Those of us in the service provider business are well aware of how service and success easily get tied to the engagement of that one-and-only-knows-my-business-resource. The client has been working with this one sourcer or recruiter since the beginning and no one you have in your entire fleet of talent could ever replace that individual…there is some truth to this, but so much can be done through a great transition, yet – that is a subject for a future blog…

This blog is about the benefits of going from working with My Favorite Sourcer to the (gasp!) Anonymous Sourcing Pool. At CBI Group, we look at sourcing as a multi-step process that begins with the research of potential candidates through all available pipelines and ends with the profiling and production of an interested candidate submitted to a CBI Group or corporate recruiter for entry into the interview process. We have a sourcing methodology and process to find all sorts of needles in the haystack. Yes, some of our talented sourcing team has more experience with financial services, others in pharmaceuticals and others in manufacturing but when our internal and external clients limit themselves to only work with their Favorite Sourcer they miss out on some great benefits.

Sourcing is about creativity, the more variety of opportunities given to a talented sourcer, the more creative they become, and this goes for every client. Having a strong vertical/niche is great in terms of knowing where to start the hunt but having different sets of eyes and different approaches leads to a wider variety of pipelines and candidates. When a sourcing team is behind you, they rely on each other for coaching, ideas, and support (you tend to get more than the Favorite Sourcer you might be paying for) and when your Favorite Sourcer goes on vacation, your recruiting pipeline does not go on hold for a week. Oh, and how could I forget to mention, your Favorite Sourcer is part of the nebulous Anonymous Sourcing Pool so you still do get their work included…

Remember – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (or the one part you are most attached to!)

The CBI Way blog series explores the tools and practices used in Talent Acquisition. CBI Way is CBI Group’s recruiting approach and methodology – it’s how we do what we do! Check in with CBI Way for insights around workforce education and training, the latest trends in recruiting technology, and how to best utilize these tools towards improving your own recruiting practices.

“In 2012, networking accounted for more than one in four hires at major companies, the most of any strategy used in job hunting,” says David Vander Does, President of the National Search Advisory and a Recruitment Consultant with Gore Medical Products and CBI Group.  “And if a candidate has a referral from inside a company, he/she is 70 times more likely to be hired than a candidate without this connection,” Dave adds, referring to a finding published by Career Xroads.

So how do you network?  Where do you start and what are the tools to help you?

“Networking is all about relationship-building.  It’s who you know and who they know that can really make the difference in your search” Dave says.

The first step is to make a list of current and prospective contacts.  “Think about the relationships that you already have (family, friends, previous co-workers, etc…) and add them to your list.  Then do your research and identify others that you need to know (company contacts, business leaders, others in your profession) and add them to your list.   Think beyond the obvious, be strategic,” Dave advises.

There are lots of tools to use in building your network with www.LinkedIn.com as one of the best places to start.  “If you don’t already have a LinkedIn presence, establish one,” Dave says.  “This serves as your professional profile for recruiters, hiring managers and all the current and potential people in your network.  Think of it this way: if you don’t have a presence on LinkedIn, you don’t exist.”

Once you’re on LinkedIn, you can conduct searches by company name, industry, through current and former co-workers and through your network of LinkedIn contacts that you should be continuously growing.  Similarly, using search engines like Google can provide great insight into your field, and help you identify prospective companies and professional associations.

Dave says your next step is to divide your list of contacts into three groups: warm (people who know who you are and can give you a good reference), casual (people you may need to reconnect with) and cold contacts (people you haven’t met yet, but you need to meet). “This will help you prioritize and maximize your efforts as you begin to work your network”

Develop a database or a spreadsheet with of course names, titles, e-mail addresses, etc. but then leave a column for “Notes” where you can track of your progress with each networking target.

