Matt: From the crossroads of America in the Hoosier state of Indiana, this is Get IN, the podcast focused on the unfolding stories and extraordinary innovations happening right now in the heartland.

I’m Matt Hunkler, CEO at Powderkeg, and I will be one of your hosts for today’s conversation. I am joined in studio by Nate Spangel head of community at Powderkeg. Yes, sir. On the show today is Harlan Schafir, owner and chief visionary officer at Exact Hire.

Harlan: I think the hidden gem in Indiana is, is it’s a, it’s a very entrepreneurial state, but no one thinks of it as an entrepreneurial state, but it is.

Matt: Walt Disney once said, you can dream, create, design, and build the most wonderful place in the world, but it requires people to make that dream a reality. And today on the show, we’re going to talk about finding the right people to help make your dream a reality. Harlan has over 40 years of experience in human resources and business management.

He has over 30 years of experience in the PEO space and is a true thought leader when it comes to the world of talent acquisition. Today we’re going to deep dive into everything you need to know about talent attraction and hiring because Steve Jobs famously once said, I consider recruiting the most important job in Of someone like myself.

And if Steve wasn’t above it, none of us are. So let’s dive in Harlan. Welcome to the show. Thank you. I’m excited to be here. Awesome to have you here. Um, before we dive deep in, can you just give us a little context of how you became an expert? Um,

Harlan: I started, I’ve, I’ve been in the HR space, um, um, since I started my first company.

And, uh, one of the companies I started in 2007 was a space that’s built applicant tracking and onboarding software. And now we actually do, uh, let companies outsource the hiring, um, process to us. So I would summarize it to say, if you built, if you wanted to build your own internal hiring team, you could do it.

And it’d be crackerjack and be wonderful because people don’t want to do it. It’s expensive and it’s very distracting to their business. We let them outsource that for a fixed fee. We’re not recruiters, no charge a percentage. People are loving it and it’s, it’s on fire right now. So it’s cool.

Matt: Give us an idea of the scale.

I know you work with a lot of companies from startups to big enterprises. Give us a little bit of a context of, of what kinds of companies you help and where you’ve been over the last, you know, For four decades of doing this

Harlan: In the hiring space or in the, the, that company’s called exact hire that company, um, helps companies at all, at all different levels.

And if you think about companies, some of them are small, like you said, startups, they don’t have a team, so they can get some software, but then they don’t even really know how to use it effectively or efficiently. And our, we, everybody on our team that helps that works face to face with clients. Or SHRM certified.

It’s one of my requirements. So we’re the only one we know of that says everybody’s SHRM certified. SHRM being the society of human resource management, they have to take a test. They have to give up so many credits a year to stay, keep their licenses um, current. So these people know what’s going on. It’s not just somebody.

Um, everybody’s sourced here in the U S I mean, those kinds of things that you look at, but then a larger companies, they’re looking for the software. They have people that have used it before. They’re familiar with the experience. Now they’re looking for features and benefits. But also here again, you know, they don’t do it every single day.

They don’t use our software and it lets, it lets them use those Sherm certified people to go, all right, I’m confused. What do I do here? What can I do here? What can I do better here? And we’ll talk a little bit about what you can do better here in a minute. That’s going to be very key.

Nate: I think before we get into the blocking and tackling of how to be an expert when it comes to hiring.

So we kind of started in 2007, but you have four decades of experience in the HR space, in the PEO space, I know, can we kind of go back to the beginning, kind of give us some building blocks on how you became a true thought leader, true expert when it comes to hiring?

Harlan: Well, way back in the beginning, I was silly enough to think that I was going to start a company that was, that had never been started in the state of Indiana.

So I have two companies today, a PEO and this other company, Xactar, both of them. My first PEO, I started in 92, left the company here in 10. For those who might not know, what is a PEO? It’s a professional employer organization. So you go into companies and let them outsource most of the HR function, um, to you.

We have, that company has clients as small as two and as high as 500.

Nate: In 1992, there were no other PEOs in Indiana?

Harlan: Zero.

Nate: Okay. So what got you excited to start that? And how did that process kind of go? I got

Harlan: introduced to it while I was working for another company in town, and I thought everyone should have it.

This is amazing. I mean, and everybody has this problem. This is revolutionary in many other states, but it wasn’t in Indiana. What I missed was the fact that if you, if you’re the first person doing it, you’re not a salesperson, you’re an evangelist, right? , and unfortunately, it took a little longer than it did, but that, that company was, did really well.

I exited that, sold it to a small public company, ran that I was the COO of that public company for a while. Left there, and then, um, I started Xactar at that point. I, and then, um, two years later, HCC was the PEO company. I back, I went back in that business again.

Matt: Let’s talk a little bit about the current landscape of talent.

And obviously we’ve got a lot of people who listen to the show who are in tech, innovation driven businesses. What are some of the trends that you’re seeing right now in kind of the Um, I, I guess, do people still use the term white collar in those kinda white collar drops out? Obviously. Uh, Nate’s not even wearing a collar, so like we don’t Oh, yeah.

Plaid collar. It’s in there. We could call it the collar start startup.

Harlan: I think hiring has drastically changed and I, the hiring, the whole talent acquisition, not hiring, let me drop that term. The talent acquisition process has changed and I don’t think it’s ever going back.

