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[Music] hey everyone we're back and we have a really interesting and exciting presentation with chris hesson uh with crelate and a couple things uh chris has been involved in staffing technology for almost a decade now and he's an expert at aligning processes world-class best-of-class processes with technology and previously he worked at the mri network where he was deeply involved in setting up processes for over 300 mri network firms supporting over 3 000 recruiters so he's really been someone that's been operating at process improvement at scale and just a quick word about crelate crelate is uh kind of an amazing company they are real up and comer in the ats space they've gone from zero to over a thousand customers in just a few years not only that they are getting incredible reviews on g2 crowd so if you're looking for an ats i would definitely um encourage you to check them out um and so with that i'm going to turn things over to chris chris it's all yours thank you maurice i really appreciate it thank you so much for the opportunity to speak here with everyone um so first off welcome we're excited to have staffing tech virtually this year i think this will be the first of many uh virtual conferences to come over upcoming months so maurice really look forward to uh seeing the work you put on here thank you um like murray said i come out of the recruiting world and ultimately i still view myself as a recruiter as you hear me talk i'll refer to we or or us because i don't think you can be a an ex-recruiter um you're once a recruiter always a recruiter and even though i've been involved in the technology side in the operations and process improvement and everything i've done is through the mindset of what does it take to sit down pick up the phone make the dial talk to your candidate and ultimately close a deal or bring in a client and i think ultimately that's my been my main focus is adding simplicity and adding process to what we do and how we do it in the staffing world and when it comes to staffing and it comes to sales in general i think the biggest piece to keep in mind is ultimately we are dealing with human beings and humans are wonderful terrible beautiful messy creatures of infinite complexity and that's what makes staffing so much fun that what is also what makes it so much hard but from a process standpoint we need to be able to understand how humans operate and what they do so dealing with humans is what makes staffing sales a challenge it's what makes it exciting that and the money so what we're going to look at is how we can define our sales process in the staffing world and definition is going to be key and we're going to talk about where the human needs to be involved but where we can lean on non-humans where we can push on automation on robots on machine learning in order to help us become more efficient or better at what we do so i'm going to share my screen here maurice can you just confirm that's coming through excellent so this is a quote feel free to attribute it to me i've said it for years if you don't have a clearly defined process then everyone is doing it wrong and i want that to sink in for a moment i've worked with a lot of firms going from individual solo in people running their desk through 150 plus employees and no matter what size firm there is a process the question is do you have that defined have you sat down and and expounded upon what do i do and how do i do it and where process becomes important is enabling scalability enabling repeatability and also enabling you to be efficient in how you spend your time and money and in all honesty i think time is the more important of those two it's the one resource once it's spent we will never get it back and from a recruiting standpoint we need to look at where we should spend our time doing things first where we can have something else supporting us so ultimately staffing is going to be about human beings and this is where from a human side we need to understand our own internal process the biggest challenge i think most organizations look at is when you have a larger team and everybody does it a little bit differently having that differentiation in how your firm operates can be the death to scaling and growing and let's talk about defining process and what that looks like i always recommend when i partner with our customers or firms starting with the end first and in the staffing sales side that might be getting the placement and beginning to recruit on a search that may be the end goal for me from the sales perspective so sit down and look at your firm and say if my end goal is excellent we brought the search in now we're working on it maybe it's you working on it maybe you're handing it off to a recruiter or a sourcer but what comes immediately prior to that in your sales process what had to happen in order for you to say yes i'm actively working on a search and what had to happen immediately prior to that and how about prior to that going through is going to enable you to really identify what is your sales process and what is your workflow now ultimately it may look something very similar to this you might have some minor adjustments minor changes but ultimately we have a sourcing bucket we begin with and i'm referring to sourcing potential clients some may call it or view prospecting as well but this is identifying who are the companies who are the hiring managers that i'm going to reach out to this may be a product of targeting specific companies this may be a product of looking at indeed looking at job boards and finding openings that i know fit my wheelhouse and i have contractors available once we've had the identification stage then we look at prospecting and by prospecting i refer to picking up the phone pulling up an email typing and getting ready to go out there most recruiters have a qualifying stage from a staffing standpoint this is where you have that conversation maybe receive a job description there has to be some piece of transfer of information from the organization that needs your help then we move to recruiting ultimately to negotiation and finally what we're all in it for you make a placement and you make some profit now if these are your large buckets and i strongly recommend you look at what are the buckets for your firm 30 000 foot view what are the major stages in your process and write them down spell them out and if you're in a leadership capacity don't just take your thought of this meet with individual team members meet with the people actually out working on your sales team what is their process how do they operate i think often you'll see be surprised when you find everybody's doing it different let's add alignment pull everyone together on how is our firm's operational style recruiting is a business where there's more than one way to skin a cat same with the sales component we need to align that and understand what people do where this will enable you to really dive deep is understanding in each of your buckets what are the actions you're actually taking in the sourcing side you may write down and create your list of i'm planning and even if the planning only occurs in your head you have some semblance of understanding who am i reaching out to why am i reaching out when am i going to call them we're going to prioritize who am i going to call first verse maybe second who am i emailing verse who am i sending a linkedin message to and if that's all happening in your head write it down think through that process then we have our processing what