Now you’re ready to get out there and network. Dave says to practice these four steps with each person you meet:

1.  Make them aware that you are looking for your next “adventure”

2.  Guide their thinking about what that “adventure” could be

3.  Be confident and specific

4.  Give them permission to share your name or resume as they see fit

Dave also encourages job hunters and net-workers to develop a script and practice in your home or office.  “For most, networking can be overwhelming and frightening.  But remember, it’s really nothing more then the act of building relationships one contact at a time.  The more you do it; the easier it becomes.”  Keep these elements in mind:

1.  Intro- who am I and why am I calling or e-mailing?

2.  Your mission- I’m pursuing my next best adventure and thought you could help…

3.  Give them permission to say “no.”

4.  Provide something of value in return.

5.  The sensational close- share your plans for follow-up and ask if you can keep in touch.

“Most people will encourage you to stay in touch… do-so, you’d be surprised at how many people never get in touch with these prospects again,” Dave says.

When reaching out to a networking prospect you haven’t met, start with an e-mail introducing yourself and making a connection (Our mutual friend Sam Jones suggested I contact you; we attended xx college at the same time, I’m also a member of your professional association…). Then state your purpose and tell them when you’ll follow-up.  Then when you call, say “I’m following up on the e-mail I sent you on…this process helps to eliminate the “cold call””

Remember to say thank you. “People in jobs today are busier than ever and even if they only give you five minutes, it’s important that you acknowledge their time,” Dave points out.  “And if they help you make a good connection, let them know how grateful you are.”

And remember; always try to provide value in return.“Good relationships are not one sided; do what you can to help others in your network in return for the help they provided to you. It makes all the difference and will help to strengthen your network for the future.”

To be specific, this is when the phone rings into my company. We want to get the caller picked up in three, ideally two, or even one ring.  We get busy like any other company and this job is bigger than anyone person who is primarily picking up the phone. We always have someone who does this most of their day. So where does the leadership thing show up in all of this?  One of the hardest things for a leader to do is to show a balance of leading, directing, and doing.  Trust is built when leaders do as they preach. Even if your company (mine) would prefer I stayed off the phones because I am not quite as good at it as some…

I have chosen a leadership model and organizational culture that is one of servant leadership while the business is organized in a flat, matrixed fashion. My goal is to squeeze the middle, empower my customer-facing staff, and force my leaders to work for them. Let that soak in. Empower the front line staff. Leaders work for them. So why should it come as a surprise when everyone in the company answers the phone? Habits. Experiences. Other places we work. All of these gained insights make it so much harder to buy-in.

However, how can an environment of equality exist unless the leaders do their best to be equal? Yes, roles are designed differently. Yes, some roles are critical to business success and very important to the success of a business.  This does NOT mean that there is not a place for a team mentality.

Some environments are siloed – don’t dare talk to someone in another department without having department heads do the talking! Some environments promote hierarchy and fear. Leaders do this by being ominous and scary or by forcing conformity to a practiced culture that all dare not bend or break from tradition.

My tradition and hierarchy are such that people are people and they perform best when they feel valued and they can be themselves – and where teamwork is sacred.  Teamwork is not an “opt-in” or “when and if I want to” kind of behavior. You’re either committed to the team or your not.  NOT just on your favorite tasks or to help your office friend out. So leaders step in and out of what needs to be done for the team.

Stepping in and out can be hard. Do I roll up my sleeves everyday? When will I plan? When will I work on business problems and opportunities?  How do I give feedback and do my leadership job? The answer lies within. But I can assure you if you never step in and help. Or worse yet, if you always dive in and help, you have a real opportunity to improve your leadership persona and have more impact!

So as ridiculous it is for you to think of someone’s President answering the phone because of their corporate culture, as a leader in an Outside-In company, not answering the phone is even more absurd to me!

However, today’s blog is about extending that service impression to the process of sales. In fact to put a fine point to it, for those of us that have to introduce ourselves and our companies to prospects, this is about the first 30 seconds of an interaction! Sales people struggle with the first introduction. Most of us spend hours preparing and researching our target. We know about their last annual report, we have read the press releases, we know about our competitors. My guess is that you’re loaded up with marketing materials. You have brochures, white papers, and case studies coming out of your ears.

So what do you need to focus on during the first 30 seconds? First off, your words.

