How to Hire | Tim Ludwig

Tim: Thanks for showing up, and uh, thanks to the whole Main Street team for putting on such a great event. It's especially hard to do one of these as an inaugural event, and so far everything is expected as an A So, thanks to everybody for all the effort. This presentation is really this format. 15 minutes is sort of like the amuse bouche of conference presentations.

You get sort of one little spoonful and that's it. So this presentation started as I'm going to talk about [00:01:00] how to hire. And then when I started to sort of dig into that, I realized there's no way that I can cover that full scope in 15 minutes. And so I shortened it down to really just a bite sized nugget, which is how to write better job ads.

Um, And, uh, If, if you think about this as a process, it's like a sales funnel, um, and that's one of the takeaways, I think, that I want to share with you all is that recruiting is a sales funnel. Um, a lot of people think about it in a different way as a screening process, as something that's sort of a necessary evil.

How do we weed people out as fast as possible? How do we spend the least amount of time possible doing this? Um, and what it really is, is a traditional sales funnel that you take all the way through onboarding so that you retain the people that you put all this effort into recruiting in the first place.

And so this presentation is going to talk primarily about generating leads, which is the raw ingredients of this process that you're starting down. And my belief is that the more people you have at the top of the funnel, the more [00:02:00] selective you can be later, and that increases the probability of a good outcome in the hiring process.

The little red flag there that talks about reference checks, if I had two topics to talk about today, that would be my other one, because I think that's the other major leverage point in a traditional hiring process, is conducting really thorough and deep reference checks on every single candidate, and I think the importance of that.

Just grows as the seniority level of the position grows. So this is not rocket science. Uh, it might not be intuitive to everybody. It certainly wasn't to me. Uh, and I'll segue for a second here, sort of diversion. Um, I'm not a natural salesperson. I've sort of had to learn everything the hard way by trial and error.

And there was a book about five years ago called Predictable Revenue that became the Bible of cold email outreach, which is now fairly standard across B2B sales. And I remember experimenting with that because I felt there was some potential with it. And my first attempts at writing emails were, I thought, really good.

[00:03:00] You know, this was all about me and my company and what I could offer to the people receiving this email. I was trying to sell, sell, sell in that first engagement. And my response rates were terrible. Low single digits at best. I couldn't do anything to move them despite rapid and, and regular, uh, revisions on everything I was doing.

And then I had a conversation with a friend who was actually a legitimate salesperson, and he said, you're not talking to the customer. Like what do they care about? What's their pain point? What are their needs? Uh, and so I rewrote my email and. Immediately, uh, my response rates went up to, you know, I think my campaigns were generating 20 to 30 percent positive response rates after that.

It was just a game changer. And the same thing is, is true in the job hiring process. This is a sales ad. Uh, that's what you're creating. When you post it on a job board, it's a sales ad. The, the, the two key components, just like in an email, are the subject line and the body. The subject line here is the [00:04:00] job title, not a lot of creativity is necessary here.

You want it to be clear and concise and short and put yourself in the shoes of the candidate. What kind of search terms would they be looking for? They're probably not looking for Sherpa or Ninja or Guru or some of the other creative titles that people give to things. You know, it's customer experience manager, controller, level two accountant, like whatever is their base of experience is what you want to angle for there.

And then, through a lot of iterative testing, uh, one of the, one of the companies I'm involved with is a high volume recruiter. So everything is highly systematized, they have tremendous throughput, and so they, they really work in driving efficiency and testing out what works best to get the highest ROI on all of these job ads, because they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to place them, and they want to make sure that that, that investment is maximized.

And they've, a couple of other things they've found is putting the salary range in the job ad is really helpful. Uh, optimizing for little, um, modifiers to say hiring [00:05:00] urgently or things like that, that sort of draws attention and creates some, some sort of trigger for people to respond to is also really helpful.

