 Hey, good afternoon everybody Tom Stewart here. I'm with Liz Trotter Matt Ricketts and our guest today Dom Williams This is smart business moves. Hello everybody Hey y'all Good to see everybody All right, let's you do the y'all thing, but you're not from I mean you live in like Washington State Is that is y'all a thing in Washington State? I It's a thing in my house. I don't know it is I do know why because It's it's very easy Nobody ever complains about y'all Okay, but they don't like some other terms you guys you folks, you know y'all works Welcome, this is your first First run here on smart business moves, isn't it? Yeah, usually I'm in the comments making you guys read my comments Yeah, busy We do that's helpful. I wanted to invite Dom because he does he's in our business He's in our business world as far as a business owner But he's also a software entrepreneur as well and has a product called higher I don't know if you want to just take a brief moment and kind of describe higher who to the audience and what you do with that and Are you use that in your business and how you help other people use that? Yeah, so basically? Higher who is an applicant? tracking system built for small businesses So what it is is purely a tool for business owners like like us to use To organize an extreme minor hiring process and more importantly automate as much that hiring process as possible We also have different features in there such as texting So, you know one of the things which I'm sure we'll get into when we start talking about recruiting One of the things we do for my cleaning company every single person that that applies They immediately receive a text message and we start to engage that conversation Within 60 seconds of them applying for our company Yeah, I think I think that's really cool And I think I had this conversation with a friend of mine Debbie She owns a cleaning company in Texas and she was looking for Something like this because she wants a workflow To automate some of this like where it's like hey send them this video or do this process Can you describe is there like a can you like set up like like an automation where it like they get a sequence of texts and things like that for Yeah, so Right now you can actually set up automations to where you know it pushes the applicants through a certain You know sequence of stages per se So let's say you got the applied stage and then the next stage is you know you want it to send them a Interview link, right? Okay, and based on maybe their assessment test or based on their screening questions They could automatically push them to that next stage and then you could have the software Do certain things whether it's send them a text message send them email Would you a reminder like like you're mentioning for your office staff to do it to do whatever kind of works for your business flow? I think that's great I think that you know, I know time usually leads this but I'm I'm super big on this too because I I use Applicant tracking software and I recommend ever everyone on our industry to do so You know, I'm kind of on something legacy Otherwise, I'd probably jump right over to what you're doing because it sounds more flexible than what I've got But I definitely see the value and anyone that's not texting their applicants is leaving money on the table I think so Tom and Liz kind of brought the idea of to me that hiring is a pipeline just like Like sales so everyone's always so concerned sales in our industry But you can't run a business without, you know the assets to run the business Which is you know, you're valuable asset. I think is your staff So you're kind of solving that pipeline that a lot of us Yeah, I mean it's definitely creating a flow So like, you know one of the things that I like to let all of our users know because you know every time I hop on a demo, you know, everyone's usually willing to just throw the money because they think that it's going to solve their their recruiting problem It won't do that, right? Because you know, although I have this software Do I still have some of the same recruiting struggles a hundred percent, right? Do I still have some of the you know, same retention struggles and do we still work through that every single day? Absolutely you still got it. Oh Because you know You froze just for a second, but you're good Okay, you know, but the good thing about it is it does help, you know Put a workflow and a policy in place that way if you are truly, you know scaling your business All of your staff can follow a you know a system, you know, it's great You're also in the cleaning business Tell us a little bit about You how you got into the cleaning business, how long you've been doing it and I'm curious how that Translated into the software or you've been software before you were in cleaning. Yeah, so no, I was in cleaning first So I've always been interested in just you know entrepreneurship, you know When I was a kid in high school for instance in middle school in high school I was always the one, you know, I had I had a fundraiser going on a hundred percent of the time So I always was selling candy to the teachers and the kids and stuff like that So that's kind of where it started and then when I graduated high school I actually decided to start all these different businesses. I did a clothing line didn't work out I didn't want to sell clothes and then I'm like, you know, let what what can I do that is going to be? You know, what can I do that's going to be reoccurring and then I can really you know Forecast and see revenue six months or eight months from now and what's going to be cheap to start So cleaning business is what I kind of came up with and the CNC Because the name of my business CNC cleaning services is actually named off after my great-grandmothers who actually worked in the housekeeping Industry all their lives. So that's kind of how it came up with it and it started in 2011 right after I graduated high school. So this is our 10th year anniversary. Wow, okay Yeah, how many people from your family work in your business because I find that amazing. It's pretty Three three so my mom so my mom's practically my my field manager and My grandma works in the office. She does like the towels and things like that keeps everything tidy and then my aunt she works in my She because we do commercial cleaning also So she works at like one of the remote sites about 45 minutes and she just goes in there and does Works with the team every single night just doing some part time stuff For some reason, I thought it was for I thought you had a cousin working for you, too But I guess I got that wrong. I thought hey by the time weeks old Matt. They might have Let me check yeah, what geographic market do you serve us? So I'm in Indiana Okay, so I'm 40 40 minute 40 45 minutes away from Indianapolis It's cool. Yeah, it's called Kokomo, Indiana So where I'm at right now is Kokomo, Indiana, but we actually have another office in Noblesville, Indiana, which is about 15 20 minutes from Indianapolis. So and that market is really its own beast So that's why we have another office there and we're trying to grow that market. Okay we Have some friends and Indianapolis what Town has Purdue University Purdue is gonna be in Lafayette. