EP22: Hiring Tips With Caleb Larkin From ApplicantPro

I feel so honored. It's been awesome.

Yeah, no, I'm excited as well.

Yeah, right now. So applicant pro, I've been doing this for like eight years now. This is by far the craziest year I've ever seen with hiring. And again, that's me saying that we have other people that have been doing it for way longer. And they're saying the same thing. I meet with construction business owners all the time. And they're like, look, I've been doing this for 50 years. And this is the first year where it's been anywhere close to this hard. So first of all, the very first thing is to understand you're not alone, right? Lots of people are struggling with hiring right now. And I think there's multiple reasons for that. You know, we can go to COVID. We can talk about the economy. We can talk about all these things we can't control. But I always like to talk about the things we can control, right? Right now, people that are looking for employment. are looking in a different way than they ever have. That's due to technology. That's due to different generations, different generations' wants and needs. And so the biggest thing that we are seeing right now is there are more and more people that are passing up opportunities. So what that means is that for everybody that looks at your job and applies, there's 99 others that looked at it and didn't apply for whatever reason. That's what we're seeing right now. And in the labor industry, the hardest positions to hire for are your CDL drivers, your carpenters, lead carpenters, right? I think all you guys know about that. That's probably the number one hardest position. We see that all the time. Very, very little applicant traffic for experienced carpenters. And then licensed plumbers and HVAC installers. That's kind of your four absolute hardest positions to hire for right now.

Yeah. So basically, what I would always recommend is you got to get in the mindset of someone looking for a job. So you got to think about, okay, I'm looking for, let's just take a lead carpenter, for example, because those are really hard to find. So the first thing that I would always recommend is look at your jobs and look if you were right now a lead carpenter in the business, would you apply to your own jobs? Right? However you're advertising, however you're trying to get the word out, would you apply to your own jobs? And most of the time, I bet you guys would go in and say, yeah, no, I would never apply for that job. Right? And so that's what we're seeing a lot because it was so easy a while ago. Nobody felt the need to market or sell their jobs. Right? Now we're seeing a market that's completely changed, right? And employers have to adapt or they're just going to keep losing out on good talent. So the very first thing that I always talk about is look at your job ads and promote your benefits. Promote things that are unique about your organization. Sell people on your jobs, right? If you guys have the best managers in the world, you got to say that somewhere, right? People are looking for managers that are very, that will treat them like they are good employees, right? And will value them. If you've got some benefit package, if you've got some perk, if you've got something, you know, we're surprised every time we meet with people how they're like, oh yeah, we offer this and we go look at their job ad. Nothing about it, right? It's one of the biggest selling points on your job and it's not even in there, right? Second thing is, where would you look for a job? Let's say you're, again, most of the construction business owners that I've worked with. have worked in the trade themselves, right? So they know a little bit about, okay, I know what I can do. I know what I'm capable of. I also know what I would do if I were looking for work right now, right? So think about the places you would go. I often like to talk about hiring as marketing and selling, right? Because it's the same basic principles. When you go and market your business, You are trying to sell people on, hey, this is why we are really, we will do the best work. We offer the best craftsmanship and you're paying for this and this and that, right? And you're trying to get people to buy into your job. I mean, into your business. Same thing with marketing your job ads. You need to go to the right locations. So you need to think about, okay, where would I go? And how do I drum up business? Most people would say, we drum up business through... Our current and client database, right? Our current clients are people that give us business. And then we may have a few other marketing techniques through social media, websites, and other places like that. Okay. It's the same basic principle with hiring. You're going to get people through your normal standard Googling type methods of search engine optimization through Indeed. You're going to get your networked people through Facebook jobs and other places like that on social media. But you're also going to get really solid people through your current employees and having them refer. That's how you make a good work environment and you start referring people. Your employees will start referring people back to you.

