart? How can you attract, acquire, and retain great leaders? Bill Humbert, The Recruiter Guy, explains the secrets of the recruiting world in this episode.
Detailed Episode Summary
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Bio
Nationally known as an engaging speaker, expert talent attraction consultant, and career transition professional with two published books (third book soon to be available via pre-sales), Bill is looking forward to meeting you!
He has talent attraction experience since 1981, contributing to the success of companies by attracting top talent – and training clients to attract top talent after his engagement is complete. Bill’s talent attraction consultant business is unique within the United States. Bill works with one company and charges a flat monthly fee for recruitment and top talent consulting. Therefore, his clients span many different industries and locations.
He is a national member of the National Speakers Association who motivates his audience to learn methods to improve their productivity while enjoying their job. Talent acquisition is more complex than top talent attraction. The outcome of his speech, Make Your Company ROAR (Recruit, Onboard, Actuate, and Retain), is higher success attracting top talent and retaining them as part of an engaged workforce. His speeches are conversations with his audience. He loves to meet members of the audience before a speech to learn their views of a topic and address areas of concern during his public conversation. All speeches are customized, so clients receive the best outcome from their engagement with RecruiterGuy.
He is a national television guest with over 102 television interviews, including on CNN Headline News, third party eBook author, podcast guest, and national radio guest. He creates new content upon request from his clients. He is passionate about his topics, including proper goal setting, where he discusses how he set a goal to hitchhike from Washington, DC to Los Angeles, CA in 5 days – and was successful in both 1969 and 1970. Then translate proper goal setting to increase employee engagement. Remember, a goal-setting and achieving employee is, by definition, an engaged employee. Raise your company’s productivity with engaged employees!
Website
https://recruiterguy.com/
LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/recruiterguy/
Twitter
https://twitter.com/RecruiterGuy81
Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/RecruiterGuys.Guide
Get Your Copy of Bill’s Books!
https://recruiterguy.com/talent-attraction-books/
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Full Episode Transcripts and Detailed Guest Information
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Transcript
The key to sustainable leadership lies in the ability to thrive during uncertainty, ambiguity, and change. Grand Heron International brings you the Coaching Assistance Program, giving your employees on-demand coaching to manage through a challenging situation and arrive at a solution. Visit GrandHeronInternational.Ca/Podcast to learn more.
This podcast is part of the C Suite Radio Network, turning the volume up on business.
Welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast, the podcast dedicated to promoting leadership development and sharing leadership insights. Here’s your host, The Leadership Excelerator®, Eddie Turner.
Eddie Turner:
Hello, everyone! Welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact. I do that primarily through the power of executive coaching, masterful facilitation, and motivational speaking.How can organizations attract the best leaders? Sometimes, you develop them internally. At other times, organizations have to look outside but that can often seem like you’re simply throwing a dart and it lands anywhere. How can organizations be more targeted in their ability to attract, acquire, and retain great leaders? To answer that question, I’ve invited a very special guest, a gentleman who I am proud to call my good friend. He is a talent attraction expert. He’s also known as the Recruiter Guy, Bill Humbert. He is in high demand. He is in such high demand for his expertise that he’s appeared on regional or national television speaking on the topic of talent attraction and job search over 120 times. Here with me today to explain how we can attract top leadership talent is the Recruiter Guy, Bill Humbert.
Bill, welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast.
Bill Humbert:
Thank you so much, Eddie. I’m so happy to be here. This is great.
Eddie Turner:
Bill, tell us a little bit more about who you are.
Bill Humbert:
Well, I have a good reason to be called the Recruiter Guy. I started recruiting in 1981. So, even though I have an English degree, I figured out that that was 40 years ago. And part of my passion for recruiting is where else can I attract top talent and give them to companies, well, I don’t really give them, but present them to companies and they help that company accelerate and become much more profitable. And at the same time, where else can I take somebody who maybe is under a bad manager or is in a company that’s not succeeding very well and introduce them to my client and have them just completely blossom in their career. And that’s the reason I’m passionate about what it is that I do.