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm about 45 minutes from there. I'm like 45 minutes from everywhere Okay. Yeah, 45 minutes from everywhere, but Purdue. Yeah, Lafayette's pretty cool Yeah It's been a lot of time in Indianapolis my prior Job when I worked in corporate as an airline pilot was headquartered there for Republic Airways And I was there felt like all the time actually it's a really Really cool city. It's developed a lot over the last You know last decade the suburbs are growing like crazy there too for whatever it's a really growing city Big hub for FedEx or UPS not camera, which one so a lot going on there So a lot of probably a lot of growth you're seeing. Yeah, we've got an Amazon near to so I'm just reaching out to a bunch of people that I know are struggling So that's what I'm doing over here. I'm texting people. Hey come here about hire who right now Right when you were talking about your location. I was texting somebody who is in Lafayette. So I was like Over here You've been in the cleaning business for 10 years How did you get into how did that translate into the software? well, I Mean we had recruiting issues What what really happened was about four years ago I started to use an applicant tracking system very similar to Matt And it it was wonderful I mean, you know, it was able to post on all these different job boards with one click You can organize it and I was doing my own recruiting at that time a hundred percent and It was wonderful and I was like, you know, what if we were to able to add other stuff like you know what if we were able to add texting to this and believe it or not and I don't know if Tom you start this way when you guys started made central, but it was a different idea at first At first it was it was an idea where I was going to track To I was gonna I was gonna create a way to know when people didn't show up when people would not likely show up for an interview Okay, okay, so that's how I've started it And I was like well, how can I get all of these business owners to communicate just overnight and there's really no way to do that, right? So then we I pivoted I'm like, you know, I can't start that way so that's when I built the applicant tracking system and We actually have you know tags built into hire who so when someone you know applies to our company and we schedule interview They don't show up we can actually put a tag on their their profile So whenever they apply for our company again, we could actually set up an automation that will automatically Either reject that person or push them to a talent pool that says hey this person's kind of a flight risk Right. You see what I did there Matt. You said that you were ex So yeah, so it does that too I like that I have this person that probably applies to my company like every month and then one of those two I'm like you have actually no showed your interview like like three times like so that's that's an interesting solution to that problem because we're like Like, you know, ma'am like, you know, like we we've tried this before. Yeah. Yeah So so that's that's kind of where it started is I wanted a solution to like trying to prevent the no shows It does help that a lot because we take we now take a lot of more notes on applicants It really is very similar to I don't it's very similar to having, you know, a Customer portal just for applicants honestly, you know Because it keeps track of the people with the same email address and the same phone number and it links that together to show you You know when they when they most recently applied and and the notes kind of stay with that person over the years Yeah, I think that's really important. I think people You know people have, you know, there are all these different things on you know on the whole hiring process and various different things I mean the idea back applicant tracking software of like basically, you know having a unified Workflow from the time they first make contact with you So the time you onboard them and start their training and ideally maybe someday you'll build this to be like, you know The training management like all of that kind of you know kind of ties together really well But you don't have to solve that problem because there's other there's other tools that solve the training problem You know, maybe just tie into them someday So that's that's the cool thing about software is you don't have to you're solving one specific thing And then you can keep improving and improving and dialing down on that So what is the core thing that you think you help businesses like if you were to say like in one sentence What's the most value that they get out of using an applicant tracking system? The out of out of a applicant tracking system or your years, okay I think the number one thing that you would get Well, I can't really name one too. I'll give you two One would be autumn truly automating the process But the other thing is take a lot you can do, you know everything that we're mentioning you can do that with about Six or seven different softwares, right? You could do that you could sign up for six or seven different softwares We can we can do all of that with just signing up for us So we actually have and I'm not on Facebook so I can't put this up there But we have to have like a a like a quick glance sheet and like some of the platforms that a lot of people are using Just to be able to do what we do is platform such as like click up Trello sure you guys heard of some of those Calendly, you know the smart calendar Google Outlook all of it because we've got email built in you either using your cell phone or Twilio, right? And then you're also a lot of people are using like you know zap for those automations to kind of leak all those things together So one of the number one things that we're gonna do For the person that wants to leverage software to make things a little bit easier But doesn't want or doesn't have the time or you know the capabilities to put all those things together Just sign up for hire who and it's it will be able to do all that for you the moment You sign up it gives you a cell phone number instant So you're bringing it all you bring it all these various different parts into one thing and then it sounds like you're tracking the life Cycle of each applicant and you know, maybe you're not necessarily scoring them But you're you're creating tags and like you know, basically, you know Measuring their way through that through that hiring funnel because we do that with we do that with sales Why wouldn't we do that with why wouldn't we do that with hiring people? You you always want to be recruiting doesn't mean that you're always hiring But you always want to be recruiting and if you aren't using You know the right tools the right automation the right technology to do that You're not gonna be as efficient or as effective as you need to be especially, you know here in 2021 There's just all your competitors are doing it and everybody else that's hiring is doing it If you aren't doing it, you're really going to be at this advantage. Yeah, I Would really love