Outsmarting the Downturn: Steven Farrell’s Proven Tactics to Grow Your Recruiting Business When Everyone Else Is Struggling

Benjamin Mena [00:00:00]:
Coming up on this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast.

Steven Farrell [00:00:03]:
Sales and marketing and ops, they're not separate lanes. These are interlocked links. Think of the links on a jacket, right? If you have a broken link on a jacket and try to zip it up, man, you can't get it zipped, right. People talk about work life balance, and I laugh at that because there is no work life balance. Replace that balance with harmony. Work life harmony.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:28]:
Welcome to the Elite Recruiter Podcast with your host, Benjamin Mena, where we focus on what it takes to win in the recruiting game. We cover it all from sales, marketing, mindset, money, leadership, and placements. Every minute recruiter spends on paperwork is lost time making placements. That's where Ascend steps in. A modern employer of record and back office solution built to boost the bottom line. Ascend automates onboarding, payroll compliance and invoicing in one streamlined platform. It integrates effortlessly with all your tools and scales as you grow, saving you hours and cutting your operational costs significantly. Want less paperwork and more placements? Head over to ascend.com and see how Ascend can make the difference for you.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:15]:
I am so excited about this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast because you know what? There are people out there doing things different. There are people out there in the recruiting world, especially the staffing world, where the numbers have been trending down for months on end, but they're winning, they're growing, they're doing things different. And so that's why I'm so excited to have Steve on the podcast where we're going to talk about sales, we're going to talk about marketing, we're going to talk about operations and how to align all those together. So that way you are thriving in 2025 because of all those things that he's put together. They're winning and he has helped produce tens of millions of dollars of the revenue within the staffing world as results. So, Steve, welcome to the podcast.

Steven Farrell [00:01:53]:
Well, thank you, Benjamin. I've been a big fan of your podcast. In fact, your podcast is the first podcast and staffing that I' subscribed to and tuned into and I've been a fan ever since. So it's an honor to be on the show today as a guest. Thank you for having me.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:09]:
Well, excited that you're here. I feel like I don't spend enough time with the staffing side of the house like I really should. Well, before we get started, quick 30 second self introduction, because I know you got a lot of things that you are personally working with Tackling and building.

Steven Farrell [00:02:25]:
Yeah, I'll make it brief. So I've been in the industry, the staffing industry now for about eight years, and presently I'm the director of sales for a light industrial staffing firm based out of Utah. Also a co founder of a CDL staffing firm as well, and of course the host of the Staffing Playbook podcast. So I'm still an infant when it comes to staffing. Just eight years in and like most people will tell you, it's a black hole. Once you're in, you cannot get out. That's true to this day. But I'm glad I'm here.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:56]:
I think that's the whole recruiting world to begin with.

Steven Farrell [00:02:59]:
That's right.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:00]:
And real quick for somebody that wants to find a staffing playbook and subscribe. Can you talk about that real quick?

Steven Farrell [00:03:05]:
Yeah. Staffing Playbook is a new podcast we started about a year ago. We're 38 episodes in. And the idea about the staffing playbook is we are here to give you the playbook, play by play. When it comes to the staffing industry. If you want to learn how to grow your sales fix, your operations, align with marketing. If you want to know what your HR leaders are thinking about when it comes to their relationships with staffing agencies, we talk about different leadership topics within the industry. But we're here to give you the playbook.

Steven Farrell [00:03:35]:
No theories, no big ideas. Let's get to actionable, tangible things that you can do to be successful in the staffing industry. And we've had a lot of fun. We're 38 episodes in and we're just getting started.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:46]:
That's awesome. And he's got some good stuff, so make sure to go hop on Spotify, hit that subscribe button and definitely check it out. Well, the age old question, how did you end up in this wonderful world of recruiting?

Steven Farrell [00:03:59]:
Well, like everybody else, kind of fall into recruiting, you fall into staffing, you know. I've led large teams throughout my career, primarily in retail and consulting. I had 500 employees at one point, at the age of 27. Would not wish that on my worst enemy. But like many others, I was looking for something different. I was coming out of retail. We had at the time, our second child. She was special, needs, a lot of complications and I needed to get off the road.

Steven Farrell [00:04:28]:
I was spending three weeks out of the month on the road. I loved what I did, but I needed to be home with my family. And so I reached out to a mentor of mine who also owned a staffing company and he introduced me to a big firm out here in Utah. And so I jumped in and I've never looked back.

Benjamin Mena [00:04:46]:
Real quick, you had 500 employees at the age of 27. Yeah, like, for a lot of people, if you go on LinkedIn, that's like the epitome of success. But you thought, you know, this sound like the epitome of.

Steven Farrell [00:04:57]:
It's not, it's not. It's the epitome of gray hairs and going bald at the age of 27.

Benjamin Mena [00:05:06]:
Okay, so you jumped in, you jumped into the staffing world. How was your first, like, few months?

Steven Farrell [00:05:11]:
Dude, I love that question. Because in hindsight, when I've talked to, you know, past coworkers of mine, people that have worked for me can summarize my first few months, probably my first year, just picture a bowl in a china shop. That was me. It was a rough start. But it's interesting, you know, there's a lot of things I learned through my career when it comes to leading teams, building high performance teams, growing sales, all through your service delivery, as well as through your marketing efforts and your operational excellence. And so I took a lot of that, what I learned in my career, and applied it into staffing. And our first two years, we grew by tens of millions of dollars just getting into the industry for the first time. So.

Steven Farrell [00:05:55]:
Talk about drinking from a fire hose. This was pre Covid. This is 2018, still hard to find talent. And yeah, we did a lot of things, we had a lot of fun, and we grew it from there.

Benjamin Mena [00:06:05]:
Did you start on the sales side? Did you start on the recruiting side? Was there almost like 360 where you had to do everything?

Steven Farrell [00:06:12]:
Everything? Yeah, I was over operations, recruiting and sales, which, you know, I think is an ideal state to be in as a staffing company. A lot of the bigger firms, they separate sales from operations and from marketing. And it's really hard to accomplish things at scale when you have three different individual business units. And so I got lucky in that regard that I had operations, recruiting, and sales under my management.

Benjamin Mena [00:06:38]:
Did you come in as a manager by chance?

Steven Farrell [00:06:40]:
I did, yep. I had seven. Seven branches.

Benjamin Mena [00:06:44]:
Wait, you came in as a manager for seven branches and you literally, like had to learn the staffing industry as you're doing it?

Steven Farrell [00:06:50]:
Yeah, it was rough.

Benjamin Mena [00:06:52]:
What was one of the craziest things that you had to learn during that first year?

Steven Farrell [00:06:55]:
I walked into high volume recruiting in my career. I've personally recruited thousands of people right over time to be on my team. And every hire was very specific, had a need Right. When it came to staffing going into I need to hire how many people in a week? 147. You know, that was really difficult. That was eye opening and, you know, I had to toe the line. This is light industrial staffing where, you know, entry level people don't really need a lot of experience. Where your customer needs 200 people, you better give them 200 people.

