Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Retrained Search, the podcast where we lift the lid on what it's really like to work retained, discuss the stories we've gathered along the way and give you all a peek behind the scenes of our amazing community and how they're getting ahead. Hello everybody, and welcome to another amazing episode of the retained search show.

Speaker 3: 0:32

Yes, nailed it, still haven't worked out the title.

Speaker 1: 0:37

Hello, sarah Chester Nelson.

Speaker 3: 0:39

Hello, thank you for having me on again. I feel like it's been a while.

Speaker 1: 0:44

It's been a while and lots has been happening. There's a reason we brought you here today. How are you doing, George?

Speaker 2: 0:50

Very well, very very well, thank you.

Speaker 1: 0:53

I'm a bit frightened of your transition to paddle away from tennis. That can be talked about another day. I'm not too, but as my tennis advisor and coach and role model, uh, I'm frightened of losing you.

Speaker 2: 1:08

I'm just diversifying, I'm staying ahead of the times and I'm making sure I have the experience and the knowledge to guide you through your paddle journey, as well as your tennis journey we don't have any padlock courts in ludlow.

Speaker 1: 1:20

If anyone's listening to this, you happen to have a spare 40 grand apparently that's all it costs to set up a paddle court, can you? Please buy some land in ludlow if anyone's listening to this. You happen to have a spare 40 grand. Apparently that's all it costs to set up a paddle court. Can you please buy some land in ludlow and?

Speaker 2: 1:30

like build a paddle court and and if you own a tennis club in ludlow, um, there's great funding available. I'm told from the lta that makes sense. They will effectively fund the paddle courts and then I think you just pay them a percentage of your money each year to pay them back long story.

Speaker 1: 1:51

Let's move on talking of evolution. Talking of evolution, um, we have been fizzing like behind the scenes at retrained because we've got separate WhatsApp groups and we've got external but joint venture partners working with us and an absolute like hive of activity because of two letters that you can't really read anything or go anywhere without seeing at the moment. And what are those two letters? Sarah Ch Nelson.

Speaker 1: 2:26

I'm gonna hazard a guess it's a n I a I yes oh yes, and we're lucky enough, we're being behind um the scenes and well, maybe not so much behind the scenes but integrated into and plugged into such a phenomenal community of small, medium and large agencies and retained and executive search firms across the board, across the world, across industries. So there's what? 350 in our search foundations program, there's there's 50-odd in our Search Mastery Program and there's RMA Sarah, oh, 80.

Speaker 1: 3:09

80 in our Retrained Marketing Program. That's a lot of businesses that we industry firsthand in so many different contexts, so we wanted to share a bit of that with you today. We wanted to share how people how agencies, search firms, executive and non are adopting it, using it um, get ahead and make their lives easier, and we also wanted to share our own experiences of what is working for us and how we're finding it making life better, as jordan just said, just before we hit the cord, um. So it's not been a straightforward journey, though, and I think the three of us have had very different experiences so far on the journey with AI.

Speaker 2: 4:11

I'm going to start with you, george yeah tell me a bit about kind of your journey with it so far and where you were and where you are now so I think probably at the start, when I first started using it I mean, ChatGPT is the main kind of tool that I use when it comes to AI I probably just used it like Google on steroids. So a prime example would be I think my two-year-old daughter is drinking too much milk, so I'm going to ask her how much should she be drinking? And then it says do you want me to create a custom milk plant for your daughter? Why not? You're just like google on steroids.

Speaker 2: 4:53

the more I've used it, the more comfortable I've become with it, the more I appreciate the value that it can add and I would say it's now transformed what I do on a day-to-day basis, because I don't think it's doing anything that I couldn't do, but it's doing it more effectively, more efficiently and actually just in terms of kind of my personal day-to-day work. It means that I'm not doing the stuff that I don't enjoy doing. It does it for me. The example I gave to sarah last week is building out a list of potential prospects for us, right for our business. That would take me hours in the past and that, like heavy research data, it's just not what.

