Brand Power: Boosting Recruiting Success Through Personal Branding

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 Milligan and welcome to Recruiting Conversations. Hey everybody. It's Richard Milligan.

Welcome back to another recruiting conversations.

And I am here today to share a recent conversation I had with a client and it goes around this idea that your personal brand matters. Digital plays a massive role in recruiting success today. And so the conversation I had recently , this individual is having a ton of recruiting success. In fact, over the course of 30 days, they brought on a 45 plus experienced salespeople in the market that they're in.

And for those of you that like me for the first 10 years of your career, we're doing good to hire three or four people a year. It seems like that is impossible, but if you don't know my full story, I went from being that person that hired three or four people a year to being someone that over the of a handful of years, hired more than 300 people, um, that were experienced salespeople. And so it is possible. Now, there's some things here that matter, right?

Like I have to understand who I am as a leader and be able to articulate what I call an attractive leader framework. You have to have systems and structure around what you're doing on the recruiting side. And you've got to have a strong Personal brand, because that matters to everything. And so in our conversation with his leader, conversation was, yeah, I'm not going to focus on my personal brand right now because everything's going well. It's just not that important.

And I, as his coach said, whoa. Okay. Because it's not just about. Attracting talent. I can get really excited as a recruiting consultant around a leader who's going hardcore at their personal brand and humanizing themselves on these social platforms. But one of the things that holds up in the data is that there are a lot of other reasons as it relates to recruiting, why your personal brand matters.

So in my journey. Of coaching people. I have found that somewhere around 25 to 30 percent of people that accept offers, whether they accept them in writing and sign the offer, or whether they accept them verbally about 25 to 30 percent actually don't show up the first day of work. Okay. So, so when you think about this, like you can't, if you're recruiting a successful salesperson in your market, you can't control certain things that happen when they go to exit.

Even if they wait till last minute to say, Hey boss, I'm resigning today, effective immediately. You will still get the data supports this. You will still have to deal with the fact that about a third of those people receive a counter offer from the current employer, that's just a known fact, right? If you recruited any level, you realize this person is supposed to join the team. They go on to resign. Suddenly everything gets better.

All the problems have been resolved and they're not willing to walk out the door. So when you think about someone said, yes.

and someone signed the offer letter and someone's got a start date where they're joining your team that sure feels like it's real but what happens is that there is this window of time where you're not in day to day conversations with the recruit and they're not on your team yet so you don't have things like loyalty and value that you get to bring to them in an ongoing basis. And there's just enough of a distance there that a lot of those people actually fall out.

So I saw a survey around this and the survey asked American workers, um, if they had ever backed out of a job, they accepted in 28 percent of workers said that they had, and 66 percent of managers said that they had actually had that exact same thing happen to them. So if you're going to be successful, You're going to have a personal brand and guess what? It's going to be a conduit in some of these places where you aren't available.

I've had leaders tell me over and over again, person wasn't joining the team. After they said that we're joining the team, saw something that I posted on show social called me and said, I saw what you posted today, and I'm going to sign the offer I'm moving towards you. Then where they had been ghosted for windows of time. I've heard that so many times. What your personal brand is consistent visibility.

Okay. Now when we say personal brand, we follow our four C's. And that means that you're growing your connection. So connections matter. You're creating daily content on the platform. So content matters. You are communicating with your audience. So you're engaging with the people that are your audience consistently on a daily basis. And you actually have a conversion strategy. Cause conversion matters.

If you can't make conversions on these platforms, why the heck are we even using these platforms? Which is why we wrote a book, how to dominate digital recruiting because you can, and most people don't think they can because they don't utilize these platforms the way that they need to utilize them. Okay. So there's several places where your personal brand fills gaps, fills voids that you can't actually fill.

And one of those is where we would start is whether someone sees you in order to self solicits you. In some industries, we're seeing the higher echelon of salespeople, up to 75 percent of them are self soliciting. They're literally reaching out to the leader. How do you reach out to a leader and engage them in a conversation around, I'd love to talk to you about your company, your team, and you, when you don't even see them in social, you can't, right?

So the first place you start is you can't be solicited by a highly successful person in your, in your, in your city, in your geography, unless you're active in the digital world. The other thing that we've seen is this happens over and over again. It's very normal that when an appointment gets set up an initial conversation with the recruit gets set up, especially where you're dealing with success, successful salespeople that they regularly no show that phone call.

That's just normal today, about half of them. In fact, and what we've seen is that if you run a sequence and you. Remind them of this three times that you can improve it, but there's a little, this little PS line on a message. When you text it says, PS, Richard's active on social media, and here's a link to his LinkedIn page. And when they see that and check that out, because they will, they're going to Google you by the way, anyways, what's going to show up as one of the top three searches.

LinkedIn has the best search engine optimization in the world. And when they click on that link and they come across your profile, or God forbid that it's not your profile, somebody else's profile, but if it is your profile and they click across to your homepage and they see your about me and your experiences and your profile picture and your secondary photo and all these things that matter, right? If you don't represent yourself as an attractive leader. They will no show the meeting.

True story. We have found that just simply adding a PS line to a text message PS where the recruiter sets a meeting PS, Richard's also active on LinkedIn. Here's his LinkedIn link. Check him out here. 18 out of a hundred people will show up for the meeting simply because Richard is representing an attractive leader on that LinkedIn profile and his content. Okay. So where they show up to the meeting, it matters. It matters whether they accept your offer. Okay.

We've talked a little bit about that in the conversation I had, um, recently with a recruiting leader. And then it matters, like we talk about accepting the offer that's different than when they show up on day one. Okay. And so whether they show up on day one, your personal brand matters. And then guess what? Let me go even further because this is all over data, whether you retain them. Okay. The retention of them matters around this. And especially if you're an executive leader.

Okay. As an executive leader, there's less of you to go around, right? You've got multiple layers of leaders around you. You've got multiple teams around you. There's just not enough of you to always be available, but here's a place as a CEO, as a C suite, as an executive leader, and especially at a market level where you will actually influence.

The retention data as it relates to your company or as it relates to your team, you will be more likely to retain people when you have a strong personal brand. Okay. And so in this conversation with this leader, I was like, Whoa, no, this matters to a lot more. You got 45 people coming expect to have a third of those people fall out. A third of those people fall out before they join. Guess what?

I saw some recent employment data for an industry, 29 percent new hires left within the first 90 days.

Okay, so you start to take a round number like 50 and you divide it into 60 percent And now it's like you're doing a lot of work And you should have a strong personal brand because you will say something, you will reference something, you will document something that you're doing, and all of those things when they show up in your social give you visibility, they make you relevant, it actually insulates you in these areas. Okay.

So that's what I had for you today. Hope you're doing well. This is an interesting season to be a recruiting leader, man. Let's be all in. I'm all in with you. And so until I talk to you again on another recruiting conversations, 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.