The Rusty George Podcast

0:00:00 - Rusty George
That's perfect. All right, man, I'm gonna pray for us and we'll get going. God, thank you for William, the many ways that he and his company serve and bless the kingdom of God and church. I thank you for what they do, for your blessing on their team and his family and leadership and health and All things. A prayer conversation goes well and this book really goes to bless a lot of people and pray all this of your name. Amen. Okay, brother, I'm gonna hit record. We're off and running that about right. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, William Vanderbloemen, you are back with us again. Thank you, it's been a while, so catch our listeners up to who you are and what you've been doing.

0:00:44 - William Vanderbloemen
Yeah, so I live in Houston. Thanks for having me back on. Um, I Get this question a lot. That actually is real. That's our backdrop. I'm a big guy and the office here in Houston and oh, where we have been part of a work, where we're an executive search firm, we started out helping churches find their pastor or, if you're a larger church like you guys, your student pastor or your Associate pastor. That's where they we then ventured out into helping Faith-based schools find their headmaster or president or that sort of thing. Large nonprofits Find their CEO, cfo, coo, that sort of thing. So it's a lot of fun and in the middle of that, you and I've had conversations. You guys have an awesome ministry over the years and Since the pandemic, when I learned something really interesting Rusty I didn't go to business school.

I got a Philosophy and religion degree over there and a seminary degree. So usually People with a philosophy degree spend their career saying do you want fries with that? Oh, so. So the business discovery from the pandemic Was if all of your clients churches and schools have to close indefinitely, it's gonna change the way your day looks, yeah absolutely so we did a lot of research and that we did a lot of serving churches during the pandemic, but we also started to drop back.

So we've been doing this while 15 years now. If you're, if you're one of the very top candidates in a search we're doing, you're gonna Work your way down through several rounds of virtual interviews and then get a final face-to-face interview. We've now done 30,000 of those final face-to-face interviews. It's amazing what compound interest can do so. We, since we're sitting around, we're like I Wonder if we could figure out who the best of those 30,000 are. Like did they get the job? Did they stay in the job? Or they flourishing? And so we figured that out.

And then we said I wonder if those people have anything in common. You know the best of it. Like you've walked in a room before at a church event. You see the, the woman or man that everyone is magnetized toward and drawn toward. You want to go find that person to be a volunteer, key ministry right, like, what is it that causes those people to stand out in the crowd and and Do the best interviews we ever do? Have some common traits? And the answer was yes, and it was super cool. The answer was yes, and the things they had in common were not they're all 175 IQ. It was not they're all six feet tall and have amazing hair and teeth, or they. They all went to Ivy League schools. It was 12 simple habits that these people had in common that are not common among the regular, regular interviews we do and and there's.

They're super teachable and trainable. And Research project turned into a book where we're like you know what? We've been paid for years to go find someone's next unicorn. Now I think we can teach you how to become one, so I'll get a book coming out. It's a lot of fun Is.

0:04:06 - Rusty George
Is that teachable, William? Because you know you've been doing this long enough? You know there's some traits you're like you either got it or you don't.

0:04:13 - William Vanderbloemen
Yes, it's a good question. I think some come more naturally than others. Okay, individuals you know one Trait. It's hilarious thing to me at 30,000 interviews, we distilled these 12 habits. One of them was just Responsiveness. Just get back to people, right. You are always so good to get right back to me. That's very uncommon, and if you look at like People who pay loads and loads of money to have marketing leads come in and how long it takes them to actually Follow up with a marketing lead, it's it's staggering how slow people are to respond. So we we surveyed quarter million people about these 12 traits as a second stage to our Research and we asked you know, how do you feel like you're doing in each of these categories through various and sundry questions, which, by the way, is going to be a really cool Self 360 and team 360 tool that'll be launching with the book in November but, anyway, quarter million people.

Would you grade yourself as responsive or not responsive? And, like 81% of everybody, said they were more responsive than average. So that's kind of funny, right.

