2069 – Streamlining the Hiring Process: Insights on Overcoming Recruitment Challenges with Talent HQ’s Phillip Rivers

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1:05With us right now, it's Philip Rivers. Philip, you are the co-founder of Talent HQ. You're found on the web at talenthq.co. It's great to have you, Philip. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me, Josh. Yeah, well, we'll give us an overview of what is Talent HQ. What do you do? So to give you sort of like the short-winded origin story, I built this pretty successful agency business doing performance marketing for mostly brands and some people selling info products and courses and service businesses, et cetera. Anyways, after having exited that, I realized like, you know, one thing I got really good at building the agency was sourcing and vetting talent.

1:44And that's like one thing that most entrepreneurs, I guess, like never really sharpened their sword at. And so I was like, I was thinking around like, what do I want to do next? And I was like, you know, I think there's a tremendous opportunity to help small businesses with like, offloading the recruiting from something that is more of like a nuisance and a distraction for them to a company like, well, Talent HQ now, that handles all what I'll say is the crap as it relates to finding talent and pretty much taking the time to recruit, go from maybe 30 hours per role to three and just doing all the dirty work on their behalf, just because I got good at doing it for myself.

2:18Yeah, yeah. Well, tell me a little bit about, you know, for someone that hasn't been doing much staffing or hiring that way, do you mind just giving us a lay of the land of what life is typically like for a business leader that's really just looking to fill some great spots and get connected with the right people? Yeah, I would say, it's not necessarily about volume of hires being made, but more so if any business is growing or even if you're a solopreneur at some point, if you don't even have something as nominal as an assistant, you are the assistant, right? And so I think it's just like, when it comes down to trying to hire for any role, there is a tremendous amount of work involved.

3:00And it all starts with, okay, like drilling down on what are the nuances, the responsibilities of the role that you're hiring for, memorializing that in a job description, drafting it in such a way that attracts the talent that you want to attract. And then all the hard work starts after that. So then you get all these applications. You have to review all these applications. You have to send out a ton of emails to request people, to request interviews, pilot projects, follow-up interviews. And there's countless messages being exchanged in between simply because you ideally have more than one or two or 10 candidates even.

3:31And so that part becomes very sort of like cumbersome. And it's not the highest leverage stuff a business owner could spend their time on. You know what I mean? And so I would say that it's really just about like offloading the stuff that is beneath them, if you will. Yeah. To someone else. I don't know if that answers your question exactly. Yeah. And tell me a little bit about like the typical process, right? And like how that can be cumbersome And the thing that I think is probably one of the most frustrating or certainly when I, here's what I really hope does not happen, right? I want to get the right person and I just hope they're a fit and I hope that they can stick around for a little bit of time.

4:17The worst thing is like you get someone in, maybe they are good at first. And then just like after a few months, it just goes downhill. That's really frustrating for founders. 100 % I think I think it's really twofold so from my experience Josh even myself included from my experience I try I think back in terms of the hires that I made that on excuse me on paper or during the interview process they seem to have that all the things that they needed to have to be successful right and then they come in and it's like sort of a Jekyll and Hyde situation right and I found it's sort of twofold number one I think a lot of times the the figurehead the person that that has the company that's hiring for the role, they're not necessarily as buttoned up as they should be in terms of what they need from a structural standpoint to put this new hire in a position to be successful.

5:04So like think of the average entrepreneur, most of the stuff that exists in the businesses between their two years, they don't necessarily have SOPs or how they would do things. They have it up here, but they don't have it memorialized for a person to come on and be able to consume that stuff, ask questions for any gaps that they have, and then be able to hit the ground running and come to this person or come to the boss, if you will, for constructive criticism. So I think most of the landmines that exist, and again, this is in my experience building my team, but I see this pattern a ton with the people that we do recruiting for, is they don't have their T's crossed and their I's dotted internally in terms of what it means or how they put this new hire in a position to be successful.

5:42And then what tends to happen is they start, they're sort of like trying to figure it out on the go. They don't want to annoy the boss that hired them, right? They don't want to signal, oh shit, I don't know what I don't know, or I need some guidance here. And then the boss is like, oh, and I have to babysit this person, they should just miraculously know all the things that are between my two years and my years of expertise, but they don't. And then what and then they sort of the talent, especially if they're remote, whether they be domestically or overseas, they start to get sort of like cast aside.

6:11Because the owners just like default to I'll just do this myself, it'll be faster if I do it myself, therefore, the things never get delegated, if you will, to the person that started. And then it just becomes, it becomes, gets pretty sour pretty quickly. And then they tend to self-select out or they get fired simply because they're just not contributing enough. So I think a lot of the time, Josh, it's a long-winded way of saying most of the issues start with the company, with the, with the CEO, not necessarily the talent that they hire. Yeah. And so obviously there's, listen, there's a lot of ways that you could probably connect with overseas talent, EAs, VAs, you know, certainly there's Upwork and that sort of thing.

