Jody Underhill’s Hiring Secrets: How Rapid Hire Pro Helped 300+ Companies

April Edwards 0:42 All right, welcome back to we love deck builders the podcast dedicated to helping deck builders grow and manage their business effectively. I’m April Edwards Growth Strategist at Deck Builder Marketers and today we have a really special guests Jody Underhill. He’s a renowned recruitment strategist and CEO of Rapid Hire Pro.com, known for his innovative approaches to hiring in the home services industry. Jody, it’s so fantastic to have you with us today, we’re really looking forward to learning your secret sauce to recruiting A players.

Jody Underhill 1:12 Cool happy to be here and looking at this. We’re open book, we’ll share everything we got.

April Edwards 1:16 He’s got years of experience, guys. So make sure that you stay tuned, we’ll try and do a good job of not talking too much because we’re both talkers. But there’s a lot of great insights he’s going to share. And, Jody, I’m really interested in you telling the audience about your background, you’ve got a lot of extensive background. And just for a little bit more of an introduction. I know Jody from a group that we’re in, and I’m going to tell you guys, it is the best, best coaching group and community that I have ever been in. A lot of our deck builders are in a community called NADRA. And it is also very fantastic. But I cannot stress enough how important it is to be in a community where you support one another and are able to really utilize tips and tricks to make you know, your lives and businesses more effective and you know, just continue to hone in on your craft. Jody has actually coached me, he is a client acquisition specialty coach in our group called the Seven Figure Agency. I think I’ve been there for almost four years, I’m going to say now. And it’s just been so amazing. And I’m just so grateful for Jody’s time, because he has no problem sharing his knowledge. And that’s what he’s going to do today.

Jody Underhill 2:38 Awesome. Well, I appreciate that.

April Edwards 2:42 Yeah. Um, so yeah, tell us a little bit about your background in internet marketing and how you transition to specialize in recruitment?

Jody Underhill 2:50 Sure. So basically, I worked for the power company in Florida for nearly 30 years. So I’m in my mid 40s, I decided that I was tired of that and started a marketing agency. And people ask me, so what does that have to do with the power company? And the answer is absolutely nothing. In the power company, you don’t have to market to customers, they have no choice. So so I had to learn some things as I went. But I was fortunate to be able to take what I knew from the power company from implementing processes, and I just followed, some people who buy products or processes actually followed it and became very successful very quickly, I got recognized by some of the biggest names in the industry, I’ve had the pleasure of being able to be a president of the largest digital marketing company in the world for a couple of years. And then from there, and the whole time, though, working with local businesses, and that has been my specialty the entire time. That’s what as April mentioned, with seven figure agency, it’s all about local business. It’s not about big brands, or anything like that. It’s about helping local businesses and helping them because usually, it’s customers, companies who have customers that are within about a 25 to 30 mile radius is really kind of edible. And so with that, I met my wife along with along the way. And also, I got to befriended a guy named Tommy Mello, then some of you may know who he is. He’s home service expert, he owns a large company called A1 Garage Door. Now, along the way, somebody reached out and said, Hey, I’ve got a problem. And another coaching group that I was part of. So I’m doing recruiting and trucking. And I’ve sold a whole bunch of a whole bunch contracts, but I’m facing a whole bunch of refunds. Can you help me put a system together? I was like, Well, I’ve got some I can we looked at it and I was like this really marketing for employees is the same thing as marketing for customers. But you’re not doing any nurturing. You’re not moving people to a process. Let’s obviously we can put in place and we did we helped them save the refunds. And I was like, that looks pretty easy. And so let me do that. So I went out. And then of course of about eight weeks, I think I landed 12 trucking companies ranging from 50 to over 500 trucks doing recruiting for that. And during that time, my wife reached out to Tommy Mello with a friend and said, Hey, I want to sell him anything so that if you need people for your garage door, Bill Since you should check out what we’re doing in trucking, he’s like, yeah, well fly out here. So the next week, we flew out to Phoenix. In his book, it says he flew to South Carolina, but we actually flew out there, he mentions it in his book, elevate. We went out, showed him what we’re doing. And he’s like, Yeah, I want you to do this. And like, we didn’t do this to sell you this, we didn’t know. But I want you to do. Well, three months later, he started telling everyone about it. And that was July of 21. And that’s when he forces less than three years. And in that time, we’ve gone from working with one home service company, we don’t do trucking anymore. We work in home services. Now, from one home service company to now we’ve worked with over 300, across the US and Canada, we’ve helped hire over 3500 people in the last four years. So we do things a little bit differently than most do. And we’ll get into exactly how that works as we get.

