Transcript
Speaker: Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the Transform Recruiting Podcast.
Speaker: As always, I'm your host, Brad Owens.
Speaker: But through this crazy recruiting world, you get introduced to some quite amazing people.
Speaker: In a very small world way, I got introduced to someone that I'm really interested to have you all hear more from.
Speaker: There are rare people in the recruiting space that really understand how to scale recruiting.
Speaker: I know there's a lot of you out there that are really listening and thinking, all right, I've got one, maybe two, three people.
Speaker: How in the world do we scale this thing?
Speaker: Because this is not going to make enough money.
Speaker: I've got to get out of just managing deals.
Speaker: I've got to actually make some money here.
Speaker: How do I scale this thing?
Speaker: Well, this person has done that and they consider themselves quite an expert on the subject.
Speaker: So I'm curious to have you all learn a little bit more from Mr. Jeremy Jetson.
Speaker: Jeremy, welcome to the show, man.
Speaker: Excellent, man.
Speaker: Thanks for having me.
Speaker: I'm excited to be on.
Speaker: So give everyone just a little 30 second, one minute intro on who is Jeremy so they know where you're coming from.
Speaker: Excellent.
Speaker: So I own a 38 person direct hire recruiting firm here in Houston.
Speaker: It's called Encore Search Partners.
Speaker: I'm the founder and CEO.
Speaker: My first business was actually a lead generation business that I started in 2010.
Speaker: And then I did that for a couple of years and I realized, holy shit, man, like all my clients are staffing and recruiting companies.
Speaker: Why am I charging these guys like three, four thousand a month?
Speaker: And then they're making three, four direct hire placements a month from the service that I do.
Speaker: So in 2013, I started a recruiting company and I accidentally got into the space.
Speaker: And so for the last 10 years, we've grown from, you know, just me as a solo recruiter to now we've got 38 employees.
Speaker: Everybody's at W2.
Speaker: We're extremely corporate.
Speaker: We've got base salaries.
Speaker: We've got 401k.
Speaker: We've got an in-house performance and mindset coach, world-class amenities.
Speaker: And I just feel like we've built the best recruiting firm in the entire United States, man.
Speaker: That's incredible.
Speaker: We've got a lot of people that would want to get to that point.
Speaker: So when you had that realization of, hey, I'm generating all these leads, I could probably be a pretty good recruiter.
Speaker: And then you turn into recruiting and be like, hey, I'm actually a pretty OK recruiter.
Speaker: What was that realization point of, hey, this thing needs to be bigger?
Speaker: Kind of when did that hit you?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So one of the things that was never really a challenge for myself was generating job orders, right?
Speaker: Because of my lead generation background.
Speaker: And so, you know, whenever I was, you know, 27, 28 years old and I was making a quarter million dollars a year, it could have been real easy to get complacent on saying, hey, I'm doing enough.
Speaker: This is somewhat of a lifestyle business.
Speaker: But I never really turned off that lead generation funnel, that spigot.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so I kind of grew by accident because the job orders were essentially forcing me to hire new recruiters constantly.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so I hired the first one in January of 13, a second one in May, another one in September.
Speaker: And then the rest is history, just organic growth from there.
Speaker: Being in Houston, Texas, we were really tied to the oil and gas industry.
Speaker: In late 2014, the price of oil went from $128 a barrel down to about 60 in less than three weeks.
Speaker: And so that really put a massive throttle on the recruiting industry here in Houston, which forced us to diversify nationwide.
Speaker: And then we kind of just, you know, released our lead generation and email marketing efforts on a national basis and and rebranded in 2015.
Speaker: And here we are on core search partners.
Speaker: That's so fun.
Speaker: I'm sure you've got hundreds and hundreds of stories of, oh, my gosh, I made this huge mistake.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: So thinking back to just that very early days of maybe you've got one, two, your third recruiter comes on the end of the year.
Speaker: What kind of things looking back on them when you're like, man, I wish I would not have done that.
