HRExaminer Radio is a weekly show devoted to Recruiting and Recruiting Technology airing live on Friday’s at 11AM Pacific
HRExaminer Radio
Guest: Bob Corlett
Episode: 143
Air Date: January 13, 2016
Bob Corlett continually upends the conventional wisdom in recruiting, developing hiring processes that are faster, more certain, and far less expensive than the old-school, unproven, and unexamined practices used nearly everywhere.Probably because he can’t leave well enough alone, and almost certainly because he freely shares his innovative approaches, Bob has been named as one of the 100 most influential people in staffing. He is one of the unruly founding members of the Editorial Advisory Board for The HR Examiner, he writes a very popular nationally syndicated weekly column the American Cities Business Journals, and he is a frequently requested speaker at Society for Human Resources Management meetings.
Bob is a recruiting practitioner, founding his own executive search firm, Staffing Advisors, in 2002. Staffing Advisors quickly attracted a client list of some of Washington’s most prominent organizations. The firm conducts searches in every functional area and career level — primarily for associations; charitable, education, and other nonprofits; and high growth companies.
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Transcript
Begin transcript
| John Sumser: | Good morning, and welcome to HR Examiner Radio. I’m your host John Sumser, and we’re coming to you live from beautiful downtown Occidental California. If you’ve been listening regularly, you’ll know that downtown Occidental California is where technology got its start in the great state of California as Leland Standford brought his railroad laboratories in the town. Today, we’re going to be talking with Bob Corlett who’s the founder of a search firm in Washington D.C. called Staffing Advisors. Corlett is one of those independent, authentic voices in the industry who draw attention whenever he opens his mouth. We’re lucky to have him with us. How are you Bob?
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| Bob Corlett: | I’m much better after the introduction. I’d like you to just follow around in front of me everywhere I go and do that introduction. It feels like when they play the tune, the Hail to the Chief when the president walks in the room. It feels pretty good John.
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| John Sumser: | See, isn’t that Washington for you? You give a compliment and you imagine an entourage.
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| Bob Corlett: | Exactly, and I have a very large fictional entourage. I’d like to let you know that. [crosstalk 00:01:36] In my head, it’s a lot of people.
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| John Sumser: | This is why LA and D.C. are actually so much alike.
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| Bob Corlett: | Yeah, it’s acting on both sides.
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| John Sumser: | Acting on both sides, big entourages, and people in charge of flattery.
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| Bob Corlett: | That’s our role here.
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| John Sumser: | That’s our role here, so why don’t you take a moment and introduce yourself to the audience please?
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| Bob Corlett: | As you noted, I’m the president of Staffing Advisors. We’re an executive search firm, and basically I’m a business process guy who fell in love with an industry that’s better known for sales focus. A bit of background, I think I’ve been an efficiency engineer since my first paper route. John, you remember paper routes. That’s when you got yesterday’s news delivered at bicycle speed.
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| John Sumser: | I had one, I had one, but I’ll tell you, I sold donuts door to door. That was a better deal because you could eat the excess inventory.
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| Bob Corlett: | Exactly, and sell what people want to buy, yeah. After my extensive career in the newspaper business for a few years, I did sweaty work in a warehouse and I thought that was really fun, and kind of got hooked on operations management, so that was really the only thing that interested me. I went to business school for that, and then after graduation, I worked in basically what’s now called business process reengineering, and there’s a bit of a pattern.
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| I just love big, complex business problems. I particularly like the problems that live at the intersection of people, and technology, and business strategy. When you look around, I didn’t see anything more random and inefficient than recruiting, so I thought, “Well, that would be a pretty good place to keep me interested.” Fast forward 25 years later, it’s still keeps me pretty darn interested, so I’m a efficiency engineer trapped in the wrong business probably.
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| John Sumser: | An efficiency engineer trapped in the wrong business. Mr. Efficiency engineer, an off script quick question. We know a lot about how to do recruiting right. Why doesn’t anybody act on that?