6:49um what are some of the challenges that are inherent in more of the platforms like you mean upwork for example yeah for example i mean i don't want to just call out upwork but well i think like i just think it comes i think it just comes down to um what suits like what what the org is is really looking for so like upwork is a marketplace really for like freelancer part-time talent there's not anything inherently wrong with that but that also doesn't work for all companies or that's not what all companies are looking for. You know what I'm saying? And so, again, I think the biggest misstep that most companies have is they don't have clarity on the roles and responsibilities that they're looking to do.

7:31And another thing that they get mixed up in is they try and pack the roles and responsibilities of two or three different roles or two or three different specialties into one role and expect to find some unicorn person, whether they live domestically or overseas. And, and they want to find them for very, very cheap, which is just not just does not really exist in the universe. So people tend to be sort of like disappointed with the work output or the communication or combination thereof, just because they don't have the most realistic of expectations of the ability, abilities of people in terms of like where they're looking in within the budget, the budget in which they're looking for them in, if that makes sense.

8:12Yeah. Well, so tell me in terms of like, so let's say someone go, okay, great, great, great, great, great. Let's fill some roles. How does it work? Because I'm like, I've got your website pulled up and the main headline says higher offshore marketing talent without the headache salary starting at$12.99 a month. It's a very compelling offer. A hundred percent. So in terms of how it works, usually if someone said, all right, let's rock and roll. Let's just say I need a designer to design emails and creative assets in Figma, for example. So we'll jump on a kickoff call, draft the job description live together and get really clear on the role.

8:53Again, what are the must-haves in terms of their skills and abilities for the role? And what are the negotiables? And then what is their spectrum from a salary standpoint that they want to operate within? And usually some people are very realistic with in terms of the skills and and uh the pricing and some aren't and so that's an opportunity for us to either level set on price or level set on abilities right so we can have alignment out of that call so we kind of we we know the type of talent that we're going after but they also know when we start to share show them talent that have gone through our force our four stages of vetting that like we're we're in aligned in terms of what we were looking for the price spectrum and who and who phil and his team is showing us um so from there put run the job description, we'll probably get anywhere from three to 500 applicants per role.

9:37And then the evaluation process starts from there. So we'll do sort of a soft skills analysis, like how's their English? How's the internet connection? Do they show up on time? Do they follow directions? Things like that. From there, the people that pass that stage will send everyone a pilot project. And this is a pilot project that is specific to the role. So for example, if they're doing design, like I mentioned a moment ago, in Figma, we'll send them a pilot project that has to do with design, that they'd be doing for the company. If they were doing copywriting, it'd be a copywriting exercise.

10:05If it's a marketing, like a media buying role, it'd be a media buying exercise, so on and so forth. Then based on their outputs of that, we review it. And I would say about top 20, 25, we invite to the first round interview on the phone and have a phone conversation with them and then get that down to 10 people, do a second round interview. And then the top three candidates we share with the client. So we do all the grunt work in terms of everything from JD to multiple rounds of interviews, testing their skills and like their hard skills and so forth. And then just putting them on a silver platter for the client to essentially at that point, it's more of a vibe check than it is a real skills evaluation because we already did it.

10:46Then it's like, do I want to work with this person? Do I want them on the team? And that's how we take it from 30 hours or so per role to three for the client, just because they don't have to do all the other stuff in between. Yeah. Yeah. And I would imagine that, you know, in your work or, you know, in kind of work with the clients that you have, you probably see clients that seem pretty well set up to bring in someone like they're doing about everything that they can to position their new contractor and themselves for success. And then you may see behavior like, oh, geez, this is not going to go well.

11:24Yeah. Like what are some of those telltale signs that you've got a good client here that's going to really do about as best as possible with this new hire? You know, I would say that, honestly, I would say that probably most businesses aren't that well equipped to bring somebody on. Wow. They don't have the structure that most don't have the SOPs or they have SOPs on a very sort of like cursory level, but nothing that's in detail. They haven't really thought about taking someone that has no exposure to the company because they're coming in brand new off the street, whether it be from Wisconsin or from Columbia.

11:59And plugging the holes in such a way that they get it and can start to contribute quickly. And so a lot of people will ask them, like, you have SOPs? Yeah. I know. Okay. And my next question is show me. And we do this on the kickoff call as well. Wait a minute. They're up in my head. We do this on the kickoff call as well. And oftentimes what we have to do, Josh, is in parallel while we're searching for the talent, help the client with their readiness for the talent to onboard. And that is developing some sort of project plan for them to develop the SOPs and sort sort of like build that structure as we find the talent for them on the other side.

