Speaker 1 00:00:05 Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt in required, where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years, and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to up my influence and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to up my influence. Com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you. With us right now is Fletcher. Winbush. Fletcher, you are the founder and CEO of discovered. I listen, hiring people as a topic I love talking about. And I'm Tanya, you know, if you're listening to this podcast interview and you're doing it the old school way, let me just tell you, your competitors are not, the ones that are stealing all your talent are using AI.

Speaker 1 00:01:33 so you better catch up. Fletcher. I'm hoping you can help us out. Yeah.

Speaker 2 00:01:39 I've spent my entire life thinking about talent acquisition and practicing and learning about the the most science based best practices. And in the 12 years that I've been an active full time practitioner outside of prior to that, I was a leader and having to hire as a leader and hire great people to grow my team and grow my business. Business units that I've managed and ran. but now I coach and work with over 2000 small and mid-sized businesses and helping them level up their hiring game. And in that journey, we realize, hey, there's all these science and best practices out there, but we want to support those with tools that help with automation and streamlining, because there's a lot there's like 40 different things you need to do well in order to win at hiring. So doing all that manually is virtually impossible. And that's why we built discovered AI to help give small businesses the tools to compete against the biggest businesses in the world when it comes to hire.

Speaker 1 00:02:45 Well, buckle your seatbelt. Let's go through all 40. Now, I know it's for.

Speaker 2 00:02:50 Another day, but yeah.

Speaker 1 00:02:52 If you could maybe illustrate some of those challenges, like when you're obviously when you're working with clients and and this is what you do. It's what you've done for quite some time. where does it usually hurt for? For companies when we think about hiring?

Speaker 2 00:03:06 Man, the mediocre hire like the person like, I can't I can't let him go. what am I going to do?

Speaker 1 00:03:16 The mushy middle. That's the worst. Yes. It's frustrating.

Speaker 2 00:03:20 Yeah, exactly. And, yeah, I need somebody to cover the phones or to do that work, but they suck at it, and I don't have the bandwidth. I don't now, I don't have the time to go replace them. And so I just live with it and I suffer. Yeah. Oh.

Speaker 1 00:03:37 And you know, and there's.

Speaker 2 00:03:37 A they're gonna leave anyways by the way.

Speaker 1 00:03:40 Too. Yeah, yeah. Tell me talk about that and and just just to drive.

Speaker 1 00:03:44 We've addressed the wound. Now let's pour a little salt in it. what are the costs of that mediocre hire that's just sitting there doing mediocre work? And, you know, not bad enough to fire and Not good enough to be, you know, excited about keeping them. And again, you know, we're talking about people's I don't want to be too cold. And you know, obviously this is someone that has their own thing going on. So I want to address this with a little bit of empathy. But still, you know, if we're leaders and we have obligations to fulfill like we have other people to consider, like there's a tax to this, and it's not the person's fault. It's just fit is what we're talking about.

Speaker 2 00:04:30 Yeah, yeah. Look, they're they're going to be better served in a different environment where they can thrive and use whatever talents or abilities or where they can be a better fit and where they can be happier because, look, they're mediocre. They're probably not happy.

Speaker 2 00:04:43 You're not happy with them. The customers aren't happy. They're coworkers aren't happy with them. They're sort of just stomach it just as much as you are. That's why I threw in there at the very end, is they won't be there very much longer. When that end will come. Might be weeks or months or maybe, unfortunately, sometimes years, but it's going to end. And so at some point you gotta rip the Band-Aid off for everybody's sake, for that person, for yourself as a leader, but also for their coworkers and the other people that they're dealing with. And so the, you know, I've thought about this cost of hiring or the cost of the wrong person question. It drives me crazy because, again, as I mentioned, I believe in facts and science and statistics. not gut and not feelings and nothing wishy washy. So I spent my career studying and understanding those things and then practicing the science and statistically best practices and then building tools to help support those things. Right. So if anybody wants to talk to me, I'll bore you to death about the science of humans and and hiring.