your go ahead speak to that. Well, you're fine. Go ahead. I just have something I had a question Oh, yeah, so this is completely different too I would love to hear a little bit about what you have seen What kind of changes you've seen and how you've had to modify hire who and What what types of things people should be looking at like? What are some of the specific challenges that you know of from the inside that we might not know about? Yeah, so one of the things that I've noticed that I've always noticed within like I'm trying to because everyone hires so different. Well, I'll say first is I don't I don't think they're Wrong way, right? I think everyone has their own different ways for their markets and things like that I've seen people's application processes be extremely long And make it extremely difficult to apply for their company What I'm noticing now because everyone's struggling that we've all made it a lot easier to hire for you know or to apply for our company So that's one of the changes that I've noticed is that some people have kind of leveraged that and just made it like hey Just just apply, you know, whatever just just come apply, you know, because we're begging for applications So that's one of the things I've noticed I Believe it or not. I get a lot of pushback when people like, you know, I don't I don't really like texting applicants You know, I don't know if that's professional and five years ago. I would have said the same thing if you would have asked me But now it's like I can't imagine calling a hundred people You know, I I can't imagine that so um So a lot of the people that we've communicated with are more open minded because the the talent pool has shifted a lot Yeah, and one of the things that I Hear that that you're doing which I think is really important when you're looking at technology to help with the hiring process you know a lot of the Portals that are, you know, used to to to do the recruiting, you know, indeed Snag a job, you know, there are others A lot of them have their own technology solutions that they kind of put forth as their version of An applicant tracking system. They have some really good functionality But they stop short They don't really want to make it easy for you to go back and mine people who Applied for a job six months ago a year ago They want you to keep spending money to find new applicants Whereas what dom's doing here gives you the ability To not only, you know work new leads if you will new new candidates But if you choose to I assume that you can go back and text and email People that that you talked to in years past so great point tom So first of all, that's probably like my number one feature that I love about hire who so It's it's based what you what you said matt earlier. It's marketing, right? So we do a lot of Commercial accounts where you know, you might need one employee and they go in, you know every night two or three hours Well, let's say we have that position open and we hire for it Let's say six months down the road goes on and that employee flakes and we need someone else Well, a lot of times there are 60 other applicants that apply that we never either communicated with Followed up with or hired or we just didn't do anything with so we what we're able to do is go back in there Click I think two buttons and send 60 people a text message all at once and say hey A position you applied for here is available again. Are you interested in chatting about the opportunity? We've actually been doing that a lot more because of the applicant count is so low So we've been just remarketing back to those same people that have applied six months or a year ago to see if they're interested in talking about an opportunity again It's a good good point So how long have you been? When did you start working on hire who and when did you start offering it as a product at other companies could license? Yeah, so started Offering it to people about a year and a half ago started working on it about three years ago I've been using it for probably two and a half years Right, so I've been I used it for quite some time before we actually Offered it to people to purchase and whatnot So yeah I really love dom that you said That you can send a text out to You know everybody all at one time with just two clicks. Yep A lot of systems can can do a lot of different things, but they make it so difficult Yeah Hard so two clicks sending it out to everybody. Ah, that's a huge win for me. That's awesome And you can build, you know the templates and you know that way you're not constantly redoing the work You know, you can kind of set it up and you know play with you know The thing is I built it so you know I could set it up for my staff and then they could be using the same terminology You know the certain the same type of text or the same type of email Tom you said something about um indeed that I kind of wanted to touch on you said something that you know Indeed's never going to make it easy for you. Um So everyone kind of has like a love and hate relationship with indeed because like, you know It costs it does cost money Which is fine, you know, we pay money for you know marketing and average like matt I see your ads all day for better life mates And it's good because I get ideas and inspiration from it Um, but Indeed is truly built for the applicant It's built for the applicant like they make it extremely easy to apply for companies It you know, they call it the you know the quick click the uh Quick apply or whatever it's called they make it easily to do that. They allow you to apply as many times as you want Um, so I don't know if it'll ever get easier for the business owner when you're dealing directly with the the job board You know so having an applicant tracking system, whether it's higher who or any of the you know other job boards Or other at s's does help filter and organize all those job boards that you're going to connect with Which is kind of interesting. I I get that but The applicants don't really Pay the bills as the employers, right? I don't know though. I think that I think that if you know If you don't bring enough people to the platform then employers aren't going to come to it just for inventory Yeah, I mean, I think it's not paying anything if there aren't a lot of applicants You know 10 years ago, none of us were using indeed I think indeed came on the market about like that I was really aware with it about seven years ago that I was really I was using craigslist craigslist ads really effectively and now we still post them to craigslist But I don't really I mean, I know I look at my data and I'd have to pull some reports on it through our application tracking system But it's it's pretty much indeed or Orals, maybe face facebook to facebook is starting to really take off for us now We're spending a little bit more on facebook advertising um for for applicants But um, do you have an idea like so you actually have the data Do you have an idea of what percentage of of applicants are coming from? You know in aggregate across all your users is like, you know, mostly indeed still is that we you know without digging into numbers so What I'll say is it it it