The Full Desk Experience

Mike Gionta [00:00:00]:
Placements are an emotional nightmare. It's the one thing in the process we can't control. We can't control if Mary, the VP of sales, hires Joan, the senior sales rep from Chicago. However, we are influencers. A placement is beyond the locus of our control. That's why recruiters go insane, because deals blow up and they did nothing wrong. They covered the counteroffer brilliantly. They managed everything brilliantly.

Mike Gionta [00:00:27]:
But. But something just happened because the human dynamic and the deal fell apart and we feel like failures. Deals blow up. That happens. Stuff happens.

Kortney Harmon [00:00:38]:
Welcome to the full desk experience. I'm your host, Kortney Harmon. In the next few weeks, we're going to be specifically talking to the executive search industry and leaders who are ready to break through to their next revenue milestone. Over the next few weeks, we're going to deep dive into proven strategies that have helped top search firms scale from steady performers to industry powerhous. This series is going to provide you with actionable intelligence that you need to scale and have sustainable growth. Each one of these upcoming episodes is going to bring you conversations from industry veterans who have successfully navigated the challenges you're facing right now. Tune in over the next few weeks. Join us as we uncover the strategic shifts necessary to transform your practice and capture high value opportunities that are going to truly define your firm's revenue.

Kortney Harmon [00:01:32]:
To those of you who are joining us for the first time today, whether you're attending live or catching this replay, we really appreciate you carving time out of your busy day to be a part of this online conference. We have been very intentional about gathering exceptional industry leaders like Mike himself here and I am so excited that they've been here. They've actually, dare I say battle tested everything that they're going to talk about today. They have use cases and I'm not going to lie. And all of the conversations, this one is actually Michael, this is my favorite as we talked just because there's so much to this. So as we talk about this Mike, I want you to tell a little bit more to Mike has over 28 years experience from the Hudson Consulting Group, the founder of Recruiter. You. He has walked a mile and plus in your shoes.

Kortney Harmon [00:02:22]:
And actually his executive search Firm was ranked 11th fastest growing technology recruiting firm in the US second largest in the greater Hartford area. And he's going to talk to us about so many things essentially that self sustaining blueprint. I mean how would you not love to like leave your office for a month, not check emails and have productivity go up. So with all of that being said, I Am going to jump off of here. No one is here to see me. They are absolutely 100% to see you. So I'm going to jump off. I will jump in the last like five minutes.

Kortney Harmon [00:02:54]:
If you have questions, please feel free to put them in the chat and we'll answer those at the end. So, Michael, the floor is yours. I'm jumping off.

Mike Gionta [00:03:01]:
Thank you, Kortney. Appreciate it. I appreciate the opportunity too. As Kortney said now I opened my business, my recruiting firm in 1990. So that's going on 35 years between coaching and recruiting coaching in the profession. I'm like a 10 year overnight success story in that I really struggled growing a team, owning my firm in the first five or six years to the point where at about 18 months in I had about 600 bucks left in my business checking account and no receivables and had gone through my line of credit. Right. So I always share that story because this business does come naturally for some people and growing and scaling comes naturally for some people.

Mike Gionta [00:03:39]:
It didn't for me. And from my experience coaching now since 2006, owners of recruiting firms, it doesn't come naturally for most. There's systems and processes that when you follow the systems in the process, the systems in the process work and it makes the owner slash manager more competent. So really what we're going to talk about, and Kortney hinted at it, is kind of that inside game of keeping recruiters motivated and productive without micromanaging them. And to the point where when you do it the right way without you even being there, my whole business, my whole vision was to grow a firm that could run without me. And we scaled to over $3 million. And at our largest revenue point, I took a month off and was barely noticeable in the office. Can I honestly say I never checked email or never called in? No.

Mike Gionta [00:04:21]:
But it was not daily and it was not long. So. And when I came back, production was up. And I'm going to show you how we did that. This is what our clients are doing too now at the Recruiter U. And the Recruiter U actually was its own organization. We were the largest coaching company in the recruiting space. And we have between mindset coaches and strategy coaches, we have 14 coaches.