Matt: Mm.

Harlan: And the reason I say that is because if you look at the statistics.

And the number of people who have entering the workforce, right? I mean, somebody had to be thinking about this 18 years ago. That person was going to enter the workforce and the numbers that are exiting the workforce, the numbers are out of whack and they’ve been out of whack for a while and they’re not going to change.

Matt: And even more people are leaving the workforce than joining.

Harlan: Exactly. So there’s going to be, right. There’s more people leaving the workforce and retiring. COVID amplified that some. Because then people decided to step out. I mean, even though they were age appropriate to work, they stepped out of the workforce because they went, wait a minute, this doesn’t work for me, whatever it is, I’m going to start my own business or try whatever.

So those numbers went down yet again. You look at immigration numbers went down again. There’s a lot of pressure. Those aren’t changing. So now supply and demand has changed and what supply and demand has changes. You then have to look at it and say, okay, what, what am I going to do differently than I did before?

Because we all know that stupid phrase, you know, keep doing the same thing, expect different results, Sandy. It is. I mean, so you have to approach it differently. And if you put hiring and talent acquisition aside in any other part of your business, you would say, these things have changed. This isn’t working.

I need to fix something right in talent acquisition. Everybody keeps doing what they’ve been doing and it’s not working. And so it’s really interesting. And we’re, we’re pushing that concept pretty hard. There’s a lot of people pushing it, but we’re pushing it too.

Nate: Can you give a few examples of those?

Repetitive things and old traditional things that people are still doing that haven’t changed.

Harlan: So I just did a, um, a webinar. If you want to see it at 30 minutes, it’s about hiring and talent acquisition. Go to our website, exact hired, uh, dot com, go to full service hiring and you’ll see a page and there’ll be a link to it.

Anyway, the very first thing is I had three keys to three keys of success in the hiring process and the talent acquisition process. And one was treated like a marketing experience. That’s huge. So if you think about it as a marketing experience, I did a speech down in Tennessee and I said, um, how many of you have rewritten your job ads and made them flashy and made them salesy and made them exciting?

Nobody raised their hand. A bunch of HR people in the, in the room. I said, okay, the very first thing you’re going to do is you’re going to take your ad, go over to your marketing department, who writes flashy, sexy ads, trying to get people to buy your product and tell them to rewrite it for you. They’re like, oh, that’s cool.

So if you think about it as a marketing experience, it changes the dynamic in the way you approach this and the way you attack it, as opposed to here’s the job I’m going to give you all the, all the, you know, you’re going to do this and do this and do this and it’s kind of boring. And then when you overlay the fact that.

The supply and demand is out of whack. So what does that mean? It means that the person, the candidate. So if they’re getting bored reading any of your stuff, what are they going to do? Click off and go somewhere else and you lose those people, but you don’t know you lost them. They were gone before you got to see them it wasn’t like you interviewed them and had them at the last day, you know, had them at the end of the equation and then they decided to go somewhere else. You never saw them.

Matt: I mean, you touched on a big trend there, which is a lot of remote work. Uh, you, you mentioned clicking. Some people are not even getting face to face in the hiring process anymore and getting hired purely through screens.

How has the remote work trend shifted how hiring is happening?

Harlan: The biggest thing is, it has opened the job pool for all of us. If you can handle remote work, and most companies, not all, can, It gives you a bigger pull to pull from that’s the good news.

Matt: Yep.

Harlan: The bad news is there’s not a lot of managers who ever trained to manage remote work and they’re struggling with it right now.

And I think you’re going to see remote work. If you don’t do what I think, which is my favorite one is to do a hybrid method because people weren’t meant to be isolated and, and, and it causes issues.

Matt: Yeah.

Harlan: And, and then if you don’t know how to manage it on top of it, I mean, look at me, I’m not a youngster.

My tool, my toolkit for managing. I learned through the years, none of it was how to remote, how to manage somebody who was working in their kitchen seven days, five days a week, you know,

Nate: It wasn’t about setting your, your slack emoji to whatever you were up to these days. I wasn’t part of, uh, you getting in the workforce.

Harlan: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So I, I, I, I like remote work. I think it, I think it makes tons of sense when you think about the demands on people’s time and how complicated it’s been, or if you’re in a major city where. A normal commute is one to two hours and without an accident, right? It makes tons of sense. But you also have to remember that this person isn’t, um, isn’t going through the normal process that they did before and I won’t beat this to death, but I’ll mention one.

How do we learn? It might be something where you teach me and it might be that you and I are working in the same place and I’m picking it up because you’re going through a thing and I’m listening and I’m learning while you’re, while you’re learning in the same thing or you go, Hey, this just happened.

Well, if you’re in your house and you’re, and I’m in my house, you’re not calling me up to tell me this just happened. It doesn’t happen. That learning goes away out the window.

Matt: It seems to me too that, um, you’ve got a bigger pool to pull from, but you’re also as an employer, your competition pool has also opened up.

You’re competing with every other company that’s hiring remotely, right? When you kind of think about the competitive advantage there that you could potentially invest in, is that kind of what employer brand is?

Harlan: That is a really, really good question because. If we were looking, we’re sitting in Indianapolis right now and you’d say, well, I know the companies in Indianapolis, but now I’m, now to your point, I’m applying for jobs with companies that are based in Kansas.

