Talent Matters

We are getting pretty specific when it comes to attracting the right kind of talent to your organization. Recruitment ads are something that most people overlook, but we have a unique trick to writing recruitment ads that work. Jennifer herself helped us pioneer this technique with The Results Group, and she’s sharing her insight into this sometimes very competitive hiring market.

Before we get started, realize that you are going to need a standardized hiring process in place in order for these ads to work. You need to be very clear on the ideal candidate you want to hire and what skills and behavior they need to make their position successful.

To get there, we have to ask you some tough questions. Many leaders learn a lot about themselves as they try to figure out the position they’re hiring for. It’s all so you can look at the recruitment process in a brand new way and write new recruitment ads that actually work at attracting talented and motivated employees to your business.

Get started with these easy tips for writing recruitment ads:

We are going in-depth with these steps and more, so tune in now for invaluable insight into how to write recruitment ads that work.

Since opening up about our employee assessments and hiring techniques in our last episode, we are getting even more excellent questions from all of you! So this time we’re dropping nuggets about recruitment systems. We’re talking about what a successful hiring process looks like so you can start taking the first steps toward creating a recruitment process for your own business.

What is a recruitment system and why do you need one?

For starters, it’s the only way you’re going to hire the most talented top performers for your business. We discuss the kinds of systems you can put in place and a few “Manager Musts” you must look for in a managerial team (and yourself!) in order to guarantee that you hire and keep high-performing employees.

Your recruitment system will also give you what we call “The Four M’s of the Recruitment Process”. These are ways to measure, manage, and monitor your team’s and your business’s growth by setting specific expectations and roles for your hiring positions. You can also take steps to modify these systems to evolve and better meet your organization’s needs as you grow.

To create a successful hiring process you need to have insight into the talent pool you’re pulling from. We have a unique perspective of the hiring process, and we’re sharing a bit of our experience recruiting across industries. We really want to help you identify the type of person you’re looking for so you don’t waste time interviewing the wrong people.

Listen now for tips on how to attract top performers and new ways to approach the interview process that might surprise you.

This will be a high-level conversation about recruiting and hiring, so stay tuned for future episodes where we get into the nitty-gritty of how to create a customized recruitment process.

Expect a change of pace in this episode. We heard your voicemails and read your texts, and we decided to tear back the curtain and reveal the secrets behind the employee assessments we’ve been talking about in our previous episodes.

We are The Results Group, and we are a master distributor of Innermetrix, an employee assessment program. We use both individual and organizational assessments, but we’re only talking about individual assessments in this episode. Mainly we discuss the three assessment indices we use, why businesses and coaches use them, and how these assessments can be implemented within any kind of business or corporate structure.

To start, we use a combination of DISC Index, Values Index, and Attribute Index to create the Advanced Insights Profile that addresses the three most important aspects of finding and honing talent — the how, why, and what behind people’s motivations and behaviors:

Answering these three questions gives you deep insight into these layers of an individual’s personality. These assessments can be used when you’re looking to hire, promote, or train an employee by showcasing which talents they bring to the table, where they can fit in with your company, and what can be developed through further training or coaching.

We go into great detail about each index in later episodes, but for now, we want to focus on how these assessments pinpoint all of the little things you need to know about someone in order to understand their personal work style and ethic.

No matter where you are in your business or what role you play, you will always run into talent that is either struggling now or will struggle later. The data you garner from these assessments can prepare for these hurdles, and we discuss how you can use this data to equip yourself and your employees with the tools necessary to grow the company and evolve with it.

We work to help talent be the most successful it can be, and we share with you the different ways we look at businesses and coaches, and how you can utilize these assessments in different environments. Our philosophy isn’t to come in and rewrite the way you’ve been doing things, but if there’s parts of our system that you aren’t implementing, these assessments will help fill in those gaps.

Listen now to find out how to access employee assessments online and how we teach, certify, and train our consultants to help others use these assessments to grow their business.