April Edwards 5:47 I mean, there’s just we got to dissect that for a minute, because there’s a lot to unpack there. First of all, I think it’s so incredible how you can, how it’s just interesting to learn people’s stories, and how a lot of times you kind of stumble on it. And it’s like, you kind of found your greatness in a way, you know, just by like trying it out. And in realizing, wow, this is this really works. And I can scale this and be able to help a lot more people, kind of similar with us with Deck Builder Marketers, I mean, we had, everybody always asks why we went with deck builders, and it was kind of the same thing. Like we ended up developing a system that worked really well for them. So props to you for like really owning that and taking it full scale. That’s amazing.

Jody Underhill 6:26 Right? And the thing is, is that people ask me all the time, what do you do recruiting us like, now here’s what, here’s the thing. Here’s how we define it. If the employees get in a truck and come to your house to do work, we recruit for it. But we don’t do recruiting and like nursing or home care, that kind of thing. But it’s all home services coming there to work on something at your house, which includes decks and pools and fences and whole thing but anything on your house that they work on, we work with just about every industry you can think of.

April Edwards 6:57 Yeah. So how long have you been doing this?

Jody Underhill 7:01 Less than three years?

April Edwards 7:03 Yeah, I mean, you guys listen to this three years like your, it’s, it’s incredible If you’re even in business after the first five years, and you’ve been able to help so many people, that’s amazing.

Jody Underhill 7:14 We’ve been very blessed I so we’ve always had a successful marketing agency. But then we moved over to this, it just became it just sort of exploded because there’s really not many other people doing this. There’s software different systems you can use. But we have a little bit of a differentiator, that is what has been our claim to fame and why people have switched over and started using us instead of a lot of other solutions out there.

April Edwards 7:35 All right, well, good, good segueway. We want to know that unique process.

Jody Underhill 7:39 So anybody can do it. It’s not magic. It’s just how we do it. What we do, everybody is posting on indeed and simply hiring in zip recruiter and that’s where there are even Craigslist to how to get sometimes their stuff I didn’t even know Craigslist was still a thing, but it is or if you’re up in Canada is Kijiji right. And that’s where they’re going in posting for jobs. The thing is, is that we hear the same thing over and over and over again, we probably do 12 to 15 new calls with new clients every week. And it’s the same thing we hate, indeed, we get a bunch of applicants, but nobody shows up, Everything’s bad. They do find some hires from now, that doesn’t mean it’s all bad. People is the people you want to hire are not standing in the unemployment. Yeah, people you want to hire are already working somewhere. So your job is just like sometimes with marketing is to get your information and your opportunity in front of them whenever they’re not necessarily looking for it. So the way that we do that is very simple. We use social media, people are spending two and a half hours a day, every day on social media. And so what we do is most everything we do is by advertising on Facebook and Instagram. Yeah, that’s the way it goes. The thing is, that’s where people are spending their time they’re scrolling through. So there’s some things that you have to do not just like, hey, we’re hiring, anybody can do that. But there’s some things that I’m going to share with you that you can do exactly what we do in order to be able to get the right type of person saying, hey, I’m interested in this.

April Edwards 9:14 Okay, let’s just stop and do a takeaway. So takeaway is the people that you want to hire aren’t actively looking for a job and you need to get in front of those folks. And the best way to do it is through social media ads, because, unfortunately, people are spending an average of two and a half hours a day there.

Jody Underhill 9:31 Exactly. And the thing is, is that they’re like, Well, I don’t want entry level people. That’s great. Attitude and attitude, perfect. Even if they’re not in your industry, and they have a great attitude and attitude, they’re working somewhere. It doesn’t mean that they’re don’t necessarily know that there’s an opportunity to come work in your company but not only that it’s not just a job. The other thing is you always have to position it as you nobody wants to go to work at a job but everybody is looking for career, something that they can grow with something that they can grow into. And that’s a big deal whenever you’re placing ads is because it’s not just hey, we’re hiring, we’re hiring carpenters or you know, that’s when we work with deck builders or hiring lead carpenters, or they’re hiring carpenters. And it’s like, no, it’s ready for a new career or ready for a career change, come work for ABC deck builders, and then list all of the benefits that you have the reason that they should come work for you, and list your requirements at the end.

April Edwards 10:29 So I do want to stop again there, because that is so so so important. I think that a lot of builders just kind of put a listing out, you know, like, oh, you know, you put it there and they’ll come but you’re not being competitive enough. Like you do have to use that marketing skill set in terms of like understanding your positioning in a way to make your listing stand out so that people want to work with you.