Speaker 2 00:05:48 But it comes from a place of facts and evidence, not gut feelings. I'll just tell you that. So the the question of how much does it cost you is a real question of opportunity costs. You hear these numbers of 3X5X ten x times their annual salary. And if you sit down and try to do the math and go, well, I bought them some uniforms, I bought them in computer. You know, I spent $300 in advertising. I spent maybe, I don't know, 3 hours or 4 hours interviewing them, and I spent maybe 20 or 40. I hope you spend more than that training them. But it's been a lot of time training them and getting them up to speed. You do the math. You know, you might come up with like 3 to 5000, maybe $10,000 in hard costs. So the hard costs are, you know, deceivingly low. It's the opportunity cost that's that's big. Yes. Sales is an easy one to put in. You hire a salesperson, they have a quote of quarter million, half a million, $1 million a year.

Speaker 2 00:06:43 They come in and they fall. And when salespeople fail, they usually fail pretty badly. It's not like, oh, they're 90% of goal and I'm gonna fail. I'm gonna fire them unless they're a jerk. So it's they're usually like sub 50% of their goal. So let's just go 50%. You got a quarter million dollars a year, you know, quota. And they're only on track to hit 125,000. You just lost $125,000, period. Yeah, well, for service, I need two $50,000 a year, people, to do the job of one. That's $100,000 loss.

Speaker 1 00:07:19 Yeah. so walk me through where your solution comes through. Like, how how does this work? And if you want to use maybe an example like let's say, you know, again, maybe it's a home services company. and they got a staff out like it's it that is a people business. They, you know, they're dealing with people. Maybe they might be.

Speaker 2 00:07:42 Plumbers, electricians.

Speaker 1 00:07:43 Yeah. Yeah. And and they might be frustrated that it feels like adult daycare.

Speaker 1 00:07:48 Yeah. And they need to make some changes. They need some fresh blood in. They need to reinvigorate things. all right. So yeah, they're talking huge.

Speaker 2 00:07:56 Huge opportunity costs in those sectors because usually the problem is I can't find people. I have high turnover. Therefore, I cannot grow my business. So without the people, you can't acquire new customers and you can't fulfill higher levels of revenue because you don't have the tech to go on the in the behind the house and fix the HVAC. You know, the air conditioner, right? So you're limited to how much revenue you can generate because of the people. Right. So, you know, that's a that's a good one. Or and you pick your lawn care or whatever, you know, pest control you name it. So you have two there's, there's, you know, a handful of major problems. But the two big issues and it's on the screen back there. But first, if you can't find them, you can't hire them, right.

Speaker 2 00:08:40 So if you can only if you can only bring in a couple of people into your pool of talent, and then the likelihood that one of those people is you're a player that and even is, I want to say, qualified are your chances of those things are being quite low. And let's just assume maybe one of them is sort of qualified. They've got some experience, one year experience working with the air conditioners. That's not a lot of experience. It's not great. I might settle for them. I'm going to, you know, maybe go ahead and hire them anyways because they're one of the handful of people that are even remotely qualified. So I'm not I'm settling now. Right. So number one, you got to have a machine for attracting and building a pool of talent. And that is difficult. What are you going to do? So yeah, you're going to go to indeed. But that's all the bandwidth you have to go to. So why aren't you going to ZipRecruiter and LinkedIn into the 100 other job boards? Or why aren't you tapping into specialty sources? Like in this particular case, we partner with blue on I mean, like we do some really, you know, you have resources and sources of these of talent pools that you don't have the bandwidth to tap into.

Speaker 2 00:09:54 That's why you leverage a tool like discover why it's connected to all of the best sources of talent from an inbound marketing perspective. Okay? The best talent ultimately comes from referrals. Okay. I need to have an employee referral program. Well, you know, everybody, everybody's experienced this, too. Like, I don't know any business leader who hasn't successfully hired from referral. But why aren't we you tripling quadrupling down on that strategy? It's too much effort, too much time. I don't have the bandwidth. I don't have the right tools. Again, discovered steps in gives you the tools to make automating and managing and and keeping that employee referral program front and center and making it easy for your people to referral. So that's, you know, number one source you want to be tapping into. And again, it may not fill all your roles, but it if you can 3X4X5X the volume of employee referrals. And that is phenomenal. And you're no kidding. Yeah. And so I don't have a recruiter.

Speaker 2 00:10:59 Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Right. That's way better than hiring a recruiter. It's way better.

Speaker 1 00:11:03 Than. Yeah. So. So think of it. Talk. Talk about this. And maybe the use case of, you know, someone that's hiring, coders, programmers, developers, project managers. You know, and those are, you know, let's say they're paying 100 to $200,000 a per role. do you want to maybe address some of the economics of this?

