Unlocking Your Potential with Tom Erb

Summary:

In this engaging conversation, Tom Erb shares his insights on the four mindsets of staffing success and the importance of performance in today's competitive landscape. He emphasizes the need for a long-term perspective in business and how adopting the right mindset can lead to greater success. The discussion also touches on personal anecdotes, motivational quotes, and the evolving nature of the staffing industry.

Takeaways:

• The four mindsets of staffing success are crucial for performance.
• Mindset is often more important than specific skills in achieving success.
• Adopting a long-term perspective is essential in business.
• Performance should be the primary focus for immediate results.
• Value is about providing genuine benefits to clients and candidates.
• Mastery involves continuous improvement and learning.
• Personal connections are vital in the staffing industry.
• Technology should be embraced to enhance capabilities, not replace them.
• Motivational quotes can serve as guiding principles in one's career.

 Sponsors:

• Allied Insight - the Preferred Marketing Partner of Staffing and Consulting businesses
• All Things Staffing - Expert Resources for the Staffing Community

Jeff Pelliccio  0:01  
Jeff, welcome to this week's episode. Unlocking your potential. In this episode, Jeff and Erin are joined by special guest Tom Erb to discuss the four mindsets of staffing success and what your leadership team can do today to impact performance.

Tom Erb  0:14  
If we're talking short term, you can immediately impact performance. And quite frankly, almost nobody does enough activity, and when I'm talking about activity, I'm talking about the things that only you can do.

Jeff Pelliccio  0:27  
Highly Adaptive is a podcast where staffing and consulting leaders learn to outpace change, hosted by Jeff Pelliccio and Erin McKenzie. They'll cut through the noise to bring you practical moves you could use right now to grow, adapt and lead.

Jeff Pelliccio  0:56  
All right, so we are back, and we're following up on our end of year events, episode, and today we get to dig in a little deeper into the temp, net fall conference. Keynote address with Tom Erb, his session is Unlocking Your Potential, how to leverage the four mindsets of staffing success. And let's be honest, a different perspective may be just the thing that leaders and change makers need right now to break the plateau and hit that next level.

Erin MacKenzie  1:24  
Okay, listeners, you guys, this is not like just anyone. This is the Tom. Erb, I mean Tom is one of staffing industry's most respected experts, national speaker. I mean Tom, I think you speak everywhere. You're president of Tallann Resources. You have 30 plus years experience in talent acquisition. You've helped hundreds of firms modernize recruitment and sales. You're not just a legend really here, but you're also the author of Winning the Staffing Sales Game. And I know that when you're not chatting staffing, you love to share insights that make people laugh and truly think differently about the business. So you guys, we are excited to connect with Tom. We're going to dive into the four mindsets of staffing success. Let's do this here. We are welcome, Tom,

Tom Erb  2:16  
Thank you. That was an awesome introduction. I'm going to make my 14 year old son. Listen to that, because he thinks I'm an idiot.

Erin MacKenzie  2:23  
So every day, every day for that,

Tom Erb  2:29  
with my wife too. Actually,

Erin MacKenzie  2:31  
we are super excited

Jeff Pelliccio  2:34  
before we dig into the topic itself. So with all of the travel that you do, right, what are some go to travel Survival Guide, like life hacking tips for this, like suitcase, hotel, plane life that you do when you are in full conference mode, like, what's getting real, also to take away with and learn, right?

