159: Stop Wasting Your Time Recruiting the Wrong People with Dom Farnan – 7FL

Do you want to stop wasting your time recruiting the wrong people? 

In this episode of Beyond A Million, Brad sits down with Dom Farnan, an experienced talent acquisition leader specializing in building teams, companies, and cultures. Dom shares her best recruitment practices and talks about her struggles transitioning from a solopreneur to leading DotConnect, a global talent advisory firm. 

If you’re struggling with hiring the right talent, this episode is for you. 

Don’t miss out!

Inspiring Quotes

• “As the macroeconomic conditions shift, the only people that are really hamstrung are the people that represent the macroeconomic condition.” – Brad Weimert 
• “Our values must be aligned with the values of our clients.” – Dom Farnan
• “Define the role that you’re trying to hire for.” – Brad Weimert 
• “To encourage and inspire innovation and diversity of thought, you don’t want someone who simply fits in with everyone else. You want someone who brings something extra that your team may not already have.” – Dom Farnan
• “Relationships drive everything else.” – Brad Weimert 
• “We’re not looking for culture fit. We’re looking for culture add.” – Dom Farnan

• 00:00 Intro 
• 01:48 About DotConnect 
• 06:15 DotConnect’s approach to recruiting  
• 14:16 How tech layoffs are affecting DotConnect
• 16:55 Best hiring practices 
• 28:22 Dom’s sourcing process 
• 36:09 Transitioning from 0 employees to 105 in 3 years 
• 44:21 Why she goes by Dom instead of Dominique 
• 49:32 The line between drugs and medicine 
• 53:22 Outro

00:01
Brad Weimert
You know, we’re moving into recession. All these layoffs have happened, which has made finding people easier. But the last two, three years, sourcing has been really challenging from my perspective.

00:15
Dom Farnan
We were onto that a couple of years before sourcing became painful. We had a thousand people in Seattle that were targeting that were engineers and we invited them to like play pool and do product demos with one of our clients. 30 people that actually showed up. Client made two hires and all in that whole process took six weeks and cost the client 2,500 bucks to make two hires. I don’t think drugs are bad. I think no.

00:42
Brad Weimert
That’s why I like this delineation.

00:44
Dom Farnan
People who, yeah, to your point, don’t necessarily have an intention behind it, but there’s recreational times and then there’s not.

00:55
Brad Weimert
What do you see as the steps to hiring good people?

00:59
Dom Farnan
First things first.

01:01
Brad Weimert
Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even ten figures. I’m Brad Weimert and as the founder of Easy Pay Direct, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology, wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today. In those multi million 8, 9 and 10 figure businesses. Life can get exciting beyond a million. Tom Farnin, it is awesome to have you on. I appreciate you taking out some time.

01:45
Dom Farnan
Yeah, thanks Brad. I’m happy to be here.

01:47
Brad Weimert
Definitely. Well, I want to dive into things. So you are in an industry that I find super interesting because it’s inevitably something that all entrepreneurs need to interact with and I think many of us try to avoid it through the journey, but at some point we realized this is how you create leverage in team building. Can you tell me a little bit about your company and your journey?

02:08
Dom Farnan
Yeah, sure. So my company is called Dot Connect. We are a global talent advisory. So what that means is we’re recruiters. I started this company on paper in 2011 and it became my solopreneurship consulting practice where I supported and hired for hundreds of companies. And then in 2019, I took that practice and grew my team around it. So I was in the seat that many of my clients were in as far as being a hiring manager and I firsthand faced struggles that I often dealt with and it was challenging and fun and interesting. And so grew my team up from 2019, 2020 and then Covid hit and then retracted the team and then 2021 was booming all through 22 and then we ended up making it on Inc 5000 list in 2022 just from growing between 2020 and 2022, about 222%.

03:04
Dom Farnan
So that was exciting, but learned a lot of lessons along the way.

03:07
Brad Weimert
Yeah, that’s awesome. And can you give me for scope here, can you give me the size of the company in 2022 and both team size or revenue, whatever you’re comfortable with?

03:20
Dom Farnan
Yeah, sure. So team size was about a hundred, revenue was about eight and a half million. That’s where we landed. When I started the business in 2019 with the team, we grew to about 30 people and we had eight clients or so. And then 2020 hit and we took whatever clients we could take at that point in time and got down to about 15 core team members. So 21 was a massive year of growth for us as it was for our clients. We got up to about 25 clients across different industries, sizes of companies, different types of roles and then 2022 was equally massive. I think this time last year were kicking off about 10 new engagements for year long projects with a lot of different big enterprise companies as well as some startups.

04:06
Dom Farnan
It was a lot growing our own team and growing our clients teams as well.

04:11
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I imagine. Are you vertically specific?

04:15
Dom Farnan
Not necessarily. We’ve spent a lot of time in tech just by default because that’s what we ended up doing well, hiring product teams, engineering teams, creative design, go to market. We randomly had a huge hiring project last year where we hired 200 sales reps for a liquor company. That was just not really in our wheelhouse but we pulled it off and I had an amazing high volume hiring team that did that. So yes, were a little bit in tech, but for the most part the way that I’ve trained the team and how they can go in and size up an industry and learn is where we can add value because we can be embedded in a company within 30 days and understand them, know how to find them talent and know the industry pretty quickly.

05:02
Brad Weimert
Yeah. So there are the whole industry to me is interesting because in some capacity we all have to figure out how to hire. Right. And we have to figure out the steps of how to assess, find talent, assess talent, onboard them, you know, sell them on the vision of the company, etcetera and recruiting firms operate in varying levels of involvement and sometimes it’s just, you know, they bring you talent and that’s it.

05:29
Dom Farnan
Yeah.

