Why Hiring Works More Like Sales Than HR

The same way you acquire clients is very similar to the way you want to acquire candidates. And just thinking about, like, how do we market it, how do we approach it as a sales funnel and work the lead quickly? As a recruiter, my job is to make sure it's a good experience for both the candidate and the hiring manager. If I see no metrics in like a leader's resume, I'm like, that's already a huge red flag because either you don't track it and that means you're not managing anything, or you don't know what's important. And I'm like, I don't know which is worse. But both are not what I'm looking for. I'd say the main thing I've ruled people out for that they can add is just better metrics. And then the people that caught my attention the most, which I don't like, send a message to the recruiter, give me the highlights, like why you're a fit in the email or the, the, the LinkedIn, like, it can help you get noticed. Behind every value creation plan, there's a data problem nobody wants to talk about. Fragmented systems, metrics nobody trusts, and decisions made on gut feel dressed up as analysis. Welcome to the PE Data Guy. Each week, host Graham Crawford talks to the operating partners, advisors and practitioners who are doing the work inside portfolio companies. If you care about what actually drives returns in the market, then you're in the right place. The PE Data Guy starts now. Frank the Tank has been in the talent game for eight years now. He started at a global recruiting firm, then he went on to acquisition.com, a private equity firm, as the founding recruiter. And he built the department and the team from 12 to over 100 people. Now Frank runs Tank Recruiting, where he helps founders scale their team. Frank focuses on executive recruitment and talent advisor support. And today what we're going to talk about is the people side of value creation in companies and how that generates return on investment. Frank, we've known each other for a while now. It's great to have you on. Thanks so much for coming in. I appreciate it. Looking forward to it. I know we've had several conversations around business and talent, so I'm looking forward to dive in. Yeah, many of them. And you've got so much, so much value to share with the audience. You know, I still remember our first conversation, I think coming up on a year now, right, since we, since we met at the, at the workshop and then, you know, got to enjoy that wonderful lunch in Vegas just Last month when I was over for the PE conference. So great to see you, and great to continue the conversation and even better to share it with, you know, everyone else, because I think there's a ton of value that that happens. We should have been selling tickets to that lunch. Next time. That's a thing I'm sure, like. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I think if we just rebrand at a Fireside Chat and then, you know, other people can come and pay for our lunch, that'd be great. I love it. I love it. So, you know, tell me a bit more about the. Just to. Just to give people an extra layer of texture on your background. Like growing a team from 12 to over 100 people, like, where do you even start on that journey? And, you know, how do you get the best practices scaled at the point that they can work at the volume they have to to get to 100 folk? Yeah. So I'd say a lot of it comes down to reps. So the advantage I had working in that specific company is that I understood how to recruit. They understood what great talent looked like. And over time, we kind of. It kind of through osmosis, came down to. I understood what great talent looked like at the level of small business ownership. Like, small businesses, it's. It's beneficial to have really someone that understands what good looks like. Yeah. So I think when I started as employee number 12, it was helpful because I knew how to find people. And then, you know, we have a high bar, and I think some people don't know what bar to set and what's realistic. And I think that's the first kind of approach when it comes to whether it's dating or looking for a talent out in the market for your hiring. It's like we. What is the bar we set? And then, like, how do we find these people and evaluate if they are actually meeting that bar? I'd say the biggest unlock for me is thinking about recruiting more like sales and marketing, and that it's something you've probably had experience doing before. The same way you acquire clients is very similar to the way you want to acquire candidates. And just thinking about, like, how do we market it? How do we approach it as a sales funnel and work the lead quickly? As a recruiter, my job is to make sure it's a good experience for both the candidate and the hiring manager. Yeah. And, you know, one of the sales reframes that actually the workshop helped me with is, hey, when we're selling something, we're not trying to get somebody to Say yes. We're trying to help someone make a decision whether to say yes or no. And I guess the same is true for candidates as well as clients in that regard as well. Right? Exactly. It's actually sometimes I try to explain to people, like, I don't understand why you would take this job. I don't think you should. And it's like sometimes not, like to try to get them to lean in. I'm like, if it doesn't make sense, like, let's pause now. Let's not run through this and like hire you. And then two months in, you're like, I want to quit. I'm like, I'd rather go slow on expectation aligning because it's a lot more painful to have to let someone go on the end. Yeah. You know, across both corporate and, you know, owning my own business, hiring badly is one of the most expensive mistakes that any company or individual could make. So I feel like we could do a whole podcast episode on the dating analogy that you just casually dropped in there of like, you know, we're not just swiping right on everybody to get somebody to say yes. Right. But maybe we'll come back to the dating analogy, you know, kind of late later in the episode. But it's, it's a wonderful one. So, you know, as part of acquisition.com, you've been through a number of acquisitions, right. So, you know, we have a PE audience here. So I want to walk through an example with you. So say a PE firm closes an acquisition and buys a company. We're on whole period. Day one or day zero is like, what's a day zero plan? And they've already identified during diligence they need to upgrade that leadership team and the default move. And there's a lot of people who naysay this now on LinkedIn and I see it all over the place of like, oh, I've got this golf buddy who used to work at GE and he'll be great. You know, he used to run a 300 person organization, so he'll be great for your 12 person h vac. And increasingly I think it's become accepted that that doesn't work. That's not the right person for the right business. And you've said that Haring is guessing to some extent. So why does that approach keep failing? Trust is something which is accelerating in value, I think at the minute with AI, someone that you know and trust, who