varied depending on the type of industry, right? So when when when a person signs up for hire who? They connect their account with indeed But then it automatically will post your job on google zip recruiter Monster and I believe career builder Okay, so it'll automatically post to those job boards and that any of those job boards that have that are affiliated with other smaller job boards It'll post there too But the thing is no one really goes to monster Dot com for a cleaning position usually not in my area So it so the numbers are kind of skewed but so but for a cleaning industry the the only place I get applicants really from is indeed and Facebook okay really that's really it and then referrals are people that go directly to my website So you're saying I could save that $150 a week in in craigslist postings that i'm doing you probably you probably can I think I probably should I'm trying to catch a long tail there of like the of the occasional 50 year old that's still looking you know for a job that might be like on craigslist that You know like just hasn't adopted to the new things But I I think it's I think it's basically like like tom's tom alluded to It's so easy. Are you alluded to and then you know tom kind of Brought back up was it's so easy to apply on on indeed. It's like one click once you've already filled in your information You can just basically click click click apply for jobs Like half the time people are like, oh what job was it? They'll tell you over the phone. I mean, I mean I applied for 30 jobs. Tell me what this is about again Tell me tell me what this is about. I'm like, oh my gosh you know And they make it so they make it so very easy So one other thing I want to talk about is um, you talked about like, you know, shortening the application down and things like that I I'm of the mindset. I still through covet. I made my application process harder I did and I'll and I'll tell you um You know, yeah, we're tight on labor like I had almost 40 texts before covet started and I've got 26 texts 27 texts right now. We're we're still way down Yeah quality of people that I've that I've that I've maintained and the new hires that I'm bringing on It's really good time. I've got I've got a uh a slide up a bit or not a slide just some data up I don't know if we can I can zoom in a little bit make it bigger here. I'm gonna have to zoom this way And so people can read it. Um, okay, so You know what I'm really interested though is is if I hire them, right? So I hired three people in january of this year Um, two of them are still here, right? So so 33 quit within the first, you know, within the first 30 days I had 100 quit rate in february. That wasn't great. Um, you know 75 percent this month, but for the years so far You know 41 quit within the first 30 days that sounds bad, but that used to be higher, right? That used to be like much worse And so I I want to make them jump through a few more hoops before they show up their first day Um, you know commit, you know check their commitment level. I think if you make it so easy that you just gave them the job um You know, I think that that's counter productive a little bit Um, so so do you have any like kind of like gates that they have to kind of get through and hire who like they have to Finish this next step like so you talked about like there's you put them through a pipeline Yeah, is there some gates that you put them through so um for us what we do for our house cleaners per se is They fill out the basic portion of the application They answer screening questions, which honestly can tell them yes or no if they're pre-qualified And then they answer um some more in-depth application questions like, you know Why they're best fit or you know all those mushy questions that we like to ask And then it will push them through an assessment test um, and then the assessment test You you can score their answers in that assessment test and you can customize that for your for your business Um, and then based on their score there you could then push them to the next stage Where you could then do a zoom interview You know, or you could do like an in-person interview invite if you'd like also I miss what our process looks like Yeah, we used to do with my old at as we used to do more assessments and I really liked that step We we do an assessment after the interview now, which is probably not ideal. It'd be better to almost have that Prior to the interview. It's kind of a post It's a post interview step in my current applicant tracking system Which I think what it's good though because we're doing our interviews over zoom And so before I send them a job offer We put them through one more one more gate basically To say hey, will you finish this next step before you say you're going to accept the job? So then they then they take 30 minutes and do an assessment and you know, then Then once they complete that and that looks good, we move them to the next step. So yeah I like gates the the other thing too that we do Um is once they apply after they think that they're done even if they schedule the interview If they get to that point, um, it will send them that automated text message that will ask them Why do they think they're a good fit to work for our company? One of the question it's something. I think it's why why do they think they're a good fit to work for our cleaning company? And and we and then we also say tell us about yourself and that question alone The tell tell us about you Gives us so much information usually in that response. We find out how many kids they have if they're single or married Um, if they're close to the office, I mean we find out so much stuff We either find out a lot of detail within that response or they just say Uh, I want to be I want to clean for a living and then those people normally don't make it to the next stage Just because of their response, but the people that leave a lengthy, you know response and they're giving details Usually we try to engage with them a little bit more Well, and do they respond through an email? Is that how they would respond to that question? Well, we so we easily set up the automations to go out with email and text message No one rarely ever responds via email rarely It's it's always it's always texting and I mean I'm telling you guys I I've gotten crazy with it I mean I've there's been times where you know, you I get so busy during the day And this is when I was doing recruiting 100 for my business But you know where you get so busy during the day and you have those days And then like you're at home now and it's eight o'clock. You're like, man, I didn't do any recruiting today What am I doing? Right? So then you'll go through and you'll start texting people and they're okay with it because it's texting But you would never call people at 8 30 at night and have a conversation But if they're responding via text message, it's like, okay Well, let's let's have a little short conversation and while we're at it. Let's schedule an interview for them I'm bad with boundaries on text messaging too. I let people text me way too late at night And and I'm bad about texting people about that so I can I can do I was ready to