2108 – Mastering Modern Hiring Practices with Discovered's Fletcher Wimbush

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1:06With us right now is Fletcher Wimbush. Fletcher, you are the founder and CEO of Discovered.ai. This is, listen, hiring people is a topic I love talking about. And I'm telling you, if you're listening to this podcast interview and you're doing it the old school way, let me just tell you, your competitors are not. The ones that are stealing all your talent are using AI. uh so uh you better catch up Fletcher I'm hoping you can help us out yeah um I've spent my entire life thinking about talent acquisition and practicing and learning uh about the the most science-based best practices and in the 12 years that I've been an active full-time practitioner outside of prior to that I was a leader and having to hire as a leader and hire great people to grow my team and grow my business, business units that I've managed and ran.

2:06But now I coach and work with over 2000 small and midsize businesses and helping them level up their hiring game. And in that journey, we realized, hey, there's all these science and best practices out there, but we want to support those with tools that help with automation and streamlining because there's a lot, there's like 40 different things you need to do well in order to win a hiring. So doing all that manually is virtually impossible. And that's why we built discover.ai to help give small businesses, the tools to compete against the biggest businesses in the world. When it comes to iron.

2:45Well, buckle your seatbelt. Let's go through all 40. No, I'm just kidding. That's for another day. But yeah, if you could maybe illustrate some of those challenges, like when you're obviously, So when you're working with clients and this is what you do is what you've done for quite some time. Where does it usually hurt for for companies when we think about hiring? Man, the mediocre hire, like the person like I can't I can't let him go. Because I what am I going to do? The mushy middle. That's the worst. Yes. It's frustrating. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, I need somebody to cover the phones or to do that work, but they suck at it.

3:27And I don't have a bandwidth. I don't now I don't have the time to go replace them. And so I just live with it. And I suffer. yeah oh and there's they're gonna leave anyways by the way too yeah yeah tell me talk about it and just just to drive we we've addressed the wound now let's pour a little salt in it um what are the costs of that mediocre hire that's just sitting there doing mediocre work and you know not bad enough to fire not good enough to be you know excited about keeping them and again And, you know, we're talking about people, so I don't want to be too cold. And, you know, obviously this is someone that has their own thing going on.

4:10So I want to address this with a little bit of empathy. But still, you know, if we're leaders and we have obligations to fulfill, like we have other people to consider, like there's a tax to this. And it's not the person's fault. It's just fit is what we're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. look they're going to be better served in a different environment where they can thrive and use whatever talents or abilities or where they can be a better fit and where they can be happier because look they're mediocre they're probably not happy you're not happy with them the customers aren't happy their co-workers aren't happy with them they're sort of just stomaching it just as much as you are that's why i threw in there at the very end is they won't be there very much longer When that end will come might be weeks or months or maybe, unfortunately, sometimes years, but it's going to end.

5:03So at some point, you got to rip the bandaid off for everybody's sake, for that person, for yourself as a leader, but also for their coworkers and the other people that they're dealing with. And so, you know, I've thought about this cost of hiring or the cost of the wrong person question. And it drives me crazy because, again, as I mentioned, I believe in facts and science and statistics, not gut and not feelings and nothing wishy-washy. So I spent my career studying and understanding those things and then practicing the science and statistically best practices and then building tools to help support those things, right?

5:41So anybody who wants to talk to me, I'll bore you to death about the science of humans and hiring. but it comes from a place of facts and evidence, not gut feelings. I'll just tell you that. So the question of how much does it cost you is a real question of opportunity costs. You hear these numbers of 3X, 5X, 10X times their annual salary. And if you sit down and try to do the math and go, well, I bought them some uniforms, I bought them a computer. I spent$300 in advertising. I spent maybe, I don't know, three hours or four hours interviewing them. And I spent maybe 20 or 40 hours. I hope you spend more than that training them, but it's been a lot of time training them and getting them up to speed.

6:22We do the math. You know, you might come up with like three to 5 ,000, maybe$10 ,000 in hard costs. So the hard costs are, you know, deceivingly low. It's the opportunity costs. That's, that's big. Sales is an easy one to put in. You hire a sales person. They have a quota of quarter million, half million, million dollars a year. They come in and they fall. And when salespeople fail, they usually fail pretty badly. It's not like, oh, they're 90 % of goal and I'm going to fail. I'm going to fire them unless they're a jerk. So it's, they're usually like sub 50 % of their goal. So let's just go 50%.

6:57You got a quarter million dollar a year, uh, you know, quota, and they're only on track to hit 125 ,000. You just loss$125 ,000 period. Now, customer service, I need two$50 ,000 a year people to do the job of one. That's$100 ,000 loss. Yeah. So walk me through where your solution comes through. Like how, how does this work? And if you want to use maybe an example, like let's say, um you know again uh maybe it's a home services company um and and they got to step out like it's that is a people business they you know they're dealing with people maybe they might care plumbers electricians yeah yeah yeah and and they might be frustrated that it feels like adult daycare and they need to make some changes they need some fresh blood in they need to reinvigorate things uh all right so yeah they're talking huge opportunity costs in those sectors because usually the problem is I can't find people.