I don’t know them. So I don’t, I don’t know if they’re good companies or not. So branding is important because you don’t know who’s looking at you and you don’t know how they’re going to make their decision as to whether they step off the curb. And fill out your application or engage with you or feel comfortable if there’s a competition between three companies, why pick yours and not pick Nate’s company?

Nate: Yeah.

Harlan: You know?

Nate: I think that goes hand in hand with you. The first tip, right, was it’s a marketing thing, right? Like this whole hiring process has got to be marketing. That’s like the, when you just boil it down, like when I think about employer branding, it’s, it’s a marketing plan.

So what do you see other than, right, take your job descriptions to your marketing team, what other ways do you see companies, uh, leveraging building strong employer brands to, to win that, right?

When you’re down to the last three companies, it’s a digital remote experience. How do you see companies winning that?

Harlan: I’m going to give you lots of points, but I’m going to just, I’m going to pull two more things from that webinar because I think it works. The second thing was, um, meet the market where it is today.

And the third thing is humanize the process of hiring and intent. And, and, and so I’m going to use that last one to answer your question is, is that if you think about if social media is powerful and you can build a brand, but your brain can get damaged on social media too. So think people think, well, I looked at Nate’s resume, but I wasn’t that excited about it.

So I’m just, I’m going to not going to do anything. So Nate’s frustrated because nobody connected with him even to tell him no. So now all of a sudden he starts trashing that company. So somebody starts looking for a job three months later, different job, different person. And they’re reading these reviews going, why would I go to work for this company?

They didn’t humanize the process. They didn’t treat me like a human, even though knows. Okay. It’s just treat me like I want to be treated. The interesting thing is Nate, you might be, you might be the perfect candidate for a job I’m going to have six months from now. Are you going to ever apply at my company again?

Absolutely not. That’s humanizing the process.

Nate: Yeah. I thought they were a success story, right? Like you, I mean, you’ve done this for, again, I’m going to reiterate a lot of years, you were an expert when it comes to this. Um, but in the last, you know, three, let’s say post 2019, do you have any really good success stories of companies that you know of that have done a great job of humanizing the process, building a strong employer brand, leveraging social media to even if it’s not like get the higher, but like create a really good talent attraction system.

Harlan: I don’t know if one particular company comes to mind and I should have, I should be, I’d have been more prepared to bring that to the table. But I will think the ones that look at the process and break it down, you’ll hear an owner say, if they want to work for me, they’ll fill out that application, or they, or they want to work for me, they’ll put up with this process, the process of whatever it is, and it might just be how long it takes to fill it out, how long it takes to get somebody to call you.

Or to text you or to set up an appointment or whatever, all those things are, are distraction. What I call it is the friction of the hiring of hiring or friction of talent acquisition. You need to reduce it because otherwise you’re going to go to where there’s less friction because we as owners need to remember to know that this is, it used to be an employer experience.

And now it’s a candidate, it’s a candidate driven experience. They’re running the show, we may not like it, and it isn’t gonna change, but it’s the way it is.

Nate: I’d love to dive one layer deeper into that, as I think about, you know, Watching, uh, movies and hearing about like you show up at a fortune 500, the Google campus, right?

In 2011, there’s kombucha on tap. They have a maid, they have a cook or whatever, chef, all that crazy stuff. And you have, you’re, you have that wow factor, like as a candidate, you walk in there for your job interview and you’re like, Holy cow, this is sweet. Do you have any examples or do you know any companies that are using digital tools, using social media to still provide that wow experience?

That like would make someone feel like when they walk into that Google campus for the first time.

Harlan: What you want to see is a human being, not a company, but the particulars. What you want to do is you want to see yourself in, in whatever image that company is throwing back at you.

Matt: Mm

Harlan: hmm. So, if, if you, if you want, if you want to see a company that’s giving back, that’s treating its employers, employees in a certain way, whether those are events, or whether it’s giving back to a community, or, or just how the first day looks, you know?

Or more, maybe even more importantly, how does day negative 10 look 10 days before you came to work for me? What did, what did we do? And people will read these stories and start to say, this is a company I want to go to work for. If you have really cool facilities like Google and you want to play that off too.

I don’t know that that’s selling, I don’t think that’s closing the deal anymore. Wait, so

Nate: culture’s not ping pong tables?

Harlan: What?

Nate: Exactly. That’s news to me. Yeah, I

Matt: don’t think so. I’ve actually got this quote here from a Google co founder, Eric Schmidt. He, uh, he once said, scouting is like shaving. If you don’t do it every day, it shows.

Right. So when a company like Google is that intentional about going and scouting talent, not just saying, Hey, we’re Google. People are going to come and. The best people are just going to find us, right? Eric Schmidt is literally saying scouting right is, is one of the most important things because if you don’t do it, it, it shows you experience it.

So let’s talk a little bit about creating a strategy for talent attraction.

Harlan: I think you have to do it all the time. I think it has to be inbred in your company.

Matt: Yeah.

Harlan: So you can call it, it’s an overused term, but you can call it culture. You can tell it whatever you want. But you have to create an environment where people really love being there.

They have to work because they have to pay their bills. If you said you want to work or stay home, they’re going to stay home. If you get, if you paid them, right? But they have to work. So if they’re going to have to work, it’s a big part of your day. Why not make that the best experience it can be and treat them like a human being?

