61: A New Approach to Hiring- with Chris Czarnik

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[00:00:47] Erin Courtenay: I didn't see the amount. I saw the headline and then I saw something that said, here's why, and I didn't read. Yeah, apparently it's tiny. Not good, or not what was expected.

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[00:01:04] Whitney Koch: Yeah, I, I don't remember the amount, but the daily news podcast I listened to did a segment on it. And it was really interesting just to learn about you know, how much money the NBA makes versus the WNBA, and how they're kind of using that to explain the great disparity in her salary. Pretty interesting stuff.

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This is why we have those conversations. It's just because we're not there yet. Now there are some restrictions, I believe because of the contract that the players have with the WNBA that does restrict things. Uh, And of course, Caitlin Clark is working on a lot of endorsements. So she's going to get paid in other ways for her great performance, but no matter how you feel about Caitlin Clark, right.

I absolutely think she's phenomenal. She's so fun to watch.

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[00:02:35] Kris Harrington: Yes. So, you know, I just thought we would have a conversation about that because we always are trying to, you know, make sure we touch on things that kind of shake up that status quo.

And this is one of those things that is a real out there information that I think we can all just understand and say, Hey, you know, she's making a lot of people a lot of money, not just for a lot of women in sports. And there's a gap here. So. Let's keep supporting women so that that gap is closed.

I think that's the key message for all of us. But you know, we have a fantastic guest today. He's going to really fill us in on everything pertaining to hiring, hiring practices, what you need to do to attract people into your organization. And how you need to, or the things you should be doing to keep them.

r. So that would have been in: 2023

Chris is a former military officer and HR manager. He's revolutionized job search approaches with the human search engine endorsed by U. S. Congress as a standard, and as a standard, excuse me. He later innovated talent acquisition processes to reduce turnover and authored Winning the War for Talent, influencing over 3, 500 organizations worldwide. As a coach and strategist, Chris offers customized solutions to enhance talent management, helping CEOs and leaders cultivate environments where employees excel.

As a top speaker for Vistage for five consecutive years, he empowers organizations to adapt to modern challenges and rethink success in talent development. Chris! Welcome to the broadcast.

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And so excited to give people some ideas. Because my people, my job seekers, desperately want your better job. They desperately want your better pay, better benefits. And they're showing up reliably every day for jobs way worse than yours because nobody taught them how to find them. So my hope today is I can give you some tools so that you can go to them.

Because we don't wait for customers to come to us. We don't wait for vendors to come to us. It's time we bring people, we teach people that they belong in our organization and our great jobs.

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So let's jump in. What is currently going on in terms of hiring and retaining talent? And what do demographics have to do with it?

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For example, I'm a baby boomer. I'm 62 years old this month, and there were 75. 4 million of them born during those years between 1945 and 1964. So there were way more people than there were jobs. And for the last 40 years, companies all around the world, and mostly, I focus most of my work in the United States, although it's moving into Canada and Europe this summer.

They posted a job ad, a line formed, and that company got to choose who came to kiss the ring of HR and kneel in front of the author of their organization, right?

We never for a second worried about the fact that if we posted a good job with good pay and benefits, that people wouldn't apply. Well, the demographic shift is really simple to understand.

So I'm going to, if I can play it out for you really quickly. Baby boomer generation, 75. 4 million people, the generation after them, gen X has 9 million less people. Let me say that one more time. If you're a manufacturer and somebody had been supplying you a raw material 76 million lineal feet of that critical raw material for the last 40 years, but came to you and said next year, we can only supply you 64 million lineal feet of that critical raw material.

You wouldn't blame the government. You certainly wouldn't blame the raw material. You would say, wow, there's going to be a shortage of a critical raw material. We better get ours before people get theirs. And because of that, we're literally eight and a half million people short for the next 10 years. And there's not enough people to go around.

There literally are not enough breathing human beings in America. My generation, which supplied all of that talent over the last 40 years is retiring at a rate of 12, 000 a day in America. We need three generations to make up a workforce.

So it used to be baby boomers, Gen X and millennials. You take out my generation, right? Baby boomers, 75 million, and you try and replace it with the new Gen Z generation that literally only has 66 million people in it.

