Watch above or read below.

Matthew Burns:
Okay, wait a second. You are Leah Bumphrey, not Jack Heald, which is awesome. Yes. And we’ve had Stephen Semple now. He’s been on the show, which is awesome. And it’s weird because there’s no real application process to get onto the Crumbs for Giants podcast. It’s more like if I decide that you’re worthy-

Leah Bumphrey:
That’s not what my agent said. Are you kidding me? And I also was told I get to wear Jack’s hats. What’s going on?

Matthew Burns:
See, wouldn’t that be nice if you could wear Jack’s hat? No. But again, there’s no way for me. It’s not a recruiting strategy that I’ve got going on. I don’t have to write any ads to get you on here. We’re all Wizard Of Ads Partners, and we love talking about marketing even when we’re done marketing for other people and then thinking about marketing for ourselves. We’re still in the mood to talk about marketing, and that’s kind of where we’re at.

Leah Bumphrey:
But if you did have to write a recruitment ad to get people. If you did, there’s the question, Matthew.

Matthew Burns:
Well, that’s part of marketing, right? I mean, let’s be honest. So, recruiting ads, this is something that you have talked about in the past with me, and I think you usually come at this from a pretty awesome angle. So why don’t you start, and then we can tell everybody where we believe recruiting ads live and what we should be doing with them.

Leah Bumphrey:
Well, okay. Recruiting ads, people forget how important they are. Having good staff is just as important as having good clients, right? Absolutely. But how do you find them? What do you do? And we forget that the whole world is potentially our HR department, our recruitment department. Somebody out there knows the person that you want to be working with, the person who is going to fit into your organization and be the perfect connection.

Matthew Burns:
Absolutely.

Leah Bumphrey:
But how do we get those people working for us, and ideally working for us for free? The long-term career that I enjoy and love is working in radio, and never in a billion years did I stop and think, oh, I wish I could work in radio, and I’d love to be selling radio spots and creative. But what happened was that the radio station I ended up working for they were very, very progressive, and you’ll never guess what they used to recruit… their own radio stations.

Matthew Burns:
What?

Leah Bumphrey:
I know. Isn’t that crazy? So here I am loving and really doing very well with a different type of sales industry. I was working in office equipment sales and doing very well. No intention of moving. I liked what I was doing. I liked where I was working, liked my clients. The only problem was that wherever I worked, they kept wanting me to move away from my little Midwestern town.

Matthew Burns:
Oh no.

Leah Bumphrey:
One day, I started getting, and it wasn’t just a day; it was over the course of a week, but one day it really intensified. I remember it was a Monday and I’d taken the day off to paint my kitchen, and I’m getting calls from clients, former clients, getting calls from people that I used to work with, people that I was friends with, saying, “Hey, have you listened to this radio station? It sounds like they’re looking for you.”

So the first call I dismissed, the second call, the third one, I’m thinking, this is kind of interesting. And then I realized, you know what? I’ve been trying to get into that radio station to sell them office equipment for a long time. I have no desire to work for that station. They were within walking distance of my house. So that night, I just went, I threw a resume in there, thinking, this is going to get me into meet the GM or the operations manager, or at least a receptionist, so they know who I am.

Well, my husband is making fun of me. You’re going to go work for that station because it’s not the type of music I would listen to. I would never, ever have heard the ads ever. One interview in and I came home, I said, “I think I want this job.” They were talking to me. So their ads, they were accurate in who they were describing.

They were talking to everybody except the person, me, whom they ended up hiring. And I am hearing from people that I know and respect and like that I should be applying for this job. So it gets the wheels turning. So in recruiting, the most important thing is to have everyone recruit for you. And yes, radio and yes, how you phrase the ads and who you’re talking to, and you’re saying, “Do you know this person? We know you know this person.”

Matthew Burns:
That’s right.

Leah Bumphrey:
Now, if I had found the ad, maybe I would’ve seen myself in it, maybe I would’ve heard myself in it, but it goes even farther than that. So that’s why recruitment, energy, and the fun of looking for people by tapping everyone on the shoulder, I love it.