Eddie Turner:
And I can tell you’re passionate. By the way, I omitted the fact that you’ve put your knowledge on this topic in a couple of books. Tell us the title of those books.
Bill Humbert:
These are on the career research side. Recruiter Guy’s Guide to Finding a Job was my first book. My second book was Employee 5.0: Secrets of a Successful Job Search in the New World Order. And right now, we’re getting really close on the third book Expect Success: The Science of the Over 50 Career Search.
Eddie Turner:
Oh wow! I bet that will be a source of really good encouragement and aid to a lot of people because I’m hearing people in that over 50 category talk about the difficulties of a job search.
Bill Humbert:
And that’s true. And what I bring to the table for all these people, Eddie, is I’m a recruiter, so I’m able to pull the curtain back to help them see how to really go about successfully finding the best job.
Eddie Turner:
And how do you do that?
Bill Humbert:
Now, that will take more than 25 or 30 minutes but essentially, one of the real quick things is 74% to 76% of all jobs are filled through networking. 8% of all jobs are filled through posting and what I call praying – “I hope the right person is looking at my résumé.” And 8% are filled through me, through recruiters. So, the best way to find a position that’s a new position, new career for you is to do it through networking.
Eddie Turner:
What an interesting statistic. And I love your phrasing “posting and praying”. That’s very interesting. And that’s so true that oftentimes when you have just responded to a post, you’re very unlikely to hear from anyone and even sometimes going through a recruiter, you may get contacted and you never hear anything back. It is definitely the networking system. So, thank you for giving us the 20-second answer on that. And folks who want to have the full answer just have to book you for a session.
Bill Humbert:
There you go.
Eddie Turner:
Yeah. All right. We’ll tell them how to do that at the end of our interview here. What is the most important action a company should take when they are trying to secure top leadership talent in the attraction phase?
Bill Humbert:
The first step, Eddie, is to understand that recruiting talent attraction is a sales process. It mirrors the sales process perfectly. And unfortunately, Human Resource departments don’t understand that. They try to make it an administrative function because that’s what all the rest of what they do is. So, it’s understandable. I would suggest the executives of the C-suite that they cut the recruiting function out of HR and put it either under the COO or the CFO because that makes far more sense. So, the first step is to understand that they’re in a sales process. Now, in that sales process, the second step is to create a solution to fill the need that you’ve identified on the sales process. And on the recruiting or the talent attraction side, that step is to create a job description. And that means the job description is the foundation of the entire sales process of talent attraction.
Eddie Turner:
Interesting. Bill, you’re saying to all my dear friends in HR where I have spent a little bit of time working that they really should be sales people and because they’re not, they really haven’t done that part of the business the best service.
Bill Humbert:
I hate to say it. A lot of them are my friends too, Eddie, but think about it. When you’re looking at new positions today online, so often what happens is the person goes to apply for the position and in the old days, what did they do? They took their résumé and they faxed it or they emailed it to the recruiter directly. Today, it’s going into an applicant tracking system. Now, that applicant tracking system usually forces them to complete an application before they submit their résumé. This is for professionals. Well, professionals, the top talent, what they do is they go “I’m out of here” because they know very rarely will they ever be contacted after that point. So, why put 25-30 minutes into an application when nobody’s ever going to call you? It’s unfortunate but that’s what companies are doing today. And so, they’re treating it as an administrative process – “We’ll get all our paperwork done first even though it’s electronic and then we’ll worry about attracting them.” Well, I’m sorry, that’s too late.
Eddie Turner:
Well, Bill, you make a lot of sense on that and that’s why I want just to highlight that point because it is so true. I can’t tell you the number of senior people who are extremely talented who’ve said it precisely what you just said. And as a result, companies can almost draw a dotted line to their ability to be a high-performance organization and this process.
