When to Let the Dumpster Fire Burn (and Why AI Is Breaking Hiring)

In short

When to accept seasonal performance drops (“let the dumpster fire burn”) vs when to intervene; then how AI is disrupting hiring and what to do about it.

Guests

Ryan (host/co-host, discusses his work/vacation habits and sales operations framework). Jeremy (head of sales; provides the “show up rate” problem and process response). Matt Swan (head of marketing; runs a marketing-manager hiring process to test collaboration and thinking).

Key claims

Show-up-rate declines may be mostly external/seasonal (July/August travel, World Cup, holidays) so don’t “defy gravity.” Focus on controllables: lead flow, double-booking, and tightening handoff between first and second calls (clear problem framing, follow-up, text introductions). For hiring, Forbes claim: 67% of managers say AI-written resumes sabotage screening; AI creates “perfect” matches that still fail.

Notable examples

Red/yellow metric review for show-up rate; marketing-manager interviews where AI candidates “talked around” projects; a post-interview opt-out email that caused about one-third to withdraw. Hiring fixes: situational application questions, small paid proof, truthful job descriptions, and an extra pre-interview role-confirmation email.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

Tap a time to open that second in VO

Returning from Vacation

0:45 to 3:21

Discussion on taking time off work and its benefits for productivity.

“I can't imagine, um, you know, being away from work, you know, that long, I actually, you know, enjoy my work.”

Understanding the Dumpster Fire Concept

3:21 to 5:07

Exploration of when to let business problems persist and when to intervene.

“I thought it would be fun to talk about when do you just let the dumpster fire burn?”

Control What You Can Control

5:07 to 9:20

Strategies for managing low show-up rates and business metrics during tough times.

“But ultimately, where we landed was that that's not the thing we're going to address.”

Evaluating Internal vs. External Factors

9:20 to 13:20

Analyzing how internal changes affect business performance, especially during peak vacation times.

“And when we do come out of this, we're going to get all the gains from the stuff that we did that was the right way to do it.”

Knowing When to Act on Issues

13:20 to 14:00

Discussion on recognizing urgent problems and the importance of timing in decision-making.

“that were made for right reasons, not going to go back.”

The Nuances of Managing 'Dumpster Fires'

14:00 to 16:45

Learn how to prioritize issues in a business effectively.

“significant decrease in volume for them to deal with.”

Feeling Overwhelmed: The Burden of Unresolved Issues

16:45 to 18:02

Understand the emotional impact of unresolved business challenges.

“And then you had one more thing that you wanted to chat about if we move from, unless you have other dumpster fires.”

AI's Impact on Hiring Processes

18:02 to 19:24

Discover how AI-generated resumes are complicating hiring.

“And that happens for lots of reasons, but there's a reason in particular that it seems to be happening right now to the point where a lot of businesses are giving up.”

Combatting AI in Recruitment: Strategies for Success

19:24 to 21:55

Learn effective strategies to counter AI in the hiring process.

“And so it's essentially our AI is just in this, you know, grotesque, you know, circle, you know what.”

Innovative Hiring Processes to Tackle AI Challenges

21:55 to 24:25

Explore practical steps to improve hiring amidst AI challenges.

“The suggestion, I think, was paid work, right?”

Show all 12 chapters

The Future of Recruitment: Trends and Techniques

24:25 to 28:00

Understand emerging trends in recruitment and employee acquisition.

“The third thing was a job description that tells the truth about the hard part so the wrong people select out.”

The Future of Recruiting: Strategies and Insights

28:00 to 32:40

Learn about innovative recruiting strategies focusing on in-house recruiters and networking.

“Those are all questions that I'd be kind of curious about.”

Hear the part that matters, and keep it.Open this episode in VO. Double tap your headphones to save a moment as you listen.

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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00Hey, everybody.

0:01Ryan Deiss:Welcome to another episode of The Business Lunch after a bit of a hiatus, I would say, or a hiatus. What do we say? Is it hiatus, hiatus? A break. After a bit of a break. After a bit of a break. But good to see you again, Ryan. And I haven't seen each other in, I don't know, like a couple months because you've been enjoying your vacation from work things for quite a while now. So it's nice to have you back.

