It is not enough to hire people who can fill in the job you need in this day and age. You also have to find the right competency and behavior to go with the skills they offer. In this episode, Char Miller and Sam Reeve sit down with an expert in the hiring space. They talk to Monte George, the Owner and Founder of The Recruiting Network, about hiring for the right competencies and behaviors. How has recruiting changed over time? Where do we start in aligning expectations and goals within the organization and the people in it? What does the hiring process look like? What competencies are important now? Monte answers these questions and more, revealing the key things every leader and recruiter needs to know to find the people fit for the job and can stay long-term.

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PSF: Monte George – Hiring For The Right Competencies And Behaviors

We are so excited to have you on board. We are a mastermind where we help people thrive customers and our employees love. We show the very best strategies to attract and attain the best talent. Our hosts would be me. My name is Char Miller. I have a unique perspective because I’ve been in human resources as an executive HR person for many years. I’ve been a Chief HR Officer and done Interim HR Director work. I also do career coaching now.

A lot of people are trying to transition their careers so I help people transition their careers. I am an Owner, Founder and the Chief HR Officer of Rocky Mountain Health Advocates. We have the pleasure of working with the gentleman who is our guest speaker now. We’ll have an interesting conversation because we work with this gentleman.

 

We also have Sam Reeve. He is the CEO and Founder of CompTeam and CompTeam Total Rewards and Compensation. I’ve also had the pleasure of working with Sam and he’s helped my company with our total rewards and compensation programs. I will tell you we’ve had some outstanding outcomes. The productivity of our employees has greatly increased. In fact, we’ve been thriving through 2020, which is unusual for a lot of companies.

We have the support and the pleasure of working with Sumit. If you look, Sumit has worked with some phenomenal companies. He’s a People Strategist. I love the fact that Sumit talks from an employee perspective as well from more of a global sense because many executive leaders now need to learn how to work in the global world supporting staff in other countries. Sumit is also one of our hosts.

At this point, I’d like to introduce our guest speaker. His name is Monte George. He is the Owner and Founder of Recruiting Network. You might want to find Monte on your LinkedIn or your other social media platforms. He’s a great resource. I have had the pleasure and the honor of working with Monte when I was doing an interim director of HR position for a challenge and Monte is a fantastic team member. He has an outstanding team to help and hire the very best talent of the organization.

Take a look at his bio and I think you’ll find he’s a true expert and take a look at his website as well. Let’s go ahead and get going. Our topic is hiring for the right competencies and behaviors. Believe me, it is changing. As a company owner, hiring the right competency and behaviors has changed. We are going to have open discussions throughout. Monte, you get the pleasure of talking to all three of us.

That sounds great to me, Char.

All three of us, meaning Sam, Sumit and myself, have different perspectives and different backgrounds. We are now going to emerge and talk about what’s happening now. We thought that this would be a great opportunity to do that. Monte, I understand you’ve got some slides to share with us and maybe you could introduce yourself a little more thoroughly than I did. Welcome, Monte.

Thank you so much. I appreciate that. My name is Monte George. I’m the President of The Recruiting Network. The Recruiting Network has been in business for several years. We focus primarily on CPG and healthcare. We’ve been doing CPG and healthcare for several years. We have seven recruiters and three candidate research managers that go out every day and find candidates for companies like Rocky Mountain Health Care Associates and other clients that we work with.

It’s a pleasure to be here. My background is varied in corporate as well as recruiting. I lead the team. I spend time with candidates every day so I can stay in the mix as well as speak with clients. I always try and stay grounded. It keeps me realistic when I’m not only dealing with my recruiters but also my research department, which is the grind of the company. Between the two, we were able to work things through. It’s very exciting to be here.

I have a question for you. For those of us that are ignorant, what is CPG?

It’s Consumer Product Groups.

I’ve worked in healthcare for a long time but I didn’t understand the Consumer Product Groups.

Consumer Product Groups are companies like Coca-Cola, Frito-Lay, large organizations. They’re usually Fortune 100 companies that we work with. We also do some work in beverage and alcohol beverage. Hopefully, that clears it up a little bit.

