When it comes to decision-making, RiderFlex Recruiting Firm takes it beyond apps and algorithms – and meets candidates in person. Is the Denver-based company’s model still feasible in the age of virtual testing? Founder and CEO Steve Urban is changing the business landscape in Denver and beyond with a recruitment process so old, it’s redefining the future: assessing potential candidates face-to-face. Not through Skype, or live-streaming, but in the same room – physically! RiderFlex Recruiting Firm is focused on matching cultures and personalities perfectly with the job description: something that can only be done through tangible interaction.

Steve Urban Founder CEO of Riderflex, Recruiting, Process, Success and Video Interviews

We’re incredibly fortunate to have Steve Urban, Founder and CEO of Riderflex, as our guest. Steve, welcome to the show. 

Hello, Bob. Thank you. Glad to be here.

First, tell us a little bit about your business and who you serve. 

Riderflex is a business advisory and recruiting firm. We’re based in Denver but we do recruiting work all over the country. People always ask us, “What industries do you focus on?” I always pause and say, “Yes.” Yes, because we focus on all. When we first started the business, since I was a former consumer goods executive, we thought we’d go with consumer goods, but we started getting phone calls from other industries, whether it’s legal, tech, services, even the cannabis industry, which we serve because we’re based in Denver. At this point, because our model is all about matching personalities to culture and less about a specific industry, I feel like we can do any industry. It doesn’t really matter. We’re not letting ourselves get boxed in to a specific industry. We’re careful about that.

I remember when we got the first phone call for attorney interviews, the law firm said, “Have you ever hired attorneys?” I said, “No, but here’s the deal. I know you, Rey,” he was our customer. “I know your style. I know your personality. I’ve stayed at your home. I’ve met your family. I know the kind of people you work well with. If you give me the requirements of the job, I guarantee we’ll find the right lawyer to fit your firm.” At that point, we started saying, “We’re not going to box ourselves in. We’re going to focus on matching cultures and personalities. You just give us the job description. I don’t care if it’s a full stack developer from the IT field or whatever. We can do it.” We focus on all and we’re not going to let ourselves get boxed in.

You don’t specialize.

No, everybody says we should and I always push back. If somebody wants to pay us, we’re going to do a good job and we’re not going to say no to a new customer.

You were thinking about that. For the audience that’s either going like, “How do I retain them to place me?” or for the company that’s going, “I’m looking for a particular skill set to fill a position.” Let’s dig into both of those. 

Most companies have a decent job description or the specs. Let’s call it “the requirements”. He has to have this degree and he’s got to have this experience with this sort of programming or whatever. They got to have these specs. It doesn’t matter what the industry is. What we usually say is, “That’s great. You gave us the job description. We have the requirements for the job.” Most recruiting firms stop right there, and they say, “We’re going to find resumes that match this job description and we’re going to shove these candidates in front of you.” For us, it’s more the beginning phase. We get that job description and we say, “Great, that’s cool. We got that.”

Steve’s going to fly out to meet the CEO, spend an afternoon in the office, get to know the culture of the team, take the CEO to dinner, hopefully meet the CEO’s family, and get to know them so that I understand their culture and their style. At the end of the day, companies are successful based on the people that are in the room working together, and people can only work together if their styles and cultures have a good match. How many times have you seen a good product or a good service blow up because Bob and Johnny don’t get along because Bob and Johnny have different styles? We’re all about making sure that the client knows we’re going to understand your culture and your style and we’re going to fit people to match that. Any junior level recruiter can get a job description and match your resume to it. That doesn’t take much talent. We take it to a whole another level and making sure that we’re matching cultures to personalities.

Companies are successful based on the people that are in the room working together.

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For that particular person that’s looking to be placed in a particular C-Suite role who are in another role, what can that person expect if they engage you guys?

Our process is pretty much like this. If we get an engagement, we’ll get all the specs, understand the client, we’ll get to know them like I talked about. Then what we do is we’ll probably put about 300 people into a bucket. Those 300 people would come from some applications but mostly from our sourcing and hunting because of our recruiter sees in various places. We’ll gather up about 300 people into a bucket, we’ll closely screen those resumes and those profiles to make sure they match the job description, and then we’ll set up about 50 phone screens. They’ll go through a phone screen first with us and that phone call will be designed to say, “Do you have a Master’s degree in Accounting?” We check in the boxes, “Will you move? Do you live in the right place?” Just checking the boxes on requirements and salary and where you live and all that stuff.

Let’s say we had 300 people in the bucket. We did 50 phone screens, then we’ll push them to a video interview round and they’ll be on a video interview with me. No other recruiter. Only former executives like myself will be doing the video interview rounds, which we think is absolutely critical. They’ll go through the video round and that’s another 30 to 45 minutes with me. In that phase, what I’m trying to do is it’s not as much about me checking the boxes and experiences, it’s me understanding who they are. Do they like to hunt? Do they like to fish? Are they a marathon runner? Are they super active? What’s their style? Because I’ll already know the CEO and the company and their culture because of our homework we did before and I’m trying to match them up that way.