you've met in real life, like us, is a very valuable thing. So why do you think that Rolodex first approach keeps failing. And what should portfolio companies actually do in that scenario? Yeah, so I think there's two things that they're battling against. Number one is bias, where it's like, I know them so therefore I'm familiar with them, which feels safer. And then second is like a, a, it will run out, so to speak. The well does run dry on that, that avenue. And the reason bias is so important is that in, in recruiting, our goal is to get as many different qualified candidates in the funnel. And if you just go through your Rolodex, you are very much limiting that, that aperture at which you can approach it. So I think the, the two things I'll answer is one, it's really low. How do I put this? It is not expensive for you to go and post it a few places and use some other levers aside from your Rolodex to get more talent flow. This will give you the volume to assess more people. And then the other side is I say as a recruiting person, which it's maybe not in my best interest, but I believe it is true, is that you are guessing when you are hiring. When I say that, it's like you are telling me something and I am telling you something. Now, if we can do a test trial period, that will be a little bit more of a proof case before I hire you. But we're just going off what we understand. And I always say past performance predicts future success. But I always say onboarding is where I really like. That's where I learn. If I hired the right person and I extend my recruiting practices into onboarding, and when I hire you, I'm like, I think you can do it. When you get started, I'm looking at you, I'm like, are you doing it? And we want to mitigate. I would say if someone's staying six months in the company and we fire them, we could have fired them at three months. There's no reason to wait. I've observed this in both big and small companies that people have probation period. Right. So of course candidates rightly object when you ask them to do pieces of work as part of the process. They're like, well, you should pay me for that. And I'm sure there are ways to compensate people for that. But I've found that once someone is on, regardless of how good or bad the onboarding is, that it's almost like a checkbox. This probation period, it's usually like 90 days, isn't it? Three months at a big corporation and people like, oh, they didn't throw red paint on the walls on day two, so therefore it's fine. Do you think companies should use that more stringently like the 90 day? The 90 day. Like again, communication is important so you'd have to open up with that. But do you think companies underuse that? From what I've seen, small businesses tend to, they usually on the fly, kind of just don't have a plan for the person starting. So we like to have that structure 30, 60, 90. And I use it as a very like simple guideline of like, are they on track? Like just hitting the marks. Which means I probably hired the right person. They're achieving things at the times I expect them. Are they slow? And then that's already a red flag. It's like, is, are they off track or are they, are they blowing through the, the onboarding? Like, what I've seen is someone I hired in HR in the past. We hired them at the appropriate level, but we knew they had more experience, but we just didn't want to over title them. So we started a little lower. They went through the first 90 day onboarding and they finished it all in 60 days. They hit all the marks by day 60. So it's like. And then in two months we promoted them to director instead of manager. And I think that you can, you can lean in more on those type of like, let's see them do the work and have them prove it. It's tougher transparently with executives though, because I always guide exec. Like if you're a director of something, I'm like, the first 60 days you should do no work. Like you shouldn't actually change things in the business. Your first 30, 60 days is learning about what's what, decisions have been made. So it's hard to measure like any impact tangibly. It's more of like, are they, are they asking the right questions and uncovering things. Oh, here it is. Funny you mentioned that, like right on the shelf, this book. Have you seen this? The. Where is it? No, the first 90 days. So it's by Michael D. Watkins and I've used it a couple of times and I've bought it for other people actually who I've hired. And it says largely what you did. Like if you're a new leader in an organization, if you come in and change something in the first 30 days, the chances of it being the wrong thing to change are extremely high because you don't have enough context to be able to sort of make broad, sweeping strategic changes in that company. So it recommends something along the lines of 30 days gathering context. At the end of 60, you should be going to your new boss and saying, here are the bones of what I think the strategy is with the aim of finalizing at the end of 90. Yeah, exactly. I think I find that really successful. And back to your point though, of like, if you're firing someone after six months, you could have fired him after three. Like, have you done a lot of that? Have you, have you seen that go down like firing people at the end of a three roll and six? I would say we are quick to let people. Like I've seen, yes, we are quick if it is not working out to like make a change. But the main thing that I think people have benefited from is the clear communication. Like, this isn't going well. It's like they might wait six months to have the hard conversation. And I found initially great leaders take ownership and say, it's my fault. I probably didn't accept expectations. Here's what I want you to do. Is that clear? And do you know how to do it? And if. Yes. Now we've kind of drawn a line in the sand. It's like, okay, you. I open the door to make sure it's clear and that you know what to do. And then we just measure. And if you're not performing, it's like it could be month four. But the idea is like, if we're getting a pulse check, this is not working. Like, let's hit them between the eyes now with the truth. And the feedback cycle that I've seen that people delay, like, oh, it'll work out. And I really, instead of just like, it's a firing tactic, like three months, just let them go. It just. Where I see the problem with the six month mark is that most of the time people are like, I'm just fed up with them. Just like in a relationship, they're like, I never told you anything was wrong. I'm just upset with you. And now you're just gone. And a lot of the time that's a failure process. Not the people and leadership as well. Right? Yeah. Yeah. The scary thing is it just happens again. Like you hire another person, you put them in a seat and then like you never really coach them up, gave them feedback and it's like, you might get a very similar result. Yeah. You never tell them what's expected. There's an often quoted statistic in private equity that 70% of CEOs don't make it to the end of the whole Period. Some of that's for good reason. Like some of that