Speaker: Oh man, there's probably a long list, right?
Speaker: Um, you know, I wish I would have hired an operator much sooner than I did.
Speaker: Um, you know, you look at me starting the business, the original business back in 2010, um,
Speaker: I'd grown into about a million dollars in revenue.
Speaker: And again, that's a pretty good lifestyle business in direct hire.
Speaker: I was making five, six hundred grand.
Speaker: I had some associates that were doing the candidate side of the deal and I was keeping the account side and I was really working a ton, man.
Speaker: I was I was really focused on grinding and hustling and building my business.
Speaker: And I had this false sense of accomplishments, this false sense of security.
Speaker: And really what was happening is, is I was spending so much time worrying about filling job orders and doing job order intakes to where my marriage was failing.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I had three young kids under four.
Speaker: I had a working wife.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: and really just wasn't developing the emotional time that was needed in order to keep the marriage strong.
Speaker: And so I reached out to a buddy of mine who I had known through Vistage, which is a peer-to-peer executive advisory group.
Speaker: And I was kind of complaining and he said, all right, let's grab a beer.
Speaker: And I didn't want to leave.
Speaker: So I invited him over to the house and we're hanging out on the back patio.
Speaker: And I basically was complaining about my business.
Speaker: You know, I've got recruiters that are lazy.
Speaker: You know, these guys are making, you know, $150,000, $200,000 a year.
Speaker: They're taking two hour lunch breaks.
Speaker: They're doing coke at their desk.
Speaker: They're not providing an amazing candidate experience.
Speaker: They're kind of just getting complacent.
Speaker: Because they've got this never ending supply of job orders.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And and he basically said, you need somebody to come in and run your business.
Speaker: And so he planted the seed, you know, over the course of the next three months, we developed a compensation structure that gave him the confidence to walk away from one hundred and sixty K job.
Speaker: to where I gave him kind of like a 100K base and then a percentage of revenue.
Speaker: And so, you know, in the first year, I could keep him whole on comp just if we stayed flat.
Speaker: But he was really focused on bringing processes, systems, and technology into the organization.
Speaker: That way we could lay the groundwork to scale.
Speaker: And that was what was critical into helping us become a real company and not just a lifestyle business.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You talk about that groundwork, though.
Speaker: That's the part that came back to bite me consistently when I was building up the firm that I had.
Speaker: It always seemed like we were reinventing the wheel every time a new search came in or we were trying to, I don't know, like a new recruiter would come on and we'd have the same sort of, well, just sit with someone and you'll kind of learn as you go.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's so rough.
Speaker: So when you think about your systems you started putting in place to help with that scale, any top things come to mind for you as a like this was killer?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: So Scott joined the organization back in, let's say, November of 2016 in December of 2017.
Speaker: So mind you, it's been a full year of him just kind of learning our industry.
Speaker: He wasn't even in recruiting.
Speaker: He was the director of sales and operations for an IT outsourcing.
Speaker: And he had helped them scale from 6 million to 35 million, kind of as a, you know, an individual contributor, then a mid-level manager, and then a director.
Speaker: And so he'd kind of seen how the sauce was made, right?
Speaker: But he brought in a system called EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System.
Speaker: Are you familiar with EOS?
Speaker: Oh yeah, Traction's on my bookshelf.
Speaker: Love it.
Speaker: So he was an expert in Traction.
Speaker: It took him a year to learn our business before he felt comfortable implementing traction.
Speaker: And then implementing that groundwork, right, it kind of forced us to do a 90 percent turnover of our personnel.
Speaker: And then that way we can get everybody on board that kind of bred the same mission, vision and values as us.
Speaker: And then that's really what accelerated our growth from there.
Speaker: I like it.
Speaker: Yeah, the EOS stuff is I still use their what's the 90, whatever that meeting style they've got.
Speaker: I forgot.
Speaker: Level 10.
Speaker: Yeah, I just do it.
Speaker: L10.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Excellent.
