Podcast Episode 13: How to Recruit C-Suite Executive Superstars

Hello, this is Corey Shepherd, vice president of Sound Financial Group, and I’m excited to welcome you to Sound Financial Bites, where we bring you bite‐sized pieces of financial knowledge to help you design and build a good life.

Hello everyone and welcome to Sound Financial Bites. This is Paul Adams, president and CEO of Sound Financial Group. Glad to have you with us today. Today I have, on our show, Paul Freed. Paul Freed is the managing partner and co‐founder of Herd Freed Hartz ‐ this is the largest retained executive search firm in the Pacific Northwest ‐ and runs the recruiting strategy consulting division for Herd Freed Hartz. Because what they do, and their primary offer, is they recruit C‐suite executives. If you have an empty seat in your C‐suite, this is the firm to help you attract that C‐level employee, CEO, COO, CFO, to your company. Yet what happens is people love the type of thinking and strategy that goes into really attracting and retaining the top leadership of a company, but they get themselves in a spot where they want to be able to bring that same culture all the way down to recruiting everybody within their firm. They now offer this recruiting strategy consulting, that I’m sure will come up later, of how do you bring somebody in to teach your entire team how to attract everyone with your firm the same way you would attract the top people with your firm. Why would we talk about this today at all? The reason we’re bringing it up is, many of our clients are entrepreneurs and business owners and find themselves having a vision for the future. What you need for any vision for the future is talent required to help you make that vision a reality. That’s talent attraction, talent retention, and talent development. What we’re hoping is, and our philosophy of helping you design and build a good life, that we want to bring whatever knowledge we can from whatever groups of people we have access to onto this podcast to be able to bring you these bite‐sized pieces of knowledge that can contribute to any part of your designing and building a good life, including in your company. Quick note: if you’re a top executive, or somebody who is on that corporate path of wanting to be a top executive, this is also going to be an important podcast to listen to. Because what you’re going to hear is what some of the best companies are doing, or should be doing, to help them attract the best top talent. In the beginning of this podcast it’s going to make a ton of sense for you to think of it as, this is your chance to reverse engineer your opportunity inside some of the best companies in the Pacific Northwest and across the country. So, welcome to the show, Paul, it’s great to have you.

Thanks Paul. Thanks for inviting me in. This is a topic I’m very passionate about and it’ll be a fun time to talk to you and your audience.

Great. The thing that I think is unique, that I’ve heard you talk about in just our personal interactions ‐ see, Paul was the recruiting chair for the Entrepreneurs Organization of Seattle when I first became a member about three years ago and that’s how Paul and I first got to know one another. He has always talked about this idea of the science of recruiting, which many people maybe think they get right, but then what they lose sight of is the art of recruiting. Could you just talk a little bit about the difference between the science and the art of recruiting?

Oh Paul, I love that topic. In doing executive recruiting for the last 20 years, I’ve seen a real shift. Because when I started in recruiting I literally had to mail résumés to my clients. I had to call the admin to find out who people were. There was not LinkedIn. There was not large databases or tools. While there are very fascinating tools that make things more efficient, I feel like the shift has gone away from the art of recruiting. That’s a real concern I have as a recruiter, that the industry has shifted towards being a keyword search for a lot of talent, and missing the storytelling, missing the sell. At the end of the day, people are looking to join an exciting story, a mission, something that really drives them to go to work each day and be part of a company. Just having some boring pitch about the company is not what brings them there. This really starts with the job description. Most job descriptions fall in a few camps. One, I call the kitchen sink. This is the one that HR creates with 25 soul‐sucking tasks that you can do, and it lists things like “attend meetings as needed,” or “keep your manager updated.” These just are so boring, you know, how much you sit, stand, push, and pull in your job. These are full of details but there’s not much buzz, not much excitement. The other description I see a lot of is, I call, culture cool. You see people playing beer pong in the office, they’re having fun, they have free espresso, but you don’t really know what you do that actually helps customers or how you make money. You want to be cool but we’re not speaking to them like an adult. The third type of description I see is what I call a “frankendescription.” A frankendescription is it takes parts of dead, old job descriptions that they piece back together into one because they “didn’t have time” to create a good job description, so I’m going to just take pieces of old ones that don’t really make sense and send it out to someone. You want someone to quit their job and change their life to come join you, but you don’t have time to take a half hour to really articulate what the job is, what they’ll be doing, and what their mission is. That’s the key tip of the spear, I find, in recruiting, is the storytelling falls flat. The recruiting brand does not reflect the company brand. Every company, they’re very proud of the company brand that you have on the website, that sales and marketing have, but you go to the careers page and it’s typically womp‐womp. It’s pretty flat, it’s boring and I think that’s a great starting point for companies it to look at the career page and just think, if you were looking for a new gig and you ran across this, would you be inspired to apply yourself?