was this was always the plan and the CEO wanted out anyway. But some of that is like, oh, the founder wants to kind of try and stick around and maybe they can't scale with the business. I think I've heard it said before that, you know, the right leader of a million a year company might not be the same as the right leader for a 10 million or a right leader for 100 million. Like it requires different skills entirely. Like, so it might not necessarily be a bad thing because it's often quoted as a scary, oh, big bad private equity's in here and they chop 70% of people. Like I'd say half of those people probably want it out anyway. Right. But the other half, Frank, do you think that comes from the same thing? Is it a failure to communicate usually? Or have you seen more PE comes in, successfully scales the company and scales it past the CEO's capabilities? It's that it's more the, the, the ladder I've seen that depends on the capacity and capability of the person. But some people can keep up with a very fast scaling company, but it is genuinely almost impossible. It's very, very hard if the company does go like asymmetric and just start to scale like crazy. Because if you go from ten to a hundred over a couple years, like how would you, it's like for you to have learned those skills to be able to manage that is it takes just time and you would be guessing a little bit. And that's where it gets. It is a higher risk to leave someone in that seat. Like very tangible marketing rules. Like if they haven't managed budgets of like let's say 100 million or let's say 100, like 10k, 10k a day. It's like just going from 5, $500 a day to 10k a day. It's like there's just a different level of, of complexity that comes with it and requirements and often most people can't keep up with that level of growth. If a company scales fast, slowly, yeah, you can have the time to let people grow. Yeah. I mean just in that marketing example, like as someone who's managed very large implementations, analytical implementations, like the level of rigor around the business intelligence for spending 500 vs 10k a day in digital marketing is huge because you just can't possibly keep track manually of that much spend across that many ads across that many platforms unless you've got super sharp kind of business intelligence running underneath it. One of the Other things I think of. And this actually happened to me at the workshop. I wasn't talking to you, I was talking to somebody else. But they were talking about the growth of my company and saying, you're probably only a year away and then suddenly your main focus is going to be hiring and firing people. And it's a good thing to raise because in year one of a company it's all about product, market fit. Like how good a product manager are you, how good are you at selling and marketing and then you become successful. And this is the phase I'm in now, right. It becomes a recruitment, hiring, talent game. Right. I'm lucky because of big corporate experience before, I've done all of that. But I can imagine the shift for like if I'm a first time CEO and I've, you know, found a banger of a product and I know I'm just out of college, in my early 20s, I've had to learn how to sell and market and then suddenly like I've done so well that now my job is hiring and talent. Like what? And the whole game changes, right? And I'm sure the game changes again once you hit once you get to 100 million. Right. Like we said before. Yeah, I. It's well said. It's like an evolution as the business evolves that the priorities for you evolve. And at the highest level it probably just comes down to people, management and decision making. It's like quality decision making and good leadership of like vision and people and. Corralling ship and allocation of resources. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I been dying to get into this question because I love a good framework and you've got one called the seven Deadly Sins of recruiting, which I've been super excited to dig into you with. So, you know, if someone's looking after looking after, you've got an operating partner that's across maybe five or six different portfolio companies and they're wondering why, you know, hiring is a constant suck on time and money. Which of these sins show up the most of your seven deadly sins? Like which are most prevalent in a PE environment? Yeah. So I'd say most for pe, I'd say it's probably the leaning in on the referrals and centers of influence. Which is funny because you talked about the Rolodex. The thing is though, there's two levels to like I always think about when you market a position, you have different social posts you can make. So go on online and social media, you can go on platforms like LinkedIn. Indeed. And then you have other people now I've seen a lot of benefits to depending on the type of company. Internal referral, like systems where you have referral bonuses and teaching your team how, how to recruit in a way that is like, here's what we're looking for and how to go out to ask your, your network. Then there's also teaching your, your audience and whoever your client tells like that you're hiring and announcing it. Aside from also going to the, what I call the center of influence, which is like, who's one person that knows all my people? And that's been like some of the fastest ways to fill talent which going back to your, your first point about the Rolodex, some of these people do have a Rolodex, but they might be misusing it to, to hire that one person. Say I'm going to take you and hire you versus like whose people you know that know your, let's say ideal candidate. And either they're teachers of them or they're just maybe someone that's retired that knows a bunch of them. It's like those people have like the little pockets of they just know 50 people and can introduce you right away. And I've seen that that's a lever most companies just don't pull in that way. It's like, oh, interesting. That's the question after the meeting. It's like, who do you know? Who's the best person you know in this space? Just going down that rabbit hole. That is interesting. And because I lean quite heavily on that one, I would say in my business, finding good data people who are also good with portfolio company executives, it's not a common mix, but those people often hang out together in the same places. And one of the reasons I rely so heavily on that, Frank, I'm terrified to open a job rack, indeed, LinkedIn, whatever it might be. By the way, I'll level with you here. I have no sympathy with recruiters on, or people in the recruitment industry on this because they started it with the AI kind of. What's the system called? The application tracking. The Application Tracking System, ats. So of course, you know, the, the people behave differently when they're being monitored. So of course the job seekers react to that. And you know, from what I can gather now, like you open a record, you open a job rec on LinkedIn which by the way, you have to pay per applicant and suddenly you're like buried in a thousand applications and you have no good way to discern quality and