They see that as employees. You get to promote that as a company. You get to speak to that, you get to say, like in our company, we don’t have any turnover. I can say I have a great company, I can say I have great culture, but if I say I don’t have any turnover, people are like, what? You don’t have any turnover?

How can that be? It speaks to really what I’m trying to say without saying it. I have great culture because nobody wants to leave. And I don’t want them to leave, you know, that kind of thing. So I do think that’s an important in this scouting part is I’m always looking for the next people and to hire.

And so are my staff. They’re looking for somebody going, Hey, well, we’re ready to hire. We need to talk to this person. I’m going to get them to apply.

Matt: Do you have like a system for keeping track of those people? So like you, you talk to someone and you’re like, wow, that was a cool interaction. We’re not hiring someone like that right now, but

Harlan: It’s informal, but yes, we, we, we do because we’re not hiring.

At the level of a Google, you’d have to formalize that one. But I mean, if you’re going to hire three or four or five people a year, it’s pretty easy to keep a little, a little spreadsheet on it or something. I

Nate: think that’s important for candidates out there. Like they’re, if you’re looking to get into a company and they’re, Oh, they’re not hiring for anyone right now.

It’s not worth my time to reach out. And it’s like, no, hold on the best CEOs that have the best culture. Are always building this bench, are always building that, that pipeline three months, six months, a year down the road. They’re going to remember that great conversation and like, Oh, you know, Matt would be the perfect person for this job.

Harlan: That’s really true. On the candidate side, if you really wanted into a company that was hard to get into. I think you were going to go start down that line reaching out and looking different than the candidate goes, Oh, here’s my resume and then we’ll have a thing is say, Hey, I’ve looked at this. I’ve looked at your website.

I’ve talked to some of your employees. I’d love to come to work for you when you have an opportunity. If I was an owner, I’d go. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that happen. Yeah. I mean, it would write, it would, it would, it would boost that person into, um, to where they are. The other thing is, yeah. Hiring for fit is huge.

People think, oh, well, we need somebody to do payroll. You know, whatever, right? I got a payroll experience. My theory is, can I teach you payroll? Yeah, I can teach you payroll. Can I teach you what your parents were supposed to do? No, I can’t. So if you come to me with the right DNA, I can train you in one of those and not the other.

So I have to make sure that you fit into that, into whatever my culture is. They’re not all the same. They’re all different. Who fits in my, in one of my companies might not fit in another, but it’s important because they’ll feel like I said, in going back to that thing about the picture of seeing yourself in the image of that company, you’re like, that’s, I want to work for a company like that versus that.

So it’s important. And so scouting is always important because. You’ve heard of people like, Hey, I went to the car dealership and the person that worked on it, that worked on my car that was a service tech was awesome. So I was like, you want a job? You know, you don’t have a car dealership. You got to some other, but you’re hiring for fit.

Matt: And when you think about where you could find this talent kind of seems like the. Options are limitless. You could be on LinkedIn. You could be in cold email land. You could be going to networking events. You could be going to virtual events. What are some of the best channels today that people are using to find this talent and what’s actually working?

Harlan: The single best source of candidates are your employees. Everyone should pay some kind of a fee. That’s just being respectful. If your employees really love working for you, they’re not going to let anybody into the house. They’re not inviting anybody to Thanksgiving that they don’t like. Right? And that’s, that’s kind of my, our theory.

You know, don’t, don’t bring, you know, whatever we’re going to pay you, who cares? But you’re going to have to work with this person. So I think that’s your number one source. It’s not the one that can scale. If you’re trying to go from 10 to 100, it doesn’t work. But if you’re going to hire at a pace that’s slower than that, it is our number one resource.

Matt: It is referrals. Now we do all the

Harlan: advertising, but our employees will tell, will call their friends and go, We just posted a job. You need, you’re a perfect commitment fit for it. You need to apply.

Matt: And they have a referral bonus if they get hired.

Harlan: Absolutely.

Matt: Yeah. What’s a reasonable referral bonus?

Harlan: I’ve seen every number from hundreds, which I think is way too low, to thousands.

I do think it’s, I do think there’s a couple of things. I think it has to be meaningful. So if you’re going to give somebody 100 or 200 I don’t know that they care enough to take any action. Honestly, they shouldn’t care if it’s 2000. They should do it because not for the economics, they should do it because they, because they’re, you’re saying, thank you.

Thank you for paying attention and stepping off the curb and telling your friend to do it. You could have not done that. Yeah. Right. So there’s just a way to say thank you. A lot of people are like, well, they have to stay a year before you give them the money. You’re like, I’m not a big fan of that. I don’t want to give it to them the day the person walks in either.

So you kind of, I think, stage it, Hey, we’ll give you half of it or three quarter or 50, 40, 30 percent of it when they come and 30 percent when they’re here, X and Y and whatever. So

Nate: Do you think that there’s a correlation between the amount of your referral bonus and the quality of your referral referred candidates?

So let me, let me dive into how I just thought about that. As you were speaking, if you’re going to give me a hundred dollars to refer. A, uh, a candidate. I’m like, ah, am I, am I, am I that incentivized if it goes well, if it doesn’t go well, I’m just like, ah, I’m just going to toss people in that pipeline. If I know that my boss is going to pay me 5, 000 for a candidate, I am dang sure going to refer a good quality candidate.