05:29
Brad Weimert
And sometimes they’re more integrated. Your approach, it seems, with dotconnect is heavily integrated.

05:36
Dom Farnan
Yeah.

05:37
Brad Weimert
Is that a fair assessment?

05:38
Dom Farnan
Totally. We have recently expanded our services to do contained search. And that’s just more like your traditional recruiting agency style, one off searches. But even with that are the way that we approach the searches are a lot more in partnership with our clients. So from my experience working with other agencies, they can seem very body brokerage. Or you might get spammed with an email that says, I have a great candidate for you. And it’s like, you don’t even know me. How do you know what I think is great? And like, I don’t want your random person. So we definitely take a more high touch embedded approach with our clients and look at it as a partnership.

06:15
Brad Weimert
Can you walk me through that approach? Because I think that there are some lessons in that are relevant to a lot of services. But I certainly like, I think any entrepreneur get those spam emails of, hey, I’ve got a client for you and. And most of the time I have the response that you just had. But sometimes I get them and I look at the resume and I’m like, oh shit, look at that. That’s worth talking to.

06:40
Dom Farnan
Yeah. I think in some cases you may get lucky and you might meet a recruiter who is a super connector and maybe they don’t know you well, but they know your space that you’re in or they listen to your podcast and they get a sense for you and they want to connect a person that might be valuable to you. So I have seen that for sure in our world, the way that we show up with our clients, I think it’s really important to call out. When were building 2019, we had a mantra of like, take all the work and we’ll figure out how to do it. Just get all of it. We want anything, we didn’t care and weren’t specific or focused. And at the same time, like, that was good on the one hand because we definitely grew.

07:21
Dom Farnan
But on the other hand, we worked with a lot of clients that weren’t aligned with us, that weren’t a fit, that were challenging to work with, that weren’t even worth the money at the end of the day based on what they would put you through to work with them. You know, each client has their own culture and we have ours. And so there’s also that like blend of values set that you have to think about. And then in the last couple of years we’ve been fine tuning who we want to work with and how we want to work. And so for us it’s really important to have our values aligned with our clients values. And we’re still like last year the client I mentioned that we filled 200 sales reps for them in the liquor industry.

08:05
Dom Farnan
That necessarily wasn’t really like our ideal client profile, but it helped us out in other ways in that it gave my team a lot of really valuable lessons and learnings through that one year engagement. Yeah, I think for us we look through, we look at the values alignment and then we want to make sure that we have partnership. So we’re not just here to find you people and throw them your way. We need a good feedback loop. And then we run our process really tight. So you’re going to have weekly check ins with us. You have delivery directors on our side that are managing our recruiter’s performance and making sure they’re hitting goals. And then you have a client engagement lead that’s your point person for any escalations because lo and behold, there’s always something and people are people.

08:48
Dom Farnan
And as much as we try and match the talent from our team to support the talent that you’re hiring, sometimes personalities come into play and you know, it’s not always as straightforward as it seems.

09:02
Brad Weimert
Yeah. So you said a couple things that I think are super interesting. One is that I want to dig further into that structure that you go through. Right. What the, what that tight structure is around recruiting. But you also mentioned this 200 head placement, right. This large contract with a liquor company. And almost in the same breath you said in the beginning were taking anything we could get. And then as we grew, we needed to get to vertical specificity. Right. We needed to have an ideal client profile to stick to because we wanted to make sure that we could perform better, things were in better alignment. It was easier for both us and the client if there was this tight alignment. But then a huge deal comes through and it’s like, oh shit, I want to jump on that.

09:49
Dom Farnan
Yeah, I’ll take that.

09:51
Brad Weimert
I think that’s a game, right? So why did you choose that? And I think that, by the way, I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer to this because there’s in tons of environments that is where you figure out a pivot. Right. And that is how you grow really quickly. Is say, huge opportunity. Is it worth a slight adjustment to do it? So how did you assess that and why did you choose to do it?

10:11
Dom Farnan
Yeah, I’ll tell you. I know exactly my thought process because I was in Cabo for Christmas last year when I was deciding to do this. So it was a friend of mine who I worked with at several different companies. I was a recruiter for him probably five different times in the CPG industry. So he called me over Christmas in 2021, kind of in a panic and he was like, I just got, you know, this project that I need to hire a thousand sales reps in a year. And I kind of was laughing like, okay, well how are you going to do that? He’s like, I need 20 recruiters. Who do you have? And we did not have 20 recruiters. We had like a handful that we could scrape together at that time.

10:53
Dom Farnan
So I talked with my leadership team and I said, here, Josh wants our help. He’s actually a nice guy. It’s not that like difficult to work with him. And here’s the flip side. I think we can probably pull a fairly junior team because it’s high volume, repeatable roles that are entry level sales reps. So from our perspective, I don’t need a super senior resource on that. I can get somebody, I can train up. And we had a bench of decent people that were ready to go to their next project. So I thought through that a little bit and then I looked at, you know, what could we do? We could give them 10 recruiters. So we pulled our 10 together and in my mind I thought of it two ways.

11:32
Dom Farnan
It’ll be self serving in that this will have the 10 recruiters go through a year long project together so they get some continuity and consistency and they’re not bouncing from like three month gig to six month gig, which is typically. Some of our engagements at the time were shorter. They could operate as a team and they could learn a pretty hardcore rigid recruiting process the client had to follow. So for me it was like partially like putting my team through boot camp and training that was paid while also knowing that we could hit the goals because the team was already capable. And then balancing that with we would make a decent amount of revenue off of this and then we could reinvest that into the bigger machine. So those were the levers and things that I was thinking about.

