IAM2300 – Chief Hiring Coach Transforms Hiring Process Using AI-Driven Techniques

00:00 - 00:27

Fletcher Wimbush: So now once you have that person in front of you, how do you evaluate them? And again, having some really great kind of legacy assessment tools that help you measure for integrity and energy and intelligence, right? Okay, that's great. And then having the now the ability to sort of customize those assessments to any specific need that you have is now phenomenal.

00:28 - 00:55

Intro: Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I Am CEO podcast.

00:56 - 01:03

Gresham Harkless: Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I Am CEO podcast and I have an awesome guest back on the show today at Fletcher Wimbush. Fletcher, excited to have you back on.

01:03 - 01:05

Fletcher Wimbush: Awesome, thanks for having me, Gresham.

01:05 - 01:37

Gresham Harkless: Yes, absolutely. Super excited to have you on and to delve deeper into some of these hiring practices and best tips and tools that you've had and been able to kind of experience. But of course, Before we do that, I want to read a little bit more about Fletcher so you can hear about why and how he's doing so many awesome things. And Fletcher, the transformative CEO of Discovered Performance Hiring Software, has dedicated decades to tackling hiring's hardest problems. A thought leader in his field, he's published extensively on reference checking, aptitude assessments, and AI's role in candidate

01:37 - 02:17

Gresham Harkless: selecting. His fact-driven hiring system drives multi-million-dollar results, proving his role as a game-changer in the hiring field. Fletcher's reach extends beyond organizations to individuals, facilitating thousands of successful careers. And as an ethical AI proponent, he's pioneering AI's powered initiative for talent selection. Fletcher's transformative approach to hiring is not just rewriting the rules, it's setting a whole new standard. And as I mentioned, Fletcher is coming back on the show. He was on episode number 780 and 1434 of the IMCO podcast. But 1 of the reasons that I'm sure we're gonna delve down deeper into these best practices

02:17 - 02:35

Gresham Harkless: around hirings because Fletcher has a record of assisting more than 2000 companies when and hiring and conducting over 10, 000 candidate interviews. So I know he has entrepreneurship in his DNA and obviously has hiring as well too. So Fletcher, excited to have you back on. Are you ready to speak to the IMCO community?

02:35 - 02:38

Fletcher Wimbush: Yeah, thank you Gresham. I'm looking forward to it, man.

02:38 - 02:51

Gresham Harkless: Always black. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm super excited to kind of jump into these best practices, but just to give the audience a little bit more of who Fletcher is, what led you to get started, what's your coming of age story, what's your CEO story, what led you to get started with all the awesome work you're doing?

02:52 - 02:58

Fletcher Wimbush: Well, I mean, I've been on a few times, but maybe if you haven't heard the other ones, come on about every 700 episodes or so,

02:58 - 03:00

Gresham Harkless: right? Exactly.

03:01 - 03:33

Fletcher Wimbush: But no, I mean, look, it's really a kind of a labor of love for me. My father, created a series of, behavioral aptitude, attitude and integrity assessments. And at a young age, I think it was like 9 years old, you know, I was like the first guinea pig, you'd make me complete these assessment, you know, calibrating them against me or whatever he was doing. But you know, as I became a teenager, I found myself in leadership roles, captain of the football team, student body president, just like, you know, shift supervisor, leader, and you know, my little

03:33 - 04:05

Fletcher Wimbush: job, you know, whole thing. And I really gravitated to the idea of you can get the right people on the bus or on the team, that great things are gonna happen inside your organization. And I just laser focused on that. I wrote a paper to graduate from high school. We had this, I don't know, like capstone paper we had to write or whatever. And I, I really leaned into this concept and everything I did through my early career, which was outside of this space and running businesses and being a leader in a business or other businesses.

04:06 - 04:44

Fletcher Wimbush: I leaned into this concept that just hiring and selecting the right people is the absolute number 1 focal point in being a great leader, not to diminish all the other things that you have that you should do to elevate your leadership skills and to drive and drive results and grow business. But this was the 1 place that I wanted to spend my career focusing on. And so that's what I did. And 11 and a half years ago, I took over this business and we've really leaned in. And that's where I came to, I made sure that

04:45 - 05:11

Fletcher Wimbush: I followed Malcolm Gladwell's best practices, if you've seen Red Outliers, and I just wanted to immerse myself in this, not just from a theoretical perspective, but put my hands on it. So I interviewed over 10, 000 people. We've worked with over 2000 organizations and just really got real world experience beyond my 10 years of leadership experience hands on, you know, growing businesses prior, right?

05:11 - 05:37

Gresham Harkless: Nice. I absolutely love that. And so I want to drill down a little bit more because I know that a lot of people that are listening to this might be in not the Elon Musk mode and understanding like we have this amount of revenue or this amount of money that we can hire those same people or also the Navidias where they're not sure how they're gonna let alone get a million dollars in revenue to let alone hire somebody for a million dollars. Like what types of things have you seen or ordered some of those best practices

05:37 - 05:41

Gresham Harkless: of like what people might be missing or things that they can do better related to their hire?