say that kind of goes both ways But no, I know I was gonna say I have bad boundaries on it too. It's it's uh So I totally can see that like how like a like someone looking for a job Would would actually be like, oh eight o'clock no big deal I'm watching the game and this job reached out to me. This is cool. Like whatever I can see that being um within the bounds of text messaging versus You know, uh People shut down email for the day. They see that as more of a distraction. I see texting is just as a You know just as distracting for whatever reason, but um people shut their email down for whatever reason And for the email too, Tom because you said how do we do that for for cleaning specifically I'm not sure a lot of our Team checks their email, you know, like we all check our email. We're in business But for for for our texts a lot of them don't a lot of mine don't check their email I know for sure. I I sent we we did a thing where we were just sending random amazon gift cards You know amazon tells you when when they open the gift card All right It took one of my cleaners like three weeks to notice that she had a 25 amazon gift card or email Oh, that was after I told everybody that we sent Some people just don't you know with text messages some just do not communicate with email anymore, you know I I'm so glad that you are saying this Dom because I think it is just really hard Especially for older business owners to sort of wrap their head around this idea that texting is completely appropriate and That it is the preferred method by our workforce I mean, it's it's great to do what we want to do But if it's not landing for our workforce for our potential workforce, what good is it? Yeah There's a question from robin. It looks here Yeah, he wants to know uh how I guess par who integrates with indeed in facebook does the data flow through or Or they haven't applied in both places. Yeah, that's a great question So remember how we were all speaking about how indeed has this feature where applicants can do like a quick apply, right? Yes, okay. You either love that feature or you hate that a hundred people can apply with a click of a button So when you integrate it with indeed first of all for indeed, they only have to apply once When you go to indeed you can like if any one of us were to just go to indeed now and pull up a job It'll say maybe quick apply Or it might say apply on a company website. Okay So robin what happens is the apply on company website portion They'll click on that button and it will immediately take them to the landing page of that hire who job posting Okay, so they only have to do it once and the other good thing is though You're not going to get a lot of those junk applicants because some of those people will stop right there When they realize they can't apply with just the click of a button. They'll stop They don't want to take any effort. They don't want to do anything else from there For facebook We're not directly integrated with facebook facebook has shut down a lot of their integrations because of covid And because i think because of the apple But either because of covet So what happens is when someone applies on our facebook page We set up an automation on the facebook back end that sends them a link to complete the application So that's how we take care of that so you know As matt was alluding to You probably see a lot of trends within industry from a recruiting standpoint do You see employers, you know doing things differently working harder. Are they you know getting fewer applicants more applicants? I guess you can maybe tell through your platform how many applicants are showing up for interviews. Um Is there any insight That you know, I know a lot of us are frustrated with our own businesses and just kind of wondering You know, am I the only company that that are you know people who sign up for an interview never show up? um Are you seeing that uh on on a broader scale through your through your software? yeah, so um What we're one thing that we're noticing is that there's more there's less applicants that are applying for jobs than than ever Um, I know that some of the states are pulling out the the federal additional federal aid So that's helping we've actually have noticed a slight increase of applicants When indiana announced that I think last week um So that's one thing lots of you know much lower applicants are applying But what I've noticed is Especially with my cleaning company is the applicants that do apply Happen to be a different level of quality like they're they're actually more qualified We're getting people that are coming from the cleaning industry more than ever We're getting people that have worked at jobs for five or seven years more than ever You know We talk about how it's a great time for anyone to find you know a job if they're unemployed It's a great time for any employable person to go find a job because they'll get paid more I mean all types of things so, um Yeah, we're we're seeing more quality applicants apply now And that's amazing What do you think that is? Why that didn't well Just to keep the answer short The fact that there are so many jobs available right now and There's a there's an incentive for People that don't want to work to not work anymore the people that are taking that initiative to say You know regardless the fact that I could stay on unemployment. I do want to work Those are the people that we're looking for the people that do want to show up to work the people that That don't feel comfortable being unemployed in this time right Yeah So one thing you know one thing i'm happy to share with with people is is that Even as many hoops as I jump through as much as I pay You know Turnover was definitely a challenge even for us last year. I've got to turn over a turnover slide kind of brought up and We can share that if you want but the the main idea of what i'm sharing is is that you know I actually saw it trending down. So this is for the last 52 weeks basically so annualized turnover Was it about 213 percent? um You know about a year a year ago and obviously that was in the mid the middle of kovat. We'd reopen Um, but you know our turnover really jumped up at that point We were we were below a hundred percent annualized turnover prior to this So our turnover really shot up and then we've been driving it down But it's hard it's hard when it's at 200 percent to really you know week after week you're driving it down People are going to leave and come so we were driving it down and then there was like a spike you know Probably 12 13 weeks ago where we started to see a lot of people leave again with um, you know some some disincentives like you like you mentioned and things like that um, but um, are are you seeing are you seeing trends where you know Do you do you feel like you know that retention is more important or is it you know? Is it just you know higher higher higher? I mean, or is it both like what are your You know, what do people need to be cracking on right now? um So that's a good question. Um, and I want to hear all of you guys just feedback on that But um, I think we have to focus on retention You know because we can we can hire