What a unique thing. I try to take away tidbits from each of the things you said, and one of the first things that landed with me was at the beginning is that the firm must have a mission and vision. If you don’t have one that’s clearly communicated, start there before you hire, or try to hire, any of that top talent. Many people ‐ I’ve seen myself guilty of it early on in the development of our firm ‐ is you recruit by brute strength for a while. We were growing up a team of people and they were like, “How did you recruit us?” I’m like, “Just do what I did when you came on board.” It travels like oral tradition and the mission and vision don’t trickle down to that actual interview, here’s the difference we want to make in the world, or in this particular sector that we’re a part of. That’s big. Did you also say that there ought to be a mission for the actual role?

Yes, just taking you back to the concept of what makes a great story. We talk about you should have a good recruiting story. We should ask ourselves what makes a good, epic story? Let’s look to movies. Think about Star Wars, think about The Matrix, think about Batman. All these epic stories have three components. The first component is a hero, and the hero is often just someone who is an average person going on with life but they were called to do something great, that scared them but they knew was something important. They went against all odds to push against a villain, which is the second component of an epic story. You need to have some foe, someone who is trying to stop you, someone who is making the story dangerous. You need a villain in the story as well. The third component of epic stories is the quest. You need a hero, a villain, and a quest. A quest is something inspiring. In Lord of the Rings it was to destroy the ring, or to destroy the Death Star in Star Wars. But, you need some epic quest that’s bigger than you, and it’s more than just making money. It’s more than delivering a quality product at a reasonable price. It’s something that drives you more into making a difference in the world. It could be some evil competitor, the villain, that you’re trying to take out. It could be a pain that people feel that you want to take away. It could be the old way of doing things. But there’s something that you have as this broader quest, and I find that people, especially millennials today, are really looking to join organizations that are mission‐driven. You see that a lot in the recruiting context where even though you’re selling coffee you’re talking about the Starbucks, the great third place, the change you’re making in society, and you’re selling coffee and bagels. You really have this whole story about what you’re setting up as the experience for someone. At REI they’re trying to get you to go outside and enjoy the outdoors, but they’re selling lots of outdoor gear. There’s this mission that you feel when you walk in the door. They want people to feel what they’re all about.

Do you have an example of a company that maybe you first engaged, maybe they weren’t even clear on their quest at the time? Or their quest, whatever the mission they were on prior to you meeting them, took them to where they were, but then you helped them rearticulate that to be bigger. Maybe specific, maybe not. We had a manufacturing firm that said, “We make widgets,” and instead they decided, “No, we build stained glass windows for the cathedrals of the world,” or something became bigger than that.

