Stephanie lays out the dead-simple roadmap for success and longevity in recruiting, including the proven, six step process for executing searches, and some tips on how to make sure you STICK TO that process.

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This is Stephanie Maas, partner with Thinking Ahead Search, and welcome to today's Talent Trade podcast.

Today, I'm excited to talk about a topic that, quite frankly, isn't super glamorous.

It's not gonna be overly inspiring or moving, or you're not gonna listen to this podcast and go, "Wow, I'm ready to conquer the world."

However, if you listen to another podcast and you get that motivation, that enthusiasm, and then you wanna know, okay, now that I'm fired up, what exactly do I do next?

Or hey, how do I stay in that motivation?

How do I keep the inspiration?

How do I keep going when things aren't fun and exciting anymore?

And that's what we're gonna talk about.

Today's thought is keep your eye not on the prize, but on the process.

So keep your eye not on the prize, but on the process.

Every year here at Thinking Ahead, we bring in both outside speakers, we have some of our top performers speak, and I have noticed after, gosh, I've been doing this for twenty-six years, is when you really sit down and talk to some of the absolute best of the best, and really in our business, the best and the best are not the one-hit wonders, but they are the folks that have figured out how to deliver results day in, day out, regardless of what's happening in their market.

It doesn't mean that they don't ever have dips, because everybody does, but they have figured out the way to, regardless of what happens in their personal life, regardless of what happens in the market, the economy, the political landscape, all the things that can be deterrents for our business, that they have discovered a way to consistently perform and deliver results within a certain level or a certain range of production.

And in all those years, what I wanna share with you today is a little bit of their secret sauce The coolest part of all this is it ain't that saucy and it ain't that secret, but it's boring, and that's where people over time lose interest because it's not glamorous, it's not inspirational.

It is oftentimes what our president, Greg Boucher, has called delighting in the dailies, but I'm gonna take it one step beyond that.

So if you imagine looking at the forest through the trees, the delighting in the dailies are you're literally on a path in the forest navigating your way out to the other side.

It's the boots on the ground.

What I'm gonna talk about today is more so, hey, you don't have a complete aerial view where you see the forest, but you know you're somewhere between that aerial view and the boots on the ground, and you're trying to figure out, "How do I deliver consistent results over time?"

So keeping your eyes not on the prize, but on the process.

Caveat to all of this, of course, you do need to know what your prize is.

You do need to understand why it's so important to you to do the things that you are looking to accomplish in this.

Again, we all know that if you don't really understand why you're doing what you're doing, that no matter what I share with you, you're gonna get bored, you're gonna get tired, this is an incredibly hard job, and you're gonna give up, and that's okay because you weren't that into it to begin with.

But if you're very sincere about wanting to build a sustainable search desk, I think these are a few things that will help.

Not the prize, that's the forest through the trees, but rather the process.

So a couple of things.

As you are keeping your eye on the process, first thing, and this is super simplistic, but do you even know your process?

If I stopped you on the street today and said, "Okay, you're just given a search.

We got the contract in place.

It's in your wheelhouse of what you do.

Go.

Tell me what is your process.

What are you gonna do?" Could you rattle off without blinking your exact process?

We here at Thinking Ahead keep our process super simple.

It's six steps.

And again, this process starts once we have a search, we've already scrubbed it down, we have the contract, and we're really ready to go to market.

Six steps.

First and foremost, develop your pitch and what we like to call the candidate matching grid.

Super simple.

When you get on the phone with your targeted audience, what are you gonna say to entice them to want to hear more?

Second of all, when you are on the phone with them, what exactly are you gonna be looking for in their qualifications to know and understand if they're a fit?

And again, we wanna develop those two things first.

Second thing is we source, and this is where you go to use all the resources that you have that have been provided to you through either your own firm, the firm you work with, or whatever you subscribe to.

These are, in our mind, it's not considered a sourced name unless you have their name and a phone number.

Emails are not enough.

We are an old-fashioned direct calling firm, so it's real hard for me to call you if I don't have a phone number.

That's what we do next.

Now, we may find some additional names along the way, but again, we want a good base to start with.

Third thing we do is we get our, quote-unquote, "Roombas working in the background." These are all of our electronic touches that can be working morning, noon, and night behind the scenes to create some reactive effort while we are doing the proactive effort.

So electronic touches include, or our Roomba, if you will, includes things like posting it.

You know, there's a myriad of different places, especially some of them are super catered to your niche in particular, but do you have your job advertised as you want to your target audience?

It's LinkedIn, it's Talent Flows, it might be strategic newsletter reach out, whatever the case may be, but the third thing we do in our process is we get all of our Roombas going.

Fourth thing we do is we grab a document called the Search Assignment Tracker.

This is an ridiculously simple document that helps us in real time look at our work effort on this search.