Matthew Burns:
Well, and I think too, if we step back a second, so let’s not think about it as okay, we should be using radio. It’s not about radio specifically. So it happened to work for you and that’s awesome.

I think that the reality is that all of us at some point in our lives have been referred to a thing. We’ve been referred to, “Oh my gosh, my buddy’s got this thing, you should go check it out. ” Or, “Oh, I was going through the want ads and man, you would be perfect for this job.” Didn’t you say something you wanted to get into that industry? And so some people have a direct path, they know exactly what they want to do. And there’s people who are, they’re good in general in sales. So they’re good in general in marketing, but they haven’t found their niche, they haven’t found their one place or the one vertical that they really can excel in. And they’ve gotten a leg up from somebody else saying, “Hey, you should look into that.”

And so what you’re talking about is building influencers. And so people who could influence you in the direction that it needs to go, there are lots and lots of ways to do that, but you can’t do that by saying, “We’re a company that is looking for a marketing manager. We pay $40,000 a year, and here are all the things you need to do for us so that we can hire you.”

Those jobs, that’s a dime a dozen, you’re going to skip it, you’re going to scan it. If the dollar amount’s not right, no matter how awesome your company is, no matter how good a boss you are, no matter how nice the perks package actually is, at the end of the day, what they’re looking at is that dollar amount. They’re not looking at what I also get out of that to fulfill my soul? Is it going to be the place that I’m going to be able to land and feel like, “Oh my gosh, I’m home.” Right?

Leah Bumphrey:
And people, honestly, in this day and age, it’s hard to find the right people. And I mean, I hear that all the time from my clients, can’t find … Where are they hiding? Oh, we’re finding someone that they’re bad at this, this, this, and this.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly.

Leah Bumphrey:
But to find the right person, you have to always be recruiting. This is not about, “Oh, we have a job opening. Oh, we’re going to have to hire it for two weeks from now.” No, no, no, no. It’s a hopper. It’s a hopper full of people at different stages because ideally you want someone who’s already working, really happy with what they’re doing, really satisfied with their location, with their clients, with whatever it is that they’re doing, but open to the ideas that there might be something more. Open to the idea that, “Oh, wait a minute, like me. Oh, you know what? This is a place where, if I were working there, no one’s going to be bugging me to move to another city. Wait a minute, this is tough.” I wasn’t unhappy where I was, but it started the ball rolling.

Matthew Burns:
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. No, so I like that. And so let’s think about this then. So, in a recruiting ad, what are we doing? What are we trying to do? Are we talking about the features and benefits of the job? Are we looking at the wants and needs of the person, or are we trying to describe the avatar that we’re looking for that could come in and fit in perfectly into the organization, and how do we do that?

Leah Bumphrey:
I am always about the story. It’s actually a romance. This is the story of the company. This is the story of the ideal person. This is how we would bring them together. We know the company. Do you know the person? Similarly, I mean, honestly, people who are looking for a position, and I’ve seen this happen, what do they do? They tell the story of the person they are, and they’re looking for a company that is okay with them being a working mom, a company that recognizes a 24-hour schedule, a company that has room for advancement, or room so that it’s pay per performance, or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So you tell the story, the specifics, do you care if you’re hiring a guy or a gal? You shouldn’t. You should be looking for the best person. Do you care if they have brown eyes or blue eyes? You shouldn’t. You should be looking for the best person. In the industry, if you are fixated that, you know what I am, I want to work in radio. I can tell you if I had been daydreaming about that, it would’ve never happened. Most people, what they think they want to do, and most companies what they think they want to hire — no, we want to be open.

Matthew Burns:
It’s usually not the right fit.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah. And I don’t think that enough companies are looking at the role itself and who the best fit is for the role. And what I mean by that is they’re looking for experience. Most people want to hire for the experience of that role. And the problem with hiring for experience is you don’t know when they got their experience, whether they were in the right role before, either.