12:35But I would say overall, people are a lot less equipped than you might think. Yeah. Okay. So where does, how does the process begin? Like if someone's been listening, they're like, okay, I'm game. Like what does that, what do you typically do aside from ask them for their SOPs? Yeah, I would say first and foremost, go to talenthq.co and book a call. We'll jump on. We'll sort of see where you're at, what you're looking for, and really just get locked in on what is the role or roles you need out of the gate and just see if we're a fit. And if we can help you, awesome. We can get the process started that I just ran through.

13:08And if not, I'll be the first one to tell them that we're not a fit for whatever reason and do whatever I can to leave them in a better position at the end of the call than they were when they got there. Sure, sure. What would be some examples of someone that you've worked with and what kind of positions that you filled up? And I know if I'm looking at your LinkedIn, you have a few good success stories. So I would say in terms of types of companies, it's really, so where we really draw the focus right now is like marketing support related roles. And a big reason for that is because when I was building the agency, I was performing marketing services for companies.

13:49So I just got good at finding people that had an expertise in a certain thing and can operate in sort of a performance environment for clients, which is, I would think, a very difficult thing to source talent for that's very performance oriented. It's not necessarily, you know, just like enriching data in a spreadsheet. Although we do do that, the sort of, it's just like finding marketing talent, I don't think it's something that's inherently simple to do. I think because most people haven't run performance marketing before, especially if they're recruiting talent. They're not performance marketers, usually, right?

14:20Just to make sure, define performance marketing, just so we understand. Like some people might hear that and say, oh, well, I'm going to hire someone that's going to work only on commission. Yeah. No. So I guess what I'm saying for me at the agency, like we predominantly ran email and SMS marketing for companies. Right. But that email and SMS marketing was done in such a way that drove a return on investment. So they made four to eight X the money that they paid us every month. So we were conceptualizing and marketing strategy and implementing it through the modality of email and text messages to generate a return for the client.

14:53So that's what I mean by performance in this case. It could also be the same thing applied to meta ads or TikTok ads or Amazon ads. For example, whoever's running the media is doing it in such a way that you're trying to drive performance some business outcome where the business makes more money than they're paying to do it. Positive ROA marketing. I like it. But I think a lot of people, they're just like, oh, I need a marketing person. They should be jack of all trades, master of none, but have exposure to every platform that has ever existed under the sun. And that's just like not very realistic.

15:21so so we started with um marketing support talent just because i i know that world so well um and in terms of like uh success stories i would say predominantly uh like the people that i've tended to help thus far are agencies and brands just because i come from that world but the way that i think about it is i'm pretty agnostic from a category standpoint it's like if you have a marketing function i can find you marketing and support related talent for that marketing function It doesn't really matter if you're an agency or a brand or selling a service or what have you, right? It's really all this.

15:54It's really driving traffic, capturing leads and having creatives, you know, to make it overly simplistic. You know, just recently there was a brand that we started working with and they, e-commerce brand that's scaling and they wanted to build out their like support function internally. So we, we, we found them like three, you know, customer support folks that live in, in South America to help them build that team internally so they didn't have to rely on contractors that weren't dedicated to them full-time anymore, for example. Another one is agency owners. I mentioned data enrichment, but they have a pretty robust sort of like lead gen and sales system, and they needed some talent to come in and enrich the CRM to better equip their sales team to have more information when they're doing cold calls or follow-ups or what have you.

16:41So it really runs like runs the gamut. But that's why I like, I always say, that's why I say like, I'm so keen on having a phone call, getting like clarity on what does someone need? Are we in a place where we can help them and be successful? And if, if we can, awesome, let's team up. If not, I'll tell you and make an introduction, help them however I can. Fascinating. Fascinating. All right. So did you mention, obviously, you know, someone could book a call. Did you have any resources or long form content or something like that? Someone's interested and they want to just learn more, kind of dive into this, anything come to mind?

17:17Dude, I think nothing off the top of my head, like I'm sure I do somewhere. I just don't have the URL off, like off the, off the dome. That said, if someone wants a resource, they can email me, phil at talenthq.co or find me on Twitter, Instagram, whatever, and say, Phil, I need a resource. I'll ask them a question or two, and then I'll give them all, I'll, I'll happily give them a resource. Just something comes to me off the head right now. Is that all right? I like your, on your website here, no BS pricing, simple flat fee pricing, no three times marked up retainers or percentage of salary BS.

17:51So very cool. Again, talenthq.co, Phillip Rivers, you're the co-founder. Phillip's been a great conversation. Thank you so much. Thanks, Josh.

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