Tom Erb  2:52  
This is, this is the most important part of the discussion. You know, I am, I am fanatical about trying to be more and more and more efficient and and I have, I have different bags and carry ons depending on the time of the season, depending on where I'm going, depending and my goal is always to get everything into the smallest bag possible. So I have a backpack that is both a an office part of it, you know, I got my I got my laptop, I got I got a full travel office. I've got dual monitors, all that stuff. But then it also has a second part of it that I can sometimes go five or six days worth of clothes, if I do it right. And yeah, so I've gotten pretty good at it. And so that's, that's one of the things. And then I bought this, this luggage from a company called Solgaard, and which I don't make any money off of saying that name, but Solgaardsoul guard has an actual they've got this, this thing that you pull out, you pack everything in, and you pull it out, and you hang up, and it's a, oh, it's a portable closet. And if I'm going somewhere like five to seven days, I can pack everything in this carry on, and then I just pull it out, it squeezes down and pull it out, and then you've got it for the whole week. So those are, those are just a couple of things. But, oh, I've got, I've got lots of stuff. It's, it's, you know, I'm always trying to get more efficient. And I never want to check a bag. Never want to check a bag.

Jeff Pelliccio  4:35  
I will say the man who's carrying multiple displays and has his own closet with him is the one that you want to ask advice to.

Erin MacKenzie  4:41  
That's for sure. No kidding, I mean, and I've been wondering who's had Solgaard. So that's great. I'm loving this pickup. This is, this is going to be something I'll be buying now as well. So your luggage, your packing, your travel tips are basically a mindset. From the travel standpoint, I'm going to jump into. Your four mindsets from staffing success. That's a good segment. You're like that. Okay, so Tom, how did this become a passion for you?

Tom Erb  5:10  
You know, I so I've been in the industry for over 30 years, and I was, I was in the staffing industry, working in the staffing industry for the first 16 years, and then I, last 15 years, have been consulting and training to it, and so I've just interacted with so many people. I've had so many different jobs where I was I realized that the difference between success and failure, or even more success and kind of just being average wasn't so much specific skills as it was the way that people approach their job. And it really came down to mindset. And so I've just focused on that mindset, you know, as as much as I can, I ultimately realized that it really isn't just one mindset that I've identified four different ones, and I'm sure there's others, but four key mindsets that apply to both the sales and the staffing side.

Jeff Pelliccio  6:11  
Yeah, when did you realize that not only this was important to you, but that it's also important to like the community itself? Like when did you start to see that this had a an impact and an importance to the community at large,

Tom Erb  6:24  
you know, I managed a lot of people, you know, I was an individual producer on as a recruiter, and I was a sales rep and, you know, so I realized it for myself. But then as I started to work with people, managing them and trying to help them get better at what they were doing. It just that was when it started to dawn on me that, first of all, it's not innate, it's not just a given that, you know, we've got this. I mean, some people are quicker to adopt these mindsets. They've stumbled across them on their own. Some of it is innate, but in many cases, it's we're taught to approach our job a certain way, and it's not really the best way. It's not the optimized way of approaching that job. And so it probably really started when I was in particular when I was managing a sales team for a staffing company is just getting them into the right mindset, and then it really has become much more obvious in the last 15 years, as I've been coaching salespeople and recruiting teams and leaders and managers, that mindset is just such a such a critical piece, And it's such a difference between success and

Jeff Pelliccio  7:41  
failure? Yeah, and, I mean, look, a lot of things have changed, obviously. I mean, you're talking about, like, market fluctuation, behavioral changes, technology advancements, you know, it's, I think, in this, in this constant state of flux, you know, each of these things likely are also, you know, shifting and adjusting as well in order to, like, adapt to that new need or demand. So what's at the core of this framework? Like, can you kind of go through and explain, you know, briefly, like, what these four mindsets are?

Tom Erb  8:13  
Sure, you know, the four mindsets are performance. The first one is performance, which is really about, you know, do I approach my job as that I want to perform at a high level? And do I know how to do that? Do I know what the path to success is, to be successful? So performance is the first one, the second one is value, and it's not just about providing a value proposition, which we talk about all the time, that is part of it, but it's really more of do I have the mindset that what I am presenting to either prospects or clients or candidates or employees, whoever it is I'm working with? Am I providing value. Are they better off knowing me than not knowing me? And that's a real mindset, because in many cases, most cases, I would say, is that people approach prospects and candidates more apologetically and more that it's, yeah, I'm taking up your time, right? And you're doing me a favor, as opposed to really providing that level of value. And so that's this, the second mindset. The third is the long game mindset, and that's about really looking at this as a marathon, not as a sprint, looking at it not transactionally, but looking at it strategically. And what I'm doing today, if I'm doing it purposefully, will have positive benefits for me in the future. It's not just all about today, right? If I'm a recruiter, I want to fill the jobs I have today, but I want to make it easier to fill the jobs tomorrow. If I'm a salesperson, I want to. Get appointments today, but I want to set the stage to get appointments and opportunities and new clients tomorrow,

