Why Your Recruiting Conversations Aren’t Working (And How to Fix Them)

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. Welcome back to another Recruiting Conversations.

It's your host, Richard Milligan, and I am coming fresh out of a group coaching session. I wanted to share this idea with you because there's a lot of power in our ability to communicate as a super communicator. Now, if you haven't read Charles Duhigg's book, Super Communicators, highly recommend it. If you're a recruiting leader, it's probably a book you should read three or four times. Or in my case, I listen to the book.

I don't really read the book anymore. Once in a while, I'll read a book, most times because it's not available on Audible to listen to, but it's a great book to read because As a leader and a recruiting leader, your number one skill set is your ability to connect with your recruit. And there's a framework in the book, and I've asked myself this question as I've studied this framework, like, how does this apply to recruiting?

And the idea is this, that we communicate through the lens of three different types of conversations. And typically, the flow of conversation goes social conversation to emotional conversation to decision making conversation. Now, what typically happens with a recruiter is that they want to have the decision making conversation as the first conversation, without any emotional connection and without any social connection.

When I begin to look at how I coach people through a systematic way of recruiting, one of the things I'm now incredibly aware of is that is that my methodology to recruiting is successful because it does go through a flow of social connection first, emotional connection second, and decision making conversations or connection last. If you don't have social capital and if you don't have emotional capital,

you will never have the amount of influence that you need to move someone through a decision making conversation. Not in an environment where most recruiters or recruiting leaders are, So I'll say many oversell whatever it is that they have to offer. And I don't know that it's done by intention, being intentional and that they're trying to intentionally be, uh, you know, deceitful or tricky in what they're sharing. It's just that transitions can be difficult. Transitions can be hard.

People hear what they want to hear. And then when they get there, something you may have already communicated very clearly wasn't heard the way they have prior experienced it. Thus it didn't have the same meaning to them, and it becomes a disconnectedness.

And the reason why I know there's a lot of disconnections that take place when we're recruiting in terms of what we're saying, what they're receiving, and how they're internalizing it is that, here's a data point for you, 68 percent of recruits in one industry that joined a company that were surveyed a year later, said they weren't sure that they actually made the right decision to move from one company to another company.

In fact, in the same industry, 29 percent of recruits who leave and go to another company leave again within 90 days. And that says we're under delivering on what we said we were going to deliver. One of the ways, one of the things that will get you through that narrative is by having a lot more social capital and emotional capital so that when

someone comes to your team and doesn't understand or doesn't hear what was being said or doesn't receive it the way that it was being explained, that you have what is necessary to get through that relationally. Now, as it relates to the external part, uh, part of recruiting, what's really important is that there's a series of steps that we take here to move people through that process correctly. Let me give you an example.

If you've listened to my podcast around the 15 minute meeting, I, I think that a best practice is that if I communicate to you the first time and you invite me into something, that that first engagement should be a 15 minute meeting where no recruiting is allowed. We simply build relationship with each other.

And if you're following that process and you understand my methodology for that meeting, then you understand that in that conversation, it is primarily a social conversation, but then pulls them into an emotional conversation.

How? Well, one of the things that I coach to is what I would call dream based recruiting. Dream based recruiting is just the understanding that there is a ton of power through getting someone to externally process through their 10 year dream with you, which they probably didn't have before you got them to externally process through that, through a method that I teach, that I coach to.

And if you are doing this in a first social conversation, asking somebody, what do you want to 10 years in your career, and you understand how to pull that out of someone, That's an emotional conversation. The second question that I encourage people to ask is, What do you want to accomplish personally outside of work over the next 10 years? Over the years, I've learned that weak questions lead to answers. Powerful questions lead to insights that are worth sharing and stories.

These are better questions than most recruiters ask. And when you ask these questions, what you're having is this emotional conversation. But you started with a social conversation. And this allows you the capital, the relationship capital that you need, the emotional capital that you need to move someone to a decision making conversation. You're having these conversations whether you realize it or not. Your conversations are falling into one of these three categories.

Now, one of the most powerful things you can do is be aware. of where you are in the conversation and aligning yourself in that conversation.

If you don't align yourself in one of those three conversations that the recruits trying to have, if you don't align yourself in the conversation, you can never move them to the decision making conversation. If someone's already trying to have a decision making conversation, And you haven't established a social connection or an emotional connection, then one of the most important things you can do is to share a conversational goal. Here's an example.

My goal for our conversation today is for me just to get to know you. I don't have any intentions in talking about my company. If you're open to that, if you're okay with that, I'd love just to dive in and find out a little bit about you. Tell me a little bit about yourself. How did you get into your industry?

So if you understand where you are in this narrative, and you also have a goal for where you want to be, in the flow of those three conversations, then a question can actually take you to those many times as much as establishing the goal for the conversation can take you to those.

Just want to encourage you, be thinking about this. If you're the type of recruiting leader that's leading with hardcore recruiting in the first conversation, you will not get the results that you want to get because you won't have enough relationship capital to motivate that person A thing or two that you might not offer, or a thing or two that you might offer that they don't agree with being the best value proposition, you'll get stuck in some weird places.

Those places will be, well, your comp's not high enough, and your sign on bonus isn't big enough, and you didn't have this one tool in your toolbox that I really preferred to have if I was going to consider another company. I was blown away in my own journey, 300 people without any type of recruiting support. I was blown away in, in why people were moving towards me.

I didn't understand that, that, that, that the flow of these conversations was actually creating velocity in the speed that people were moving

towards the, towards the finish line. If it's dysfunctional and you're trying to lead. With selling your company first, that's the decision making conversation, okay? You don't create the velocity, and you're simply going to lean on one thing, this person being dissatisfied, this person being disgruntled, in order to actually get them to make a move. So, great read, great book, completely aligned with everything that we teach, everything that we coach to here in this podcast.

I would check it out. Again, it's Charles Duhigg, called Super Communicators. Download it on Audible. You can get the actual book through Amazon like you can most books, including my book, How to Dominate Recruiting in a Digital World. A lot of that book you're going to figure out is aligned with that super communicators book. Check it out if you're looking to actually improve your skills in the digital world.

And until I come back in another recruiting conversations gang, have a great week and cheers to crushing your recruiting goals in 2025. See 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.