Step-by-Step Recruiting and Hiring With Danny Kerr

RCS Influencer Danny Kerr says taking the time to increase recruitment and retainment is well worth the extra effort. 

Editor’s note: Danny has plenty of experience working in recruitment and development and provides excellent advice in this podcast. You can listen to the entire episode below or read the transcript. 

Megan Ellsworth: Hello, everyone, back again for an influencer response with Danny Kerr from Breakthrough Academy. Hey Danny. 

Danny Kerr: Hey. Thanks for having me, Megan. 

Megan Ellsworth: This month's topic is what programs do you have for finding new hires? So, how can you speak to that today? 

Danny Kerr: Well, I've got lots of thoughts are on this. I spent the better part of my twenties being in recruitment and development for all kinds of people in the contracting space. So at one point, used to have a hundred resumes a day coming in and can tell you how I used to do that because it was quite the endeavor. 

Megan Ellsworth: Oh, wow. 

Danny Kerr: So first things first, even just speaking about this topic in general, everyone who was listening probably understands and knows and gets it, recruiting and finding good people is the biggest challenge in this industry right now. And it's only getting worse since COVID happened, since we started paying people to sit at home, it's become this massive problem. And then to top it all off, everyone else has more money in their home and everyone else is spending more money than they ever have because there's 40% of the money that was in the economy was printed last year. 

And we've created this really big imbalance, right? We have more money in the economy than we have people to do the work. And so for a lot of people, this thing, the general thought is there's just barely any of no good people out there anymore. And the truth is just like in 2008, when there was a recession, we are. We are in a recession of people though now versus a recession of money. And I think it's very important to acknowledge that if you're an entrepreneur or you're a person who has to problem solve the economy around you, the amount of shift that's required to be great at recruitment, to be great at attracting talent is I think much bigger than anyone realizes. 

Megan Ellsworth: So true. 

Danny Kerr: So I'm going to speak through a couple of things that I do. It does take some time and effort, but it is the effort worthwhile, almost more than building a bigger sales process and selling more jobs. We have lots of jobs, we need people now, so I'll walk through it. 

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. Cool. 

Danny Kerr: So one of the first things I do when I'm identifying a role that I need to hire for is I need to build what I call an ideal candidate profile. And what that essentially is, is I need to identify who am I trying to attract? What are their wants and needs and fears and aspirations and goals? And what do they think about every day? Because I know what I think about every day and I know that I could write an ad all about what I want, but if I do that, I'm not attracting anything. If I write an ad of all about what they would want, then I can attract like minds and people that are brought into the copy that I write. So a good example of this is one I use often is one of the first times I did this was when I had a project manager that I needed two more of. 

And I basically sat down with him and I took him out for lunch, and just was asking all these questions. What do you love about your job? What do you hate about your job? What got you started with us? What keeps you around? And really understood his needs. And in doing that, he came up with stuff like, "Danny, I love that you're my coach more than you're my boss. And I love that you give me freedom and autonomy to drive the crews in my own way, so I can just use my strategic brain and I love that you give me goals to go achieve and actually get paid to hit them." And he's like, "Dude, I'm the quarterback of the football team in high school. I get to use that same way of being on the field as I do with you and your business." 

And it clicked for me. Right? And I changed my ad from need a project manager, drive company truck, manage crews, to need a quarterback to drive performance in our team, looking for a coach more than a boss. Wish you had freedom and autonomy to drive goals in your own way? Wish you got paid to hit those goals? Boy, do we have a job for you. Right? 

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. 

Danny Kerr: And I spoke to my ideal candidate about what they care about and not what I care about, if that makes sense? 

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. 

Danny Kerr: So step one in attraction of good people is figuring out that type of language. And I often like to think through when I build copy, what are things that a lot of people in that category would think about all the time, but they don't necessarily say. And when you can get into the inner psychology of what people think about a lot, and that's what you write in your copy, that attracts like-minded people. 

So, in the game of recruiting, that would be your lure. If you're fishing, that's the thing that's the lure that's going to attract the right type of person. From there, you've got to cast that lure out into the right areas of the pond to make sure you get bites. Because with this recession of people right now, there's not a lot of fish in the pond. 

Megan Ellsworth: Right. 

Danny Kerr: There's still people, but there's not a lot. And so I think we all have to be very intentional and down to earth about what that's actually going to take. And one of the first things I'll tell you about marketing is when you're in a downed economy in 2008, I saw a lot of companies that would sit and wait for the phone to ring because they weren't used to going after prospect and then find people themselves. 

And they went bankrupt. And I saw a lot of other companies who are used to getting out there and driving lead phone themselves, going door to door, going to trade shows, calling back their previous customers and actively marketing. And there is a big difference between active and passive marketing. Passive marketing is putting up a sign and waiting for someone to call. 

Megan Ellsworth: Precisely. 