So, the thing is they weren't fast at all. So we had we partnered with SurveyMonkey for the big, you know study, right, and so we asked them like, hey, what do you guys do this a lot? What's a fast response time? And they're like all the fast responders are always going to get to you within the first three days. Right, you'll get some people after that, but the first three days are your first responders and, and you can stretch it out, or so we went and looked at our a quarter million people we surveyed. The average response time was six days. Oh my.

And 80% of them thought they were better. So is it teachable? I don't know. I can lead a horse to water Right. I can show you how to drink, but it's not. It's Rusty. It's not like here's how you slam dunk like Michael Jordan. No, it's something everyone can do. Will you have the willpower to actually do it? That's a different question. The stats would say no, you don't, but we think that we've put together a resource that shows people how to get better, how to measure how they're getting better and eventually stand out in the crowd.

0:06:37 - Rusty George
Before we get into these traits, which I want to walk through some of them, did you find that some of these came easier for various age groups or generations? Because you talk about response rate, I think man response rate of my generation, gen X, the greatest generation, is a lot different than the response rate of my kids, who will leave you, as I say, leave you on red on the text message for days. So was there a difference?

0:07:06 - William Vanderbloemen
Yeah, and then there's the whole, the ones that'll dot, dot, dot you on the text, and then it goes away, it goes away.

You're sitting there waiting on the dot dot dot. You know that is going to be a great thing for us to study as we continue to build out the tool. What we're trying to identify rather selfishly, is what, of these 12 habits, what should the very best campus pastor have as their top four? Okay, that's great. And then can we start to group hundreds of thousands of candidates we have and show kind of like a string finders. You know, like on the string finders you probably, as your chief accounting officer, you don't want creativity, right.

0:07:50 - Rusty George
Right, so that gets a bit in jail.

0:07:54 - William Vanderbloemen
Yeah, we tried that here in Houston. It was called Enron.

0:07:58 - Rusty George
The crooked E I remember.

0:08:01 - William Vanderbloemen
So so we're looking right now at you know, if you're building, if you need a campus pastor and I know your model is your model, is it live teaching or is it more general management I can probably start to see well, they need to have these gifts, and then we'll be able to run reports on where the people with those top five gifts are. It's getting pretty cool. It'd be great to slice into demographics as well. I have not noticed anything that would tell my gut that there's some that are better than others at the at the different 12 gifts, generationally.

0:08:37 - Rusty George
That's great. Okay, so the book is called Be the Unicorn, which you know. The term unicorn has been used for a while as somebody who's, just you know, hard to describe, hard to compare to, hard to become. I've heard about it in sports. A lot, but great title for the book. So what are these 12 traits? Just give us a few of them that came up.

0:09:02 - William Vanderbloemen
Well, we talked about responsiveness and that would be, you know, one of the the telltale signs like we're doing a search right, and we do a search for real life or for life church or some awesome church. That ought to be wow, I'm amazed they're interested in me. If I reach out to you to say, would you be willing to have a conversation? If I don't hear back from you pretty quickly, not good. If I hear back from you quickly and there's some boundaries around it, that's awesome. If I hear back from you just straight up, quickly, that's awesome too. But I want to, I want to learn more. You know another. Another one that people could take home and work on right now is self-awareness. So what does that mean? Well, like in a job interview, you know it, particularly with pastors you say, tell me about yourself, or you know telling your journey or whatever, and all of a sudden you're now. I, oh, I'm going to say some things that are bad, Rusty.

I already know what you're going to say this is good, I'm now sitting at your camp about your decision to follow Jesus when you were 12, and then what you did wrong when you were 13. And then, and that's all fine and well, right, but we're not in a pastoral counseling session, we're in an interview. So how do you separate yourself from the best right? You say, oh, Rusty, your church is growing so fast. And you know, like I'm guessing that whole thing in your job descriptions there's that line that says other duties as necessary.