Mike Gionta [00:04:45]:
And we merged with Next Level Exchange in August last year, 2024. And I was and continue to be really excited about that for a lot of reasons in that one. Now I'm partnered up with Greg Dorsching and Jeff Kay and John Bartos and the resources that we're able to bring to our clients and actually Share with next level exchange, SRA and all the synergies with that. So for those of you who don't know me, I'm now part of this bigger entity. For those of you that know me, I'm now part of this bigger entity and it's a huge win win for all four of these divisions. So if we're going to get somebody to peak performance we're getting them to a point of certainty and confidence and which seems pretty natural if I'm really certain about my technique, if I'm confident that I'm able to deliver whether it's take great search assignments, whether it's find great candid, put marriage together, hire people onboard them successfully at the root of it. One of the things we procrastinate, one of the reasons we procrastinate is because we lack certainty and confidence. And the path to certainty and confidence is having the right plan with proven strategies, consistent implementation.

Mike Gionta [00:05:56]:
Reason I put that one on the bottom that is the foundation. There's a lot of people out there with a plan and strategies and very inconsistent if not non existent implementation. And then you cap that all off with the right mindset because one has to believe it's at least possible. And we're going to talk. I'm going to take you through a process that's kind of a coaching process because we sit here a lot of times and we ask ourselves I have trouble finding self motivated people. Why can't I find people like me? Well people like you are entrepreneurs and they've set up their own business so finding them like you is probably remote. And I can look back now. Early in my career I did find a lot of people that were motivated and disciplined and I put them into the wrong process and without proven strategies and I didn't consistently implement as their coach and mentor.

Mike Gionta [00:06:45]:
So here's what I can do in at least 45 minutes to help walk you through what that looks like. So this is a form we use with our when we bring on a new client. This is basically the form I use with my recruiters. So it's a game plan and you take one of your recruiters and it's real simple. What did you do in revenue in the last nine months? What did you do over the last 90 days and what's your interview to placement ratio? I'm going to talk about KPIs in a minute and why they're so important for you to be a mentor to coach and get productive recruiters. But the main thing is here I'm going to really emphasize is this what is so important to you about these goals? Oh, I'm sorry. Define progress. If it's done 12 months from now, I apologize.

Mike Gionta [00:07:28]:
That's the first key question. This is called the Dan Sullivan question. I would learn this from a mentor of mine. You sit down with a recruiter and I go, I want you to imagine it's a year from now. And personally, professionally, you've just met and exceeded your targets as a human being, as a recruiter, earnings wise, et cetera. And we haven't talked in a year and we meet a year from now. Tell me what that looks like. What does it, what does done look like from you being in that position where you're thrilled with your progress.

Mike Gionta [00:07:56]:
And that should be in the form of a story. It shouldn't be more revenue, more placements, higher fees, more retainers. I can't measure any of that. Plus none of that's emotional. None of that's emotional. I want to take my billings from 200,000 to 300,000. I'm going to be working on, I'm going to take my desk from 25 to 50% deposit based. I'm going to fire three bad clients.

Mike Gionta [00:08:17]:
I'm going to work at least two position at BP or higher and that'll really make me thrilled, to really make me think like I'm growing and progressing on my desk. And then the second part is, what is so important? What is it about 300 versus you just did two, meaning you might make $35,000 more with an extra hundred. What are you going to do with that? Where is that allocated? Right. Not spent. Doesn't have to be on stuff. But is it financial security? Is that important to them? Is it, is funding their kids college important to them? Is taking great vacations important to them? Is that a combination of those? It should be emotional. You should be able to sense that they're passionate about it and that they should be measurable. And then the flip side is, so Kortney, what happens if you don't hit that goal? You know, at 200, I'm not going to fire you.

Mike Gionta [00:09:03]:
You know, it's not great production, but it's not horrible production either. What happens if you don't make it? And if this is where you have to be real careful is, well, you know, I mean, I'm doing okay at 200. I'm very blunt with a recruiter. Then you're not going to fight for three. You're probably not going to fight for three because growing 50% in revenue, by the way, which does not require them to grow. Put 50% more effort in. They do it the right way, they can do it in the same or less time. But growing revenue, 50%.

Mike Gionta [00:09:32]:
You're going to have to change some things about your day, your approach and your mindset, and you're going to be challenged and you're going to want to regress to what you're comfortable with. So unless I'm really convinced as the owner manager that they are passionate about making the sleep, I'm going to sit there and challenge them here because it's important to challenge them here because it's basically like what fire is to steal. It forges it. Because now I know emotionally what they want and why it's important to them. Then here on the, on the bottom is your habits. I want to know. Well, we've tried this before. What has stopped you in the past? And it's usually a belief.

