Dashboard: We Are in a Talent Crisis

[Music] welcome to another 21 hats dashboard I'm here with Rob Levan who is co-founder and chairman of work better now which provides remote Workforce and virtual assistance services to small businesses welcome to dashboard Rob thanks Lauren really excited uh to to have a nice chat with you today it's great to have you here rob you have a particular area of expert you well you've had a number of businesses so you have a lot of expertise but in particular your business now is involved with talent and hiring and we all know we've been through an unusual few years uh in terms of the labor market and there's always a conflicting reporting out there conflicting narratives about where things are going and whether they're getting better and there always threats looming I'm just I'm really eager to get your perspective you you and your team talk to business owners all the time where do you think we are so we first of all Let Let Me Take A just a step back and talk and just remind everybody something that they already know but they really need to think about is that your people in your culture are going to be the probably the biggest um keys to your success right how well you do sure and it's it's never been more important to have the right people in the right seats uh in your company and a lot of that has to do with all of the change that's going on and the pace of change and of course the business owner can't do everything themselves so you got to just have you have to have terrific people um and and what's going on is we when I say we I mean small and midsize businesses and make sure I come back to that um we are in a talent crisis and we've been in one for a while and we're probably getting used to it but we're we're it's not going away anytime soon and there's a lot of reasons for this it's a combination of a number of things one is demographics we have an aging population right um the other thing is uh and and and unfortunately a lot of this is attributable to the younger Generations in the workforce but there's a a low engagement rate in work now again in a small or midsize business you need everybody fully engaged right I I don't know anybody that that can afford to have a slacker and um you know this is the thing I wanted to come back to if you read the papers today uh or social media whatever it is how however you get your news you're you're reading something very different which is the the and I have air quotes if you saw me a video right now the the power is Shifting back to the employer right and salaries are going down and and this doesn't apply to most small and midsize businesses at least not the ones we're talking to and we talk to a lot we we have a lot of clients we're always talking to small and midsize businesses the ones that we know uh are having trouble they either they have people that they don't want to hold on they really don't want to have in the company but they can't replace them and they just simply can't find you know good people today so it's aging it's it's the Aging population it's the the fact that uh engagement is so low meaning um there are people that that actually say I can't believe this is a thing now not only I'm going to do the as little as possible or the minimum level of work required but I'm going to talk about it which you know just on Tik Tok yeah exact of course where else um so it's we're in a talent crisis because it's really hard to find uh and keep the the the people that you need to run your business today and again it's not going to get any better you know I couldn't agree more about the discrepancy between what we read in the general press and what we experience in all of our own businesses um it's a very different story for for big corporations and obviously that's what gets the most attention I I will say I'm a little bit surprised to hear you bring up the engagement issue as as strong as you have referring to small businesses I I I know it exists I know it's an issue but my sense was that that's a bigger issue for bigger companies am I wrong about that uh no you're not wrong about that it is a bigger issue for bigger companies uh there are plenty of small businesses affected by it but it is largely a bigger company issue but the the point is is that we have a Workforce that as a whole does not have a high level of Engagement so here's one way to think about it how many small businesses do you know that hire people that have big company experience it's probably not very high like I know I don't look for people that have big company experience I want people who worked in other small business the only time I hear about it is when somebody is telling a nightmare story of a mistake they don't ever want to make again there you go there you go so if you think about that the fact that the the large part of the working you know population is in large companies the the the the low engagement rates an issue because again that's part of the the the universe of people you can hire from and if those people are not engaged you obviously cannot hire from them just leaving a much smaller pool to hire from not not to mention there are plenty small businesses that are dealing with a low engagement issue can you point to to data about this I mean I I you do have a a window on this that few of us do you are talking to business owners all the time but I'm I'm curious if there's other evidence of this being a crisis especially for smaller businesses I I don't have data on engagement and small businesses I do have data and it's very consistent depending no matter what source you go to about the US Workforce in general which says about 70% of the U us Workforce is not engaged now the definition of of what is engaged isn't that's that's a whole discussion of itself but when almost three4 or a little more than 2third of the workforce is generally not engaged that's an issue that's going to affect everybody and it shows up most prominently in the the um businesses that you talk to in terms of I'll tell you how it shows up I'll tell you exactly how it shows up it shows up when when we're having a consult with business owners and you know they are saying I can't they're coming to us because they can't find good people in the states it's as simple as that and is this for all levels um particular types of talents well I I can only speak about our personal experience and our the the people that we provide to our clients are you know above entry level and Below managerial level I don't know about executive level that's a whole different ball game but that's also