Jody Underhill 10:53 What I always tell people is like, Look, you don’t run an ad that says wanted homeowners with with a three to 5000 square foot house, who paid their bills on time have an excellent credit score, and are interested in having a deck built in their backyard. If that do we may it we may come out and give you a quote

April Edwards 11:11 we may

Jody Underhill 11:13 for employees. We’re looking for somebody with three years carpenter experiences led a crew that’s done this, it’s done that they have you can read a blueprint. Oh, and by the way, we’ll pay you this much money. And these are our benefits whatsoever. Just like you advertise for customers. You want to advertise for employees by listing all of the reasons and all the benefits of why they should come work for you. Now, the other thing is, because they’re already working somewhere else, you have to really hone in on what is it about your company that’s going to cause them to want to come work there? How can you move to those benefits, and what some of the things that yellow can work with the deck builders and Fence Builders, we actually work with a plague big, large playground installation company where that their whole, their whole business is doing playgrounds is one of the things is that their, their team does not have to dig any post holes, they have somebody that goes out ahead of time and does it or the one company actually has, it’s thicker in Kansas, they actually don’t dig any post holes, they drive the posts into the ground. And they haven’t seen the drives into the ground, but they’re all in there before they go out to build the deck or build the fence. I wouldn’t know because I didn’t that business. I’ve built a couple of decks in my life. But you know, I use posthole diggers and but anyway, so get those the things. The other thing is are you know, what is it about your benefits that have that it could be that you’re you work for tins, instead of working five eighths or no weekends, or do those types of things that help towards work life balance, as we know there is an ageing workforce. And the thing about that ageing workforce is that the new people coming in the younger crowd is just as interested or are just as interested in work life balance as unpaid benefits, pay and benefits are important. But work, they need to know that they’re not going to be working 80 hours a week. So you have to show that balance also, in the in the world of deck building and fence building, you have to look at sometimes it’s seasonal. If it’s seasonal, what are you doing to help them through that season? I can see a lot of times in the north. That’s a lot of snow, you’re not doing a lot of work during the season. But what are you doing to help them bridge that gap? So I’m companies they have they do different things like snow removal, or I don’t know those things? Or if it is seasonal, what is it how they’re going to make enough money during during the busy season that’s going to carry them through the offseason. So a lot of those things can go into helping them make a decision. Yeah, because here’s the thing, nobody’s going on Facebook or Instagram looking for a job you are gonna need to stop them scrolling, they’re looking at the latest brisket knife or their neighbor’s kids soccer game, or here’s a golf training aid, or the latest helmet for a dirt bike or those kinds of accessories. And here’s an ad for your deck building company to come to work for you. You got to get stop scrolling, look at it. So your branding is very important. The imagery, smiling employees doing work is very important. And then because I got to stop scrolling, look at it, click it, open it up to read all the great things because all there is is a headline above the image, read all the great reasons, push the button, enter their information to then apply for the job. So you have to be very convincing in the information you’re putting there to get them to do that. The good news is very few people are actually advertising for employment on Facebook is a special ad category. So you got to navigate that a little bit. But think about it. How many employment ads have you seen? Very few. So you already can stand out and be different than everybody else in your area?

April Edwards 14:42 Yeah, yeah, for sure. I want to share one thing because I just found it so interesting. I’ve spoke to a couple of deck builders that in terms of the seasonality thing they actually have. They have a second office in Florida and they just go down to Florida or whatever and look at this, did you do that? I got a Thumbs up. But yeah, they’ll take their team down to Florida for the winter. Do work down there. I thought that was really interesting.

Jody Underhill 15:07 Like the there’s some that do Christmas lights are so there’s different things they can do to stay busy as well. I’m not saying you have to have that. But if you do, that’s definitely something highlight because that’s on people’s mind.

April Edwards 15:18 Yeah, I mean, look, none of this is complicated, it just takes a little bit of strategic thought. I mean, your advice of just having a smiling employee in the photo is, you know, is is big and so easy to do, but often overlooked, you know

Jody Underhill 15:37 I mean, the camera on this thing is more powerful than when I used to use 10 years ago, and I used to talk to people 1000s of dollars to do go out and do a photo shoot, you can do it on an iPhone and take that and turn it into an ad graphic with a free service like Canva go in and throw some sort of throw some extra birds on the screen on the on the picture, and then utilize that as an ad. So there’s none of the things that I’m talking about are things that can’t be done. There’s things that sometimes people want to have help with, because it’s not your main focus, but anybody can do it.

April Edwards 16:09 Amazing, you guys, this is amazing advice, just take it and go, guys. So I do want to dive into a little bit more if you can, just how marketing plays a role? I mean, obviously, you’ve already shared the you know, the the social ads, but maybe you can elaborate a little bit more on are you doing any type of like automated follow ups to really like make the experience professional and informative.