You know I tell you about myself. I'm learning, I'm a mess, I'm a work in progress, but I am fundamentally extroverted. I'm fundamentally a seven on the Enneagram. I'm fundamentally interested in things where I have to sell an idea. So you're interviewing me for this marketing position and what makes me excited is that it's probably something new every day. And let me tell you five ways that played out my old job, where I do something new every day. It made my compliance buddy crazy, but I loved it and that's why I think you know, as we're talking, I'm not just looking for a job, I'm looking for a match and what I'm learning about myself and what I'm hearing you say you need, I think there's a potential match there.

0:11:20 - Rusty George
OK, so right there, that was a master class in how to interview. You separated yourself from everybody else, you compared yourself to somebody else and you told us so much about yourself in that just a couple of minutes. Yeah, we pastors are not known for our brevity, and that was perfect.

0:11:40 - William Vanderbloemen
Well, it's no knock on your faith story. I want to hear that, but can you show me that you're self-aware? It also you know what it really does is. It might even prevent the terrible interview question of tell me your greatest weakness and blah, blah, blah.

And that's why I work too many hours and I never ask for a raise and blah, blah, no, no, no. If you can say oh my gosh, yes, I'm a 7. I'm an introvert, total extrovert. I would love something new every day. If you were asking me to do board governance documents or manage people's expense reports, you would fire me so fast. I can do detail work if I have to, but that's not where my energy goes, it's not where I'm wired up. So this self-awareness piece can save you a lot of headache.

0:12:36 - Rusty George
That's really good. Ok, so self-aware, responsive. What else do you have there?

0:12:41 - William Vanderbloemen
Oh, I can't tell you all. 12, Rusty oh.

0:12:45 - Rusty George
I know, I know I'm not asking for all 12.

0:12:49 - William Vanderbloemen
This one's going to come naturally to a lot of your audience. But we interview people that are pastors and non-pastors and the people who stand out the most and this might go back to self-awareness have some deep sense of call in them and not just I'm called to serve the church. But like Rusty, I sold newspapers as a kid. I grew my route, I bought out other routes. I was kind of this entrepreneur sales guy and I thought growing up church was just kind of keeping the aquarium and I never really got that part where Jesus said no, I want you to go fish, I don't want you to keep the aquarium. And when that light bulb went off in my head that I can be an entrepreneur for Jesus. You want me to do evangelism and teaching pastor Like I will sell Jesus and what do you? You can call it eternal fire insurance all day long. I love it and it matches up with who I am and my sense of the gift Scott's given me here.

0:13:47 - Rusty George
Oh, that's really good. Okay, so that's some great ones. You've got 12 in the book. You're going to have resources that go along with it that allow you to be tested right and be able to learn about your team and yourself. This would be a great exercise for teams to go through. Is it only faith-based, or businesses can use it as well.

0:14:07 - William Vanderbloemen
No, not at all. We spread the. We started, of course, with our interviews, which would be faith-based, right. So you know, our first sample size showed a heavy skew toward people who were purpose-driven and that's probably true within our more so than the guy who's running a car wash or whatever thing it is that he's just doing because he's doing it. But when we spread out to the quarter million people that we surveyed, it went way broader than that.

I do think that you know what I didn't realize until we started studying this is a God timed book that it has never been harder to stand out in the crowd. I mean, it's noisier than ever. Everyone's on social media and has a platform. There are, for the first time in the United States history, there are five generations in the workplace Five and they speak very different languages, as we all know, but it's that much more crowded. The economy's doing some wobbly things, it's that and we've got another generation in the workforce coming up called the machines.

So, like, as AI rises. Right, how do you do? Every one of these 12 habits is not something AI can do. I mean, maybe they can respond quicker than us, but, like a lot of, it's just human soft skills and what's staggering to me is how common these habits were among the best of the best, how easily attainable they are. It's not like drop 50 pounds, you know, and quit smoking tomorrow, and then how uncommon they are in the population. So I'm hopeful that what we found is kind of a roadmap for people to be able to, without you know having to break their own back, just adopt some simple habits that will help them stand out in the crowd.

