Jim James (00:01)
As an entrepreneur, I've always found the recruitment part of the business, one of the most challenging, because I know that I need to spend more time on it. I know that it's mission critical, but it's also not necessarily directly revenue related. And it's not a skillset that I've been trained in. There is a solution and we're going to talk to a gentleman today who's actually got an amazing business out of Surfside, California, and it's called Discovered. Fletcher Wimbush has got the platform.
that people like you and I need for finding and retaining and tracking talent. Fletcher, welcome to the show.
Fletcher Wimbush (00:37)
Thank you for having me, Jim. My pleasure.
Jim James (00:39)
Well, it's my pleasure because we know that a business is as good as the people, even if they're temporary or they're freelancers. If we're building teams, we must have the right players. Fletcher, tell us about Discovered, which is your AI performance hiring software. What it means to entrepreneurs. What difference can you help us to make in our business?
Fletcher Wimbush (01:08)
Yeah, as you mentioned, I mean, I think it's a forever problem. Um, you know, there's two big challenges in hiring one is just finding people. And I think in the last five to seven years or so, you know, uh, everybody understands how tight the labor markets are and the rollercoaster of COVID and whatnot, um, so having the right tools to market your jobs and to, to be, to be found and to be in the right places. Um,
is really step one, how to be your own headhunter and nurture a talent base as a tool or as a skill set that you probably want to work on developing at some point in your entrepreneurial journey. There's several other techniques that you want to master and having the right tools to make doing that easier, because as you mentioned, it's not your primary job responsibility. It's not the thing that you focus your time and energy on every day. You know,
want to make that as easy as possible, right? So that you can be successful at building a pool of relevant, high potential individuals, right?
Jim James (02:18)
Fletcher tell us how, sorry to cut you off there, but how do you operate differently to, for example, the job boards? Because there are loads and loads of job boards and then there's platforms like Glassdoor that helps the employee evaluate the employer. But how do you offer something different to the entrepreneur?
Fletcher Wimbush (02:18)
...
Yeah, diversity, right? So if you rely on one source, you're limiting your opportunity to find and select that, to identify that best person. We're a platinum partner with Indeed. There's only 10 out of 300 applicant tracking systems out there in the world that are at that level, as well as partners with tools like ZipRecruiter, LinkedIn, Monster, and many, many others. So again, that
really helps you expand your reach. You're not just reliant on one job board. Um, most of those, almost all of those job boards, we are published openings for free, no cost to the employer. And, um, you can throw extra marketing dollars and things behind it. But then also things like, um, employee referral programs and making those easy. Um, the key behind those is just talking it up and going social media posting.
Mining your existing database of candidates. Uh, so if you've been in business for a little while, you've built a pool of people, and if you're sitting on one platform, it can be very difficult to mine those people back out of your database and re engage them, um, you know, creating talent benches. So the platform helps people do all of those things, right. Uh, as well as sourcing talent, right.
Jim James (04:02)
...
So we've got here, meet your hiring hero, you've got a picture on your website of a video with a bot. So am I right in understanding, Fletcher, that what you're doing with Discovered ATS is you're really helping an entrepreneur by creating an assistant, the digital assistant, to go out and find on these job boards appropriate candidates and bring them back through one centralized recruitment system?
Fletcher Wimbush (04:31)
So something like that, yeah. You make one post. It's going to distribute your job across all these different channels, job boards, social internally. Candidates come in, the bots going to help you identify which of those people are highly likely to be a fit for you. And then, um, it's going to help you do things like write ads and messages, nurture sequences, text messages, and then assessing those people to make sure that they're good. So it's going to assist people at every stage
of the hiring process.
Jim James (05:03)
That's amazing. I can see that you've got automated candidate engagement and follow-up. And often it's that first tranche when you put out an advert and you get hundreds maybe of applicants of which 60-70% are completely irrelevant, right? And you need to get down to the top three to five that you actually want to interview. So what I'm understanding is that with Discovered ATS, that kind of manual process.