you need a system just to Even read a thousand resumes. So how do you suggest people deal with the way the recruitment market is currently and still getting value out of those platforms? Yeah, so the first thing I'll say is you do need a process to review resumes quickly. I remember when I was getting thousands of resumes the well I'll say two things. One is testing on like the platform. So I found changing and doing different job titles increases the likelihood I get more exposure to different talent. So like obviously coo, just post coo, there's only one title. But if you're hiring let's say like a tax manager, like senior tax manager, tax planner, like there, there's just different titles you can put out to market that people have job alerts for and sometimes spending, trying to spend 500 a day or a lot of money. On my post I'll spend the least amount possible because I've learned from speaking to people at these companies it's like I'm not going to outbid Google. I'm not going to out like. So it's like I'm not going to try to outbid them and win the money game. I'm going to try to just do different titles to kind of different nodes to apply to. And when I look at applications I'm trying to think about it as how do I rule them out, not how do I rule them in. So it's like I was able to review a hundred resumes or 100 applications in, in an hour and it still takes that time because I had kind of like almost like a panning for gold approach where if you don't patch the first filter, which is usually knockout questions, like questions that if you don't answer correctly you're already out, then I'm not going to even proceed to the next step. What's an example of a knockout question? So like let's say you're looking for someone with five years experience doing like let's say a COO to like oversee your $20 million company. You can ask specifically what's like the largest company or a small business company you've ran as far as revenue and then if they say anything, if they could do it, LinkedIn's limiting which I don't like because it just makes it numerical or yes, no in that indeed is a little bit more open ended but something to the example of like how many years have you been a CEO for a small business or what size of small business have you managed and scaled? And it's like that number say they say 200 million. It's like you're first off, that's not a small business. You're already too high. Or maybe they're say 5 million. It's like you haven't been where we're playing. So I'm not gonna even entertain it. So it's like a quick like, yeah, that makes sense. Having sat in that seat panning for gold across thousands of resumes. Like, what advice would you give to folks? And there are many of them actually like looking for, looking for roles with companies right now. Like, how do you, how do you get panned? How do you stay in the gold Frank's gold pan when it's good question. I'd say number one, especially if you're higher level, like put like actual metrics in your resume. So I always say speak to the idea of like, what have you done? Put a number then how you did. It's like I increased this by X by doing this. I think there's just a lot of value in a really like putting a lot of metrics. If I see no metrics in like a leader's resume, I'm like, that's already a huge red flag because either you don't track it and that means you don't know how you're not managing anything, or you don't know what's important. And I'm like, I don't know which is worse. But both are not what I'm looking for. I'd say the main thing I've ruled people out for that they can add is just better metrics. And then the people that caught my attention the most, which I don't like, send a message to the recruiter. Now granted I want to like be thoughtful. Like there's good ways to send a message and there's bad ways to send a message, but mainly just like give me the highlights, like why you're a fit in the email or the, the LinkedIn. Like it can help you get noticed. Like, and also anything optional, I would recommend doing it. So like I. There was an optional video I would like. If you actually care about the opportunity, I would recommend putting that video or sending. Sending the note. Just the extra touch helps to stand out. But from a resume standpoint, metrics. I use this example all the time. My wife came out of education. She was a teacher for a long time. She now works in the trade association. She works in the bakery industry and she was really excited about this job when she saw it. So she created a whole bread themed PDF on Canva with like bread puns. And, you know, rather than text boxes, she had like metrics in like slices of bread and various other things. And I'm convinced that that's the sort of thing that can make a difference as well, because you can. I'll send check this advice now, Frank, because I know some people who are looking for jobs and I will say to them, as a data person, you've got to pick the right KPI. And if they come and say to me, well, I had a successful week because I applied for 20 jobs on LinkedIn, I'd be like, the wrong KPI. Right. And my thesis, and I'd love to run it past you, is LinkedIn Easy Apply button. You may as well like toss your resume out the window and hope that it lands on the executive desk as do a LinkedIn Easy apply. I agree. I think you still want to do it. I just think there's. You have to take other approaches too, if you really care about that opportunity. Yeah. You have to show that you care because, you know, it is not a. It is not a new trick. It's not a unique trick to say, here's my resume, here's a job description. Here you go. Chat GPT, fix my resume for this job description. I'm like, I can spot this in my life. I'm sure you can even more so as well. Right. And that doesn't show care about the job, does it? No, no. Yeah. I think the. The metric to track, in my opinion, I love your pushback on it is like first interviews. Like how many first, like the main one is how many interview screenings Are you getting past that? There's a lot of other. Obviously it's like second interview, obviously the funnel metrics. But that first interview is what I'd be aiming for because most people just want to talk about their experience. And that's the real. That's the opportunity, the recruiter screen. Because that's the measure of success of how good is my application. And if that's sitting on zero, your application's not very good. Or it is and you're not doing enough to get attention, which is what you're alluding to. It's just applying is not enough these days. I want to come back to the seven deadly sins. So you talked about the Rolodex sin. I don't have the full list, by the way. I'd love to talk about any ones that you want to talk about, but we talked about the ones that PE companies are most guilty of. Which ones do you think are most impactful to the Value of the company at exit. So say a firm is acquired and they're planning to hold for four or five years or whatever. Which of the seven recruitment sins is the most deadly in terms of value at exit? There's so many angles to go at it, which I'd say, like, my thought is the. Is