Jody Underhill 16:38 That’s one of the that’s one some of the the magic, the secret sauce of what we do is because nobody is ready to take the action, even though they put their information in and push the Apply Now button. They’re just giving you their contact information on social media, you can’t really ask for any more information than first name, last name, email and phone number, because if you do, they say you’re discriminating the reason I know that back when we were doing Trucking, we used to have to put in what zip code they were in, because the trucking company didn’t want them to be more than 30 miles from the corridor. I came in 137 ad sets rejected because of discriminatory practices, because we were asking for what zip code they lived in. So while you can you can you can you can ask any questions, but your ads aren’t going to run because all you can legitimately ask for his first name, last name, phone number. Yeah, you also can only target by geography. You can’t target by age, you can’t target by gender, you can’t target by industry. I mean, if you’re running an ad on Facebook, or Instagram, for a customer, you can get granular it’s like homeowners that are the top 5% of income earners. But if you do that, with target fighters targeting with employment, you get hit with discriminatory practices. And they not only reject your ads, they’ll shut your ad campaign. Yeah, you have to do that. But, but in going in and setting it up, whenever they give you their first name, last name, email and phone number, what we do is we pull them into an automated follow up system, because I said no one’s ready to take that big step, right. Because who knows, they might have seen it when they’re driving down the road, or they’re sitting in a car and they see it, they’re not ready to fill out an application. So you have to nurture them. We send them a text message and an email and every couple of days even a ringless voicemail encouraging them to go fill out the application. We do the application we filter a little bit more because what we do is we have them do an automated video interview, that we can see what they look like how they communicate. And if somebody you’d feel comfortable sending to your home to work on a deck. And then then we do some other things. But it only works because we continue to nurture them. You have we tell people that and we do this with recruiting faster than humanly possible, because the automations work instantly. And that’s what continues to do that we even do things here’s a brighter downer for those of you at home watching. Here’s the thing. When we get down to about the fourth day, first of all, the first message you send them should have an image of the ad or your logo. So they have a visual and they know okay, because the biggest complaint people have from social media is they say that people respond to who are you? Why are you calling? Why are you texting me? So when you send that out with the image of the logo, they don’t forget, you don’t lose those responses. Then every day they put emojis in all your ads. And also in your text message follow up. We get down to about day four, we plot the stops when we send a picture of a pet, say April, do you have a dog or a cat or a goldfish or anything?

April Edwards 19:38 Yeah, I have an angel. Her name is Koda.

Jody Underhill 19:42 So we get a picture of Koda. And we go, Hey, April. This is our mascot Koda. Every time somebody completes an application Koda and gets a treat so go and complete the application. Today Koda is counting on you. Yeah, it seems kind of corny but it interrupts the pattern and we’re refer them to engage those kinds of things all the way through the process. And that’s the automations of the follow up. But even better if you just 66% of people said they’d rather hear about the job interview or job through text messaging, so we use multi channel. But if you only use one use text, nobody’s answering the phone today when it’s ringing from an unrecognized number. So we don’t call, no emails, 5% of people interact with emails, but the most of them are interacting with text messaging. So that’s the biggest

April Edwards 20:31 Yeah, Unreal.

Jody Underhill 20:35 Probably have heard that information before. But anyway.

April Edwards 20:37 No, no, no, that was amazing. I love it. I absolutely love it. By the way, so Jody taught me a nice follow up sequence that I use this week. It’s the I apologize. Follow up. So if somebody’s become unresponsive, you reply with you know, hey, I apologize, I want to get some feedback. And I had somebody that I got a call booked from it, because they just recognize that it was something different. And that’s what the the dog thing does. Like, it might seem cheesy. But that type of stuff. If you leverage the power of automation, you just again, like, I feel like our world is moving more to like all of us being pilots. I’ve said this before, where we just need thinkers to like think through the process. And then we have all the tools that make it really easy for us to do so all of the things that Jodie is saying, it’s just you set it and forget it. And it kind of works on its own, which is pretty amazing. And of course, you’re refining it. And you know, we’re always trying new things. And I think my biggest takeaway from some of the things that you mentioned, is having to play nice with these platforms. Like you know, our role is Google primarily, and Facebook, but you know, have knowing these little tidbits of how you’re supposed to play with them. So that you don’t get banned and go in Facebook Jail is so important, because you’re going to lose a lot of time if you do it wrong.

Jody Underhill 22:01 Yeah, another thing that’s very important, one of the things that we’ve learned is that you under doesn’t really happen that often in the probably in the decking world unless you have salespeople. But a lot of times people are performance pay is commission only when you can’t say commission only are commission based because they say that’s unrealistic outcomes, but they do like performance pay or pay for performance, even though that’s commission, right. It’s still they’ll allow pay for performance. So that’s some of the things that we’ve learned, you know, from that standpoint of what they what they because they don’t feel that anybody that’s being paid commission only can make any money because anything you have a commission only, it flags it as being like work from home or network marketing. So that’s how they kind of they got some really broad rules. Billing is when they reject your ad. They just just tell you the reason they don’t tell you what about the ad was the rep reason like when they say discriminatory practice. Yeah, we didn’t know what it was. We had to figure it out. But it was we asked for the zip code. You testing until they approved the thing. So yeah, pay is commission is pay by performance.