Fletcher Wimbush (05:18)
...
Jim James (05:33)
is now taken care of in an intelligent way by the system. Is that correct?
Fletcher Wimbush (05:39)
Yeah, yeah. Candidates come in and we score them right away. And so you can go and look at their a hundred candidates that you got, you know, last few days and you know, they're already ranked for you. And it gives you a good starting point to say, okay, who do I, what do I want to do next? And then, you know, you may want to have these people complete some assessments or skill-based testing or provide references. And, uh, it'll, this will reach out to the candidate and ask them to do or complete those tasks. And then, you know,
report back how they did. Maybe you want to ask them to complete a one-way video interview, whatever it is that you want them to do and to get them through some of that initial screening. Um, you know, when, when we do offshore hiring, the whole process is literally completely automated all the way to the final interview. Uh, it's pretty, pretty crazy.
Jim James (06:29)
Yeah, that's amazing, Fletcher. And by the way, Fletcher is going to offer some access to his platform for those of us listening today that are interested in using the Discovered ATS platform so you get a trial. So do stick around because Fletcher is going to give you some places to go where you can get some free-access and he's also got a large number of tools and assessments on his website that he's going to give you access to. Fletcher, I can really, really understand how you're really giving us
a virtual HR manager, aren't you, that's working for us.
Fletcher Wimbush (07:02)
Yeah. Recruiting manager, but yeah, I don't, yeah. You know, we, I get put in the HR bucket, but I'm, I'm not an HR person actually. I'm a, you know, I'm a entrepreneur. I'm a business leader. I'm a, I've been a leader in businesses my whole life, uh, in every role that I've had from captain of the football team to, you know, running a business. But, uh, you know, it's a talent acquisition or recruiter is probably, you know, I think a little bit better.
Jim James (07:06)
Yeah, I could.
Okay.
Fletcher Wimbush (07:31)
But, and I think that's an important thing for people, small businesses to understand that hiring is not an HR function. It's, it's completely different mindset. You know, you don't hire an HR person to win at hiring. You hire a talent acquisition expert to win it.
Jim James (07:47)
Oh, that's it. I hadn't understood that differentiation before. Fletcher, what's the difference then? Help me to understand why are those two things different.
Fletcher Wimbush (07:54)
Yeah, primarily HR is focused on compliance and what you do with the people once you have them on the team. So oftentimes they're doing things like payroll or benefits or putting on parties or doing other administrative tasks of managing the team. And oftentimes they're tasked with doing recruiting, but you have to keep in mind most HR professionals are not trained as talent acquisition or recruiting experts. They're trained in legal compliance, administrators.
To make sure that the human resources are dealt with compliantly and recruiting is not that.
Jim James (08:31)
That's very, very interesting. I suppose as an entrepreneur without that level of sophistication, I used to just think of it as going out and finding people and hoping to attract people. But it's really, really valuable to get that distinction. As you say, you've got almost a sales function, having you to go out and find good talent, and then you've got the administration, the hunters and the farmers, I suppose, would be maybe a way of looking at it. But you have mentioned, you're an entrepreneur, Fletcher, you know,
Fletcher Wimbush (08:48)
It is.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jim James (08:59)
On this show, I try and find people who've got goods and services or products and services that are useful, but I also like to find out about you and how you build that business. So tell us with Discovered ATS as an entrepreneur, how you're building this brand, how you're getting people to come and be your clients and partners.
Fletcher Wimbush (09:08)
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I think one thing, you know, I think is important for me to note is everything we've done has been bootstrapped. So we've taken no external money or partners or, uh, and I'm a solo-entrepreneur. So I have no business partners. Um, and that's its own unique path. I feel this in this day and age, but, um, you know, uh, I found, you know, in a, through our previous business units or channels here that.