Mike Gionta [00:10:10]:
It's usually something like, you know, I just feel like I'm bothering people when I'm marketing. I don't have enough time with owners when we deal with them. It's too expensive. And those are all limiting beliefs. And I'll walk you through later on the coaching process, how you start to break those down. But I want to know mentally, intellectually, where they stop. The only way to do this that I know of is using KPIs and metrics, which makes a lot of people roll their eyes. But I want you to posit a company that does an earnings report where they're not talking about performance metrics, where they're not talking about rates of business closure.

Mike Gionta [00:10:45]:
How do you think they can forecast their revenue 3 months out? They know if they have a bunch of proposals out there, they know what their close rates are. They know all that stuff. In the absence of measuring activity, it will be very difficult for you to predict income, hold accountable, or actually build a scalable team. Pearson's law. This goes back to like the early 1900s. That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially. That has been my experience, not only with my own team, but being a coach now for the better part of 17 or 18 years, when we started holding our clients accountable through some of the structured programs we have, their performance skyrocketed.

Mike Gionta [00:11:26]:
And again, they didn't have to work longer hours. Actually, what happened after three or four weeks of this? When you coach your people the right way, they can actually get more done in less time. And so I always ask if I was in a forum where I could see you all and we were in a big room. I ask owners how they set goals, right? And what'll happen is I sit down and Kortney's on my team. So I say, Kortney, what do you want to build next year? And she goes, oh, I want to do 400. And okay, you did 200. And what are your strategies? Oh, I'm going to have higher fees, and I'm going to work higher levels. And a lot of times this is done around the holidays, and the owner rents a restaurant or has this catered party at his house.

Mike Gionta [00:12:03]:
And in my early days, this is what I did, too. And we go around the room and everybody's like 50, 75, doubling their business. And now I just had this firm that was 7, $800,000. And based on everyone's projections, I'm almost 2 1/2 million. And that never happened. Never happened. When you set goals that way, none of it's measurable, none of it's tangible. Everyone's excited during that 24 hours, maybe 48.

Mike Gionta [00:12:27]:
And it all goes away because we haven't put legs under it. I'm going to show you with GPS how we set legs under it. Because what we've all been taught to measure is placements, right? And for those of you who've seen me before, you know what I'm going to say. Placements are an emotional nightmare. It's the one thing in the process we can't control. We can't control if Mary, the VP of sales, hires Joan, the senior sales rep from Chicago. And what happens when you combine two human beings and this VP of sales who's worried about hiring the wrong person, and maybe he or she's a perfectionist, and this candidate, when they go home to their significant other. And we all know, as recruiters, I'm not telling you anything you don't know.

Mike Gionta [00:13:08]:
And as recruiters, we do bring people together that left to their own devices, that placement wouldn't have happened. I know that. However, we are influencers, a placement is beyond the locus of our control. That's why recruiters go insane, because deals blow up. And they did nothing wrong. They covered the counteroffer brilliantly. They managed everything brilliantly. But something just happened because the human dynamic and the deal fell apart.

Mike Gionta [00:13:37]:
And we feel like failures, metrics and KPIs. I'll walk you through this in a second. That's all built in. Deals blow up. That happens. Stuff happens. So we're going to define what a placement looks like. And if you got a $250,000 desk, I'm using very conservative numbers.

Mike Gionta [00:13:53]:
Even in this economy, most people that we measure, their numbers are better than this. But if you've never tracked metrics, this formula is the basis. So now let's just say you know that recruiter on that game plan call, let's say their goal was 250. Let's say their average fee is $21,000. Their first time interview to placement ratio 8 to 1. First time interview, we define that as a phone interview, zoom meeting, face to face, whatever. Just the first. We don't measure the seconds.

Mike Gionta [00:14:20]:
It's not that they don't matter, but they don't increase the predictability of a placement. So I want to measure as little as possible that it's going to help me forecast revenue. A straight contingency desk, five to one. We see a lot, we see lower than that. How many RP to fti? RP is how many candidates do you have to talk to to get one to go on an interview? Some desks are 15, some are 10, some are 30. If you're working like very senior engineers with a very micro niche, it's going to be lower, but their interview to placement ratio will also be lower. Meaning? Meaning I might have to talk to 40 to get one to interview, but maybe I only have to set up three on an interview to get a hire. And then marketing.

Mike Gionta [00:15:01]:
MP stands for marketing presentations. That is actual conversations. It's not LinkedIn exchanges, it's not email exchanges. It's an actual dialogue. I don't care if they pick up and they go. Recruiters should all go pound sand. Right One, it was live in this market, we're seeing that ratio about 13 to 1. So you're going to hear I'm not hiring 12 times.