05:43 - 06:18

Fletcher Wimbush: Well, I'll reference a few other kind of influences in my life. E-Myth was revisited or E-Myth. I think any good entrepreneur, especially early in your entrepreneurial journey should read that book. So it's the difference between being an entrepreneur, a manager, and a technician. And most of us, and I started as a technician, And I often still wear a manager hat and keep aspiring towards being an entrepreneur. And, you know, it's a great way to kind of think about that, what it's like to be an early stage entrepreneur. You have to be able to do a lot

06:18 - 06:24

Fletcher Wimbush: of things and then eventually you have to be able to manage a lot of things and eventually you have to be able to lead and set the vision. Now, as

06:24 - 06:24

Speaker 4: an early entrepreneur, you have to be able to do a lot of things. And then eventually you have to be able to manage a lot of things. And eventually you have to be able to lead and set the vision. Now, as

06:24 - 07:00

Fletcher Wimbush: an early entrepreneur, you have to be able to do all 3 of those things, essentially moving towards that entrepreneurial hat or role that, that you're going to play. And, you know, I think in the early days as a technician or a manager, it's often difficult to give up control of those things. I think, you know, first and foremost, you have to start to identify what are your own special powers, what is your mission, where are you trying to go? And I say this on both sides of coins for any human being, like where do you want

07:00 - 07:43

Fletcher Wimbush: to be in 10 years? What is your personal goal or vision for your own life? Right. And what are your own personal core values? And, you know, I don't think often enough, any of us stopped to really think about those things, but our work should be driving us towards our own personal goals and missions and support our own personal value systems. Early days of entrepreneurs, that personal mission and core values often becomes highly reflective in the organization's mission and vision. Right. But it's okay. So you understand where you're going and what your personal ambitions are, for

07:43 - 08:11

Fletcher Wimbush: your life. Right. And then you begin to identify the things that you love doing and that you wish you weren't doing. And then it's beginning to identify those roles and that's essentially that org chart. And at first you're in every single bucket. So you got to put what's finance, marketing, sales, production,

08:12 - 08:17

Gresham Harkless: cooking, bottle washing, bottle washing, right?

08:17 - 08:50

Fletcher Wimbush: You know, so you put all those things under your name and then you begin to identify, well, where's my zone of excellence? And begin to take some of those technician roles off and begin to wear more of a manager hat eventually. And There's another good 1 that references Dan Martell and he wrote a good book called Buy Back Your Time. So, I would definitely encourage also to probably read those 2 books in tandem, right? You never visited and then followed it up with buy back your time. And I really liked the way he approached it is

08:50 - 08:53

Fletcher Wimbush: he said, you know, you got to master the task and then

08:53 - 08:54

Gresham Harkless: you got to delegate it.

08:55 - 09:26

Fletcher Wimbush: Well, master might be extreme, but you need to grasp it. You need to get a hold of that task and then delegate it to hopefully somebody who can do it a lot better than you. But you're laying out the framework, the structure, the system, the process and defining what good looks like in that process. It's all of these are foundational steps to going from a solo or small entrepreneur with a handful of employees to a Nvidia.

09:27 - 09:55

Gresham Harkless: Yeah, I love that you mentioned that. I think to be able to understand that if you do have this specific ass of going from 10, 000, you know, people come to your site to 100, 000 or a million or whatever that might be, you can ask for that specific thing. You can ask for the specific industry and get these applicants that you can take out to lunch or to breakfast, to get coffee, whatever it might be, and they can be a fit. And I think understanding like this technology is now there where you can be that

09:55 - 09:59

Gresham Harkless: precise in what's going to help you succeed is incredibly powerful.

10:00 - 10:32

Fletcher Wimbush: Yeah, it was important to us to build it all into 1 platform and to make it available to the non-recruiters. So these are all things that professional recruiters do, right? Particularly when it goes to sourcing people who are not necessarily looking for a job, right? But you can do this stuff yourself. And, you know, I great example is I had a friend who's in a foreign mine and he was a food broker. And I kind of understood the business. I came from the food service industry prior, but you know, not really my area of expertise. He

10:32 - 10:36

Fletcher Wimbush: was a friend and I don't want to muddy work and friendship here.