April Edwards 23:04 Jeez, unreal. Would you mind sharing some of any, like, perhaps any unique questions that you ask on the application to help better qualified candidates?

Jody Underhill 23:16 Yeah, the main thing we do, and this is the biggest takeaway, it’s not as much about what we do ask, it’s more about what we’ve done. So on the application, we’re asking for all their contact information, the last two employers, can we contact the employers, then we ask for their driving history? Do they have they had we give them a list of the like the five bad driving where things make sense so they’re driving your vehicles that would make them uninsurable? Like you have a careless driving or DUI or leaving the scene of an accident, those kinds of things are unlawful co unlawful, criminal speed that gets over 25 miles an hour is considered criminal, criminal speed. Those make them uninsured or criminal. Believe me, that’s how I was I was young once. So then the other way ask is if they’ve ever been convicted of a felony. Because whether you do or don’t allow it, you don’t you want to feel some people will be truthful, sometimes they won’t. But then what the so we ask those things that what we do not ask for is a resume. And some people it was strange, because all of the job boards out there ask for a resume, and they have to create one. But how many great carpenters are great lead carpenters do you think are project managers out there have a resume laying around ready to upload? Yeah, very few. So

April Edwards 24:40 Especially if you’re looking for somebody that already has a job, right?

Jody Underhill 24:45 Or, like I said, whether it’s nothing is I don’t like people want to hire laborers. Nobody wakes up in the morning saying I want to go to work and be a laborer, you know, find something nicer to call like an apprentice or something like that, even though it’s not it’s just something like that, but the thing is, is that not asking for the resume gets us more actually more qualified applicants. And if we ask for it, and if you look at most home service company websites when you go to their careers page, and they have a little form to fill out to apply 95 plus percent of them have upload your resume. Yeah. So what we do is we say, upload your resume, if available. Here’s the other part of that. There’s only an add on this. Okay. Yeah. I don’t know how to attach a resume to. And I’m in this industry, I don’t Yeah. What are the chances that they know how to do that? So you want to make it so that it’s as easy as possible for them to apply in every easy for them to apply? And also make sure that your application is mobile friendly? Because

April Edwards 25:49 I, there’s certain things that I think we still do in 2024, that I question and one is the resume I mean, I just get a LinkedIn profile. Right? I mean,

Jody Underhill 26:02 Most of your most of them are not going to be on LinkedIn. You know, we’ve tried to indeed, we tried running ads on LinkedIn. And indeed, they’re not there’s they’re very, they’re not qualified. And all the people on LinkedIn are overqualified. I’m like, right, because technicians are not spending time on LinkedIn. They’re on social media, your CFOs your your salespeople, they’re on LinkedIn. But most of your quote unquote, workforce is not on LinkedIn. It’s more higher level people.

April Edwards 26:30 Yeah, yeah. But I don’t know, I want to I want to predict that maybe in the future, maybe not the near future, people will start leveraging these things a lot more. Even, like even it doesn’t even matter what their role is. Because getting those recommendations and that type of social proof is still really good. But yeah, I can get that for today for sure. Yeah. So um, what about deck builders? Can you share any success stories that you’ve had during recruitment for deck builders?

Jody Underhill 27:02 So I said, we work with deck builders work with playgrounds installation, large playground installation companies. And the thing is, is that it’s, here’s the thing, the one of the companies is in New Hampshire, the biggest issue that you have is not necessarily what is the company like, it’s how big is the population where the company is. So this particular company only had about 30,000 people in the county they were. So my team was like, this is never going to work. It took a couple of months for things to ramp up. But they did wind up hiring a lead installer and a and a lead carpenter. From the efforts even though it was a small, even though it was small, because they were on they were like found it on Facebook. And they didn’t, they weren’t on indeed looking for it. And that’s one of the successes, the playground company, they were hiring a whole plethora of people, they were hiring installers, they were hiring laborers, they were which we talked them into calling something other than the laborers, they were hiring salespeople, they were on our project managers, most project managers will have a resume, salespeople typically will have a resume. But from that standpoint, it was it was tough. And it was, we were struggling to see what it worked. But it took up it takes a little bit longer when you have a smaller population, but it will still work that we don’t now whenever I look at that, I explained it with people when they have a lot smaller population, that is going to take a lot longer. But that was successful. He hadn’t hired a new person in six months, on the job boards whenever we started working with him, and within two months, he had two key players. And that was a year ago, and they’re still there. Yeah.