And why are they looking for a new job? If everything was perfect and they were in the right role and it was the right seat for the right human, why would they even be interested, even if the right job opportunity comes up, that should be the right job opportunity where they’re at? And so everybody looks for whoever the most experienced person is.

And I would argue that what you want is, if you’re in a manufacturing facility and you’re making this gizmo and you make a billion of these a year, and you try to bring in somebody who’s highly forward-thinking and is a visionary, and they put them at the controls of this machine where they’re going to go stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp. And you’ve got a visionary on board, their brain is going to break. They’re not hiring for that position.

And so it’s finding the right human attributes and attitude for the role in which they’re going to be, not the experience that they’ve already done it.

Leah Bumphrey:
And understanding that you probably have those attributes, you have specific attributes people are looking for. The other day, I was walking through a mall, and there was the friendliest guy working at the kiosk for the movie theater. And I stopped, and you had to talk to him because he was just that friendly kind of a personality. And here he worked there part-time. He worked at a subway place part-time. He had worked at McDonald’s, and I’m thinking, I’m always recruiting. I’m thinking, this is somebody, man, he would not be afraid to knock on doors and cold call businesses.

I said, “Well, what are your long-term plans?” “Oh, I finished school in the spring.” He had taken a two-year, some kind of certification in accounting, but he was hired by Disney. Do you know why he was hired by Disney? He’s going down, and I’m in Canada, so he’s going down to Florida. He starts in October. He’s hired by Disney because of the type of person he is. Here he’s worked all these people would call jobs, but it shows he knows how to work. It shows he knows what he’s doing. He’s hungry to prove that he can do more.

And he said to me, “I’m going to make this Disney thing really work. I’m really going to make it work.” I said, “You are. You already have.” Bravo. And I say bravo to any company that is willing to look for someone who’s putting themselves out there. Now, I don’t know. I would love to have known the rest of the story. He got pulled away, but what’s the rest of his story? How did he connect with Disney? What did he do? Well, I do know one thing he did. He worked hard. He was the type of person who would talk to a weird woman walking through the mall who was going, “Hey, how long have you been working here?”

Matthew Burns:
Yeah, and I agree. I think that when it comes to recruiting ads, we really need to understand that writing the ad to the person, to the sensibilities and the capabilities of the human, not their experience level, is always going to get the right person in the seat for you. And then it’s whether or not you have this highly skilled job that they needed to come in with experience as well, or it’s a job that you can then train through, and then you make decisions based on that.

Because this job and this job, one highly skilled, one not, the right person might fit both those roles. You’re always looking for the right fit, the right personality, the right psychometrics for the job. And so you’ve got to be writing creatively for that. Okay. What are we missing? We’ve got a couple of minutes left. What are we missing when we think about finding the right human for your business?

Leah Bumphrey:
Well, think about it in a work situation, you want everyone to get along. Yes. You want to have a team, a cohesive team. Where do you find cohesive teams? Well, you find that those people who are already on your team, how many people are they connected to that may be perfect fits? You’ve already got it built in that the social structure will be there if they’re hired. They already have someone who’s going to hold their hand through the process.

So what are you doing as a company to incentivize your current staff to say, “Hey, you know what? If you bring in someone that we end up hiring, this is what you’re going to get. This is what it’s worth to us.” There’s a lot of monster, no pun intended, employment sites online right now, and you can find jobs all over the place on those that match this criteria, that criteria. But again, how are you writing it? What are you saying that you’re looking for? Are you even bothering to say the specifics?

Matthew Burns:
Exactly. So I think, Leah, then what I want to do is I’ve written a bunch of recruiting ads over my career to help my clients get the right person to fit the right seat. I think I’m going to do a mock ad up, and I’m going to share below so you can take a look at what we’re talking about.

Leah Bumphrey:
There you go.

Matthew Burns:
And that way, it just gives you an idea of the writing. And because I mean, to show you the writing and to do it live, it’s hard. But take what we can give you and use it for your own purpose. Just a really quick shout-out to the Wizard Academy. Leah, that’s what we learned: how our best writing came from the learning there. And we try to make sure that we talk about them as much as we can.