anybody, you know I mean you can do hundreds of interviews and you know You think that you've hired the right person But if I look at it like a like a like a bucket, right? If you've got all of if you're keep putting more water in the bucket, but you have a hole at the bottom Nothing matters You're still going to end up with less water. So you have to work on retention You know equally that you do on on recruiting and putting more water in there. So, um, I would say Retention is more important than recruiting. That's my input. So I want to know your guys's input on that too though I'll share I think go ahead with this once you Okay, so I'm on the same wavelength as you Dom. I mean definitely retention, but Right now You've got to be hiring you just oh yeah We've always got us to hire. Yeah, still keep hiring But really you got to maintain the focus on the retention And really I think retention is a lot trickier nowadays Then it was in the future because we have so many people that are remote so many people that are working solo You know, there's there's there's additional trickiness going on with the retention then It's To from for my business It's harder now than it has ever been in the history of our Company and we've been doing this for about 27 years now And this is the the trickiest time I've ever seen so for sure retention like Stay on it and like keep tweaking and Adjusting but hiring hiring too right now when when you're short of of you know technicians You'll throw as much, you know Time you know time and treasure as as as you can muster at recruiting and hiring And a lot of times you neglect Everything that happens from you know the instant you hire somebody through the process until No, they made it through training and or you know successful technician and If you take some of the resources that you're burning on the front end recruiting and hiring and apply it On there's other steps until they're they're a technician You can get a better return off of your your your your your timing treasure that way we've Done it ourselves. We've seen other companies do it where You know you're you're just the the cost of that turnover And then you start getting on that wheel You just kind of double down and you just keep hiring and hiring and hiring and You don't even take the time to think about what happens, you know I agree with that 100 percent. Um, I was having a conversation with um my hr manager a week ago Because she was having conversations about you know, well, I've got these two starting this week these three I'm and I'm just like, you know, we keep talking about this recruiting What are we doing for the retainant of our current employees because we we get so focused on that And then you literally forget about we got to take care of all these other people That have been here for a year or been here for two years or or whatever it is You honestly just lose track of that you have to focus on that at the same time You know That's the key same time you can't it's not a one or the other thing It's Exactly the same time you got to keep at it I'll share I'll share one more screen with you guys if you don't mind. This is kind of a quick report from google analytics um See if I can zoom this in a bit Is your career page? No, this is this is actually This is actually just how many leads we're getting right now And how it's like water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink, right? Like so Um, I it's kind of hard to read. I'm having trouble zooming in but so 706 leads in the last 30 days We we've we've got our online booking really dialed down because you can only book based on real availability But even still we've had 32 people finish bookings online Um, but 674 of these leads or goal completions have been requests for quotes So, yeah, if I could hire everyone that I wanted right now My company would be bigger than it was prior to covet. I mean we're again water water everywhere it's like this gush of Of leads coming in and I'm tracking all this and I have this Amazing sales funnel and great marketing that I don't want to turn off Because I've invested so much in you know in it and I believe that we're going to get turned this around with the employees But man, it is it is discouraging to see This kind of performance on our marketing without the people to do it. I'm sure we're all seeing it But I I mean I really track this so this is you know every web lead that comes in through made central off my website and every booking that's in real time and Yeah, I mean I've never seen I I'd have to go back and compare this But I'd say this is I'd say compared to well compared to a year ago. That's not really that's not really relevant I suppose but uh, I'm gonna I'm gonna pull a report at some point and see compared two years ago. I'm gonna guess this is Significantly higher than anything I've ever seen before Matt 700 leads is ridiculous by the way That is crazy, dude Yeah, yeah, if you use a point system like Derek's point system This is why I fired a this is why I fired a customer that that we were spending they were spending 150,000 a year with us Last month, but the profit margins were too tight. I've already replaced the revenue from that job Plus some in this last month. So we we ended servicing them at the At the beginning of this month at the beginning of May May 4th was the last day and it would be the equivalent of like nine and a half weekly customers basically If you're using a point system, that's like almost 40 points, you know, whatever. However, you track your customers um but yeah, we've we've More than replace them with the amount of lead flow that's coming in. So I can't be alone, right? Like I think everyone is probably uh, is probably experiencing this I just track all this, you know, really carefully and and I'll have to go to my to my Applicant tracking system, but the the numbers don't match, right? It's not there's definitely a A demand issue that we are unable to meet with supply And you know, that's it goes back to like a lot of these conversations we've had about, you know, um, You know customers wanting crazy things right now and you know, you know making sure you're you're really You know, I'm having You know Conversations with customers that are underbid and stuff like that Because if you are if you are keeping these customers that are that are driving you crazy things like that And you're not making enough money Then it goes into the idea that you can't pay To can't pay enough right like because you don't have jobs that you're charging enough for I just want to ask you a quick question. Do you do you charge? Do you do like fee split like commission? Or do you do job ticket hour? How do you how do you pay? Um, your team members, I mean some are probably hourly you probably do a mix. I don't know Yeah, so we pay we pay a base hourly pay and then everything else is kind of based on performance based on their quality and based on attendance Okay, so most people start at anywhere Most people start with the base of 13 an hour and as long as they show up They get an extra like two or three bucks an hour and then as long as they have good quality There's another two dollars up to