2373 - Unlocking Talent and the Magic Behind Successful Recruiting with Magic Talent Solutions' Robert Howard

0:03Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If you're committed to growing your business by serving audiences with generosity and real expertise, you're in the right place. This is a daily 15 minute show featuring leaders who believe real impact comes from generosity, not hype, which means as a listener, you're going to get the good stuff. In fact, we created podverified.com to give thoughtful leaders like you free tools to show up better on podcast stages, like this one. That includes your free PodVerified score, free PodVerified guest training, a free media kit builder, and so much more. It's the first ecosystem of its kind built by podcasters who genuinely want to help guests thrive and grow in podcasting.

0:46Visit podverify.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, it is Bob Howard. Bob, you are the founder of Magic Talent Solutions. You're a fellow military vet business owner, fellow disabled military veteran business owner as well. So first off, thank you for your service. And Bob, it's great to have you. Hey, thanks for having me on, Josh. Pleasure to be here. Yep, your website, magictalentsolutions.com. We're going to get to that in just a second. And before we do, always love talking with fellow business leaders and kind of finding out what they do for fun outside of work and maybe kind of what they're into or kind of passionate about or geeking out on.

1:30What have you been into lately? Yeah, so lately, well, I guess not really lately. The past few years, my wife and I, we love to go do escape rooms. We've probably done over a couple hundred at least, and we try to do them everywhere we go. It's a fun little thing that we get to do and, you know, really, really builds that teamwork and sometimes frustrations. but we like doing that. Wow. I was going to brag that we've done a bunch. I think we've done maybe about 40 of them and we haven't been doing them as regularly lately. A couple of hundred. That is incredible. Well, so one thing I know for sure is that once you start doing them frequently or you do them a lot, you start to see a lot of familiar pattern, not familiar patterns, but you know, definitely, you know, there are themes that might repeat and certainly just kind of building those muscles or building those skills, you know, leads you to start thinking like a great escape room artist.

2:28So I'm curious, Bob, like what, having done that many, what have you noticed about yourself or your wife or your relationship? First off, you guys are still together. So congratulations because sometimes yeah no definitely definitely can right um you know definitely start noticing patterns you start seeing kind of the same uh definitely seeing the same themes like sometimes we got to look at ourselves like hey have we done this one before um let's double check because you know you have a pirate theme at one place another pirate theme and you're like oh you know i'm definitely i'm definitely guilty of booking the same room twice a couple of times, unfortunately.

3:07Just, you know, you do one a few years ago, but for, you know, pattern recognition is huge. So you start seeing how, okay, here's a book that probably means something. Let's look through it. Oh, this is underlined or it's bold. So you start looking for those different patterns and realizing, okay, this is probably gonna be for this or it's gonna be for this type of lock or we're gonna use it over here at, you know, or we're gonna use it later. So you start seeing pattern recognition then you start using each other's strengths, right? So you start seeing, okay, I'm good at this sort of puzzle. Wife's good at this sort of puzzle, or she's good at finding clues.

3:44I'm good at kind of the manual tasks while she does other things. So we very much kind of work to our strengths. After a while, you start realizing, okay, she's really good at finding the tiny little details, whereas I can put in codes relatively fast and can kind of remember where something will come in later. Yeah, yeah. It's got to be hilarious now that you guys have done so many when you get put in a room with a couple of strangers who have maybe never done one. Yeah, so that's happened a couple times, but generally nowadays we try to find rooms that we don't get put with other people. Yeah.

4:25And that's just because it does get frustrating, you know, especially get put with some newbies who are trying, you know, a 10 out of 10 toughness puzzle. It's like, why are you here? What are you doing in here? Let's not do that. So, you know, since COVID, they really started cracking down on private parties and they found kind of a good business model that works with that. So we definitely look for places where we can just, you know, just do us or, you know, we bring the kids. So, and then of course, you know, if they're brand new and they're just trying to enjoy their full hour and you guys are just like whizzing through all the puzzles and you're like, man, we're going to be out of here in 22 minutes.