The sole purpose of, of this part of the job ad development experience. Is really just to say, I want somebody to click on this ad. I want it to feel familiar enough and give them enough information as a teaser that they can click through and then learn more about the job, which takes us to the real meat of the process, which is the job description.

Um, and the, the bottom part of this is where I think most companies fail most significantly, as on the requirements. But, starting off, like, this is your opportunity to shine. This is what you can use to talk about why your company is so special. From the candidate's viewpoint, if somebody looking at your company from the outside, we're evaluating you and we're thinking about becoming a partner of yours, either as an employee, or a customer, or a lender.

What would get them excited? What's, what's the purpose? What's the vision? How do they connect to what you're doing and become a believer and an advocate for your story? And then the next part is [00:06:00] what's in it for them. What is this job and why is it meaningful? How does it connect to the larger purpose and vision?

How is it going to advance their own personal interests, whether that's financially or having a great culture to work in or remote work and hybrid schedules, like you'd need to highlight a few of those things to capture their attention and to get some buy in. And then you can start to talk about the specific job responsibilities.

And again, you don't want to have a four page list of like, here's everything you're going to do throughout a week. There's 15 or 20 things every day that you're going to be responsible for. It's overwhelming. It's unnecessary. And what you're doing is you're starting to screen people out before they've even had a chance to apply, and you can exercise your own judgment about whether or not they're going to be a good fit for what you're doing.

So when you get to the requirements, this is oftentimes in the job ads that I write, the shortest part of the job ad. It's just a few bullet points, boiled down to the bare minimum. I oftentimes won't even talk, depending on the level of the role, level of education that's required, number of years of [00:07:00] experience.

You know, I want to find things that most people can say yes to. That's what I want. I want a lot of heads nodding and saying, Oh, I'm that. I can do that. I have that skill. So that then they take the action, which is what I'm trying to drive, which is clicking on the submit button or sending the email that has the resume in it.

So that then I get the opportunity to evaluate what they're doing. And that's really, that's really the whole purpose of the thing is to generate a high number of applicants. And so that you draw people in and then you screen them out later. Most job ads, and you can go on Indeed or some of these other job ad platforms and look, most of them screen out at the job ad.

Uh, and when you talked about people that are having really frustrating hard times hiring, especially in a, in a low unemployment market like we're in now, um, this is where the problem starts. Uh, they don't write job ads that entice or sell the position effectively to people. And as a result, the candidate flow tends to be suboptimal.

Um, so you put all that together, and what you get is a really clean, simple job ad. It doesn't have to be anything [00:08:00] elaborate. You can, you can write this in probably 15 or 20 minutes, once you understand the requirements of the job yourself, and you have agreement with your team. Um, and then you post it.

And just like with the cold email outreach, You want to test it. Um, and so that sort of comes down to other best practices. Indeed, um, sort of insider knowledge after lots of testing is by far the very best job posting platform. It outperforms every other job platform we've tested for almost every role by a large margin.

For more senior roles, um, things like LinkedIn can be effective as a supplement or for very senior roles. What, what we've found is that also, uh, this is sort of a secret trick. The, the large consulting firms, McKinsey's, the Bains, the BCGs Deloitte's. They have free alumni job boards that you can register for as a recruiter and post for free.

And it's not just these, these highly pedigreed consultants that are looking for jobs. It's also the alumni of those firms. They'll come back to these job boards and, and look at who is [00:09:00] hiring there. And most of the time it's all fortune 500 type companies. And so if you're a smaller business, like the ones that we're typically involved with are.

You stand out. It's a differentiator, and it ends up being more of a positive than a negative because there's a lot of people that are in the big corporate world that are looking for an exit path, and they don't know how to access small businesses. They don't know how to qualify them. They don't know what's a good one versus a bad one, and if you can tell that story to them in a compelling way, you can attract really, really senior, like, awesome people that most small businesses could never dream of recruiting.