Yeah, so that's the same thing as a new startup business, right? You got to get that first one. But then what we want to do is still make it attractive, right? We want to attract the right type of candidates, go to social media, start networking in with... There's Facebook job groups that are specific to contractors, right? There's all kinds of things in your area that you can shortcut that plan of getting into a network. Because that's all that employee referrals are. is it's a network, right? And now you're tapping into another person's network. Great

That's correct. Yeah. Most, in fact, I would say I probably work with about 80% of my clients are under 20.25 employees, right? So really small businesses, almost everybody is, hey, I work the trade, I now have my own business, and I'm trying to step out, and I can't, right? That's probably everybody's like, yep, that's me, that's me, right? So yeah, we do that a lot for small businesses. Most small businesses don't offer full benefits, right? And that's important to understand. And it does depend on your area, right? We have... the living expenses in California are very different than I'm out here in Utah, right? And so you have to match your market, right? So lots of times what we'll do is we'll do a competitor analysis based on location and say, okay, let's look at them. Let's see what they're offering. Look at their website and kind of give you a comparison. So it does vary. Most small businesses do not offer full medical benefit packages. But what they do offer... is a lot more flexibility. And that's the things we like to promote. Big businesses will have all the opportunity to do the higher pay and the full benefit packages and the 401k matches, right? But smaller businesses needed to play to their advantage. And what we see most of the time is, hey, we want to promote flexible pay, flexible time. We also talk about instead of paying on a per hour, a per job option. right? Which will give them the, it's almost like earning a commission based on the jobs that they complete, right? And that's really appealing to a lot of independent workers in the labor industry that are highly skilled and don't want to be micromanaged, right? And that's one of the main reasons they will go to a smaller employer instead of a bigger employer that's going to pay a little bit higher and offers those benefits as well.

Yeah. So it is a really interesting concept that a lot of people are not implementing. You can go right now on Search on Indeed. Search a carpenter position. You'll get hundreds and thousands of... physicians and they're, most of them are going to be like, you need to have this, you need to have this, you need to have this, here's what you do. That's it. Apply. And like, none of it seems like, Hey, this is attractive at all. Right. But it is really important to understand your strengths. Right. We, I like to talk about, I'm, I'm pretty big Malcolm Gladwell fan, right. Read a lot of his books. The David Goliath book is one that we promote a lot because it talks about all how, you know, everybody knows the story of David and Goliath. talks about how David actually had the advantage because even though Goliath was this massive person, he had a sword and they were on a battlefield far apart. So he used his advantage of the sling. And that's the same thing when you do with small businesses. You don't promote that, hey, we pay less. That's not how you're going to sell people on the job. And like, oh, we pay less and you kind of go over. I mean, I've had companies basically apologizing. When they get applicants, like, so first of all, I just want you to know this sucks, this sucks, this sucks. It's like, well, who's going to apply when you start off saying like, this is all the things that suck about our work. When really what you want to do is say, well, this is why you would want to do it, right? And if you can't figure that out, you need to figure out why you're in business because you need to develop your business enough that it's a good enough place that other employees would want to work there.

Exactly. We get people that come in and they're like, okay, so we pay the absolute worst. We offer no flexibility. We treat our employees like crap. Awesome. Fix it for us. And we're like, dude, they're going to be able to... They can see that. They're going to see that. And if they don't see that and you trick them, they're going to quit really quickly. And so yeah, it is the responsibility of the business owner to promote something that's going to attract employees. There's got to be a reason. You can't just say, well, people out of the goodness of their hearts or desperation are going to work for us because that's the exact type of worker you don't want. Nobody wants to hire that lead carpenter that's like, well, I'm at the last end of my rope and I really don't. I'm not very good at my job, but please hire me. Because that's the only people that will go to apply to the worst. employers.

Yeah. No, it is really important to understand. I think that lots of people want to accredit problems in their business and problems with hiring just to, well, that's just the way things are. And whether or not that's true, it's not empowering, right? It basically makes it so, okay, there's nothing I can do about it, which is one of the biggest challenges we see that we try to overcome is helping employers see that there is something you can do about it, right? It might be vastly different than it was before. And to stay on that same path, yeah, you're going to get poor results. But there are some things that you can change that greatly affect your applicant traffic, your quality of applicants, and your new hires. So very interesting there.

