Quirky HR
Quirky HR
Ep 79 | Mission, Vision, and Values of Talent Acquisition with Fletcher Wimbush
Join your host Dana Dowdell and guest Fletcher Wimbush as they dive into the mission vision and values of talent acquisition. If you think talent acquisition is a painful process, you are not alone. Fletcher share's through his experience, a secret to becoming good at talent acquisition is learning from those painful moments.
Imagine a recruitment strategy so compelling, it not only attracts the best candidates but also aligns with their deepest aspirations. We delve into the powerful draw of an Employer Value Proposition (EVP) and how it can turbocharge your recruitment marketing. Fletcher also discusses the value of assessments in separating the great from the good once you are attracting the desired talent.
Even if you have found that perfect hire, the job still isn't done. The conversation to the importance of onboarding and accountability. Even the best candidate will struggle to succeed in an organization without access to the right tools or leadership that recognizes their weaknesses. Enjoy this episode with Dana and Fletcher as they share some Quirky insight on recruiting.
Find Fletcher Wimbush at:
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https://fletcherwimbush.com/
https://www.discoveredats.com/
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Dana Dowdell - Boss Consulting - @bossconsultinghr - @hrfanatic
This episode is brought to you by Boss Consulting HR and our downloadable products. We launched downloadable products in 2023 and I'm excited to share them with you through the Quirky HR podcast. If you head over to Boss Consulting HR and navigate to the downloadable section, we'll, of course, make sure that it's linked in the podcast description. There you can find resources for small business owners, hr departments of one, new business owners who are not quite sure where to go to get started, all for purchase. Our goal is to provide all the resources and tools for small business owners so that you can make sure that you are doing right by your employees and running your HR function appropriately. With that, check them out over on Boss Consulting HR and we'll get right into the show. Welcome back to Quirky HR. I am joined by Fletcher Wimbush with Discovered, who describes himself as a lifelong student of talent acquisition. So, fletcher, welcome to Quirky HR.
Fletcher Wimbush:Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Dana Dowdel:Thank you so much for being here. So I always like to know how people landed into the HR sphere, particularly talent acquisition, because I do feel like talent acquisition is a common career jumping off point for HR professionals. But you describe yourself as a lifelong student, so tell us about yourself, how you got into it and what you're doing now.
Fletcher Wimbush:Well, don't kill me right away, because I think talent acquisition and HR are really two completely different animals, obviously closely related cousins. But no, we can talk about that all day too. But yeah, I got in very yeah, I think, like many people were very untraditional way. I didn't set out to be an HR person or in the HR world necessarily. My father was a bit executive coach, business management coach, and he created these assessment tools that he used originally.
Fletcher Wimbush:This is back in like late 80s, early 90s guys, so pen paper, manually, like marking assessments and like giving people reports via fax machines and things right. And he was an engineer, high C type. I'm a high D, high I kind of guy. So we're like exact opposites and I don't know what we spent our time talking about in the car and in the bathtub and at dinner, like my whole life was like work and I'd be a better person, a better communicator, better leader. Hiring obviously is a big part of being a leader and I gravitated to this idea very early on. I was like captain my football team. They elected me student body president. They really Wimbush for president. We were Australian.
Dana Dowdel:Oh my God, that's so epic.
Fletcher Wimbush:Yeah, you know it took the fosters. You know whole approach there. You know they never. They should have elected Katie. She was way more qualified than me she, but feel bad for her. She went on to like Princeton or something, right you know. So I think she's doing all right. And at 16, I was like, look, the most important thing a leader can do in an organization whether it's student body, football team or a business organization is get the right people on the bus. I'm also a fan of Ken Kesey, so don't hold that against me too much. But, and if you really want to get into some quirky stuff, I'll tell you about how LSD changed my life.
Dana Dowdel:We might have to have that conversation offline, because I do want to hear about that.