Cause I know that it’s meaningful. Right. Do you think that there’s a correlation there?

Harlan: I think, I don’t think money’s the motivator. I really don’t. I think it’s because they, they, they like working there. They want it. They, they, they, my people would say to me, this is the best place I’ve ever worked in my life.

I’m not going anywhere else. They don’t want to screw it up. They don’t want to see our company fail and then go, Oh, I got to go to work for somebody else who won’t treat me this way. So, I don’t think there’s a correlation. There is probably an avenue where I can just five people who really aren’t all that good and you’re going to give me five grand and maybe I’ll get half of it because the person’s going to leave after seven months.

That goes back to the core culture’s wrong and the fit’s wrong and, and the numbers are wrong. But, you know, I don’t think it’s a money motivated thing. I think it’s a invite me to, if I’m a, am I going to invite this person to Thanksgiving thing?

Matt: If you have to grow your team fast and you’re not going to grow from referrals and you’ve got to find a way to go outbound, what are the best strategies today?

Is it? Job boards, is it outbound email, LinkedIn, all of the above?

Harlan: I think LinkedIn’s powerful. I think it’s, but I do think Indeed runs the show. I mean, they’re, they own the market. Um, and, and if most of the people, that’s one of the job sites they’ll be on. So everyone’s gonna look at Indeed. Okay.

LinkedIn’s pretty powerful as well. ZipRecruiter’s well, you know, there’s Um, where you can step off the competition race a little bit is find some smaller job boards maybe that aren’t as populated like an Indeed where you might, and they would be specialty. So if you’re looking for, you know, truck drivers or if you looking for, um, you know, certain salespeople in a, in a medical capacity, there might be some job board where those people, uh, survive, we’re, we’re, we’re hanging out if you will, right.

Yep. Whether it’s associations or whether it’s going to, you know, it’s, you know, there’s What I call hand to hand combat is like, I’m going to go to an after, I’m going to go to a powder keg after, you know, you know, after market or, I mean, the evening event and I’m going to look for, you know, I’m going to, that’s hand to hand combat.

It doesn’t scale fast, but what does scale fast is telling all, telling everybody, you know, you’re looking and LinkedIn is a good tool for that. And so is joining, you know, organizations like powder keg or, or everybody, you know, in powder keg and saying, Hey, I’m looking, I’m looking, I’m looking the more people you tell.

You know, the more people hear it.

Nate: I love that tip for like a niche job board, you know, because I feel like the thing with like LinkedIn one click apply is that you can put it out there and you’re going to get volume and volume, and it’s like being on the other side of that, it’s like you have a hundred one click applications to look through, they’re all start like looking pretty similar on there, right?

So that’s a great tip.

Matt: How does talent acquisition differ at startups versus large enterprises?

Harlan: Usually the thing that a big company can offer is clearly they’d probably have more money for pay. They probably have better benefits where it’s where I’ve seen startups work. And if I was starting another one and I was looking for people, yeah, I’d be talking about impact you could have on the organization.

We’ve all heard that how much fun you can have. If you’re a young person, I have two boys, I’ve always told them, you know, don’t try to figure out how to make the most money, find something you love doing, then figure out how to make money doing it.

Matt: Right.

Harlan: So if you can go into a startup and learn. How that works, no one can take that away from you, you know, they can’t take education away from you.

They can’t take experience away from you. So you’re getting experience. So I’d be saying to them, you can go there and three years later, you’ll be doing kind of the same thing. Maybe get a promotion, you make more money, you’ll have better benefits. But in the startup world, what are you going to learn is you’re going to see everything because there’s only three of us pipe breaks.

Two of us are going to be fixing this pipe tomorrow. You know,

Matt: absolutely. That’s, that’s great advice. And, and to be able to kind of share that, uh, as a startup makes a lot of science, you’re going to make a real impact. You’re going to gain real skills as we get successful, you’ll be successful too.

Harlan: The other part is you can sit around a table like this, throw out a great idea and execute it tomorrow in a big company.

There’s that doesn’t usually work like that.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, that’s right.

Harlan: You know,

Matt: that’s right.

Harlan: We all know that, but we forget it. So if you were selling a startup, that’s how I’d be doing it. You know,

Matt: Nate’s got some questions about hiring process because his hiring process was, Hey, I’ve been watching you on linked in here for about a year.

You want to grab a cup of coffee?

Nate: Yeah. And it’s just so funny. I put myself back in the shoes before I joined powderkeg and I was like. I can’t not imagine going to a company that like, I’m not eligible for this promotion until it’s like, you just like, look at the person up the hiring shit. That’s what I’m going to be in 25 years.

I’m cool. I’m cool with that. I’m going to go to startup route, but talking about these big companies, right? And then they are good at, they are good at acquiring top talent. Uh, we have a quote that we’re looking at for Mr. Marc Benioff off of Salesforce. So.

Acquiring the right talent is the most important key to growth. Hiring was, and still is, the most important thing we do.

So, as we think about optimizing that recruitment process, what key elements should organizations focus on to optimize the process from soup to nuts, right?

Harlan: Reduce the friction because you can throw everything in that bucket. If you really want it, you could force everything in that bucket.