12:16
Dom Farnan
So we agreed to do it. We started the project in January. It was a mess. The client didn’t. They weren’t ready for us, they weren’t ready to onboard, 20 recruiters, 10 of ours and then 10 of the other crew that he could pull together. He didn’t have really a point person internally, which made it challenging. And their process was very structured, highly compliant. They had a lot of hoops to jump through. They also were hiring a thousand people at scale and internally didn’t have infrastructure to support those new thousand people. Everyone had to pass a background check like it was pretty hardcore. We ended up wrapping it up a little bit early because they hired 795 people, not the thousand. And now they need to let the dust settle before they can hire the balance towards that thousand goal.

13:06
Dom Farnan
And you know, as it turned out, my team was able to perform exactly how I thought and they had a lot of resilience because it was not an easy project to build this thing while you were in it and constantly be met with kind of pushback or challenges from the hiring team. There was, you know, you had a lot of new hiring managers as well. So you’re hiring a thousand people and then the new people who you just hired are coming in and now they’re taking over a territory to, you know, hire their own team and they’re brand new, they don’t know anything about hiring. So it was the perfect storm of all the things. But the end of the day, I was so proud of my team because they were early career and this was their first big project.

13:49
Dom Farnan
They pulled it off and they learned a lot and they kept with it. And so it was like their attitude and their resilience and their optimism despite feeling at times pretty challenged and maybe a little beat down from some of the dynamics with the client. Now moving forward, we know, hey, it was a hard lesson to learn. We probably wouldn’t do that project again and it was worth it. But also it was challenging.

14:16
Brad Weimert
So you said you wouldn’t do it again. I know that in the. We’ve. Since 2022 there’s been a. You’ve been in tech recruiting and there’s been this tremendous freeze onboarding and layoffs, et cetera. Would you. Are you tempted to. To change the ideal client profile or to look at other approaches in the face of kind of a weaker recruiting economy?

14:45
Dom Farnan
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We’re looking to expand into different industries beyond tech. And like we’re looking at climate tech, health care, cpg, not necessarily retail, but other direct to consumer products, things like that. So we’re definitely open and I have to really reaffirm with my team that we’re industry agnostic because they are a little one track mind of like, well I just worked on all these engineering jobs. I’m like, yeah, well those are kind of going to go away for a little while. So now what are we going to do and balancing that?

15:17
Dom Farnan
But you know, at the same time, just because big tech has made quite the disruptions with the, you know, with the changes and the layoffs and things like that, the end of the day, small and medium sized software companies are still hiring and right now is a good time to do it. So if you have budget or you have key hires you want to make, do it now.

15:39
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I think one of the things that I that consistently comes out of my mouth and I like to remind myself of and other people is that as the macroeconomic conditions shift, the only people that are really hamstrung are the people that represent the macroeconomic condition, meaning these behemoth companies. But small businesses and mid sized businesses can maneuver within that if the macro changes. You just have to change your approach. If E Commerce is down, Amazon is fucked. But when E Commerce is down, the small business owner can change their marketing model, can hire more people and modify and change their approach. So I think that’s a good reminder.

16:25
Dom Farnan
Yeah, we do still have a handful of clients that are smaller that are just trucking along like nothing’s ever happened. So you know, it’s actually been really nice and refreshing to see that they’re not all frazzled. And you know, if you’re on my LinkedIn every day it’s like a doom and gloom because I’m connected with a lot of big company people but generally it’s not like that for like to your point, the small and medium sized companies like and now’s your time, go and shine and get those best hires you can.

16:53
Brad Weimert
Yeah, for sure. So I want to dig into sort of the mechanics of your process both for hiring your own people and for hiring people for others. But why don’t we start with just sort of generic. What do you see as the steps to hiring good people?

17:12
Dom Farnan
Yeah, I think the first things first, clarity and alignment. So let’s just go through a scenario. If you’re the hiring manager, you need to know what you want to hire. Let’s say you get approved budget, you have 100k, you’re going to hire a marketing manager. The hiring person who is in charge of making that decision a needs to know if they own the decision or if it’s going to be made by somebody outside of them. Sometimes it’s them, sometimes it’s Their boss. Right. So clarity is important. Then I think you need to write a job description. Luckily you have chat, GPT and all the AI in the world to help you like write those things now or you can use my team and we can help you write a job description and interview you and come up with some cool copy.

17:54
Dom Farnan
But essentially job description first because you can’t expect anyone to send you a resume unless they know what they’re being interviewed for. Right? Then I think that you need to meet with a recruiter if you have one, or if you are your own recruiter, meet with the interview team that you pulled together that’s going to assess your talent. So job description, who’s owning the hiring decision? Meet with your team as a pre brief. You say, hey team, I picked you to be on my panel. I want you to focus on these things. I want Bob to focus on sales, Sally to focus on marketing. I’m going to focus on culture. Whatever you divide and conquer in terms of the principles and the values that you want each person to cover.

18:38
Dom Farnan
Pre brief, before you start interviewing people, your recruiter does your initial vetting and phone interview where they deep dive. They’re getting all of the things that are important to you and the non negotiables. So you want your recruiter to spend their time knocking out anything that you don’t want to see in the next round or flagging. Like, hey, they were kind of cryptic about this. Maybe you deep dive in that hiring manager because you know, I’m not a technical expert in xyz. Also, compensation details, if they’re going to be moving, relocation details, any of that kind of important stuff.

19:11
Dom Farnan
You also want your recruiter to reiterate all of those things every time they’re doing a check in with the candidate and they should be checking with the candidate a lot because you’ll find that a candidate might tell you, yeah, I’ll take 90k this day and then the next time they talk, they’ve talked to 10 other people and they actually want double that. So you really want to constantly be hitting them on the head with the comp piece, especially in this market because things change every day. You do your phone interview for sure, or a zoom after that. You get everyone together and you debrief. I think it’s important when you’re debriefing with your team that whoever’s the decision maker in the room goes last on that debrief. You don’t want to taint anyone else’s feedback.