Jeff Pelliccio  10:07  
which is that's also probably, like, one of the bigger, like obstacles, right when, when trying to coach on this, because there's so much of a need to get something done now that, like, it's about, you know, shifting the momentum, or getting that drive, getting those conversions to occur in order to influence today and this month right now, that it like sometimes that long game is forgotten or not prioritized.

Erin MacKenzie  10:35  
Oftentimes, I think, right, right. Often people aren't thinking to the future. They're only thinking in that moment. So I think the long game is such a critical mindset love

Tom Erb  10:44  
that it makes me think of when I was in driver's ed in high school, and one of the things that they told you was, don't look right in front of the car. Look way ahead of the car, because if you're always looking right at front of the car, you're not going to see what's coming towards you. And it's the same kind of approach is like, if I'm just looking at the hood of the car, it's going to be too late and I'm not going to be able to see everything that's going on. So it is about taking that approach of, I'm in this for the long haul. I'm going to this is my profession. This is my career. I'm going to take control of my career, and I'm going to have some purpose to it, instead of just letting other events and other people dictate where I go. So that's the third mindset. And then the fourth mindset is mastery. It's about, how do I constantly get better. How what am I doing to purposefully be trying to get better all the time? And that is through learning more. It's through experiences, through through following the right types of thought leaders and and paying attention to what's going on in your profession. It's also about, how do I keep getting more and more efficient? How do I keep getting better? Which also ties into performance mindset too. They all tie together. But those are the that's kind of a quick summary of the four mindsets.

Erin MacKenzie  12:12  
That's great. And I love your analogy through everything. And the driver Ed analogy totally resonates because it is so true. It's always, I mean, I even think about it of you're looking at the yellow light and, okay, do I do I really proceed with caution and stop? Or do I go through and how much time do I have as I'm going through this Tom these are great. I mean, these four mindsets definitely resonate, I mean, and I think that the relevance is even right now, especially right now. What, how do you feel that the these mindsets also adapt to everyone in the state of the industry that we are today?

Tom Erb  12:52  
I think it is really relevant right now, because people are wanting sales today. They're wanting business today, right? It's been a tough economy for a while in the industry, and everybody is but everybody's always wanting it today and

Jeff Pelliccio  13:12  
immediate gratification. Tom, yeah,

Tom Erb  13:16  
and I don't know if you know David Steven Patterson, he oversees the headhunter and executive recruiter community on Facebook, and he's also a consultant to the industry. And just yesterday, I got an email from him, not just from, you know, it was mass email. He was just emailing me and saying this, but what he said resonated with me, which is, what is your bank account going to look like in six months? Because it's not what you do in six months that affects your bank account. It's what you're doing today that affects your bank account. And it's a great way to put it, and so it does. It absolutely is so relevant right now. And then you've got you throw in, you know, the the whole thing about AI and about, you know, is it going to take my job and all this stuff, if you adopt those four mindsets, then you're going to be fine. Yeah, it's the people that don't adopt those mindsets. It's the people that are just transactional and just are processing candidates, or they're just going through the motions, or their sales people that think they can email their way to success is just those are, those are the people that are going to ultimately be at risk of being replaced. So the mindset, so, I mean, yeah, definitely apply to what's going on, but they always

Erin MacKenzie  14:39  
do. That's so true, because their bank accounts are not going to look as good as the ones that are adopting AI. They're taking kind of what's new with technology and incorporating it into their everyday Yeah, and I definitely want a stronger bank account, not one that's so we all know where we want to be. Yeah.