the qualification one, which is the second one. So your ability to actually document what you're looking for and like the process itself. I'll say it like this, where the second step is to make sure we're aligned and understand what we're looking for in the market before we go out to the market. Very similar to, like, dating, where instead of trying to go look for a girlfriend and going out to the market and then bring some back and be like, hey, mom, is this the one you think I should date? It's like, no, like, you're missing this, this, and this. Like, oh, dang, okay. Like, let me go back out. I rather started with the rubric, and I feel like from my experience, it is not a step people care about, but they do care about it and value it highly. When you're now looking, say, cool, like, when I want to go hire more of these after, you know, buying your company, do you have, like, any documents or standards that you guys have upheld that I can go out to the market with it? Just, like, it speeds up, like, within, let's say, a portfolio company we worked with. It's like, for hiring sales salespeople. Here's the sales people that fit our company. And this resource is always evolving. And what that means is that we'd actually go out of our way to, like, update it when we hire more talent. So it's an iterative. Like, we learn from interviewing, we learn from firing. We update the document to refine. Like, this is the level of candidate we're looking for for our specific company that will scale. I think I shared to go on that. That. That rubric to pull on the rubric thread. I'm going to come back to dating, by the way. Like, you've mentioned it twice now. I'm going to walk through the door in a minute because I think there's some good parallels, and I'm loving the analogy. I had someone on the podcast a couple of months ago, Jacob, his name was, and he runs a company called higherlined. I think you and I talked about this at lunch. And what he does is he tries to find ways by interviewing people at the company who have been successful to quantify or create a rubric for the culture of that company, which typically is a hard thing to quantify or boil down into some questions. But he's shown amazing results in terms of retention. So typically he's working with companies with high turnovers like security guards or sales development reps or whatever. They're typically dealing with, you know, 30 plus percent attrition on an annualized basis. And by doing that, he then changes the interview questions that get asked to increase the quality of the candidate. And he's consistently showing like kicking down attrition rates significantly, which as you know, doesn't always show up directly on the balance sheet, but is of huge value to a company. Yes. There's a lot of cost that people don't think about for mishiring or having to fire somebody. So like right off the bat it's 30% of their salary. And that's not even including any of the things they did wrong that increase risk or people they trained or culture that they tarnished. So it can get. Or big initiatives that they delayed or. Yeah, exactly. We're gonna have to start this again with a new leader all over again after we hire them. And that's going to take three months. Exactly. Yeah. And that doesn't show up directly on the balance sheet. That's always a tricky one. And as a fellow business owner, Frank, in terms of selling your service, how do you position that in terms of roi? Because you know, reduced attrition isn't necessarily directly going to show up on the balance sheet. So how do you, how do you position it when you're selling your services? Yeah, so I focus on more when I hear that they are mishiring or they're struggling to hire. We try to get underneath the hood of like, what is this preventing you from doing? And that's the whether it's like an accountant where hey, like if we don't hire this accountant, we can't accept more business. So there's supply constraint or it's maybe on a marketing side. It's like if we don't hire this really good director marketing, we can't, we can't hit the marks of hitting, you know, let's say 20 million this year. And I'm more positioned as like if you want to recruit that person and the right person. So you do hit those things. It's, it's position against the opportunity gained from the right person versus that's, that's kind of like the focus and like the risk. You don't, which is like you miss your targets, it costs you more money. Yeah. Or in terms you have an exit window that you had planned for your investors, and you're risking not hitting that exit window if you don't make the right hires because you're not going to scale, you're not going to get them multiple. You're not going to get that EBITDA that you need in order to. In order to get that. That's great. I promise. We come back to dating and here we are. I actually think it's a great. One of the reasons that hit with me is a great analogy is people are trying to do that. And again, I think about advice I give to people seeking jobs. And I always say to them, once you, like, once you get past that recruitment screen and you're speaking to someone who's actually hiring, you need to focus on what problem it is they're trying to solve, right? They have an open role for a reason because they have a problem they're trying to solve. And you need to make the focus of that conversation the open role. But what often happens, especially people who've been out of work for a while, use the recruitment process as an opportunity to validate themselves as someone valuable. And the same thing happens in dating, right? People don't apply that rubric on Tinder or Hinge or Date one or Date two or whatever it is because actually their primary concern is validating themselves as someone who's worthy of dating. Right? And it's a very natural. It's a very natural human thing, but something that your skill has to fight past because you're actually trying to shift the conversation to, I have a problem in my company and how can I solve it? Yeah, exactly. What came to mind is be interested. Not interesting. It's very similar to dating, but it's an approach that helps when you are preparing for an interview. Because if you spend the time to understand, like you said, the role, the pain, you're actually more able to. To then hit the points you need in the recruiting. For the recruiting, like check marks, there's so much value in like learning from the interview process, seeing what you can get out of the recruiter, seeing what you can learn from the hiring manager, because then it helps you make a better, better case for why you're a fit. Or you realize, like, dude, this is what they're dealing with. Nah, this is not what I like. You learn more like, this is not. This is the crazy X that I'm going to have down the line. Let me just not go that route. So curiosity first. And I have a. I talk about this very openly. I Have a custom Claude model that I run on. Claude code for me doing sales. And it rips me to pieces. Often it's like, stop trying to validate yourself on sales calls. You're already validated or they wouldn't be on the phone to