Thank you. I appreciate that. I want to have it clear for our audience.

Team collaboration is the key to success Click To Tweet

Feel free to check or cross-check if I’m using acronyms that may or may not make sense.

Thank you.

Monte, a quick question as we get started here. I know you’ve been doing recruiting for many years. I imagine there have been some significant changes due to the pandemic and so forth. How has recruiting changed over this time? Has there been a significant change in the way we do things?

Some of the biggest changes we’ve seen in recruiting on the healthcare side is a lot of the companies that we work within healthcare are set up with ancillary services or ancillary surgeries, surgery centers, physicians and secondary. What’s happened with the insurgence of ER, critical care and other areas of the hospital is that they’re so urgent to take care of COVID-19 patients. All the clients we work with are now basically put on hold for over six months.

If you’re looking to get a surgeon for a secondary operation that doesn’t have to do with cardiology or perhaps pulmonology, which are huge areas with COVID-19 that hit, all of those functions have put off on surgery. How it’s affected our company is that a lot of those clients for the first six months of the pandemic basically stopped all of our jobs and put everything on hold.

 

We went to New York, got involved with the pandemic, worked with some of the assisted living, which are ground central in New York, for the pandemic in March, April and May 2020. We made ten placements of RNs, nurse practitioners and other lower-level nursing positions. We had to adjust our format on what we were doing.

Consumer products so the large companies pretty much stayed the same. They did tighten up and stop recruiting in the beginning but they’ve returned. Some of the jobs that were put on hold have come back in healthcare. It’s been a big stall. There have been six months of no work or different work. What we’ve done is adjust it.

We’re very fortunate to have Rocky Mountain Healthcare Advocates come along at that time and be able to work with them. We’re involved in some other things as well but that have diversified our portfolio. To answer your question in a short phrase, it’s been difficult and we’ve had to adapt. It’s been interesting and not completely lucrative. It’s had its challenges.

Over 10% of the workforce is unemployed. Has that made things more challenging or having more candidates better? Is it the fact that you had to do a lot more screening? What is the impact there?

The situation in candidate recruiting is still the same. We’ve got candidates that are highly qualified that have a lot of the competencies that our clients are looking for. Those candidates are still the same. There are fewer jobs and a lot more demand for healthcare. There’s a lot more competition happening, especially in the nurse industry, RNs, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, higher levels of competency where in the past, those individuals were able to set their own wages, if you will and their own hours. A typical nurse practitioner would work one job, 20 hours a week for the highest pay and another job for 25 hours a week for the best benefits.

Those jobs have now changed and those same nurse practitioners ends up coming back to me and said, “I’m only going to work full time. I want a job that gives me security,” and there’s a lot less all the cart shopping. There’s a huge shortage of qualified nurses, in general, but what that’s done is change the dynamic of having the candidate demanding, going back to the client saying, “This is all we have,” where there was a diversified portfolio of jobs.

Now they’re saying, “This is the area that we want to hire in.” The core competencies have changed because of the pandemic. We’re screening a lot harder with our candidates. It has changed significantly. It’ll be interesting to see how it changes over the next few years with vaccines becoming more prevalent.

I will say with Rocky Mountain Health Advocates, we look for top-notch people but individuals who have the qualifications at the level that a typical nurse practitioner would have. Those individuals need extra income. They’re looking to supplement perhaps the change of their income levels that they’ve seen in the past. They need flexibility and time so that they can do the regular nursing positions.

It’s an interesting phenomenon to be an executive HR person for health care. Now have a company that doesn’t require that level of health care professional but they need the income and what we might be able to provide. That’s why Monte and I have had an interesting experience working together because we’re learning that all of those changes are impacting the healthcare recruitment space.

Monte, I know you have some slides to show what we have on as far as the competencies and so forth and how that’s used in the recruiting area?