that's not the bulk of the the the workforce that as a small business you have you have a few Executives at your company right so um it's it's for those PE you know they're coming to us to to get those people that are in between that entry level for those roles that in between entry level and manager and what do you tell them well they're coming to us because we can help them with that so that's you know and and what what we do and I don't want to go into too much detail on on us but we provide Talent from Latin America because we found we've tapped into a Workforce that they get behind a company's Mission and they they're fully engaged in you know great attitudes and all all of that stuff can you tell the difference between a company that is struggling to find good people because there aren't enough good people looking for work right now and a company that just isn't doing a good job of hiring because you know we know both exist I'm gonna I'm gonna take that in a slightly different direction um and this actually you know ties into our mutual friend Sean busy and the companies that have good cultures really good cultures cultures by Design right those those companies have less of an issue finding and keeping good talent those companies of course are believe it or not in the minor and no I don't have any stats on that but um you know it's funny I was I'm going to leave names out I was uh having a couple of drinks last night with a few clients friends the these I'm friends with these people and one of them in the Professional Services space was talking about how they're they're going um back to the office four days a week from two or three and um this is going to ramp up productivity and you know I had to mention that we're 100% remote with 80% of our people not even located in this country and we have no issues at all with productivity zero and I I really attribute that to the fact that we have a great culture in the company and I I actually learned this from Shan years ago that you know when you have a great culture it it does a it takes care of a lot of issues with not only customers but with your Workforce it's funny Sean is one of those people who thinks productivity goes up if you get your people back in the office I believe yeah well and and you know in all fairness to Legacy companies if you're traditionally if you've traditionally been in the office I think it's it could be harder to make remote work in all fairness we we were you know we started in 2018 and we were remote from day one 100% remote from day one we've made it work right um right and but again I think our culture is a big part of it so let me ask you about that you know we all know hiring is hard no nobody bets a thousand uh it seems to me it would be even harder for you you're hiring people in other countries other cultures what have you learned about doing that well um for us it's very different so you know we we hire for ourselves for our own team and then you know we we we get four to 5,000 applications for our pool for for our clients and we Whittle that down to like one or two% out of that you know out of that four or 5,000 each month so so I want to leave that out because that's unique to to our business model but there are things that companies need to do the let's put it this way the way that if you've been in business for more than five years maybe more than six or seven years the way that you should be conducting your hiring recruiting has changed and I can give you a few things that um I can give the audience a few things that they should be thinking about um that they're probably not doing now that will make it easier to hire and by the way hiring is really hard even companies that are good at it don't get it right a fair percentage of the time and um but let let me go through if it's okay with you I'll go through some of those please okay so uh in no particular order number one you got to double first of all if you don't have a great culture you got to work on improving that let's assume that you already got your culture where you want to be Culture by Design it's positive healthy and fun culture um double down on employer branding what's an employer brand so a company's brand is the other one way to think about it is what do people say about your company when you're not in the room that's your brand right your employer brand is what do your current and perspective employees say as your place uh as your company is as a place to work and the reason this is really important today is because it's on it's on public view with glass door right so you know when when we woke up maybe two years ago maybe three years ago I went on to Glass Glass St and you know unfortunately what tends to happen on these things is the people that had a bad experience working for your companies the ones likely to post and we didn't have a great score so I simply just asked the entire team I said I don't care what you say just go on glass door please and post your experience and now we have a Great Glass Door score and and I just heard from my recruiting head of recruiting that there are Facebook groups throughout Latin America that talk about us in a very positive way so you gota you know just like you're you're thinking about your marketing and your your branding to your customers you got to be treating your talent pool as a customer base too and you got to really look at your employer brand so that's the first one while you're talking about glass store just a quick question do you encourage people to respond if there's a negative review there um I I don't I don't have a a thought on that but now that you asked the question I absolutely would um I absolutely would just like if if there you should do the same thing as if there's a bad review on Google for your business that's the way to think about it um jumping to the next thing is recruit and interview with upskilling in mind so what's upskilling upscaling is when you take somebody could be a current or prospective employee and you train them up on a new skill now this could be internal training it could be external training a great example of where a lot of companies can do this now is with AI right uh AI is really important we may or may not get around to that on the on this call but a use AI as an example well let me I'm sorry let me use another example think about it this way let's say you're interviewing two candidates and you have 10 requirements for this role candidate a meets all 10 requirements but the cultural fit really isn't there right whatever that might look like candidate B great cultural