Fletcher Wimbush:I'm not advocating that people go use hallucinogens or anything, but it is part of my story and so I really that just stuck with me, man at like a really early age and as being thrown into these leadership roles by for no really good reason, but ending up in these roles, and I really focused on that and then continued through that, through college and to being in leadership roles and then into my early jobs, you know again, you know being elevated supervisor manager until and I had two careers before this one I opened Deli's all over the country and it was very entrepreneurial thing and you know crazy business. And oh, 908 really crushed us and so got out of that and I started. I became professional dishwasher after that and I worked to work for this large privately held organization called Autoclore and they're really well run, world class organization. You know, 1500 employees, 100 business units all over the country, and they elected me to run their worst performing business unit and I said, sure, that sounds like the best job ever. Give me the worst business unit you've got and let me go for it.
Fletcher Wimbush:Right, and I got to really practice the idea of getting the right people on the bus there and we turn that into a top performing business in the country Like 15 of the people that worked for me or went on to being in leadership roles to one of the guys is like number three in the company and there's a really good friend of mine to this day and you know, wildly successful.
Fletcher Wimbush:I mean literally the organization you know has made millions of dollars based on the team we built. Like now 16 years ago, right Thanks. And then 11 years ago, almost to the day, my father passed away and, carrying on his legacy and the assessment tools that he built and everything he taught me, I gave up my good job to make no money and to go out and evangelize, getting the right people on the bus, and I'd learned some things along the way in my leadership roles. I had to recruit and hire and do a good job at that to be successful. But I didn't know that much and it's not as much as I know now and I really threw myself into that and 11 years later, here we are.
Dana Dowdel:So I feel like a lot of what HR practitioners do. It's like mystified in a way, Like this idea of finding the right people on the bus and then also making sure that they're on the right seats in the right seats on the bus, like that's not unheard of in my world.
Dana Dowdel:But then when we look at the practicality of that in practice, the amount of variables and people that are involved in these hiring and talent related decisions, and then we look at bias and just not proper talent acquisition techniques, like I just think there's so many variables to it. So if you can walk us back to that experience when you were that young leader about building that team, what, how did you do it?
Fletcher Wimbush:Well, we turned them over three times first, so we made a lot of mistakes.
Dana Dowdel:So you have to, I mean, you have to, you have to fuck up, you have to make shitty hiring decisions and hard decisions, right.
Fletcher Wimbush:Yeah, yeah, I mean, that was that's where it began, right? You know you feel the pain and you go, that's. You know you hit rock bottom and you say, look, enough is enough. I'm going to make this a priority and I'm going to get my shit together and I'm going to do this better. Right, and it doesn't just get better like that.
Fletcher Wimbush:You know, as you mentioned, I've identified like 40 different variables and what I kind of preach is like a what I call fact driven hiring, so you have the right foundational steps in the process and things like job analysis, job description, employer value proposition we talked about leading up there. You know, ideal candidate persona, like candidate scorecards, right? So these are all the fundamental foundational things that nobody wants to do. First of all, right, like, even if you're an HR, I don't think, like people, nobody gets excited about doing that part of the job, right, but you know, like Einstein said, you know, preparing or failing to prepare is preparing to fail, right? So it's like any other thing that you do in business or life, really, like, if you don't set the right foundation and preparation to go on this journey, then you're going to make mistakes in that journey. You're going to, like, forget your water at home or you know, but the tent when you go camping or something, right, you know, or you know any number of pitfalls and then you got to then from there. That dictates who you want to attract right and that then helps guide. It's like your mission and your vision right. It helps guide like, how are we going to go attract that ideal person right. And then there's a plethora of tools and strategies and techniques and talk about recruitment, marketing we earlier that's one piece of that attraction.
Fletcher Wimbush:But sourcing just where do you find that hyper specialized person that you're looking for right? And then candidate evaluation are they actually any good? Are they actually a fit, are they actually the right person? Or my bias is getting in the way of making a good decision right, this is where bias really gets, you know, heavy. You know it happens all along the process, but where you see it come out the most right. And then training and onboarding. And this people forget about, it's hiring process isn't over just because you evaluated, made the offer and they accepted and thank God they showed up on Monday. You might hire a rockstar and if you don't create a great process for onboarding and getting them embedded in your organization and trained. I don't care if they're an expert in your field. You still got to do those things because you have your own cult.