There's, there's no politics, there's no religion, it's math, there's no alternative facts, it doesn't matter whether you watch Fox or CNN, right?

Like, we're literally eight and a half million people short for the next 10 years, and because it takes 18 years to make an 18 year old, we got you.

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[00:08:30] Chris Czarnik: Can I speak to that just for a second? Yeah. So now that we know that's a mathematical certainty, when your HR person comes to you and says, well, nobody wants to work and everybody's, everybody's living off government handouts. I want you to remember the thing that should bother you, everybody in your organization, is that people are showing up reliably for way worse jobs than yours every day.

I'll give you an example. Last week, it's very likely one of us on this show went to a 10 minute oil change place. What we didn't realize is that in the pit of the 10 minute oil change place, there was a 21 year old mechanically inclined female who got up at six o'clock in the morning. She's good with computers, right?

She had to figure out your filter and your oil. She's good with people. She explained the process and the bill to you. She's clearly good mechanically because you trusted her with your 50 rig. And she got up this morning at six o'clock this morning to show up for $16 an hour, 22 hours a week, no full time job, no full time benefits, no health insurance, and no opportunity to grow.

What should bother people everywhere is why is she there? It's not rational to think that she doesn't want your better job. It's not rational to think with all of those skills and abilities, she wouldn't be a great customer service person, a good mechanic, somebody who works on your hydraulics, one of a dozen different jobs in your organization.

And so why isn't she there? Because she doesn't know she fits in your jobs and the only one who knows who does fit in your jobs is you. So it's up to us. We got to stop waiting for people to figure out they belong in a place that they've never been, and we need to go to them.

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And how has that helped you understand what it is that employers need to do to make that adjustment?

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So whether they were high school graduates, college graduates, or 4, 000 of them were mid career professionals. And they came to me and they said, listen, I never belonged in this job, or I have a bad boss, or I'm on the wrong shift, or I just got passed over for promotion, or my family just had a child and I have to rethink my life.

Chris helped me figure out where to, where I belong in the world and work and how to find it. So maybe the easiest way to say it is from a CEO in San Diego who said, the reason to listen to Chris is because if you're fishing for talent, he just spent 17 years with the fish.

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[00:11:38] Chris Czarnik: And so if I can, so here's a really easy way to think of it. So, you know, people, when they can't find people, we see it on TV all the time, you know, nobody wants to work and quiet quitting and all those darn millennia to school for their French Art degree.

And now they're living in their parents basement, delivering pizzas to each other through grub hub. And all that stuff we say when we don't know what to do next, then we have to make it the world's fault. Well, can you imagine if your salesperson came to you and said that? If you're a CEO watching this and said, and your sales manager came to you and said, well, you know, I saw on TV, there's going to be a recession and nobody's going to want to buy anything. So don't hold me accountable for my sales numbers for the last eight next 18 months till the recession fades and then talk about me being responsible for sales. My guess is that conversation with that salesperson would be pretty short, pretty direct.

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[00:12:29] Chris Czarnik: So we can use all the things that we know about selling products and services to sell a job.

But even when I say the word sell a job, that hits you strange, right? Never had to sell a job because there were more people than there were jobs. And now we do.

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[00:13:06] Chris Czarnik: And that's, that's the really beautiful thing is, I promise whoever's watching this, you're already really good at this. I'm not asking you to become, you know, take some large course or, or change the way you do business. I want you to, I mean, what do you do when you sell a product or service, right? You create a persona of your ideal customer.

You identify why, what problem that customer probably has. You identify how your, your product or service solves that problem. You identify them, you approach them, you touch them, you create a relationship with them. And you get them and you'd start a longer term conversation to decide that the two of you should have a longer conversation.

And so sales as easy as I tell people, you identify this exposed nerve, you touch the exposed nerve, you soothe the exposed nerve and you sell the bandaid.

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And that's what people need to, I, what would be the message by the way? What would be the tagline for I'm looking for talent? What's a winning tagline?