It’s conversational during the video interview. Towards the end of the interview, several people, especially the C-level guys have said, “I’ve never been interviewed like this.” Usually, it’s somebody looking at a piece of paper and checking off little boxes because they’re supposed to ask certain questions. We don’t do that. I have a good conversation with them, get to know them, dig their personality and their style out of them so that I can figure out who they are. In some cases, our clients want to see the video interviews so the client can also gauge their style and personality from the video interview before they ever go meet the client, which saves time too.

Once the candidate gets the video interview round, then we’ll select probably three to five finalists that we will present to the client. We’ll say, “Mr. and Mrs. Client, we started with 300, we phone screened 50, we video interviewed 25. Here are the five best. Any of these five can do the job. We’re putting three to five in front of you so that you have plenty of options and you pick the one you want. You meet those three to five and pick the one you want.” The other great thing about having the three to five finalists, which we think all can do the job, is if they pick one and it crashes, or the negotiations go bad, they can fall back on another one.

Let’s talk about prior to Riderflex. You had an extensive career in retail and middle market, yes?

Yes, it was all small to mid-sized companies. I worked for a few larger ones, but I was an old retailer, and then an executive, whether it be retail or wholesale. It eventually became wholesale, too, so you could say I’m an old retailer that turned into a retail wholesale executive over the years. I interviewed my first person when I was sixteen years old and I was the Assistant Manager of the neighborhood convenience store where I lived in Oklahoma. I remember the owner said, “We got some guys coming in. I want you to interview them.” I did my first interview in 1983. I’ve been doing interviews for a long time, and over the years, I’ve gotten pretty darn good at bucketing people’s personalities and styles and putting them into what I think is probably a function that they will do well in or a style or a culture that they’ll do well in. I’ve gotten good at that over the years and that’s from interviewing thousands, hiring and firing hundreds, and managing many, many people at all levels. I’ve gotten pretty good at finding the right person to put in the right job.

What makes us different, too, is so many of these recruiting firm have recruiters with a pretty face that they slap on LinkedIn because those are going to get attention from people, but these recruiters have never been hiring managers. They’ve never been executives. They’ve never held any of these important positions that they are now recruiting for and they’re making decisions on people that should go through and be hired at companies. I always think to myself, “Why in the heck would a CEO or a Founder of a company that has built something from the ground up and spent millions of dollars in, poured his life blood, let a junior level recruiter that has no hiring experience make the decision for the bodies that go into his company?” We always stress that. We say, “You can hire those inexperienced people to find your candidates or you can hire a former executive like yourself that knows you and that can select the right candidates.” That’s a big difference for us at Riderflex.

I was thinking what you said that they only hire them for a pretty face. I’m thinking you have that problem. They say, “We’re working with you because you have a pretty face.”

Unfortunately, I don’t have that problem. It’s almost comical. I see these LinkedIn profiles of these recruiters and they’re all good-looking folks for a reason. We’re all visually attracted in some way and it makes a big difference because it’s sales. Then you look at the profiles of some of these folks and you’re like, “What in the world? Why would this person be qualified to make a good judgment on the right candidate?”

For the business owners in the audience, if you had one or two key pieces of advice, if they’re stuck in the interview mill trying to find good people, what would you offer given all your years of doing interviews?

I would say it’s time. If you want to hire the right person, you need to invest time. What I mean by time is the time to source and hunt, the time to screen the resumes coming in, and the time to take them through several rounds of interviews. Most companies don’t do that because they don’t have time, and then they end up in this shotgun approach where they’re super desperate. They’re out of time. They barely have time to breathe and they hire the first person they meet because they need the position filled. I would encourage CEOs or companies to invest in a good recruiting firm that can help them. The sad part is that the CEO or the CFO, they see the fee and they’re like, “We’ll just do that internally. We don’t need to pay that fee,” but they don’t factor in that all of these people internally don’t have time. That’s not their skill set. Now, you got these people making shotgun decisions because they’re frustrated, tired, and in a hurry. If they would’ve invested those dollars, those dollars would have been saved by slower turnover and better talent that would help make their company more profitable. I see it all the time.

That feeds into one of the things we wanted to talk about. The potential clients are in the audience and they’re trying to frame a potential fee. I know that’s always a discussion. How do you address that particular discussion? 