Okay, great question. That is actually the number one thing that I always try to convince people of because there's so many people that kind of get focused in on, well, I can't pay that much because we don't make that much, right? And if I paid our lead carpenter that much, I'd be losing money on things like that. So the number one reason. right now. And you can go and Google this. You can see it on Indeed. You can see it on all types of job boards and places that review, that employees can review organizations. Number one reason that carpenters are leaving employment is their manager. Manager, right? They don't get along with their manager. Now, what does that typically mean? That means they don't get treated like a good employee. They don't get valued for the hard work that they're doing. They have some expectations of... And I think... This is a hard labor industry, which is a very thankless job. People go in and do this as a carpenter, and they've been doing the hard labor stuff, doing really good work. And they come back and their manager is like, okay, here's your next job. Pat on the back, that's basically it. They're looking for a value of understanding that they bring. tons of value to your organization. And so if your manager can promote that, understand that, and even do what I've seen a lot of times is you don't have to promote it always with words, right? Promote it with a bonus. Promote it with, hey, you just did this. This is an awesome job. You went above and beyond. Let's give you this, right? So some people are motivated by monetary things. Some people are motivated by recognition. Some people are motivated by... simple like, hey, you get an extra PTO, right? Or whatever it is. So we do almost, we always recommend some type of merit-based program that incentivizes employees, right? Doesn't matter what position they're in. If all you're doing is hourly or salary wages, you need to rethink that because people want to see that they can control the value that they get out of their work. Okay. So that's what a lead carpenter, what I see most of the time is managers, appreciation of them in some type of form, and then flexibility, right? Being able to say like, look, I can't do it this time. I need to take this work off or, hey, I finished all this work. I don't want you to just pile this onto me. I finished this early so I could go do this other thing, right? The flexibility and work, those are the number one and number two reasons for employment. And number three comes pay. Right? So that tells you that all these small businesses have the advantages of number one and number two. They're not even using them, right? Because they think, employers think number three is the most important.

So the biggest thing to do that is, so we have to understand that in an interview, people are trying to put their best foot forward. And most of the time, what they're trying to do is guess what answer you want to hear. Right? And you guys all, you're like, okay, they're trying to, you know, and that's normal. It's human nature. We're trying to put our best foot forward. We want to be able to do that. So what I think helps out a ton is giving examples to help lower barriers of what's okay. For example, I interview for, you know, on my team, I do some interviews and I said, there was somebody that was really worried. I could tell he was motivated by money. He didn't really say it. And I said, look, I hired somebody a little while ago that literally told me their goal is to make $10,000 so they can go on this vacation that costs like $9,500, right? That was their main goal. And I said, awesome. I'm going to help you get to that goal because it motivated them. And they all of a sudden are like, oh, I didn't realize that that's an acceptable answer. I thought you were going to not hire me because of that. But instead, what we find is that if we can motivate people the right way, even if their goal isn't perfectly in alignment with what we have for our company, we're able to get their goal so that we have mutually beneficial results. And in this case, this person was... They were awesome for those 10 grand moments. They were awesome during that time because they were highly motivated. I talked to them about, here, remember, you're working towards this vacation. This is how you can do it quicker. This is what your process will be. This is what we're looking for. And so we went in extremely transparent. That's the biggest thing that I've noticed in an interview is be as transparent as possible with, hey, this is what we're looking for. And we want to get it this way. You may not be the exact perfect fit for that. but here's our goals. Tell us your real goals because we're interested in it. And the best way to get the real goals is give them an example, right? Hey, someone says this and it's okay. It basically gives them permission to be honest, right? So that's a good question. Sometimes you may not have that example, right? You guys are probably thinking, well, I haven't hired somebody that gave that example, so I'm not going to necessarily lie, right? It's not a good idea to lie in an interview, right? Definitely don't recommend that. But the best thing that you can do is say, okay, here's what we're trying to get out of our employees. We value hard work. We value this and this. We are trying to see if you match these values. Being straightforward with, we value you through monetary gains, but we also value you through these different methods and doing work well. And so if you can really lay out your company values first, the candidate will then start expressing a little bit more. It's an emotional databank is what we call it, right? You give a little in your honesty, straightforwardness, they give a little back, they open up a little bit more.

Okay. Yeah. No, first of all, Eric, I'm just going to say there's a little bit of genius to it, but don't let that go to your head. Okay.

All right.