Links Discussed

Beth Shelton, CEO of Greater Iowa Girl Scouts, wears many hats, more than you would think one would wear while running a non-profit. But when it comes to managing 70 counties of local girl scouts and 50+ employees (make it double in the summertime), Beth is responsible for everything from property management, animal care, water sports, insurance coverage, and more.

Beth’s experience in higher education changed her perspective, but when she found the Girl Scouts, she couldn’t have prepared herself for the rollercoaster ride of fun and business management she was going to run into or how much she was going to learn about herself.

Of course, we say “fun”, because that’s what it is — cookies and craft beers, leadership skills and campfires. But the reality of running a non-profit organization as large as this one means she has to make a lot of difficult yet financially stable decisions that keep the mission running from behind the scenes.

That means hiring and creating a team that is dedicated to the servant leadership skills she values in herself. Beth takes leadership from the bottom-up approach and sees her role as one that supports the team above her. She expects the same from the leaders on her team and makes hiring decisions that fit in with the culture of her team as a whole.

Looking for servant leadership like this doesn’t come without snags. Beth discusses how her own mistakes in recruiting ultimately helped the Girl Scouts grow. When she realized that she was getting too hung up on trying to figure out people’s motives, she started looking for new ways - and new people - to approach the hiring process.

What she learned that letting go and allowing someone else to take over actually empowered the members of her team, she knew she was on to something. A good leader knows they can’t do it all, and one of the best ways to empower a new leader is to step out of their way and let them get the job done. Odds are they can do it better than you anyway, and Beth discusses ways to recognize your own strengths and weaknesses so you can build a well-rounded team that complements your own leadership style.

When you see yourself at the bottom of the stack, looking up at the team you work with, you’ll definitely garner a new workplace perspective. Servant leadership can present you with new opportunities you may have missed before by opening you up to the ideas and perspectives of others. For Beth, it makes work fun, which creates an excellent work environment for her team and the girl scouts in her troops.

Listen now for tips on incorporating servant leadership into your management style and ways to get involved with Girl Scouts of Greater Iowa.

Links Discussed

Bruce Logan is the President and CEO of Logan Contractor Supply, a company that really knows how to succeed in a niche. That’s due in large part to the way Bruce trains and engages the employees on his team. Talent plays a critical role in how Bruce does business because he believes you can’t start thinking about getting customers until you have a talented team structure in place.

Today’s labor force is tight and inexperienced, but rather than see this lack of vocational training as a loss, Bruce saw it as an opportunity. He explored new ways to find the talent needed for his niche industry of highway construction materials and equipment, and he ended up creating some of the innovative hiring processes that we discuss in this episode.

Finding the right employees means investing upfront in the payroll for training and onboarding education, says Bruce. He is intimately aware of the culture of his employees and how they work well together, and he’s become practically obsessed with finding the perfect fit for his crew.

Experience isn’t always necessary if the candidate has the right personality, and Bruce will hire someone based on their work ethic and their personality if they have a desire to learn. Because teaching a skill is easy, but creating an environment that makes people excited to come to work is different.

You can create training processes to teach your staff hard skills, and Bruce shares some of those processes with us, but it’s the investment in the employees themselves that really pays off. When employees see how much their leader invests in and empowers them, they’re going to give you the best possible job performance that they can.

That’s where the Bruce Logan Leadership Academy comes in. It started out with smaller groups from the management teams, but today any employee who wants managerial experience can attend any of the Logan Leadership Training programs. What’s more, these programs are designed not to take longer than 90 minutes so they can be done during work hours and no one has to sacrifice their work-life balance to be a better employee and leader.

Bruce truly loves watching people grow and succeed, and figuring out the best way to get there with them is his favorite part of the job. Listen now for new ways to approach your hiring process that will develop a culture of people who genuinely like coming to work.

Links Discussed:

Katy Martin got her taste for leadership in the contracting industry. She was inspired by these types of organizations and more that are driven by their sales team and has ultimately uncovered the secret to hiring the perfect people. Her experiences led her to found The Smash Company, a recruiting agency that helps clients hire the right people.