Danny Kerr: Active is getting out there and making the call and engagement. So how do you do that in recruiting? Well, there's a couple of things you can do. And there's two things I'll talk about today that I found are my deadly strategies. These are the ones that have worked the best for years and have been timeless. First one, probably the best one, is I use my employees network. And so what I mean by saying that is, I don't just ask them, "Hey, do you know anyone? Maybe let us know." 

I drop the profile, I draw exactly what we're looking for. I drop a really good ad copy, I've even gone as far as to create really good videos that show what we're doing as a team, but all in light of that ideal candidate. And I create a link and I say to them, "What I would love you to do is go through your Facebook list, your texts on your phone, whatever it is, and message a hundred to 200 people each. And it's not everyone who's a good fit. It's anyone who you have a good relationship with, has a good network or potentially is a good fit, but maybe they're not available. Maybe they are. And all I want you to do is message them this, "Hey, so-and-so. Our company X, Y, Z is looking for person X, Y, Z role. Curious if you know anybody who'd be a good fit? Please see link below. We're offering a thousand dollar hiring bonus. Be happy to share that with you if you did know anyone."" 

So my staff's not trying to prospect potential fits for me, they're just trying to get the word out. 

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. 

Danny Kerr: What they're doing organically is they're having people check out this ad copy on this landing page that I prebuilt that attracts a very specific kind of person that either will read it because that's who they sent it to, or they'll send it to their buddy and be like, "That's totally my cousin." And you're attracting people now that aren't necessarily job hunting on Indeed or Craigslist or ZipRecruiter or whatever. And maybe they already have a job, but they read that and they're like, "That's me. I should probably call these people." 

And you can imagine as your team grows, there's a snowball effect that happens because you have five people on your team. They send out a hundred messages each, that's 500 messages, which is pretty good. We now have a team of 30, so there's 3,000 direct messages that go out on a Thursday afternoon. And that creates quite a bit of buzz. And it's organic. 

Megan Ellsworth: Wow. 

Danny Kerr: So that strategy alone is huge. When you start to burn through your staff's network and you feel like it's becoming a bit too much for them, one thing that we've done, that's really helped as well as reach out to the external audience by doing this. So we go to LinkedIn, we use LinkedIn recruiter functionality. It costs some money to do it. And we actually pay someone to direct message people. So first what they'll do is they'll do an advanced search in LinkedIn. 

And so you can search by area, by job title, by past companies you've worked for, all kinds of stuff and you can start to screen based on my ideal candidate, this is my search parameters. Let's say it brings up a few hundred to a few thousand potentials. And all these people are just sitting in LinkedIn. You click to connect with about 250 a day. We do more than that in LinkedIn, so just keep it within about 250 click to connects a day. And then you'll have usually about 30% accept your connection. When they do that, you're going to send them four different messages. The first message is going to be complimenting them or talking to them about a bit about something that you've read through their profile. So it can't just be stock the whole way through. You actually have to have a personalized, like, "Yeah, I noticed you worked at Enterprise Rent-A-Car for four years. That's really awesome. I hear them amazing management training." 

And then I'll say to them, "I was curious, our company X, Y, Z is looking for person in X, Y, Z role. Curious if you know anybody who would be a good fit, please see link below. We're also offering a thousand dollar hiring bonus. And if you know anybody, be happy to share that with you." It's the exact same Facebook message, but you're just adding a layer of personality to it or personal reference because there's no relationship like there is with your staff, that would have the people that are sending that message to. And if they don't reply, you usually have two to three other messages that you just, "Hey, I wanted to see if you got this. Hey, maybe you don't check LinkedIn a ton." 

And then the last one is usually, I call it the breakup message where you're making fun of yourself and you're willing to let go of the relationship. And you just like, "Hey, just let me know either way if you're getting these messages so I can stop feeling so awkward about this one sided conversation we've been having." And just something humorous and just something that I find a lot of people do get back to because they're just like this person's just being a little less serious, right? 

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. 

Danny Kerr: I hired somebody to do this and they just do this through my profile consistently. And in doing that, we now have a pool of external people that we don't know, but fit the parameters of what our ideal candidate would look like, that they can either look at it and be engaged. Or like I said, share it with people they know, because like-minds know like-minds. Now we've got two active strategies in place that aren't passive. We're not just putting out ads and waiting, of which you should still do all that stuff. But these active strategies allow you to play the numbers game and put more effort in order to achieve the result you're trying to achieve. And I'll just wait and hope and pray. 

Megan Ellsworth: Wow. Brilliant. 

Danny Kerr: There you go. So have at it. Good luck. And hopefully that helps. 

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. Hopefully we helped some people hire some people. 

Danny Kerr: You got it. 

Megan Ellsworth: All right. Well, I will be chatting with you next month. 

Danny Kerr: Thanks, Megan. 

Danny Kerr is the director of assessment of Breakthrough Academy. See his full bio here.