0:27Roland Frasier:yeah nice nice to be back i did my annual uh 30 day vacation practicing what uh what we preach it was a company it was longer than 30 days um the act so the actual being gone part uh was 30 days but what i've what i've kind of done now is i take the week before off and i take the week i get back off it's like my wife's birthday it's a season that's it's not like on the day it's the

0:54Ryan Deiss:correct yeah correct she said her birthday season begins the day after my birthday and then continues until the day of my birthday so it's uh it's a it's an ever-expanding season i currently i currently own the full 24 hours of my birthday though so yeah well it was funny because i i mentioned to

1:16Roland Frasier:somebody you know i i posted something about you know being gone and doing this 38 um vacation on on X and somebody was like, I can't, you know, I just took a three day vacation. I can't imagine, um, you know, being away from work, you know, that long, I actually, you know, enjoy my work. Um, kind of like a, you know, Uber type deal. And what I don't think people fully understand is I work when I'm on vacation. It's just a very different kind of work. Like for, for people like us, like we can't not work. Like, but just for us, rest is work. And so when I'm on vacation, when I'm on a trip, like I'm thinking, I'm thinking about stuff.

1:58Roland Frasier:I can't not. And, and the thing is I want to people like, Oh, don't you wish you could turn it off? Not really. I mean, don't, don't get me wrong. There was a day where we just sat on a beach in Nice and I didn't think about anything. Um, I think the hardest battle war, um, the hardest thing is you've got to actually

2:15Ryan Deiss:make yourself stop it, thinking about it. It is good to stop thinking about it. Even if you want to do it as you and I both do. But I, I absolutely believe like my wife always says it takes you a week to get like to come down, you know?

2:30Roland Frasier:Right. And so that's, that's what I've got. I mean, I basically had a couple of weeks where I was like, I needed that time just to decompress transition and correct. And, and then I was, I was sort of good. And then the back half of it, I was incredibly productive. I mean, you and I were going back and forth on framework stuff. I finished my book. I wrote out some memos. So I guess the ideas and kind of the point that I would make to people is when you rest, the benefit of it, it is productive, I guess is what I would say.

3:10Ryan Deiss:Yeah, I agree. I agree. Well, now that we have you back and adjusted a bit, you had a couple things you thought would be fun to talk about. What you got?

3:21Roland Frasier:Well, so kind of a timely one. I thought it would be fun to talk about when do you just let the dumpster fire burn? All right.

3:31Ryan Deiss:Does that mean that we have a dumpster fire currently burning someplace?

3:35Roland Frasier:There's always dumpster fires burning. Yes, of course. but no I got off I got off a call with Jeremy you know our head of sales and he was he called because he's like man show up rate has just been really rough the last couple of weeks and so he had some ideas for like how to improve it and wanted to run by me and I was like let me ask you a question why do you think show up rate's been bad the last two weeks and just for context, we're recording this on, you know, July 15th. And so the last two weeks, well, you can, if you're in the States, you kind of know it's sort of been the holiday vacation season the last two weeks.

4:18Roland Frasier:And he's like, well, yeah, people have just been doing a lot of rescheduling. And I said, right. Why do you think they've been doing that? It's like, well, people are traveling. I was like, right, right. So are we just trying to defy gravity here? and so I just thought it would be worth kind of talking about whether it's seasonality or just other forces in in business it's important to point out and just to kind of ask ourselves when things aren't going well or as well as we would like for them to is it something that is caused by internal forces so something that you did something that you broke or is it an external thing because all too often, if you didn't break it, you probably can't fix it.

5:04Roland Frasier:Now, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try. But ultimately, where we landed was that that's not the thing we're going to address. We're going to work on some other things. So anyway, I just thought that that might be something worth, you know, worth chatting about.

5:19Ryan Deiss:I like it. The immediate thing that comes to mind for me is like without making a drastic change, it would be kind of like the airlines do would be, okay, I know that show up rates are down, so I should book twice as many calls if I have them. I'm not going to worry that people aren't going to show, you know, that I'm going to be over booked because it's likely that given the summer, which is historically for all, pretty much every business we've had been a downtime of year, then you just basically understand you've got to book a whole lot more to get the same number of shows. Is that volume available?

6:00Roland Frasier:And that's the, yes. And that's the first, so that the first thing is what are the, what are the pieces that we can control? And, and so the first thing that we can control is lead flow. Um, and I mean, what, what you said is absolutely true. Historically, summers have been terrible, but as I know, you know, last month, June was a record breaking month for us. Why? Still summer, but we also had high lead flow and all the other good stuff. So it doesn't have to be as long as you control things you control. So yeah, let's go and just put more in there. And so that one of the things we said is like, maybe we need to start double booking people.