Sometimes, the competencies are important, but the skillset is even more important, especially in healthcare. Click To Tweet

Let’s talk a little bit about hiring for the right competencies and behaviors. As I was thinking about this, as I was putting together the slides and going back through my own experiences, it gets down to starting with well-crafted expectations and realistic goals on the side of the hiring manager or the company. It’s important to have realistic expectations and goals and to spend time crafting them from HR and then disseminating them throughout the organization. HR has a puritanical way of looking at things. In my mind, they’re a little bit up in the tower looking down. The reality is people in the streets need to make it happen.

I will say that Char is the most realistic HR person I’ve ever worked with and I worked with a lot of HR people. It can be a little too radical. Char knows this too. I’m sure Sam and Sumit have experienced this. It can be a very top-down push but when you work with one of the top 10% HR managers, like Char then it becomes more collaborative. That’s the effort to be able to hire the right competencies and behaviors. It’s setting goals and parameters. More importantly, adjusting those to things like COVID when things change, competencies change a bit and behaviors change. Team collaboration is the key to success, I think.

I think that was the magic. When did I start working with Monte? How many years ago?

I think it’s been a few years, time flies.

I left my corporate job and started doing interim HR director work. It was an opportunity to work with Monte. I realized at that time that when I was working my traditional corporate HR job, I did not have a true collaborative partnership with my recruitment department. When Monte started working with me as an interim HR leader, I opened my eyes to the fact that this collaborative partnership and communication has to happen almost every day.

We were either safely in our cars openly talking about what the CEO expected and the CFO and quite candidly, the CFO had a big part of that too. We were hiring nurse practitioners, RNs and MAs. There were certain expectations about how much we could afford to hire and find the very best talent. Monte and I had to collaborate heavily in order to meet the need to hire over twenty professionals to meet that organization’s needs.

What does that look like? When we look at this from a business perspective, the C-Suite is saying, “We need to fill this many seats in 2021.” They’re thinking, “We need to make this whole list. We need them from these areas,” but they’re trying to get things done and not doing a great job of communicating their particular culture. The competencies are needed in each of these roles. How do you step in and get that information from them? Do you ask certain questions?

The way I started off, Sam, is I interview my client like I would my candidate and maybe even more thoroughly in the beginning. To break it down and find out information early on saves time for my team and allows my research department to be more effective. As an example, I had a very successful interview process with an aesthetic nurse, a nurse that administers Botox and does cosmetology. The client loved her. They thought she had a great attitude. She had all the right behaviors if you will. She had most of the right competencies.

However, what they didn’t tell me is not only did they want her to do dermal fillers, which is typical Botox and those types of things. They didn’t tell me that they also needed laser work. I don’t even know if they knew in the beginning. I believe what happened is they had two RNs doing this position and decided to melt it down to one. Since they didn’t know, I couldn’t know.

When they went back and reviewed the candidate, they told me all the great things about her but that they wanted to continue to look because they wanted somebody with laser skills to go along with aesthetic injecting. It was frustrating for me. I had to think through and say, “Did I do all the things that I was supposed to do in the interview to find out what the competencies that they wanted?”

I decided that they didn’t know at that point. It’s an evolutionary process. I call it fire for effect. I sent candidates in and I played this game a little bit where Char would tell me,” I need a nurse practitioner and these are the competencies in this particular position.” I was working with Char before. It was a drug rehab where they had to know certain specifics. As I sent candidates in, Char would say, “No, I need this adjusted and make sure they have these areas of competency. This is no longer an issue or even something we’re seeking.” I think it was Dan that we were working with. Is that the CEO, Char?

Yes.

The CEO changed his mind a lot daily. I had a few interesting nicknames for this guy when we were in the car back and forth.

It’s the drunken sailor.

I’m glad you said it before I had to.

I don’t care because he sold the business.

Good for him. I hope he did well but his behavior was irrational. When you’re dealing with irrational clients, you need to take a breath or even interdepartmental people who are irrational and change their minds a lot on competencies. You have to take a moment, take a breath and ask yourself, “Is this something I can continue?” I worked probably until 2:00 in the morning, finding the candidate who had all the competencies.