You know, there's been a handful of things have been very successful for us. Number one, SEO has been inbound content based or organic search marketing, uh, has always been our number one generator of leads and customers ultimately. Um, and, uh, that that's been number one. Number two is, uh, doing things like this. So being on podcasts, standing on stages, speaking to small groups and doing workshops and, uh, one of our core values is educate first. So,
that fits the content marketing and the SEO side, if it's getting on stage, being on podcasts. So those have been very successful. Cold e-mail has been very successful in our executive search business. Um, and,
Yeah, I think those are, those are the big ones. I feel like I'm missing one. Yeah.
Jim James (10:37)
Those are the big ones, but I will pick you up because Fletcher, you have also on your website a lot of certifications and you've got Capdera, you've got Trustpilot, you've got It's App, you've got one I can't read, we've got SHRM ATS partner. Do you want to just tell us about that? It's social corporate proof strategy that you've got.
Fletcher Wimbush (10:58)
Yeah.
Yeah. Um, uh, you know, I lean, I've leaned into that idea over the years for a long time and, uh, you know, we do a really wonderful job. We, we transform our clients' businesses, right? Uh, we were talking in the pre-game, you know, nothing is more satisfying than coming back to our clients a year later, which we do to all our clients. We check back in and say, Hey, how's it going? How did that hire go? Or how are those higher? How's hiring going for you for higher volume
clients, right? And to hear them, I mean, I had a concrete company the other day, tell me, you know, they went from couldn't get their trucks out of the yard because they couldn't find drivers to buying more trucks. And that's a, you know, five million dollar a year impact on their business.
Jim James (11:57)
And Fletcher, that's incredible. As you say, if labor, finding people is the bottleneck in the growth of the business, then if you like, it sounds like it's almost a meta engine that you've built there that helps people to manage all of that is very powerful indeed. You do have a number here on your website that clients have collectively enhanced their bottom line revenue by over $643 Million. How do you get that number? Because on the whole,
Fletcher Wimbush (11:57)
Right. That's.
Jim James (12:27)
clients are very reticent to share their successes. So I'm impressed that you've got a number as well.
Fletcher Wimbush (12:33)
Yeah. Well, I learned this from a content guy and I learned this from Gallup. Uh, he's probably familiar with Gallup, right? Um, they published an article, I don't know, 2019, right from the pandemic that there's, uh, that, uh, turnover is a $2 Trillion a year problem for us businesses. Right. And they didn't go out and survey.
US business to figure this out, but they use some great deductive reasoning. And, you know, looked at the publicly available database, but the 20% of, there's an average turnover, 20% average pay is about $50,000 a year. That cost of turning that person over, they use an estimate of, I think like one and a half times that salary. And we did something kind of similar to that. We looked at, Hey, you know, we're helping our clients
collectively last year make a thousand hires, roughly. It was 963 hires or something like that, right? And so we could do the math pretty quickly in going back through our records there and saying, hey, you know, if these folks are making these hires and they're able to retain these folks, and through these testimonials and surveying our clients, we know that they have very, very high success rates with the people they hire using our tools and our methodology
that has an impact on their business. When we did the math came out to 643,000 Million, excuse me, and probably a bunch of other numbers, we just rounded it. But it's a pretty good approximation of the impact we've been able to make.
Jim James (14:03)
Yeah.
Yeah, that's it. It's impressive, but also I do like the way that you're trying to quantify the impact that you're making because potential clients will be seeing that and want obviously to be part of that as well. Fletcher, you do have another business and I know that your heart is currently in this new business, in this AI driven business. Do you wanna just talk to us a little bit about the strategy when you've got, if you like, an established
Fletcher Wimbush (14:25)
...
Jim James (14:40)
company, which is you've got to have a recruitment and a search business. Um, you've got those established ones and you've launched a new one with a new brand. Many, many entrepreneurs, me included, have suffered with kind of losing much wind in the first business as we try and fill the sales in the new business. How have you managed to build a second and a third brand without impacting the revenue on the earlier ones?