Speaker 2: 5:40

As you know, I'm not particularly detail focused. It's just not what I enjoy doing. I gave chat gpt a prompt to act as my kind of personal research team um, and to ask me a list of questions one by one that's going to help identify my perfect prospect and then go away and build me a list of 100 of the best companies that meet that criteria, of the best companies that meet that criteria. Had it done in like an hour I love that.

Speaker 1: 6:07

That is one of my favourite things to ask it, to ask it to interview me, to ask it to ask me the questions, to get the information it needs to be able to perform the task.

Speaker 2: 6:19

So it's just like as I say, I could have put that list together myself. I'm sure I could to an extent, but I probably couldn't have done it as well. It would have taken me days, I think, to do the depth of research needed to make sure they were all as relevant as they could be, and Chachi BT did it in 10 minutes.

Speaker 1: 6:39

Thank you, george. Sarah, I have to ask this because I don't know the answer. You guys you and George, while I was away on holiday came up with, or something transpired whereby you now are running a session with I think it's open to external members. Yeah, it's not closed to our community. On how to. On leveraging AI for BD, it all started with Starbucks, didn't it Sarah?

Speaker 3: 7:20

I know I think that it just means you need more meetings in Starbucks. But yeah, it was. I think it was you that told need more meetings in Starbucks. But yeah it was. I think it was you that told me about what you were doing with it and I was like, okay, that's interesting because, yes, I had been doing forms of like using chat gpt to research.

Speaker 3: 7:35

But I am a bit of a geek and you know I hopped onto AI and chat gpt as soon as it came out. But for me it was quite refreshing or interesting to hear someone else from like, not a techie background, say oh, actually I went to chat GPT and I did this a bit. I was like okay, and then we had one of one of the reasons we were meeting was we needed or we wanted to review some of the, some of the stats that we had as a business and like where, like, why our marketing stuff wasn't it, and like what makes our call spike, and also all stuff like that that we were reviewing yeah, and we can have a look and we have this spreadsheet that we've been filling out every week and I've had all this stuff and we both looked at it and we're like, shall we just put it into chat gpt and see if it'll tell us like stuff?

Speaker 3: 8:26

and anyway we put it in, not thinking like, well, you know, wasn't really sure what we're going to get out of it, but it kind of changed everything because, you know, we've, we've it told us it could just pick out the patterns so much easier than it was. It could tell us why, specifically, we did well over others and it wasn't just like oh well, that week is great. But it worked out okay. That the reason was because a couple of weeks ago you did this, because it connected all of the um, all of our kpis, all of the things that we're doing, with the result and it made something that would have took me a whole day to unpick. We did it in like 40 minutes, didn't we just together, kind of working out like, oh, why don't we ask it this and that? And that's when we were like right, okay, actually I think it would make sense, like because we've used it from the BD point of view and just the research side as well.

Speaker 1: 9:19

Like it, it makes sense to to do your webinar so what kind of things are you going to be sharing and showing um through that, without giving too much away because people can join that session, can't they? And I think we'll um be sharing, maybe with this podcast, when that session is. But what are the next? Thursday, so firstly the 18th 1 pm UK time and what kind of things are you going to be sharing then on that session?

Speaker 3: 9:52

so, firstly, I guess we're going to be talking about how it benefits search or retained work um, I think one of the things that I have constantly got at the minute is people telling like it's like the same thing. That happened with automation. So when we automation came out I love automation, I can automate so many different things thing is, everyone else then starts automating stuff and then you realize that it's automated and people go to the nth degree with automation and it's kind of the same with AI. Like, just because we can now personalize and send loads of emails at scale and mass send these emails and target so many different people on LinkedIn doesn't necessarily mean that's what we should be doing with it. So we have got a like a shortlist approach.