In Southern California, candidates are either A) A golden unicorn or B) Has already been found is working. The team has our work cut out for us. Hopefully, that explains what we run into as far as clients either A) Changing their minds or B) Not necessarily knowing what they want in the beginning and having things evolve. It doesn’t have to be just between recruiter and client. It happens inter-departmentally all the time. Communication is the key.

May I add, when I mentioned the CFO, there are other executives as well. It could be the marketing vice-president or the IT director. It depends on the department and expectations do change. Part of the challenge is our world is changing so fast. Technologies, healthcare and our political environment are changing. It’s the recruitment and the talent leader or HR leader.

That is why Monte and I literally almost every day would talk because I knew it was frustrating for him. He would send me 5 to 10 awesome resumes and then I’d turn around and go, “These are great people but they’re not fitting the CEO’s needs.” I would end up in a meeting at 7:00 AM with my CEO in front of a whiteboard and his expectations would change. I literally would have to call Monte and say, “Help me here because it’s something different now.”

That’s an interesting point. One is identifying the correct competencies for the role but the next piece that needs to be considered is the people you’re working with. Sometimes certain leaders may be difficult to get along with. They may be great to get along with. They’re looking for certain types of behaviors themselves and people to fit. Do you interview the leadership or it depends on the size of the organization? How do you find out that that right fit or ensure that relationship is going to work with the candidate and their managers or leadership?

In working the system, there are two departments that I generally want to interview. I want to interview the hiring manager first because they’re ground zero. They’re going to be accountable for this person ultimately. They are going to either do a 30 or 90-day review. It’s their call. In doing that, if I’m working with an excellent HR manager or senior C-Suite level and their open-door policy and I’ve got a couple of great clients that way, the more I can talk to them through the process. Char mentioned technology and healthcare changing. What used to be maybe an hour-long conversation might be a two-hour text back and forth.

We’re all busy. We have our phones with us all the time. Sometimes, a C-Suite manager may be involved in a meeting and texting me back and forth. They may be working on a project and texting me when they can. One of the beauties of texting versus a phone call is I can send a text out or they can send a text to me. In real-time, we can get back and forth as it’s convenient, as long as it’s not a deadline. A sense of urgency requires an email or a phone call to make things happen.

Things have changed. I want to interview HR management, assuming that I have a very good HR manager, occasionally occurring. More importantly, I always want to interview the hiring manager and the hiring team and make sure that we can work through it. You take a lot of information in, then it boils down to the facts we need.

Sometimes the competencies are important but the skillset is even more important, especially in healthcare. You’ve got to have an RN with certain areas. Using this example, they told me they wanted somebody with not only aesthetic abilities but actual documented aesthetic licensing, which is very rare. There’s only a couple of companies that do that. The search went from difficult to difficult but they’re willing to pay top dollar in a fee, which is difficult these days because it’s become more competitive. We’re interviewing a lot of people to reach those competencies.

If I may throw in what we’re doing to address that problem. Since our company is now you utilizing the TMA method, we’re putting all of our trainers through the training process for understanding competencies, passions and drives. We’re going to include Monte in the process so that he has a better awareness of what are our leaders are looking for. We believe that’s going to reduce this time of back-and-forth texting and perhaps get candidates that are way too qualified. Our specialty is not only having some exposure to healthcare but also being good at sales. That’s hard to find for a middle-level type of professional.

One of the interesting things is it was a difficult find before. With COVID and seeing that most of your offices are set up in mall locations, I’m getting a lot of very interested candidates who are ready to go forward. Either Susan, the hiring manager, the director will talk to them or in the interview process, when they find out they’ve got to be exposed to a large variety of people, even with all the safety precautions that Rocky Mountain Healthcare Advocates takes.

It doesn’t happen right away because they sold on the idea. They love the concept. Many of them want to get into a more medical background or apply their sales skills but they’ve become overwhelmed by it. Sometimes they talk to their families or give it more thought and they don’t want to be that exposed to COVID. It’s tricky. That’s where we’re at in the last few months.