6:39Roland Frasier:If we know the folks are going to show up, maybe we need to start double booking. That was kind of the, you know, one of the areas where we landed. The other thing, so the first thing is control what you can control and don't try to defy gravity. Like that's kind of the first thing because when something's broken, we tend to focus on it and we tend to try to fix it. But if you can't fix it, there is the law of diminishing return. Sometimes just the number is the number and you're going to have to let that dumpster fire burn. So let's control when we control. The other thing is let's make sure that we're continuing to do the easy and obvious things well.

7:17Roland Frasier:So we know that there are certain things that we should be doing in the handoff between the first call and the second call. Because when we talk about show up rate, that's what we're talking about. So somebody, you know, they booked a meeting, they, you know, they requested a meeting or they applied, they're interested in our services, they talk to somebody, we book them into a second meeting, and then do they show up or not, right? That's what we're talking about in terms of show up rate. Well, we know that there's things that we can do to optimize for that. number one, we can make sure that we clearly identify what the problem is.

7:52Roland Frasier:Like make sure that we absolutely know what the problem is that we are solving for. If we haven't identified that, if we haven't made it clear to them, then they're just going to, you know, frankly, something else is going to come up in their life between now and then that's going to be more important. Because we haven't made it obvious that this is really, really important. That's why you need to show up. We need to make sure that we're following up with that. You know, So in the email, hey, you mentioned this importance. This is what we're going to be talking about on that next call. Hit it and hit that problem really, really hard.

8:22Roland Frasier:The other thing that we know is we need to make not just an email introduction, but a text introduction. So we need to get them communicating between the salesperson who had the initial call and the person who's going to be having the second call. We need to get them communicating via text. Stuff like that. Is that happening? And all too often you find that, no, some of the easy and obvious things aren't happening. And when everything was going great, it didn't matter as much that the easy and obvious things weren't happening because everything was going great. And so it made up for a lot of shortcomings.

9:00Roland Frasier:But when things aren't going well, let's make sure that we're at least doing the easy and obvious stuff. So if we can control, we can control. and if we make sure we're doing the easy and obvious, then we're probably going to, maybe we're not going to make up the full gap, but we're going to do a whole heck of a lot better than trying to push back against the forces of gravity. And when we do come out of this, we're going to get all the gains from the stuff that we did that was the right way to do it. I like it.

9:34Roland Frasier:So what did Jeremy say to that? and what was the action step for him? I mean, ultimately, he was relieved was the thing. I mean, because I think sometimes just the acknowledgement that the number is the number

9:53Roland Frasier:is just sometimes what we need to hear.

9:57Ryan Deiss:So the dumpster fire that Jeremy was concerned about, and he brought that to your attention, or were you seeing sales and just said, hey, we should chat about it?

10:07Roland Frasier:I mean, the nice thing is it showed up on the scorecard, you know, showed up on the scorecard on the Monday meeting. And so he looked at it. It's a red metric. You know, when we see red metrics and red for us, red means we're behind and we don't know how to fix it. Right. If it's a yellow metric, then we're behind and we've got an idea to fix it. And so to his credit, he was following the process. I don't know how to fix. I need to come up with a way to fix it. Yeah.

10:30Ryan Deiss:And so you said, don't basically don't worry about its seasonality. Let's look at the two things that we can control and try to adjust those. But basically, it's not a giant concern because we know that it's a repeating challenge that we haven't figured out exactly how to solve other than the two things that you mentioned. And it's pretty much going to happen every time this time of year. And it's very limited because it's usually really July and August, with August being, I think, the worst because people are trying to get their last minute vacations in and they are headed back to school with their kids.

11:04Ryan Deiss:I think one thing that I don't know what the attendance was in the 90s, I think it was 94. The attendance of the World Cup was, I think, 34 million. And the World Cup basically did take over for a whole lot of people and I think probably pulled a fair number of higher income people, which is our target, out of their normal appointment setting and business focus. And between the 250th anniversary of the United States, people traveling and thinking that was special and doing things for that. I think that more of the even usually deeper August depression got pulled forward into July for those two events.

11:50Ryan Deiss:Do you have any thoughts on that?