you. Ask more questions about the problem that they're trying to solve, please. So there's my confession. And before we move on to the next question, when, when you were dating Frank, like, what was your rubric for looking for a girlfriend? Like, what was high on your list? I mean, number one is like good human. Like, I need to inherently see that. Like when I see that you're interacting with others and you're kind to the waiter, just generally kind. Because I'm. That's. That's number one. I like that. I get that from you for sure. Yeah, I just, I wouldn't be able to deal with somebody if they're not because. So like, yeah, kind is definitely up there. And I've broken up relationships for drive. I'd say it's hard to assess that initially on the first interview, unless I'm actually being a recruiter, which I've gotten feedback. Are you interviewing me or is this. Oh, it's not just an analogy for you. You do overlap it. I see a little bit. What's my tenant? I'm a curious cat. So in interviewing and in dating, it's like I'm leaning in just interested to learn about the person. Back to private equity. Thanks for indulging me on that one. So as you said, people are playing placement fees 30% typically and especially for a senior hire, that can stack up pretty fast over a four or five year hold period. Rather than like focusing on individual hires, you, through tank recruiting, install a recruitment operating system. Can you just talk me through like what that is? What does it look and feel like and why it's different from like headhunting or focusing on an individual hire. Yeah. So what I found is that some companies, depending on where you are, if you don't have any understanding of recruiting or you've kind of cobbled it together, you're missing a key step that your talent is using to assess you. So what I mean by that is like, if the interview process is clunky, they're gonna assume you run a clunky company and you might miss out on candidates because usually the best talents off the market in a few days. So where I kind of created my arbitrage is that most recruiting firms will fish for you and that's great. They'll take the you know the role you need and go hire it, but you have no idea how they did it and then now you become dependent on them. And my aim is to help the companies I work with understand how to fish for themselves so they first can continue to get that skill in their own company and not have to pay out these, these fees. The approach is really I think about as like three steps which is like qualifying the position, amplifying it and then like evaluation which ties into closing. So really it's like how do we understand what we're looking for which going from forecasting to prioritizing the right position to hire to then making sure we defined it before we go out to the market like the scorecards, etc. Then amplifying it which is like how do we pull all our levers, all the levers at our disposal to get this out and fill up a funnel of talent. And then the last is like curating an interview process is both quick but effective and then ideally the offer call. So what I've seen when working with companies, they just lack the process like the scripting, the scorecards, the know how like hey, you can hire someone in eight days. You don't need to, you don't need to make it a 20 day like holding period. If you like them like and you think they're great and they meet the requirements like just, it's just. Which by the way is the other candidate complaint I hear very all the time at the minute of I had, I had to go through six or seven rounds of interviews across eight weeks and they still said no. And now I'm all pissed off. Yeah, I think candidate experience is super important, especially you're. The amount of times I've gone back to my second person maybe like six months later because we need to hire another person. And they said, they're like, you know what Frank? That was a good experience. I'm open. Or like just years later I still have good relationships with a talent that did I said no to. Because you say yes to one, you say no to like the other hundreds. Of course it's important to make sure they'll still speak about you after. And you will, hopefully it's good or will think about you or take your. Call right place at the right time. Right. And you know, you mentioned, you mentioned the four steps of the operating system. And one, one of that stuck with me from the time I spent with you a year ago was this concept of thinking very carefully about job descriptions and understanding. It's a big responsibility to Communicate very clearly about what you want. Because many places it just reads generic. Like, much as candidates put in shitty generic AI, CVS companies are just as guilty of putting shitty generic AI job descriptions out there as well. I agree. So how do you go about building. How would a portfolio company go about building a good one? Yeah. So I use a rubric that I learned in private equity, which is not a rubric, a framework of the four Rs and three, you're going to be more common. With one you're like, oh, that's important to probably point out. And it helps you understand your role yourself so you can communicate it. So it forces you to get clear on the role. But the four are the role. So you start with what the role is. Yeah, the responsibilities. Everyone knows what that one is. The results is the one most people don't put out, which is like, what am I expecting you to accomplish? And then the requirements. So I like to have those as well as logistics outlined. But in the start is where I kind of feel like I make the most impact. So is how do I hook the person? So that first sentence, there's really two ways to approach it. Which is the person I'm looking for, what pain are they trying to run away from? Like the. Like an accountant that's like, I hate doing this type of work. It's like, maybe that's something they don't have to do here and I can sell to that. Or they have no growth opportunity, pain or motivation, or ideally both. Like, what are they running towards or away from? Try to hook them in the first sentence and then make sure that that role description is trying to describe both a little bit about your company and then, like, the opportunity for them. Like, what would they get the chance to do? And also, like, grow into potentially. Yeah. If they had those. If they hit those results that you're saying that you want from them. Yeah, yeah. So I try to make sure I'm at, like, my most important thing when I, When I write it and then give it to the team. Is like, is this accurate and clear? Because, like, we don't want to oversell it and we don't want to undersell it. But, like, is this actually what they're doing? And then I try to write the bullet points as I try to frame it as opportunity versus, like, work. Like, you have the opportunity, like, ownership of this thing. Just like when someone reads it, if you write it, if you actually take the time to write it, the ideal candidate will read it and be like, this feels like it's written for me. And that's some of the best people I've ever hired in my life is they started