19:55
Dom Farnan
And from that Point, you powwow with your recruiter, you work on who’s going to negotiate the offer, who’s going to pull together. Typically the recruiter would pull together the recommendation, hey, I think we can close them at 95. You good with that? Good. I’m going to do a soft offer conversation, see if we can get a verbal agreement from the candidate and then that’s kind of it. That’s our process, at least.

20:21
Brad Weimert
Got it. So you’ve got, on the front end, the conversation from the recruiter is kind of hitting on all things. Then you’re trying to assess value fit, technical fit, I. E. Skill set and compensation and get an idea on the front end of if they’re going to be good or not.

20:38
Dom Farnan
Yep, that’s correct.

20:40
Brad Weimert
And then for most of the people that you have, they’re doing an initial interview to do their own assessment and you are communicating with them after the fact on that.

20:50
Dom Farnan
Yeah, exactly. And so you know, the best relationship that you can have in the process is the hiring manager and the recruiter needs to be like this or the hiring manager, the recruiter and the HR business partner. Depends on your makeup. If you’re a smaller company, you might have HR person who’s doing recruiting. If you’re bigger, you might have a lot of other competing stakeholders, you might have compensation team, you might have HR business partner. There’s a lot of other people who need to be in the mix.

21:19
Brad Weimert
Okay. And in terms of actual technical assessment and value assessment, what do you see? And it’s, I think it’s important to look at team size because once you get into enterprise, as you just mentioned, the structure is entirely different. When you’re in the sort of eight, nine figure range you often still have, it’s still a tighter team and the process is quicker, I think, less red tape. But where do you see things like personality profiling, technical assessment, value assessment, fit into the process?

21:55
Dom Farnan
Yeah, that would be at the on site stage, but I think the hiring manager needs to own some of that at the onset of the process. So generally recruiter screen, then it would be hiring manager conversation. And sometimes it’s just one conversation and the hiring manager at that point I would recommend is doing their deep technical dive. So if this person, if it’s an engineer, for example, like if they can’t code, it doesn’t matter if you like them or not because you’re not going to hire them. Right. So you have to flush all that out at the early stage of your process. But then your interview it could be one round or two with your broader team, but you should divide and conquer.

22:37
Dom Farnan
So you should think about who are the other cross functional teams and people who I value their input that need to be on my interview panel and what can they vet for that will give me a holistic preview of this person’s experience, like where can they go deep in their interview. And then collectively when we come together, we could say, wow, we’ve got this really good cross section of feedback and examples of performance. And also when it comes to culture, I think it’s important everybody should be vetting for culture ad. So culture ad is the new kind of terminology. It’s not culture fit because ultimately, you know, and really to encourage and inspire innovation and diversity of thought, you don’t want somebody who just fits right in to everybody else.

23:21
Dom Farnan
You want somebody who brings an additional thing that maybe your team does not have. So when I think about my own leadership team, we use an assessment called predictive index. And that was really helpful for us to see who, what each profile was. So I’m a maverick, my head of growth is a maverick. We have almost the same profile. My CEO is an artisan and she’s the opposite of us on the predictive index panel. So it looks like, okay, yeah, we have complementary skills.

23:51
Brad Weimert
Okay, so a question that I think, a question that I have routinely is what’s the purpose of a hiring team? Is it. I mean, certainly from some perspective it’s buy in. Right. You get other members of your executive or management team to kind of sign off on a candidate and feel like they participated. But there are a lot of hires and I would imagine in your case, when you’re hiring recruiters, where you probably don’t need the feedback from people to assess whether or not the recruiter is going to be solid, what is the purpose of getting everybody involved for you?

24:25
Dom Farnan
Yeah, for me it’s just to get you kind of almost validate or debunk my assessment and to get a lot of different sides of feedback. So I’ll give you an example because last year I hired somebody who was networking, who was connected to me through my network. I talked to him for a couple of years. I was kind of courting him and he was courting me. We knew each other through a network and then I had him talk to maybe one or two people. I didn’t even follow my own process. I was like, let’s just fast track him. He’s great. I know this guy. Like, you know, we’re in the same circle, so we Hired him and I didn’t really put him through the process. And then like, little things started coming out, you know, team dynamic stuff.

25:09
Dom Farnan
And like, I was like, well, I love him, I think he’s great. But I didn’t really work with him closely. He was just on the extended team. And the team was like, yeah, we have some concerns. Like, this is coming up and people feel like this and this. And I’m like, oh, I had no idea. Like, I probably could have fleshed that out a little bit more had I included people to assess this team dynamic, team fit beyond just like me having one little sliver of information. So I think sometimes I wouldn’t say, if you’re a smaller company, you don’t have to go crazy and involve everybody. But at the same time, it’s almost like balancing and challenging your own assumption.

25:49
Dom Farnan
For me, I had no idea because I wasn’t vetting him against what team will he be on, how will he show up as a leader, yada yada.

25:58
Brad Weimert
One of the things that I try to do and I laughed when you said I skipped my own process because I think that we’re all guilty of that at different times. But I try to create a scorecard ahead of time to know what I’m like what you mentioned, predictive index, and there are a bunch of different personality profiles, but to know what profile I’m trying to hire for and know kind of what the character traits are that I’m looking for and then devise questions that help suss that out.

26:29
Dom Farnan
Yep. And maybe I didn’t put that level of detail in the explanation because usually with our clients, we’re working through their applicant tracking software that generates a sales scorecard that allows for feedback that’s discussed in the debrief as well as in the pre brief our team will pull together. Here’s the schedule, here’s what you’re focused on, here’s your bank of questions. And in that pre brief conversation, we’re saying, is everyone clear on their role and what they’re going to go and dig into? Do you have any objections? Do you want to build on the questions? And so we definitely have the documentation because I think a scorecard is really important as well.