11:52Roland Frasier:Yeah, I'll buy it. I think that's accurate. I don't even care about soccer that much. I mean, my kids play it, and so I'll watch their games. But I have been locked in to this World Cup. Like, I'm, you know, the world's biggest soccer fan. And the U.S. was in it for a while, too. So, like, if you were really... Yeah. So, I think they actually made it interesting for us for a second. So, no, I think that's good. And that's why, ultimately, the decision was, we're just going to let this one burn for a bit. Because, yeah, to your point, We think it's going to put itself out. We think it's just going to burn itself down.

12:25Roland Frasier:It's going to put itself out.

12:26Ryan Deiss:We'll be starved of fuel by the time, right? So then the opposite side to me, what's the inversion argument? How do you know when the dumpster fire needs to be attended to because it's going to consume the whole building? I think if you know you caused it, that's when it is the most concerning.

12:52Roland Frasier:And that was one thing you said, internal versus external. Yeah. And that's why the first question I asked him was, have we done anything differently? Like, has the team done anything? And one thing he did say, he said, you know, we moved our best sales development rep, our best setter to AE. Well, that's going to have an impact. you know, on sets as well. You know, so definitely some internal moves were made that were temporary. So there were some internal changes we made that were made for right reasons, not going to go back. That's a good point though.

13:25Ryan Deiss:If you know, as we do from many conversations you and I have had, that these are the terrible months, you know, in almost every business that we own. Unfortunately, we haven't invested in ice cream shops yet. But if you know that's going to be -

13:42Roland Frasier:It's the counter-immysical businesses.

13:43Ryan Deiss:If you know that that's going to be the case, then that's the worst time to try to do things like that. Like you should pretty much, I'm going to argue that that's not the time to run experiments because now you won't know if that new AE moved setter person is like great or not because there's going to be a significant decrease in volume for them to deal with. so you know the other alternative argument would be that's the best time to do it because the damage will be the least if it didn't work out so what are your thoughts on those two things

14:20Roland Frasier:yeah i mean it is exactly what you said i tend to say let's try to test in and try new things in good times let's do it when we have a surplus the but the reality is is you want to fix things that are broken when they're broken. And so in this case, this particular person had earned a shot, right? They had done everything that they were supposed to do. And so it was their time. They had earned the promotion based on the way that the schedule was set up. You know, we have a career escalation path in our sales department and it was their time. And so to deprive them of that would have been, I guess, uncool, even though it was when it was.

15:00Roland Frasier:Arguably, should we have said, hey, you know what? Maybe we're not going to do this over the 4th of July holiday. Yeah, I think that would have been a case we made. I think that's a solid lesson learned. But, you know, there you have it. But I think the case, you know, a good question to ask, and going back to your original question, is did we cause it? Because if we caused it, then we can probably fix it. Can we reverse it at least to get back to it? Can we just go back to doing what we were doing before? And this was a combination of, no, we didn't cause it. it was seasonal. And yes, we did cause it, but we can't, we can't change it because we did it, you know, for a good reason.

15:37Roland Frasier:But I think that when do you need to make sure you put out a dumpster fire when you were the one that said it? Like, I think that's really important. Now, the reality is there's never just one dumpster fire in a business. There's never just one, there's always many. And I think one of the things that business owners get frustrated by is they feel like they've got to put all of them out, or they feel like when they get to a certain stage of scale that they're finally going to put out all their dumpster fires. That's not what happens. And what scale looks like is the strategic selection of which dumpster fires to put out.

16:14Roland Frasier:And usually what it looks like is putting out the biggest one right now or the one that is preventing you from getting, you know, from going down the street that you want to go down. And that frankly is what leadership looks like.

16:27Ryan Deiss:Would you just apply theory of constraints to that? Which dumpster fire is creating the biggest bottleneck and that's the one to work on first?

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16:34Roland Frasier:That's exactly it. Yeah, it's just where's the biggest bottleneck? That's the dumpster fire to put out. And the ones that aren't, we're just going to have to let those dumpster fires burn.

16:44Ryan Deiss:Interesting. I like it. And then you had one more thing that you wanted to chat about if we move from, unless you have other dumpster fires.