8:01I have high turnover. Therefore, I cannot grow my business. So without the people, you can't acquire new customers and you can't fulfill higher levels of revenue because you don't have the tech to go on the, in the, behind the house and fix the HVAC, you know, the air conditioner, right? So you're limited to how much revenue you can generate because of the people, right? So, you know, that's a, that's a good one or, and you pick your lawn care, whatever, you know, pest control, you name it. So you have two, there's, there's, you know, a handful of major problems, but the two big issues, and it's on the screen back there, but first, if you can't find them, there's, you can't hire them, right?

8:40So if you can only, if you can only bring in a couple of people into your pool of talent, and then the likelihood that one of those people is you're a player that and even is i want to say qualified are your chances of those things are being quite low and let's just assume maybe one of them is sort of qualified they've got some experience uh one year experience working with the air conditioners that's not a lot of experience it's not great i might settle for them i'm gonna you know maybe go ahead and hire them anyways because they're one of the handful of people that are even remotely qualified So I'm not, I'm settling now, right?

9:22So number one, you got to have a machine for attracting and building a pool of talent. And that is difficult. What are you going to do? So yeah, you're going to go to Indeed, but that's all the bandwidth you have to go to. So why aren't you going to ZipRecruiter and LinkedIn into the hundred other job boards, or why aren't you tapping into specialty sources? Like in this particular case, we partner with Blue on, I mean, And like we do some really, you know, you have resources and sources of these, of talent pools that you don't have the bandwidth to tap into. That's why you leverage a tool like Discover.ai.

9:57It's connected to all of the best sources of talent from an inbound marketing perspective. Okay. The best talent ultimately comes from referrals. Okay. You need to have an employee referral program. Well, you know, everybody's experiences too. Like, I don't know any business leader who hasn't successfully hired from referral, but why aren't we tripling, quadrupling, 10Xing down on that strategy? It's too much effort, too much time. I don't have the bandwidth. I don't have the right tools. Again, discovered steps in gives you the tools to make automating and managing and keeping that employee referral program front and center and making it easy for your people to referral.

10:41So that's number one source you want to be tapping into. And again, it may not fill all your roles, but if you can 3X, 4X, 5X the volume of employee referrals, then that is phenomenal. And you're having extra. Yeah. So I don't have a recruiter. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Right. That's way better than hiring a recruiter. It's way better than that. Yeah, so think about, talk about this and maybe the use case of, you know, someone that's hiring coders, programmers, developers, project managers, you know, and those are, you know, let's say they're paying$100 ,000,$200 ,000 per role. Do you want to maybe address some of the economics of this?

11:25Well, I know you did a little bit earlier. Then you get into sectors like that where it doesn't matter if you post a job on the job boards, you're not going to get any talent in some of those sectors. So if you want to hire an AI machine learning engineer today, you post a job for that, you're getting jack squat, right? So that channel's dead. You know, you should, I mean, you should probably have some ads up there just in case one happens to stumble by and find you, but like, don't count on it. So referrals we talked about, that is going to be your best source there, but now you need to do some hardcore headhunting, right?

12:00So now you need to go to LinkedIn and tap into the best databases out there. So again, Discovered steps in and connects you with the best sources of data. You can just go in and look, say I'm looking for a machine learning engineer in San Francisco, California with five years of experience with Python and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And boom, here they all are. And here's their phone number and their email and their LinkedIn and their GitHub and their blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so pick up the phone and call them, man. Like, there you go. That's what a recruiter does, right? And then lastly, is just having a database.

12:32So any great business leader or guru you might talk to out there, and I have a fun one, but you gotta build a talent bench. So again, you need to have a CRM for hiring. What do you do in sales and marketing? You have a CRM to nurture your ICP, your best customers who start as leads. they're not banging down your door today, but you're nurturing them little by little down through the funnel. And when you are dealing with highly specialized talent, that's highly in demand, who's not banging down your door because there are very few sectors where anybody is banging down your door these days. You need to be, when you do find them and you miss and they move on to another opportunity or they're not interested today, you need to stay in touch with them, man.

13:21Like you gotta nurture that. And so every good leader should be nurturing, especially at the higher levels, executives, or highly, highly, highly specialized roles. Let's use a machine learning engineer. You need to have a Rolodex of 10 to 20 people that you're reaching out to on a regular basis. And again, you have to have a tool and a system to organize yourself to make doing that easy. Because I don't know how I stay in touch with 20 people if there are a bunch of business cards sitting on my desk. Like, I just can't, I don't have bandwidth to manage that. Again, Discovered, right? Yeah. Your website is pretty great.

14:01And you have some resources here. Do you mind maybe sharing a little bit? So obviously, so again, we kind of talked about the website. It's discovered.ai. Do you want to tell me for someone that's listening to our conversation, like when they go there, what would you recommend they do? Well, I sign up for a free account and start playing around. If you're not using any tools or the tools that you're using are very feeling antiquated or leaving you short of where you need to be, you know, sign up for a free account, start playing around, start using the tool, talk to one of our experts and, you know, we'll show you around.