Yeah, a recent client of ours, a company called Zemax, they’re in Kirkland, they have about 50 employees. When I first started talking to them, they’re super smart engineers. These guys are all way smarter than me, all PhDs in optical, electrical engineering. They were talking about how fast their software is that helps optical engineers make stuff. It was all a very engineeringdriven story about how fast their product is and how it works; it’s a classic engineer marketing. What I asked them, “What kind of stuff does your software enable?” “Oh gosh, do you have an iPhone? Our stuff helped make all the cameras in iPhones work. Have you heard of GoPro cameras? Oh, and NASA launched the Mars rover and our stuff was in the Mars rover, and there’s lasers and optical stuff in medical devices.” So just in talking to them I realized, your story isn’t about this engineering piece. We helped them create on the walls, the vision they’re working on right now is, to have a storyboard on their wall when you walk in having pictures of all of these finished products that you see today, you engage with. “We helped these ideas come to life.” You’re helping have that bigger vision about these ideas that people have. There are some ideas that they’re working on, but it’s stuck in the lab or it’s stuck in engineering, but now you actually take these ideas and help that come to life. That’s an example where they had a bigger vision of what they were accomplishing. Another example is a company called Guidant Financial. David’s a friend of ours, you remember. But what they do is a really cool product, where you can take money from your IRA to help launch a business. There are some really cool mechanics around that, helping launch businesses, but their mission wasn’t just to be a financial company. Part of the storytelling was they help entrepreneurs launch their dreams, so it’s helping entrepreneurs do the American Dream. That’s what it’s all about. They’ve launched 11,000 entrepreneurs with $3 billion in assets, and they’ve helped created 66,000 jobs through what they’ve done. Yeah, there’s this financial product, this little engine that they do, but it’s really about the entrepreneur. They have on the walls of their lobby just pictures of entrepreneurs who have companies today that wouldn’t have otherwise. I think that’s what really drives people versus saying you’re a financial product company.

The thing that I think of ‐ have you ever read the book A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink?

No.

Daniel Pink talks about, in this book, that our brains are sometimes referred to as the left brain, right brain. The left brain gets analytical, and once it’s goes analytical it actually can’t make decisions. It can’t make choices. The right brain is the side of the brain that actually makes choices on a consistent, ongoing basis. Career changes, decisions to buy a home, buy a car, et cetera. We’ve all heard that saying of people buy on emotion and justify with logic.

Before reading that book I had the hardest time because I’m not going to make people cry to make a decision to join our firm or become a client, but the idea in A Whole New Mind is it’s the story that engages the right brain. The left brain will still work perfectly well while the right brain is engaged, but if you get the left brain engaged it literally goes into processing mode only and will continue to think about decisions, all that. It won’t kick over to the right brain to actually make a choice. It won’t hand the controls over. It’s so neat how I hear the story of somebody looking at a job description, or somebody even hearing that there might be an opening and they go to your website and maybe get engaged by your vision, they get disengaged by the job description.

You’re totally right, Paul. Facts tell, but stories sell. We’ve heard that in marketing a lot but I think recruiting needs to engage that as well. So in thinking of a job description, to me it’s half steak, here’s some facts and details that you would expect a professional person to want to ask. There’s a way to proactively give them facts and details about the role, about the company, so it’s saves you time in explaining that later, but you need to balance that with the sizzle. The sizzle is telling about why it’s great, why the opportunity is amazing, why you’re a leader, why what you’re doing matters. I think sometimes there’s this northwest humility that we want to be very collaborative and very nice, your mom told you not to brag, but the job description is a way to say we’re doing something that is amazing, you should consider coming here. This is a place where you’d be bummed out if you weren’t working. You want to be a part of this mission. There’s a little swagger you need to have in the job description and when you have it in the description it also, ironically, is re‐recruiting your current team. It reminds people ‐ because you get busy, you’re in the trenches and you have tough customers and you have a bad day ‐ reading the descriptions in your own company, or interviewing people and being onmessage, re‐recruits your current team as well.

One of the things I heard was, a CEO I worked with for years, and he said what you want to do is trigger people that if they didn’t join him, they’d realize they’d have to compete with him. Enough swagger ‐ were not going to be after you, but just know if you bump into a client and we bump into a client, that client probably isn’t going to choose you, because our story is so strong. I think that’s a unique way to think about it, from the swagger perspective. I think so often people think from a recruiting perspective ‐ and I’m just talking naïveté, not being in the recruiting world every day ‐ is that people really think that their job, recruiting people, would be the equivalent of hanging out a shingle. I put up the ad and I interview people, but not in the, I also need to actually attract. I do need to be a buyer, but I also need to be selling the vision, selling the company, and creating that balance. I don’t know if it’s a push‐pull… How would you speak to that ability? You’ve got to vet the person; you don’t want every chucklehead joining you, so you’re vetting them. In the C‐suite, we’re talking about the upper echelons of corporate America. It could be somebody making anywhere from $200,000 to $2 million a year that you would help place with a company. Tell me about how you balance that. Those people definitely have to be attracted out of their current roles and yet there’s a certain amount of vetting you still have to do to make sure they’re a good fit for the employers. How do you balance that and how do you coach the employers that contract you to find those people to balance that?