Steven Farrell [00:07:28]:
But some of those, maybe 20% may not be the ideal fit. You don't have the right time to screen them properly. And so navigating through that initially was actually really hard for me because I did not believe in that model. I believe in high volume recruiting, but not just throw bodies at a problem. Like I want every hired account, like your customers relationship hinged on that one hire out of every one of those for 200. And so that was, for me, I think that was the biggest hurdle was getting my operations and recruiting strategy behind. Every hire matters, regardless if you have 200 openings or not. That was tough.

Steven Farrell [00:08:05]:
That took time.

Benjamin Mena [00:08:06]:
Recruiting and staffing is like the land of misfit toys. So many people just fall into this space. But there's this magical line where it almost becomes a career and it's like a mind shift change. It becomes like you said earlier, like, you know, you're stuck here for life. When did that shift happen for you?

Steven Farrell [00:08:27]:
I love that question because I was two years into my career in staffing and recruiting when I realized this was not for me. We broke all, all kinds of records. We had a lot of fun. We were growing, you know, faster than the industry, but I didn't have my why. You know, Simon Sinek, he writes, he's got a book, you know your why or find your why. I can't remember the exact title, but a lot of companies start with the what and the how and they never get to their why. And so I needed to find my why and I had not found it in staffing. And so this was towards the end of 2019, I decided, I'm going to go back to what I know, what I love, and that's retail.

Steven Farrell [00:09:06]:
And so I started putting my fillers out there. I was taking my time, I wasn't in a big hurry. And then something happened in early 2020 called Covid. And I was not going anywhere. Forget about my career aspirations in retail. Retailers were being shut down left and right. They were going bankrupt. And here I am in staffing.

Steven Farrell [00:09:25]:
It was fun, but I didn't have my why. And so I just stuck it out with everybody else. We did our Best supporting our customers. And towards the end of 2020, had a large volume customer that produced a medical product that people, their lives literally depend on this product. And we had over 200 openings in the building. We could not fill it. Low wages, you know, the background criteria was very stringent. They had a COVID protocol because they're dealing with medical equipment where at any given day there is at least 250 people absent from the plant.

Steven Farrell [00:09:58]:
And so we're talking almost 500 people absent from the facility at any given day. And so their leadership team invited me to an emergency meeting and they're explaining the situation. They're not getting their product produced like they need to, and people are not going to get their treatments and that's going to cost their lives. And so here I am, I'm just, I'm just their staffing provider. Like, hey, you raise your pay by $4 an hour like everyone else has in this market, and we'll get you your 200 people. Right? But they couldn't do that. They had fixed costs. So I get off of that call and it's the first time in my adult career I literally just broke down and cried.

Steven Farrell [00:10:32]:
Like, I felt like the weight of the world came crushing down on my shoulders and I had to do something about it. I felt responsible for it, even though I'm just the staffing provider. And so all night I was tossing and turning one of the, you know, talk about the dark night of the soul. I had my dark night of the soul that night. It was a crisis that I needed to resolve. And so the next morning I grabbed my team hold an emergency meeting ourselves. I explain everything that was just shared. And I'm just like, guys, let's figure this out.

Steven Farrell [00:11:02]:
I don't care if we have to shuttle people in from the moon. Like, we have got to fix this. And so we toss around different ideas. We're not getting anywhere. And then one of my managers says, man, I just wish we could get some, like, shuttle people in from another state where their unemployment is still really high. In Utah, the unemployment had already come back down to 3.8%. This was in late October, November of 2020. And I'm like, that's it.

Steven Farrell [00:11:28]:
So we looked at different states nearby Wyoming, Oil, gas and mining. The lights were still off. They had high unemployment. So I called our manager out in Rock Springs and I said, hey, here's a situation. What are the chances you can get me 200 people at $15 an hour, shuttled in on a bus, stay in a hotel and come work in a production facility 12 hours a day, four days a week. Like, what do you think? To my surprise, she was like, I could get you a thousand. Okay, now we're talking. And so this is a very long story, but we went back to the customer, we told them it would be $220 per day per person.

Steven Farrell [00:12:07]:
We could get you your 200 people. And they're like, done, let's go. So, you know, working 100 hour weeks, killing ourselves, my entire team, we're skipping holidays with our families. Like, we are just here to make it a success. And it was a wild success. And six months later, things stabilized in the market. We were able to backfill those positions with local Utah employees. So I'm on a call with the HR director and, you know, we're just wrapping this up.

Steven Farrell [00:12:34]:
And she's just like, steven, you have no idea the lives that you've saved. But we do. Like, I can't thank you enough. I can't thank your team enough. And so, for the second time in my adult career, I'm crying again. And it was at that moment I didn't care about any accolades or any extra bonus that may have come from the GP we generated. Like, it was at that moment I realized we truly can make a difference in people's lives with the work that we do. And that was my why.

Steven Farrell [00:13:01]:
That's the fuel in my belly that will never go away.

Benjamin Mena [00:13:05]:
Out of all the recruiters that you've met and the recruiters that you've talked to, because I know you go to conferences, I know you have your podcasts, how can another recruiter turn that switch and find that why for themselves?

Steven Farrell [00:13:18]:
Yeah, I've asked myself that question multiple times throughout my career. It's intrinsic, really. And you have to have that conversation. You have to share your why with your team. And it has to come from a sincere source, like a lived experience. And so we have these very special moments. They're rare in staffing where you have someone that comes in, you don't know that they're living out of their car and that this is their last shot before they give up on life. Right? And you give them a chance and they get that job and they own it and they go do a wonderful job.

Steven Farrell [00:13:52]:
They get promoted to a line lead and then department head, and then two years later they come back and tell you they were homeless and they were ready to give it up, but you gave them a chance and it made all the difference. And now they have their own apartment. Now they're caring for their family. Like, it's those small moments that we rarely get to see or hear that give a lot of people their why. And so for recruiters, if they're looking for their why, you can't force it. I couldn't force it. I was ready to quit. And then I took on what it felt like the impossible for me, and it changed my life, and I found my why.

Steven Farrell [00:14:28]:
And so take on the things that feel impossible to you. Those goals, those expectations, those placements, those clients that are hard to work with. Maybe you don't have a good relationship with an HR leader and you feel like you're going to lose this account. Give it everything you've got, and you'll likely find your why in the process. It's that journey.

Benjamin Mena [00:14:51]:
And it's one of those things, like, I normally never see it in the first, like, two years of somebody's recruiting career as they're drinking from the fire hose, or you yourself, the bull in the china shop. It's like, after that is when the career move actually happens.

Steven Farrell [00:15:05]:
That's right.

Benjamin Mena [00:15:06]:
I know, like, you've done a lot of things. You guys crushed this Covid project, kept on recruiting. You also did some other crazy things during COVID to fill some positions. I want you to talk about that.

Steven Farrell [00:15:19]:
So leading up to Covid, I, you know, I had a marketing background, so I understood the importance at the time to be on Facebook to have this social awareness. And so there's these large job boards that are groups on Facebook that I would go in, and you'd see recruiters posting in there, you'd see job seekers posting in there, and you'd try to align the two. And so see a lot of spam postings. And so I'd reach out to the admin and go, hey, your group's getting out of control. There's like 20,000 people in this group, 40,000 in another group. Could you use some help, like, as another admin? And they're like, please help. Yes. I'm like, okay, let's go.