She sort of fell into recruiting by accident, and she shares how that story ended up turning into the full-scale recruiting agency she leads today. Katy helps clients get super clear on what kind of business culture they want to build and how to hire the people that will make it happen.

The biggest hurdle she sees clients face is undervaluing the positions they are hiring for. No position in your business is more important than the other, and dedicating some time to vetting and hiring the right salesperson is worth the investment.

It’s more than just having a standardized recruiting process. It goes beyond group interviews and assessment tests. It’s being able to put your ego aside and focus on what a business needs, and it’s amazing what you can learn when you just listen to people.

Katy learned a lot from her own team, and she discusses some of the hurdles she’s facing as she builds a business from the ground up. The Smash Company is about to double in size, and she’s taken on the leadership role of preparing her current team of 28 to recruit, onboard, and train the new hires. Her systems work because everyone is actively engaged and personally contributes to some part of the process.

Katy trusts her core team to train the newcomers and build the relationships necessary to continue building the business, but she has a few tricks up her sleeve. She shares some strategies she’s using to not only motivate her team but making the recruitment process easier and more automated. Automated systems can set a standard for your business and streamline your processes so you can guarantee you’re hiring the right person for the job every time.

When is the right time to start hiring people? Katy answers that question and more. Listen now if you’re ready to start hiring salespeople and building your team.

Links Discussed

Fred Paul is bringing a new perspective to leadership. As Manager and unofficial Dean of Wacker Neuson University, he is in charge of educating the North American sector when it comes to how to fix or sell Wacker Neuson products and services. His leadership skills were put to the test last year when we had to figure out how to connect with his team remotely.

For those of you who don’t know, Wacker Neuson is an organization that creates concrete and worksite technology and equipment. It’s a niche market with unique products that require specialized knowledge and training. Paul does all this training and more by teaching soft skills, like leadership and management, to the thousands of employees who interact with Wacker Neuson products every day.

Wacker Neuson makes a huge investment in their training, and Fred is a salesman. Training is his opportunity to be more competitive. He can penetrate the market with awareness programs that pique interest and help people understand the products while still being interactive and informative.

We have both worked with Paul over the years and seen him at work, and he’s breaking down how his processes had to evolve with the pandemic year. The key to his success? Besides being able to think on his toes, Paul knows how to connect with people.

The success of his team is due to the fact that he listens to their needs and builds the programs and materials that fix their challenges. He calls it a “hand-shake business,” which requires people to get back to the basics of interpersonal interaction. For him, that means trusting your team, listening to their insight, and making decisions that benefit the organization as a whole.

Listen now to learn how Paul put all these pieces together and translated in-person training for remote learning without sacrificing that interpersonal element we all need as successful leaders.

Randy Keys just hired his 91st employee the morning we recorded this podcast. This is epically serendipitous because this is our first-ever Talent Matters Podcast episode, and Randy is someone we have watched grow from technician, to sales, to owner of Schaal Heating Cooling & Plumbing.

Last year, Schaal was nominated again for Top Workplace for a Small Business in Iowa and has been listed as one of the top five workplaces in the state for the past four years. Creating a work environment like this one doesn’t come without a few bumps and bruises along the way, and Randy has seen his fair share while growing this business over the past decade.

When Randy bought Schaal, there were just 18 employees. At first, he acted as general manager, hiring manager, human resources, and whatever else he needed to be, but around the 75th hire, he realized he was going to need some help. But he was very careful about what kind of help it was and where that help was coming from.

At the core of his business is people, and Randy’s main focus is growing his people. Rather than going out and hiring as many people as possible, he asks himself two questions:

The answers to these questions lie in knowing where people’s strengths are and helping people learn to recognize their personal strengths.

Randy learned early on that if you put people in the wrong place, they lose their joy and you lose their commitment to their position and their career. You can’t just assume your employees are having a good time, Randy says. Rather, he takes time to ask each employee how they feel about their position and what they expect from him. That’s the best way to guarantee he’s answering those two questions correctly.