Speaker 3: 10:41

So, based on the book that we absolutely adore as a community at the moment, um shortlist by david echo, yeah, where we will show kind of how um, exactly what george was just showing there like how do we build a list of people to target? How do we get people that fit within our core target audience? And we we spend less time on kind of the research and the putting the, the campaigns together, and more time on the the human touch element. So, yes, we can use ai to help us with these things, help us target people, help us craft messaging, but ultimately, what's gonna push the needle, get people to want to speak to us, is us and you know that human element which we don't want to replicate or we don't want ai to take over with that we're really busy, right, and what we hope is we're not going to give any wishy-washy, no like we're going to give implementable advice, how people can take a beating, protest, implement iii and make it more effective, more efficient and more successful and we we could go super complex with.

Speaker 3: 12:01

You know the likes of tools like Clay, where we can build a massive list and we can then get everyone's email addresses and then we can use a variable and personalise it and send them all out. We just want to get responses and we know we've searched like we actually don't need a crazy amount of retained searches to do very well. So rather than going at scale and having such a small percentage response rate, we turn the tables. We go the other way, like how do we have like a list of like maximum 100 people, 100 contacts, and we go after them and use ai to help us to build those relationships with those, those people that we know are relevant as well?

Speaker 1: 12:45

and in terms of the people we work with, then the um, different firms, individuals, you know, independent recruiters and and individuals from bigger teams. What do you see um I wouldn't say you know as kind of best practice or the best use of ai, because everyone's just on their own journey. I think everyone's just at different stages with it, aren't they? And what do you see as a kind of um, the early adopters doing now? You know, those that are kind of at the forefront of of using um, ai and the latest tools and um, and what do you see from those that are kind of later adopters and just starting to, as you say, george, use chat dpt as a, as a google engine, like could you share with us, sarah, do you see people using it in a quite an advanced way? And, if you do, what kinds of things are you either helping them to do or are they doing themselves that you think, wow, that's really, really good well, yeah, I think it's one of those things where I like to keep on top of this stuff.

Speaker 3: 13:57

But it's funny the amount of times people come to a collab call and they show me something they've managed to do with chat gpt and I'm like I don't know, I don't know I could do that. That's so cool. I like things are changing so often as well, um, but I think where people oh, I've seen the the best success is when people um use chat gpt exactly what you said before about, like ask me questions to understand my target audience, my um, you know core demographics like once you see it's got all of that information about you as a business, as like who you are like, and you can feed it all of the all of that stuff as well. That helps, like we, you know. The one thing I absolutely love is people using call recordings and transcripts, like as much information we can give of us just means that the outputs you get are so much more tailored and it's when people really understand that and kind of almost make a custom GPT. So you know a chat GPT that knows what its role is like, what its target is, is how it's meant to act, like every time you talk to it. That's those are the people who kind of excel with it, rather than just using chat gpt, as george said, as kind of google it, not knowing the context of you and who, who you are, though like it is going to give you quite generic advice.

Speaker 3: 15:19

So sometimes I understand. You know, I get the same thing. Quite often. People say, oh, I try, I try chat GPT to help me with content, but it just sounded, you know, very AI and I get, I get that, I do get that and I see it on LinkedIn all the time. You're like oh, those m dashes. I know it's chat GPT, but again it's like the. The more stuff you can give it, the better stuff the output. So and I think you know you've realized this as well like once, it takes a bit of time at the start, doesn't it? But like with any like employee, like when you first have someone start with you, they don't automatically know your brand values and all of like, the like little things that kind of make the business what it is like. You have to teach them and train them and spend time with them, but once you've done that with chat gbt, it then gets it.