Mike Gionta [00:15:22]:
Even a really good economy, you're going to hear nine times I'm not hiring. So what I always get asked, and I'll cover it in advance is why don't you count emails, why don't you count texts? Because of technology. I'm saying, I'm not saying we don't. I'm not saying in this mode that you should not use those alternate technologies to get people to talk to you. Absolutely, I do agree with that. It keeps these numbers lower. However, the reason I don't count them is because they don't build relationship. You don't build a relationship in an email or text exchange.

Mike Gionta [00:15:49]:
I'm coaching our clients, I'm coaching our people to ultimately get people on the phone even when they don't need you now because they'll need you. Later. So for this individual to make a 250, it's about 12 placements a year. I take 250, I divide it by 21,000, I get 12, meaning one a month. One a month. That means the person, if they're going to make one a month, 12 placements times eight first time interviews over the course of 12 months, they need 96 first time interviews or two interviews per week. This is how you create sanity at a desk level. This is how you create sanity for your recruiters.

Mike Gionta [00:16:23]:
This is how you create sanity as an owner. If this person's producing two first time interviews a week at these metrics, they'll bill 250. I've never seen it not happen. 30 years of mentioning this unless we go into a recession and sometimes the numbers switch a little. I'll talk more about that in a little bit. But this person, to get two first time interviews a week needs 1,440. 40 over the course of a year or 30 per week. So if I talk to 30 candidates per week, six per day, I'll get two interviews per week.

Mike Gionta [00:16:54]:
I also need a five to 160 job orders. So I need 1.25 job orders a week. I need to make over the course of a year, 780. Have 780 marketing conversations or 16 per week. Basically three per day. So nine conversations per day. And it's probably less. I would say, I would posit just from our experience in our, in the groups that we're running with new clients and solo operators, owners that are coaching their teams, that if somebody's doing nine conversations per day, they're probably at a three, three and a quarter level of billing.

Mike Gionta [00:17:26]:
Just a generalization again, I wanted to be very, very conservative with my numbers. So that if somebody just took this formula and just plug in your average fee, you'd probably not only hit the goal, you'd probably exceed it. But now this is what happens. The recruiter knows at the end of the day if he or she's on target to hit their annual number. I talked to three hiring managers, I talked to six candidates. I had two deals blow up today. I had a good day. That is actually the mindset.

Mike Gionta [00:17:55]:
And don't get me wrong, I've never stopped morning placements that blew up. But this person does nine a day. We've had a number of clients tell us that was so liberating. Like, you know what? I hit my nine and it was 4:30. And I pretty much did prep my candidates and on everything. And I would spend time with My kids guilt free. This is what liberates. And I'll show you here in a minute too.

Mike Gionta [00:18:17]:
This is what liberates you as an owner. Because I'm tying this number at 250 emotionally back to what they said in their game plan call a couple slides ago. So when I sit down and coach them and I'll go through that process, I'm holding them accountable to what they want for themselves. I'm not beating them up because you didn't talk to enough people. You got to make more calls like, you know, mean boss. I'm not, you know, micromanager. These people are adults. No, this is just like we talked about here.

Mike Gionta [00:18:45]:
This is the gps. If you're in New York and you want to go to Los Angeles and you're going to go in your car, you're not going to follow the stars and the sun, you're going to plug in the address in Los Angeles you want to be at. It's going to say take a right turn here, take a left turn there, go straight for 10 miles. That's what this does on the course of any given week and any given day. Not that I advise monitoring it daily with tenured people, but you know, if the person is on target for their billing goal. And just real quick, I'm not. It's the same numbers but for people, when they get, when they think about $1 million office where you can multiply three, four or $5 million office, you know, well, I got Joe, he's billing 350, I'll do 50. Kortney's doing to.

Mike Gionta [00:19:29]:
We're close to a million. And then, you know, Joe quits February 15th and like your whole plan for a million dollar office blows up. You never see publicly traded companies go, well, look, we're going to take a hit in earnings because our best sales rep left, right, just doesn't happen as a manager of a company. Basically, if you just go to this line here, Your firm needs 50 placements of $20,000 to be a million dollar firm or 400 first time interviews or 7.7 per week. And I would posit with most recruiters it's probably six. But again, being wickedly conservative. So now instead of going, will Joe bill 350 and stay with me, will Kortney do 200? Will I bill 350? It's. Is the firm producing 7.7 interviews per week? If it is based on these numbers, I have a million dollar office.