there So they everyone's gonna make at least 13, but if you're a b or a player, you're gonna make 17 18 dollars now So we have a couple of questions here So the first question was up robin wanted to know I can add it here real quick Oh, that's not the one You want to know this was the first one you said we asked that one. We already answered that one It's not it's not coming up for me. Here we go. How does hire who help get better applicants? It does it No one can help you do that That's the answer no one helped you that well the only thing that hire who would do for you in the sense of For the for the applicant portion It can help you filter and screen those applicants that way you're not wasting the time On filtering through so many of those applications and then it can you know Push them through automations to help save your office staff or you Time on on the on the back end for the admin so That that is a Believe it or not that question is asked a lot Um, it's also actually no can hire who help you get more applicants No, you know, we we have we have no platform And we have no intentions on building a platform that is going to drive Applicants, we're not trying to be the next indeed. Um, you know indeed is indeed for a reason So they're already doing all the marketing to pull the applicants in All we're going to do is act as a tool to help you filter and screen those better Help you automate it help you engage with them and connect with them And then truly get that person into an employee stage. That's what we're going to do Nice All right. So also Wayne and Gus Matt does work for made central matt. How long have you worked for made central now? Two and a half months two months now I've been an advisor with on the on the team for a while, but I've Forever, yeah, I've been an advisor on the project for a while Wayne, I think we had a demo this morning. You rescheduled get back on my schedule. I want to You guys special business. I want to talk to you so You know So There is no plan for matt to come on here and share stuff But anybody that knows matt knows he's got to share and this is he's a numbers guy. He's got to be sharing all his stuff Can you can you pull up? Um Do you mind because I want to talk about this before we do in it Yeah, as you said something at the beginning about you know And which is extremely important that recruiting has to be done the same way as marketing Can you go to my cleaning website? If I push this in it to you really quick Yeah, what is so what's the address? I just type it up more clean indiana.com What cc clean indiana cc clean indiana.com. Yeah, I put it in the private chat Also while you guys are looking that up. Yes robin Screening and automation helps filter the better applicants then right it automates it It makes it so that you can manage the process better whatever you're using You'll be able to manage it much better much smoothly with less time less Less energy less anything if you're using um higher hoof I like your website by the way. We should pull this up tom. This is a beautiful website So scroll if you can scroll down to careers because I want to show Yeah, I need to do better about this on my website careers here. Yep Okay, so one of the things that sometimes we Cleaning business owners forget about is ensuring that you know What we're doing is it we're truly selling that to the people that are about to apply for our company So, you know, if you don't have, you know, a career page explaining some of the benefits or some of your core values You know, this this is a good example And there's a lot of other good examples out there too. I've seen a lot of other cleaning business Pages matt your your career pages is pretty nice too, but it's not this is clean. This is clean I don't I think um, I mean your website. Did you just redo this? This is beautiful. This is really well done Matt just We have the same designer So, yeah, but um, but no, yeah, we redid it probably like six months ago Okay Little cove little coven project. Um, for sure. I don't mind sharing. I don't mind sharing our the designer we have He's good. I don't want to put it out here on blast because I don't want him to get too busy that he can't help my Help my business. Yeah, so but but at the at the bottom there. So you see those job openings Yeah Okay, so that is just some code that that a user could take right out of hire who and throw on to their website And the value of that is if you are, you know, someone that may not be that super tech savvy When you're posting jobs on hire who those jobs will automatically be updated in real time on your website So, you know, once you have someone build you a very beautiful career page You can then just always keep your job openings updated right there on on your career page So I want to tell you I really like this as a um as a feature I think i'm going to put an instagram feed on my career page based on what you just did here Because most of our instagram pictures are just our cleaning techs having fun and stuff like that Nice So I I got an idea from your your site that i'm going to that i'm going to implement here in the next week or two Is to basically put an instagram feed On to my jobs page. I'm going to put this down as a note Except I don't have a pen with me, but I'll remember This is a this is a really for people that are watching this is really good Because people are like they're putting themselves in the shoes with these images like oh, this is fun Like they're having a christmas party here Like these employees look like me like I could I could work here Um, I don't know if I want to feather dust her in my face, but you know, she's having fun So yeah And and the other thing too that we do which you can even see as you were scrolling down on the job openings We have quite a few of the same type of job openings But the names the namings are the names are different and you know The location might be a little bit different because we're trying to We're utilizing you know kind of marketing to see what we're going to get a different applicant in here this is really smart because I should do this too because Like my office is in st. Louis county But I should probably be advertising in st. Louis city and jefferson county Which is another county that is a good draw for employees, especially since my employees can just You know drive from their house to their first job Um, yeah, that's this is smart and then this would actually be really smart in how you post this in indeed guys So whoever's watching this look what he's doing here. This is really smart. So he's actually segmenting out his his job postings With the location. So if you are trying to draw from a few different areas, tom, you should do this too. Yeah This is actually really clever. Um, I this is good marketing So, um, you know for me, I need to I need to draw from three separate counties for employees And uh, I can I can already take home a couple ideas right from this Um, so this company can you do you know how many applicants you get that originated on your Website versus through some of your other sources I mean relative to indeed for instance, I'm assuming More applications come in through