Speaker 1: 16:11

And once you've done that legwork, the outputs you get, I think, is quite incredible one of the things I've noticed is that as I've got more confident and more knowledgeable and more experience of um working with you know the one we use track, gpt pro. I think it is um that the the the more multi-dimensional its support can be, like across a whole kind of chain of I keep hearing this word workflow and I guess that's just a label for you know things that you've got to do that are all related to the other to get to an outcome right, I'm assuming, because to begin with I was quite one-dimensional with it. You know, asking it to do a single thing and what can you help me with this? And then I got better at feeding it more information before I asked it to do things and then just continuously feeding you know really detailed information and knowing which kind of model to use or whether I wanted to use deep research. Annette, our finance manager, and I have just done a really nice piece analysing all of our P&Ls over the last tax year and all of our cash flow situation, and it's built a dashboard for us. Wait till you see it. You're going to see it at the 90 day meeting, guys.

Speaker 1: 17:34

But the deep research section of that took a while but because the spreadsheets were ridiculously complicated.

Speaker 1: 17:41

Research section of that took a while, but because the spreadsheets were ridiculously complicated to getting to the stage where now it's not just one piece of a workflow that it can help with, like when we're writing content for our programmes, for example, or all of our programmes for those that don't know and there aren't members that are listening to this are iterative and are constantly evolving, so we're constantly.

Speaker 1: 18:07

Every time a new tactic or new technique is working and is the latest, then we feed it in and there's a playbook bill and so our stuff doesn't stand still Prior to using AI to help us with.

Speaker 1: 18:21

With that. That's like a lot of work, because we've got to work out what all those components are, how to write the playbook, how to publish it, how to make it easy for the learner to digest and pick up all the pieces that they need using a trained prompt that can, that can pick up each one of those elements, like, okay, give me this, this and this to be able to break this down for me, and then they break it all down and then now section it into these sections and now this section just makes it so much to do the whole thing from digesting the content of what we need to be able to share, to breaking it down into stages, to be able to then publish it in a way that's easy to learn is, I think, amazing. And then what blows my mind is the people that are kind of next stage of this, you know, using more of the agents and like that is all a little bit new to me.

Speaker 3: 19:23

You've yeah tell us about what you've been doing. So one of the things is so you've got a meeting, like you're going to london in a couple of weeks, and you said, oh, I'm going, you know, I've got this event on be great to do some meetings. And when we've done meetings in London before, like we, we're not um based in London, um, so it's not an area that we really know, but also London is massive and so, and you know, you'll talk to a Londoner and they'll tell you like, oh, do you get from A to B for certain places? It's just like it would take you ages. So I was like, okay, well, I can't. Just normally I would just go into our CRM system, which we use as HubSpot, and search for anyone that we've tagged as London, and then I'd either mass send an email to them and say, oh, we're in the area. But then once what has transpired before is people go well, actually that's like that's so far away from me, um, but there's just hasn't been another way. I can you, you know, work out Even with postcodes. Like, again, people have told me, you know it's very complex how you can get to certain places.

Speaker 3: 20:30

So, anyway, I went to the track GPT and the agent and I just said, look, we've got some time in London, like this is the event location, but we want to do some meetings like either before or after Please can you have a look in our HubSpot and see if we have any companies in that area.

Speaker 3: 20:50

And I was like super specific, like you know, we want to be able to walk there or it needs to be a really short taxi ride. Like we don't, you know, it can't be on the other side of London and like we don't, you know it can't be, um, on the other side of London. Uh, and yeah, it went into our hub spot and took a few minutes, but it came up with all of the people in in there. But then what was funny was I I wasn't specific enough with companies, but it remembered that I had been doing stuff very much to do with search firms, so it just focused on search firms. So when I sent it to you, you were like these are a bit too executive searchy. I want you know, uh people earlier in that journey.

Speaker 3: 21:28

Yeah, yeah exactly I want permanent recruitment people. So I was like, okay. So I literally just copied and pasted what you said to me and said these are a bit exec searchy, um, can you find me people that are like contingent recruitment firms with, that are primarily perm? So off, it went again back into HubSpot, found me more people and then I was like, okay, this is great, but can you have a look outside of HubSpot as well to see if we're we're missing anyone? It did that. Obviously. Chat GPT just likes to like, just go the extra mile and it started qualifying them for me as well and tell me who would be a really good, good fit based on what it's found out, um. And then I asked it like, can you just like um, check that the addresses are correct as well and maybe tell me the, the managing director, like the best person to go and reach out to as well? So it did all of that for me.