Bill Humbert:
Oh, absolutely. It’s totally together.
Eddie Turner:
Yeah. As I’ve listened to you speak, you’ve made a differentiation between attracting and acquisition. Tell me more about that.
Bill Humbert:
So, think about it. Talent attraction is becoming a company where people want to come and join you. Talented acquisition, even by the name, almost sounds like it’s an administrative process. Now, I can tell you what’s going to happen. Talent attraction is going to get really successful when people start realizing that it’s a much better way of going about it and then HR departments are going to say “Well, we’re going to call it talent attraction too but they still have to fill out that application before they submit their résumé.” That’s the way it works.
Eddie Turner:
That makes me think about the Blue-Chip companies that, as you say, people want to work for. Whether there’s a job opening or not, there’s always a top ten list of organizations that anybody would love to work for and then there’s everyone else. And so, is this what you’re referring to when you say the talent attraction?
Bill Humbert:
That absolutely is.
Eddie Turner:
Very nice. Very nice way of thinking about that. So, what’s the best source for organizations to go to? You said maybe not HR on this but if people want to get the attraction phase right, what’s the best source to go to?
Bill Humbert:
Well, there’s a couple of things that they probably should do. First of all, they should pay attention to their website because if a person is interested in a company, what are they going to do? They’re going to start typing in the URL to the website and go to the website. For me, it’s very interesting when it’s difficult to find careers on a company website. There’s one major telecommunications firm whose name I’m not going to give you but I will tell you that they’ve been around just about forever. And if you search for careers on their home page, even at the bottom, it’s not there. Now, if this is a sales process and they need a ton of people, wouldn’t it make sense to tell everybody about that, make it easy? So, on the website, on the home page, especially companies that are growing quickly, it’s important to get out there, I know marketing owns the web page, but get out there and say “We’re hiring” and just allow people to click on that and have it go directly to the list of openings. Marketing has demonstrated that every time a group of people have to click to find a list of openings on a website, you lose half of them.
Eddie Turner:
That’s substantial.
Bill Humbert:
So, you start at 400. You go to 200 and you go to 100 in just three steps, three clicks. Now, who left in that first 200? Top talent.
Eddie Turner:
Yes. So, there’s a price to pay for not having this done right.
Eddie Turner:
And how do companies capture the metrics on that?
Bill Humbert:
Well, it’s easy for the companies that actually track. The marketing companies, they can see how many clicks are on for each page. And so, they can track it.
Eddie Turner:
So, truly a case of less is more.
Bill Humbert:
True. If you put “Careers” or you put “We’re hiring” and you make it one click to get to that list, you’re going to capture a whole lot more of the candidates. And then make it easy for those people to submit their résumés.
Eddie Turner:
Make it easy. Make it simple. Make it quick. Now, that brings our HR friends back into the picture. Are we really hiring the right people in Human Resources since, as you described, much of this tends to just be administrative tasking?
Bill Humbert:
Well, when you consider the list of topics that’s on the Society for Human Resource Management website, all of them, except talent attraction, they call it talent acquisition, are administrative tasks – Compensation, Benefits, Employee Relations. You can just go down the list. So, they’re hiring the right people for those areas. What they’re not doing is they’re not hiring sales professionals to be their recruiters or their talent attraction specialist or I call them recruiters because that’s what I am.
Eddie Turner:
All right. Is there any organization out there that you look at and say “Wow! They’re getting it right. They’re the best example, best in class.”
Bill Humbert:
Well, I’ll tell you, Amazon is having a lot of success right now. And part of the reason they are is they’re allowing their employees to get involved in that process. And so, if someone comes in through an employee, the employee gets a little bit of a spiff and also, at that point, they move that person’s résumé up to a higher level because they’ve been introduced that way. And I’m sure that that’s part of the reason why they’ve hired so many people in the past year.