Fletcher Wimbush (15:02)
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's a, I mean, it is a real challenge, Jim, frankly, right. Um, but you know, it came from very early on, early on within a few years of the business, um, you know, we were doing search work, had this executive search, retained search business, and then we had this assessment business and, and at first they were all together and intermingled and the employees and the people on my team, you know, we sort of just did everything right. And, um, which is true. And it's always, you know, we're all going to wear lots of hats, but,
we got to a point where we realized there were very distinct businesses and made that separation. Uh, we got clear about who our target audience was and we separated the teams. And so there's a team of people who focus on the search business and the things that make that business move forward. And the things that make the assessment business move forward. And immediately the first year doubled revenue, right? As soon as we made that switch, just a focus switch, right. Um, and in terms of
that, sticking true to that, in order to do this, it's been very much having to create a new team around the new brand and the new focus. So the new brand though is ultimately a parent to the others. And that is, as we talked about, it's kind of for me as the culmination of my journey in helping people solve the hiring problem. And so it is, some way it's a reunification
for most of them.
Jim James (16:42)
Yeah, but it's interesting that you found by separating the company into multiple brands that actually each one of them has become more efficient and more effective because of the impact of focus, whereas before it was sort of an amalgam of business models under one brand. So you really have got mitosis there, haven't you? Where you managed to create two cells properly from one.
Fletcher Wimbush (17:04)
Yeah.
Jim James (17:13)
Fletcher, so it sounds like a bit of a textbook case that you've managed to build the business and separate and grow businesses. As an entrepreneur based over in Surfside California, which sounds beautiful, any things that haven't gone quite your way, any marketing mistakes that you've made that you could share?
Fletcher Wimbush (17:29)
Yeah.
Yeah, we've been, we've been toiling on this one, um, you know, pre-game, um, uh, you know, I think, you know, it's been the shiny object, you know, chasing of, uh, ideas, you know, I think, you know, I've struggled with paid ads mightily, you know, it's been a big one for me.
I've, you know, I've struggled with the lack of focus and the best thing that happens focus, but lack of focus has also been, you know, a challenge there. Um, you know, agencies has been, uh, always a failure for me. Um, so, you know, we've. Yeah. Using eight. I've yeah, I've never successfully hired a marketing. I've turned probably seven of them over the 11 years, uh, that I've.
Jim James (18:20)
...
Is that right? What, what, what do you think has been the recurring issue there? Because it's interesting how many entrepreneurs I meet who do fail with agencies and you know, when people get to 14, 15 people, they hire an agency before hiring a marketing manager, you know, is, is tends to be the rubric. Uh, and then they find it doesn't work. So I'm interested to hear what's been your experience and what we might be learned from that.
Fletcher Wimbush (18:33)
Yeah.
Well, I think, I mean, what I liked, I mean, I think what we do is pretty unique, especially when you talk about the assessment and the discovered platform and these things, there's not really a lot of us out there in the world that do what I do, right? There may be a few hundred, which might sound like a lot, but, you know, unlike the recruiting world where there's thousands, right, of competitors in that space, right? And so
Jim James (19:22)
Yes.
Fletcher Wimbush (19:27)
like any hire, you have to train and onboard them and you have to, you know, brain dump and, you know, get them up to speed with you. And marketing agencies tend to be pretty expensive to work with. And so as a, on a bootstrap shoestring budget, paying somebody five or $10,000 or $15,000 a month to only get a fraction of their time and their energy and attention is a real
big investment and it's super challenging and to get them on message, helping getting them to understand the product, the service, the ideal customer, everything about marketing your business. Ultimately, it really, I find it came from me. I've ultimately been my own CMO for the whole time and for better and worse,
brought it all in house and we get 15x the volume of work done, you know, and, you know, are more focused.