If you want it to, it probably doesn’t not the right way, but you could. So reduce the friction could be how long does it take me to read the ad? Is the addict sexy? And now I have, now I go to the application. Does it have 80 questions on it? Do you really need it? Do you really need to have 80 things to fill out to decide if you’re going to hire somebody?

So I say to somebody, if I walked into your office today and I said, I want to come to work for you. What questions would you ask me? No one’s filling anything out. We’re sitting at a table. What questions would you ask me? And they’d say, well, I have three questions and I’d go like, well, okay, then why isn’t that your application?

Maybe you get it the five or six, I get it, but okay, you know, do you have a license or drug, but whatever, whatever it is in every step of the way, try to reduce that, that friction of the hiring process from how long did it take you to get back to me? You know, do I understand, do I understand what the next step is going to be?

Nate: How can technology or AI be used to help reduce that friction?

Harlan: Um, it’s in flux right now. Sure. It can do it by, by using keywords and information and searching and saying you were looking for somebody who is a, an accountant. And I looked at all these, I looked at this and I can tell you these people have accountant in their information or their, you know, cause it’s gonna look up the resume.

Or history in some way, which you need to make sure of it. There’s, there’s a lot of articles out there right now about, about, is there any bias in this automation at all? You got to make sure there’s not, because it’s a great way to get sued.

You know, there’s a great way to get sued. If you don’t, if you have bias and you’re using people to AI is, I just plugged it in and I did this and I, and this came out, so you got to make sure that it’s not excluding people that can be a little bit dangerous, but nonetheless.

I think if you have a lot of volume, it makes a ton of sense, you know,

Nate: So talking about bias there as, as one common mistake that, that employers can make, are there two or three other like common mistakes that people make with their talent attraction recruitment process?

Harlan: Making sure that, that, that I’m, I’m, I’m being responsive to you.

Even if, even I’m going to tell you no, or even if I want to tell you yes, We have clients that, you know, we do this and we watch them and go like, you know, you got a, you got applicants and you didn’t contact them for two days. You realize that’s like, that’s a big deal. You know, this has been measured in seconds and minutes, not, you know, days and weeks.

Like, I didn’t know that. I, you know, I thought it was okay. And, and so that’s, that’s a very important one. The other one is, is that I’d say there’s two different ways. One is, Do you really understand why your top performers are your top performers? Oh, so I have a salesperson who’s a top performer. Why?

Because they sell a lot. Obviously. Why are they a top?

Why are they a top performer? You know, what characteristics are you trying to find? Because it’s not that easy to figure that out. So that’s, that’s one thing. The other one is, is I going back to that, they call it skill based hiring is, is looking at it and saying, I’m hiring for the skillset, not the experience.

If I got the experience, okay, great. But I want skillset. I want somebody who’s going to be good with customers, who’s going to be patient, who’s going to be accommodating, who isn’t going to, who doesn’t have the personality of a running chainsaw, you know, that kind of stuff. That’s what those things are important.

Cause what does the customer, what does the customer want? They want to be treated with respect and they wanted to be treated. Like the other person on the other end of the, they want the other person at the other end of the phone to say, to be caring enough to listen. So those things, so that skill base is important.

Say, can I teach you my job? Probably. Yeah. I’m in almost all jobs, not, not all of them, but a lot of them. But that’s skill based stuff. That’s I’m a bumper sticker guy, right? I mean, like that’s, that’s what your parents are supposed to do. You come to me. I can’t undo that. I can’t fix it.

Nate: How do you assess those soft skills or the cultural fit?

Are there questions that you have that you ask or ways you can uncover that throughout the interview process, especially if it’s zoom, like remote hybrid work, three zoom meetings, how can you really tell the soft skills and the cultural fit?

Harlan: There’s a couple of ways I’ve seen it work. One is, um, you can do assessments and they’re very accurate.

We sell, we sell an assessment. There’s tons of other assessments, so I’m not pushing ours. Ours is great, but you know, it’ll tell you that, that, that, what that per, what that person is. But more importantly, you need to understand, okay, this is how, this is, I assessed Matt, I got it. But I, but I’m really trying to do is get another Nate.

I got to figure out why Nate. Isn’t as significant in those traits, so I can match you up and try to see, do I have any fit? The other one is, is that you need to ask, you need to, as a, as a interviewer, you need to, obviously everybody’s seen this in all the articles, you got to talk less, listen more, but you got to ask more open ended questions and you got to ask tough questions.

Like, you know, tell me a time, whatever, whatever you’re looking for. And you, you know,

Nate: What are three great interview questions that are not common?

Harlan: I would try to find, like, tell me something, tell me a time that you failed. And tell me how you handled it and, you know, how, how did you handle the failure?

How did you explain it to your boss? What did you learn from it? One of my favorite interview questions is I, I call it the story. I want to know your story. I want to know where you grew up. I want to know what your parents did. I want to know what your, what you saw. Not that, that, Oh, if my parents were hardworking, that means I’m hardworking.

There is a lot of correlation, but that’s, there’s no guarantee you could, you could be not that or the other way around, but it, but it does give you some insight to start to ask more questions. And so I like that. And the other one could be, you know, what was the most significant thing you ever learned from work?