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So I'm going to ask you this simple question. Have any of you on this call or anyone watching this broadcast ever had a class in high school, college, your master's program, or through SHRM to help you figure out your personality type, your skills, your abilities, your talents, the problems you can solve, the value of solving those problems, how to sort through the 20, 000 companies within 20 miles of your building that have those kinds of problems, identify what happens in the company that causes those problems to happen.

And how to demonstrate your ability to solve that problem in a way that has more value than the cost of your pay and benefits, everybody who's had that class anytime in your life, please raise your hand. Right. So if that's true for us, that means nobody's ever had that class, which means you start with the premise that nobody knows where they belong and nobody knows where their skills and abilities can get them. In fact, the only person, so think of this, really shift your mind here. The only person who knows who we hope applies is us, the people who run the business, right? We're the ones who have this idea of who we walk through the door. So we post a job ad.

It's like dragging a net across a Lake and then sitting on the shore and throwing back all the fish that are in trout. How about instead we, we study trout. We understand right. The depth that they are, the time of day that they feed. And then we use a trout lure at a trout time of day in a trout lake.

And we catch trout because that's what your salespeople do. Your salespeople don't just call on everybody. They don't go knocking door to door and say, Hey, do you need automated equipment? No. Do you know anybody who does? No. You have a persona of your ideal customer. You use tools like databases to identify companies just like them.

And then you go in front of them and tell them that you can solve their problems. And that's exactly what I teach companies to do.

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[00:16:43] Chris Czarnik: Yeah. So, the persona, you've asked the perfect question here. A persona, for those of you who don't know, is a fictional model of your ideal customer or candidate. And so how can we advertise to anybody?

What are we doing writing a job ad or doing any kind of search until we first identified who we hope we get and bring inside our organization? So creating that persona, which is why I always tell people the first step you need to do in changing this is bring your sales and marketing people into the HR process.

Remember your HR people, everything I'm talking about for HR people is new and exciting and it's overwhelming. For salespeople, if they watch this, they'd be like, well, that's just like Friday.

I do that every single day to sell products and services. And I'm genuinely suggesting that once you build a persona of your ideal applicant, now all of your advertising, where you advertise, what you say, what problems you solve. I'll give you a quick example, if you don't mind.

We know from SHRM, the Society for Human Resources Managers, that 38 percent of everybody in America changes jobs because of a negative relationship with their direct manager or supervisor. Right, let's call it bad boss. I hope you've never had a bad boss, but 38 percent of everybody in America has. And so, when I write a job ad, I first identify that we can solve that problem for someone, and then the top line of the job ad It doesn't say engineer.

It doesn't say hydraulics technician. It doesn't say salesperson. The top line of the job ad says fire your horrible boss. Just think about that for a second. Can, can we all agree that nobody's on Indeed as a hobby? Can we agree to that?

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[00:18:30] Chris Czarnik: There's zero people on Indeed looking for a new job saying, I love my boss.

I love my company. I love the culture. I feel well taken care of, well paid. I'm working on interesting things with a clear development plan. But I think just for fun, I'll send a resume to a person I've never met at a company I've never heard of for a job I've never done on the hopes that my life will get better for 6, 000 more a year. That's not rational.

So the reason they're on Indeed or LinkedIn looking for a different job is because something's wrong personally or professionally in their life, in the way their job fits into their life. I want your watchers to ask their best people.

Every answer you need to do what I'm asking you to do exists in the minds of your current employees. You caught great fish, you just have no idea how you caught them. So you ask them these two questions. What job or industry did you leave to come to us? Right? That helps us teach people they can change lanes from other industries into our industry.

So what job or industry did you leave to come to us? And number two, what changed in your life personally or professionally that caused you to start a job search that led you to us?

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[00:19:36] Chris Czarnik: If you knew that for the last eight people you hired, these job ads write themselves.

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[00:19:43] Chris Czarnik: So sorry, you asked a nickel question, I gave you a dollar fifty.

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But if you craft that job description with a person in mind, even if you're, not precisely the persona, you find an interest there and you recognize a company that has a story to tell. And I think that's fantastic.

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Can we agree to that, that something's not fitting in their life? And so they want to see themselves in the job, because if you look for your own job ad, you'll see almost all the jobs look the same. Duties, tasks, responsibility, authority level deliverables. And none of them speak to, if you're unhappy for this reason, come talk to us and we can fix it.