Eddie Turner:
Yes, I seem to hear their name a lot, now that you’ve mentioned it.
Eddie Turner:
All right. Very good, Bill Humbert. We’re talking to him. He is the Recruiter Guy. He is a talent attraction expert and he’s explaining how we can attract top leadership talent. We’ll have more with Bill right after this.
This podcast is sponsored by Eddie Turner LLC. Organizations who need to accelerate the development of their leaders call Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®. Eddie works with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact. Call Eddie Turner to help your leaders one on one as their coach or to inspire them as a group through the power of facilitation or a keynote address. Visit EddieTurnerLLC.com to learn more.
This is Patricia Fripp, the Presentation Skills Expert, and you are listening to the Keep Leading!® Podcast with my friend, Eddie Turner.
Eddie Turner:
We’re back, everyone. I’m talking to Bill Humbert. Bill is known as the Recruiter Guy. He’s a talent attraction expert who’s appeared on regional or national television speaking about talent attraction and job search over 120 times. He’s the author of two bestselling books with a third on the way. We’re talking about how we attract top leadership talent.Before the break, Bill, you were explaining to us how companies are attracting talent, how they can do it and who is doing that the best and we talked a little bit about applicant tracking systems but we didn’t really get into that detail. In the old days, you could reach out to certain job titles and kind of get in by making a direct plea to a hiring manager. You can’t do that anymore. You have to go through the system literally and these applicant tracking systems put a huge firewall up for that reason. Can you tell us a little bit about how they work?
Bill Humbert:
You talk about favorite topics. So, first of all companies, do a poor job in writing job descriptions, number one. Number two, applicant tracking systems quickly scan a person’s résumé and then they measure it against the job description that the applicant tracking system has. And if that person doesn’t have 88% of the correct keywords, they get dinged every time. For instance, let’s say you graduated from Harvard University with a major that’s the right one for this position. You probably would not put high school diploma on your résumé. That’s my guess. If the job description has the three words ‘high school diploma’, you get dinged, even though you graduated from Harvard.
Eddie Turner:
Yes, yes or the fact that you’ve graduated from Harvard but it wasn’t specifically in the area that they said they want the person but you have other experience that could account for that.
Bill Humbert:
Exactly, exactly. And so, if the job description is poorly written, even though the person’s a perfect fit, they don’t match up well and they don’t get selected for an interview.
Eddie Turner:
Which is why a lot of people really dislike those systems.
Bill Humbert:
Exactly. Well, that’s the reason 74% to 76% of all jobs are filled through networking. They just go around HR.
Eddie Turner:
Yeah. And, Bill, the other reason that I hear people talking about their dislike of these systems is because they always force you to put in a salary requirement and negotiate against yourself.
Bill Humbert:
I have a hack for that.
Eddie Turner:
Go ahead. Tell us.
Bill Humbert:
Here it is, folks. So, they will not allow you to write the word ‘open’, ‘negotiable’, anything like that. They force you to put a number. The Recruiter Guy hack is write the number 1.
Bill Humbert:
In every place where they look for a salary requirement or what do you seek or the salary that your current salary is, which in 23 locations you can’t do that anymore, it’s illegal. So, you write the number 1. And then what happens is they get to your résumé, you got lucky and they picked you out of the crowd and they go “You know, I saw in your application that it said 1 was what you were looking for.” So, you play Mickey the Dunce.
Bill Humbert:
And you say “Ah, it says 1? I put a number in there.” Now, the person that’s asking you that question, their hard drive just went on spin. And so, you capitalize on that moment and you say “You know, I was just thinking job descriptions are usually poorly written and my résumé I wrote to mirror the job description so that you would pick me. Wouldn’t you agree that if I liked you and you liked me, we would find some middle ground?”
Eddie Turner:
But what if they take that as not being totally forthright with them?
Bill Humbert:
Well, that’s the reason you network.