the interview like, I feel like this role is written for me. It's like, that's good. Yeah, it's like great marketing copy. Right? It's. Yeah. It feels like a product that was built for someone specific. Yep. People. Most people won't read it right at the start this easy apply, but they will 100% read it right before they get to the interview. Like, and like that will either help them understand what they're looking for and get more excited or they're like, they kind of come in flat. Yeah. Like, I don't really want to be here. I'm doing it because my. Yeah, I'm doing it because my KPI is first run interviews. See, every KPI's got a flaw. Right. I got a ton of first round interviews for jobs I'm never interested in taking. So I want to come on to talk about something else that you describe as discretionary effort. So again, go back to classic PE model, or at least the outsider's view of it. As P buys, the company guts the company for every efficiency gain it can get, including as many people as it can get rid of. And you know, all the time I spent working with private equity, I found out that's not true. Right. Largely. And it's not the. It's not actually the norm and usually there's a lot of good reasons for it. But in terms of optimizing EBITDA, rather than trimming the fat and reducing the headcount, discretionary effort is a way to get a lot more out of the current headcount that you've got. And recruiting is one of the channels into that. So can you talk a bit more about what you mean by discretionary effort? Which is something I know I've seen you put in something I know that I've put in in my career and the magic that is unlocked if you have the right candidate. Yes. So it starts with like the alignment of both the company and the role that they're hiring for and the person. So it's very hard to get discretionary effort out of somebody if like they're doing it just for the paycheck, which is where the they have something that you're offering and that they will work harder for. So it starts in recruiting, but it definitely extends into like how you manage the person. So in the recruiting side, it's thinking genuinely of like in two to three years, what type of person could this person become or career paths could they have. And then you can allude to that in the interview. It's like, hey, you actually have a couple different paths here. You can stay as a, you know, individual contributor, go to manager. Eventually, you know, if things work out even better than expected, you can, you know, do xyz and then like, but what is your goal? Because if this is not aligned, like, there's no reason to. Yeah. What you're looking for. And sometimes I just ask them simply based on what your understanding of the job is and the opportunity or why is this interesting for you? Like, I just want to make it like. And you just play kind of dumb and like, I want to hear you explain it to me. Like, sometimes they'll say stuff like that's not what we're going to do here or that it sounds aligned. But then when you hire them is where I think the, the real, like after the 60, 90 days, like, that's when you start to create this like stretch assignments. And I have like this framework of like, understand their goals, give them work that will help them achieve their goals, and also gets you stuff done for the company, give feedback and then reward development. And I feel like when you have like this approach of developing your team towards this, this goal, when you pour in, they often pour in back to the company because there's a reason to. And I just say if you don't, if your prayer, if your teammate doesn't have something they're chasing, where your employees have something they're working towards, it's hard for you to like, you don't. I don't think that's the right approach from a people management side because there's higher risk of like they're going to leave and what are they like, what is their discretion effort for? So I always like to kind of. Sound, they need to, they need to feel to some extent. So what that. Yeah, let's shift it into a PE example. So PE firm has just bought a company. Typically in that situation, employees correctly or incorrectly feel a little precarious in their positions. What could a PE firm do? And you know, even, even to the extent of adjusting compensation packages or rewriting job descriptions, whatever it might be. What are some of the things that a PE firm could do to transform that from like a feeling of precariousness into a feeling of I want to pour a discretionary effort into this. Even if they know the plan is in four or five years, this PE firm wants to sell the company on it. Yeah, I think the fastest thing to do that is the most impactful is have a. It's going to be a little bit complicated for the one reason you need someone internally that is a champion to champion what I'm about to say. Otherwise it will feel like some external person is coming in just telling you what to do. But I would have some type of vision like meeting like basically all hands meeting where you're going to establish where the company was. Reward everything that's been done. Don't poo poo the past. That's no, there's no value in that. Yeah. As I always say to people when I'm talking to them during. I often talk to employees during diligence or just post close in portfolio companies and I'll say to them like this must be a great company or it wouldn't have got acquired. Like so let's, let's be real. Yeah, like exactly. Well said. So like the, the high level is I would have a meeting where you're going to forecast the vision of this company and like explain to them where we're going to take this as a team. So you rally the troops and then the sections are, you know, reward the like, praise the past, set a new future, go over the tangible like things that you're trying to accomplish and then explain the behaviors that would need to happen for that to occur. So this will allow you to kind of reset like an expectation and rally the troops around. Whatever you believe as a leader is like the initiatives or behavior is trying to remind people to do. Whether it's just, I think the behavior part, ideally you want to get people bought into this vision and have a set of behaviors that you want them to implement when you're not around. Yeah. And it could go one of two ways. Right. Because I imagine being the CEO, maybe a new CEO or an operating partner from a P firm and going in and saying hey, it's our vision to improve this, this business in these three tangible ways without poo pooing the past. And that's going to involve a really high focus on sales or recruitment or whatever it might be right for the next four years. And then our plan is to sell it again. And if that makes someone uncomfortable and they can't get behind that vision or it's not what they want to spend their time doing, then that gives them the clarity to know that walking is the right thing to do if they want to do it. And that's often like going back to dating. That is the best thing to do when people realize early. So you're Right. That vision meeting is really about putting cards on the table