Great question. Not everyone is a fit for every role. I think that’s a part that some companies often forget. It’s not about attracting everyone, for every role, everywhere. There is an ideal candidate that is your ideal fit, and instead of broadening the description of the story it’s better to narrow it. By narrowing, it’s being more specific about what the dream person is and what problems they’ll be solving, and what, ideally, you are looking for. In our process with our clients ‐ and this is from startups to family‐run companies that are non‐profits, to public companies, it’s the same process ‐ the money question, I’ve found, that really separates the good from the great descriptions, is asking: what are the top three outcomes in year one? So, I’ll ask that in a few different ways. I’ll ask it either that or I may say, “Okay, you’re going to fill this VP sales role. What are the top three things, when you’re giving the first‐year review, that made you the happiest?” this role nailed. And it’s amazing, the answer I get next is typically something like, “Oh gosh, I’d love to launch this, or increase sales by that, or fix this.”

That’s the employer, you asking the employer that question of, you brought on this role, you paid $300,000 a year base income plus incentives to this role…

What’s success look like? The answer I get back is the emotion. They’re like, “Oh man, I would be so excited on the first‐year review to see they accomplished this or fixed that or built this new strategy that took it from an idea to launch.” Typically that’s not in the description. So I say, “Aha! That is the job, those three things.” Get the smart goal. What exactly is the success and how do you define that, and why does that matter. That’s always interesting, like, “I want to launch this.” Great, why does that matter? So when you really nail, here’s the specific goal, the top three goals, and here’s why it matters. If you get clear on what those are, then all the activities, all the, be busy doing stuff, will fall under one of those three things. By getting clarity on that, it creates focus on what the ideal person is because it’s simple then to say, what should we ask for screening questions? I don’t know, maybe tell me when you’ve done this and that, the top three things. That tracks to qualifications. What kind of qualifications would someone have to accomplish those three things? You start thinking about where to source people who have done those. You can push earlier in the assessment and screening process answers to those key questions that’ll inspire the hiring manager to hire someone. As far as thinking of the screening we do, I like to have people fill out answers to those three questions, even before they interview with the client, written, because a client will respond emotionally by saying, “Whoa, they were great. If that person could do for us what they did for them, that would be fantastic. Let’s bring them in.” Or the answer’s really flat and boring or just off the mark, like, “That’s not what we want.” Either one is a win because you get an insight into who they are. You get out of this long qualification bullet point matching list and you get more inspired about your top three outcomes, and those top three outcomes drive what’s a good fit or not. It’s amazing how that simple process saves time, creates focus, and, ironically, it also inspires the candidate because they want to know what’s the mission? How can I be a hero in year one?

Yes, and when you talk about assessing them on the three things, you’re actually asking the candidate, here is the company they are ‐ you know, Joe’s Microsystems. Joe’s Microsystems wants you to hit these three things. What are the things from your outside view that you can already know about the industry or already know about them, that you would do to produce those three outcomes in the first year. Am I hearing you right with that? You actually approach them, let them answer those in writing, which gives them all kinds of ability to assess ahead of time. What I’m also hearing behind all of it is this idea of, like what we talk about with design and build a good life, is what always comes first is design. That you need to say first what is a good life, with your planning for the future, because if you say what it is first then life tends not to pull you off center or get you distracted. Or just because something looks shiny and new we buy it, or because an investment looks shiny and new we buy it, versus just being deeply nested in our strategy. I’m hearing the same thing from a business perspective that you set your strategy first of what the executive needs to do, so no matter how bright and shiny they are we’re not pulling the trigger based upon bright and shiny, we’re rather pulling the trigger because we said, “Okay, we’ve got a role. The role needs to do this in the first year. It would be this kind of good if they could do it, and here’s how it would tie into our deeper vision overall and our mission for the future.” That creates the hirer holding strategy, and it creates inspiration and leadership already demonstrated from the employer to that new candidate, whether they’re sitting at the front desk or they’re sitting in a C‐suite. Did I capture that right? Yes, you captured that great. An image I use is a triangle. At the bottom of the triangle is strategy, the middle is art, and the top is science, and they build on each other. What I mean by that is the strategy of recruiting, you need to ask, “Why does this job exist? What are the key outcomes?” There’s a few fundamental strategy questions that need to be there. If you don’t really have those it’ll trip you up. The second piece is the art of recruiting. That’s the storytelling, the lean forward into the opportunity, the much better marketing about role. And then the science is the technology. That’s using great databases and analytics and assessment tools. The problem I find is most companies don’t really know what they want and they have a very boring pitch. With one button they can spam 300 people on LinkedIn and then they wonder why their LinkedIn response rates are crashing. Part of this is if you can actually figure out first, get your strategy right about what you want, spend your time on the art of recruiting and having a good story and really practice that, when that’s really down and you’ve got that nailed, then science is great because technology can accelerate both good and bad ideas.