14:32But check out the Hiring Academy. And I'm going to leave in the show notes. I'm assuming you'll share this with everybody, but a free code, HireBetter, and download that. And for those that are kind of maybe a little bit bigger organizations and you have other key executives or HR people, or maybe you have a recruiter in-house and you're looking to level them up, have them go through that. That's an eight-hour e-learning course that covers the 40 things that you need to do to be winning and hiring. Some might be more applicable to your situation than others, but it's going to give you the full master's degree on hiring.

15:06And you can level up your people leveraging that tool. You can level up yourself as a leader. you should go through it too, but I know the CEOs won't do that, but you know, at least, you know, push it down and it gives you all the tools and the playbooks and the checklists and the best practices. And it hits it from every single angle possible. So take advantage of that. And then I'm going to share with you a GPT that you can get in chat GPT and tire GPT. Yeah. The $20 a month to have a paid version. If you're not doing that, I don't know what we shouldn't be talking, but no, I joke a little bit.

15:36A lot of my friends still are not paying the$20 a month to use it is the smartest$20 I I'm I don't even need the$200 program I would happily pay$200 for the$20 chat GPT membership I mean I I'm I'm in it three to four hours a day no joke yeah a little plug for chat GPT there yeah yeah free ads I got my hiring expert GPT in there that will literally walk you through everything you need to do and create all your recruitment marketing content all your social content to market all your employee referral program all of your candidate scorecards, interview guides, custom assessments. So one of my favorite things is creating core value or culture assessments for my clients and customizing them specifically.

16:23Because before AI, we'd have to take off-the-shelf assessments and then kind of package them around those things. And it would take hours and years or weeks and months and lots and lots of effort. Now I can create a core value assessment for your organization, get you a testing link that you can start assessing candidates tomorrow. I mean, I could do this for you in about 10 minutes and you could start testing your candidates for core value match for your company. You get a report back, all the information you need, sort of an assessment and evaluation, some verbiage, some numbers, a score, and just a definitive answer.

16:58Like, yes, hire this person or no, don't hire them because they're not a map. You know, so it'll walk you through all that. It'll create a training and onboarding program for you. And again, a lot of those tools are all built right into discovered as well but that's the free version do it yourself and yeah let me ask you about that so fletcher obviously someone could contact you reach out and you'll help them find that if if that's an appropriate solution for them immediately um i'm in the gpt store right now i i've built uh custom gpt so i'm really nerding out on you know knowledge files and apis and and just like this open language coding i just you know kind of just this, it's fascinating.

17:39I mean, that's what I'm spending hours a day doing, um, you know, both for my own company and then just, I mean, just the potential is just staggering. Um, what we could do with this. Um, do you, do you know what, recall what the exact name of the GPT was? I just dropped it in the chat so you can open it up. You could open it up and you'll share this in the show notes as well. I will. These are the two freebies that I'll offer you guys. One, you know, go to get, get the e-learning course, invest in your people, invest in your leaders, have them invest in themselves you know use it they can self-pace you know but again this tool here is the hack of hacks of hacks yeah well yours was this one was the number one that came up in the gpt store uh for it's just called hiring expert oh yeah hiring expert yeah that's what yeah yeah yeah um by community builder so wow 4.8 stars um thousand conversations yeah thank you so much.

18:32That's a very cool. Leave it a review, please. Yeah. Is that associated with you? Yeah. Yeah. I dropped it in the chat. Hiring expert. It says by Fletcher on my end. I don't know. I don't think it says when you look it up, if you show your screen, maybe. But anyways, I dropped the link. It says Community Builder. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think it actually shows. I think it only shows on my end. It's okay. That sounds right. We're going to talk off air. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds good. Awesome. Well, Fletcher Wimbush, again, uh ceo and founder of it discovered dot ai uh all the show notes all the links to our friend that's listening just click around your podcast app you're going to find the information button or the show notes button click that we got everything as a direct link fletcher to your website and uh do you do uh take calls and yeah yeah linkedin's the best way so i was blessed with a very interesting name and you can google my name fletcher winbush it's w-i-m as mary b as boy, USH.

19:29And I'll come up on the first 10 pages of Google and you can find me on LinkedIn and I hang out on LinkedIn nowhere else. Well, there and the beach and surfing, fishing, but you can't, you know, but anyways, you find me, you find me on LinkedIn and you find me on Google and you can find me on my websites or FletcherWinbush.com. And yeah, I take calls and I can talk about this all day long. That's all I do is consult with business leaders on best hiring practices, solve their problems. And my team and our tools support them in the execution of those things. So, but I just like to talk about it.

20:02Excellent. Excellent. Fletcher Wimbush, chief hiring coach, founder, CEO of discovered.ai. Fletcher, thank you for joining us. Thanks.

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