Um, and same job ad approach there, speak to these people, understand what they want, give them the messages they want to hear, and then evaluate them rigorously. AB testing of the ads, just like with email, it might be changing one word in the job description, and seeing how that impacts candidate flow, it might be changing One part of the body message or the body message entirely.

But if you're actively in the market recruiting, that's something that you absolutely should be doing is going through and [00:10:00] systematically testing on a continual basis and what worked in one market might not work in another market. What worked in one season might not work in another season. What worked in one macroeconomic environment might not perform in another macroeconomic environment.

So it's just good to always be active and to measure the results. Um, giving your ads personality, I think the copywriting of this is really the art of it. And when you start out, I think it's, it's okay to look for some good examples of job ads that you've seen elsewhere and sort of parrot those to get some familiarity and some reps in.

As you gain confidence and comfort and experience with that, you can play a little bit more. You can be a little bit more outlandish. You can be, uh, use your own voice more and bring that in so it doesn't sound like it was written by a corporate PR hack or a marketing manager. It sounds like it's actually coming from a human.

If you think about what it's like from the candidate perspective applying through a large job board, or even just a direct email to somebody, it's like you're sending your hopes and ambitions into a black hole. [00:11:00] Like, nobody, nobody, expects a response at this point anymore because the level of service is so low across so many companies you sent it in.

You just cross your fingers and hope that maybe you'll get a response, let alone a request for an interview. And so anything you can do to provide a slightly better candidate experience is also going to be differentiating and a brand builder. Even in ways that you might not expect, they, those people might know somebody and talk to somebody else who's a customer or who might be another future employee and say, I didn't get the job, but I had a really wonderful experience with this company.

And they actually responded to me, they gave me feedback, they treated me like a person, um, and they feel validated that way in a way that most companies don't take the time to do anymore. Um, always be recruiting. This doesn't necessarily mean you always have to be posting job ads. Uh, because that can get expensive, but you should always have a pulse on the market and be building a bench.

It's how you stay informed about how aggressive you need to be in the marketing, how you know what salary ranges are appropriate for the roles. And, uh, we've certainly been [00:12:00] victim to this in the past. It's very easy to create sort of an on and off culture where, where you're episodic and you're hiring needs.

And it's really hard to build the discipline to do it consistently. But when you do, when you do have a need, You have a much better chance of having already a pool of candidates that you think meet the qualifications that you've maybe even started to build relationships with in some sort of a nurture funnel.

Um, and it sort of jump starts the whole process and increases the odds of making a good hire, but also decreasing the time to hire, which for most people is always a very important metric. Um, And the last one is respond to applicants quickly. Uh, this presumes, of course, that you're responding to them at all, but if you respond to them quickly, it's just like Google with their search ads, right?

One of the things that's made Google such an amazing business is that they're able to monetize the moment of intention. And serve ads up against it. So I'm shopping for a sofa. I click on that ad. I am in a buying pattern in that moment. And you're serving me something that's going to help me in that process.

It's the same with these [00:13:00] job ads. When somebody's online looking for jobs, that's their mental state at that moment, is I'm looking for a job. If you can get to them really quickly, and under five minutes is probably not achievable for a lot of businesses, but you can build systems to help automate some of this now.

And even use a I to help respond. Um, you can capture more of those potentially interested applicants right at the moment when they're applying and increase your yield. So instead of having, you know, a 20 percent response rate, you might get a 30 percent response rate to that job ad. And one of those candidates in that extra 10%, that 50 percent uplift, might be just the person you're looking for.

And so you don't want to miss any of those things. You want to fill all of the holes in this leaky recruiting funnel that you can. Um, I'll sort of close with, uh, two books. Tracy Brickkuhl, this morning, for anybody that was in the kickoff session, mentioned one of these books. It's called Who. Uh, it's a father and son duo that wrote both of these books.