4:58You know, they're probably like, Hey, we got to do something. Oh yeah. I mean, I can remember one of the times we did with somebody and it was just trying to like wait for them to figure out a puzzle and just get so frustrated. You're sitting there like, no, I just let me do it. Let me do it. Oh, that was definitely something that we had to, that we learned early on that we do. Yeah. Literally, you're going to be patient with the kids, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Bob, tell me about Magic Talent Solutions. I've got your website pulled up right here, and you're based in San Diego, but tell me what you do.

5:31Yeah, so Magic Talent Solutions really was born out of a need during COVID. Lots of turmoil in the staffing industry. So I kind of started getting myself on more and more contracts and realized, okay, I need to start establishing myself. So Magic Talent Solutions was born in early 2000s, early 2020, excuse me, that is a staffing firm and coaching and really consulting, right? Consulting on people matters, whether you're needing training, whether you're looking for a job, whether you're looking for people to hire into your organization. Magic Talent Solutions is there to help with those solutions.

6:11Yeah. Yeah. Well, so when you're working with your clients, what is it that you're able to do that they can't do as easily themselves? Yeah. So a lot of things that I'm able to do is I have a lot more access to different sourcing strategies and different ways that I'm able to get the clients the people that they need or to get the people they have up to speed, whether it's training them on different recruiting steps or maybe they even have an early young team that needs help with training. and I help them train with understanding how to do recruiting. And I actually just had a client recently that they had a very, very young recruiting team, a very green recruiting team.

6:53And they needed help understanding kind of more so the basics on how to interview and even understanding California law. So sometimes it's just the companies are trying to do other things and they don't have time to sit there and train people up on a job. They need someone in the job that knows what they're doing. So they bring me in. I come in and help out with doing actual recruiting myself as well as training their internal teams to help them over the long run. Sure, sure. Well, how is it? I mean, we're kind of in a weird spot. It's the beginning of 2026 now. What is going on in your world?

7:30So for those of us who are not in the recruiting and staffing space, there's been a little bit of chaos here and there. Give us a little bit of this kind of a state of the union for recruiting right now. Yeah, right now, it's definitely rough, right? You're seeing a lot of these big tech companies doing layoffs. And I think that just comes from a big overcorrection that there had in 2020, 2023. And what happened is, you know, during COVID, lots of layoffs. There was, you know, shorter business. And then as we started getting out of COVID, you started seeing a drastic shift in hiring. I mean, I remember at one point Amazon was hiring 14 ,000 recruiters, just 14 ,000 recruiters.

8:13Now, Amazon, obviously a huge company, but Amazon ended up doing layoffs at the end of 2022, beginning of 2023. So they were kind of fixing that overcorrection of hiring with now more layoffs. And you're seeing a lot of these big tech companies, Microsoft, Amazon, that are starting to do these layoffs. and kind of, you know, they like to call it right sizing, but really it's just a matter of overcorrecting or correcting the overcorrection. And now kind of the tail end of 2025, you're starting to see a lot of, I guess what you want to call it, I saw a post actually called it hygiene, right? So you're starting to see a lot of people, a lot of companies kind of figure out, okay, this is where we're at.

8:55We're going to probably let one or two people go, maybe add one or two after all the overcorrection and the recorrections. So you start to see that bounce back. And that's really common in staffing anyways. You're going to have people, you're going to have these big projects, you staff them up, then it either doesn't go well or does go well and now you don't need them anymore. And it's just, you know, unfortunate reality of the job market. Yeah. Well, how much is AI impacting things today? And again, I think there's been this kind of weird ebb and flow with all of that. And again, I don't know that anyone can necessarily predict, but what is the common thinking in your space regarding how this year is going to go regarding all things AI?