1.  Be crystal clear with your purpose.  Sales people of the world… face it – we’re not crystal clear with our purpose in the first 30 seconds! We wander in these early conversations. We try to connect and “build relationships”. We try to impress with our knowledge of our offerings. We ask for the “order” when our prospect barely knows us. Be direct without being pushy. Be authentic.

2.  Don’t ask for a relationship right out of the gate. It is weird to ask to build a relationship in the first call. It did not work in the hallways of high school, and it is just as well, creepy when selling. This is just too much of a leap of faith for an audience that really is still paying attention to their email or the project they were working on when you called them and interrupted them.

3.  Differentiate yourself. Oftentimes, we act like and conduct business like everyone else. You could insert any product into your introduction and you would sound like the other ten voice mail messages your prospect deleted this week. Make yourself stand out. Think about how your company differentiates itself and how you can communicate it. Don’t let your introduction be “one size fits all”.

4.  Make sure to speak in terms of customer benefit.  As sales people, if we’re not careful our opening conversation sounds something like this to our prospect, “I am Chris Burkhard, I work for my company, I am interested in getting to know you so I can sell you my product so that I can meet my monthly quota, because I am falling behind on my bills, and I really need this sale now, you see.  Truth is, I need a a quick hit to stay on track, and keep my sales manager off my back.” Does your introduction sound like me, me, me?  It is subtle but true.  Until we learn to speak in an Outside-In way and in terms of the customers benefit, we will always sound selfish. Who wants to build a relationship, ever, with someone that is all about themselves?

Sales people of the world, if you’re on plan then you can ignore me.  If you’re falling behind, I bet I know why, and I have the answer – it starts with your first 30 seconds.  How good are you and your company at first impressions?

While in- and out-patient, therapeutic and operating room facilities were being constructed, the Nemours HR team faced the challenge of building a staff of several hundred doctors, nurses, therapists and other allied health professionals to provide care within these new facilities.

Already well-established in Florida, Nemours faced the pressing challenge to recruit and retain a team of 600 additional professionals to provide care while maintaining and further developing its national reputation. Every year, Nemours is included in the top ranking of pediatric health facilities in the US and while smaller Nemours clinics already existed in Florida, this new hospital and health campus would be the ultimate showcase for its widely-respected calibre of care.

Download full Customer Story

Sometimes a value is perfect because it causes such debate and controversy. Defined by 3 Customers seems to be that value for our companies. The origins come from the desire to change the way company leaders and employees have typically thought about making decisions. And to alter the perception on who is considered most important in the business. Is it the vendor? Is it the customer? How about employees? Just depends on your point of view I guess. For me it was simple to think differently. My desire was to create balance and equality. To value all the same. And to use this sameness to allow the business to have balanced thinking. What would the impact be for employee customers? For our vendors? For paying customers?

In the past, I have worked with customers that put their stock price and shareholders first, and it showed in how they treated employees in big and small ways. In big ways, employees were numbers and disposable. In small ways, their needs, wants, ideas, desires and passions if at important seemed to come second. This is frankly still the case for many companies today.

The other common point of view is that there is only one customer. So don’t cloud the issue on this. A customer is a customer. An employee is an employee. A vendor/ partner is just that a vendor/ partner. I see the logic to the argument. But our goal is not clarity in words. We aspire to show the world we have a goal to be different and to value that difference in how we run our company!

By the way, this goes on all day long. In every facet of our business, in fact. There is magic in this message. I am often told and challenged about the vendor/ partner part. Why do we need to treat them special or go out of our way to stand out? When it comes down to crunch time and when you really need them they remember it. You take care of vendors by paying them promptly. By communicating effectively. By building unique relationships. Our goal is to pay our vendors in 10 days whenever possible. Some goals take longer than others.  As we grow, build the business and cash, this will become a guarantee!