indeed than people who Wind up on your jobs page on your website Right. So one of the things is tom, we're we're actually in the process of redoing our so when you have a hire Who account you have a dashboard and we're in the process of redoing the dashboard So when you log in it shows you just those data points, okay? Hey, this is where your top source is coming from if you move someone to the higher states This is where the top source of people that you're actually hiring. Here's where people are falling off in your state So we're actually in the process of revamping that Um, I can tell but it's only because I built it but other Yeah, so but one thing about this what you know are these the job titles Like do you actually create an in indeed which I think would be really smart would be it's linked So the moment I click play the moment I play on that job It pushes it to indeed in three to four hours. So everyone that's watching So like put where put some put some variety of locations on your ads in the titles guys This is a great idea because then you can expand your Um, you can expand your reach for people that are searching for jobs in their area Maybe even a few different towns that are centered around like the bigger towns in a county or something like that How would that work with your sponsorship? Spin do you is that on a per ad basis? You'd have to segment each each ad that I do I do I I do you can either do peep paper click or there's a couple different ways to do ads within indeed But you would actually sponsor each job so each job would have its own spend And you might spend more on the bigger counties and less on the smaller counties or the smaller towns that you're trying to advertise to But um, this is a takeaway. I'm gonna implement like maybe tomorrow. I mean, this is This is something. I'm glad we went to this page because there's a lot. There's a lot here We're talking about marketing and marketing to employees and you got to reach them where they're at This is this is a big takeaway for me The the same way that you do the sponsoring on the back end of indeed It's still the same. You don't have to change that flow tom So all of those jobs that you're seeing on that page if you were to go to indeed right now They're going to show on indeed Okay, but the difference is it will not allow you to do a quick apply It's going to say apply on company website and when you click that button It's going to take you to that landing page of one of those jobs that you clicked on Yeah, that that was a question that robin was asking about cutting out the quick applies Oh, yeah, it does and then you have you have some spanish language Applications, do you help people with that or is that like kind of built into the to the back end of or do they have to do their own translations To do that. That's good. That's good. It's on our list It's been a long list. I'm sure you guys do too. We got a we got a long list Um, but no I didn't I did that on my own and and honestly When I tell people it's very easy to do that It took me, you know fire and there might be some type of errors in it, you know from The way that spanish people speak But I just I just use google translator and it's better than nothing Is you have some spanish up there and like you're making it you're making it easier for them to apply Go ahead luce. I have to put my question out there real quick before he heads off So just as we're closing up here don What are so I know you have a long list of things that you're doing But what are like the next three things that you're looking to bring to hire who what what can people look forward to? Okay, so the the number one thing that we're working on right now is the analytics portion Which is going to be on the dashboard that way people know exactly Um, I wish I would have logged in but that way people know exactly where Their applicants are coming from and where they're falling off in the stages that way matt when you're talking about your process is long well Is that working a hundred percent and you'll know hey people are going through this process and there's no issues Where are and if they are stopping in the application process Where exactly are they stopping at in that process? So that's one of the things that we're working on that's going to be huge The other thing is right now. We do have the smart calendar feature where it will take You know your availability very similar to Calendly, but we're actually going to make it even better to where it's even It's either exactly like that or much better than even the way that Calendly is built So we're enhancing that and then lastly We're constantly working on additional automations in our platform that way you could just continue to keep automating More and more things, you know that way the process, you know is less hands on And one last thing the fourth thing the fourth thing that we're doing is we're constantly looking for job boards to integrate with So we were on like the facebook job board request for a while And then we got denied because they just weren't doing integrations right now so So if you get it out to zip recruiter, you'll be on all like the local news boards because What's that big company that owns all the news stations? throughout the country Garrett gannett or something like that. I can't be right gannett. Somebody owns a bunch of the news stations and they If you didn't know this they all all these news stations have job boards is kind of like on their website and they all They're all posting from zip recruiter. So not that you probably don't know this already, but um, I was trying to get on my local uh local news station job boards and I have I have no interest in You know creating a relationship with zip recruiter, but Maybe you do Yeah, we're and we're integrated with zip recruiter right now. Oh, are you? Yeah, so when you post a job on there it it gets posted to zip recruiter But you might have something better than what I have we might need to talk We but we just don't but there's just not a lot of traction from there. So, okay. All right We uh, we are at the top of the hour. This was really cool done. Thank you for joining us um, I dropped the url to uh, higherhoo.co in the in the chat Check it out. I mean, it's a pretty cool website. It's a pretty cool platform if you don't have any you know tools Like this to manage your your applicant workflow It's a heck of an investment, you know trying to do this manually the way that it was done You know 10 years ago is is not where you want to be in today's world Um, any last thoughts you'd like to share it on. No, thank you guys for having me. I appreciate it I love talking about this stuff and I love talking business. So I appreciate it so much. This was great, man I'm so glad that I that I asked you Thanks so much Dom. It's nice, uh meeting you on smart business moves. You'll have to come back. All right. Thank you guys So we are done for today Uh, Monday is memorial day. We're taking the day off, but we'll be back next wednesday So week from today five o'clock eastern For another smart business moves Have a safe week weekend. Have fun. We'll see you next wednesday five o'clock. Bye. Bye