Tom Erb  15:00  
Yeah, well, you know, I talk about the analogies of Driver's Ed and all this stuff, and then, you know, then David sends something out and says, Well, thank you. Oh, well, that actually money speaks. Money is abstract, right?

Jeff Pelliccio  15:13  
You know, to piggyback the AI thing too. I find that, like in those conversations, the people that are trying to implement AI in their worlds, like as their role, the ones that are trying to implement it in order to not have to do as much are the ones that are wildly at risk, and the ones that are trying to implement it in order to improve and empower and amplify or magnify their capabilities. Those are the ones that are going to be invaluable, you know, as again, as you talk about that long game. So, so these are amazing. These are amazing elements to consider. But as we all know, like people, especially today, like they're struggling to be able to figure out, what do they need to focus on for prioritization of technology, where do they need to put their emphasis and focus in terms of who they're going to go after and their target list. If you were to give advice on one of these principles that you know, people should probably focus in on more so now for you know, this upcoming quarter, yeah, what would that one be

Tom Erb  16:17  
of the four mindsets? Yeah, yeah. To me it would be performance. Would be the first one in if we're talking short term, you can immediately impact performance. And quite frankly, almost nobody does enough activity in any of the jobs that they're in, whether that's recruiter, sales rep, anything. And when I'm talking about activity, I'm talking about the things that only you can do, if it can be done by somebody else, or if it can be done by a computer program, it can be done by AI. That's not an activity that can be a support activity, whether that's on the sales side or on the recruiting activity, but it's what is it that really takes your skill, and that, quite frankly, is still picking up the phone. It is still talking to as many people as possible. The more people we talk to, the more good things happen. And so performance really is what in the short term is going to give you more results. And then you're looking at things like the long game and value and those and obviously the value mindset also helps, because if I'm doing the performance, which is doing the activity, and doing what I need to do to give myself a chance to be successful, the better my mindset and the better my messaging, the more success I'm going to have. If I'm just calling up timid to 200 people a week and apologizing for interrupting their day and just saying, Hey, do you have any jobs we can help you with and giving no value or anything like that, you're not going to have much success. You might get lucky every once in a while that I don't really want to base my career on luck. Yeah. So whereas, if I make those 200 calls and I am confident and I feel, I strongly feel that they are better off having a conversation with me, they're better off working with us than what they're doing right now, then I'm going to have a better conversation with them, because I'm going to feel like if I didn't do that, that would be a disservice to them. Yeah, and so it's just a totally different mindset. So performance is the first thing foundationally. Let's get the activity, then we work on the value mindset and having having that confident, not only confidence, but almost like I feel obligated to reach out to this person and see if I can help them make their lives better and make their company better.

Erin MacKenzie  18:47  
No, that's so true. And, I mean, that's such an important takeaway. And I think oftentimes folks are forgetting about picking up the phone. They're hiding behind the phone through a text message or anything like that. So being able to actually pick up talk to someone. It's something that we did 15/20 years ago. We had our call list and bringing and I've heard it a couple of times, like bringing that back into action and doing it's gonna drive the performance. And I think we've lost sight of that a little bit.

Jeff Pelliccio  19:17  
And it's not just necessarily, like picking up the phone to do all your cold calls, either, like this could be, you know, contacting people that are within your network. Like, how are you? How are you using those activities in order to continue to make good human connection, nurture relationships, yep, and make sure that, as Tom said, you're bringing your value. And I think that when you have the performance and you've got your value in alignment that creates phenomenal amounts of momentum, and it gives you a lot of confidence to be able to drive these conversations and be more present in that moment, to share things that I think people are going to be looking for.

Tom Erb  19:55  
Yeah, absolutely.