16:54Roland Frasier:Yeah, no, no, no. I think we smacked that one around enough. I just mostly want people to... The look on Jeremy's face when we got off this call ahead of sales, it was just this sense of relief, like, oh, you know? Okay. Like, so the number is the number, right? And I don't have to fix everything. That's kind of what I want people to feel right now. both because you're not able to, you're not always going to be able to fix anything, but what it did and his response to it was exactly the right response. He said, I can take the effort and energy and attention and the resources that I was going to put on trying to fix this and we can put it into other places and I believe we can close the gap much faster and easier and build assets that we'll be able to carry forward into future months.

17:48Speaking of, that's the lesson.

17:50Roland Frasier:I was going to say, that's the lesson. That's what I wanted people to hear.

17:53Ryan Deiss:Okay. Well, speaking of dumpster fires, one that seems to be kind of raging right now is challenge in infilling positions. And that happens for lots of reasons, but there's a reason in particular that it seems to be happening right now to the point where a lot of businesses are giving up. I know that there was an article that you and I both read. You want to chat about that?

18:16Roland Frasier:Yeah. Yeah. So I saw this in Forbes. The title of the article was Why Small Businesses Aren't Hiring. And what made the stat in it is 67 % of hiring managers say that AI written resumes are sabotaging screening. Because basically what you have, and they highlighted there was this one job post, 400 resumes came in, and it looked like they had basically all been written by the same robot. And I know we've experienced this, where you need to make a hire, so you put up a job post. A bunch of resumes come in and all the resumes are basically written by AI to perfectly met. You're like, oh my gosh, this person's perfect.

19:04Roland Frasier:Oh, it, it, it, like everything they've done in their past, it perfectly lines up with everything that we need. Amazing. I can't believe it. Oh, this person too. How amazing. Like, and then you realize you're like, God dang it. AI is just freaking customizing their resume to perfectly match. And then on our end, we've got AI that is trying to surface the perfect matched resume. And so it's essentially our AI is just in this, you know, grotesque, you know, circle, you know what. And nobody's able to actually find anybody. And then when we do actually interview, so this happened a couple of hiring cycles ago, where when the hiring manager would get on the phone with somebody, they didn't even realize what company we were.

19:54Roland Frasier:Like we get on and talk to them. They're like, wait, what company is this again? So yeah, this is a huge problem right now. Yeah.

20:02Ryan Deiss:And you had some thoughts about, I think the article suggested three ways of dealing with it. Do you remember what those were?

20:09Roland Frasier:Yeah, they, I mean, they said, and I think that these are all good. They said an application question that's so situational that AI slop can't fake it. And we've done that. So when you're doing a job post, if you don't have some type of an application where people need to fill in questions, you are definitely just wasting your time. But those application, the questions themselves, you really need to think those through to where AI is going to really struggle to answer them.

20:41Ryan Deiss:So that's where I would think that I would think the MBE, that motivational based interviewing, which is to me like just the best of the best way to interview people would be very good there because it's asking for specific situations where you did something that, you know, that did something. And then that would be, I guess, I could hallucinate answers to that, but that would help, I would think. Yeah.

21:04Roland Frasier:Give me an example of when you did this thing. And obviously they can lie. And we had that happen. I mean, we just ran a hiring thing for a marketing manager. And when Matt Swan, our head of marketing, was interviewing people, and he was asking him follow-up questions about this project where they did this thing, Matt's like, I mean, I could tell they were talking around, and it was clear that they didn't even know that they had put that in there. Like, just their AI made up what they did. And so you will have people who will lie. They're going to get exposed, but most people, if they know they lie, they will at least have enough self-respect to not show up for the interview.

21:40Roland Frasier:And so having application questions, but making sure that the application questions are just that. Questions around, give me an example of when you did this thing. And it's going to be difficult at this stage in the game asking for proof of work. But to the extent that you can, where it's appropriate, like for designers, hey, drop a link to your portfolio. Those kind of things.

22:03Ryan Deiss:The suggestion, I think, was paid work, right? Some sort of paid thing to prove, which is how we do even executives like CFOs. It's like, you know, we'll pay you, but you need to build a 90-day plan for what you would do or something like that.

22:18Roland Frasier:Yeah, so that was number two is to have a small paid thing. And that's helpful when you get past a certain point of the process, right? So that's pretty deep into the hiring process. I don't know how much that's really going to help with this initial interviewing phase, but I do think that that's important. And going back to, again, this most recent hiring cycle that we did for a marketing manager, we didn't just have them do a paid project. What we did, and I got to give Matt credit for this, Matt's like, I want to see how we're able to work and collaborate together. So he said, we're going to hop on Zoom for 90 minutes.