April Edwards 28:42 Wow. I mean, that’s a return on investment, it takes so much time to recruit. Especially if you don’t have secret formula like Jody does. In it gets exhausting, you know, like you kind of contend to just throw your arms up in the air and be like, Oh, so that’s amazing to hear. And I’m sure that save them a lot of money too. And frustration finding the right people, we use the EOS model. And so we say the right people in the right seat. And we’re hiring now based off of culture first, because we can train on the expertise. But finding people that feel like family is, you know, is is the hardest part.

Jody Underhill 29:25 That’s one of the things we focus on when we’re working with a company is we want to know what their company vision is, what their core values are in a company culture, because that helps us develop an avatar because going through the filtering process is much easier whenever you have those things in mind whenever you have those things because that helps you attract the right kind of people and repel the wrong kind of usually. From that standpoint, your core values go a long way in doing that as well. So we’ve thought that we will always be slower the US model and our company as well. And look for the I look at core values as they should be strong, so strong that if you are not embodying them, it’s a fireable offense. We just won’t go that way. But we will. And our core values are such that whenever I’m interviewing someone, like to come to work for us when I’m talking to a client, and they ask us our core values, and I tell them the first one, if they have a usual reaction, I know they’re probably not going to be a fit to work with us.

April Edwards 30:26 So what is it

Jody Underhill 30:29 Gives the ship. That’s our number one core value. Because if you don’t, you don’t need to care about our clients, you don’t care about your team, you got to give us the second one is leave without vital, everybody that works here. That’s good. The third is, give grace be kind first, always because you don’t know what someone else is going through, especially in home service business, sometimes owners call and they’re frustrated because they got something happen, or they, you don’t know what’s going on in their world. So they’re not necessarily upset with you, they’re just upset in general. So get to understand what’s going on with them, and then finally, show up, you got to show up for everybody. And those are four very simple, there’s only four, but they’re very simple. And if you don’t follow them, we’ve had somebody go last night, who was not showing up. They were they were going in, they were just going through the motions, and they said that it would give you a chance, and we’re just not going to move forward. Anyway.

April Edwards 31:26 Yeah, I mean, those core values are amazing, because if you do build them, right, and I mean, again, like this is simple stuff what Jody just said, it’s assumed, you know, but like, assume is a dirty, dirty word, right, you have to have it written out. And it makes it so that you can run things so that it’s not subjective and based off of like, you know, your perspective, but it’s based off of core principles that you’ve laid out. And, you know, they should know. And your team should know those core values at any point should

Jody Underhill 31:55 Be able to repeat them, go ask your team members that they can say your core values that they can’t, then just like they everybody in our company knows our vision and what our mission is finding great people to help build great companies. Pretty simple. Yeah, right. We don’t we don’t do lead gen. We don’t do anything else. Everything we’re doing is finding great people to build great companies. Makes it very simple, very easy to pay to know if somebody asks him a question about doing marketing, but like, No, we don’t do that. Because begin with they were like, oh, because we have that background, we can do everything. We do one thing we do one thing very well when entwine the mildy. to that. So those are focus, then one of the things I know you’re going to talk about is like how do you keep these eight players once you get them. And part of that has to do with how you bring him in how you’re advertising for them again, with how you’re positioning, what you’re going to do. And then those core values are what should make them stay. Because if they’re living up to the core values, and you are as well, then that will definitely they will stay for the long term because they see that the work life balance they have and the things that you’re saying you’re going to do live up to that, because people will stay at a job making less money than go to work for a company that has a bad reputation or bad culture. For sure, and they will turn down a job making 25% More if a company has a bad review, and a battery has a bad reputation or a bad culture.

April Edwards 33:17 Yeah. So I mean, folks take some time to really figure out what you what your values are, what your vision is, what makes you different, what benefits that you have, that you might just assume people know or expect. Just take the time to write all of it down, and I get pictures of your employees smiling. And guys, I want to say definitely get more pictures of your team. I mean, we build websites for duct builders all the time. And I’m like, Look, you know, your local based business people buy from people, you know, and they want to trust you, they want to know who is in their community that they’re going to spend 1000s of dollars with. So have a picture of you, even if it’s with your family, or definitely take pictures of your crew and stuff like that and be authentic. You know, I think that’s a really good word to use for all of this. So I’m curious about social media, just in general, like apart from the ads themselves, what or do you have any tips like do you utilize or recommend that your clients utilize social media to reinforce any of these values and things that we’ve been talking about? Of course, and