I know that there are a lot of new trends as far as what you might be looking for candidates in certain types of competencies due to the pandemic. Sumit, I think Carol put a couple up there. What did she mention there?

She’d put up an interesting list. She mentioned communication, flexibility, change management and empathy as part of her list. In fact, I’ve got a slightly related question to that. As practitioners, we are quite clear that we do need new competencies. Monte, how do you influence or get HR managers and leaders to think that what they’ve been doing is no longer relevant or needs to be changed? What are the new competencies to be looked at in the new age? The traditional mindset won’t work necessarily in a post COVID world.

That’s the million-dollar question, if you will, Sumit. What were important competencies in the past, still on a core level, are. With COVID and other things changing in the workplace, as Sam pointed out, with unemployment being 10% or higher, there are a lot of candidates who are also adjusting their skillsets some of their competencies, education-wise and changing industries.

I’ve had several nurse practitioners decide that they do not want to continue working as nurse practitioners in a certain field and changing over into other fields or other sub-competencies. It’s tricky. I think the future is going to be told that adaptation is the most important thing. On your list, I think one of the things that you brought up that’s very important is empathy. Can we empathize with candidates? Can we empathize with clients? Can we slow our world down enough to be able to say, “This person matters and they’ve got 90% of what we’re looking for?”

You've got to be able to go through what somebody else has had and then always come back. Click To Tweet

We’re not trying to put a round peg in a square hole but sometimes I have to go back to my clients, which I will be doing later with the example I brought up earlier and say, “You’re looking for the platinum unicorn. I can deliver this but it’s going to take six months. That’s my estimation or maybe never. It may not happen.” I think managing expectations is important, Sumit. Managing expectations both on the candidate and the client side and meeting the gap halfway. What I like to do in Char’s example is I want to send a lot of resumes in and then have the HR manager or hiring manager adjust it.

That has become even more prevalent in our COVID world if you will. There’s more testing that’s happening as far as them being selective. In health care, in 2020, if you had a nurse with a pulse and could fog a mirror, she was getting hired. The clients are stepping back and saying, “I don’t think so.” At this point, it’s more important that our core competencies are met. We’ve got 3 or 4 other things that we didn’t need previously that we now need. In the example of aesthetic nursing, they had two positions. Now they’re going to boil it into one. They didn’t tell me in the beginning but now we’ll make adjustments. Does that help answer your question, Sumit?

It does. Although I still am not sure about the empathy part of it. I’m a fence sitter on that one. There’s an interesting book I’ve been meaning to read. It’s called Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. It’s written by a Canadian psychologist and the person argues that compassion is good but stepping into the shoes of somebody who’s facing a certain situation can potentially create more problems than it solves because you lose the ability to think objectively. On the face of it, it sounds like a compelling argument. Although, I guess I’ll discover more when I do read the book.

It sounds like I need to read the book too because our core values are compassion, dignity and respect. Monte knows that’s our core value. Things are changing in that regard as well. We’re all learning and adapting so very good points, Sumit.

You have to tell us a little bit more about that when you read the book. I know that humanization or treating people more human-like at this age is quite important. I love to know about your discovery there.

 

Sumit brings up a great point. It’s important to empathize with people but at the same time, we have to achieve our goals. I think it’s important to compartmentalize and to feel. Sympathy is important. I think empathy is more important. You’ve got to be able to go through what somebody else has had and then always come back. What is the goal? You have to have a rational mind in the hiring process. There are accountabilities. It’s your job.

Whether you’re the hiring manager, the recruiter, HR manager or you’re a part of the team, we always have to stay objective and, at the same time, treat people well in a world where ghosting happens a lot and Char and I have talked about this. You get a great candidate. It’s interview time. There’s no show and you have egg on your face. The more qualified the candidate is, the more upset the client is. What do you do?