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| Bob Corlett: | It’s not easy to do it right. It’s much easier to work on what’s in front of you. I think recruiting in general suffers from what I call the streetlight effect. Are you familiar with that?
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| John Sumser: | No. Oh, sort of, sort of.
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| Bob Corlett: | Everybody’s most familiar with it by the old joke of a guy’s walking down the street, and he sees a drunk. It’s at night, and he sees a drunk looking under a streetlight, and he says, “What are you looking for buddy?” The drunk says, “I lost my car keys.” The guy says, “Well, let me help you find them.” Now, why’d you help a drunk find his car keys, I don’t know, but anyway. The guy goes to help the guy find his keys, and after a couple of minutes he says, “Hey buddy, there’s nothing here. Are you sure this is where you dropped them?” The drunk says, “No, I dropped them over there,” and he points down the street to a darkened park. The guy says, “Well, what are you looking over here for?” He says, “Well, the light’s better over here.”
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| It’s the streetlight effect. I think in recruiting, people look for what’s in front of them and they look for where it’s easy to look. The real action is where nobody is looking. You have a resume in front of you. You say, “Well okay, what can I learn from that piece of paper?” The real action probably isn’t the factors found on a resume. When you run an ad and you get a stack of resumes and you look at that, you say, “Okay, that’s the candidate pool,” but what is really interesting is who didn’t reply, who didn’t respond, who’s not in front you. You start looking at that and you start teasing that out. You start to see a whole number of things in recruiting that aren’t obvious. It’s almost like the whole game is played where you’re not looking, and that’s what’s kept me really interested for 25 years.
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| John Sumser: | Wow, interesting concept. We’ll dig around that a little bit more. I would love to tell you right now that that story is actually a Sufi parable. I don’t know [crosstalk 00:06:20] if you know about this.
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| Bob Corlett: | Is it really?
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| John Sumser: | Yes it is, yes it is. It’s a hard part of the … The Sufis are sort of a mystical Islamic sect. This is the kind of teaching that they do, so it’s not a drunk. It’s a normal guy, and the person walking down the road is a Sufi teacher, and that’s the kind of teaching they do in Sufi. You might dig up some Sufi literature one of these days. It’s full of amazing little stories like that. [crosstalk 00:06:52] How did you …
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| Bob Corlett: | That’s amazing. I’ve heard the joke told 30 different ways. Never heard it as a … Thank you.
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| John Sumser: | Oh yeah, it’s great. It’s interesting particularly in this day and age when we’re sort of hard pressed to find positive things to say about Islamic culture. That source of wisdom of Sufi is pretty interesting. What of Staffing Advisors and what do you do there?
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| Bob Corlett: | When people hear the phrase executive search firm, people think, “Okay, well that’s some rarefied era where you guys just hang around in the board room and not in real life.” Particularly when you hear like Washington D.C. retained executive search firm, you have a whole another level of you don’t live in the real world. We have lots of high profile very prominent clients, but we have a lot of clients you’ve never heard of. Yes, we do senior level executive searches like all retained search firms, executive directors, and CFOs, and chief operating officers, and the like, but we also handle a lot of jobs further down the work chart that are equally important.
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| Probably the third thing that everybody thinks of when they think of executive search firms is you’re going to be slow, and ponderous, and pompous, and sales-driven, and arrogant, and needlessly expensive, and we didn’t set out to be anything like that. We actually set out to do what everybody else does. I wanted to start a company to do what nobody else seemed to be doing, and we just set different goals for the company, and the goal that we set is a different organizing principle. We didn’t want to be the most profitable, not that we’d mind, but we didn’t set out with the goal of just making money or just being the largest or whatever. We actually set out to make hiring certain. Fast, predictable, certain, and when you do that, you can actually make it less expensive, and when you do that, you can open it up to a whole host of jobs that people don’t ordinarily think of executive search firms for which is why we do jobs up and down the work chart.