Dana Dowdel:Acclimate them to your organization.
Fletcher Wimbush:Yeah, because the water cooler's over there and it used to be over there.
Dana Dowdel:It's so interesting because I feel like these, like these, are known right, these are factual.
Dana Dowdel:There's data that supports you know the structured onboarding and structured training and what the payoff is, but yet we still fuck it up, we still do it wrong, we still, you know, yeah, we still wing it or we still just say you know, I just want somebody that wants to show up to work like who you know, and we have all again all these kind of like assumptions. So why do we keep doing it wrong? Would we know? There's proof in the pudding.
Fletcher Wimbush:Well, I have two theories. One it's fucking hard. So that's number one. Anything that's hard. People just, you know, shortcut it and just get lazy about executing. Right, it doesn't have to be that hard. It's always hard, it's never going to be easy. But systems, processes, routine, being consistent in how you execute those, all those different things makes it easier. Right, you know, it's like running for the first time like or a better one for me. I learned how to surf during COVID. Never surfed in my life. Anybody ever try surfing out there. Running is another good analogy Never been a runner, went for a jog and it sucks. Right, it's really really hard. So the only way you get good at it is just keep doing it.
Fletcher Wimbush:But there's a technique, there's a process, there's a way to do it better. And you keep doing it and keep falling down or keep getting shin splints and you learn how to overcome those things. And if you persevere, if you don't quit, then at some point you get pretty good at it, right?
Dana Dowdel:Do you think some of that requires and this is more of a leadership question like do you think some of that requires the ability to get introspective and self-reflective and say I fucked up in that decision, versus because I think we often try to put the blame on the candidate that they just didn't wanna do a, b or c and instead, maybe in hindsight, more self-reflection would say, well, I didn't vet those applicants well enough or I didn't have enough structure to the training and onboarding process. That's a leadership flaw.
Fletcher Wimbush:Yeah, it's a leadership flaw. And I don't care if you're a frontline talent acquisition person or you're the CEO right, you know, if you're, it's your first job out of college and you've been the talent acquisition specialist or HR specialist tasked with this job. I mean, take ownership of what you're responsible for, period. And I don't care if you're the lowest man on the totem pole or person on the totem pole or the highest. You all have a culpability in this process, right? So you know you could blame the hiring manager, you blame the CEO, you blame the company, you could blame the employment, the market, the candidate people all sorts of people get blamed in this process for the failures. Right, but it is your job to influence all of those things in HR or in talent acquisition, because all of those things are real problems that you have to find a solution to so that that hire becomes successful, right?
Dana Dowdel:You had mentioned, and we had spoken before we started recording, about employer value proposition and recruitment marketing. In my consulting company I call it the hospitality of recruiting because I come from the hospitality industry. So can you speak to the value or lack of value that those types of things provide or don't provide to the recruiting and talent acquisition process?
Fletcher Wimbush:Yeah, I think about it is. You know, I hang out with a lot of like business coaches. They tend to be great partners for us and we like to think we speak their language a little bit like EOS scaling up Maxwell, I mean I don't know you name it. You know we kind of hang out in those circles a lot of times, right, and you know, the first thing that any business coach is gonna do is go into an organization and really try to get the mission, the vision and the core value straight, right, and that's then we need to take that and that then shift that to our employer value proposition. And so how do those things affect the quality of life for the people that are in the business?
Fletcher Wimbush:And to me, employer value proposition is about answering the question of how does this job improve the quality of life for the people in it? And there's like three things, right, I mean I wanna, first and foremost take care of myself and my family. That's just. I don't care if you're the CEO or you are an hourly worker, right, we exist for one purpose only is to take care of ourselves and to improve our quality of life in that area. Number two I don't know a human being that's not looking for personal and professional growth, right? You know those as human beings I think it's something that's in our DNA like we don't like being stagnant, right. So we need to find a way to evolve as humans, or to not stay stagnant and to grow those ways. So we need those challenges. And then purpose yeah, have to be able to align our personal purpose with the mission and vision of the company.