Steven Farrell [00:15:56]:
And I'd go in and actually help. I'd clean it up. I'd set rules and parameters, and it'd really make it a place to network recruiters and job seekers. And so I did this over the first two years in staffing. And, you know, I had 12 large groups that I admin. And it was interesting. A few months into each one of these groups, I'd reach back out to the admin, the group owner, and go, do you even want to do this anymore? Do you want me just to take it over? And nine times out of the 10, I'd say, yeah, it's yours. And I'd just kick them out of the group and take over the group.

Steven Farrell [00:16:25]:
And so I was doing that just to help create awareness, get jobs out there, help job seekers find jobs. But then when Covid hit and the demand for consumer goods went through the roof, which means ultimately you need people in the factories making widgets, you need support on all levels, and the labor force was just not there. And so I decided, let me leverage what I have and make it better and let's reach job seekers. Job seekers were a little fearful of going into the workplace because they're hearing so much information how they can get Covid, how they can't, how they protect themselves. So I'm like, why don't I just showcase my clients, what they're doing, their COVID protocols to protect people in the building, where we'd have one way set up and masks and all of that social distancing. And so I decided to start a live stream every single day, talking about our clients, what they're doing, talking about the jobs we have open, how to apply. And this turned into a daily stream where we got a lot of attention. But then we took it to the next step where we did a virtual job fair.

Steven Farrell [00:17:30]:
So if you'd imagine for a moment, you know, the career fair, where you're in a gymnasium and there's 40 different booths, all these different companies, and they're handing out their swag, talking to people. Well, I wanted to take that concept and do a virtual job fair, a three hour event. And so I took 14 HR leaders, gave them 10 minutes each to talk about their company, their culture, their jobs, how to apply. And I was just interviewing them back to back on the live stream. And we would have over 100,000 people watching the live stream, which was pretty remarkable in itself. And I'd have assigned recruiters to look at those that are commenting saying, oh, that sounds like a great job. How do I apply? They would private message that individual and they set em up in a separate group chat and they'd interview them. And so we would hire over a hundred people every single one of these three hour job fairs.

Steven Farrell [00:18:24]:
And it was a huge success. We were able to fill our orders when other agencies just simply could not, they could not reach the talent where they were.

Benjamin Mena [00:18:32]:
That is like insane. Like, did you just like think of this idea or was it like a spark of the moment? Like, you know, I mean, this is completely outside the box especially like it was, you know.

Steven Farrell [00:18:42]:
Yeah, these are the kind of things that just pop in my head late at night, you know, really, another fun thing that we did during COVID to get the talent is, you know, think of your business depots where there's like 100 different warehouses just in one area of your market. Right. All your manufacturers and all your three pls are there. And so we had, luckily enough, we had a client at each entrance of this large business depot. So I'm thinking to myself, how do I steal people from one building and bring them over to the next? People when they're coming on their shift or coming off their shift, the ones that are willing to leave, go to another company, they're probably disgruntled, they're just unhappy, they just worked overtime or maybe they're coming in early today or whatever it may be, they're not happy with their boss. And so at 5 o' clock in the morning, I put up these huge white canopies. I lit them up with lights. We had a table, big, big freaking sign on the side saying drive thru job fair.

Steven Farrell [00:19:38]:
And we placed one at the entrance and exit of this big business depot. And so if you were coming in or coming out of this depot, you were forced to drive past our drive thru job fair. And so sure enough, we hired hundreds of people by doing this that come through our drive thru job fair that we're just looking to move on to.

Benjamin Mena [00:19:57]:
Something else, you know, with all these creative ideas. I remember my first job in the staffing industry or recruiting industry and I was thinking outside the box. I'm full of dumb ideas that I try. I call everything a dumb idea. This podcast was a dumb idea. The summits were what I call a dumb idea. I remember getting told no. A lot like, no, you can't do that.

Benjamin Mena [00:20:23]:
You can't do that with the leadership at your organization. They gave you the freedom to do stuff like this, right?

Steven Farrell [00:20:31]:
Yeah. You know, it's funny, a lot of those dumb ideas, you only hear about the dumb ideas that turn out to be a good idea. I tried a lot of dumb things that did not work out. Okay. I'm not immune from that. You know, sometimes it was a hard sell because it's a brand new idea. Like what? What do you mean you're going to live stream every single day for the next year? Like, shouldn't you be visiting a client? Well, of course I'm gonna still visit my clients, but that's not our problem. Our clients need people.

Steven Farrell [00:20:58]:
And so this is one avenue of getting people. And so a lot of times it was just, hey, I needed to sell this, help them see the big picture and the roi. But other times I just do it without asking for permission and then show the results. And it was like, wow, that was actually a good idea, Steve. Kudos. Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:21:16]:
So let's fast forward. Like, you've made it through Covid. You know, you've expanded on, like, all these, like, incredible things on the last year. You've really done a lot of changes, at least. Yeah, I want to really zoom in on. I want to talk about, like, some of the sales or marketing changes, but, like, where did this next evolution really start to happen?

Steven Farrell [00:21:38]:
The staffing industry as a whole. I know, you know, recruiting within that industry, but the staffing industry as a whole has been down for 30 consecutive months. And we were saying this last year. Right. Last year was one of the toughest years in the industry since the recession. And you look at why agencies are struggling. You know, there's a lack of business out there. Right.

Steven Farrell [00:22:00]:
The industry contracted, but there's still business to be had out there. It was about gaining more wallet share with the clients that you have, stealing market share from your competitors. And so we wanted to figure out how we could do just that. At the time, we had about 18,000 companies in the state of Utah that were ideal for staffing. But not all 18,000 are using staffing. And those that are using staffing, they don't have as many job orders. And so we niched down. We focused on what are we good at.

Steven Farrell [00:22:30]:
We're good at light industrial staffing. We're good at construction staffing. We are good at, you know, professional placement. And so we looked at all of the areas that we're good at and what we're not good at. And we focused on just those niches that we can. That we can service. We have the infrastructure to service. And so that 18,000 potential customers that we could reach, it went down to about 3,000.

Steven Farrell [00:22:55]:
And out of those 3,000, we wanted to identify who has a need, because not all 3,000 have a need. So we looked at job boards. Okay, are they hiring? It's like, I think about this analogy. I'm on a mountain above Utah. I'm looking down, and there's beacon lights on every building of companies that have raised their hand. They're saying, I'm hiring. And so within our niche, let's focus in on those that are hiring, and let's go talk to them. Then let's look at the customers we've done business with.

Steven Farrell [00:23:26]:
In the past, we had over 500 customers that we've done business with that we're no longer doing business. Let's go and reengage in those conversations. Let's build that relationship back up. Let's understand why they're not using us and why they stopped. So let's see if we can repair that and service them. And then last segment is customers that use staffing that are likely being under service. There was a clearly rated survey done, I want to say, right at the beginning of 2024. I can't remember the exact date, but staffing firms indicated they were going to focus on new business more than their existing business.

Steven Farrell [00:24:00]:
So I saw that as an opportunity. That look, you have taken your eye off the target. Your current customers are being under serviced because you're going out and trying to get more new business. Because if you're not growing, you're dying. I get it. But you've got to focus on your core business as well. And so I directed my team to go after every single customer that's using staffing presently that are likely being underserviced. And sure enough, they were being underserviced.