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| In our business model, our biggest competitor isn’t just other search firms. It’s do it yourself. It’s the people who think they have to handle certain kinds of jobs on their own. As everybody knows, some jobs are really easy to fill in. Some jobs are really hard to fill, but at the outset, you’re never quite sure which ones which. You never know which way a search might go, and you hope you’ll get a terrific ad response or whatever, but you never really know at the front end of a search. What we’ve set out to do is be a bit more transparent and pick the data that we have to share it with our clients to help them make good choices, so we used our internal metrics to develop a visualization tool on our website that’s free, and it allows our clients to calculate their odds of success. You need a director of sales. What are your odds that you can fill that on your own? You need a manager of IT. What are your odds that that’s going to work for you in this current job market?
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| Now, our data primarily is for Washington right now, but the concept is there of we know what things are supposed to look like, and instead of hiding it behind some veil of secrecy, we just thought we’d put it out there so our clients can see for themselves. Our prices are posted online. When a client wants us to run a search, we’ll show them who we’re talking to. We thought we’d be because there’s nothing to hide, we thought are clients would appreciate the transparency. Here’s what’s in the market. Here are your options. Here’s who doesn’t want to talk to you and here’s who does. Here are your choices. When clients are giving that kind of information, that kind of insight into the job market, we find that we can skip the silly gamesmanship, and the negotiating, and the silly things that happen often in the search business and just sit down and look at it from the same agenda. That’s turned out to be a really rewarding way to work with our clients.
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| As a result, we’ll land about 90% of our work right now is with people who came back 2, 3, 4, 5 times. Some of our clients have used us 20 times. People really like the transparency once they get a taste of it, but most people haven’t seen it before. That’s the executive search firm with a twist story about Staffing Advisors..
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| John Sumser: | Wow, what a great story. You’ve been focused on hiring and hiring efficiencies for …
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| Bob Corlett: | … Ever.
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| John Sumser: | 15 years? Forever, okay.
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| Bob Corlett: | Since the late ’80s.
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| John Sumser: | Since the late ’80s. What have you learned?
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| Bob Corlett: | It’s something like this. A lot of what causes conflict in the relationship between a search firm or a recruiting department, everything we’ve learned is equally applicable to internal hiring, so there’s nothing different about what we do than what an internal HR department could do except of course we’re staffed much differently than a typical HR department, but the concepts work equally well. What happens is there’s a conflict. There’s an inherent difference between how the recruiter internal or external looks at the world and how the manager looks at the world, and very often the recruiter looks to the hiring manager to be the job market expert. “Well, what do you want Frank?” “Well, I want 7 years of experience and I want this and that,” and the manager gives a laundry list, and the recruiter just goes and takes that vision and goes to look for it.
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| The issue is the hiring manager isn’t the job market expert. They very often in smaller organizations certainly, they haven’t been in the job market in a while. They haven’t done their own search in years. They’ve had their job for a while. They may not have hired a particular skill for a long time. What happens is the hiring manager isn’t an expert in the market anymore. They’re an expert in the work to be done. They’re an expert in what they want to achieve, but they don’t know what their options are. When you ask them, “What are you looking for?” They’ve got one path to competency which is the path that they took. “Well, I went to Harvard, so a good education must be pretty important.” “Well, I worked for IBM, so therefore that seems like a pretty good path.”
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| What they do is they tell you their history of how they got to become competent in the area, but they can’t imagine all the other paths that people might’ve taken to become competent. The first things that we learned was the hiring manager really benefits with a little more market intelligence, a little more knowledge of what’s out there. Too many people in recruiting both internal and external, they put on their paper hat, they write down the order and they say, “Do you want fries with that?” They march off and look for what the hiring manager said they wanted, and everybody calls that normal. Everybody says, “Well, that’s how it’s done.” It’s a little riskier to say, “Hey, why don’t we do this together? Why don’t I show you some information and we’ll work this through, and as the recruiter, why don’t I take some ownership of showing you some options so you have some choices?” Managers love that when you do it for them, but nobody even knows to ask for it because it’s not what’s normally done.
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| John Sumser: | I think what you just said is that left to her own devices, the hiring managers view of who to hire is predictably skewed away from actually solving the problem. Did you just say that?