Speaker 1: 22:19

All I had to do was log into hubspot for it and it went and did that for me and one of the um things that really there was a couple of things that's really stood out for me this week in my dealings with our um I suppose my network and our membership, our community is. I had a conversation with a very, very experienced, very senior board advisor to the executive search industry, to one of the Shrek firms in particular, but with broad experience across super senior executive search and sits on several boards, and this person's approach, when I asked about the AI how AI was being adopted and approached within these firms was that it didn't fit with their GDPR legislation or restrictions and that senior clients and candidates won't have conversations where note takers are present and that AI is not suitable for retained executive search because senior leaders won't engage with AI in any form or generated content. I mean, I was absolutely staggered. Firstly, and I didn't quite know what to say, I think I just smiled and nodded. But what is your thought on that, either one of you?

Speaker 3: 24:17

Well, it just reminds me of like way back when, when, like people said, the internet wouldn't change anything. You've got to adapt, haven't you right? It's coming or not, you know are you enjoying this so far?

Speaker 1: 24:32

don't miss a single episode. Hit the subscribe button right now so you can be part of the conversation that's shaping the future of recruitment. So we dive really deep into the strategies, the stories and the truth about retained search. So if you want to hear more about it or you know someone else that needs to hear this, then share it with them. Right, let's get back to the good stuff.

Speaker 1: 25:00

Yeah, and the other thing that surprises me about that is because the firms, a lot of the firms that we work with, are smaller. Right, they're boutique from a an executive search perspective. Um in the mastery group are are smaller um search firms, and they are. They are competing and winning against these big executive search firms. That's the first thing to note, right, and the second thing to note is I can't think of an exception to this they are all using AI, probably moderate on to the moderate adoption to high level adoption. In fact, I think that some of them are the most advanced in their adoption of AI through workflows and agents and processes, and it is only enhancing what they do for their clients and their candidates, not breaching legislation or alienating senior leaders in any way.

Speaker 2: 26:09

I totally get why the search firms will push back against AI, because I think it allows smaller, more agile firms to compete in areas where they couldn't previously.

Speaker 1: 26:23

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 26:23

One example of that came up in one of my collab calls the other day. Right In that we know some of these big search firms, the big Shrek firms, right. One of the things that they do that a lot of more boutique firms can't is they'll produce 20, 30 page glossy reports at the end of a search. They can do that.

Speaker 2: 26:43

They can do that because they've got these big research teams and they've got the manpower research grads, yeah, and I don't think that's necessarily needed. I don't think it's always what the customer wants anyway. Right, but now, as long as we're collating the right data during the search which boutique search firms doing a proper job in delivery are playing the data I can produce that report in like 10 minutes yeah, yeah yeah, because all of a sudden we can now compete in those areas too yeah, yeah, I agree.

Speaker 1: 27:14

And also the other reason is I think it's well, it's convenient, it's a convenient narrative, isn't it, to say that, no, this breaches GDPR and we don't use AI because it alienates candidates, and so, therefore, you know, we remain at the forefront, but actually, behind the scenes, their processes and their internal bureaucracy and red policies aren't enabled yet and haven't advanced enough to be able to adopt it as quickly as the smaller firms, and so there's got to be a narrative behind that, hasn't there? So it's convenient to use that with a client and say, you know it's dangerous and okay, that's fine, but actually, the smaller firms have never been in a better position to be able to take market share and to be able to do things that they have previously never been able to do, and I'm excited about that. Like, we go into our Search Mastery event next week and, oh my God, some of the stuff that I know is going to be shared and is going to be talked about on the screen and the cable's going to be going around around the room, I know all day for two days like, oh, show us how you're doing that. Yeah, cool, okay, plug in, right, this is how I'm doing this, you know, from um uh, iterative generation of um scorecard and candidate assessments, from the briefing meeting transcript calls to the objective and unbiased assessment of candidates, from again from the transcripts of calls and then the assessment criterias and pulling in the tactics of all the psychometric and behavioral profiling tools, you know, through to the actual workflows of the search process itself, and, and, and how to streamline that and make it more efficient and more effective so the human can be more involved at the most crucial stages.