Speaker: So you've got these systems now.
Speaker: You've got these recruiters that are firing on all cylinders, hopefully after 90 percent turnover.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: But you got these recruiters that are firing on all cylinders.
Speaker: What was the next thing that you were like, oh, wasn't expecting that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So when the bottom fell out of the market, right, in 15, we were really, really invested into oil and gas.
Speaker: And that spawned me to bring in an individual contributor that had a complementary skill set to myself, right?
Speaker: I was an expert in energy, industrial and manufacturing.
Speaker: And I'd met a guy who was an expert in recruiting in the wealth management space.
Speaker: And he was kind of burnt out.
Speaker: He'd been doing it for about seven years and he was looking to escape.
Speaker: and come to us because he'd seen us, you know, kind of on social media because we were a lead generation firm.
Speaker: And after sitting with the guy, his name's Casey Knight, and learning more about the area in which he recruited,
Speaker: I basically convinced him, hey, dude, I don't think that you need to abandon all this intellectual property that you've got in the wealth management space.
Speaker: I think you're just in the wrong system.
Speaker: You need to be with a firm that that is intentional about investing in their people and their technology.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so.
Speaker: Really what transformed our organization was really identifying the benefits of becoming an expert in a very, very niche sub vertical.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And not necessarily being a generalist.
Speaker: in finding that the riches are actually in the niches.
Speaker: And so when you look at Casey's business unit today, last year we did about 6.8 million in revenue in direct hire, not staffing, no payroll, you know what I'm saying?
Speaker: Direct hire billings in the wealth management space.
Speaker: Now he started back in 2016, right?
Speaker: So it's been eight years in order to accelerate that growth, but being intentional about developing
Speaker: focus expertise in a certain practice area, then you can get way more acute in your marketing, your messaging, way more intentional about skill marketing and MPCing active candidates that are really, really valuable in a space.
Speaker: That's what transformed our organization.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: So I'm hearing focus.
Speaker: I'm hearing systems.
Speaker: I'm hearing making sure you're not going alone, actually finding people that you trust to help you run this kind of thing.
Speaker: What else has been instrumental to where you are today?
Speaker: You know, another thing that's been instrumental is recognizing that just because I'm the best at something in the firm doesn't necessarily mean that I need to be the one doing it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, you know, we've got a full time, you know, marketing manager.
Speaker: We've got project managers, executive assistants, BD managers, client development managers, all this overhead in the organization that are non producers that are here to turn a 300K producer into a 400K producer.
Speaker: a 500 into a 700.
Speaker: So really like investing in people that can hyper focus on one area of what maybe the owner or executive team would traditionally do.
Speaker: And that way we could elevate ourselves to work on strategy and execution, right?
Speaker: Not necessarily the tactical components of the business.
Speaker: So that's a hard thing for people to give up.
Speaker: What did you find when you got to that strategic versus tactical split in your career?
Speaker: What did that do for you in your day to day?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So number one, the reason why I kind of got there was I joined EO, the entrepreneurs organization.
Speaker: And here I was making a million dollars a year.
Speaker: I was the most successful guy on my street, had an Audi R8 in the driveway and thought I was fucking successful.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And then I joined EO and I met people that didn't make a million dollars a year.
Speaker: They were making a million dollars a month.
Speaker: And they were working less than me.
Speaker: They were happier than me.
Speaker: They had better relationships with their wives, with their kids.
Speaker: And that's really what planted the seed that said, man, I think I almost need to work less and delegate and elevate.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so, you know, my president, who was that VP that I hired back in 2016, that's been promoted two times from VP to COO and then from COO to president.
Speaker: He had me do an exercise that helped me identify, OK, what are the things that I'm great at doing and that I love doing?
Speaker: What are the things that I'm great at doing that I don't love doing?
Speaker: You know, one of those quadrants.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And then really kind of delegated everything.
Speaker: And then I realized that I didn't necessarily want even to be the CEO of the company.