27:07
Brad Weimert
You mentioned applicant tracking systems. Are there any that you prefer? I tend to find most of them are terrible.

27:15
Dom Farnan
Yeah, they are all terrible.

27:18
Brad Weimert
I mean, a lot of them were created. It seems like they were created 15 years ago and haven’t changed since. Do you have any that you like?

27:27
Dom Farnan
We use Ashby and I love Ashby. And it’s easy to use, it’s lightweight, it’s not super expensive, it’s intuitive. And I find that’s good for our size and often clients of ours as well, if they don’t have an ats, we may recommend that they use that. Use Ashby or something along those lines. I’ve used Greenhouse Lever. We use huge ones like Workday and Taleo and all those super old school, very clunky. Those are better for Enterprise. And they’re not better, but they just are what Enterprise use. And it’s often when you have a highly compliant interview process where there’s a lot of documentation, or you’re maybe a federal contractor and you need all kinds of different steps that you have to be tracking and following. But I say Ashby is like a really good, easy to use, lightweight one.

28:19
Brad Weimert
Cool. That’s helpful. One of the things that has become a problem in the last couple years, and this is starting to change, it’s January 31, 2023. For reference, I almost said 22. I’m glad I caught myself there.

28:35
Dom Farnan
We were in Antarctica. That’s where were.

28:38
Brad Weimert
That’s right. That was an awesome trip. I actually recorded two beyond a million episodes in Antarctica.

28:46
Dom Farnan
Amazing.

28:47
Brad Weimert
But it was awesome. But the downside was that for anybody that checks out the video, there we are looking out the window, but we could not capture this dope background that were all staring at because the lighting was terrible. So we’re kind of making jokes about our amazing view and you’re looking at the backdrop of some shitty cruise ship room. But that’s true. So, okay, 1-31-23. We’re, you know, we’re moving into recession and all these layoffs have happened, which has made finding people easier. More talent is out there. But the last two, three years, sourcing has been really challenging from my perspective. And it seems like it’s kind of across the board. A, did you experience that?

29:38
Brad Weimert
And B, can you walk me through your sourcing process where you’re going to find candidates and how that works inside the walls of a recruiting company that had 105 employees through that process?

29:51
Dom Farnan
Yeah, yeah, we definitely found that. And were onto that a couple years before sourcing became painful. So even when I thought through the organizational structure of my team, I came from being a solopreneur and I always needed help with sourcing. That was like, you know, majority of my day as a recruiter is supposed to be spent with hiring managers and candidates. Those are Higher value added activities. Activities for us. So what I did was I carved out the recruiter role from the sourcer role and then I paired them together. So even in our model, when you use one of my recruiters, they come paired with a sourcer or a team of sourcers to support the roles that they’re working on. And the recruiter may or may not source. Usually they do, but most likely the sourcer is the one diving deep.

30:45
Dom Farnan
How our sourcers source. We have an amazing global sourcing team. So they’re all offshore, which is awesome. And they work collaboratively together. So Wednesdays we have a sourcing jam where all of them get on a call and one of the recruiters will share one of the roles that they’re challenged with. And then everybody works on it for an hour or so and they might come up with a list of like a couple hundred warm leads. But usually the sourcers are networking their different Slack communities, Discord groups, LinkedIn as a way to identify people, but they’re not necessarily always trying to get connected to those people through LinkedIn. It’s like, where do these, the talent that you are targeting, where do they live and where are they talking to people and where are they connecting?

31:31
Dom Farnan
So there’s a variety of different ways, but lots of networking groups, associations, discord groups, Slack communities events. We’ve done some pretty interesting in person events for our clients. One we did a couple years ago, we called it the summer soiree. It took us six weeks to pull off. We had a thousand people in Seattle that were targeting that were engineers and we invited them to like play pool and do product demos with one of our clients. But we also combed the client’s applicant tracking software former people who maybe had rejected their offer years prior or people who were silver medalists that declined their offer or, you know, didn’t make it all the way through to the end and get an offer, but they really liked them. We invited them to come back. So targeted a thousand people.

32:20
Dom Farnan
We got 100 RSVPs, we got 30 people that actually showed up for the demo and the client made two hires. And all in that whole process took six weeks and cost the client 2,500 bucks to make two hires.

32:32
Brad Weimert
And what was the framework for the event? Why did people want to come to the event?

32:36
Dom Farnan
They wanted to come to the event because it was a free game of pool and drinks and food and then also product demos for this client.

32:44
Brad Weimert
Got it. Awesome. I love that. Well, there are a couple things that I think are Huge takeaways there. One is people are aggressive on the LinkedIn recruiting. I mean, the amount of inmail and solicitations I get in LinkedIn is wild. And so what you said was you’re not necessarily looking to find people there, but to identify people and then look at other areas that they might be involved in. And that would be other social platforms or I guess, other social platforms. Is that the nutshell?

33:15
Dom Farnan
Yeah, a lot of other social platforms or communities that they’re engaged in. So I’m a big fan of all things slack. So I’m in tons of different slack groups and there’s often hiring channels or different topic channels that you want to go and kind of peruse and see, you know, who’s talking about what. Twitter is really good for engineers. So, you know, there’s lots of people who are getting recruited on and off Twitter. But yeah, I think there’s a lot of different ways you can tackle it.