That’s part of the technology issues. There’s not as much face-to-face, sit down, connection and empathy. I wouldn’t pick on a particular age group or demographic but we have trouble sometimes with Millennials saying, “It’s not that important. If I’m an RN, I have five opportunities. If this doesn’t fit exactly where I want anywhere along the process, I’m going to drop off.” We have specific strategies to go find people ghosting us because once our client tells us what to do, we’re like bloodhounds. We go after it.

Can we talk about that a little bit more, Monte? This trend of ghosting that’s happened over the past several years is so odd to me. I remember when I started looking for a job in my career, I’d spend days sweating it out, preparing for the interview, putting together my resume and questions to make sure I made my best approach. The fact that we have people not even showing up or showing a lack of care, what are your thoughts on that? What are the contributors?

I agree with you, Sam. I remember I was a professional interviewer for about four years in my corporate career because I wanted to know what was happening on the other side. I wanted to see opportunities, move up and be promoted. I was constantly preparing, always working on my resume and consistently working towards goals. What I’d say now is it’s a lack of preparation on the candidate’s part and due diligence.

As a professional, you always want to put yourself forward the best you can. Some of the demographics that I’m working with now, especially within healthcare previously to COVID, had too many opportunities put in front of them. There were so many jobs and recruiters. Time was short to get people in that I’ve had candidates send back to me notes that say, “If you’re not paying me $45 an hour, I don’t want to go further with the discussion.” I thought to myself, “What if there are other parts about this job besides pay that might be important to you?”

As a professional, you always want to put yourself forward the best you can. Click To Tweet

For example, I worked for a long-term care facility in one of the toughest parts of Oakland and it was a constant challenge. I was constantly milling candidates through it because they had to be able to meet not only core competencies but ethnic competencies and other areas where they had to fit in. They also had to be very brave because they had to go into a neighborhood that was difficult to go into. Once they got there, they had great security and the facility was beautiful but to get people to go to the interview could be tough.

What I started to do was only recruit candidates from Oakland. If I could win across the bay to San Francisco, my percentage of not only placing the candidate but having them show up for the first interview was less than 20%. If I was working with somebody in Oakland, it was over 80%. Sometimes knowing the ins and outs of the situation or some of the finer points will help you recruit better both as a client and a recruiter. It’s important.

If I may add from a manager perspective and manages hiring leaders is now recruiting, particularly in the service industry, requires meeting people face-to-face with COVID concerns. It seems like the RNs, the nurse practitioners and the medical professionals and our ideal candidate is to have some medical background plus a selling background. A lot of people are saying, “I want to work from home. I want to work a remote job.”

They desire the pay that we have. I think they like the fact that we are building a very great culture and probably heard that we have a great culture but then their reality becomes, “I have to be working face-to-face with people.” It can be a real challenge because the reality of our work environment is that be it I’m a nurse or not, that’s the reality. Sometimes you have to work in jobs where you have to face the public. The reality truly hits when candidates walk into the locations, see the actual face-to-face environment, turn around and walk out and ghost the recruiter and the hiring manager.

It’s very frustrating. In your situation, Char, recruiting for Rocky Mountain Healthcare Advocates, I’m glad we structured our contract the way we did. If we had made the number of placements we’ve made so far and candidates falling off, it would have been interesting. Having structured more of a monthly situation where we continue to do it, I have an optimistic approach to recruiting. We’re not an aggressive mill-type recruiting organization. We’re focused. What we’re going to have to do is ramp up the number of candidates that come through and see who’s willing to show up and work. That’s a core competency now. Do you have a work ethic that will allow you to show up in a difficult time?

Earlier in my career at Frito-Lay, right after college, I had to run around for six months. I thought to myself, “I worked my butt off for four years, worked full time and went to school full time. Now at 5:30 in the morning, I’m out running around delivering snacks food.” Later on, as we were hiring people, we would try and dissuade them from the job. What we tell them is, “You have to be up at 4:30 in the morning. You’re going to have to work twelve-hour a day. Is this something you can do?”

A lot of people would start backing out. They see the marketing program and want to be part of the company. The reality is quite a bit grittier. I think that’s the same thing. We have a medical representative position, insurers company and a lot of people want to break into medical. A lot of people want to be a rep or a durable goods rep within medical. They see Rocky Mountain Health Care Advocates not only as a good company but also as a stepping stone.