23:01Roland Frasier:and he said, I want us to work together on this and to kind of brainstorm thing and hash stuff out. He's like, because I want to see how they think. And that way also, I know they're doing it. He's like, and I don't even mind if they're using AI while they're doing stuff. I just want to see how they are. Of course, yes. He's like, but I want to see like, do I enjoy working with this person?

23:21Ryan Deiss:So it's the tacos and tequilas test.

23:23Roland Frasier:Vango, yeah. Is this somebody I want to go eat tacos and drink tequila with? So when you think about a paid project, think about how could we do this collaboratively and collectively with them. That's a good way to think, to approach it.

23:39Ryan Deiss:Okay. Nice. Looks like my camera's in the process of resetting. So I'm still here. Yeah, I'm pausing.

23:51Roland Frasier:Until your camera comes back. Okay. And then I'll get to what number three was, and then I'll share what kind of a take that I've got.

24:09Roland Frasier:Let's see if that makes it come back on.

24:13Ryan Deiss:Yes. Okay, good. But now I have the dancing light thing, so this lights out. But we're still going, so we'll figure it all.

24:24Roland Frasier:Yeah, so the paid thing was number two. The third thing was a job description that tells the truth about the hard part so the wrong people select out. And this is something that we've always done. Like, we literally have had at the bottom of every single job post, here's why you won't like working here. And we've listed out, like, you know, we're not a massive Fortune 500 company. Like, we're a small company, which means we're nimble. But, you know, you get to do stuff. But we also want to have tons of resources. We're this. So basically, being honest, telling the truth about what makes you great, but also what are the things that certain people won't like about you.

25:09Roland Frasier:That's big. To me, that's obvious. There's a fourth thing that we added to our hiring process that mega helped with this whole AI problem. And that is in between when you've approved somebody for when you basically you're ready to move somebody on to the interview process. So in between that and the actual interview itself, we send out an email. And this goes out literally from an just from an assistant where it's congratulations. You're being moved on to the next phase of the of the interview process. us. You're going to be interviewing with so-and-so. But before you show up for the interview, we want to make sure that you fully understand the role and all the details about it.

26:06Roland Frasier:So just as a reminder, this is the role. This is the description of the role. This is what it pays. so we tell them what it pays and we reiterate, this is what you won't like about working at this company. If after reading this you would like to opt out, let us know. If after reading this you're still excited, we're excited to talk to you as well. We had about a third of the people who opted out after receiving that email and it definitely saved a lot of time. We also had a number of people who responded and say, after seeing this, I'm even more excited to talk to you. So that email where you just are reiterating what the job is, because again, so many people don't know the role or even the company that they're applying for.

26:53Roland Frasier:So that's a fourth thing that I would add to their list. And it got me thinking, I believe that a role that companies are going to be adding to their team sooner than they might have done in the past is an internal recruiter. I think internal recruiters is going to be kind of one of those must-have roles.

27:22Ryan Deiss:The question would be, I guess, based on need, because we have three recruiters in our tax prep business. We have multiple internal recruiters at our business services business. And it really is essential. You know, you have turnover. I think it's a turnover, you know, in sales because we have salespeople in both of those. When you've got high turnover, you've got to have it. When you've got rapid growth, you've got to have it. And I guess the question is just like, at what size does it make sense to have that? And is there now like a fractional internal recruiter? Does that work or is that too hard?

28:04Ryan Deiss:Those are all questions that I'd be kind of curious about. The thing I was thinking as another potential, and then I'll shut up, another potential thing would be you really need more of a referral network that I think you're basically seeing the end of mass advertised job fulfillment. And it's more, you've got to figure out, just like you've got channels of customer acquisition, you need channels of employee acquisition. And, um, and that those might be paid, um, in terms of referrals, um, kind of like a search type thing, but for businesses that need lower level people, um, someone qualifying those people to send you real candidates is important because otherwise you're wasting your advertising dollars to find them.

28:51Ryan Deiss:And you're wasting the time of your people who have planned in their day to be there to interview these people who, you know, aren't worth interviewing. Those seem like some things to think about.