Mike Gionta [00:20:22]:
I have a million dollar office. So that's the difference in thinking and what a lot of People, they say, well, Mike, you don't get it. This is the mindset part. It's harder to get people on the phone now and people don't pick up and people are remote and it's not. They don't want to talk to us. I understand. And in some ways it probably is. It's very different.

Mike Gionta [00:20:43]:
I'm not going to argue, but again, I'm talking about what's working in the recruiting industry today, as demonstrated through not only, you know, the hundred or so clients of the recruiter U, but through SRA franchises, through starfish partners and their hundred recruiters is in some ways it's actually easier to get a hold of people. You know, what we have access to right now with researchers, people that can get mobile numbers and the right titles.

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Mike Gionta [00:22:15]:
So what we did, and this is where I don't ever want to use my opinion on a data driven topic to justify anything. We do this every month with our client. So with hundreds of our clients this year, and we've done this once or twice a month, we put them into what we call a power hour. This is a great technique to do in an office. If you're remote, put everybody on zoom. If you're in a physical office, just designate an hour from 11 to 12. There's no incoming calls, there's no emails, there's no texts, there's no social media. For this one hour, we're going to go old school, have a list, probably one of a list of 35 people to call marketing or recruiting, we don't care.

Mike Gionta [00:22:52]:
We do this with our clients and our power hour because we have to Give them five minutes of instruction. Because there's always new people. New to the power hour concept is kind of what I just gave you. They're dialing for another 45 minutes to 47 minutes. We cut them off, we have them put their numbers in chat, we total up the averages. And this is what we've come up with. After dozens of these, the average number of attempts is 19. And actual conversations in 45 minutes, 47 minutes is 3.9, meaning a run rate of five conversations per hour.

Mike Gionta [00:23:23]:
Some are higher, some are lower. That's why we come up with 3.9. So we'll go back to that desk where you needed nine conversations a day. You really need two hours, a little more than two hours of focus time on the phone. And then you have six hours for planning, prepping, debriefing, all the other stuff. All the other stuff. So this is just data. And we've done it with people.

Mike Gionta [00:23:43]:
And again, they never did this. They thought it was impossible. There's no rocket sciences. It's just a clean list of people to call in whatever category you want and then being very focused just for a one hour sprint. So just to show you that's how the realistic it is to be able to get to 8, 9, 10 conversations per day. So, okay, now we have all this data. We know what the person wants in their life. They know if they bill 300,000, for example, or 250 in this example, what that's going to mean in their life.

Mike Gionta [00:24:12]:
We've got what is about. This is important to them, whether it's reducing debt, putting money aside, et cetera. We want to meet with them, if not every two weeks for 20 minutes, at least once per month. And this is coaching for performance. And we don't want to get sucked into their drama. They're going to have all these stories. Well, the deal that blew up, deals blow up. I'm going to have.

Mike Gionta [00:24:34]:
I'm not going to use a coaching session with one of my recruiters as a teaching session. I'm going to use it as a coaching session. The stuff on technique, whether deals blowing up or helping them close the deal, all that stuff, I'm going to help them with that, but not in a coaching session. The coaching session is always about where they're at and moving them forward based on what they wanted for themselves. I'm going to keep saying that based on what they wanted for themselves. Why is it so important what they wanted for themselves? What they want for themselves is almost always more than we need from them for Them to be profitable and productive for us. So when I'm holding them accountable to what they want for themselves, there's an emotional attachment versus a fear based need to please you. So two, in a coaching session, these can take 20 minutes to a half an hour.

Mike Gionta [00:25:18]:
And again, at least once per month. Leverage your resources. And this is where coaching versus teaching, if there is, I just said if there's a technique issue, if you subscribe to like Next Level Academy or Next Level TV or any, you know, according to Danny or any of the others that are out there, you could say, you know, this is a problem. You know, there's a great video on this, on this site, on this module, go watch it. But I'm not going to teach the technique in the coaching session. But the process starts at the very beginning. I'm going to bring the person in and if it's Kortney, I'm going to say, you know, we met two weeks ago. You know, what are your wins over the last couple weeks? Where did you make progress? Even small ones? I want them focused on what went well because it keeps them out of failure.