Speaker 2 00:11:25 Well, and so.

Speaker 1 00:11:26 I know you did.

Speaker 2 00:11:27 A little bit earlier, but then you get into sectors like that where, yeah, it doesn't matter if you post a job on the job boards, you're not going to get any talent in some of those sectors. So if you want to hire an AI machine learning engineer today, you post a job for that. You're getting jack squat, right? so that channel is dead. You know, you should I mean, you should probably have some ads up there just in case one happens to stumble by and find you, but, like, don't count on it.

Speaker 2 00:11:53 So referrals we talked about that is going to be your best source there. But now you need to do some hardcore headhunting, right? So now you need to go to the LinkedIn and tap into the best databases out there. So again discovered steps in in connects you with the best sources of data. You can just go in and look. Say I'm looking for a machine learning engineer in San Francisco, California with five years of experience with Python and blah blah, blah blah blah. And boom, here they all are. And here's our phone number and their email and their LinkedIn and their GitHub and they're blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so pick up the phone and call them, man. Like there you go. That's what a recruiter does, right? And then lastly is just having a database. So any great business leader or guru you might talk to out there. And I have a fun one. but you got to build a talent bench. So again, you need to have a CRM for hiring.

Speaker 2 00:12:47 What do you do in sales and marketing? You have a CRM to nurture your ICP, your best customers who start as leads. They're not banging down your door today, but you're nurturing them little by little, down through the funnel. And when you are dealing with highly specialized talent that's highly in demand, who's not banging down your door because there are very few sectors where anybody is banging down your door these days, you need to be when you do find them and you miss and they they move on to another opportunity or they're not interested today, you need to stay in touch with them, man. But you gotta nurture that. And so every good leader should be nurturing, especially at the higher levels executives or highly, highly, highly specialized roles. Machine learning engineer. You need to have a Rolodex of 10 to 20 people that you're reaching out to on a regular basis. And again, you have to have a tool and a system to organize yourself to make doing that easy, because I don't know how I stay in touch with 20 people if they're a bunch of business cards sitting on my desk, like, I just can't, I don't bandwidth to manage that again.

Speaker 2 00:13:53 Discovered, right?

Speaker 1 00:13:56 Yeah. Your, Your website is, is pretty great. and you have some resources here. Do you mind maybe sharing a little bit? so obviously. So again, we kind of talked about the, the website. It's discovered. I do you want to tell me for someone that's listening on a conversation, like when they go there, what would you recommend they do?

Speaker 2 00:14:15 Well, I sign up for free account and start playing around. If you're not using any tools or the tools that you're using are very feeling antiquated or leaving you short of where you need to be, you know? Sign up for a free account. Start playing around. Start using the tool. Talk to one of our experts and, you know, we'll we'll show you around. But, check out the the hiring academy. And I'm going to leave in the show notes. I'm assuming you'll you'll share this with everybody, but, free code hire better and download that. And for those that are kind of maybe a little bit bigger organizations, and you have other key executives or HR people, or maybe you have an A recruiter in-house and you're looking to level them up, have them go through that.

Speaker 2 00:14:52 That's an eight hour e-learning course that covers the 40 things that you need to do to be winning and hiring. Some might be more applicable to your situation than others, but it's going to give you the full like master's degree on hiring, and you can level up your people leveraging that tool. You can level up yourself as a leader. You should go through it too. But I know the CEOs won't do that. But you know, at least, you know, push it down. It gives you all the tools and the playbooks and the checklists and the best practices, and it hits it from every single angle possible. So take advantage of that. And then I'm going to share with you a GPT that you can get in ChatGPT and Tiger and GPT. Yeah, pay the $20 a month to have a paid version. If you're not doing that. I don't know what we shouldn't be talking, but, no, I joke a little bit. A lot of my friends still are not paying the $20 a month to use this version.

Speaker 1 00:15:40 It is the smartest $20 I I'm, I don't even need the $200 program. I would happily pay $200 for the $20 GPT membership. Yeah, I mean, I I'm I'm in at 3 to 4 hours a day. No joke.

Speaker 2 00:15:55 Yeah. A little plug for ChatGPT there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 00:15:57 Yeah. Free ad.