fit but it only checks eight out of the 10 boxes higher candidate be and upskill on those two on those two skill sets where they may not have the experience number one you can teach skills you can't teach attitude the other way to look at it is you may never find a candidate that has all 10 boxes checked and if you keep looking months go by and you're of course your company suffers with every every time you have a seat that goes unfilled so I I've been noticing our our Forward Thinking clients for lack of a better way to put it they're hiring candidates where there's a great fit and yeah I got to train them up on this software package or or whatever else it might be and that's working really well and it works well for us too by the way we've been doing so much upscaling um that I just I mentioned we had our EOS quarterly meeting today so we had our whole leadership team there most of them are in Latin America every single one of them other than my partner and I and these are the leaders of our company they started at at an assistant or coordinator level and we've between upskilling and and and some other things they've now risen the ranks to the leadership level that goes to show you what the power is there and then um the I guess the last thing I'll cover today is um look at your recruiting process hopefully first of all you have one and tighten it up like a lot of companies during the pandemic what they did was they looked at their C whole entire customer experience and where can we improve it and they you have to do that because of what I call the Amazon effect whether you're B2B or b2c your customers are still people and Amazon has spoiled everybody right it's just easy to do everything on Amazon right so you got to look at you got to do that same thing for your recruiting process are people filling out the same form more than once are they um uh are they when they're interviewing multiple people at your company I'm not suggesting to reduce the number of interviews but is that all taking place over one or two days or is that taking place over a week you got to shorten your cycle time make it efficient make it fun uh pretend you're recruiting trying to trying to solicit a uh a new customer and you got to put your best foot forward so look at that entire process and see where you can make it more quote unquote customer friendly so those are a couple of ideas on on how you can improve the hiring process the first thing you mentioned was the importance of culture um is there anything particular you would highlight in terms of building a culture in a remote business um so it it's a great question there's a I can just tell you what we've done um number one and the these are not in order but number one um we tend to over communicate so we you know we have our EOS uh weekly meetings in each department um we have Ono one meetings um on on a regular Cadence whether it's every week or every other week um we get together uh with fun things there was like a like a talent show that we had last week um but you're saying over communicating is a good thing yes yes it it's more important to do in a remote environment because you don't have the water cooler right you can't um you know slide your chair back to the and look at the person in the cubicle next to you and ask them a question you can do it of course through chat but and then we also encourage video communication because it's it's much better than just audio and it's you know the next best thing to to be in the person our leadership team and most of them are in Latin America we get together and in person twice a year we do encourage local get togethers um and we also recognize people uh consistent with our core values so we came up with something and you can blog workb better now.com you can blog for this you can search for the blog on the W Awards where anybody in the company can recognize anybody else in the company for going you know above above and beyond the Call of Duty tying it into one of our six core values and you got to see you should see the the look on people's face when on our weekly all staff Call they get recognized it never gets old it's it's inexpensive it's easy to do um and people want to get recognized and it's more important to do that in a remote environment so those are those are a few things to do and of course if you're not sure what to do ask your team or have an outsider ask your team hey what's what's really good about the culture what's not so good and what can be improved and how would you improve it I'm GNA ask you a bit of an unfair question if you can't answer it that's okay but you've given us suggestions for how specific indiv idual businesses can deal with the talent crisis you've described have you thought at all about what would solve the talent crisis for small businesses in general a a larger more macro solution no I don't uh it's a great question Lauren I don't I don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about those things I really try to focus on the things that I can control and how we can help our you know how we can do our part to to help small and midsize businesses I was afraid you going to say that and by the way by the way some of this is not easily or even possibly solvable because it's it's a numbers issue it's a lot of it's a demographics issue um the engagement part maybe not so much but there is there sure there is just a simple demographics issue too that's that's a big part of this all right then the last question I have for you I just can't resist you mentioned Ai and the impact it it's having and what it's changed what what should small business owners be thinking about in terms of using AI in all these areas okay so I'll give you a bunch of things you know but in short Snippets um number one before AI comes automation uh automation is now accessible to every business it's built into almost every so piece of software there is if it's not built into the software you have U what I call Api connectors things like zapier Za P eer that'll connect a spreadsheet to a piece of software two pieces of software you have to be using automation uh for a number of reasons number one it requ you'll reduce man hours needed to do tasks number two you're going to reduce errors number three you're going to improve cycle time which will probably relate to a better customer experience so for automation to do what Rob automation to do anything you can in the company anything that's re that's repetitive any everything should be automated so for example when we have a new client here we we literally click a button in