Mike Gionta [00:26:04]:
And there's a concept called the gap in the game taught by Dan Sullivan. Again, I can't speak highly enough of him and their programs. And what he talks about is as people that are ambitious and entrepreneurs is. We're always looking at, it's like looking at the horizon. And again, if I was in a public forum, I would ask, and I ask you to just think about this for a second. What is the definition of the horizon? It's really simple. It's where the land or sea meets the sky. If you look out, it's where the land or sea meets the sky.

Mike Gionta [00:26:35]:
And the second question is, can you ever get there? No, we live on a wrong planet. You'll never get to the end of the horizon. And that's where a lot of times ambitious recruiters, there's always, and owners, there's always more to do. You know, we're not good enough, we're not far enough along. We should be farther along, except we don't turn around and look how far we've come. So this is one of those things. I wanted to take them back. I'm like, you know what, remember one of your objectives, Kortney, was to work on three high level searches.

Mike Gionta [00:27:05]:
You just got one two weeks ago, right? And I know it's a little sticky and you're having a little problem, but you're on target to hit your goals. That was a win that you stated, you know, two months ago when we sat down. And then once I have their wins and I've got a little bit of momentum, hopefully feeling a little bit good about themselves, I want to unpack their issues. Looking at your desk and your operation, what are one to three of your biggest challenges and or opportunities that you need to move forward and stay in alignment with that $250,000 billing goal? And I don't want to start to solve the problems, I just want to unpack them. What else? Say more. Why is that important? Why is that a challenge? Do you have any how if you were me, how would you fix it? And then based on that, now I'm going to get it to design their game plan for the next month. The game plan I showed you was kind of a big picture for 12 months. And I'll show you the template here in a minute.

Mike Gionta [00:27:57]:
Design a game plan. Your recommended, your what are your recommendations, your strategies, your recommended resources and what are their actions? What three things can you commit to doing between now and next month to move your desk forward? And this is also a time where I'm reflecting back. You know, I'm going to pull up their metrics and their KPIs and go your, your 89, you know, because you'll see this over time when you measure metrics. If they're 89% of their first time interviews, they're probably between 80 and 95% of their placement goal. If they're 85% of their recruit presentations, they're probably between 80 and 90% of their first time interview goals. Once you really dial into good KPIs, the numbers vary by only 2 or 3 percentage points. And in this meeting I'm also holding them accountable to you're at 90% of your RP, you're at 85% of your MP and subsequently you're 87% of your first time interviews. Meaning you're not going to bill 250, you're going to bill about two and a quarter, 200, 220.

Mike Gionta [00:29:00]:
So you're going to lose about 12,000 in commissions. Which one of these goals do we take off of your list? Because you're not going to be able to do them all and I want them to fight for it. And what happens with some people, bluntly you have to, you lower their goal and they're like, you know, I'm actually good with two and a quarter, let's lower my numbers. As long as you're good with it. And the reason this is so important, I'm linking everything back to what they want for themselves. So when I take a one week vacation, they're not sitting there going, Mike's gone. I don't have to worry about my activity and I don't. He's not going to be checking my phone time, which I don't while they're gone.

Mike Gionta [00:29:35]:
But I come back and I have the metrics report. And here's what I learned when I put this in place with these coaching sessions. I remember going away for a week and production was better than when I was there. Then I was like, I think a year later I'm like, I'm taking two weeks off. Then I took three weeks off and production went up to the point where they say go away more often. Because when you build the right team that is working for themselves and they understand the link between their activity and, and their personal income, never mind their billings, their personal income and what it means for them and you've been able to shine a flashlight and hold up a mirror all year long to them. That's where self motivation comes from because they're connecting their emotional desire to an actual activity level. And that's where I think most of us have fallen flat in the recruiting business is that's a huge thing that we teach is how to weave that together from the interview, from the very first interview before you hire somebody.

Mike Gionta [00:30:31]:
So we leave this coaching session with, okay, all right, here are your actions, here's the resources, here's the videos to watch. You know what to do, do you know how to do it? Are you committed? And we're going to meet again in 30 days or two weeks to go over this again. These meetings should take no longer than a half hour or so. And this is the, we call it the 20. This is the format. I can get you kind of templates of these. This is exactly the format I just talked about. Project.

Mike Gionta [00:30:59]:
Okay. You want to take on a project and people always go, well, what would a project be at a desk level? Project could be getting a retained assignment. All right, so the three actions is, I don't know. I've been all contingency. One action is watch the ABC retainer training from so and so. The second action is start asking. The third step is review with Mike and in 10 business days on progress and get coaching. It could be working higher.