Steven Farrell [00:24:25]:
And that was our opportunity to gain more market share. And it worked. We grew by double digits last year when the staffing industry was down by double digits.

Benjamin Mena [00:24:35]:
So it's one of the fun things, like, you know, whether you're a manager, whether you're on the sales side, but it's always this idea that you have to keep on hitting these metrics, which, you know, metrics is super important. KPIs are super important. But I've seen it time and time again, including my own business, where, you know, the race is to go get a new customer because that's what you're supposed to do, that we forget about how you can go deeper on the people that you've worked with in the past. When did this realization actually happen? Like, what was it just like, okay, like, wait, everybody's doing this. I need a pivot to go deeper this way.

Steven Farrell [00:25:08]:
Yeah. Speaking of numbers, we were not hitting our numbers. We were literally halfway through the year last year, and we are way off from our goals. And so I sat down with my team and I'm like, let's write down every single thing that we are doing right now, and let's just rate it. What's working, what's not. If it's not working, cross it out. Okay, so we did that. What is it that's working? Let's talk about that more during this process we had leading up to this aha moment, we had just went through a workshop.

Steven Farrell [00:25:40]:
It's based on a book called the One Page Marketing Plan by Alan Dibb. And if you have not read that, you need to. It's a phenomenal book on marketing, but the idea is to have your marketing strategy on one side, single page. And through that process, we developed our customer avatar, also known as ideal customer profile, your icp. And our ideal customer profile was Ron Christensen. He was in his mid-50s. He liked to listen to YouTube on his way home from work. He also likes to rock out to 90s grunge music.

Steven Farrell [00:26:14]:
When he's home, he's not watching network television. He's on Reddit. He really cares about his employees. He cares about the staffing agencies that supply him as employees. Like, he wants to know that you truly care about the people you are sending him more than he cares about them. Right. And so we took Ron Christensen out to lunch and interviewed him. We asked him lots of professional and personal questions.

Steven Farrell [00:26:41]:
And then we went back to the team, said, what did we learn? How do we develop our marketing message to Bron Christiansen? So we did just that. That was one of the first steps of being aligned with marketing, is now we have an ideal customer profile for sales to go after. We were zipped up as a marketing sales team of who's our ideal customer profile. So we have our ideal customer profile now we have our markets that we're niching down into. Now we're segmenting that to who we want to actually target within that market. And then we ran with it.

Benjamin Mena [00:27:13]:
So you went from like the 15,000 to, like, the 5,000. And with this, like, developing the ICP, like, did it shrink even more?

Steven Farrell [00:27:21]:
Yeah, it certainly did. Because not all customers. Just because they could be a customer staffing doesn't mean they should be your customer. Every type of position and industry that you can hire for as a recruiter as part of the staffing industry. But what is it that we're really good at? And Ron Christensen helped us realize we are good at light industrial. In fact, we're great at light industrial.

Benjamin Mena [00:27:42]:
I love that you guys actually took somebody out to dinner or to lunch and just, like, drilled him for.

Steven Farrell [00:27:49]:
We took his photo and posted it down the halls and offices of our corporate office. I mean, you cannot go a day without seeing Ron Christensen.

Benjamin Mena [00:27:58]:
And did you start to see that evolve the sales team?

Steven Farrell [00:28:02]:
Yeah, certainly it helped us evolve to just get more clear on who we're targeting and why. Part of our success wasn't just narrowing down our niche, identifying our ICP and building a strategy around that, a marketing and sales strategy. But it was. We had to get good at selling, consultative selling. And so another thing we did in Q4, for recruiters, this is like, game on, right? You are getting your placements. It's crazy. You're up all night, you get no sleep. Like, forget the holidays.

Steven Farrell [00:28:35]:
You're just super busy getting your placements. Well, for sales, it's different. You're not closing as many big deals, you're not getting as many accounts, because people, they have their need, they need to get their product out. They're just not focused on switching to another agency. And so I pulled my team aside, and for three months straight, every single week, we spent a third of our time role practicing and memorizing 45 questions that you would have different types of questions within the discovery meeting. We would not ask all 45 questions. Tried. That does not work.

Steven Farrell [00:29:09]:
It's really more like 15 questions, but then two or three iterations depending on the scenario that you're in. And so my team, we memorized these 45 questions, then we roll, practiced over and over and over. And that really helped us not only grow last year, but this year because we've done so well with the discovery meetings. We've more than doubled our closing rate from discovery meeting to contract signed, and we're outpacing last year again by double digits.

Benjamin Mena [00:29:39]:
Okay, so this 45 questions, is this something that, like, you guys had to drop yourselves? Is it something that you stole from another industry or stole from another company? How did you, like, figure out? Like, I need to focus on better questions.

Steven Farrell [00:29:53]:
Yeah, yeah. We sat down as a group and we mapped out the discovery process from start to finish. Then we started inserting questions that we should ask. And so just past years of sales training in consultative selling, you have an idea of that framework, but we had to make it staffing specific. And so it was a team effort. And so we had several sessions developing the script and then memorizing and implementing the script.

Benjamin Mena [00:30:19]:
Did any of the team give you a lot of pushback on memorizing?

Steven Farrell [00:30:23]:
We all did, including myself. Think about it. When was the last time you were asked to memorize anything, let alone 45 questions? That is pure hell for anybody and my entire team, including myself. For decades past school, the thought of that was just paralyzing. So the first couple weeks were really clunky. And, man, we had a lot of fun just making fun of each other. But we got better. And as the weeks Went on, it got easier and easier and it just became muscle memory.

Benjamin Mena [00:30:55]:
While you guys were selling consultative selling, was any parts of the team like the operations or marketing also doing stuff or were you guys like intertwined with them too? Or is it just like you guys hitting the phones, the in person meetings, like going through your questions?

Steven Farrell [00:31:12]:
Yeah, this was really neat as well. Our operations team, they were focused on securing the relationships that they had and building upon them. And so the operations team also memorized their own set of questions they should have not in a first discovery meeting. Right. This is with existing customers discovering their needs, other things that are going on within their organization. It wasn't just about going in and getting a job order. It was building a relationship, showing value, bringing information from the market is telling you, sharing that with your clients. And so our operations team also had their own set of discovery questions that they memorized and used in their meetings.

Steven Farrell [00:31:53]:
And this also helped our marketing team as well to get the messaging right. What are those key pain points right now that our customers are facing? Let's make sure we get that in our messaging. When it, when it comes to marketing.

Benjamin Mena [00:32:05]:
I know because of doing homework on you before this episode and I've seen like, you know, when the industry contracts, everybody's like, you know, not spending money on tools, not spending money here, not spending money on like anything. It's like, let me try to save every dollar possible. You guys increased your marketing spend. First of all, can you talk about that and can you talk about the things that you guys did for marketing?

Steven Farrell [00:32:30]:
Yeah, we went from a team of one to a team of three, plus other agents that we hired. The whole thing is, you know, I get it if your expenses are usually at a set amount. And so if your revenue decreases, you can't just keep your expenses where they're at because you're going to start losing money. That makes sense. Right? But long term, what is the value of those customers that you're reaching out to and signing? We had through the one page marketing plan. One of the things we also did was determine the lifetime value of a light industrial staffing customer. And then we broke that down into first year, second, third and five years. And so we understood, and the owners of this company understood that we needed to invest.