HubSpot and I don't know how any of this works but my team does a whole bunch of things happen emails go out to different departments blah blah blah all of that stuff a lot of a lot of companies are doing manual um so automate everything that you can in the company now let's talk about AI by the way you don't have to do that before AI but it's an easier thing to do AI I love Peter diamantis he's from the X prize uh his quote which is there'll be two kinds of companies in 2030 those using AI throughout their businesses and those that are he says out of business I'll say that are really limping along um AI is UN un believably powerful there's so many things you can do but you know what rather than me and by the way we're using AI throughout the organization rather than me tell you about how we're using AI let me tell you about how I as one of the two owners in the company got got the company um excited about Ai and the way we did that is a few months after chat came out chat GPT was released maybe four or five months after I realized this was going to be a big thing in the company and I'm the Visionary in the company that's my job to to look for these things I also knew that as one of the older people in the company and you know only semi digitally native I'm not going to be the one to figure this how to use this stuff right and granted I use AI every day but I'm not going to be the one that's going to figure out how do we really leverage this in the company so I simply went to my leadership team I said look you guys have probably heard about Ai and chat GPT and there's more stuff coming out every day this is going to really impact our business I want everybody to start experimenting and just if you need some money for subscription fees no problem document what you're doing if something doesn't work don't don't consider it a failure just share it you know share it with other people in the team and just play around with it and then I and then we encourage them to get their departments involved we're now at a point where we're using AI throughout the business in in different areas and we're always looking to do more and we actually have an AI showand tell once a month and it's everybody's favorite thing to do so we we're not only using a on the company but we've created a culture that Embraces change which is really given the pace of change today is really uh critical that all businesses do you have people that aren't like afraid of change like people who say oh I'm afraid AI is going to take my job away it's the wrong attitude how am I going to use AI to do a better job or how am I as an owner going to get my company get everybody in my company to start embracing AI That's what people should be thinking about that's a great answer again I just can't resist you say you're using it throughout the company can you give me a quick show and tell a couple of things that you think might be a little bit surprising about how you've been able to use it so one of the things that we're we started to do we're still tweaking it its early stage but it's top of my mind so I'm going to mention it to you because it was just mentioned an hour ago is you know we have a proprietary process after a client does a consult and we essentially get a job description as well as like the soft skills they're looking for and all that stuff now we have all of these candidates that have gone through our um also proprietary uh process um of you know that whole screening process then we have to match them and that's that's a hand match or tailor match process so how can we use AI to speed up the process and actually make it better and that they're they're now playing around with a few tools where we're going to you we can use AI to take the essence of our process but make it even better because look our process you got to our process even if you even if you tag certain things with the candidate and you tag certain things with the uh with the perspective client it's still a hand Pro it's like a it's still a manual process but AI can do this better and faster because if you've tagged certain things they just look for the same tags and um they automatically put people together and then we can have people that will review that just to just to make sure that you know AI is not hallucinating or anything like that that's one example we're using AI um on the marketing side constantly to tweak our messaging um we don't use it by the way to create blogs I think that's a grave mistake but you can use it and I can explain why if you want me to but you we we do use not even to do a first draft not for for that's a I think that's a terrible move I would use AI to come up with the ideas and maybe possibly the outline and then certainly for the editing but here's why you don't use AI for for for blog for blogging content if you're going to create content that you're going to use for marketing purposes and as you know I used to have a Content marketing firm um if you're going to use content that content has to change the point of view of the recipient for it to make any type of impact and in your case as a as a business hopefully to get them to to to nurture them or to become to become a a real Prospect and ultimately become a client that point of view changing content it's really unlikely that that that rests in the AI world that rests in whatever it is that secret SAU is that you do right so uh I'm you know in in in our world you know what am I I'm blogging about I'm blogging about um uh how companies are you know thriving with remote Talent I'm going to use real world examples for that right other companies might be you might have there's a there's a famous guy his name is escaping M right now he had a pool company and he did a lot of um Marcus somebody Marcus Sheridan Marcus Sheridan thank you so what what he was doing with that content the reason it worked so well is he just simply took their expertise and turned it into uh you know a blog or possibly video video video format the the stuff that's going to change the point of view of the re reent is that expertise that you as an entrepreneur or you're you as a business do really really well and you're not going to get that from ai ai is going to regurgitate the same stuff that's out there already hope that made sense that does make sense actually this was all great Rob Lan is co-founder and chairman of work better now which provides remote Workforce and virtual assistance services to small businesses Rob thanks for taking the time thanks I really enjoyed the conversation Lauren me too have a great week everybody [Music]