are you doing when you're reaching out every firm may be different i've worked with some that still pound the phone incredibly hard to this day hitting a hundred plus calls that's not everybody there's other firms that are sending thousands of emails out every day there's others that are using linkedin and social media and other means texting to get a hold of their potential clients or hiring managers how are you reaching out when you look at the prospecting component what do you what tool do you use and when do you do it hopefully some of you have heard of the concept of sequencing this is something that automation has a lot of power to help with we'll talk about that in a minute but where that really ties in is what tool are you using when do you do it how do you reach out to make that connection when you qualify a job lead you're speaking with a hiring manager you have them either on the phone you're interacting with them over email you're learning about a job what are you doing to demonstrate your value from an activity standpoint often in that conversation we're finding pain we're trying to identify what are the pain points that are hiring managers going through if there is no pain there is no check they are writing to you at the end of the day companies do not want to pay a recruiter they have to pay a recruiter demonstrate your value from our process standpoint when we actually get to our recruiting workflow that would be a separate conversation of diving deep into how do you recruit when do you recruit what tools do you do developing your process ultimately the main goal here is identifying at each step in your workflow what are the specific activities you are doing and again i can't stress enough write them down formalize the information from your brain put it down on paper or put it into a computer and ultimately where this becomes important is we need to identify which are the human elements and which we can automate and while sales and staffing may be about humans automation is all about robots and i say that a little tongue-in-cheek unfortunately our automation tools are not as cute as this fellow here but ultimately automation is us handing human activities and giving it to a machine to do for us and i think that's incredibly key because what we're doing is we're understanding evaluating our internal processes and defining where does a human not need to be involved now one of the dangers i've seen some firms into is just decide that i want to automate everything and there are tons of tools to be able to help but if you remo remove humans entirely from your process you are removing any need for yourself and although automation is increasing every year and ai is increasing every year and there's more and more that machines are capable of doing it will never remove completely the human element from staffing it will never remove the human element from sales so if you look at when do we automate look at what are the repetitive tasks you're doing what are those specific activities in your workflow that it's doing the same thing over and over again when i ran a desk every time i left a voicemail i always wanted to have an email follow up to it not only did i want a light blinking on their phone i wanted them to feel it in their pocket because everybody's work phone has their email address on it so every voicemail i left i had an automation where immediately they would receive an email saying maurice it's chris hessen i just looked at your message here's my number give me a call back when you're free very simple automation but that one repetitive task something i would do a hundred times throughout the course of a day a machine can do that there is no critical thought involved in that whatsoever if you look at um you know digital marketing we can have target identification there's other elements machines can really dive deep when you look at your process the clear distinction is is it something repetitive that does not require critical thinking if the answer is yes to both of those questions that is something to automate if the answer is no you still need a human involved in your process so let's look at the robot to-do list what can automation do for your firms automation and robots they can publish posts on social media you don't need to sit on twitter or instagram or linkedin or facebook and type every manual post and send them out we have automation that can manage that for you sending bulk emails out having targeted campaigns developing a sequence of hey if they haven't responded in four days send them a second follow-up automation can manage that once you define your process there is no critical thinking involved it's execution website widgets if you've ever been to a site and you see a chat bot where you can kind of talk and get some info or or ideas that is all automated bulk text ad placements data management um sequencing these are all things that are repetitive tasks that machines and automation can do that aren't worth your time as a recruiter they need to be done but a human does not need to be the person doing it now if we have a robot to-do list we need to compare that to what is the human to-do list and in all honesty this is where you add value the items on this list are so unbelievably critical because this is what differentiates you from every other staffing firm out there every recruiting firm will have access to the same automation tools they will not have access to the same humans as a human we need to build relationships and trust a computer cannot do that we need to persuade automation cannot manage that for us we need to instill confidence so our clients are confident in our process in our ability in our capability a machine can't do that focus on differentiation my favorite in all honesty and i should have put this the top is passion and sincerity i think that is what differentiates most staffing whether you're in sales or recruiting from any of your competitors when you speak with your candidates when you speak with your clients are you passionate do you care about what your client is going through do you care what the candidate is going through that is something that absolutely cannot be d a machine cannot replicate that as we look at digital marketing developing content this is something a human should be doing you know your audience you know what they do you know what they think about writing content we as humans need to do that ultimately making decisions and thinking strategically are elements that the human being is intricately required in so as you go through define your process what are your workflow steps identify the specific activities you undertake in your daily staffing sales process and last is this something that humans should do or can a robot do it for you everyone i really appreciate your time again this is chris hesson with kerleigh and maurice thank you so much for uh having the time today all right uh hey that was an incredible presentation uh chris um i i've been doing recruiting processes and technology for a long time but you completely nailed it right there in your presentation in terms of what matters and the other thing i loved about your presentation was you really kind of spoke to the future of recruiting where more and more tasks are being automated but what's left for for humans and and that human to do list is really where we're headed as an industry so um thank you so much i think lots of hard-won lessons learned and i think if you take this um into what you're doing you can really uh gain some efficiencies in your uh recruiting processes [Music]