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| Bob Corlett: | It’s not necessarily skewed away, but it’s maybe 20% of the choices they could’ve had.
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| John Sumser: | Oh, I see, I see, so you’re under the streetlight again. This is back to the drunk under the streetlight.
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| Bob Corlett: | Or in the newly revised Sufi mystic, the ordinary person. Yeah, when you say, “Would you like a beverage?” The manager might say, “Yes, I normally drink coffee,” and as the recruiter you then exclude tea. The manager only said coffee. Tea is a perfectly fine beverage, so what if you learned a little bit more about what you want in your beverage? A certain amount of caffeine, certain temperature. “What are we trying to achieve here? ” “I would like to not be thirsty.” “Oh, then we can open it up to iced beverages.”
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| What happens is recruiters go from this very narrow just taking what the manager said and don’t do the next level of what are we trying to achieve with that beverage. It’s not a flaw in the manager’s world view. It’s just a gap. It’s not that they’re wrong about the 20% of what the job market they might have considered. They just didn’t know that the other 80% was worth looking at, and the 80% wasn’t even there to be seen. It was invisible. Hiring really has this persistent invisibility problem that what’s not in front of you is ignored, so it’s like what you see is all there is, but that’s just not how life works.
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| John Sumser: | That’s fascinating. You must have some pretty strong opinions about the idea that good market research consists of asking customers what they want.
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| Bob Corlett: | Good market research … Understanding what customers are trying to achieve is the thing that’s often left off the table entirely because all this discussion of skills, and 7 years of this, and 3 years of that, and this acronym and that credential. There’s all this talk of particles. There’s very little talk of what are we trying to achieve. What are we setting out to do? Then working back into what are all the different ways you can achieve that goal? That takes a level of understanding of the business problem to be solved, and what’s happening is all that knowledge is locked up in the head of the hiring manager and nobody ever asks her, “What are we trying to achieve?” Nobody ever learns in the process of all the things, all the richness of what’s in that manager’s head. Nobody ever comes back and says, “Here are all your other options.”
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| Managers love choices because what’s happened is the manager’s mental image of what they’re looking for is a declining yield. In 2016, this is the year of counteroffers. This is the year of multiple job offers. Some people are still having a terrible time in this economy, but over the ones who are being recruited. If you’re in that category, if you’re one of those fortunate people that is being recruited, you’re getting multiple job offers in 2016. What happens is managers when they’re locked into one image of how to solve the problem, they’re stuck and they’re grinding away on 20% of their available options, and 80% are just left untouched. That’s a recruiter problem. That’s not the manager’s fault. They had no idea they could’ve had a V8. Nobody offered them.
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| John Sumser: | You are about to be the world renowned publisher of a piece on the HR Examiner that contains 5 easy assumptions to make about recruiting. We’ve nibbled around the edges of some of them, but you have some pretty crisp and easy to articulate notions about what a hiring manager ought to be able to expect if he doesn’t fall for the easy answers. In particular, I like the one that says it’s easy to assume that you can learn a lot from a resume. The best looking resumes are what you should concentrate on, and I believe regarding to right now, tell me why that’s a bad idea.
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| Bob Corlett: | You look at a resume and you say … You make assumptions. Everything is a proxy for something else. If I say, “Hey John, there’s 2 candidates. One went to Harvard and one went to Penn State. Which one is smarter?” Tragically, your brain answers that question. Your brain has no idea which of those 2 human beings is smarter. The one who went to [crosstalk 00:20:43] Penn State …
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| John Sumser: | My guess is they’re both dumb.
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| Bob Corlett: | Sorry, that’s why we don’t ask you questions John. You’re off in Sufi mystic land. When you put something in front of a manager, you’re saying, “Okay, this one went to Harvard and then worked for [McKinsey 00:21:04],” and the manager has a whole set of attributes in their head about what that person is that they completely made up. They don’t know the first thing about that person except that they went to Harvard and then worked at McKinsey. They have a whole package of attributes and who they envision that person to be. Then you show them somebody else from a different maybe a socioeconomic class who couldn’t afford Harvard, and went to Penn State, and worked somewhere else because they didn’t get into McKinsey because they went to Penn State. As it turns out, the Penn State candidate might be immensely better to solve that hiring manager’s problem.