Steven Farrell [00:33:13]:
We're not going to see that ROI in the first five months. We're not going to see the ROI in the first year. It's going to take time. And so we doubled down on our marketing efforts and we hired some of the best people in the industry to Join our team. And so, yeah, we tripled our spend. We even did billboards. Like, who's putting billboards out there right now? We've got a billboard coming up. It'll be all up and down the interstate in Utah.

Steven Farrell [00:33:39]:
It's going to say 99 problems, but staffing ain't 1. Something like that. It's going to be really fun, right? But we have now seen the ROI. It's more than 2x from what we've put in. If you're going to put in money and you're going to get a return on that, like, why would you not continue to put in more and more? And so, yeah, our marketing team is sharp. They've been closely aligned with our operations needs, with our sales needs. And, you know, it was a risk, it was a big right swing, but it's paid off and it's continued to pay off.

Benjamin Mena [00:34:12]:
The Elite recruiter podcast has multiple summits coming up that you need to make sure that you are registered for. We have the AI recruiting summit 2025 coming up. And on top of that, finish the year strong. These two summits are going to help you move the needle, help you achieve your goals, help you achieve your dreams, and make 2025 the year that you started out and you wanted it to be. Make sure you get registered and also stay tuned. Got something cooking for you guys. Working on another project that you guys are going to absolutely love. All right, see you guys in the summits and see you guys soon.

Benjamin Mena [00:34:43]:
I want you to kind of like go into a little more detail on shock and awe.

Steven Farrell [00:34:50]:
Yes. Like, this is so cool. All right. When you go in and have a discovery meeting with the prospect, right? You're getting to know them and their needs. You're trying to identify, you know, the pain points and then you're going, okay, client, I see you have X problem, we have Y solution. And here's other clients that had similar problems, and here's what we did for them right throughout that meeting. You know, if you have an effective discovery meeting, you've identified those pain points and now you're going back to the team. You're coming up with a plan to address those pain points and go back to that prospective customer.

Steven Farrell [00:35:25]:
Say, here's our plan to service you. Well, before we go back to the customer with our plan, we send them a nice shock and awe box. And so this is a branded box. Show you right here. Those are looking on the camera.

Benjamin Mena [00:35:39]:
Oh, that's awesome.

Steven Farrell [00:35:40]:
This is like a superhero style box. You open it up and it's got some really neat graphics in there. It's got a special letter about the yes story. We have a mascot, a 3D printed Yeti in there, some other yes swag. It's just a nice thank you for your time. Call it a kit, because some customers can't receive gifts. So here's your shock and awe kit. And so it's just surprise and delight.

Steven Farrell [00:36:04]:
You open it up, there's a handwritten note from the sales rep thanking you for their time. You're encapsulating the key points. And it's really a delight every time customers, they respond back in an email when they get it in the mail or they call us and they go, this was so neat. Like, thank you. What's next? Send me your contract. So we track the conversion rates of shock and awe sent to contract signed and we were tracking before we were doing the shock and awe. So for every 10 shock and awe boxes that we send, six turn into customers.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:41]:
That's an insane return.

Steven Farrell [00:36:43]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:45]:
Wow. I love the shock and awe box and I love, like actually being able to see that. So, like, definitely hop on the video, whether Spotify or YouTube, to actually see what the box looks like if you're listening to this in your car or workout. Okay. But like, you guys also kind of changed up how you guys are selling too. You know, you got your 45 questions, but you guys also moved to more of a data driven consultative selling instead of like just pounding the phones, like, yeah, can you talk about, like, what you guys are maybe doing now and like, compared to two years ago or a year ago?

Steven Farrell [00:37:15]:
Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. A year and a half ago, we're looking at how many. Hey, Benjamin, how many cold calls did you make last week? Only 75. Like get that to 110 and you're going to be more effective. It's just so funny, right? It's quantity over quality. And so we decided as a team, we're going after quality, not quantity. Which I explained a little bit through that one page marketing plan.

Steven Farrell [00:37:36]:
How we had 18,000 customers turned was really more like 3,000 and much smaller from there. And so we wanted to take a quality approach with ourselves. We want to use data. You know, every market is, you know, you have the US Economy, then you have your states and you have your counties, you have your cities. Like, every market is slightly different. And so within my sales team, it was what's going on in your market separate from anyone else's market. Let's find out the pain points in your market. I Have one market that's paying competitive wages.

Steven Farrell [00:38:10]:
Every employer is at $20 or higher. But then just 40 miles south of that market, they're paying 13 to $14 an hour. Right. Huge difference in wages. And so we cannot sell the same in the market that's paying $20 an hour as we can sell that's paying 13 and 14. The one in 13 and 14 is much harder path to success because we have to educate our customers on how to be competitive in the market. And one of those ways is by raising their wages. So we use the market data.

Steven Farrell [00:38:42]:
You know, there's customers that they need that light industrial technician, right? They need someone to go and fix the equipment. Well, you bring the data to the customer. They're paying $25 an hour for a maintenance tech. And there's only 7,000 maintenance techs in the state of Utah, but the demand is another 3,000 on top of that. So you're not going to just find a maintenance tech just by, you know, raising your hand and saying, I'm paying $25 an hour. You need to pay at or above market because you have to steal them from another company. So we'd use market data like that. We use a tool called Lightcast.

Steven Farrell [00:39:20]:
Great tool. If you're not using it, I recommend it. But we bring that data to our customer. We go into the consultative approach. You know, I did a podcast recently with four different HR leaders and asked them to do a tell all when it comes to working with staffing agencies. The good, the bad and the ugly. I asked everyone on the same question, do you see the staffing industry as a commodity or as a strategic partner to your employment strategy? Every one of them said that they see us as a commodity, but they want us to be that strategic partner in their employment strategy. So when we go into meetings, prospective meetings with clients and even current clients, we ask a simple question.

Steven Farrell [00:40:00]:
Do you want a partnership in your employment strategy? Because if you do, we need to have a seat at the table. If this is transactional, if you just want bodies, we are the wrong partner. We want to have a seat at this table. Be at all your staffing meetings, help with the retention strategies. Like, we are here to partner with you as an expert in this industry. And so if you're not looking for that, then you're not a client of ours. And I think in this industry where it's been really tough, I think most people would have a hard time walking away from a deal because they look at you as just as a commodity. But we see ourselves At a much higher value level.

Steven Farrell [00:40:39]:
We want to partner with you and those businesses that are won on price are going to be lost on price. So why let's go in as a partnership and yeah, that's a longer sales cycle. It's not, it's not going to be a 10 week sales cycle. That might be a year, it might be a two year sell cycle to build that trust, to establish yourself as an authority. But I'll take that over just a transaction that I'm going to lose six months later.

Benjamin Mena [00:41:02]:
When you guys do come in as that trusted partner and adding value. Have you been able to find a way to like increase your margins because of that?

Steven Farrell [00:41:10]:
Absolutely, yeah. I had one prospect I was going after. High volume client. They were at a 30% markup. This is light industrial again, 30% markup with the current agency. The agency was not getting the job done. I went and toured the facility for a couple hours, talked to the supervisors, talked to people on the floor, just found out what their needs are, why they're losing so many people. And you know, at the end of the day, the agency was not invested in this client's success.