Bill Humbert:
Okay. So, they don’t understand they’re in a sales situation. In a sales situation, you negotiate. Well, in any negotiation, the first party to put a number on the table loses.
Eddie Turner:
That’s a good rule of thumb.
Bill Humbert:
Yeah, think about real estate. What’s the first thing you do when you want to sell your house? The realtor says “Okay, it’s worth X number of dollars.” And so you have four people come through your house and unless the real estate market is on fire, which it is in a lot of the US right now, but if it’s not on fire, the person goes to the house, “Yeah, I like it. It doesn’t have this, doesn’t have that and I’m going to make an offer last.” Well, the same thing happens when you’re conducting your salary negotiation. If you put a number on the table, they’ll say “Well, we got to train you for that and we got to do this.” And so, they start to try to lower whatever it is. It’s best not to give a number and let them value the position at the company level and then extend an offer to you. I have an entire script in all my books.
Eddie Turner:
Okay. Well, here, ladies and gentlemen, is another reason to pick up Bill’s books which we’ll put a link to the books. At the end of the recording, you’ll have a link to the books on the KeepLeadingPodcast.com website.Bill, I want to play old school, new school.
Eddie Turner:
In the old days, and I say this because I felt like I used to know a little bit about job search but a) I haven’t had a job in eight years, I’ve been working for myself but b) I haven’t had to really keep up with these, but my knowledge on this comes from working with clients and hearing their stories and what we talk about. So, old school, new school.Reference checks. Old school? New school?
Bill Humbert:
Well, reference checks have been around forever. And so, what happened was most of these companies were smaller back in the day and they were in smaller communities. And so, a manager went to hire Eddie and they’d call somebody they knew that you used to work for and say “Hey, I just wanted to find out about Eddie. Can you tell me about his work habits? Are there any areas that you feel he needs improvement? Where did he absolutely start? And you know a little bit about my company and its area and our culture. Do you think he’d be a fit for the culture?” That person’s generally going to tell you the truth because they’re going to want to make the return phone call when they get somebody that you know, okay? And so, what happens is that person gives you the straight scoop. Now, as a recruiter, I’ve had people say “Well, those are all his friends.” I said “Well, you know, that’s not a good assumption to make, number one. And number two, let me tell you about an experience I had.” And this is true. I called a reference one time for a woman. And I could tell she was very good from a technical perspective and I called her most recent manager. And when I told the manager the name of the person who used her name as a reference, the manager burst out laughing and she said “I cannot believe she used my name because I fired her two weeks ago.”
Eddie Turner:
Oh my! Well, so, it was something that was standard and open in the old school. In the new school, is that still a good practice to do reference checks?
Bill Humbert:
It absolutely is. Companies are complaining all over the place “We can’t find a good cultural fit.” Well, guess what, the reference check is where that happens.
Eddie Turner:
All right. Even if it is a list of their friends, there can still be valid people to check on them with.
Bill Humbert:
I’ve done a lot of reference checks over the years. In my experience, if the person who’s the reference is a good friend but they feel that this person is not a good fit for that job, they’ll tell you but you have to ask the right questions. You can’t ask “Did they work there from such and such to so and so? Was their title, da, da, da, da? Were they eligible for rehire? Okay, thank you and go away.” That tells you nothing.
Eddie Turner:
All right. Old school, new school – do I still need a paper résumé on nice fancy paper?
Bill Humbert:
Not so much. I mean, it’s good to take a nice résumé to an interview and give it to whoever’s interviewing you. And so, from that perspective, I’d say yes but you don’t mail it.
Eddie Turner:
Okay. And when we talk about old school, new school, things that used to be the standard and are no longer the standard, what’s something that I’m not thinking about?