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| It turns out the McKinsey consultant might to have the remotest interest in taking the job, but what happens is you play out these fantasies in your head based on a resume and you overlook what you didn’t see. You overlook all the things that are not on a resume. Why did you go to Penn State? Why did you pick that major? What problem are you interested in solving? You don’t know anything about the candidate and why they’d fit your job or do well in your job. That’s what happens with a couple of things.
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| The best example is Trident sugarless gum. Everybody knows that 4 out of 5 dentists recommend Trident sugarless gum. What people don’t realize is when they did that survey, the fifth one said, “You really shouldn’t be chewing gum,” and the whole survey was if you were going to be chewing gum, what should you do, sugarless or not sugarless? What’s missing in that entire 4 out of 5 dentists thing is that most dentists were like, “What are you doing chewing gum? That’s not a good option,” but of the ones who had to answer the question if you were going to be chewing gum, 4 out of 5 said Trident.
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| In resumes in front of you, there’s a thing called selection bias. First, the resumes in front of you are not a representative sample of what’s in the job market. They’re just who answered your ad or whatever recruiting approach you took, so you don’t see the whole market. You see some slice depending on how you chose to recruit. Then once you look at that tiny little not representative slice, then you pick resumes based on your own personal bias, and there’s no other word for it, but bias is like, “I like people who went to Penn State because I grew up in Pennsylvania.” Okay, great. You like people who went to Harvard because of whatever you think. What happens is you get this biased sample size and a biased selection within it and you still have no idea who’s best qualified to solve the business problem in front of you because guess what? Harvard has very little to do with it.
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| Why is Google not looking at degrees anymore? Why is Deloitte in the UK trying to remove names and where people went to school? Because these things are not valid predictors of whether somebody’s going to be good at the job, but we look at a resume like it tells us something and it just doesn’t. It’s in front of us, so we say, “Oh, I’ll use that.” Instantly in the act of looking at what’s in front of you, you’re ignoring what’s not in front of you.
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| John Sumser: | Are you saying that what’s possible is to open up the world a little bit, but what’s not possible is to understand the entire market and get the best?
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| Bob Corlett: | No, no. What I’m saying is if you look at the easy work in recruiting of looking what’s obvious which is what 99.9% of organizations do. When you look at what’s obvious, you miss the important stuff. You have to consciously train yourself to look for what is not in front of you. Let me just walk through that real quickly.
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| If you imagine that what the manager’s definition of hiring is is all there is, then you ignore all the people the manager can’t imagine. If you look at the resumes in front of you and think that you’ve learned something about them without talking to the candidates, you’ve missed a lot of data. We’re huge fans of telephone interviews to get the rest of the story, so before you choose, I will talk to the Harvard candidate and I won’t interview the Penn State candidate. Well, if you talked to them on the phone and gathered a bit more data.
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| If you assume that the best looking resumes are the only ones to talk to, you’re ruling out just a whole lot of people. If you assume that everything you’ve learned in the interview process is all there is, you ignore the fact that the resume is a performance art. Some people are just better at it. Extroverts just interview better. If you assume that what you see in the interview predicts job performance, you overlook that a work sample test is a much better predictor of success. What happens is everything people do in an interview, all these observable things, resumes, interviews, all these kind of things. People never notice what they weren’t paying attention to by definition.
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| The whole process is skewed toward a very narrow slice of what actually exists out there, so you get way more options. You get way more choices. You get way more information and you make hiring far more certain when you train yourself to say, “Okay, what’s missing here? What am I overlooking? What am I ignoring?” When you train yourself to look at what you’re ignoring, you find a whole world out there that you didn’t know existed. It’s a real red pill, blue pill moment from The Matrix. You have no idea what you were missing, and most people have not trained themselves to do that.
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| John Sumser: | Interesting, so can you train people to do that, or are they always going to need your help?