Speaker: I really wanted to be the chief marketing officer.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So identifying, OK, what is my superpower?
Speaker: What do I love doing?
Speaker: What are my strengths?
Speaker: And every other thing in the organization I was going to hire someone to do.
Speaker: That's really what bred that flexibility and bred that happiness in coming to work every day is how can I generate marketing content?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: In order to do two things, create an environment where top talent wants to come work.
Speaker: And then also, right, create an environment where high-performing organizations want to outsource their direct hire recruitment.
Speaker: You and I can share a beer over that one.
Speaker: I'm just doing marketing all day, baby.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: Like, cool, let me make some content.
Speaker: Y'all figure out what to do with it.
Speaker: Like, I could do that all day.
Speaker: Because then you accidentally get in front of somebody that's like, oh, I'm ready to buy and you're the guy I want to buy from, right?
Speaker: It's insane, right?
Speaker: If you put yourself out there enough, I mean, golly, you know, shit just kind of works itself out and you make a couple million bucks a year.
Speaker: It's fantastic.
Speaker: It's very weird.
Speaker: Yeah, but I mean, it's through...
Speaker: Genuine connections, though, like none of this stuff that either you or I are doing constantly is because we're just like, hey, let's throw it out, see what sticks like.
Speaker: We're targeted about this stuff.
Speaker: We're focused on this stuff.
Speaker: So, yeah, I love it.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: One little pivot here.
Speaker: So you have been running this organization and being a part of a what was one niche now multi niche kind of recruiting organization.
Speaker: What have you seen change that organization the most in the past 12 months?
Speaker: Oh, in the past 12 months.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I would say it's been somewhat of a focus on going for individuals without recruiting experience has been pretty pivotal in our growth and success.
Speaker: To hire.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I would say that early on,
Speaker: you know, you don't have the time to allocate to train and develop people, right?
Speaker: And so you end up taking other people's B players because the A players, they're being financially rewarded.
Speaker: They're on an escalator.
Speaker: They've got a pipeline.
Speaker: They've got the golden handcuffs.
Speaker: They can't walk away from a job where they're making $300,000 a year, right?
Speaker: So, you know, getting the folks that have got five, seven, 10 years of experience and they're making 100, 120, right?
Speaker: The B players, right?
Speaker: And what the challenge is, is like A players, they don't wanna work with B players.
Speaker: The ones that have a really, really strong business acumen,
Speaker: have the ability to learn at an incredibly rapid rate, have incredible work ethic, focus, discipline, and personal accountability, right?
Speaker: And so having the B players on the team was holding back the A players from really like developing or even wanting to come work for us, right?
Speaker: And so what we started to do is we really started to just hire A players that are like super early career, right?
Speaker: Because I can hire an A player
Speaker: with zero to one years of experience for 60 grand, 65 grand, right?
Speaker: Because I'm competing against ADP, Paychex, Insperity, Alliant Group, Paycom, all the big, you know, we train them well and they become killer shops.
Speaker: Because like the B players, they're making 45, 50 grand right out of school.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so you kind of looking at that, that disparity between an A player and a B player and saying, hey, we're going to develop the processes.
Speaker: We're going to develop the systems.
Speaker: We're going to have the automation.
Speaker: We're going to have the technology.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That knowledge transfer resource system.
Speaker: to completely accelerate the development of these A players to where we're turning first year associates into 300K producers.
Speaker: Hell yeah.
Speaker: In their second year, they're doing 450.
Speaker: Third year, my vice president of legal as a senior associate in her third year billed $1.8 million in direct hire billings.
Speaker: As a third year associate,
Speaker: Imagine the income she made on that and the transformational growth that is created in her life, right?
Speaker: Professionally, socially, relationally.
Speaker: Then we said, hey, let's hire a marketing team.
Speaker: Let's put her on camera to share her story, right?
Speaker: And then now we're attracting other A players that don't have staffing and recruiting experience.