Mike Gionta [00:31:25]:
I'm going to work a higher level position this quarter. I've always worked the manager level. I want to go to a director or VP level. Right. That could be a project. A project for an owner. When we do this with our Owner clients could be hiring a couple people, hiring a researcher. Those are all examples of the project.

Mike Gionta [00:31:41]:
And based on that project you can envision, you don't have to. We don't necessarily know when we, when we're taking on something we've never done before. We don't know necessarily all the things we need to do. But I promise you, you know what the first couple steps are. And generally my experiences and the laws of the universe dictate that once you take the first couple steps and you stay in continuous action some way, somehow the next steps start to become obvious and show up for you. So this is how to do a very simple coaching session. And I cannot overemphasize. Hey, going from doing an in depth game plan call where you emotionally understand what's going on in their life and their business.

Mike Gionta [00:32:19]:
And the story I share a true story was one of my recruiters was doing pretty well and then he kind of went into a slump and he went backwards, but he was still doing well enough to pay all his bills, take care of his family. And one of the things he shared with important to as part of his billing goal was he had a 14 year old son who he had promised to pay for his college. And at 14 he didn't have any money put away. So our game plan was what was the level of billings he needed over the next few years to be able to honor that promise. And he fell short activity wise. And in the first meeting we kind of had, okay, I don't ever get upset, I'm stay neutral. Is this something you still want? Is this a promise you still plan on honoring? Oh my God, I'd be devastated if I didn't. And after two or three months where there was very little progress, I just said, you know what, it ain't happening.

Mike Gionta [00:33:11]:
You're not going to pay for it. You don't want it bad enough. And I'm not sitting here as your judge. I'm just telling you from the data there's a disconnect between your activity and the revenue you're going to need. So let's just rehearse the conversation where you tell your kid his senior college, high school, I mean you're not paying for college, you didn't save the money and he broke down. And I think as owners and leaders, it's the greatest service we can provide. We're just confronting them with their future in the present as it relates to the things we can help them with, with their income, with their lifestyle, with time off or whatever and placements. Are such a frustrating way to coach people because yeah, if you have a lot of activity, you're going to make a lot of placements.

Mike Gionta [00:33:56]:
If you don't have a lot of activity, you're probably not going to make a lot of placements. But to see the one to one correlation and go, I, I need nine today. I need to talk to six candidates, I need to talk to three hiring managers and if I do that, I'm going to bill 250,000 in that previous message. Now, we all know, having been in this field as long as we have, that the placement isn't going to fall off the assembly line every month on the 30th like clockwork, at the end of 12 months, there will be 12 placements. I've seen people in my office, this happened to me, myself, personally on my desk. We see it with clients three, four months. We just saw a client go through five months of doing all the right things but zero placements. We had calls with her to keep sharp objects away from her.

Mike Gionta [00:34:40]:
She was doing everything and she's like, what am I doing wrong? What am I doing wrong? And that's what you do with your recruiters when you coach them. Did the quality of their job order slide is part of their process broken? And most of the time it's no. And we go, you're due for like five placements. And this was, this just happened this past January with a client of ours. She was due for five or six Between I think mid January and the end of February. She made four to five and it was like other stuff in progress. She was no smarter in February than she perceived. She lacked the knowledge in November and December when everything was blowing up.

Mike Gionta [00:35:11]:
This is what, as an owner coaching my own recruiters, where I could sit there and go, you're due for four deals. I looked them in the eye and it never not happened, by the way. It never not happened with, and we do this with our clients. Now I can look at them if they're a solo operator, if they've got somebody in their office and they're showing me their numbers and I'm going, she's due for five placements, she's due for four placements. And with our clients, they go, I know that you were going to say, I don't know when they're going to come, but they average out over six to 12 months in the metrics. That's the beauty of this. That's how you coach and manage people. So you can take time off guilt free and have your operation not only continue to grow, but the recruiters continue to be productive, if not more productive and real quick as part of this merger.

Mike Gionta [00:35:57]:
Two great friends of mine over the last couple decades are now are now my partners, Greg Dorsching and John Bartos. And we're doing the webpage isn't up yet, but we're doing this event in Atlanta May 1st and 2nd. The webpage will be up in the if not today, tomorrow Production Summit on unlocking growth for recruiting firms and solopreneurs. And it's going to have Greg's enemy too. He just released yesterday to us as kind of new stuff he's doing in AI for recruiters. The right tools, the right process, the right time for business development as part of managing the search process. It's utterly brilliant. He's going to be teaching that at the event.