Our answer is we have a premium service and we’re going to spend a lot of time finding you the right candidate. First of all, we’re going to spend a lot of time getting to know you, then we’re going to spend a lot of time getting to know the candidates, and we’re going to match the right person. It’s a premium service and our fee structure, compared to what everybody else is doing in high level executive search firms, should probably be 30% of compensation or hire based on the amount of time that we’re spending on candidates. We don’t have a certain number. Our fee matches the budget of our client. It’s the best way for me to say it. If we want to do business with that client because we think they’re good people and the CEO running it is a good person and we want to have a relationship with them long-term, we’ll figure out the number. We don’t go to a meeting saying, “We have to have this.” We go to the meeting saying, “Let’s talk about it. Here’s what we provide. Here’s what we think it’s worth. Let’s talk about what you can afford, and let’s see if we can figure it out.”

I know that’s a gray answer, but I don’t like to have a hard number because it depends on the engagement. Are we going to hire five people? Are we going to hire 50? Is it a one-time deal? Is it a client that could last and be there for a long time? For example, if Nike called us tomorrow, we’d probably do the engagement for free because we need that client. Meaning, it all depends. Since we’re a startup still to a certain degree, Riderflex, even though I’ve been interviewing for 30 years, this entity and brand is still new. We will do certain things to make sure we’re engaged with the right companies, so the fee structure varies.

For the audience that says, “We need to reach out to you,” what’s the best way for folks to find you?

First of all, Riderflex.com, our website, has everything about us on there that you could possibly want to know, including my direct email and our corporate phone number. If they wanted to go deeper, my LinkedIn profile has my email and personal cellphone number right on my LinkedIn profile. I’m always fascinated by because when salespeople are calling to sell us something, they will call the corporate number or they’ll email me saying, “How do I get in contact with you?” I’m thinking to myself, “If you’re a good salesperson, you would have checked my LinkedIn profile because my personal cell’s right there.” One of the things on our website that they can see because this is important for us, because we spend so much time getting to know the client and the candidates, we really build a relationship with them. When they go to the website on Riderflex, they will see a reviews tab. That reviews tab has all the reviews from C-Level people, clients and candidates that have experienced Riderflex saying what it’s like to do business with us. On Google, we have 28 five-star reviews in a matter of fifteen months. It’s all people saying, “Wow.”

RiderFlex Recruiting Firm: There is no secret super patented algorithm formula for what we’re doing. I have no problem putting the process right on the website.

I’ve been dealing with recruiters for a long time and most of them aren’t very good. When they go to the website, they’ll see that. They’ll see our board members, they’ll see our clients, they’ll see our reviews. They’ll even see our process on the website. We’ve had some people say, “Don’t put your process on the website. Somebody will steal your process.” I think that’s funny. First of all, there’s no secret sauce. There is no secret super patented algorithm formula for what we’re doing. I have no problem putting the process right on the website. The reason is because the reality is most people aren’t going to do it. They won’t do it. I have no problem saying, “This is what we’re doing,” because I know you, Mary and Johnny, you’re not going to do what we’re doing, so I’m not worried about it.

For example, we’re right on the verge of signing a contract with a new client in New York and we were on the phone with the CEO talking about the contract and starting to build a relationship. We said, “The next thing we’re going to need to do is Steve’s going to fly out to New York and meet your team and take you to dinner and stuff.” There was this long pause on the phone from the CEO and he says, “What do you mean?” We’re like, “We’re going to come out and get to know you.” He said, “I’ve never had any recruiters say that they wanted to do that before.” We believe that that kind of relationship leads to reviews, referrals, recommendations, and that’s how we’ve built Riderflex. 30 clients in 60 positions in fifteen months. That’s because we do a good job and we get the reviews and the referrals that take us to the next client. That’s how you should build a business. We haven’t spent a dime on marketing. It’s all been grassroots marketing of word of mouth and just do a good job.

In wrapping up that piece about the process, this is what I say about the process, too. I walk them through the phone, the video rounds, and how we do all that, but the overarching thing is we do a good job. We work really hard, we communicate well, we do what we say we we’re going to do, we follow up very thoroughly, and we present great candidates. When I tell people that, they’re always like, “That’s so basic. Doesn’t everybody do that?” No, everybody doesn’t do that.

It’s a foot in front of the other approach and it’s a process. 

If you follow a decent process, it didn’t have to be scientific and secret. Just have a process and do a good job. We’re not big on testing. Some companies love all these. They want candidates to fill out a survey and do a questionnaire. I’ve done them all. All of them. I’ve done them all in my career and I don’t want to mention them on here because I don’t want to slam any specific one, but I don’t believe in them. I always say if you want a survey to tell you what candidate you should hire, then you don’t need me. Just have them do the survey and you can make your hire. We live in this tech world where everybody’s trying to create an app or an algorithm to make decisions for people, and we’re the total opposite. I don’t use testing. We visit with the candidate over video interview, and then sometimes if they’re local, we’ll meet them in person. We did a CFO position in Denver and I met the candidates in person. We’re big on getting to know the person through human to human contact, not some BS survey that’s going to...