Unfortunately most companies are using recruiting science and technology to accelerate really bad ideas. That’s why I’m on this mission. Get your strategy and your art of recruiting fixed and then you can use the tools that are out there to speed up the recruiting process.

It reminds me a little bit of a sieve or a colander is at least the image I have in my head of people ‐ when you send out that spam to a ton of people on LinkedIn to attract to a new role, you’re shaking that sieve and who’s going to respond to that may well be the least qualified or least desirable people. In fact, the people you may want to talk to are the people that never make it through your sieve. You’re actually creating what they call in the insurance world “anti selection.” Anti Selection in the insurance world means you’re doing something that unintentionally is attracting the least healthy people, or the people with the worst driving records, things like that. In the traditional going to science first and not having the rest settled, you can actually be bubbling to the surface not the cream but the crap coming right to the top. They both float, but because your screening process becomes, who will respond to this thing, we throw out passively and hope it comes back, versus, we are going to be really intentional about the people that we even approach.

I’ve heard that term, that the cream and crap both float, but you’re right. They do and that’s a very analogy, Paul.

I actually left Paul Freed here slightly speechless with that particular metaphor.

It was great, it was great. It’s very sticky. So the thing in recruiting is you hear this term passive candidates and active candidates. Active candidates are people who are looking for a job. They’re unemployed, they’re really upset, they’re constantly looking at indeed.com for jobs, they’re active jobseekers. They will look at a lot of companies, they will do whatever you tell them to do, they are actively looking for a job. Those are the people that, honestly, are not always your best hires. They could be ‐

I was going to say, because they’re going to be actively looking when they land with you in six months, too.

Yeah, so companies can mistake… We see it in resumes from recruiting like, “Oh wow we got 20 resumes!” No, you found 20 people who are actively looking for a job, or their employers don’t like them. They could be a diamond in the rough. I’m not dismissing that you can get lucky sometimes, but where you should be spending your time and energy is on the passive candidates. That’s someone who is happy, at the top of their game, and not looking. That’s where you spend your time, going after those people. That’s why you need your careers page to pop, why you need your description to be compelling. Think about the person who could make a change but they don’t have to. Maybe they got referred to you through a friend or maybe you reached out to them and they’re kind of curious, but they weren’t thinking of making a change. That’s where a company should be spending their efforts, thinking more on those terms, because that’s where the harder recruiting but that’s actually where the best hires come in. That’s where you get actually on a scale of 1‐10, where you get your 9 and 10 hires or that group. But the 7s and 8s will always come to you. You can find some but you’re typically, eh, they could do the job but they might not, and you find yourself being on the fence. That’s probably because you’re just looking at the best of what came in, versus going after who you could get.

Yes, in fact the passive candidates are who we look for most in attracting people to our firm. Oftentimes, we go after people in other industries. We go after people who are already earning six figures plus where they are and enjoying their career, but maybe they don’t see the next five to ten years at going where they want to go and thereby an attraction conversation allows them to be sussed out, if you will, out of the background. I see the same thing for some of those key roles you guys are looking for. You’re looking for those same key people who might stay where they are if they didn’t see a compelling vision, a compelling story, all the things that we don’t have to do to get that candidate who is actively looking. Like you said, you can send them a ClearFit and they’ll go through and click through that no problem, and you can send them another test and they’ll go do that because they don’t have anything going on anyway. Versus that person you’re trying to get to attract out of the background. Let’s think about the process and the recruiting. The first step, let’s assume you have clarity about your mission, you have a very compelling job description. They actually reach out and want to talk to you. This is where an organization should map out the candidate experience. That’s a big buzzword in recruiting right now is the candidate experience. The way I like to think about this analogy is ‐ have you been to Disneyland?