Jody Underhill 34:23 Then one thing that a lot of people don’t realize, and this is one of the it’s very easy to do, is that they think that oh, I’ve got 1000 People that like my page, that they most of the time, only 3% of the people actually see the content. So don’t think that you’re gonna be a boosted post for a job, because you can’t even do that anymore. Because Facebook took that away and they used to be used to post a job and boost it. You can’t do that. You have to do it as a Facebook ad. But do things like change out your cover image when you’re hiring. If you change out your cover image, it shows up in the newsfeed of everyone who likes the page. Oh yeah. Post only shows up from about 3% of the people that like the page, a change like that, or if you are hiring, and one of the things is post an event posted as an event, even though if it’s not a date and time kind of event posted, you know, we’re hiring as an event that will also show up in the newsfeed of people who liked the page. There’s very few things to do. But those are two of the main things that will get people’s attention. Because one other tip that I did not say is whenever you create an ad, no matter what it’s for, always make sure the ad is shareable. Because like one of our largest clients is a one garage doors, humming melodies, and some of his best people never saw the ad, their spouse saw it, and said, Hey, honey, you need to take a look at this. And they would they shared the ad with them. So always make sure that it shareable but change that cover image out, you know that we’re hiring, or we’re looking for great people to build our great company. So that’s an event on Facebook, all of those things can help with that exposure. And

April Edwards 36:00 How for somebody that doesn’t know I mean, how do you set it up so that it’s shareable. It’s

Jody Underhill 36:05 In the settings of the lead form, it’s a little bit tighter. It’s just it’s there’s two tabs. There’s the one tab where you fill everything out. And there’s a second tab on the lead form that you click. And there’s a couple of things. One of them is made shareable, and you just check the box. But that’s, that’s on a lead form. The way you make it shareable on a post is it asked you if you want to share it, right? Yeah.

April Edwards 36:26 Okay. Pretty simple. Guys. Don’t forget that. These are like, check. These are checklist items in our tasks and click up. Um, so what do you could you share any kind of big mistakes that you’ve seen people make in their recruitment process? I mean, I feel like you’ve shared a ton, but maybe there’s a juicy little nugget or story you can share?

Jody Underhill 36:48 Yeah, the biggest thing is that we see as people not honoring, or here’s the big mistake, not letting their current employees know that they’re going to be running ads for positions. And then inflating how much money the people can make at the company, and their employees seeing it and go, What the heck, I don’t make this much money, you’re hiring people saying they’re going to start at $25 an hour, and I make $22 an hour. That and giving assignments, it’s fine to do. But you’d have to explain to your existing employees why it’s important that you’re paying a sign on bonus, and they’re not getting a bonus if they already work there. So understanding how to do those, and I tell me, like, what can we limit it, so our existing employees can’t see it? Now, you can’t target and you can’t limit it, you got to show it to everyone in a geographic area. But there’s those things and make sure that your employees know that you’re gonna be running the ads, because they’re gonna see it. Yeah, they know, I had one, we had one that’s like, you’ve held up things like on a paper, it’s like, I can’t really talk about the pay or the position because the person sitting next to me. So instead of calling it a project manager, office manager, they call it a salesperson. And we’re like, we thought we’d do it, we probably need to, we’re probably going to need to reconvene on this because the thing is, I’m not going to do that. We’re not going to do a call where the person’s sitting there, but they’re, they’re going to talk to us on Zoom. And not as like, we probably need to talk about this whenever, whenever you have more time or if we just we ended the call because I’m not going to do something that’s, that’s going to undermine someone you got to be honest with people that you work with. Yeah,

April Edwards 38:36 I mean, business one on one, you know, just be honest, and

Jody Underhill 38:40 Kindergarten, you know, go to Golden Rule treat people you want to be treated.

April Edwards 38:45 We all need reminders sometimes. Exactly. Um, so where do you? Where do you see the hiring, landscape going? or changing? You know, in the next few years,

Jody Underhill 38:57 I see it getting more and more competitive. So you were you in Miami? Last year you were there? Yep. Kind of eye opening is said that most people most for the for the way the economy is going to be a doomsday scenario, because I hate that and I’ll talk about any economy. But it’s like it’s there’s, it’s not the growing market share is not going to grow the peep, you’re you’re the number of clients is not going to grow. But the only way to grow your market share is going to be to take it from other people. So what I see is there’s going to be it’s not poaching, because you’re just putting an ad on a platform and someone’s seeing it. But more and more because the workforce is aging out and there’s a younger workforce, you’re gonna have to be in a position that not only to attract people from other companies that have experience, but what I’m seeing the trend going more and more to is developing and training programs so that you can bring people in hire for attitude and attitude and train them in your way. You’re going to have to invest more in training, because there’s not going to be the experience people Lautrec I get on calls like, yeah, I want a plumber or I want to, I want a carpenter with 10 years experience that can do this, this, this and this. And I was like, Okay, so basically, you’re looking for a unicorn, and I’m sorry, but we are fresh out of magic wands. So we’re gonna have to look at what is it? What is it that you’re going to be able to really utilize and who isn’t just going to actually be able to come work for your company. So training programs are going to be the way that goes, even some of the larger companies that are having success that are taking people away from other companies as they’re bringing them in and training them. And the best way to go about doing it, you’re going about doing the things that way, they’re doing things your way. If you’re a smaller company, you’re going to have to still come up with ways to embed invest in new employees that are coming in, in order to get them to the point that they’re going to be able to produce the product that you’re selling. That doesn’t matter if it’s decks or plumbing or widgets, or cabinets, you know that you’re going to cabinet shop, it’s going to be the same thing.