Jim James (20:34)
Yeah, interesting. That's an interesting observation. Agencies can be a consortium of very smart, creative people and there's an energy inside of that company and it's sort of a creative sort of boiling pot really. But as you say, getting them to be in alignment with the company's understanding, values, customer's customer journey can be quite difficult sometimes. They tend to do very well with larger
corporate clients where there's bigger resources as well. Which is why I started the UnNoticed Entrepreneur actually was because I've seen agencies not always work out for the smaller company, but then where do you get the strategy from, that you do need to find the strategy that's not just in Google, right, or someone else's blog.
Fletcher Wimbush (21:23)
No, yeah, they, I've always learned from them. I've always taken something away from them. Some of them have had different, you know, positive strengths and things that they bring to the table. So I've also taken advantage of, okay, well, if I'm going to spend this amount of money with an agency, like let me at least internalize, learn from them. So I am, you know, taking away something that I can use forever as opposed to just like, oh, you go do it. And then when they fail,
just disappointed and mad and thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. Right. So I don't know. It's, you know, it's a challenge again, it's particular challenge for my business because of its uniqueness. You know, I have friends, plenty of friends who are on marketing agencies and they're, you know, they have wonderful case studies and do wonderful things for their clients, but I see a trend that they're typically hyper focused in a particular sector. Like they work with dentists,
or construction companies, right? So it's easier for them to adopt a new customer because some of the industry, some of the uniqueness of their business is taken out or taken out and less to assimilate with, right?
Jim James (22:22)
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, in the McKinsey speak, they call it T-shape consulting. So you have across the horizontal, you have an expertise marketing, for example, PR, and then on the vertical, you have the industry expertise. And it used to be that you could be fairly horizontal across multiple industries. And the last 10, 20 years, just for the reason that you're explaining.
Fletcher Wimbush (22:46)
Yeah.
Jim James (23:00)
Clients need to have some domain expertise because of the language and the people and the media contacts, for example. You need to know the industry as well as they have to practice.
Fletcher Wimbush (23:11)
But in the size to the size too, right? You know, are you a big national dental brand or are you a small corner shop? You know, dentists to, you know, two different animals.
Jim James (23:22)
Yeah, very, very different challenge. One thing I will pick you up on Fletcher, you're one of the first people to have an accessibility button on your website. This is completely random, I know, but I couldn't help but notice on the left-hand side of your website, you have the picture of the person with their arms and legs outstretched. And you've got the accessibility where I can change, I can look for online dictionary, I can increase the font size, I can do dyslexia friendly.
Fletcher Wimbush (23:38)
Yeah.
See ya.
Jim James (23:50)
as well. That's very interesting. Visually pleasing experience. How has this impacted your business? Or has it not? Or is it really just a bit of a gimmick?
Fletcher Wimbush (24:04)
Well, I, there's a lot to unload there. So I don't know what impact has made, honestly. I wish I did, um, uh, frankly, but you know, it is important. It was important to us. It's important to me that we're, uh, following the best practices. As I mentioned earlier, our number one success driver has been organic search. And this is a best practice in organic search. So, you know, the search engines want to know that you're accommodating to all
types of people. Also, a joke, I'm not in HR, but often are lumped into the HR bucket, and being sensitive to people with unique learning abilities or different disabilities or cognitive abilities is a really important topic there. And we want to be sensitive to that. And in fact, we want to figure out how to be more inclusive.
Jim James (24:57)
Yeah.
Fletcher Wimbush (25:03)
I have somebody with Asperger's on my team. I have somebody with Tourette's on my team. Um, and you know, I, all of that was frankly by accident. Uh, but no intentionality there. Just we put them through the same process. We put everybody through and turns out that none of them told me this in the hiring process either, like, you know, uh,
Jim James (25:15)
Yeah.