33:46
Brad Weimert
And the other thing that I found really interesting or relevant, and it’s one of these things that, like, we all should know and we probably don’t do, which is if you have a pool of candidates that you rejected, made an offer to, didn’t make the cut in the past, man, is it ever worth going back to that pool? Totally. One of the value propositions to me of recruiters is that they have relationships, is that if they’re, especially if they’re vertically integrated, right. If they’re heavy in tech or heavy in my case, payments, they’re talking to people in the industry all the time. And so they have kind of warmer leads. But we all, if you’ve been in business for a while, have these pools that are worth kind of rehashing.

34:28
Brad Weimert
And the same thing’s true of customers, obviously, or like customers that didn’t convert or. Yeah, it’s just a marketing campaign.

34:33
Dom Farnan
Yeah. I think that’s the best thing you can do if you don’t have an ats, Make a list, open a spreadsheet and save your candidates anybody that you talk to, even if you don’t move them forward to the next round, but they left an impression on you and you’re like, man, they’d be good in five years. Keep a little ticker for yourself. Because those people do come around. And, you know, with some of these tools that you can use within these applicant tracking softwares, you can tag people, you can like add. You know, it’s like HubSpot or something. Right?

35:00
Dom Farnan
You can add, like, hey, follow up in a year, or follow up in Six months, see where they’re at and you can kind of follow their careers and you know, depending on what moves they make, they could be ready for you sooner than whatever year mark you put in your head.

35:14
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I love that. And I love also the idea of if you’re not using an applicant tracking system, at a minimum have a spreadsheet where you’re tracking these candidates for us. In the applicant tracking system, you can kind of set the stages of where you are in your recruiting process. Initial interview. We use DISC as a profiling tool, tech assessment, face to face interview reference checks. But we have a category specifically for future hire. Right. Or future consideration. So we have that bucket. But definitely could do that in a spreadsheet too, which I love.

35:53
Dom Farnan
Yeah, no, totally. I love the future hire because I mean they could come back in a year, they can come back in two years, they can come back even better than you remember them because they went and got some great experience. So I love that.

36:07
Brad Weimert
Yeah, that’s great. Okay, so I want to talk about the transition, which is rough, right? But there are tons of industries right now that are squarely in the crosshairs of getting crushed by economic forces. And recruiting is tech recruiting in particular is one of them. Not recruiting at large, but tech recruiting and obviously mortgages and real estate are the other one that’s in my head right now. I have many friends in both spaces that are just confronted with this reality of what they were previously doing, stopped working. The first question is, how do you handle the. You went from zero employees in 2019 when you were a solopreneur executing yourself to 105 employees in 2022. How do you handle the transition? What are those conversations like and how do you reduce workforce when that happens?

37:03
Dom Farnan
You know, I’m really proud of the culture that we built and being a conscious leader because that has allowed us to have really challenging conversations from a place of being heart led and human first, and do it in a way in which people who we’ve had to wrap up or let go because we don’t have paid client work enough at the moment are in a collective channel on Slack as alumni. And then we’re keeping them up to date on what’s happening in our business. And then also they’re joining our all hands meetings and office hours and we’re staying connected, communicating a lot with them, but they want to be here.

37:41
Dom Farnan
Like I’ve never been in a situation where people we’ve had to let go that aren’t being paid show up to my team Meeting, rallying, wanting to be back working with us together under the same roof and under the same team. And it just goes to show that’s because of the culture that we built. If this was a couple of years ago, it may not have been that way. I talk about this in my book that’s coming out in March about my journey from toxic boss to conscious connector. Because a couple of years ago I wasn’t conscious and heart led and human first. I was in a dark place. So I was going through my own dark night of the soul while trying to run this business.

38:17
Dom Farnan
So I think to your point, there is a way in which you can educate and inform people, even if the news is not great news, and do it with grace and empathy and wrap people up in a certain way where they still feel supported. You know, last week I did a masterclass with my team and we talked about what it means to be an intentional networker and how you network and how similar it is to kind of creating and planting and watering a garden and watching that garden grow. And so I’m also trying to show up for my team and give them skills that they can use while they on the bench waiting for us to get work for them at large. But then also more practically, like I know you can’t just wait on the bench and sit around and not make money.

39:01
Dom Farnan
Like you have to support yourself, right? So this is where we talked with my team last week and thought through like, what are ways that you can make money today? And it’s not going to be corporate recruiting right now or embedded RPO type of stuff that we were doing. But at the same time we’ve also totally reimagined our services and have offered a lot of different microservices. So do big, long term, often high volume engagements, you know, a lot in tech. Now we’re doing what we call micro rpo. So maybe you only have three roles that you need worked on for a couple months. We can do that. Maybe you only have one role that you need a recruiter to help you with because you also have other things happening. We can do that.

39:44
Dom Farnan
So there’s a lot of different things that we’ve come up with to get creative, which I think will differentiate us in the long run because most other recruiting companies that are of the size that were are just sticking with what they know. And like they’ve got a lot of, you know, marketing spend to go out and try and get in front of people who may or may not benefit from using them, but there are also, there are industries that are hiring, healthcare, renewable energy, logistics, construction, remote customer service type of stuff like, or other telecommuting jobs. Like there are things happening, it’s just not in the same way that we saw it before.

40:21
Brad Weimert
I love the deliberate framework around both consistently communicating with those employees as you go through this transition and also modifying product set. And I think that in all industries it’s an important lesson to take away because even if it’s not, I think that applies to both how to reinvent during a downturn, but also opportunity to reinvent and enhance. If you just want to have another lever. Right, another opportunity. And that’s kind of the conversation that people have when they think about do you keep driving with one model or do you slightly modify and enhance for growth?

41:01
Dom Farnan
Totally. And that’s totally where we are at. And I think it’s actually been such a beautiful experience to give us some time to innovate a little bit and get away from just this one track, one revenue play that were working for a long time. So I’ve enjoyed a little bit of space within the company and the team. And I gotta be honest, the 105 people, I have a core team that I know and I have ranked and listed of the 50 that I want to bring back, not the 105 that I want to bring back. And so a lot of that 105, we’re supporting very big client engagements and projects and probably not the best fit long term for us. From a values alignment standpoint. They did their job, they did it well.