Speaker: They're selling tax consulting, right?
Speaker: They're selling public accounting.
Speaker: They're selling who knows what.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And then they find an industry where you can make 40, 50 thousand dollars in commission by brokering human beings.
Speaker: The staffing and recruiting industry is one of the only industries where when the client signs a recruiting agreement, they want to pay us 40 thousand dollars.
Speaker: They want to pay us.
Speaker: Isn't that insane?
Speaker: I'm not excited about paying my bankruptcy attorney, my divorce attorney, my M&A attorney.
Speaker: No one's excited about writing that check.
Speaker: But in recruitment, oh shit, you helped us find our VP of engineering.
Speaker: Thank you, Jeremy.
Speaker: Who do I make the check out to?
Speaker: This is an incredible industry, man.
Speaker: It's unbelievable.
Speaker: For a couple of different reasons.
Speaker: You just mentioned that there's a B player that's earning over six figures.
Speaker: That doesn't happen.
Speaker: Other firms.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You're right.
Speaker: That's a good point.
Speaker: We are in such a recruitment bubble.
Speaker: But I get you.
Speaker: You know I'm telling the truth, though, dude.
Speaker: You can just by showing up to work at Robert Half, just by showing up and like not fucking over someone, you can make $120, $130,000.
Speaker: But it creates this like very false sense of accomplishment that you've become successful.
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: Because you're driving a 2022 Camry and live in the fucking suburbs.
Speaker: You know, like who wants that life, man?
Speaker: It's very interesting to see how the larger, like there is this inflection point of like a billion dollar plus firm that is now like just they have their own engine and you're just growing more fuel on the fire versus a smaller, more niche type firm like you're growing now where they truly have to come in and be ready to hunt.
Speaker: Be ready to hunt that entrepreneurial mindset, eat what you kill type environment, right?
Speaker: That's what we feel like we're migrating more towards, right?
Speaker: Because maybe we were a little bit complacent when we were 5 million, 6 million, 7 million, relying on the house job orders.
Speaker: And now we're in that
Speaker: If I could use maybe the opposite of a digital transformation, we're in that human transformation of bringing in those aggressive, ambitious, and individuals that are focused on self-improvement and continuous improvement, bringing in those folks to really help accelerate our growth from 12 million to 25 million.
Speaker: I like that.
Speaker: So you can't be completely devoid of technology.
Speaker: So there's got to be some sort of technology that's helping you with this transformation.
Speaker: training and upskilling unless you've got tons of people that are doing this.
Speaker: But I'm curious, what do you feel like is supporting that effort to bring in these people that have no background and getting them up to speed?
Speaker: Yeah, so, you know, obviously I mentioned that we did a great job of upgrading our systems and our processes.
Speaker: And so as an executive team, we meet once a quarter and we identify our rocks, right?
Speaker: What are the things that we need to accomplish that quarter?
Speaker: And so creating a mid-level manager, her title is Director of Talent Acquisition, Learning and Development, right?
Speaker: But she's essentially our corporate project manager.
Speaker: But every single idea that we have as an executive team
Speaker: We delegate it to her.
Speaker: And then she has her finger on project managing all these strategic initiatives because it's hard to pull away a division VP that's responsible for carrying a $4 million, you know, P&L line, right?
Speaker: It's hard to take away the CEO, the president who's making seven figures and say, hey, do you want to focus on like the website redesign?
Speaker: It's like, no.
Speaker: Like we know we need to do it, but I kind of just want to like write the check and make sure that it gets done.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so creating that layer of mid-level emerging leaders, investing in their confidence, their presentation skills, their own professional development and business acumen and technical development with those people that get it, want it and capacity to do it.
Speaker: That's been transformative in helping us kind of scale past that $10 million mark.
Speaker: So I'm going to ask you an interesting question here because there's a lot of people out there that would love to have those kind of people that would be able to say, all right, they're early on in their career.
Speaker: They've got the potential.
Speaker: I see it in them.