Yeah, but it is interesting though. So for anyone that wants to see that at work, you can go to discoveredats.com to see on the left-hand side, the accessibility. And also I've been doing screen recording if you want to go to the YouTube channel to see that because you're the first person Fletcher I've seen that's got that accessibility bar. So congratulations to you. Now we must just move on to sort of my penultimate question. Before we're gonna have the,
Fletcher Wimbush (25:46)
Yeah.
Jim James (25:51)
the offers that you're kind of going to make. A number one tip that you would give as an entrepreneur to my fellow UnNoticed Entrepreneurs about getting noticed.
Fletcher Wimbush (26:00)
About getting noticed. Oh boy. Well, I mean, I, like I said, I've committed, I mean, one of our core values is educate first. And so I've just leaned into that and content all the way, right? You know, I don't wanna spoil my favorite book, but it's all about, you know, being brutal transparency. I mean, just being, sharing your knowledge and
Jim James (26:02)
Mmm.
Fletcher Wimbush (26:29)
you know, going, coming from a place of giving first was always important to me and still is, and if anything, you know, constantly reminding myself of that. And, uh, you know, that's created a lot of opportunities to be on podcasts like yours or stages, speaking to other entrepreneurs. And, um, that's been a huge driver for us and revenue.
Jim James (26:51)
Okay, so give first maybe a tip and we're gonna get from you your favorite book that you'd like to share as well.
Fletcher Wimbush (26:57)
Yeah. So I'm in love with Marcus Sheridan. If you're out there listening Marcus, I want to give you a hug and a kiss. But his book, "They Ask, You Answer" is everything I hope I want to be when I grow up and I wanted to be for 11 years. And I've aspired to and done many of the things that he's suggested and will continue to be a student of his.
Jim James (27:25)
That's one of, he wrote a book also including a case study, I believe, about writing on his website about the best pool types, didn't he? And he had a pool business in Florida.
Fletcher Wimbush (27:33)
Yeah, the book is a case study of how he almost went bankrupt and is now the largest manufacturer of in-ground pools. What are the other, so synthetic pools.
Jim James (27:47)
Yeah, swimming pools, right? Yeah, based on a blog post giving people guidance on ways to buy a pool. So that's a great, great story. I heard him give a talk online about that. Fletcher, speaking of being online, I mustn't keep you any longer. If you want to find out more about you and those kind offers that you'd like to make, where can they go?
Fletcher Wimbush (27:57)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. So discoveredats.com That's our website. Feel free. There's a in the pricing section. There's a free plan there. You should check it out. You'll get a free applicant tracking system. Now some of the cool things about that is you get a free career page that's branded to match your brand, you can embed it on your website. So I think many small businesses haven't quite got there yet or have been longing. Oh, man, I wish I had.
I don't want to spend the money on the marketing team to do it. There's a performance management tool, really simple, effective performance management tool, because that's super important in your workforce planning and hiring and how you do and measuring success of hiring. We'll also give you five free disc assessments, or you can try one of our other 30 plus assessments or some of our other 30 plus assessments. And there's a bunch of other tools embedded, interview guides, candidate scorecards.
All free and access to our AI tools to help accelerate your hiring efforts. All part of that free plan. So I definitely encourage people to check it out, at least dip their toe in the water of starting to hire better.
Jim James (29:14)
Fletcher Wimbush, you have been discovered. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So we've been listening to Fletcher Wimbush in the rather glamorous sounding Surfside, California. And I'm just here in Wiltshire. My name's Jim James. Thank you for joining my guest Fletcher and I to talk about hiring and the importance of it. And I think this idea as well that he's come and shared from a business point of view is the importance of focus.
Fletcher Wimbush (29:18)
Thank you.
Jim James (29:41)
and that you create a brand and a focus around a particular business need, and that's actually liberating, not debilitating. And so that's wonderful. And also finally, to give first is a great long-term strategy. So thank you for letting me give to you another episode of the UnNoticed Entrepreneur. If you've enjoyed it, do please review it on your player and share it with a fellow UnNoticed Entrepreneur because we don't want anyone to go unnoticed. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.