41:49
Dom Farnan
But long term weren’t going to be the people that we want on board to help us build or do things different or show up as conscious connectors and conscious recruiters. So to me it’s been very eye opening from that standpoint. And I think I’ve squeezed all the lessons I can out of last year and now we’re just focused on what we’re going to do going forward. But yeah, it’s been a wild experience because I always thought scale and a lot of revenue and all of that was what I wanted. And now I’m like, you know what it’s made me rethink? Like I’m good with a 50 person company turning over 10 mil or whatever the number is, like I’d be happy with that.

42:29
Dom Farnan
But it’s hard to think that when you’re in the middle of all the fun of growing and reaching numbers you’ve never reached. And it’s exciting and spending money and making money and all of that.

42:42
Brad Weimert
There’s a huge parallel to that and where we started, which was, define the role that you’re trying to hire for. And similarly, when you look at the growth of a company, it’s relevant to define what you’re trying to get out of the company, both professionally and personally. And there are very few people that go into entrepreneurship with anything, but let me grow this thing as much as I can and just sort of throw their energy at it. And every so often, I meet people that don’t rationalize small growth through the lens of, well, I want to live this way. But they actually deliberately approached it and said, no, no, this is the type of business I’m trying to have. And I think we have a couple mutual friends like that. But I think it’s uncommon, and I think it’s a really good realization.

43:31
Dom Farnan
Yeah, no, I’m. I’m actually so excited because now I feel like I have a handle on my business and my team. You know, last year when were growing, were so busy we couldn’t see straight. I would ask, who are our best recruiters? And my team wouldn’t be able to articulate it to me. Now we have a list. We have a ranking, we have assessment. We have values, alignment. We have everything and where they’re at in their career and what they worked on and how they’ve contributed. And it’s been actually really beautiful to see, too. Just this collective that’s alumni that are ready to come back when they’re ready and how they’re feeling out there and what they’re seeing.

44:10
Dom Farnan
So I would encourage anybody who’s had to make any changes, definitely stay connected with the people that you want to work with again and that you want to potentially bring back when things turn around.

44:21
Brad Weimert
Yeah. I mean, relationships drive everything else, Right?

44:23
Dom Farnan
Yeah.

44:26
Brad Weimert
One of the things that you said to me before we started was were talking about the ambiguity of your name, Dom, and it being unclear whether this is a male or a female name. And you told me that you deliberately, instead of using your full name, went with Dom because it was ambiguous. And you found that you got more responses if people thought that you were a man.

44:49
Dom Farnan
Yep, that was my career. That was the early days of my career. Yep. I would be emailing people all day, trying to get someone to email me back when I was recruiting. And it was funny because when it was Dominique, I don’t think I got a lot of responses. And then when I dropped the rest of the name and just went with Dom, I would get Tons of responses. I noticed it was like almost like my own AB test that I didn’t even realize I was doing. And then I’m like, oh, okay, this sticks. Okay, I’m just going to go with Dom because I’m seeing that my response rates to anybody I reach out to is 10x. A lot of the and the guys would come back like hello sir and whatever, and they would just drop in immediately with connecting with me.

45:30
Dom Farnan
But it was very challenging the other way.

45:33
Brad Weimert
First of all, that one’s interesting because when I have a recruiter reach out, for some reason I have a higher propensity to respond to a female recruiter than a male recruiter. It seems to be like a softer interaction for some reason. I don’t even know. I don’t know what internal issue I have where that’s my response. Yeah, but I do know that there are, there certainly are biases across business. In fact, somebody that I’ve had on the podcast, Javon McCormick used to go by J.P. Yeah. I love when he would reach out. Yeah. Specifically because he felt like he would be judged or was judged when he said his name was Javon. And so I think we all have biases for different things. Are there other areas in business where you feel like it’s a very different approach being a female versus a man?

46:26
Dom Farnan
Yeah, I mean I talked about this Sunday I was on a panel called Mushroom Summit because it talking about functional and psychedelic mushrooms because that’s a whole other part of my life. But and it was just an interesting experience because this is the third panel I’ve been on in three weeks in the psychedelic industry. And that’s an industry that I’m interested in and have another business in and through third time, three weeks. I’ve been in the industry for six months and there is just a need and an invitation for women in psychedelics. Meanwhile, I’ve been in recruiting for 20 plus years in all different industries and have hired tens of thousands of people, work for probably 450 different companies. Never been on a speaking panel about recruiting because I don’t work in corporate as a leader in HR or a head of talent.

47:19
Dom Farnan
And primarily a lot of the people who are on panels for those other engagements in that industry are a lot of men. So it just was like a route, reflection and realization that I had. And even like the, you know, the podcasts I listened to that are in that industry of corporate recruiting or whatever. There’s not many, but it doesn’t seem like it’s overly Filled with a lot of female voices, despite a lot of females being in HR in general.

47:53
Brad Weimert
Yeah, that’s very true. In that specific space. Do you see that as a. I could see this both ways. I could see this as a hindrance or an opportunity to stand out and be unique. How do you view it?

48:07
Dom Farnan
Yeah, I definitely think it’s an opportunity to stand out and be unique. And I think that’s what’s. Where I’m feeling more myself is in this kind of new industry of psychedelic therapeutics and startups in that whole world, because I don’t feel judged. I feel, like, accepted. I feel like there’s that oneness, there’s that culture. I mean, if you’re in that industry or you know anything about it, like, or those medicines, then you understand what I’m saying. I think in corporate, which is where I grew up, I definitely felt like I had to be a certain way and show up a certain way with a certain mask on.