It's our most objective way to measure our efforts Of what you're putting into a search, be able to document real-time feedback, and then it also works if you're newer in the business as a great document to share with your leaders or mentors to make sure that your search efforts are netting the fruits of your labor that put the odds of a fill in your favor.

So the fourth step is we get that document started.

The fifth step is we get on the phone.

We start making calls.

Here at Thinking Ahead, for a lot of us, in any given week, we are gonna look to put in somewhere around fifty outbound calls per search, per week.

This makes it really awesome to be able to tell our clients that, "Hey, within typically, depending on the niche, between three and six weeks, we will have been able to cover the market on your behalf."

Phone calls take effort.

Waiting for people to get back to you and following up a second or a third time, or exchanging, you know, availability to connect via text or LinkedIn messages, all those things take time, but we know if we're putting in an outbound phone call effort of about fifty calls per week, we can confidently let our clients know at the end of six weeks the market has been covered.

So that's our fifth step.

Our sixth step is a weekly review of every search on your desk.

This is, again, where the search assignment tracker can come in and be incredibly helpful.

It shows how many calls we made on every search we're working on.

It documents feedback that we're getting from the market when we do talk to potential candidates.

And then that way, as we go to plan our following week, we can adjust our time needed per search based on this feedback.

This is an incredibly simple process, but we here at Thinking Ahead know that if we do this process every time the same way, that the odds of us filling a search go up considerably in our favor.

So that's the first part.

Keep your eye on your process.

Can you articulate and share what your process is?

And then number two, do you use your process?

It's one thing to know it; it's another thing to use it.

And this is where the mundane comes in because it's so easy to go, "Ugh, I know the perfect candidate to call.

I know three people I'm gonna call right now.

I know they're gonna be a fit.

That's where I'm gonna start." And we start skipping steps, and we start trying to shortcut the system And we jump on the phone right away, and we haven't practiced our pitch.

I'm not gonna say that we sound bad because most of the time, quite frankly, if you're at all decent, you can kinda wing it a little bit.

But this is also, too, when we haven't done a thoughtful pitch, this is where we start getting questions, and we go, "Oh, yeah, I don't know.

Hang on.

Let me get back to you on that.

I'm not sure.

I don't know about this.

I don't know about that." All the different things.

That does not make us sound good, and it's certainly not a good reflection of us on our clients.

Another thing I see experienced recruiters trying to shortcut is they forget to do all the electronic touches.

So they're two, three weeks into the search.

They have no inbound efforts other than the return calls.

They're running out of people to call.

They haven't gotten the number of candidates they want, and they go, "Oh, I forgot to post it.

Ah, I forgot to send out that talent flow.

I forgot to have that Roomba working in the background." And then you're already several weeks into the search, and you gotta try and do that. The other thing I see is we get lazy, and we don't source appropriately. It's, "Oh, I know who I'm gonna call.

I already know the 10 best people to call."

We call them for a myriad of different reasons.

We go through that process with them.

None of them are a fit or interested, or the timing is off or whatever the case may be, and now we gotta go back and start the search over, and we've just lost a week to 10 days because we were just so confident we knew what to do and where to go.

First thing is you gotta know your process.

You gotta do it.

Use it every time.

Third thing is when you do, and this is, I think, so awesome, when you do have a process, and you use it every time consistently, you will start to be able to track the numbers that create the most success for you.

Again, these numbers are a reflection of your efforts, and they will serve you in two ways Number one, it'll help you make sure that you're spending the right activity, the right efforts that again net the highest probability of a fill.

So it puts, again, the odds in your favor of generating revenue.

The second thing it does is it gives you something super specific and tangible to talk to when you're marketing or trying to win new business.

I will tell you by nature, I am not a great salesperson.

In fact, by nature, anything that is high pressure or relying on, you know, me being a smooth talker or just really…

I, I… it's just not me.

What I love about the search business is I don't have to sell anybody on anything.

I can just explain, "Hey, here's what we do. Here's why it works." Back it up with numbers.

If that seems like a good solution, I'm probably a good partner for you.

That's about as salesy as I'm gonna get.

And again, that's where knowing your process, using it, and then tracking the numbers involved with it will give you that same ammunition every time.

So it'll serve you, it'll serve you for when you're trying to win new business, and it gives your candidates confidence, good, sincere, authentic confidence that if you work this process, you will be successful together.

To me, this is one of the coolest things about talking with top producers.

Do they also do some amazing other things along the way?

Absolutely.

In fact, what I'll s- share with you is top producers are incredibly creative and thoughtful, and they're master question askers.

They know how to hear what people are saying when they're not even saying it.

But all of these things are secondary to an incredibly consistent, dedicated process that they've honed through the years that they know will serve them short-term and long-term.

So as you think about navigating the next couple months of your business, I absolutely hope you have a prize in mind.

I hope you have set up some kind of goal that, hey, if and when I hit this, this is gonna make it all worth it.

And then right on the heels of knowing what that is, I hope you will determine a process that you know you will use and will set you up for even more success on the next go around.