Steven Farrell [00:41:36]:
They didn't understand their business, they didn't understand the type of talent that was needed, needed in that building. And so I discovered that and I went back to the customer, I said I could see why this has been so hard for you. And I think that was validating for them. Like, wow, you didn't just come in here and say, oh, this is easy, we can do it, you're telling us. I can see why this has been so hard. And then I need to go back to my operations team. This is what I shared with the HR team. I need to go back to my operations team and see if this is something we can even do.

Steven Farrell [00:42:04]:
And if we can, we need a very clear plan of how we're going to get there. So I'm going to write out a scope of work if we can do it. So we did just that, went back to the HR team and I said, okay, here's the deal, we can do this. Here's the extra things we're going to do. We've got a mechanical aptitude test that we've put together that we're going to screen associates in. Through that test, we just went through several different things. Oh, and by the way, I can't do this without an on site manager because we need to retain the people that we send you. It's going to be costly if we keep turning and burning them.

Steven Farrell [00:42:38]:
And I Can't do this. At the current rate, it's going to be three points higher. Well, guess what? The client signed on three points higher than their current agencies. So it was not transactional to them. Because we came in, we showed them the value, we understood their business, we understood their pain points, we validated it, and we decided to link arms as a team.

Benjamin Mena [00:42:58]:
I absolutely love that. And there's two points or a point. I definitely want to take this. You actually went there on site, had the conversation, talked to everybody. I feel like that's almost like a lost art in the recruiting world.

Steven Farrell [00:43:13]:
Yeah, it's. It's unfortunate. I get it. A lot of these positions now for recruiters, you're remote working out of your home, so you can't just, you know, jump in your car and do a client visit or jump on a plane. But if you're not doing it, someone else is. I'm doing it. Hey, send me the list of customers you're not visiting. I'll go take care of them for you, I promise.

Steven Farrell [00:43:31]:
Like, I'm going to jump in my car, I'm going to jump on a plane. Because we are here for them. Right? We have to link arms with them. We need to understand their business and understand if we can help them and if we can how. And if you're not visiting that building, if you're not getting to know the people in the building, you're not seeing the work, it's just harder. You're not going to get it right.

Benjamin Mena [00:43:50]:
One other thing that we talked about that I want you to highlight, and I feel like I'm throwing away things that we've talked about offline for. So this is part of the homework listeners that happens behind the scenes. But you start doing these in person summits for your customers.

Steven Farrell [00:44:05]:
Yeah, yeah. Think about it. People think sales is such a mystery. Like, oh, you know, it's so hard to, like, get a discovery meeting. I've called them 20 times. They don't pick up the phone, they don't respond to my email. Like, it's such a mystery of why your prospective clients aren't calling you back or why your current clients have left. You ever thought to ask the question of why? Like, why did they use staffing or why did they stop using staffing? What keeps your customer up at night? What are those pain points? What are they thinking about when it comes to their workforce? These are real challenges that we're faced every single day.

Steven Farrell [00:44:42]:
And so why not just bring all your customers in a room and talk to them? What Is it that's keeping them up at night? What are they aspiring to? What are they working towards? So we took 39 HR leaders in the state of Utah from some of the top employers in the state. We brought them in a room, this is a three day event and we presented to them the market data. What is it that's happening right now that we're seeing? You're not going to have people like this one to one ratio right now that it feels like for everyone job, there's one applicant that's going away. We're never going to have more people than there are jobs. There will always be more jobs than people. And so we shared this data and then we, we asked every person in the room, what is it that they're doing, like what's working and what's not. And it was really cool because you have one HR leader that says, hey, I took my 400% turnover down to 15% turnover in just a year and here's how I did it. Then you have three or four other HR managers like oh my gosh, tell me more and did you think about this and what did you do here? And so you've got HR leaders collaborating, talking and strategizing and we've got a whiteboard and we're writing everything out.

Steven Farrell [00:45:51]:
And so we're hearing directly from our customers their pain points, what they're working on, what their needs are without ever selling. We did not do a single pitch to this group. Oh by the way, the end of this meeting, like you want to sign up with your employment solutions, like come talk to the sales rep. We didn't sell to them once, but they all look to us as that authority in the space because we brought them together. And it was interesting, you know, we had a group of current customers and prospective customers that we invited. Well, the prospective customers all reached back out to us within 24 hours saying we want to work with you, let's talk. And that was without asking.

Benjamin Mena [00:46:31]:
We'll just say like it's hard to do total lifetime, you know, revenue and all this stuff. But like just guessing wise, like how much revenue do you think you guys produced from that three day summit?

Steven Farrell [00:46:42]:
Yeah, we're in contract negotiations but what we've mapped out so far is there's probably about 30 plus million dollars of new business on the table because of that meeting, because of that event. That event only cost called about $10,000. I'd pay $10,000 every single day to get in front of 30 million. Wouldn't you?

Benjamin Mena [00:47:03]:
Yeah, absolutely. And I was just going to ask you, like, how much was the investment to put that on?

Steven Farrell [00:47:07]:
Yeah, yeah. Pennies, right?

Benjamin Mena [00:47:10]:
Pennies on the dollar. And you guys paid for everything or did you guys charge them?

Steven Farrell [00:47:14]:
No, we didn't charge them. Yeah, we paid for it. Love it.

Benjamin Mena [00:47:18]:
What is one other crazy, out of the box thing that you guys have been doing right now that's actually working.

Steven Farrell [00:47:26]:
Well? It's interesting, the podcast, you know, I'm doing for the staffing industry, but it's kind of a side effect has been this growing audience of HR leaders that are tuning in and wanting to participate. So for me, that's been really crazy, the fact that I'm doing it to help the staffing industry, but it's also helping our business because we're all of a sudden becoming authority in the space. We have a voice and our clients are tuning in. And so for me, that's been pretty crazy. I've got one other crazy thing that's been a lot of fun is we co branded a donut box of the local donut company. They make donuts out of mashed potatoes, which so delicious. And so once a quarter, we get 250 dozen boxes of donuts, we fill a box truck up with donuts, we pull it up to our corporate office, all the operation managers come in, all the sales reps come in, and we get our dozens of donuts and we go and hand them out to all of our current customers as well as our prospective customers. And we do this quarterly.

Steven Farrell [00:48:32]:
And that's a huge investment if you think about it. That's a lot of money on donuts. That's a lot of dough. And every time we have more than 3xed our spend on the donuts from getting more job orders from our current customers, as well as getting prospective customers to say, hey, let's talk, let's see what you guys are about. And we're not doing it to get new business. This is our way to thank our customers and our prospects every quarter. But for some reason, we get more business out of it.

Benjamin Mena [00:49:01]:
I love that you guys also have them branded boxes instead of just getting the normal Dunkin Donuts box and dropping that off.

Steven Farrell [00:49:08]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:49:10]:
So with all this, how do you truly keep sales, marketing, and operations all in line with everything that you guys are doing?

Steven Farrell [00:49:19]:
Yeah, it's hard, but it's essential. I've given this analogy before. Sales and marketing and ops, they're not separate lanes. These are interlocked links. Think of the links on a jacket, Right? If you have a broken link on A jacket and try to zip it up, man, you can't get it zipped right. So you unzip it again, you're realigning it, you're trying to zip it. It just. It doesn't work.