Speaker 1: 29:13

Not taking away from the human what we do best, which is reading between the lines and reading emotions and seeing the things that ai doesn't see, but giving us superpowers in that area because we're not bogged down with all the other crap that we've been bogged down with for years. Like all of that, I can't wait to be just advanced, more shared and then advanced more through. You know the group of people that it, that it will be, and I'm excited about the opportunity for smaller businesses to really excel where the bigger businesses are stalling and slowing on it, and so I think it's a fantastic time to be alive. That's what I say yeah, yeah, me too.

Speaker 3: 29:54

I'm sure jordan would agree, because you have to do less and less admin now because of it less and less admin, and Gia has got the perfect milk schedule yeah, and I've got my own personal tennis mindset coach the personal aspects of people.

Speaker 3: 30:11

That is such a great um. You know, someone's always like saying like, oh, I don't know where, I'd use it, like, honestly, get people using it for stuff in their personal life first. So that's how my, my husband got into it, because he 12 months ago was saying to me oh, we don't know about this AI stuff, it's going to take all our jobs and all of this. And I got him on to chat GPT. I just said, look, just have a go. And then he made it become like a personal trainer for him that understands that he's vegan and what he needs to do. And he's given it all his biometrics. And now he's obsessed. I can't get him off chat gbt. You're you're saying with tennis coach, I have a weightlifting coach as well people just don't understand what it can do, isn't it?

Speaker 2: 30:52

so my um, my uncle, was made redundant this week. He's a project manager for a big liverpool based um, like building contractor and he's like 62, right, he's got three years before he retires and he's like in a bit of a bad place because he can't believe he's been very redundant when he's getting close to retirement, right, and I was like he's like he's not done a cv in 30 years.

Speaker 2: 31:13

And I was like listen, when you're back next week, come, I'll sort your cv for you. And he's like are you sure it's gonna take hours?

Speaker 1: 31:19

I'm like, it's not me, it's going to take me about seven minutes yeah, and, and my daughter emily who you both know well because she's, um, spent some time helping out with the behind the scenes of the marketing team and a few other bits and pieces has been constantly chipping away at finding her ideal career, as you do when you're 18, you know you feel like you feel under such pressure, don't you, to find your thing. You know I think it's so hard, isn't it for teenagers today? Anyway, um, and she's just been constantly looking, looking. She found this. She's been applying to jobs in equine nutrition because that's the kind of field that she wants to be something, something horsey, but she also also she likes sales marketing. She's quite commercial as well like she's got that from me.

Speaker 1: 32:05

She does like money.

Speaker 2: 32:06

Let's just say that yeah um, if you want to be into horses yeah, exactly totally, totally yeah totally and.

Speaker 1: 32:18

And so I said well, when you get time, why don't we sit down and I'll just, we'll see if I can help you, because surely to god I can help, but we should be doing it all on the road. So we sat down, I said and I'm applying for these jobs, right, tell me, show me your application, show me the CV. And I'm looking at thinking there's massive room for improvement. Cv's not tailored to the job description, to the advert, the cover letter's not tailored enough. You've done so much more than you think you have here and you've got so much more you can talk about. So, straight away, set up a custom gpt. You're going to be emily's job application assistant. Ask emily all the questions you need to know to build the best profile to suit, firstly, as an example, this position, right. And then from now on, I want you to build me a custom gpt that will become that for Emily for every single job that she sees. And we did, and it just started asking questions Tell me about what you did at school, tell me what results you got.