We have to be very careful when we get people that are transparent. Sometimes you can’t tell and they don’t even know. Digging in deep and deeper is what we’re going to do. We’re going to put more candidates through at a little lower, not competency level but maybe a little bit lower expectation level coming in. It’s an adjustment.

That’s exciting about including you in our TMA Method training that we have not kicked off yet. We are putting our leaders through a ten-week program including money into that program so that we can realign the expectations of the competencies and the behaviors that we need. Realistically, we want to be a stepping stone as long as we keep our candidates for 2 to 4 years. We know many of our candidates have passions and perhaps want to be an RN or move into a different type of position. Our company is perfect to be a stepping stone. That’s so exciting.

I wanted to show the competencies that are available on the TMA Method. Based on what we’ve been talking about, this can be a great way to communicate with your recruiting team and hiring manager of different options that you can explore to define the job, get that ready for the hiring process. This is a free tool. If you go to CompetencyLibrary.com, you can dig into this. The cool thing about it is that there’s a lot of additional features that are available in this tool to explore. I’d encourage you to do that. It gives you different behavioral examples and development interview types of questions managers can do. It’s a pretty handy tool.

 

What we’re going to be doing with Monte is he does the pre-interviews and then my leaders are utilizing this tool. Although the app has changed a little bit, we’re improving our app and technology all the time. As long as Monte and his team of experts understand that we are hiring for competencies, behaviors, utilizing these screening questions and our recruitment team has a good understanding of that process, it’ll improve when my actual hiring leaders interview the top 3 to 5 candidates.

We are going through a transformation now. We are acting as a pilot to utilize this process. We have been utilizing this process for a while. The quality of our candidates has skyrocketed. We hired on Monte not too long ago but we are now already seeing that our productivity, volume and return on our investment have only tripled. I can honestly tell you that our financial guys are super pleased because we are hiring better quality talent.

They know that we believe in their career development and personal development that’s in line with their passions, goals and motivations. It’s made a major impact on my little company of twenty employees. Our company is going to be growing and using this new method. We’re definitely going to be growing probably three times larger than we are now.

I think it’s good to have an infrastructure in place that you can leverage for that fast growth. It’s good to have those communication tools in place.

It starts with talent acquisition, though. That’s why I love that we have Monte on because it starts here.

Monte, you probably have this conversation with your clients a lot. What have you seen go wrong with certain clients where they’ve come to you because they’ve hired the wrong person? What are the stories that you’ve heard? Why do they seek you out?

We’re very technical on our healthcare side. I have a surgery center that had hired an RN who turned out to be incompetent. They couldn’t tell in the beginning because she had a great resume and background but what ended up happening was the candidate was not able to perform functions at the level that she had committed. When this happens and they go through the process of removing the candidate or the employee from the organization, it’s very painful because they put a lot of time and effort into training. The candidate either misrepresented what they’ve done or didn’t understand what level the surgery center was operating on. I usually get the frantic call. I go from being on somebody’s D-lists to their A-list.

That’s exciting for us. We want to be there, as Char knows, the more activity we get, the faster and harder we work. I think the more urgent the situation is, the quicker my team steps up. We get energized, if you will, to come in and solve a problem. We’ve had both things on the consumer product side where maybe a vice-president has gone off the rails and has not done their proper functioning.

Nobody likes a negative Nellie. Nobody wants someone who brings problems that are inappropriate or personal to the workplace. Click To Tweet

Unfortunately, in one situation, we had an internal theft problem with a CFO. When you get those problems, you get a client who’s very motivated, not only to make a fast decision but they also want to make a great decision because now they’re wide open and bleeding. Bleeding green is bad for a corporation. We’ve had a lot of weird situations come up over time.

I’ve had CEOs that have hired me and had been gone a week later under some weird situations. A lot of interesting stories some of which I can tell and some of which because of confidentiality, I can never tell. Maybe I’ll write a tell-all book when I retire. Char and I could probably co-author one. We could probably get feedback from Sam and Sumit as well and have a lot of fun.