I was almost going to take that back, but it's all right. So this is the reason that it is that way. And that it's because the hard qualifications already come in the application. Right? You're asking, can you do this? Can you do that? Can you do that? They already answered those questions, right? What you're going to do in an interview is break down to see if they're going to be a company culture fit, right? It's an impression. That's why you can kind of go to it and see that most employers hire based on their gut feeling from an interview. They're not, they would actually go back to the resume and be like, oh, I forgot about all that, right? Because that's the process. The process of hiring is you go through some standardized, computerized processes that weed out the people that don't have your basic qualifications that you need. But the interview process is designed for you to say, are they going to be a good fit for the company culture? What are their personality traits in the workplace that are going to match mine? Can I work with them? Right? So if you're asking questions that are going to lower their shield, and give them more freedom to be honest, you're going to get better results of long-term, is this person going to be a good fit for me? Too many people in interviews are like, okay, show me this example. Here, this is a stress test. Be a stress test process. And basically, people don't perform well under a stress test environment. So you're like, here, put you at your worst, and let me judge you, and you need to be at your best. So that's one reason I just think that's genius. lower down their shield, get their personality traits, get them to come out.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a really important point. So we will go through and do a location analysis and a competitor analysis. Competitor analysis, basically, at the beginning, is going to give us an understanding of what are your strengths. I'm going to look at your other competitors. What do you have that you're offering that's unique that we can promote? That's the biggest thing is we're trying to market you. And if you look like everybody else out there, we talk about this a little bit at Applicant Pro, is that... A lot of people want to be a commodity with their jobs, which is like milk or gas, which means the only reason you buy the milk that you buy or the gas that you buy is whichever one's closest, basically. There's a few people that do something different than that, but most people do that. And jobs are becoming the same way, right? You write your same job out as your competitor does, and you now become the only differentiator is your pay, right? So what we recommend when we do competitor analysis is we want to promote something that's unique, eye-catching, and marketing you the best way. Now, we do that based on location, right? Because you have to understand the job market is not the same in California as it is in New Jersey, as it is in Texas, as it is in Florida, right? And you can't have the same offering or your unique offerings won't hold the same weight. So we're going to do it based on location. And then we also will go through... And eventually, we're going to use that competitor analysis to also say, hey, this is where you're weak, right? Now, that's a tough conversation, tough pill for a lot of people to swallow of like, hey, we need to break the norm here. And you're offering something that's just not good, right? In this area. And sometimes that's just a very difficult change. And we don't necessarily say, hey, your pay is the lowest. You need to be offering a little bit more. Sometimes we'll be like, look, can you offer more? If you can't, here are some other ideas. that are going to boost your benefits.

Yeah, no, that's great. And that's a really tough question. Not a soft toss there for that one. But there's basically two ways of going about it, right? We can get in front. of those people and throw out something that's vastly different. Break the norm. Yes, they're satisfied with where they're at, but now we can go through and make a change that's going to change their lives. And the only way you can get in front of those people is through social media. They browse on Facebook not looking for jobs and all of a sudden it'll come up. Or through networks. And that's, again, typically through social media. is people that are connected with them and you're like, hey, this guy is doing something crazy insane and it's working and you should consider going there. The other option there is create your own unicorns, right? And this is really hard, right? But basically the idea is you start with somebody that has the potential, they have your company culture, they have the desire, and you invest in them. Right? You guys know this because everybody can post. I mean, we can go out there and you're like, yeah, lead carpenter, extremely difficult. Apprentice carpenter, yes. I'll get all these people that are interested in that. Right? So what do you do at that point? You can solve a different problem. Instead of trying to find a unicorn, you create the unicorn yourself. Right? And again, it just kind of depends on, you'll have to do a cost-benefit analysis on which one's going to be better for you and which route you end up taking. So, great question.

Yeah, absolutely. So you can always find out more about us. You can go to applicantpro. com. They have tons of marketing information on like, hey, this is what we do. This is how we market your jobs. Basically, we become... a, you'd contract us out for doing all your hiring. We create your content, we advertise for you, we screen your candidates, get all that, like we talked about, covering your basis so you can kind of go with your gut at that point, right? And so we do have an initial startup commitment of three months. And so what we're offering on this podcast is 20% off of that initial price. So you can come in, you'll want to come directly to me. I think we'll share the link here in the podcast details.

Yeah. And so that will allow you to connect directly with me and there'll be a spot there that you can say, hey, what is this about? And that's where we're going to put in the promo code hammer and grind. And so that will get you 20% off of your first three months using our services. So I appreciate you guys and being on. So if there's anything else.

Absolutely. We do, right? So that's, we always do referral programs. We take it to our clients all the way through our long-term hiring strategy and do full referral programs for them. As well as if you are interested in referring over to us, we give you a one month free every time you refer somebody. Again, it's the same idea, right? We're marketing just our business in the same way that we recommend you guys marketing your jobs. It's that same process.

Amen.