Mm‐hmm.

Disney thinks about every moment of your experience, from when you park in Mickey Mouse land, in the parking lot there, and then the bus greets you, to the front door to the person who greets you… Every moment, even when you’re waiting in an hour‐long line, they make the experience amazing. In a similar way, you want to map out all those moments of truth for a candidate. That can be what does the career page look like, what are they seeing, is it easy to apply? When they do send an email, what happens? Do you know that 60% of the time when people email a company, they get nothing in response.

Wow.

If you have an auto‐responder, you’re actually ahead of half your competition, but the opportunity is to auto‐respond with a very personalized message from Paul Adams, the CEO of Sound Financial Group, and to tell your story about the organization and what you’re about and a personal invitation to explore it further and a link to some videos and a link to learn more, and here’s what the process looks like… There’s this amazing experience, the ultimate response that you would love to give someone. You take the time to create that template once and then they get that as the auto‐responder and it’ll totally surprise people. They’re not used to it. Then, mapping out the interview process from the phone interview, thinking about what you can do to set them up for success with preparing for it, having a great call, that when they go on site you have their name badge preprinted for them, you’ve thought through the details in the lobby about what they’re experiencing, what they’re seeing… Your story should come alive on the walls without even talking to someone. There’s little things you to do reinforce your brand in that process. They might leave with a handful of tchotchkes from you or a Starbucks card to the nearby place that you could use if you join us. There’s all these little steps along in the process, even when you get to offer process. I’m a big fan of using the gift basket. If someone is considering a quarter million dollar job, and they’re debating two offers, I’ll coach my clients to send them a gift basket. You’re selling the spouse. This is the trick is that the spouse will say, “Wow, they care about you. This is a personal message and a personalized story to us, and also they included a box of Legos that said come build the future with us.” It’s kind of playful and fun. Those are the the things we think of, those moments of truth as a candidate experience that really stand out from the pack.

The thing that stands out for me is, I guarantee if a few packs of Legos showed up at my house, whatever it is the person was trying to approach me with, they got time because I’m going to be thanking them because my son would lose his mind if Legos randomly showed up at the house. Wow, I love that. Can I ask, just as we kind of wrap here, we’ve got some people listening who are on the other side. They’re those C‐suite people that might get placed by you, or high income earners in a sort of business development role, or somebody who is progressing their career. We don’t know our entire audience yet from the podcasting side, but let me ask, are there two or three things you would say like ‐ I often hear if somebody’s trying to become a really good chess player, the first thing you have to do is just stop making the bad moves and then the good moves will come forth out of that. What would be two or three definitely don’t do these things, these are the biggest mistakes we see people make as candidates, and maybe one or two, here’s something you can do to have yourself stand apart. They’re probably the simple things that we all forget about or it falls in the background, but candidates are not looking for new roles everyday. It’s something they engage in periodically. What would be the don’t‐dos and the go ahead and enhance or start doing?

Most people are happy and not looking for jobs. They’re not professional interviewers. So, the interview process is awkward and scary for some, so the three mistakes that are most common and the advice I would give for each of them to a friend, over coffee, about how to do this best… The number one mistake is most people don’t know where they are and they don’t know where they’re going. It’s a simple thing, but when you don’t really know where you are ‐ and what I mean by that is, what really are your strengths? Where are you at in your career? What really inspires you? Have you taken a DiSC test or a behavioral profile to really understand how you’re uniquely wired, what makes you a best fit on teams, what gives you energy in life? Just really asking those questions of, I am here, and then asking the question, where do I want to go with my career or my life? If you don’t know where you want to go, you’re hoping someone will give you a vision for your life. You’re seeking that. This comes across in how they describe their story, because when someone doesn’t know where they are or where they want to go, you hear them ramble.

They’ll show up weak in the interview.