Or, um, when, when did your boss give you an unreasonable deadline and how did you negotiate with them? You’re looking for a story that tells you something into the character of that person that you. It isn’t just, well, you worked here, you did this, you know, tell me what your job was and tell me what your skills were is like when you failed the guy in town, you know, did fail fest.

If you remember that. And I thought, who’s going to do a program on fail fest is this crazy. And I went to it and I thought this might be the coolest thing I’ve ever been in in my life.

Matt: Yeah.

Harlan: People getting up and explaining what didn’t work and what they learned from it is monstrous. And you’re the willingness to comfortable enough to explain that.

Gives you a view into that person a little bit.

Nate: I just have one more question. As we think through, um, the recruitment process, we talked about bias. I think diversity is, is super key and especially maybe pushing back a little bit when, when you recruit from your personal network, when you recruit from your employees, your personal network.

Everything kind of looks the same and people have similar circles. How do you build a culture of diversity, uh, in the recruitment process?

Harlan: I would say that, and I don’t think we do a great job of it. I mean, it’s embarrassing. We’re an HR company and I’m like saying, I don’t think we’re very good at this.

Because I think you have to look in places that you don’t normally look. Right. So if, if all of a sudden you’re saying, I need more color or I need more gender diversity or I need more color diversity or whatever, or age diversity, whatever it would be, you have to constantly think where are these people hanging out and I have to go after them in a way that I wouldn’t go after them differently.

And I don’t want to, I don’t want to try. It would take too long. I’d end up in a, down a rabbit hole. But, but I do think you just think about that. Where would these kind of, where would these. Kind of diversity, not hang out. And, and I should go try that as we see opportunities as we see that supply and demand thing, you know, tighten up.

I think people get, or have been getting and are going to continue to get more creative. I mean, we have a lot of clients. So when we sit down with them and say, what’s your number one issue? Well, 10 years ago, it was like, Oh, sales is my number one issue. Cash is my number one issue. Talent, talent, talent, talent, talent, every one of them.

Cause they realize that. Unless we’re in a market where there’s no competition, the brochures all look alike. The only differentiator is, is the customer experience. Yup. Yup. And that comes from what? It comes from, um, people, culture, you know, feeling like, you know, what I do here matters. So I’m going to, I’m going to make it good.

I can’t remember which website it’s on. And so it’s on the HTC website is how I treat my employees. So I, I either came up with this one or I stole it somewhere. I can’t remember where I stole it. I don’t remember how I treat my employees is how they’ll treat my customer.

Matt: Yeah.

Harlan: So the cut, my employees are the high end, my pyramid, everybody’s seen some version of that, but it really works because.

You don’t have any customers. You know, if our company does well, it’s because our employees did their jobs and really knocked the ball out of the park because of me.

Matt: I love that. Last question before the lightning round. Yeah. Um, and you may have touched on some of these already, but just to summarize, what are the three biggest trends in hiring right now that you think people really need to be paying attention to?

Harlan: I think probably the, the biggest one is, is that supply and demand and the friction equation is that if you try to do what you did before. And if you don’t change the friction equation, you’re going to, you’re going to continue to get less disappointing results and you’re not going to understand why. I also think that one of the biggest trends is, is that in my era, people had a, had an idea that they were going to work somewhere for a long period of time.

So I think in the hiring, you need to measure that a little bit. You can’t force somebody to say, well, are you, are you going to work for me for eight years or seven years or three years? I mean, they’re going to always tell you whatever they’re going to tell you. But the point is you have to understand what motivates that person and think, can I, can I keep them motivated?

Because if you can’t, you’re going to train them for a year, then they’re going to be there one more year and you’re going to get to do it all over again, which is painfully expensive. So I do think that, that that’s part of it. The other trend is that if I’m young and I’m, and I’m, and I have, and I need to learn, I want to learn.

I mean, it’s part of, it’s part of the world. And now I’m in a remote work, Oh Matt, you’re great. Okay, great. So you’re going to work from your house. And like, how do I keep, how do I get, how do I build culture when I don’t even, when no one’s even showing up in the office or they’re showing up one or two days a week?

How do I do that? How do I connect that? How do I glue that together? That trend is going to have a huge impact, you’re going to see a lot more turnover, culture being damaged, you’re going to see isolation, you’re going to see depression, all those things are going to show up because people are going to like, you know, I’m here by myself or I’m in a big city and my apartment is 800 square feet, I can’t even turn around, I bump into myself.

You know, I mean, right? Or seriously, I have a one, I have a studio apartment, so I’m sleeping here and I’m working, you know, half a foot away from where I sleep. I mean, that’s weird, but it’s happening.

Matt: If people. Want to get some help from experts like yourselves, yourself and the team at Exact Hire. What’s the next step that they should do to like, learn more

Harlan: in the hiring space, an exact hiring experience.

They would, they would come and just talk to one of our people and whether they use our service or they just stole our ideas and do it themselves, it’s okay. It’s okay. There’s enough, there’s enough opportunities out there, right? So, but it’s very important for people to learn in that way. You could hire a consultant, even at my other company in the HR space, we have consultants that people sit down and dissect it.

There’s a lot of great consultants out there, you know, we’re not in the market all by ourselves, of course. You have to be a constant learner. We all have seen that the rate of change is staggering. You know, you think you know something and then a year later, you’re like questioning whether you know it or not.