There’s always going to be a link about the Wizard Academy. Listen, guys, they’ve got every course under the sun for communications, for advertising, for marketing, for businesses. Go find the one you like, but start with Magical Worlds. We highly recommend it. Go look at that. And Leah, can we do another? Will you do another one with me?

Leah Bumphrey:
Oh, you and I, who’s going to stop us from talking? Who’s going to stop us? We’re talking about Wizard Academy, non-traditional. Same thing with recruiting, non-traditional. Wizard Academy is a non-traditional business school. What we’re talking about is non-traditional recruiting. It works because it gets down to the basics of tradition, and that’s stories, and what makes people stick and tick.

Matthew Burns:
Stick and tick. Perfect. Okay. I appreciate you. Thank you so much. And we’re going to come back on another episode. Bye.

[Company Name] Job Ad –
Service Technician

Title: Service Technician

Hiring a tinkerer, mechanical detective, problem solver, and system
builder.

A tinkerer isn’t afraid to dive right in.

A detective knows how to follow the mechanical clues.

Problem solvers understand that sometimes new is better than fixed.

We believe that serving the customer is job one and you like to take care of people.

You have always like to take apart your toys and put them back again to figure out how
they work.

Happiness, for you, is when you fixed, perfectly, what was broken.

You’re looking for a company that you will be proud to align your good name with.

You’re living a life of higher purpose. To do something bigger than yourself. Way bigger.

You’re looking for the ability to be the best at what you do. A career that will challenge
you. That you will be able to build. Something you will look back at and be proud of.

Ready to get your hands dirty and make people happy?

Service Techs carry out tasks.

We can teach you all the tasks necessary to do your job.

That’s easy.

We are looking for a natural mechanical genius.

A servant to the people, motivated by a job perfectly performed on time. A detailoriented,
nothing slips through the cracks Samurai ready to rule the world.

There’s no room for ego, arrogance, or general puffery here.

Arseholes need not apply.

This is a KEY ROLE in our rapidly growing residential home service business.

We have to get this hire right.

We are looking for someone we like, for sure.

But more importantly, we’re looking for someone who wants to be part of building a
huge business.

Someone who knows how to investigate, find the problem, offer the best solution and fix
or replace what is broken to achieve our vision — to be the best $100 million dollar
residential home service company in [the service area].

That means the best culture, the best buying experience, and the best quality of work
our cherished customers will ever experience. Period.

As our Service Champion you will be:
● Ensuring our customers get the absolute best solution to their problem, period.
● Ensuring on time service that leads 5 Star reviews
● Ensuring to communicate well with both the customers and home office.

This means looking your best, smiling, and delivering on our promises.

It means going the extra mile to work and deliver the values of [Company Name].

This means protecting and defending a happy, healthy, wealthy culture with your life.

We’re not satisfied with satisfied customers. We want delighted customers!

Are you looking to build a giant – one delighted customer at a time?

We thought so too.

That’s why we like you so much.

We really like how thoughtful you are.

We love your work ethic.

You don’t give up. You figure it out.

You’re so resourceful.

You’re not afraid of asking. You ask all the time. Ask ask ask.

No guessing with you.

You know premium prices mean you can deliver a premium result.

That’s the only way. Literally.

And it’s okay if there is nothing to sell. You’re thrilled to just make a fan.

The win is in the long game with you.

So awesome.

That’s why you’re going to make $xx,xx – $xx,xxx a year just for showing up. Plus
incentives and bonuses on top for delivering top-notch service and sales. You’ll be
smashing through 6-figures in no time.

And this is just the ground floor!!!!!

We’re headed to the stars, baby!

And we want you along for the ride.

You ready to jump on the [Company Name] rocket ship?

Cause we can’t wait to meet you.

You know what to do next.

[Business Owner’s Name]

Owner

[Company Name]

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