Speaker 1: 33:10

Tell me what you did after school. Did you work while you were at school? And it just it built the CV from scratch, right. And then it said what tools did you use and what CRM system are you using? And it pulled every single thing out. And then the CV was perfect. And then, okay, here's the job. And then it tailored the CVs perfectly to the job and now she's got that forever on her desktop. She got the job, she got. She got what is the perfect start. E-commerce administrator for a retailer of equine equipment it's like happy days and she gets loads of free shit, which she's well happy with.

Speaker 1: 33:43

Um, yeah, so that all the personal stuff can be.

Speaker 2: 33:46

She can't be horsing around in that job.

Speaker 1: 33:51

Sorry, sorry, it makes me think like I want every teenager in the world to have that. You know, I want every teenager to have like their own assistant to help them pull out their experiences and tailor their application every time.

Speaker 3: 34:03

Isn't that interesting as well? Because it's not. We've not lied about anything like it's literally asked Emily questions and she's just answered those questions. Because, if you think that is, sometimes when you write a CV like one, you forget some of the things and, like also, it depends on people's mentality, but some people are really super confident and will talk about everything that they've done and other people aren't, and so you know it comes across in the way we write sometimes.

Speaker 1: 34:29

So the fact that, like this, takes the stuff that Emily knows about, has had experience with, and puts it together, she totally missed out a section where, all the way through school, all the way through GCSE, she's worked on a livery yard at the weekends and been paid to look after. Ok, what were you doing and were you advising on turning out and turning in? And then were you reporting back on the behavior? And she's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like, oh, my God, there's a whole section of two years of experience of advising, reporting back, of using equipment that wasn't even on there before, but it's there. We just weren't talking about it. And you think how many people apply for a job that I've either missed out or overlooked, especially if you're like george said, you're in a redundancy situation and you're not really you're not your best self you're not putting yourself forward because you're feeling on the back foot.

Speaker 1: 35:21

So you know when you take those things and apply it to your business. I read the um ai leadership by jeff woods while I was on holiday and the way that it helps you to do a strategic review on your business. Well, you guys, we've been talking about it on our leadership meetings and you're like oh my god that's good. This retained readiness order is just genius, and we're building that at the moment for you, by the way, those of you listening that don't know.

Speaker 2: 35:50

Oh, that's your idea.

Speaker 1: 35:50

Yeah, of course, um back to jeff, was ai leadership excellent book. Um ask gets you answer one question at a time and it basically takes you through a full strategic review of your business, identifies the weaknesses, the strengths, the gaps, and suggests how to improve your strategy moving forward. It's such a simple thing, but if you didn't know how to do that, you wouldn't do it, and it's literally there at your fingertips waiting for you to explore. So I guess um to close out today, what would be um, if it's, if it's something that I think the vast majority of people are in the kind of middle ground of they're using chat, gpt, a little bit like a search engine or um, you know, asking it questions, or polish this email or um, create me a bit of content and what would be your tips for advancing to the next stage? Uh, I've got to ask you, sarah, as our tech savvy specialist uh, well, a couple of things really.

Speaker 3: 36:54

So if we're just focusing on getting a tool like chat gbc or cloth co-p whatever to create us the results that we want, with not too much back and forth, like the first thing would be the import, like making sure that we import stuff, but also just really simply like if you know what you want to achieve but you don't know how to do it, just ask chatGPC achieve, but you don't know how to do it, just ask chat gpc.

Speaker 3: 37:24

Chat gpc is the best person to ask in this situation. Like, if you know the end goal for example, you know, with georgia and finding qualified prospects, you know he could say to it look, I want to find 10 companies to um to reach out to, who are relevant to my target audience. Please can you ask me some questions and can you guide me on how I'll better do this? And that's where it will start asking you the questions just to make sure that it fills in the gaps properly. And then it will go and go and do it or say let's create a custom gpt. And again, uh, I can't remember who told me that, but, um, I think it was larry larry hernandez, who helps me a lot with AI stuff, Like he's an absolute genius with it as well. He was saying he has a custom GPT to create custom GPTs.