Everyone has a choice to work wherever they want and for their own unique reasons. I want a place to come everyday where I can brag about our ongoing commitment to run our business while taking into account our three customers:  paying customer, vendors, and employees. Sure, we can overcharge our customers. And get away with it for the short-term. We can stop communicating with employees and tell people what to do. For a brief period. We can screw vendors by asking them to discount severely on one deal.  But they wont come back the next time. We face this ethics challenge each and every day. We have to find the equilibrium.

When you work in a growing, changing, stretching entrepreneurial company it is impossible to apply ironclad rules of thought to everything. This value has been challenged, and I have dealt with our imperfections. Try telling employees that you are Defined by 3 Customers when you need to discuss reducing headcount due to a recession. On the vendor side I have taken the calls from our partners when they feel shunned or ignored when we were not direct enough with our feedback on their performance.

This is not about the pursuit of perfection. You will not always make the right decision. This is the nature of decision making. We should all move to Vegas if we could get it right each and every time and win big.  This is about is your mindset. About having a belief that when you’re in a spot to make decisions or work on a project that you will think with all 3 Customers in mind as you wrestle with finding compromises and plans that treat all customers as if they matter for the long term!

So as a recruiter your #1 goal is to find the best fit for a position. You assess the position requirements, responsibilities, team and company cultural fit and interpersonal interactions with the manager and the team, you begin recruiting against all these hard and soft responsibilities, and find the perfect person. How’s that for a happily ever after?

So what happens when this top candidate gets in front of the hiring manager and the message back to you is: I want someone younger/older/male/female? We all have or will have to face this at some point. Below are three suggestions on what to do when the inevitable occurs:

1.      Ask why - There are sometimes valid (and lawful) reasons to ask for an otherwise protected characteristic. For example, if the job requirement is to model women’s dresses, the most ideal candidate may very well be a woman, or if a job is to design apps targeted for the under 30 market’s use, a Millennial may be the most qualified candidate. It never hurts to ask questions to gain clarity.

2.      Educate – In the absence of a valid reason, it is always recommended you educate (teach don’t preach!) your hiring management about non-discriminate hiring and most importantly the value to the organization of having diverse teams. (Start by reminding them their clients are diverse!)

3.      State your purpose and get back to the first sentence – your job is to find the best fit for the position — to enable the new hire’s, team’s and company’s success! If the first two suggestions don’t yield any traction from your hiring manager, it might just be best to go back to the drawing board and find the best fit!

The CBI Way blog series explores the tools and practices used in Talent Acquisition. CBI Way is CBI Group’s recruiting approach and methodology – it’s how we do what we do! Check in with CBI Way for insights around workforce education and training, the latest trends in recruiting technology, and how to best utilize these tools towards improving your own recruiting practices.

The Wild West is easy when you’re under 30 employees.  We would gather in a conference room or someone’s office and the entire company could get on the same page with the company direction.  In fact, everyone came to every meeting when we had them.  Which was not frequent, because I hated the meetings I had to attend in my last gig.

The Wild West is about letting people be themselves. Early employees join because they believe in the founder and in why the company exists. Employees simply made decisions. There are no job descriptions. When the phone rings someone answers it. When something needs to be done no one needs to ask, someone simply did it.  This time in the business is really special.  Every customer win or innovation is so easy to see and celebrate, and communication happens in real time, all of the time.

Then one day it all stops working.  The growth stops.  You might even lose ground!  This is my story.  The Wild West gun slinging era stopped producing results. Your staff hates it and can’t figure out why!  And they will leave unless you make changes to how you run the day to day. And many small business folks never figure out how or why.  As you grow communication begins to break down.

Everyone stops knowing everything. The business that ran so perfectly in its early years grinds to a halt. It seems like every person, every step in the business, every process, even every function of the business like accounting, sales, or marketing can’t keep up and does not know what the other parts of the business are trying to get done.

So why is growth so hard?

1.  Leaders find it hard to change the business routines.  Small business leaders love working long hours at first.  I was known to say “Every problem is mine to fix!”.  The variety of tasks and duties (although overwhelming) is intoxicating.  Delegation becomes really important here.