Speaker: They can become someone great here.
Speaker: Give me your favorite interview question to ask those people to understand that they're the right person.
Speaker: Oh, man.
Speaker: I come hard.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: So I'm a big believer.
Speaker: This is going to sound pretty messed up because I own a recruiting company.
Speaker: But I don't like to interview people that aren't just obsessed and begging me to work here.
Speaker: Does that make sense?
Speaker: So so we do a good job of digital marketing on Instagram, on LinkedIn.
Speaker: We've got followers on my personal pages, obviously the company pages.
Speaker: We have a full time video person that's constantly producing content.
Speaker: And so what I found is, is I'd rather hire the person.
Speaker: who is obsessed about working at Encore search partners, right?
Speaker: And then we give them an aptitude test and a personality test that is administered from a firm called the Criteria Assessment Center.
Speaker: But it's basically called Criteria.
Speaker: And I just hire smart people that have aligned learning styles and personality styles that are obsessed.
Speaker: Because if they're obsessed, I don't need to convince them to stay late on a Tuesday to finish a project, right?
Speaker: Because they want to do it.
Speaker: I don't need to convince them to just do what I say, not what I do, not to say that I do anything that's out of pocket.
Speaker: But if they view me as their mentor, if they view me as an expert in my space and a leader as somebody that they want to emulate and develop into, I don't need to wonder if
Speaker: You know, if they're going to take shortcuts on, you know, what I taught them.
Speaker: No, they're going to just do WWJD.
Speaker: They're going to wear the little bracelet every single day to work.
Speaker: What would Jeremy do?
Speaker: You know?
Speaker: And so we hire people that are obsessed, dude, you know, and not people that are needing to have their arm twisted to come work here.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so, you know, in the beginning, who was obsessed?
Speaker: It was people that wanted to make a lot of money.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because I made a lot of money.
Speaker: And then we got better.
Speaker: And then it became people that wanted to make a lot of money who had strong work ethic, who were focused and disciplined.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And now because we're like Encore Search 3.0, we're
Speaker: We can find people that want to make a lot of money, who are focused and disciplined, who have a high aptitude and similar learning styles and core values to us.
Speaker: And so really it's being a little bit more picky through every evolution of our development, right?
Speaker: And being intentional about only hiring A players because when you have our technology and our resources,
Speaker: They're capable of even so much more than I could even teach them.
Speaker: It's unbelievable.
Speaker: It's incredible to see how much a human being can influence the growth of an organization, not just the company.
Speaker: I think that's the tagline for the entire episode right there.
Speaker: How much a single individual can influence a trajectory of your company.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So I like to keep these things under a half hour so that people can walk their dog and back.
Speaker: So with another one minute, anything else you want to leave everyone with before we sign off?
Speaker: Yeah, you know, what I can say is, is that we're in the season of life where we really, really intentional about creating content that breeds engagement.
Speaker: And so I'd really encourage you guys to follow me on LinkedIn.
Speaker: It's just my name at Jeremy Jensen, J-E-N-S-O-N.
Speaker: And I want to hear your guys' opinions.
Speaker: What content do you want to see?
Speaker: What do you want to engage with?
Speaker: If there's something that you disagree with, I want to hear about it, right?
Speaker: Because we want to constantly refine our craft and we want to be known as the purple squirrel hunters.
Speaker: in all of national recruitment in the United States of America.
Speaker: If you're looking for a left-handed single mom in Juneau, Alaska that has a CPA and a CFA, we want to be that firm that finds it for you.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: Absolutely love it.
Speaker: All right, everyone.
Speaker: Well, links to Jeremy's LinkedIn profile will be in the show notes to this one.
Speaker: Can't say thank you enough.
Speaker: Thanks for spending some time with us and educating us how to scale a firm the way that you did.
Speaker: And yeah, I'll just sign off with that.
Speaker: Thanks so much.
Speaker: Excellent.
Speaker: Thanks, Brad.