Speaker 1: 38:08

Yes, I love that.

Speaker 3: 38:10

I was like that's amazing.

Speaker 1: 38:11

I love that.

Speaker 3: 38:13

I love custom GPTs because they do cut out a lot of the legwork. But I was like it just takes a bit of time to set them up though, doesn't it? Because you do have to input stuff and, you know, give it all of this stuff. And he was like, yeah, but I've got a custom GPC to help me create custom GPCs. I was like, of course you do so. That is one thing, and then the other thing is I've had a couple of people, or a few people, say to me like it just doesn't sound like me and like, and like when I use it, like to create content, it just starts like going like it just yeah, it doesn't sound like me. I.

Speaker 3: 38:46

The best thing to do, or what's worked really well for me and other members is, if you know what you want to write about or an email or you've got a topic, say you've just come off a call with someone and it would spark a really good idea. Just get on loom or get on zoom, record yourself just talking about that thing for about five minutes. Like, um, you know, just had this call with this person and it brought up a really good point about this and like it made me think about this and just just talk about it how you would, and then stop that recording. Take the transcript, which is super easy if you use something like loom, get that transcript, pop it into chat, gpt, and just say um, this is a brain dump from me. Um, please can you help me create an email, a linkedin post, whatever it is that you want to do?

Speaker 3: 39:32

Um, and I want it to sound how I sound great, and it just makes it sound so much like you, and the more you do that, the more it'll get that naturally, um, but I have found, like you can't and you, you can speak into track gbc as well, like that's. You know that's an option as as well, so don't feel, oh, it was, you did make me laugh. So I saw george the other day and he he was watching me just put something into track to you to say he goes. I didn't realize that you could just keep all the typos in, like.

Speaker 2: 40:07

I spend going off typo. Need to change that like if it'll do deep research for you, it'll figure out your type.

Speaker 1: 40:14

I think it'll work.

Speaker 3: 40:15

It works out, what you're trying to say so don't worry about like yeah, don't worry about like having it perfect or like you know what I do. Quite a lot of the time I've checked up to here is like I just I use it on my phone and just like microphone and then talk and tell it what I want to know.

Speaker 1: 40:34

Um, yeah, so, yes, such good tips, such good tips. Uh, enjoy everyone. Hope today's been helpful and thank you very much, george. As always, sarah joy, a delight to have you on. Uh, please save up all your tips and share them with us on our next episode that you're with us we're going to see all of you on thursday oh yeah, should we put a link in the show notes link?

Speaker 1: 41:01

in the comments to join the BDAI session on Thursday, the 18th. Don't miss it. Well, that's another episode of Retrained Search the podcast in the bag. Thanks for listening to our wild tales, linkedin controversies and our top tips on how to sell and deliver retained search. Get involved in our next episode. Send in your questions and share your experiences with us by emailing podcast at retrainedsearchcom. And don't be shy. Connect with us on LinkedIn and come and say hi, we don't bite, unless you're a Shrek firm, that is.

Speaker 1: 41:40

We want to say a special thank you to our retrained members for sharing what's working for them right now and innovating new ways to grow and evolve. It's an incredible community. If you're wondering what exactly we mean when we mention our communities, well, we have two separate programs. Our search foundations program is for recruiters who want to learn how to sell and deliver retained search solutions consistently, and we have our Search Mastery program. That's for business leaders or owners already at 50% retained or more and looking to scale and grow and structure their search firm. We cap memberships to these programs to protect the integrity of the community. If you want access, just talk to us. Okay, thanks for listening. We'll be back very soon with another episode of Retrain Search the podcast.