They ramble about what they’ve done, they ramble about where they want to go, and it comes across very vague. I think having more crisp answers to, what are you looking for? Someone should answer with, “I’m looking for five things. Boom. I’m looking for a VP sales job to leverage my experience in software, and I really like the B‐to‐B space. I’m passionate for the international side and I really want to leverage my background in the healthcare market.” Something like that where you’re very crisp, you’ve got some bullet points, they’re measurable and make someone on the other side of the table nod their head saying, “Wow, you actually know what you want.” The second question they’ll always ask you is, “Why are you interested in us?” Likewise, this is my second tip, is doing your homework. A lot is researching the company and really knowing their story about what makes them great, what mission they’re on, the competitive landscape, looking up the news on their site, but just explaining, “I’m interested in you because…” and then something compelling. It’s the lean forward moment where you explain to them is, “What I’m doing is something I’m really passionate about, a space I really want to go down, I’ve talked to people who work here about the culture.” There’s something about this that makes you physically lean forward. That’s the other thing I find is most candidates are very intellectual and they lean back. They should be leaning forward and saying why they want to work somewhere. My third tip is the case study format for describing your background. Going back to the facts tell but stories sell, is telling a three to five‐sentence story about an engagement. A facts example of this and a mistake people make is they say, “Well I handled the email marketing for this company and I sent a lot of emails out, and I led a team of four,” facts and they’re true, “And we sent out 50,000 emails a day.” Okay, that’s the facts. The story equivalent of that would be saying, “I was hired to increase qualified leads to this company because they weren’t getting many online. I took them, doing a customized email strategy campaign, from 1,000 to 2,000 qualified leads a month. That led to a sales increase of $2 million. Therefore our company went from number two to number one in the industry.” That quick, four‐sentence story makes you go, “Whoa, I want that.” That storytelling case study mindset of describing what you’ve done in your roles would be my third tip.

Right on, right on. I appreciate you being here today. I want everybody to keep in mind two things when you may want to engage Paul Freed. One is, he of course has the offer that is them ‐ his team ‐ finding a C‐suite level talent for you and your company. That’s the executive leadership and above, and that’s Herd Freed Hartz, and you’re going to see a link to their website right in the description here. The other is, some of you may want to just revamp and get some of what Paul talked about today right inside your company from a recruiting perspective, culture perspective, mission perspective, and you can get that at paulfreed.com. He actually does consulting where he’ll come out for the day. It’s certainly not an inconsequential amount of financial commitment, but I will tell you for the companies that have done it it’s been game‐changing. Not just with their new hires, but it’s been culturechanging for their entire company because of the ways he helps them look at their company and how they appear outwardly to a new candidate, which automatically changes how people view their own companies inwardly among their existing team, helping with retention, development. One of my favorite things Paul said today is that to design and build a good life ‐ you didn’t say this exactly, I’m putting it in SFGese, Sound Financial Group language ‐ you actually have to design and build a good career as a candidate. You’ve got to be clear on what you’re after with each new role. Not just what you’re after in maybe getting the job and what the income means, but why would that matter to you five, ten years from now and that’s super meaningful to any employer you’re going to engage with. Paul, I appreciate you taking time away from your business and away from your family to be able to join us here. I know we’re going to get emails on this podcast with people wanting to get a chance to hear more from you, hear more about you. We’ll make sure to get them your contact information, and if anybody wants to engage with us, don’t hesitate to go to www.sfgwa.com, as in Sound Financial Group Washington. On there you can get the first three chapters of my book. You can go to Amazon and download my book on Kindle, that could be done before the outro music and Corey Shepherd is complete. We’d love to see you at one of upcoming events, either inperson or web‐based events where what we try to do is bring you financial knowledge on a consistent, ongoing basis to help you design and build a good life. Thanks again for being here Paul.

Thank you, Paul.

Hey, this is Corey again. I just wanted to say it’s been great to have you here listening to this episode. You can find out more information about us on our website, www.sfgwa.com or you can find us on Facebook under Sound Financial Group. We’d love to hear any questions or comments from you there. Who knows? You may hear one on a future episode. For our full disclosure, you can go to the description of our podcast series, this episode’s description, or our website.

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