9:42Yeah, so AI, obviously a huge topic, especially when you get into what AI is doing versus what people are doing. And that can be a really touchy subject because, I mean, there was just a lawsuit recently where AI was screening out older candidates and the company was sued. So I've seen people that love it. It's great, and it can definitely be helpful. But I'm seeing a lot of people that are trying to keep the human in human relations. And keeping the fact that people are viewing actually, actual humans viewing resumes and not having some AI take out resumes before it even gets somebody. And that is, again, something that is very much split between the community from what I've seen.

10:28Personally, I think AI is great for those menial tasks, you know, sending block emails, sending follow up emails, but definitely need to stay away from the actual selection process itself. It's just it's it's not there yet. And I don't know if it ever will be. It's still something that needs to be done by by humans in order to get the best results, because I don't I don't think AI is there yet. Yeah. Yeah, it's certainly a lot of shaking out, I think, in what that's going to look like. And I think that, you know, you hear a lot of very strong voices one direction or the other. So, Pop, what is it like working with you?

11:08Explain your model. So to our friend that's listening right now, we just have a few minutes left. Where would they go with you? Who should be reaching out? And if you want to think maybe specifically about maybe their goals, their industry, your budget, that sort of thing, maybe define who absolutely might really benefit in working with you. Yeah, I mean, anywhere, honestly, anybody that is looking to hire, you know, those hard to fill roles, you know, any company from, you know, from 10 people to all the way up to, you know, enterprise level 1000 headcount companies, I am here to kind of fill in the holes that are left, right?

11:45So if you're a company that is having trouble finding a hire, needs to get this really mission-critical person in the role, I'm the person to come to. I'm able to really sort through, free up your recruiters and your teams for other things, as well as helping people find roles. So if you're looking for a job, you can go onto our website. You can find the looking for a job tab. Click on that. Send in your resume information. That'll go into a database that I have. and when I'm looking to fill roles, I go to my database first, look at people who I know are looking and I know have their up-to-date resume.

12:22As for industries, really, it doesn't really matter the industry. I will say though, my two kind of caveats to that is I don't do lawyers and I don't do like traveling nurses. I know that's a huge one. We've got a lot of carriers out here in San Diego that do the traveling nurses. I don't do that. Outside of that though, I've done a lot of biotech, a lot of commercial. you know, people looking for sales, marketing, those types of roles. So very big with that. And, you know, can definitely help with, you know, trying to augment your teams or even just maybe one-off roles that you just really need the expert in there to do.

12:58Outside of recruiting, though, I also do a lot of consulting. So if you need maybe some training, if you need leadership training, especially, you know, help, definitely there to help, you know, my education, my work background, very strongly work with leadership principles and really helping people kind of grow in leadership, right? Because just because you're a strong individual contributor doesn't always mean you're going to have those skills to be that leader that companies want you to have. So definitely available there as well. All right. So someone wants to connect with you, what do they do?

13:28Yeah, just go onto my website, magictalentsolutions.com, or they can also email me directly at bob at magictalentsolutions.com. All right, Bob Howard, founder of Magic Talent Solutions. Thank you so much for joining us, Bob. I appreciate it, Josh. Thanks. Semper Fi.

13:48Thanks for listening to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If your goal is to grow your business, increase revenue, and build authority without gimmicks, this show is designed for you. Each episode gives you practical insight from leaders who have turned trust and credibility into real business results. If you value short, thoughtful conversations that respect your time, make sure you're subscribed. We publish daily 15-minute episodes focused on growth that actually compounds. And if you're interested in being a guest or you want to turn podcast appearances into measurable business growth, visit podverified.com.

14:24You can start for free with your Podverified score along with free podcast guest training and a free media kit builder. These tools are built to help you get booked on better shows, deliver stronger interviews, and convert audience trust into revenue. No more desperate sales. You truly can enjoy all the business you like by generously sharing your wisdom. Everything we offer is built by podcasters for guests with a focus on trust, organic growth, and long-term business success. Thanks again for spending your time with us. I'll see you next time. We'll be right back.