Bill Humbert:
There’s such a focus on human resources and them providing résumés. And remember again I’m a recruiter. My feeling is that managers should be the ones creating short lists. For instance, the University of Utah just maybe in the last month fired their basketball coach. Within 11 days they had a new basketball coach signed up and ready to start. That means the athletic director, and I know all the athletic directors do this, they keep a short list of top talent that they will go after if they need them. And I believe that that’s what all managers should do. Get it out of HR’s hands, keep a list of your own top talent, you can meet them at conferences, you can meet them maybe in a previous company but you know who it is that you want to put on to your team next.
Eddie Turner:
So, taking them out of the hands of HR and letting the managers drive that decision making because they know who they need, they know who they want and they have a better pulse on what’s happening.
Eddie Turner:
All right, good, good. Anything else that I’m not thinking about when we think about the old way things were done and the new way if we want to be hired or if we want to attract the top leaders?
Bill Humbert:
Well, it’s always good to network. As a recruiter, that’s what I do, that’s how I find candidates. I call people and I say “My current client is” whatever the name of the company is “and I’m looking for a person with these skills. Who would you recommend that I talk to next?” And what I’m doing there is I’m trolling. If I know that person is one that’s got all the right skills, I’ll talk to them and tell them about the company and what a great company is and the benefits and how their retention of their top talent is so high. And then I’ll say “So, who do you feel I should speak with next?” I take it away from them. And then they go “What about me?”
Eddie Turner:
Well, what about me?
Bill Humbert:
That’s the best way to recruit.
Eddie Turner:
All right, very good. Well, Bill, I have thoroughly enjoyed talking to you and learning more about how to attract top leadership talent to organizations and as a leader how to maybe get into an organization using some of the techniques that you’ve shared. What is the main message you want to leave our listeners with?
Bill Humbert:
I think it’s very important for companies to set goals for the candidates. And that should be part of the job description. So, set the three-month, six-month, nine-month and 12-month goals early in the process for that position. I understand that’ll tweak over time but when you do that, now the candidates know exactly what the first year looks like. That’s a way for you to then measure during your interviews, create the questions that determines whether the person has the skills, the experience or the attributes to be successful in that position the first year. That helps you to select the right person out of the four or 10 interviews that you have. That helps you on board that person because then the manager talks to them about the goals and says “If there’s any place in this where you need help, I’ll be happy to help you.” And then that helps your retention. You hear companies complaining about “We can’t retain people.” Well, the problem is companies have gotten away from setting goals properly. And when you set the three-month, six-month, nine-month, and 12-month goals, at the end of the year, there is no dart to be thrown on the “exceeds” or “meets expectation” dart board. You know exactly whether they met their goals or they didn’t. And so, that’s what I want to leave everybody with. If you want to retain top talent, work with them to set proper goals and now they’ve got a track to run on and they’re excited to receive those because very few people do it.
Eddie Turner:
Thank you, Bill. And where can my listeners learn more about you?
Bill Humbert:
I’m easy. I’m kind of all over the place out there but the best way to find me is RecruiterGuy.com.
Eddie Turner:
RecruiterGuy.com. We’ll drop a link in the show notes and people can visit your website, follow you on LinkedIn and Twitter using that location.Thank you for being a guest on the Keep Leading!® Podcast and helping us learn how to attract top leadership talent.
That concludes this episode everyone. I’m Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So, whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.
Thank you for listening to your host Eddie Turner on the Keep Leading!® Podcast. Please remember to subscribe to the Keep Leading!® Podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen. For more information about Eddie Turner’s work, please visit EddieTurnerLLC.com.
Thank you for listening to C Suite Radio, turning the volume up on business.
The Keep Leading!® podcast is for people passionate about leadership. It is dedicated to leadership development and insights. Join your host Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator® as he speaks with accomplished leaders and people of influence across the globe as they share their journey to leadership excellence. Listen as they share leadership strategies, techniques and insights. For more information visit eddieturnerllc.com or follow Eddie Turner on Twitter and Instagram at @eddieturnerjr. Like Eddie Turner LLC on Facebook. Connect with Eddie Turner on LinkedIn.