April Edwards 41:02 And I just want to add to that, you know, guys, if you’re wearing a ton of hats, you got to figure out where your time is best utilized. And in my opinion, you probably started your business because you knew how to build amazing decks, right. So you probably know how to train people the best, but you might be too busy to sit down to do it, because you’re still doing too many other things. So delegate those things off of your plate, so that you could spend more time on what I call your brilliance tasks, that are really going to help move your business forward, you have to invest into you know, documenting your processes, and getting good training, you know, systems and programs in place we have, personally, we have an on we have a new team member onboarding process that we constantly refine every time we bring somebody else on and we get their feedback, and we improve it. And we’re always adding new things. And so we take that very seriously, because I mean, especially as you know, a service based business, like your people are everything. I mean, they’re 90% of what you’re offering is, you know, their skill set. And you know, whether or not they what is it an EOS? Do they? Do they get it? Do they want it and didn’t want it can? Do they have the capacity? So simple? Well, um, I am so interested to learn more about Rapid Hire Pro and kind of you know what you guys I mean, obviously, you’ve shared all your tips. But if anybody wanted to just be like, Hey, Jody knows what he’s doing. He’s helped a million people like, what, what can they do? What do they need to know about working with you,

Jody Underhill 42:43 These things were pretty simple, pretty straightforward. You just go to rapid fire pro.com, there’s a blue button in the upper right hand corner, excellent blue button just about anywhere you go on the site and schedule a call. And we don’t do sales calls, what we do is we do discovery and recommendations, because we need to know a little bit about your company, know a little bit about the positions you’re looking to hire for. And then what we do is we kind of walk you through and show you graphically exactly all the things I’ve just talking about. And we record the call and we send you a link to the recording. And if you want to know what it would look like for us to help you do it, we can send you a proposal along with that. But that may be you walk away with images of exactly what the ads look like and exactly what we would do in recruiting for your business. If it was our business. And having worked with over 300 companies across the US and Canada, we have a couple of ideas.

April Edwards 43:36 Wow. So it’s almost like you’re giving away a playbook for free. That’s pretty cool. Like

Jody Underhill 43:41 I said, we go through everything, and we send you a link to the recording. But I tell everybody is I’m gonna record the column, I’m going to share some things with you that you’ll be able to take and utilize yourself, even if we’re not a fit for everybody, but we want to make sure we add value for everyone.

April Edwards 43:56 Very cool. Well, any final thoughts to leave with our audience? I mean, I gotta say, before I open it up, anybody that is listening to this, please ping me. And let me know what your takeaways were. Because I just feel like you dropped so many knowledge bombs here, I really hope that somebody listens to this. And they go there fast to implement, and they immediately take some of these ideas and move forward with it so that they can see a direct impact on their business. Otherwise, give you a ring and take advantage of that. You know, free playbook essentially, which is pretty cool. But yeah, any last words of wisdom.

Jody Underhill 44:36 The main thing is, don’t be overwhelmed. If you’re gonna run the ad yourself. Just understand it as a Special ad category of employment. You have to set it to basically use a lead forum to gather information and only ask, it’ll allow you to ask other questions but hold back you can only really ask for first name, last name, email and phone number and then move it into you vacations, because you want to people like we can do it in Messenger, but then you can only talk to them while they’re still on Facebook. We want to move them off of there and start communicating with them on their phone so that we can communicate with them anytime we want to. And you want to do the same thing. Yeah.

April Edwards 45:13 And build that relationship from, from the first touch point. That’s good. And

Jody Underhill 45:18 Please, please, please, please use a local number. Yeah, that’s the biggest thing. People use an 800 number. Yeah, people don’t want to respond. I think it’s the sales, the sales promotion, a local number, people respond better to wait really

April Edwards 45:31 Good stuff. Um, make sure that again, you you ping me with any knowledge bombs that you got from this, because this was so amazing. Seriously, take advantage of, you know, a consultation with Jodi and his team. And, yeah, until next time, you know, make sure that you keep moving forward. And then for today, I want to say, I want to leave you with build smart, hire smarter. So thanks again, Jody for coming. And we look forward to your feedback.