Speaker 2 00:15:58 I got my hiring expert GPT, in there that will literally walk you through everything you need to do and create all your recruitment, marketing content, all your social content to market it, all your employee referral program, all of your, candidates scorecards, interview guides, custom assessments. So, you know, one of my favorite things is creating core value or culture assessments for my clients and customizing them specifically because before I, we'd have to take off the shelf assessments and then kind of, you know, package them around those things. And it would take hours and years and weeks and months and like lots and lots of effort. Now I can create a core value assessment for your organization, get you a testing link that you can start assessing candidates tomorrow.

Speaker 2 00:16:41 I mean, I could do this for you in about ten minutes and you could start testing your candidates for core value match for your company. You get a report back all the information you need, sort of an assessment and evaluation, some verbiage, some numbers, a score and a just a definitive answer like yes, hire this person or no. Don't hire them because they're not a, you know, so they'll walk you through all that. It'll create a training and onboarding program for you. And a lot of those tools are all built right into discovered as well. But that's the free version. Do it yourself. And yeah.

Speaker 1 00:17:13 Let me ask you about that. So Fletcher, obviously someone could contact you. Reach out and you'll help them find that if if that's an appropriate solution for them immediately. I'm in the GPT store right now. I've built a custom GPT, so I'm really nerding out on, you know, knowledge files and APIs and and just like this open language coding kind of just, you know, kind of just this it's fascinating.

Speaker 1 00:17:39 I mean, that's what I'm spending hours a day doing, you know, both for my own company and then just it's just the potential is just staggering. what we could do with this, do you know, recall what the exact name of the GPT was?

Speaker 2 00:17:53 I just dropped it in the chat so you could open it up. You could open it up, and you'll share this in the show notes as well. I will yeah, these are the two freebies that I'll offer you guys. One, you know, go to get get the e-learning course, invest in your people, invest in your leaders, have them invest in themselves, you know. Use it. They can self-paced you know. But again this tool here is the hack of hacks of hacks.

Speaker 1 00:18:13 And well yours was this one was the number one that came up in the GPT store for. It's just called hiring expert. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 00:18:23 Hiring expert.

Speaker 1 00:18:23 Yeah yeah yeah, yeah. By community builder. So. Wow. 4.8 stars.

Speaker 1 00:18:29 1000 conversations. Yeah. Thank you so much. That's a very.

Speaker 2 00:18:33 Leave it. Leave it a review, please. Yeah.

Speaker 1 00:18:35 So is that associated with you?

Speaker 2 00:18:37 Yeah. Yeah. Well, I dropped it in the chat. Hiring expert. It says by Fletcher on my end. I don't know, I don't think it says when you look it up, if you show your screen. Maybe. But anyways, I dropped the.

Speaker 1 00:18:47 Community.

Speaker 2 00:18:48 Builder. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think it actually shows. I think.

Speaker 1 00:18:52 It's okay. It's.

Speaker 2 00:18:53 That sounds right.

Speaker 1 00:18:54 We're going to talk off there.

Speaker 2 00:18:55 Yeah yeah yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 00:18:57 Sounds good. Awesome. Well, well. Fletcher Winbush again, CEO and founder of discovered Dot. I, all the show notes, all the links to our friends listening. Just click around your podcast app. You're going to find the information button or the show notes button. Click that. We got everything as a direct link, Fletcher, to your website. And do you do, take calls and.

Speaker 2 00:19:19 Yeah, yeah, LinkedIn's the best way. So I was blessed with a very interesting name. And you can Google my name, Fletcher Winbush. It's women's Mary Bush. And, I'll come up on the first ten pages of Google, and you can find me on LinkedIn, and I hang out on LinkedIn. Nowhere else. well, there and the beach and surfing, fishing. But you can't, you know. But anyways, you find me, you find me on LinkedIn, and you find me on Google, and you can find me on my websites or Fletcher winbush.com and, yeah, I take calls and, I can talk about this all day long. That's all I do is, consult with business leaders on best hiring practices, solve their problems, and my team and our tools support them in the execution of those things. So. But I just like all about it.

Speaker 1 00:20:02 Excellent, excellent. Fletcher Wimbush, chief hiring coach, founder and CEO of discovered AI. Fletcher, thank you for joining us.

Speaker 2 00:20:11 Thanks.

Speaker 1 00:20:17 Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit up my influence. Com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt in or email required, where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years, and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies.

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