Even though every product and service you've sold in your life, you've sold that way.

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[00:21:04] Chris Czarnik: Yeah, so that if I'm known, I got to tell you what's interesting is I said that in a speech on accident about four years ago. It has become my moniker around the world. So, but it's really true.

So I want you to think about millennials and Gen Z's, right? The two generations that we're mostly trying to recruit from today. They're the first two generations that don't know a world without Google. They have had access to the combined knowledge of the history of the world in 15 seconds since they were 5 years old.

They are learning entities. They have been learning on when they were 5. They were learning when they were 7. The reports that they wrote in high school were based on assessing all of the knowledge within 15 seconds. Why would we think that learning isn't important to those people? Trouble with that is that people my age didn't expect to learn, right?

So 62 year old, if you're watching this and you're a baby boomer or a late generation X person, you might be thinking, well, I didn't, you know, I didn't get all that learning. I didn't get all that training. Yeah. Cause we had to walk to the two miles to the library to check out a four year old copy of Encyclopedia Britannica, and by gosh, we walked uphill both ways to get it.

Right. That information, if you want to know the difference between generations, it really boils down to access to information. Millennials and Gen Z expect to learn and grow every single day. What I build for organizations, it's a much longer conversation, but I literally build like an entry mentor, subject matter, expert model of growth that the employee drives themselves inside the organization that costs almost nothing, but also gets people prepared for their next level of leadership.

And so just think about, Anybody, you know, in your life. I mean, we have what a couple of millennials on the call today. Is that correct?

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[00:22:52] Chris Czarnik: So when millennials stop learning they start leaving. How do you react to that?

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[00:23:12] Chris Czarnik: Yeah. Thank you.

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We created incredible relationships and really wanted to see each other succeed in the organization. So there were all these other benefits that came from training.

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In our hiring process, our talented HR people screen out everybody who doesn't want to develop and grow, right? Everybody without initiative doesn't want to develop and grow. We don't let them in our organization. So we only hire in people who want to develop and grow. And then we don't have a way to develop and grow them.

And you're asking why they leave every 3. 4 years. And that's the statistic is over the last 18 years, millennials, if they're not given a chance to learn and grow, it's not even a promotion or pay raise. If they're not given a chance to grow their knowledge base and their ability to serve the organization at a higher level, they have left companies, not jobs, but companies every 3. 4 years.

So it's not a question of if you need to put in something, some kind of development program. I mean, you can choose not to, but remember we're 8 million people short and those people will find a place where they can grow.

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It's my experience is leadership are pretty set in their ways and their beliefs. You know that, yeah, these kids just want to live in their parents basement forever. Nobody wants to work. So how do you change that narrative?

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We just have tried everything we can that used to work and it's not working anymore. And so now it's got to be the world's fault because it's not the world's fault, then it's got to be my fault. But I want you to think about this for a second that, that this idea that people my age, we never had access to information the way we grew up was being told what to do.

Just, and you know, if you chose me and you told me what to do, I did it. You paid me every two weeks and paid my health insurance. And that was the arrangement between employer and employee. But today, right? If you don't grow that person, right? Not only aren't you going to keep them staying, but you are never going to develop the next level of leaders in your organization.

That's why, you know, at a different conversation. Maybe I can show you the model, but there's a model of the first 18 months. Somebody just becomes great at their job. With the help of a mentor. And then from 18 to 36 months, that person can be the new person can become now a mentor to a new person.

And then after 36 months, that person can lean into if they're chosen and have earned it, become a subject matter expert on a topic that's important to the organization, analytical problem solving, win win bargaining. EOS implementation by studying using all of the tools of the internet and online learning platforms.

So, the basic, if you want me to convince people to do it, this is a really easy way to do it. The first thing you do is identify the number of people that left you last year.

SHRM would tell you that it costs you 38 percent of a person's annual wages to lose, replace and retrain their replacement.

So if one thing I know about CEOs who might be watching, If it's not on the PNL, they don't do it. Not because it's not important to them because they only have so much capacity and can only pay attention to so many things. And so we're on the PNL, right? Here's what I'm asking everyone watching this to do.