They run a very successful human development and talent assessment firm out of Chicago called GH Smart. I [00:14:00] think the, the son may have broken off. Uh, the, the Bible is really a book called Top Grading. It's very dense. It's very thick, very comprehensive, but it covers a really, I think, effective and scientific approach to hiring, which includes a tremendous section on reference checking.

Uh, Who is sort of more the layman's version of that. It covers a lot of the same concepts, but without a lot of depth. So you could start there and then move into top grading. Or you can also now just Google and look at videos and there's sort of shortcuts and summaries and things, which is also an effective way of doing it.

But I think just systematizing the recruiting process and treating it as importantly as almost every other function in your company, uh, is gonna do amazing things to help bring more great people into your organization. Uh, so I'll close there. I've got five minutes left, I see, and so there's time for a little bit of Q& A.

On references, sure. So, the, and this is straight out of top grading. The key idea there is the threat of reference check [00:15:00] during the interview process. TORC, T O R C. Uh, and that means that as you're talking to a candidate, there's all these psychological tricks that they use about How to elicit more truthful information for people, something like, as simple as how would your best friend describe you?

It usually elicits a more accurate response from somebody than if you say, how would you describe yourself? The threat of the reference check is a little bit more of a heavier nudge in that direction, applying some of the same principles that says as you're talking to somebody, I'm going to be contacting your references later, how would they respond to that same question about you?

Uh, and then if they know that you're going to be calling the references, they don't want to be caught in a lie, and so they're much more likely to be truthful. Um, and the, also part of the top grading process is a very exhaustive career history. So you sort of have people document in, in a fair amount of detail.

Every job that they've had, what the responsibilities were, why they left, what happened, you want to look for patterns and trajectories. If you've gathered all of that information from the candidate in the front end of the [00:16:00] process, by the time you get to reference checks, you have sort of, uh, this anthology of this person's career history, and you can then go in and ask much more deep questions about the things that have risen up to be potential red flags, or Even if you really like the candidate, things that you just want to understand better so that you can help them basically be successful when they step into the role, and it's a way to sort of get deeper more quickly when you can say, you know, I've noticed in this person's history that they've always had a really hard time receiving feedback, and they said that their response is this.

Did you notice that? All right, as opposed to tell me about how they were in their job. Did they do pretty well? Were they okay? What would you know? What were their trouble spots? And so it's just, it's, it's a more rigorous process around the reference checking and not just relying on the references that they provide, but trying to go back door and look for other people that they've worked with.

Which you can find on LinkedIn or other channels now and say who is a peer that they worked with, who is a supervisor that worked with them, who is a subordinate that reported to them and really trying to build that 360 [00:17:00] degree circle around them to assess what, what kind of an employee they were in that prior role because the best predictor, scientifically, I believe, in a lot of studies says that the People's performance is most accurately predicted by their prior performance.

And so the reference checks are a really reliable way, if you do it thoroughly and carefully, to collect a pretty good, uh, stream of data points that you can connect into a narrative that, that's usually pretty accurate. Yes. Yeah, question was about the, um, consulting firm alumni job boards, and why I think that's an attractive pool of candidates for small businesses.

And what was last part? Okay. Um. So I think there's a lot of people that are consultants that are really tired of the travel. They've got golden handcuffs. They don't know how to find an exit ramp unless it's to one of their clients typically or a similarly large size organization that can afford the consulting firm's fees.

And so they, unless they really love big business and bureaucracy [00:18:00] and sort of navigating the political waters and having lots of meetings, um, a lot of them are yearning for more autonomy. They, they want agency and in their careers, they want to be the person that is making decisions and seeing the impact of those decisions, not just doing a case study and handing it off to the client to maybe implement or maybe not.

And small businesses offer that in spades, right? I mean, there is such a short feedback loop and every decision that's made and there's usually no, almost no levels of reporting that you have to go through to execute on those things. And so the consultant toolkit. of being able to assess situations, to interface really rapidly with a diverse, broad group of people to extract information, and then to collect those data points and to synthesize it into information that you can use to make decisions is a pretty good generalist starting point.