But employee engagement involves so much more than a questionnaire at the end of the year, so Randy makes sure every leader at Schaal is doing something every month to engage employees. He shares which coaching and leadership courses prepare his team to engage with employees on an individual level, and we discuss the youth initiative programs that offer the skills training kids need to start a career with Schaal.

Showing this kind of investment upfront, proving that a company is willing to invest in the growth of its employees, can send engagement skyrocketing. When employees see that their leaders are excited about their success, they will follow your lead. Listen now to hear how Randy Keys is leading by example.

Leadership is about investing in yourself, but you have to seize the opportunities you have. Not all of these opportunities are obvious, others will hit us over the head, as Matt Moeckl found out. But for Matt, a chance opportunity and his own sense of leadership inspired him to create these kinds of opportunities for others.

With all of his success, he finally had a purpose for it.

Matt was always a natural-born leader, he just didn’t realize it right away. He’s a self-starter, buying up real estate two months out of college, creating a zeitgeist of wealth and opportunity for himself. But it was a volunteer opportunity at a youth summer program (don’t call it a camp!) that changed Matt’s perspective forever.

Matt’s first experience at Wildwood Hills Ranch, a conference and retreat center focused on leadership and life skills development for at-risk youth, opened his eyes to the fact that not everyone has the same opportunities that he did growing up. He focused on equipping these kids with the life skills they need to seize their opportunities, and he focused on a few of his own, too.

Matt learned early on that healthy, trusting relationships have the highest rate of success, and today he encourages his staff and his students to learn, experience, and prepare for lifelong success by being both a source of strength and investing in the personal strengths of his team and his students.

He discusses the growth initiatives he uses to train his current team of full-time and volunteer employees and all the ways he keeps learning from them and his students. He compares being a good leader to playing chess and explains how he prepares for the long game by investing in his team’s skills and their intuition, something good leaders learn to trust.

Listen now to hear all the ways Matt is building the next generation of leaders and how to connect with him for leadership training, volunteer opportunities, and more.

Links mentioned

It’s your unique talents that will prepare you for the future workplace, and our guest is someone who’s honed his own talents enough to help others.

Dr. Trent Grundmeyer, an Associate Professor of Education at Drake University, moonlights as a leadership guru. He owns Grundmeyer Leadership Services which specializes in training educators and connecting them with school districts in need of their expertise and skills.

He brings a multiplicity of perspectives to the educational world. He’s disrupting the status quo by helping uniquely talented educators find the perfect job. But what can you expect from one of the youngest principals in Iowa?

That’s right - at 25, Trent became the youngest principal in the Iowa school district at the time. Today he’s training future principals and superintendents with much of the same insight and excitement he had on his first day as principal.

Trent’s talents come from his perspective. He looks at the younger generation of educators as the ones with the fresh ideas that public school systems need to give the incoming generation of students a relevant education.

Many of the things we discuss in terms of leadership talent come from Trent’s ability to recognize that he isn’t pretending to be an expert, and he expects himself and everyone learning from him to treat all-new experiences as an opportunity to learn.

Education deserves new ideas, fresh perspectives, and objectivity that listens to the opinions of the student council as well as the school board. But hiring these leaders can be difficult. Trent shares some of the biggest obstacles he’s faced in training and hiring, and we discuss the ways he’s prepared himself to face these challenges.

Too often in education, many processes are seen as “the norm”. If it’s not broken, why fix it? But it’s that limited perspective that has kept a lot of public school systems behind the curve. We can’t expect to educate the future if we aren’t updating our systems to meet the future head-on.

Trent’s biggest advice for leaders in education and other professions is to keep yourself from getting too deep in the weeds. It takes talent to balance the minutiae of your job with the broader picture regarding the work you do. If you can remember to remove yourself every once in a while to look down at the bigger picture, the opportunities for learning more and just being all-around better at what you do will present themselves. It’s up to you to take them.

Listen now to hear all of the ways Trent’s skills and talents prepare future leaders and check out these resources that can help you improve your leadership skillset, in education and across other professions:

Links mentioned

(Add CTA depending on client’s preference).