Take the number of people that lost less left last year, multiply it by their annual wages without benefits and multiply that number by 0. 38. You likely had last year a 340, 000 retention problem, but you don't talk about it that way. When we talk about, well, another 16 an hour employee left us, there's nothing we can do.

But when we do the math and we say, wow, if we don't fix this retention issue, that costs us either out of pocket or opportunity costs 364, 000 this year. And it's on the PNL. So they have to explain it to the board of directors every month when they describe the PNL. I promise you will have their undivided attention.

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[00:28:21] Erin Courtenay: Yeah, I would be happy to. So, we've been talking about generations. This kind of fits. When I was young, when I was a child and I listened to music, I would save my pennies, roll them up and take them down to Woolworths and buy an album.

An LP, vinyl. And we have heard about vinyl sort of making a comeback over the last 20 years. The hipsters sort of brought it back into vogue. But something that I just learned that is so I don't know if you guys remember when we were young, sometimes, rarely, an LP would come out, and it would be a color.

Do you, did you guys ever have one? Absolutely wanted the color one. I, they were always maybe a little more expensive, a little harder to get, but I just, they were super cool. And that's a new product that artists are releasing.

And I think it's fantastic. I think it's a great way to make a sort of intimate connection with your music that a digital collection doesn't. And even more so that specialness of the colored LP versus, you know, the old black vinyls. So I'm glad to hear that that's changing. That's exciting.

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[00:29:31] Erin Courtenay: That's what, that's, that's what brought it to my attention. You know, I don't think I'm going to, but I'll tell you that this morning, my friend had a birthday party for her daughter before school, and it was Taylor Swift themed because the album just came out. And it's really fun to see all these young girls getting excited about music. It's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. How about Whitney? What about you?

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[00:30:44] Erin Courtenay: Oh, that's great. Awesome. What about you, Kris Harrington?

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And it is, what is the most fulfilling job experience that you ever had? And I just thought that a question like that would reveal a lot about what a person enjoyed. You know, a little bit more about themselves, but also where they see themselves fitting. Maybe even longer term, depending on the role that you're hiring for.

So Chris, any thoughts on that?

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[00:32:17] Erin Courtenay: I also like it from an attraction standpoint, because if I were asked that in an interview environment, I would know something about that company that they value fulfilling experiences, which is not something that you take for granted.

So I think it also does that work that we've been talking about today, attracting talent. So I think it's an awesome question.

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[00:32:42] Kris Harrington: Well, I appreciate that feedback. You know, there are those little things where you hear something you're like, Oh, this is so good. So yeah, I hope that's helpful to others too.

Chris, what did you just learn?

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It's not different at work than it is in your own life. So that's why I'm a huge fan of mentor programs inside the organization. I mean, remember when somebody leaves their job and comes to work for you, they just left everyone and everything they know behind and work with a bunch of strangers.

How could we not try to connect them to people when there's, you know, hundreds of jobs that they could choose other than ours. So that's what I learned. Do you have a best friend at work? And if not, help your employees create one.

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[00:34:20] Chris Czarnik: Yeah, so so you can go to chris czarnik. com c h r i s c as in cat z like zebra A r n i k k it's called career research group. The book is called Winning the War for Talent I'm a farm kid from Appleton, Wisconsin, who started sweeping the floor in a paper mill. So manufacturing is in my blood and there's still pulp in my veins, I'm pretty sure.

But if you go to chrisarnik. com and please connect with me on LinkedIn, please. I have videos and I have a YouTube channel with. Ideas for your HR people. I write a blog every single week that can give your HR people new ideas every single week.

Cause remember your HR people want to do better. They don't need pressure. They need tools. And following me and connecting with me. I can give you some of those tools to get started on with tomorrow.

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[00:35:12] Chris Czarnik: It's a great honor. And again, you guys re this industry as a whole is so important.

It's the backbone of America and it feels pretty good to start sweeping the floor around automated equipment, running it and then installing it, and then finally helping people fill those roles. So thank you so much for the opportunity to here today.

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Thank you.