Fletcher Wimbush:And so if you start there, it's pretty easy to begin to morph that into the value proposition and the value proposition that you share. And that then dictates how you go about identifying the job description, the ideal candidate, how you're going to find and source people who are more likely to align with that value proposition and who that value proposition is gonna be good for. Like you know, if I'm gonna hire a cook, you know that's not gonna be somebody who went to Princeton, right, that's, I'm not gonna make those lined up. So I need to fish in a pool where the cook job is gonna help them improve their quality of life, and it can't. That job can improve somebody's quality of life. You know, we could all sit here and say that job sucks, but for somebody it's a step up opportunity for them, right? So where are those people and how do I connect with them and how do I share how I'm gonna help them improve their quality of life, right? That's just the beginning.
Dana Dowdel:My initial thought, as you're saying, this is what I heard when I was trying to build my business of you have to go where your customers are. I think it's that same philosophy. You have to market, recruit, network, connect with in areas where your ideal candidate is. You have to show up, you have to speak their language, you have to have that visibility.
Fletcher Wimbush:I did this for a client of mine, a really, really great organization. I was lucky to work with them. They're a roofing company in Southern California, If anybody knows. I mean, roofing is not a great rough gig. It's hot in Southern California in the summer and most time of year and you're up on a roof and it's a dangerous job Not a lot of people want to do that job.
Fletcher Wimbush:Construction is a great example of this. Without the people, the talented trades, the people do the work you cannot make any money in that business. It's a people business. Putting roofs on other people's houses is a people business Chris was absolutely dedicated to. We're going to build our own talent pool because these people don't exist. The ones that already have experience oftentimes are the retreads and the problematic people who probably shouldn't be part of our organization that has eye integrity. Oftentimes we help them hire a recruiter town acquisition person for the business. We help them train them up and then he went out into the communities who had folks who were not working or underemployed and he didn't care whether they had any construction experience, labor experience.
Fletcher Wimbush:It was about building relationships and figuring out hey, who is looking for a step up opportunity? Because you can actually make pretty good money as a roofer. These guys make $60,000, $80,000 a year Incredible, starting out, I think it's like $60,000, right Going to the day labor camps and to the restaurants and to the ranchero music restaurants, nightclubs and all these places. A lot of these people are underemployed, doing gig jobs like putting getting any kind of job they could get working, maybe in restaurants, working for $15 an hour.
Fletcher Wimbush:He went out and he built, shared with them the vision hey, come a roofer. It's a hard job, it's a worthy job, but it creates an opportunity, both short-term and long-term, for you to improve your quality of life. And then they had a good value problem. We're a company of high integrity. We want to grow people, we want to develop people. We want to see you grow with the organization. They had a track record of people being with them for a very long time at all levels of the organization so they could back up their statement with proof. Like hey, there's like the vast majority of people been with us for a long time. Ask them how they feel about it. Right, and so that might be an example of how you go about doing that right.
Dana Dowdel:Well, I think it's easy to assume, like in certain industries that drive talent, skill, like it's looked at differently than you know some of the more technical industries, or medicine or healthcare or whatever, and I think it sounds like with this client he really saw the value in the talent and sought to pour into it, versus just like I don't want to say monopolize, but take advantage of.
Fletcher Wimbush:Yeah, because I think his competitors would say, well, I'm going to, you know, just turn and burn them. You know what, I'm just going to hire some people and throw them out there and we're going to just see what happens. And if they make it, they make it, if they don't, they fall off the roof. Then, oh well, sorry, you know, like they took it. A few years later we helped them hire their training and development director and they brought in and they really formalized their training and development program. So you know it's started with just acquiring and writing 10 and you know they did and they trained and developed these people, but, you know, a little less structured than we talked about earlier. And then eventually they graduated to, they installed like a roofing university into their business, right?
Dana Dowdel:It's incredible.