Steven Farrell [00:49:41]:
And imagine yourself, you get a heavy winter jacket, you're, you know, summoning Mount Everest, and a link in your zipper breaks, like, halfway down, and you cannot zip it back up. Like, you may not make it off a mountain. And it's just as crucial for sales, operations, and marketing to be aligned like links in a zipper. I've talked about this on a prior podcast, how there's this idea called superfluid helium. So superfluid helium, if you take it down to, you know, just lowest temperature possible, like near zero, not quite zero, but close to zero, all the atoms align and they become one. And they can move through fixed objects. They can break the laws of gravity. They can go up a jar, they go down a jar, they can go through the jar.

Steven Farrell [00:50:29]:
But the really neat thing is they do it without any friction. So there is no friction with the atoms of superfluid helium, and the atoms, they're moving through or moving past. And so the idea there is sales and operations. We have to move without friction. Search. Sure, we can disagree on our tactics and our strategy and all of that, but the more friction that you remove, the faster you can move. And so that's really our goal that we work on every day, is to remove the friction, to work as one cohesive unit. Even though we're three separate entities, we're all working towards the same goal.

Steven Farrell [00:51:08]:
We just have different and specific strategies to get there, and we got to do it without friction.

Benjamin Mena [00:51:14]:
You love that. Well, we've covered a lot. We've covered your entry into this industry. We covered the crazy, out of the box things that I just absolutely love. Before we jump over to the quick fire questions, is there anything else that you want to go deeper on that we covered?

Steven Farrell [00:51:27]:
I just want to hit on back to sales, marketing, and operations. Alignment. Ask yourselves, what does alignment really look like? You have to ask each business unit, what are their needs from marketing? What are their needs from sales and operations? And so sales, they have needs. They need to know, you know, what is it that the market is telling them? What kind of applicants are coming through the door? What kind of visibility does your sales team need from a marketing perspective? You know, how often do they need to pivot based on what the market's telling them from operations, from marketing? So you have to ask those questions. Same with marketing what is that go to market plan that's going to set yourselves up for success? What is that brand awareness campaign that your operations team needs? And maybe we don't have a candidate problem today, but what's our plan for the candidate problem of tomorrow? Are we ready? Right. And operations, like, they need to make sure they're aligned with sales on what sales is seeing and what they're hearing and the struggles that they're having and having that feedback loop with the new customers on the talent they're placing and aligning those goals. You know, if operations drops by a million dollars, like, well, sales now has to pick up that million. Right.

Steven Farrell [00:52:38]:
To make up for the difference if we're going to hit our goal as a company. And so I just wanted to hit on that. You have to ask each department what their needs are and the needs from each department. If I'm an ops, what do I need from sales? What do I need from marketing? What do I need from hr? What do I need from it? You ask that question for every department and you get aligned to make sure all the needs are being met and that we've got the right tactics to still hit our goal.

Benjamin Mena [00:53:03]:
Love that. Well, jumping over the quick fire questions, they don't need to be quick answers. What advice would you give to a brand new recruiter that's getting started in the, the staffing industry in 2025? I've never been a recruiter before.

Steven Farrell [00:53:17]:
Patience. Be patient with yourself. I tell new recruiters this one thing. A year from now, you will finally know what you need to know. Not that you know it in a year, but a year from now you're going to realize, wow, like I'm, I'm lucky to even still be here. Like, that was crazy. But now I know what I need to learn moving forward versus I know what I need to be successful moving forward. No, I know what I need to go learn moving forward.

Steven Farrell [00:53:45]:
And so if you're a brand new recruiter, like just be a student, drink from that fire hose, have fun, you know, master your craft. And that's going to take time. So be patient with yourself. You're not going to be a masterful recruiter in a year. I know there's exceptions out there, but be patient with the process, but really just learn the industry. Like go and log into the ASA and read the different reports. SIA clearly rated lots of resources out there. Like, get familiar with your industry, your customers, what their needs are.

Steven Farrell [00:54:18]:
If you're in it recruiting, like, you don't have to know everything. About it recruiting from day one to be successful. But you should become an expert in that field. You should know what keeps people up at night that are in the IT space, like get familiar with it. And that just takes time. But study, put in the practice, put in the time.

Benjamin Mena [00:54:36]:
Because you have a podcast and because you're constantly learning, you probably get a different perspective of the industry. Where do you think AI is going to take us?

Steven Farrell [00:54:46]:
Oh, you don't want to ask me this question, but I'll give you my answer. AI is going to make this industry better. We're going to be a lot more efficient. We're going to be able to service our customers and our talent at a much faster rate and a higher quality rate. There is that human element in this business that I don't think you'll ever be able to replace. But AI is going to replace a lot of your day to day. A lot of your operations are going to become more efficient. And AI, when it comes to the recruiting space, for every three recruiters, you're only going to need one.

Steven Farrell [00:55:22]:
And then you're going to have an endless amount of AI agents working on your behalf. Dude, just doing all that mundane work, all the stuff in your ATS or CRM, like you're going to have an agent doing that work for you and that's going to free up your time to actually spend time with your candidates and with your customers, building those quality relationships. So I think relationships are going to get stronger, but we're going to be much leaner as an industry because all that operational work that requires just clicking on a screen, you're going to have a bot that does that. And sure, some people lose their jobs if they don't use AI to assist them in their work, but it's coming. I use bots all day, every day. It's freed me up to be able to do more things like the podcast and to spend more time with my customers. And sure, I could have had an executive assistant paying 70,000 a year to do that, but now I've got a bot that does it for $200 a month and it works great. AI is going to be pivotal in our industry.

Steven Farrell [00:56:17]:
And if we're not learning, if we're not playing around with the tools, if we're not adopting those tools, you'll be the, hey, AI, replace my job, you'll be in that camp. Don't be in that camp in saying that.

Benjamin Mena [00:56:28]:
Do you have like a favorite tech.

Steven Farrell [00:56:29]:
Tool when it comes to AI, when.

Benjamin Mena [00:56:31]:
It comes to recruiting? It could be AI could be something else.

Steven Farrell [00:56:34]:
Yeah. I use a ChatGPT operator for my AI agent. That's probably my favorite tool. I play with all the AI tools. Like, yeah, I use Grok for my therapist. I use ChatGPT for my emails. Right. I'm a big fan of Aviante as an ats, but I think that's a great out of the box tool for staffing, for light industrial staffing and for my CRM.

Steven Farrell [00:56:59]:
I'm a huge proponent of Salesforce. Big user of Salesforce.

Benjamin Mena [00:57:03]:
How did you get ChatGPT's operator to not run around like a drunk toddler?

Steven Farrell [00:57:08]:
You know, it still does every once in a while, but it's all about training that operator. So a lot of people don't realize when it's struggling with a task, you can take over and say, please watch me complete this task and I want you to remember it for the next time that I ask you. And so Operator then records that session. You go and do exactly what you asked Operator to do that it could not do, and it learns it within milliseconds. And now it can complete that task with no problems. And so you just have to train it like a toddler. Like, hey, let me show you. Let me teach you how to walk.

Benjamin Mena [00:57:41]:
Do you have a favorite book that's had a huge impact on your career?