And you’re like, how did that happen so fast? I mean, it was like a blink and it’s speeding up, but everybody else is doing it to the other, your candidates are, your employees are, your customers are. Everybody is. So you have no choice. You either stay up, stay, try to stay up, try to maybe even excel, or you get just walked over by some competitor who’s smarter, faster, and cooler than you are.

I mean, maybe I didn’t answer the question exactly, but yeah. I

Matt: think that’s great. The fact that you have people on, on the team that can just share best practices, answer questions. Um, and be there to take the next step if, if people are ready.

Harlan: When you have lots of clients, you see lots of things, you get pulled into them.

You weren’t, you know, you didn’t make this stuff up. I mean, they pulled you into it and you’re like, I didn’t see that one coming. And then you have to work through it. They’re obviously, they’re trying to educate themselves and be smarter, of course. But, but life experience is invaluable. I mean, you know.

Matt: Well, thank you for this masterclass on hiring, talent acquisition, uh, having a strategy for growing the team. It is obviously super important. We shared some quotes, uh, today from some famous entrepreneurs and, um, you gave us some really good insights. So I really appreciate

Harlan: it. Well, the thank yous to you, cause I feel honored you asked me, I mean it sincerely.

So thank you very much. Absolutely. I had a ball.

Matt: You’re not out of the woods yet. You’re not done yet. Nate’s favorite part.

Nate: We’ve got three final questions for the lightning round today. We’re fast, quick. First thing that comes to the top of your head. No wrong answers unless it’s a wrong answer. So outside of the amazing entrepreneurial ecosystem, what is Indiana known for?

Harlan: I grew up in Florida and then Texas was a little stop over and came here. I would tell you I’m going to never move to Indiana, but I got transferred with a company and they moved me here to work at one of their divisions. I love this place. I mean, I think for me, uh, it’s, it’s just the front, the people are very open.

You can get to anybody in this, in this state, I mean, if you would decide. I want, I want, I don’t know the governor. I want to talk to the governor. You can, you can get there. You know, try to do that in Texas where I lived for a while, it ain’t happening. I also think that people are willing to give you a chance.

I also think that people are willing to try to legitimately help you and listen to your story and even share their stories, successes and not. It’s very easy to get connected here if you put your mind to it, if you work hard at it. It’s easy to build a network. Now, networks like plants. You gotta water them and feed them because they’ll die, obviously.

But, but it’s, but it’s easy to call somebody, meet somebody. You know, I’ve gone to a lot of your powder keg events. They’re just amazing. And you just bump into somebody, you go, can we have coffee? Oh yeah. You’re like, he doesn’t even know me, or she doesn’t even know me. They said yes. I love India. I love that.

I love India. Great answer.

Nate: Yes sir. What is a hidden gem in Indiana?

Harlan: I don’t think I would have started this business in some of the other states. I don’t think I knew that when I started in Indiana. I think I went into it ignorantly and just Learned it, you know, kind of look back in and got it in the rearview mirror.

The hidden gem is the state is really, um, it, it focuses a lot on, this isn’t just about how much venture capital money there is. This is not the number one state for venture capital money. We already know that. But as far as starting a business and being supported and looking and, and looking for help and, and not being, you know, well, you can’t do that because of this, you can’t do that because of this.

I, I, I think the hidden gem in Indiana is, is. It’s a, it’s a very entrepreneurial state, but no one thinks of it as an entrepreneurial state, but it is.

Matt: Fertile ground for entrepreneurship. That’s your hidden gem. Oh, well, yes, sir.

Harlan: Yeah.

Nate: All right. Final question of the lightning round. Who is someone we need to keep on our radar?

Someone who is doing big

Harlan: things. The name’s Christopher Day. And he goes by Toph, and I’ve known him forever, but when he went to Elevate, I, he’s doing some really, really amazing things. I mean, I, I mean, I’ve known him companies and companies ago. He’s a client of mine. He became a friend of mine. He’s doing some really cool stuff.

He’s shaking things up. And his vision, if you went to Rally last year, you guys were there. Obviously you were on stage. I went there. I’m like, how did he even come up with this? And the next one’s gonna be better and, and on. And, uh, there’s a lot of cool people doing stuff, don’t get me wrong, but he’s the one that if you, you know, it’s the lightning round you ask me on the spot, he’s the one that would come to my mind right now.

Gotta keep tough on your radar. Yeah. Yes sir. I think so. I think so. I like him and he’s genuine as as can be.

Nate: Harlan, this was great. Thank you so much for, for all the expertise when it comes to everything, talent, attraction, hiring, oh, the list goes on and on. So many actionable items. I love a good episode where we come out with like, Hey, we need to go do X, y, Z, rewrite our job.

Our job description’s amazing. Thank you so much and keep up all the hard work.

Harlan: Yeah, okay, cool. Thank you very much for the time. I appreciate it.

Matt: Thank you. This is awesome. Yep. This has been Get In, a Powderkeg production in partnership with Elevate Ventures, and we want to hear from you. If you have suggestions for our guest or segment, reach out to Matt or Nate on LinkedIn or on email.

To discover top tier tech companies outside of Silicon Valley in hubs like Indiana, check out our newsletter at powderkeg. com slash newsletter. And to apply for membership to the powder cake executive community, check out powderkeg.com slash premium. We’ll catch you next time and next week as we continue to help the world get in.

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