Mike Gionta [00:36:32]:
John Bartos is kind of the chief investment officer of Starfish Partners. If I ever want to sell my business, Even if you're five or 10 years out, which is the ideal time to start going, what needs to be in place for me to maximize the value of my business so I could sell it, eventually we're going to have sessions on that. I'm going to be talking, I'm going to go into a lot more depth on predictable revenue and what the individual ratios mean and how to use that in your office to coach people and the secrets of effectively using offshore recruiters. A lot of people have tried using offshore recruiters and they've done it the wrong way. And we've kind of dialed in a system and a process based on KPIs based on scripting, based on approach for both business development and recruiting. And I put it in here. Even if you've failed at this before, right? Because a lot of people go, oh, I tried once. And a great metaphor I think Jeff Kay uses.

Mike Gionta [00:37:19]:
So when you were a teenager and you dated and the relationship didn't work out, you said, look, I'm just not going to date anymore. Or you know what, I sent this person out on an interview and he didn't get hired. Did you stop working on the search? Sometimes you have to go through a few people, but I think in the way we're going to teach it, we're going to minimize the failure rate. If you're interested in that and or you want a copy of the templates I gave there for the coaching session, just send an email to mikeg@therecruiteru.com as a university.com that's mikeg@therecruiteru.comas a university dot com and just put in there, send me the templates or send me the link to the website when it's up on the two day session. And if you're here and you send us a note we can get a hold of you. So Kortney, I don't know if there's any questions.

Kortney Harmon [00:38:04]:
I've been just chatting away, chatting away. I can't look at this picture without wanting to frame it.

Mike Gionta [00:38:11]:
I'm not going to lie to my marketing team.

Kortney Harmon [00:38:14]:
I love it, it's amazing. I need a picture of me and a sombrero. Guys, we have two minutes before we jump into our live other live event. But if you have questions, type them in the chat. We have two minutes to start answering and if we don't get to all of them, we can always send Mike separate questions to Mike for you to be able to kind of answer those on the side. So if there's any questions feel free to share them in the chat. Again mikeg@therecruiteru.comhappy to be able to send that later. If you guys have any other questions, feel free to also connect with Mike on LinkedIn.

Kortney Harmon [00:38:48]:
Mike, I don't think I have any questions. Feel free to write in the chat how much you loved Mike's presentation. I mean I know this is, this is like the love hate relationship Mike. Like it's like oh, managing people, oh hold them to metrics, oh all the non fun things. But this is really where the rubber meets the road and this is really where you grow your business.

Mike Gionta [00:39:09]:
And here's what happens Kortney. To do it initially it's almost like something new. It's, there's always going to be resistance. One of the things when we would take on clients and you know, a couple come to my mind they were already at a million dollars and they wanted to grow to two or three. And basically, you know, we trained them in a little more detail on this and doing that with their team. Like how do I do it with somebody? It's already like doing 3, 400. They're productive, they're great. Is you say, look, I've uncovered how to make your income predictable.

Mike Gionta [00:39:37]:
And what happened was when you present in a way of I'm using this as a GPS for your revenue versus as a whipping tool to beat you up because you're not doing enough. Which I think a lot of recruiters grew up in what I call an abusive numbers environment. And the numbers were never really connected to the exact specific price, precise billing. Everyone should make 100 calls a day, everyone should talk to 20 people a day but it wasn't connected to revenue. Once it's set up it becomes self managing. They adjust on their own. You're not sitting there every two weeks going you're not talking enough people. You're not talking to people.

Mike Gionta [00:40:13]:
You're not talking enough people.

Kortney Harmon [00:40:14]:
Yeah, I love it. It was such good insights. Destiny loved it. She said it was fire. Guys, if you have any questions feel free to follow up with me or Mike. You can do either. Mike, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate all your wonderful knowledge and I will frame your sombrero picture and I will send it to you later.

Kortney Harmon [00:40:30]:
Thank you Mike.

Mike Gionta [00:40:31]:
Thank you. Kortney.

Kortney Harmon [00:40:34]:
Thanks for tuning into the full desk.

Kortney Harmon [00:40:36]:
Experience specifically focused on the executive search industry over the next few weeks. Tune in next week as we talk to the next industry veteran that you're going to learn the best tips from. Have a great day. See you next time.