My wife works in healthcare. She is an admissions director for the largest hospice in Las Vegas. Her stories are amazing as well. At the end of the day sometimes all we can do is drink wine and talk about how things are tough. The people’s stories are pretty interesting and that’s what makes it great. I hope it answers your question, Sam.

It does. Where can people go to find out more about you and your services?

They can go to RecruitingNetwork.net. That’s our company homepage. Probably the best way to interact with me is on LinkedIn. You can find me. My name is pretty unique, @MonteGeorge. There’s not a lot of us floating around. If you still can’t find it, put in Las Vegas and it should come up on LinkedIn. I would like to go through one more thing, we’ve talked a lot about competencies but we haven’t talked a lot about behavior. Right behavior is important in an organization. In some ways, it’s as important as a competency.

Let’s talk about right behaviors. A lot of these are common sense for the people here but not so much common sense with candidates. Everybody is living their life, things happen but in right behaviors, the first thing we want is a positive can-do attitude. Nobody likes a negative Nellie. Nobody wants someone who brings problems that are inappropriate or personal to the workplace. It happens but it needs to be minimized.

These are important. These right behaviors as I was going through it, I was thinking about Rocky Mountain Healthcare Advocates because as Char said, we’re going through a transitional mode now. We’re evolving. This is super important. This next one, courteous and friendly. In an environment where you’re interacting with a lot of customers, you need people who are approachable. You need people who people off the street or in the mall, feel very comfortable talking to them.

We’ve hired some people that are so friendly and warm. When I’m working with Susan and she sends a note back saying, “I love this person. They’re exactly what I’m looking for,” I think to myself, “We’ve hit the right behaviors.” The next one consistently meets deadlines. We don’t want any flaky people. We don’t want people that over-commit and under-deliver.

The next one is very important as well, gladly takes responsibility. I think that insurer’s environment. It’s important to get people who not only want to do their job as a rep and maybe want to go as a manager, fill in as a manager, whatever it takes to open the kiosk or close the kiosk. You need people who are willing to take responsibility when that becomes available to them. Anytime you’re working in retail or with the public, good attendance and punctuality are key. No late people, that’s not acceptable. I want to go through some of the right behaviors and maybe open it up to see what you think.

Sumit, have you seen a good comment or questions that you would like to highlight?

In fact, there are a couple of comments about interviewing for what-if scenarios rather than based on what people have done in the past. As a Trained and Certified Behavioral Event Interviewer, that’s something I’m not too sure about. The theory of behavioral interviewing is that the past predicts the future especially for mid-career or senior executives.

You need people who are willing to take responsibility when that becomes available to them. Click To Tweet

I would frame questions and probe people on what they’ve done earlier to see if any of the work they’ve done ties in with the competencies and even the behaviors that I’m looking for. For example, when you’re talking about being courteous and friendly, looking for people who are team players, you can watch out for whether the person’s entire answer is structured around, “I did this. I’m so phenomenal and I’m brilliant,” or whether they do give credit to other people.

You can gauge some of the behaviors if you’ve got the right skills in place. It’s important to have the right competencies. It’s also important to have what’s called a Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale or BARS in place. I’m a little uncertain about what-if scenarios because I think they don’t do justice to the interview process. It’s easy to give an ideal answer and an answer that’s politically correct in place without being too sincere. I’d love to know what you guys think as well.

You have excellent questions, Sumit and you always do. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you, Monte. You are awesome. I love what you have to say. We’re going to have you back so you can finish that presentation.

It’s been a pleasure, Char. I’d love to come back anytime you’ll have me.

Thank you so much. We appreciate your time.

Thank you.

Important Links:

• Char Miller
• Rocky Mountain Health Advocates
• Sam Reeve
• Sumit Singla
• Recruiting Network
• Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion
• CompetencyLibrary.com
• @MonteGeorge – LinkedIn

About Monte George