Erin MacKenzie  19:57  
Okay, so Tom, I've got to ask you, because. Both Jeff and I have a quote or a proverb that we both live by that's really kind of impacted us through all of our years. What's one that you live by? Do you have a quote or anything that's like your go to and your mantra that you think about day in, day out?

Tom Erb  20:18  
So I'm a huge music fan, and there's, there's a lot of different quotes from song lyrics that I like, but my favorite band of all time is a band that a lot of people probably haven't heard of, is called Dinosaur Junior. And dinosaur Junior was, you know, late 80s and 90s alternative band. They were part of the grunge movement and all that. And there is one of my favorite songs of theirs has a line called, How can you move without a goal? Oh, good. And it's a it's a simple line, but it says so much, and it's really true. It's you know, how do you know where to go if you don't know where you want to end up? And so just that simple line of how, how can you move without a goal? To me, is, is a pretty powerful statement. So I would say that's, that's one thing I live towards, is, or live by, is that statement. Plus it's cool, because it's my favorite band.

Erin MacKenzie  21:30  
So I love that. You're probably going to be getting a lot more people listening to Dinosaur Junior now, so so that will be great. And I have heard of them, I just don't know if I've listened to them, so great. I now I'm going to be playing that on on the radio here, or not radio, I guess it's all about the Echo Dot and everything else.

Jeff Pelliccio  21:49  
Yeah, no, for sure,

Tom Erb  21:51  
anybody that was in college in the early 90s would have heard Dinosaur Jr. They would have seen him on MTV. They had a brief moment of stardom. I love it along the same time as Nirvana and Pearl Jam and all that, they just didn't hit those same levels.

Erin MacKenzie  22:05  
But love it.

Jeff Pelliccio  22:06  
That's awesome. Well, Tom, thank you so much for being a part of highly adaptive and thank you for all that you do for this community, aside from TempNet, aside from Staffing World, like, Where can people find you if they want to connect. Talk to you about these four mindsets. Get advice, music advice, travel advice, like, where can they? Where can they get in touch with you?

Tom Erb  22:29  
Yeah, I might have a I might have a new, new side job that I would travel. Rick Steves is going to retire at some point. So there you go, goals, I Yeah, the That's right, yeah, LinkedIn, I'm on LinkedIn. Quite a bit. Would always welcome connects on there. And, you know, post quite a bit on there. Our website is TallannResources.com. It's spelled like tall and two L's, 2n and TallannResources.com So that's, that's where we are. You know, I, I do write for essays Staffing Success Magazine, and I've written the BI monthly article recruiting today for, actually, the last, I think, six years now. So you can check me out there. We post a lot of blogs. We do a lot of different things. Just get a lot of content out there. So yeah, definitely look for me on LinkedIn or on our website,

Jeff Pelliccio  23:35  
and hopefully back here again.

Tom Erb  23:36  
Yeah, absolutely,

Erin MacKenzie  23:39  
definitely.

Tom Erb  23:40  
Well, this is fun. I'll be happy to come back.

Erin MacKenzie  23:43  
We are excited to have you back again. This will be lots of fun. And it sounds like everyone can find you anywhere. You could probably even just Google Tom herb, and I know you'll, you'll, you'll pop up. So this is great. So Tom, thank you so much, and cannot wait to see you at all of the different conferences, and hopefully I'll be having my Solgaard suitcase with me. There we go. We're pitching it. So thank you again. Tom, seriously, couldn't appreciate you more for being here. 

Tom Erb  24:13  
Thanks for having me.

Jeff Pelliccio  24:15  
Big thanks to Allied Insight, not just our sponsor, but an industry leader and preferred marketing partner to staffing and consulting businesses nationwide. If your firm is looking for expert level support that goes beyond the logo, you know where to go. AlliedInsight.com If this episode helped you share with your friends and colleagues and subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts and Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts while you're there, consider leaving us a review, and when you're ready for more Industry Insights, articles, case studies and more, find it on AllThingsStaffing.com. This episode was produced and edited by Allied Insight and the Music provided by HomeMusicStock. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.