48:47
Dom Farnan
And as I start to push the boundary a little bit more, which I’ve been doing in the last few years, it’s interesting because I get feedback from clients, a lot of executive men, who are, like, rooting me on and cheering me from the sides and like, yes, share all that shit and tell us all the things. And, like, I like it when you’re just totally honest and it’s uncomfortable and you call us out and whatever. So I feel like I’m definitely at a place in my career and in my life where I’m coming into this level of leadership and feeling very comfortable with who I am and how I show up and what I talk about, and I don’t have to be in this corporate little box anymore. Like, I’m just gonna be how I am.

49:30
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I love that. I can’t help myself. But you just called mushrooms medicine, and so I. I want to know where your line is between drugs and medicine.

49:40
Dom Farnan
Yeah, so. So there are plant medicines, like, you know, ayahuasca and wachuma, and the. The real sacred medicines. And mushrooms can fall in that category if you are doing them for therapeutic purposes. And there’s a lot of that happening now. So you also have to understand, coming from corporate, I was not an, like, mushroom doer in my teenage years or high school or college. Like, a lot of people I talked to, like, oh, I did mushrooms in college. Like, I didn’t. I was a straight edge. I didn’t do any of that. I only started using psychedelics as medicine and healing two years ago. And really last year, the first Year I did a couple like high dose psilocybin journeys for deep healing purposes. But then after that, it’s not like I was doing mushrooms every day.

50:26
Dom Farnan
Like now I microdose and that’s a whole other thing. But it was never in my world at all until it was for healing.

50:35
Brad Weimert
Sure. So is Oxycontin a drug or is it medicine?

50:42
Dom Farnan
Well, that’s a good. Depends how you use it. So I think it could be the same, right. Like if you’re being prescribed, I don’t know, that’s. If you’re being prescribed by a doctor because you’re dying of terminal cancer and all that they can give you is OxyContin to help with your pain, like my uncle, it is a drug, but it is also his medicine. If you’re using it, if you’re misusing it for a different purpose, well, then that’s a different story.

51:11
Brad Weimert
So your delineation here is that it’s the use case, it’s the intention behind the use of the substance that categorizes it as medicine or a drug.

51:21
Dom Farnan
Yeah, I think so. And it’s also the person, you know, like, I don’t think drugs are bad. I think now people who.

51:29
Brad Weimert
That’s why I like this delineation.

51:31
Dom Farnan
Yeah. Like people who, yeah, to your point, don’t necessarily have an intention behind it, but there’s recreational times and then there’s not, you know, like, sure, I definitely will have my fair share with my fun mushroom time, but I know when that is and then I know when I’m going deep for like, hey, we’re going to sort some shit out and you’re going to like, go in your journey and it’s not going to be pretty. So there are those types of things that go through my head for sure.

51:56
Brad Weimert
Yeah. I’m not offended by the deliberate delineation between the use case. I just generally think they’re all drugs and you just use them differently.

52:05
Dom Farnan
Yeah, totally.

52:06
Brad Weimert
So, like, yeah, it’s all, it’s. Caffeine’s a drug, sugar’s a drug, alcohol’s a drug, and those three are the completely socially acceptable ones which you can fully abuse or you can use in some dose that is incredibly enhancing to your life.

52:23
Dom Farnan
Yeah.

52:23
Brad Weimert
And I think the same is true of the other substances, barring maybe, you know, ibogaine or ayahuasca.

52:27
Dom Farnan
Yeah, no, totally. And I think that there, that’s to your point. Like, I think when you’re out on LinkedIn, where I tend to live a lot, I can’t say, like, hey, I’m doing a huge mushroom journey. You have to, like, approach it. Like, hey, this is for healing. There is an intention here. Like, this is medicine. Like, healing medicine. And you have to kind of pick and choose your battles because LinkedIn is just not ready for that yet.

52:51
Brad Weimert
I don’t know, Dom. Fuck it. I think you should just do it. Didn’t you just tell me that you were getting feedback from the world that you should be yourself?

52:58
Dom Farnan
Yeah, I, I, I do do it. I mean, I have another.

53:01
Brad Weimert
Just not that much yourself.

53:03
Dom Farnan
No. Hey, I have another company called Dose Connect that is focused on helping people hire in the psychedelic startup world.

53:09
Brad Weimert
Oh, I love it.

53:10
Dom Farnan
Yeah. So I’m very in it.

53:13
Brad Weimert
I love it. That’s cool. Well, that’s a big conversation, but I like it. I appreciate you shedding some light on it. Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, I appreciate you carving out time. I think that there’s tons of good stuff in here for lots of people, but entrepreneurs in general tend to struggle with hiring. They tend to struggle with the integration between recruiting firms and how they operate and what their process is. And I think a lot of people don’t know how to scale up or scale down a team through different seasons of business. And many, many entrepreneurs hit those points for different reasons. So I think that the openness to share that super helpful for lots of people listening.

53:55
Dom Farnan
Yeah, I’m glad. And if anyone, you know, if you need anything, just, you guys can reach out to me. I’m on LinkedIn or I’m on Instagram at. I am don Parnon. My company’s.connectllc.com Perfect.

54:09
Brad Weimert
I love that. Well, thanks for carving out time.

54:11
Dom Farnan
Awesome. Thanks a lot.

54:12
Brad Weimert
I hope you enjoyed the episode as much as I enjoyed doing it. I need your help. There are three places you can find beyond a million. The podcast itself, BeyondAMillion.com, which has some cool free resources, including a free course. And we finally launched the Beyond a Million YouTube channel. I would love it if you would go there and subscribe. And if you don’t want to, you still would probably enjoy seeing the visual content. Check it out. YouTube.comyondamillion.