29:02Roland Frasier:What do you think? Yeah, I mean, exactly that. And that kind of is what I'm thinking on the recruiter front is they are more of almost a sales function. So when you bring this person in, I would actually look for them to be, I bet the person who could do this role really well is somebody who has background in sales, specifically like outbounding, and that wasn't quite their thing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because so much of recruiting is you're doing outbounding. And so I think if you're going to be making a hire or two a month, that's probably when it's time to bring in an in-house recruiter is what I would say.

29:51Roland Frasier:And this is me thinking out loud, by the way. Well, I think if you're going to be making a hire or two a month, like at that point um which is not a giant company um then it and does does it need to be

30:07Ryan Deiss:a um does it need to be a full-time person or could that just be part of someone else's job like somebody in hr or somebody in some other part of the company i think i would hire this

30:21Roland Frasier:role before I would even hire anybody in HR.

30:23Ryan Deiss:Okay. I would, to me, this would be a, a, a hire that I would make and I would probably, and,

30:33Roland Frasier:and where I, what I think it's, it's going to happen is I think they're going to be, uh, in, in the specific functions. So I think you're going to have a recruiting role in the sales department, in the marketing department, fulfillment. And each of these departments are going to have their own recruiting functions, recruiting people who are in those roles, working directly with the hiring managers, as opposed to in a separate, you know, HR department. I think that makes a lot of sense. Because so much of it is about, like you said, the network, right? And so if you get somebody who knows a lot about these areas, like, let me go and find somebody who has a lot of connections in a particular area, let me bring them in as our internal recruiter and just say, hey, go find more people like this.

31:23Yeah, I agree.

31:26Roland Frasier:It is at scale, all businesses become banks and they become recruiting agencies whether they want to or not because the two biggest constraints are capital allocation and people. Those are the things that you need and you got to figure out. So it makes sense that, and I don't think that most companies do it well right now. And I don't think that HR is the best place for recruiting in the way that HR is done in most companies. HR is usually the drama department. It is usually not a high production, high output department. Yeah, I agree. Just my experience, though. I like it. Any other thoughts on that?

32:10No.

32:11Roland Frasier:I mean, hopefully we can. And I would love if somebody's doing this like internal recruiting role, especially the verticalized, you know, function specific. Let me know. Because again, this is completely thinking out loud. Haven't tried it yet. But if you're doing it, I would love to hear how that is working for you. Because it makes sense. But full disclosure, it's not something we're doing yet.

32:36Ryan Deiss:I like it. I like it. Awesome. Well, I am temporarily back with my camera that keeps turning on and off on its own will. So I was trying to get the studio display to come up, but it's not coming up for some reason either. But I think we pretty much covered everything we wanted to cover for this time. Anything else you want to say before we sign off? No, sign us off. Awesome. Okay. Well, guys, hope that you enjoyed the topics today. A couple of topics that were a little bit less time, but we did two of them. and let us know what you think. We'd love to hear your feedback. If you like this, please share the episode, tell other people about it.

33:15Ryan Deiss:We always appreciate having more people come on and we'll see you next time on Business Lunch.

33:27Roland Frasier:Ever wonder how some people build real wealth

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34:03Ryan Deiss:It's actually an implementation program, and it's designed to get you from the idea to the acquisition in just 16 weeks or less. We work with you one-on-one to help you find, fund, and close your first or next deal. And once you do, we're gonna plug you into our Elite Epic Board community so that you can keep scaling through acquisitions. We install three powerful systems in your business. The first is the deal flow engine. So you always have high quality off-market deals coming to you. Number two, we give you our offer and funding system so that you can structure offers that get accepted and fund them creatively many times with no money out of your own pocket.

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From the publisher

In This Episode of Business Lunch: Not every problem in your business is yours to fix. Roland Frasier and Ryan Deiss break down how to tell a seasonal slump from a fire you actually started, why the easy and obvious moves matter most when the numbers dip, and how AI written resumes are quietly breaking hiring for small businesses. Plus the internal recruiter role they think every growing company is about to need.

Chapters:

0:00 Welcome back from a 30 day vacation

1:46 Why rest is actually productive work

3:20 When do you let the dumpster fire burn?

4:52 Internal vs external: what you can and cannot fix

6:00 Control what you control: lead flow and double booking

6:51 Do the easy and obvious things well

15:07 Red vs yellow metrics on the scorecard

20:46 Theory of constraints: which fire to fight first

22:47 Why small businesses aren't hiring: the AI resume problem

25:01 How to interview when AI writes every resume

30:20 The pre interview email that filters out a third of applicants