Fletcher Wimbush:Yeah.
Dana Dowdel:Really cool. It's incredible. So you grew up in the assessment world. Can you share a little bit I don't use assessments with our clients and I think because there's so many different ones what is your, you know, perception or feeling on the assessment world and the value that they add to the talent process?
Fletcher Wimbush:Yeah, Well, I mean, there are lots of different types of assessments. We have like 20 proprietary, different assessments. So you know, I think you know one. It's about pairing the right assessments to the right role and right situation. So you know, to some degree there's some that can be sort of universal, but then ultimately, you know, you really want to kind of get the right combination or one assessment for the role, and so it's kind of hard to have a one size fits all. But I think you know what I learned pretty early on is they're a fantastic tool for people who are who, A want to make good hiring decisions but B but maybe lack the experience in vetting or evaluating candidates well themselves, because just haven't done enough. Reps never been taught. Nobody teaches talent acquisition in college. I don't know what kind of. Did you get an HR degree? I did. Did they teach talent acquisition in your HR program?
Dana Dowdel:Well, I can't remember, but it's really funny because I actually teach at the college level and I teach a talent management course and I have a whole module on like the compliance of hiring, kind of that risk stuff. But then we'd very much talk about the interviewing technique and employer value proposition, but it's, it's it's good. It's. It's still fragmented a bit.
Fletcher Wimbush:Yeah, there's not the 201 course on hiring right and it tends to be pretty compliance. I'm assuming you know when, even when, if ever hardly rarely talk right. I don't know where I was going with this, but my point is it's not something that people are taught. They're taught through osmosis right Through. They watch their boss do it and they watch somebody else do it or they just flat out wing it, like I mean, it's really a skill set leadership skill set that is rarely taught or taught formally. It's always very informally learned or taught right. So assessments are a great way, because assessments are an objective assessment, structured interview that has no feelings, has no bias, doesn't care what color you are or who you are at all.
Fletcher Wimbush:It's just asking you questions in a structured format right, and then it comes back with an objective score in different areas and says you know, be careful about this or be careful of that, and so then that gives the interviewer some opportunity to say, okay, wait, it's identifying some concerns. These are areas that I should now begin to dig in deeper to and either corroborate or overturn and say no. I found plenty of evidence to the contrary, that the assessment is wrong, that you know Fletcher has really, you know, got super nice and got lots of empathy. I got low empathy but if they interviewed me well, they'd learn that really quick and I'd just tell them I'd have to practice sympathy. So, but it's a great tool to say start pointing the interview in the right direction, and then it also encourages them to hopefully begin to learn how to be better at executing repeatable structured interviews, leveraging candidates for cards, getting more focused. So it's a kind of a way a lot of times to get people to back them into better practices and habits, right.
Dana Dowdel:And my understanding and experience in my past life, before I was out on my own, was the customization of them, in that many of them force you to really sit and think about, like what is a rock star candidate and what quality skills does that individual have? And then you build an assessment that helps capture that right.
Fletcher Wimbush:Yeah, exactly, and that's the first question we asked clients. They fill out a form on our website. They come to us and say I need an assessment and we go well, who are you trying to hire? What are you looking for in this individual right? And we begin to take inventory of what they say. And it's a pretty informal process. Now, the clients who take this very seriously, they go pretty deep, you know, as deep with them as they'll let us. I mean, this goes back to the. It's hard at all time for this I'm. You know it's lazy, frankly, right, but you know the clients who take it seriously, you know we'll go deep into that fundamental, the foundational stage there, and that's how you get the right one ultimately.
Dana Dowdel:Relationships and networking as part of talent acquisition. We I did a whole episode on this podcast about networking for HR professionals because I don't think that we are taught to network, that it's traditionally something that's encouraged in our career, but I think it's so important from a talent pipeline perspective. Can you speak to that at all?