Steven Farrell [00:57:44]:
Simon Sinek's Find your why? That's been a book that's really influenced my career and it reminds me every day of what I should be focused on. David Goggins, you Can't Hurt Me. He's got two books out there. If you're ever having a pity party, read David Goggins. And he's just going to kick you right in your teeth. And you're like, okay, yep, I'm a wuss. I need to stop crying. I need to pick myself up.

Steven Farrell [00:58:10]:
So if you need to pick me up when you really don't want to pick me up, go read David Goggins. That helps me every time I'm having a hard day or a hard week.

Benjamin Mena [00:58:19]:
So you have a podcast, you're leading sales teams, you're leading organizations, you're helping a company grow. I also know that you're a runner, too. How do you balance everything successfully?

Steven Farrell [00:58:29]:
Yeah, balance is really key, right? People talk about work life balance, and I laugh at that because there is no work life balance. Replace that balance with harmony. Work life harmony. You may be focused on your family for a time where work just doesn't matter. It's like whatever's going on at home You've got to focus on, you've got to have harmony in the home. Same with work. There'll be months where I'm just pulling 80 hours a week at work and when I'm at home for the few hours that I'm home, I'm making it count. I'm not just lounging around watching tv.

Steven Farrell [00:59:05]:
I'm intentional about the time I'm spending with my family. And so you really gotta just find that harmony within your day to day, whether that's work or family. You have to find that harmony.

Benjamin Mena [00:59:17]:
Like you've experienced a lot in your eight years of staffing, right? Probably more than some people at their 20 year mark. With everything that you know now, like, if you can go back and talk to yourself in like that first few months of you being a bull in the china shop, what advice would you tell yourself?

Steven Farrell [00:59:35]:
You know, I'm here today because of my past, so I wouldn't change anything. So I would not go back to myself and say, hey, be a little nicer. Although I'd like to, but those were hard lessons learned. When you have your on site manager pull you aside off site and tell you directly to your face that she feels unsupported and she needs you to pay attention and to help her. Like, that was such an incredible experience that I learned so much to be intentional in my meetings, to pay attention to what's going on, to give, to be a good listener, right? To leave my agenda aside. I would have never learned that lesson if I came back, you know, in time and said, hey, pay attention. Right? Those lessons learned are the most valuable lessons learned where you just, you mess up, you make mistakes and you learn from it, you recover. And so, yeah, I know a lot of people would go back in time and do this and do that, hey, get these lottery numbers.

Steven Farrell [01:00:33]:
Don't do that for me. I'm here because of my past, so I would not tell myself anything.

Benjamin Mena [01:00:39]:
So one of the cool things about having a podcast is you have a lot of people that reach out to you. And a lot of people, like, typically they ask you the questions like, you know, how do I increase my sales? What are you doing different, sales wise, what are you doing with your content? Like, how do you start a podcast? So it's a lot of like, like very focused questions. But through all those questions, is there a question that you wish a recruiter or a salesperson in our industry would actually ask you, but never do?

Steven Farrell [01:01:06]:
I think, you know, for salespeople, I wish they would just be more curious, like really curious about the entire process. I wish they would maybe ask, like, how can I be, you know, more engaged in a conversation, be more empathetic. You know, for a recruiter, it's like, tell me it's okay to, like, mess up, right? I don't know the best way to answer this question, Benjamin, but I think all of us out there, we don't know what we don't know. And so it just goes back to being patient with yourself, being patient with the process, and be willing to make mistakes. In fact, fell forward. Maybe a great question would be, how do I fail forward? So all of this, this was my mind working this out. The question would be, how do I fail forward?

Benjamin Mena [01:01:52]:
Awesome. Well, Steve, like, this has been like, I've been looking forward to this podcast interview for a while since I've been kind of like, seeing some of the things that you've been doing. And it's just one, it's fun to talk to another podcaster. Two, it's been awesome seeing the influence that you have within the recruiting space. So I just want to say thank you for kind of, like sharing your story, sharing some of these, like, out of the box ideas that, like, you hear about, like, God damn, I should have done that myself. But that's the thing. That's the whole beauty of, like, you don't know what you don't know. So if somebody wants to follow you to watch what you're doing, see what you're doing, how do they go about doing that?

Steven Farrell [01:02:27]:
Yeah. Well, first, Benjamin, thank you again for having me a guest. I've been looking forward to this. Never thought four years ago when I started tuning into your podcast that I would ever have the opportunity to come on as a guest. So for me, this is surreal. This is so fun. I appreciate what you're doing. You've contributed a lot to this industry.

Steven Farrell [01:02:46]:
You've made recruiters much better because of your content and the guests that you bring on. If you're looking to check out the Staffing Playbook podcasts, we're on Spotify, we're on Podbean, we're on LinkedIn, we're on YouTube. Just search the Staffing Playbook podcast will be the first thing that pops up. We're working on getting on Apple podcasts, so that's coming shortly. If you want to find me on LinkedIn, just type in Stephen Farrell. There's a lot of them out there, so if they look like me, it's probably me. So those are the two best ways to find me.

Benjamin Mena [01:03:18]:
And before we Let you go. Is there anything else that you want to share with the listeners?

Steven Farrell [01:03:21]:
Look for those of you that are struggling right now, that are listening in and you're not sure how you're going to get your next sell or get your next commission or if you're even going to stay open or, or have your job. I completely understand that feeling. And the interesting thing is when you're in survival mode, it's hard to switch your mindset to this thriving mindset where when things are good and you're thriving, things just become much easier. Right? It's a snowball effect. It's just compounds wins build upon wins. And so when you're not winning, you stop thinking like a winner and you just get stuck in this survival victim mode. And what I'd like to share with the audience today, for those of you that are listening in and you're just surviving, it's okay where you're at, but don't stay there very long. Do not be the defense attorney for your challenges.

Steven Farrell [01:04:14]:
Be the prosecuting attorney to your challenges. And so stick with it. Keep trying. Fail forward. The faster you try new things and make mistakes and get it wrong, the faster you're going to arrive at your destination to get to those answers. So just keep pushing forward. It's really hard. Give yourself some empathy.

Steven Farrell [01:04:35]:
But know that this industry is cyclical. It will turn around. And if you plant the seeds today, if you work on your business today and work on yourself, work on your team, it will pay dividends. So don't give up. Keep grinding it out. This industry is phenomenal and you're here for a reason. It's not just because it's a black hole. It's because we change people's lives every single day and we have an impact on every person that we talk to.

Steven Farrell [01:05:00]:
So keep making that impact. Don't give up.

Benjamin Mena [01:05:04]:
I got nothing else to say for to finish up this episode, except for hit the 30 second rewind back twice to listen to that again. Go Crush 20, 25, guys.

Steven Farrell [01:05:13]:
Let's go.

Benjamin Mena [01:05:14]:
Every minute a recruiter spends on paperwork is lost time making placements. That's where Ascend steps in. A modern employer of record and back office solution built to boost the bottom line. Ascend automates onboarding, payroll, compliance and invoicing in one streamlined platform. It integrates effortlessly with all your tools and scales as you grow, saving you hours and cutting your operational costs significantly. Want less paperwork and more placements? Head over to ascend.com and see how Ascend can make the difference for you. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast with Benjamin Mena. If you enjoyed, hit, subscribe and leave a rating.