And they're also pretty adept learners, they know how to work really hard, uh, oftentimes they're willing to take a pretty significant cut in compensation just to get out of the lifestyle and have an opportunity to have a more meaningful role in a company. I think [00:19:00] This is probably exacerbated by the generational shift certainly from my generation to the younger generations is that people want more purpose in their lives now.

It's not like people are waiting 50 years to collect a gold watch, right? Like they want to find meaning in what they're doing every single day. And, and if you can offer that as a small business and say like, What we're doing is important, or if what you're doing isn't really that important to a lot of people, it's making widgets of some sorts, you can still connect it to doing something that's important to them, which is maybe leading a team or having more exposure to problems that they might not get access to for another 10 years in their current role.

Um, and, you know, investment banks and other sort of typical NBA off ramps can also. Be great hunting grounds for those types of people, but, uh, and I've looked, but I can't find another category of company that has the alumni job boards. It makes it so easy to access those pools, uh, in such an efficient way.

Yeah. Sure. The floor on the recruiting process for lower level roles. Um, there are constraints [00:20:00] everywhere, right, that you have to manage. And obviously if it's a more important role, um, where somebody is more unique in their skill set that they're bringing to the table, you're going to want to spend more time and resources attracting them and really treating them almost like a professional athlete gets courted.

Right? And you're whining and dining and sending presents and getting to know the spouse or partners and as much about the families like you really want to just hug them tight and make them feel the love. I think trying to distill the essence of those experience as far down, um, the career ladder as you can is the goal.

Uh, and so, some people are really good at systematizing that, you know, they build in little things that make people feel special or that extract information in more efficient ways, and it might, it's imperfect, it's sort of the Pareto principle at work, right, like, maybe we can't do a four hour in depth career history interview, but maybe I can collect You know, an hour's worth in a video interview that doesn't take up much of my time, but I can push it out to them and let them respond.

And now you could even use AI to [00:21:00] synthesize that so you get summary notes from that, uh, that, that help to build up that collection of, of, of, um, information about that person. This is a little bit of a tangent too. There's a book, uh, that I read recently called, uh, Unreasonable Hospitality. Some of you may have heard of it.

It's, it's a fantastic book, uh, written by somebody that came out of the restaurant industry at the highest levels that he worked in. Was the front, front of the house manager for Eleven Madison Park, which under, under his leadership became the number one restaurant in the world. And they were exceptionally good at things like this.

You know, figuring out that, um, People were parking on the street and their meter was expiring. And so they would have to interrupt their dinner to go feed the meter. And rather than have them do that, they now just had a change jar at the host stand. And they would ask people as they walked in, how did you get here tonight?

And if they said they drove, they say, Oh, where did you park? And they would sort of just have this normal. Pattern of conversation, but they would collect all this information and then in the middle of the middle of the meal, they would send a runner out to go put [00:22:00] change into the jar. And it was, it's the systematizing of those special moments that is the aspiration I think of this process.

Yes. One more question back here. Uh, if you're an infrequent user of Indeed, the sort of upgrade options are not worth the money in most cases, in my opinion, they're a tricky organization to work with, even at a much larger scale where your ad spend is really high because the incentives are misaligned, right?

Like they want you to spend more. So that sort of drives them to want to create inefficiencies. In that recruiting process, and they will never tell you all of the tricks and trades that make a job ad perform better on their platform. That algorithm is sort of their secret sauce, uh, and so you can start to tease out through experimentation what maybe some of the things are that they're trying to optimize for.

But even when you have a dedicated account manager, the information, in my experience, has not been really reliable. And if you talk to three different account managers there, they would all have different things to [00:23:00] say about what you should be doing to optimize your ad spend. Yeah. Thanks everybody.

Appreciate it. 

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