Fletcher Wimbush:Yeah, so referrals are the number one source of the highest rated hires. So I don't know, silk Road did a study on this and there's massive studies, but basically, if the person is referred into the organization, there's an 87% chance they're gonna be rated as a good to great hire by their supervisor. Right, and everything we do in life is based on relationships and referrals, right? You know, if I go to Connecticut, you know, and I'm gonna call you and say, hey, you know where should I go eat?
Fletcher Wimbush:And I'm gonna tell ya yeah, where should I go do and that's. You know that's a referral, that's a relationship, right now, you know as a job seeker, that's absolutely critical. Right, you know there's crazy studies like resumes basically don't get read if you submit them through. You know, if you apply to a job, right, you know nobody looks at them, that's not totally true. But you know, a good organization looks at them, but typical organization, most organizations I don't know they don't have a bandwidth and a lazy.
Fletcher Wimbush:I don't know why they don't look at them right. So, yeah, relationships are crucial, right, who you know, and then building those relationships of the strong. And so if you're a leader or you're an up and coming leader, you're building relationships throughout your career. So when I now become, you know, the executive vice president at the bank, then I know who the best underwriters are, because I've taken care of them. I came up through the ranks with them and so, oh boy, now I need a great underwriter. Well, now I can call my friends at you know the other bank and say, hey, I'm now at this bank and I'm gonna have a great job.
Fletcher Wimbush:Right, you know, sourcing referrals from friends in or outside of your organization, right, it is by far the most effective way to identify, to find yourself a job and to find great people. And I've got some flack for that recently. But you know, like you know, it's bias or something. And yeah, sure, yeah, probably is a little bias, but if you add that, if you have a strong, structured hiring process, you can, just because they're referred in doesn't mean you just give the person the job Right.
Dana Dowdel:It's easy to assume nepotism, but if you have that structured process of assessing a candidate, they go through the same selection process as anyone else.
Fletcher Wimbush:Yeah, and they should, and I would never say otherwise. Right, just because you know, just because I like you, doesn't mean you're the right person for this job. Right, you know, it's a good clue, it's a good starting point, but it's not the end, all of you.
Dana Dowdel:Yeah, you mentioned with discovered and the platform that you hate, the phrase or terminology ATS.
Fletcher Wimbush:Yeah.
Dana Dowdel:Can you tell us why?
Fletcher Wimbush:Well, I don't want. You know, my mission in life is to solve hiring period Right, and you know, when we built discovered we wanted to build it to support a fact driven hiring system, and so that means helping people make better job descriptions that are based on measurable outcomes and creating candidate scorecards so you can be more objective and structured in their process. Creating great structured interview guys to go along with those scorecards to pair up Right. Obviously, delivering assessments to support reference checking.
Fletcher Wimbush:I am a staunch advocate and evangelist of reference checking. I don't believe in. You should never hire anybody without speaking to their past bosses, just that's it. Like we can argue about that all day long, right, and I'm happy to happy to win that argument, but no, but. So there's like best practices, right, you know structured interviews, candidate scorecards based on most great measurable job descriptions that we wrote earlier in the process. So the platform supports all those best practices. So it's not just about like, hey, post your job and get some resumes and organize the process. It's about enabling and making the execution of every step in the process more effective and easier to do, because, remember, it's fucking hard to do. So I like to call it a performance hiring platform.
Dana Dowdel:I love it, I love it. And where can listeners find you and find discovered and more about all that you do?
Fletcher Wimbush:Well, as we talked about before we jumped on, I was blessed, my mother, with giving me a very unique name, so you can find me at Fletcher Wimbush, that's with an M, with WIM as a Mary, be as a boy FletcherWimbushcom. Fletcher Wimbush on LinkedIn. There won't be 10 of us. There won't be many of us. It'll be really easy to Google in that sense. So that's a great place. Or you can check us out at discoverats. com and check out some of our tools and what we're doing there and lots of other places. But yeah, I'm an easy person to Google Amazing.
Dana Dowdel:We will, of course, make sure that Fletcher's direct LinkedIn and website and all the other places to find him and discovered are in the show notes. Fletcher, thank you so much for joining me on Quirky HR. Thank you for letting me share.