of like, here are my intentions with this company that I'm asking you to be a part of. And this is what success means. And it just gives people that clarity. And I think there's always temptation to try and be a bit cloak and dagger about it and like pretend there's some secret sauce going on and actually just alienates people. I think more often than not. Yeah. I think one of the best things, any leader, which is in technically private equity, when they come in, they are like pseudo leader. In that moment, they're like, we own the company or a big part of it is to get in front of the people immediately. Not so you can write the story. So the story is not written about you. And I think, I think it's invaluable. Even if you have one on ones with individual people. I think it's a very important thing to get your story out there first. And these type of meetings, if you can explain how it benefits them, it's like, hey, this will help individually, everyone here, people want to win and people want to be on a winning team. So if you can say this will be a career making opportunity or financially worth it for you at the end when we do this, it's like, now there's something that people are going towards, like working towards. Absolutely. And I've advised many leadership teams on this in my career, mainly in corporate. The team can tell when you're adjusting the strategy because you stop disappearing into the rooms and the blinds close and whatever else. Like, people have eyes and they've seen this, they've seen this movie before. If you don't tell them what the plan is, they will always assume the worst, both in terms of the company as well as, you know, their role in it. And then it becomes a harder. A harder thing to. To rescue. So, yeah, big, big fan of clarity of strategy and leadership. Even if. And it all comes back to. There's a theme developing here, Frank, of like, approaching the difficult conversations and not avoiding them. Because it could be a difficult conversation if the employees don't like where you're taking the company. But better to have that now so that we can be clear about who's a match and who's not a match on both sides and then act appropriately on it. I want to be respectful of your time and get to a kind of golden question thing, because I've got a golden question that I share from the world of data, and that is when my teams are sitting side by side with People and they're showing how they pull the monthly KPIs or the quarterly board report or whatever it might be. Often they'll open a spreadsheet, they'll paste that somebody else's, they'll control csl, and then they'll control via into their own spreadsheet or into a PowerPoint or whatever else. So the goal in question of Data Advisory is how do you know that number is correct? Right. And usually it's a bit of a showstopper and usually gets to some of the issues that are going on in the company. What is the equivalent in recruitment? So say there's an operating partner sitting in a board meeting right now and portfolio companies behind on value creation, and they know that people is a problem, but they can't prove it and can't quite make it tangible. Like, what are some of the questions that they should be asking that you would ask a CEO that they're probably not asking themselves? I would say from a data side, the data side. The first thing that most people don't measure is the quality of hire, which is like, 60 days in. Did we get a snapshot of, like, how good this person is based on feedback from them and the hiring manager? I wouldn't understand. Like, how do we. Yeah, I think, like, that actually that's what I was held to as a recruiter. It's like, it's not that we hired him, it's like, how did that work out? 60 days in, and what did we learn? Yeah, how do we measure quality of hire? I think that's a great question because I think in most cases, again, to go back to where we started, it would be, well, they pass probation and it's a binary yes or no. And actually it's a lot more nuanced than that per all the conversation that we've had so far in this episode. Yes. And oftentimes I like to have data leading up to that, which is like, check in. Like, how do we check in? How do we onboard and check in on, like, I have my leaders every Friday. They'd fill out, like, basically red, yellow, green. So I just, like, I don't need you to do a lot just on culture and skill. Like, how is this person performing? If I see a bunch of reds, I'm like, that's alarming. Yellows are not very good either. But green means, like, we're all good. And this is how you can proactively. It's like when you get to day 60, it's like they mark them like, yeah, they're eight out of ten. I'm like, you have four reds over the past two months. Like, how are they? How are they an eight out of ten on the score? I love it. Yeah. You're a data guy as well, Frank, obviously. Because it's like, it's the same thing for me, right? Business KPIs for how you're measuring a business. Like, like, too often people aren't measuring the right things in the first place. And quality of hiring, if the answer is did they pass probation or not, then that's very low sensitivity for such a critical thing. Such a critical thing in a company. I agree. Yeah. I love it. I love it. So, Frank, thanks so much for coming on. I think there's a bunch of PE operating partners and PE firms that are going to be super interested in what you've got to say. Any route to value creation is a good one, but something critical as people, I think there are nowhere near enough experts in the world and I doubt that many companies are even measuring quality of high, never mind all the other great stuff that you do. So I'm very grateful for you coming on and sharing all those insights with the audience. For people that want to find you afterwards, where should they go to hear more about what Frank the Tank is up to and how Tank Recruiting can help the PE firm? Yeah, tankrecruiting.com would be for the website and then There is on YouTube under tank recruiting, there is a like a resource that we put together to walk through our whole process. It's 37 minutes, but if anyone wanted to send it to their HR leaders to develop them, that'd be a good introduction to how we operate. Yeah. And from what I know about your approach and, you know, your own discretionary effort, Frank, I've no doubt that that 37 minutes is packed full of a whole lot of free value for people as well. So we also provided a free workbook. So, like. Yes. But I appreciate you saying that. We tried our best to put everything we know out there for you to follow. So love it. Love the approach. I'm a big fan and follower of it myself. So we'll make sure that we link it down below in the episode description. But thanks so much for coming on and for, as always, an awesome chat and I look forward to talking to you again very soon. Thank you. It was a pleasure. All right, take care, Frank. You too. See ya. Thanks for listening to the PE Data guy. The place where private Equity meets data. Please forward this episode to your favorite private equity friend. Thanks for listening. See you next time.