10:36 - 10:37

Speaker 4: So he's

10:37 - 11:12

Fletcher Wimbush: like, I think he was going to ask me to go do the headhunting. I was probably going to cost him 30 grand to do this job. And so I said, look, just spend 15 minutes a day looking at these, you know, put in your ideal person. Now, in this case, it was a little easier. It's just who are your competitors? There weren't that many. It's such a niche industry. So there's 15 competitors and the Metro that he wanted to hire. So put in the names of the competitors and then let the search find all the people

11:12 - 11:48

Fletcher Wimbush: who work there and just spend 15 minutes a day looking at those people's resumes, LinkedIn profile, social profiles, whatever information that you know we can get gather from them which is a lot and almost everything and say yeah this person would be this is exactly who I want right you know and starts ranking them this one's perfect almost perfect looks perfect looks interesting not not relevant right you know build that little bit of a list. And again, it doesn't take that much time really. And again, if you just, it's like habit stacking, you know, you just

11:48 - 12:24

Fletcher Wimbush: okay, I'm 15 minutes a day while I drink my cup of coffee, I'm going to just do this task and then begin to do an outreach to these people. And again, sending an email, sending a LinkedIn connection, sending them a message on Facebook, whatever. I mean, it doesn't take very long to do. And it's this be impatiently patient, right? And chip away at this. And within another 30 days, he hired the number 1 sales guy from his top competitor there. That's a million dollar hire.

12:24 - 12:49

Gresham Harkless: Yeah. And that's such a huge thing because I think so many times we can overcomplicate it. So that's why I love the tool and everything you've been able to do, I always say, and I didn't say it actually was a quote, the true sign of genius is being able to kind of simplify things for other people. You have a high level knowledge of what's happening, how those things are going, but to be able to simplify, as you have all done really well, is to be able to create a tool or abundance of tools to be able

12:49 - 13:11

Gresham Harkless: to help do that process to simplify for the person that maybe is not as knowledgeable about hiring and what to do and what not to do, what questions to ask, what skill aptitudes has to give, and what does all those things look like. So to bring all those things together ends up being extremely powerful because you've been able to simplify for those that are not as knowledgeable as you all have been.

13:11 - 13:47

Fletcher Wimbush: Yeah. So that's a big piece of it. And then you get into these assessment things and we kind of talked about those a little bit right prior prior to that. So now once you have that person in front of you, how do you evaluate them? And again, you know, having some really great kind of legacy assessment tools that help you measure for, you know, integrity and energy and intelligence, right? Okay, that's great. And then having now the ability to sort of customize those assessments to any specific need that you have is now phenomenal. And then building

13:47 - 14:07

Fletcher Wimbush: in other tools just that allow you any different type of hiring process that you might be going for like one-way video interviews that you can automate interviewing and AI will evaluate you know those people for you and give you a starting point. You know, I wouldn't, I'm not gonna say you should be relying on AI to make your hiring decisions, but it's speeds it up.

14:07 - 14:09

Gresham Harkless: Yeah, that is a big huge thing.

14:09 - 14:23

Fletcher Wimbush: Yeah, so that's what we do. And Aaron on our team, he calls it services as a software, right? So, you know, our clients, they get a hiring coach who blocks them through this, helps them dial in the different tools that are appropriate. Not every tool is appropriate for every situation,

14:23 - 14:36

Gresham Harkless: right? Absolutely. Appreciate that. So Fletcher, now I want to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And our goal is to have different quote unquote CEOs on the show. And I know you've been on a few times, but how would you define being a CEO for you?

14:36 - 15:19

Fletcher Wimbush: You are the, the, the, the visionary and the, and the shepherd for your, you know, for your vision, right. Or, you know, chief, I think I told you, the chief evangelist for your mission, right, you know, that's inspiring your people and your customers to be excited about what you're doing and the service or product that you are offering. And yeah, I think, I mean, ultimately that's where you want to be in that hierarchy in the E-Myth we're visited, right? We're on this journey to become that, you know, chief evangelist, and inspire for people. And that's a

15:19 - 15:24

Fletcher Wimbush: journey to get there, you know, but you gotta have it in the beginning to start

15:24 - 15:36

Gresham Harkless: off. Yeah, absolutely. I love that definition. Now, what I want to do is just see if there's anything additional you wanna let our readers and listeners know, and of course, how best people can get a hold of you find about all the awesome things you're in team are working on.

15:36 - 16:09

Fletcher Wimbush: You can Google me. And, you know, I'll come up on like the first 10 pages. So, but LinkedIn is a great place to find me. You can get Fletcher, Wimbush. And then also you can check us out at discovered.ai. So again, discovered, so like discovered the best people.ai and you can check us out there, but I'm an open connector on LinkedIn. You can just say, you heard me on the podcast and you know, I will respond. You can ask me any random questions about how to find the best people. You can schedule a call with me.

16:09 - 16:13

Fletcher Wimbush: I'll spend, I'll spend my time with you sharing everything I know.

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Gresham Harkless: Yeah, absolutely. And of course we're going to have links and information to show us as well too. So I hope you have a phenomenal today.

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Fletcher Wimbush: Thanks, Gresham.

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