2. We have an identity crisis when it comes to putting process in place. If you worked in corporate America I bet there was lots of process and focus on systems. Early companies just exist. I find the hardest part of my job is right here. How much process is enough for the stage my company is right now?  Or if I am growing for next quarter? Don’t over-engineer and kill the entrepreneurial spirit. BUT, if you don’t put process in place your costs of doing business will escalate and not keep up of with your top line.

3.  All of a sudden competitors and clients know you exist.  Small business does not claim market share. Small business goes out and does what it needs to do to sell things and create top line revenues. Bills must get paid. The big hope really is that as you pay some bills, your customers will help refine and improve your products and services. This Outside-In® interaction with your market will drive creativity and new offerings to solve your customers challenges – and your growth cycle continues.  However, if you grow, your (bigger) competitors get to know you, …and they can lower costs or press to take away your clients.  So it is hard to mature and grow as a business, everything about your business must grow up too!

I know I said three reasons growth is hard.  However, there is one additional big challenge to stay aware of and that is the entrepreneurial leader. We as leaders must change our approach and style with the phases of growth of your business.  Yes, you still want to open the mail, and show that you’re hands on. But how does your role need to evolve? It involves trust in your colleagues and employees. Are you able to let go of the reins a little bit and let your vision grow in the hands and minds of those you hired?

However, I think this structural shift has impacted the way leaders need to lead. One of my personal pet peeves is when leaders don’t take the time to admit fault. There is this funny thing called “leadership pride” that keeps our lips shut.  We may act like we did something wrong, we may make amends or attempt to fix a mistake, however, we don’t often vocally admit mistakes enough. When we don’t admit our mistakes, we damage trust on our teams and in our company. Trust is a funny thing. Easy to lose. Hard to get back.  Must be built through your actions and of course, your words.  They better be close to one and the same.

By not admitting mistakes we look fake and disingenuous. Today’s worker must do their job on the edge of their seat and take risks in their job to create some wow (or do something Nth degree in Outside-In® language). But the risk is the key.  If you won’t show vulnerability as a leader and expose yourself how do you expect others to do so?  And if you expect creativity or new thinking from your people, then celebrating mistakes is a requirement.

Making mistakes makes you real.  By making mistakes you are human. By admitting them, you allow others to admit them and creates an open channel for improved communication to blossom. A problem said out loud, is a problem half solved! Openly addressing mistakes you’ve made as a leader allows trust to grow and build between you and your employees. It’s about being Open Book — being honest, vulnerable, and transparent – and living Outside-In® leadership, where accessibility and trust are key components of a strong leader.

We all need a culture of admission, right?

There is so much we can do to be better sales people.  Reading about sales and going to workshops on sales technique is a must. Being prepared and planned everyday is critical. Many sales people sometimes wing it; they count on their strengths too much, and they don’t prepare to to maximize their time. They do too little in the way of the activities that are necessary to produce the volume of output their quota probably requires!

However, I have come to grasp that sales people can’t do it alone! Your company has to work hard on your behalf.  I believe a company must work hard on its brand, and that the brand must be an honest representation of what the company stands for, whats it personality and character are like, and what promise you can make to your prospects.

This is always a brand challenge for any business. Every business has a brand.  Sometimes the brand is intentional; sometimes it is the absence of a plan. In all cases your company gives the marketplace an impression of what it is all about and what it stands for.

In my experience, I have found that being an Outside-In® company matters. Our brand is about being all about the customer. Our brand is our culture, and our culture is how we view ourselves. You can call this our overall personality! This personality is how we help our sales staff add value and clearly how we stand out in a world that is terribly the same! We are definitely not the same. However, we are not different for the sake of being different.  Our difference is because we chose to turn ourselves inside out. We are what our customers need and want us to be!

Our culture and our values? 100% a reflection of employee behaviors that will best enable each employee to be the best they can be in the unique business landscape we all operate in today. Our brand is our culture.  Our culture is our values.

Remember, good marketing helps you amplify the truth, not pitch something that you wish exists. That is the difference!

Watch our video for our truth!