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| Bob Corlett: | No, it’s actually pretty easy to train. Once people get a sense, it’s like one of those once you see it you can’t un-see it. Once you realize that work sample testing brings you a whole host of information that a interview doesn’t, you’re hooked. You don’t go back. Once you realize that there’s information you’re not getting form any part of your recruiting process and you see that there’s more stuff to get, you want it. That’s the curse of IT. Once you have one report, you want 3 reports. Once people realize all the stuff that they’ve been denied in the process, they really get hooked. It’s harder. You have to think more. You have to stop and …
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| You can’t just go into machine mode in recruiting. You have to stop and think, but once you realize how much is out there, it really expands your hiring options and it really improves the quality of hire, and you stop making mistakes. People find that very appealing, finding certainty in a thing that you just had assumed your whole life was random. People like certainty. There’s not a lot of things in life that bring certainty.
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| John Sumser: | What an amazing point of view. It would seem to me that as you get your method refined, there’s going to be a growing demand for the kind of services you’re providing. This is a different story than anybody else is telling. How are you planning to handle all of this growth, and wealth, and fame, and groupies, and all of that sort of thing?
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| Bob Corlett: | I have a lot of imaginary groupies as we’ve discussed, so that’s been very comforting. Trying to distinguish the imaginary from the real will probably be the challenge. I mean it’s …
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| John Sumser: | We’re back to mysticism already.
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| Bob Corlett: | The issue is this is a lot of people like simple. We’re not simple. I don’t think we’re going to grow terribly fast because you know what? Some people just want, “Hey, screen for the Hollywood casting. Screen for appearances. Screen for a firm handshake and shiny shoes.” Some people like simple and we’re not simple. A lot of our clients, once they get a taste of it, they actually put this into their RFPs and proposals and that’s great. We like being specified as, “I would like to see your methodical recruiting approach.” That really works well for us.
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| The plain fact is recruiting is going to do just fine on the superficial. Some clients are just, “Hey no, just find me what I want. Skip that other 80%.” Some managers are still going to be interviewing the way they always have because human nature doesn’t change fast. The people that are drawn to our approach are the ones who are saying, “Hey, I don’t like the results I’m getting the other way. It’s really frustrating to have random herring results.” That kind of thing John, you know that when you have something that nobody knew existed, it takes a while for that kind of a thing to catch on. I don’t anticipate that it’ll be like hitting the Powerball for us any time soon.
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| John Sumser: | You may have already hit the Powerball. We have zipped through our allotted time. Is there anything that you’d like somebody in the audience to remember from this conversation?
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| Bob Corlett: | The thing to remember is it’s entirely possible to confidently, consistently hire top performers. It’s entirely possible. It can be quick and efficient. It’s not easy, but we’ve done it literally 600 times. We’ve done this. My companies that test [bed 00:31:24] for this. It’s not easy. It does require some hard thinking, but the plain fact is that it exists. Now you have a choice, and I think that’s the thing to walk away from. It’s not that … It’s Mark Twain’s quote. It’s not what you don’t know that kills you. It’s what you know for sure that ain’t true. This is an entirely achievable goal if you want to do it.
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| John Sumser: | Got it. Take a minute and reintroduce yourself, and tell people how to get ahold of you.
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| Bob Corlett: | I’m Bob Corlett, and my company is Staffing Advisors on the world wide interweb at www.staffingadvisors.com. The best way to reach me is bob@staffingadvisors.com via email. I won’t give you my number because better to send an email.
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| John Sumser: | Okay Bob, thanks so much for doing this. It’s been great to talk to you and it’s been enlightening I think for the people listening in, so it was a real pleasure. Thank you.
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| Bob Corlett: | Thanks for having me John.
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| John Sumser: | Yeah, that’s just great. You’ve been listening to HR Examiner Radio. I’m your host John Sumser. The sun is coming out in Occidental, California. It is no longer the dark and dead night, so we’ll wish you a happy day today. Thanks for listening and we will see you the next time too. Thanks so much.
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