0:15:55 - Rusty George
That's really good. You mentioned AI. That seems to be a popular thing to talk about right now because it is coming. We all saw it would come in the Terminator, so we know how this ends. Yes, but you say it's not the coming apocalypse. So is a chance for us to evolve? Is that for us just to go back to our soft skills set and kind of develop those a little bit better?

0:16:14 - William Vanderbloemen
I think so. You know, I'm certainly seeing in impastoral circles like what is the? What's the profile of a super effective pastor post pandemic? And if there's anything that people were missing during the lockdown, it was human interaction, right? Like first curse in the Bible, god says it is not good that you be left alone, right? So pastors that can smell like the sheep, pastors that are willing to get in and among the people, that's gonna be super high premium or high effectiveness and all of that's around soft skills. And if you think about human history, our workforce has always had technological advancement, reshuffling of what jobs go where. I think that'll happen again. It's gonna happen maybe more severely than ever and it's probably worth.

If you're applying to college, it's probably worth not majoring in accounting or some of the things that really are gonna go away and focus on the things that only you can do as a human. I was talking, Rusty, with the chief of staff for Google, who she's in charge of all their AI stuff, and this was in the springtime, so a lifetime ago now and I said I was in a room. It was about 25 coders in me and everybody was asking coding questions about AI. So finally she looked at me. You have a question, so I don't code. I do have teenagers, though. What would you tell me I should tell them not to major in college? And she wouldn't answer me directly. She said I tell you what they should major in liberal arts. They should major in human to human skills.

0:17:57 - Rusty George
Wow, that's really interesting. We had a counselor come in to our church and do kind of a parent workshop post COVID, and he predicted he said you remember the days we went to school and we had a home act? Our kids and the next generation will have skill sets on just how to interact with people, because they haven't learned that, whether it's they're on their phones or whatever. But COVID kind of shut it all down. It really is kind of returning to that, don't you think?

0:18:28 - William Vanderbloemen
I think that's right. I think that's right and I can't tell you how many times the search comes down to candidates and the guy who gets the job, or a woman is the one who gets along better with others. Like it's kind of great commandment sort of stuff. Like love Lord, love your neighbors yourself, you'll stand out in the crowd.

0:18:53 - Rusty George
Boy, no kidding. Okay, so let's flip the script here a little bit. I'm somebody hiring somebody Sure. How do I ask better questions, and what are questions that can kind of reveal some of these traits that I should be looking for, rather than just you?

0:19:09 - William Vanderbloemen
know. So I think what one of the traits that we noticed, one of the 12 habits, is this insatiable curiosity, constant learning right, we could spend a whole podcast talking about that. But what I'm finding in my interview so I don't do a whole lot of searches anymore I'm kind of a represent the company, write books. I do these sorts of things. If I'm doing a search it's for a long time, friend, or you know, I'm doing kind of the final touches, and so a candidate's been through lots of interviews before they get to me, and not because I'm special, but because I've got better consultants than me at this now. And so what do I do you know? Do I say, Rusty, I know you've already told five people on our team about your night at camp when you were 13. You don't have to do that on this call. You're welcome to. But what I found and I stumbled into it, Rusty was I found, like you know, what might be a way we could spend our time that would help us both is why don't I just answer questions for you?

I mean I you know, ask me. You're not gonna offend me, I'm not your future board member or boss. Just what do you want to know and I'll tell you. I mean, like my job is to make sure you don't walk down the aisle with Rachel and wake up next to Leah, right? So what can I answer? That would be real and you know that. Just, I learned more about a candidate based on the caliber of questions they ask, then maybe anything else in the interview now.

So I guess if you're interviewing, I might encourage you to ask more.

Let them ask you more and and not be so worried about a script, right, and, of course, just a simple interviewing. I mean, probably all your folks know this already, but it's a long time saying in hiring that that the single best predictor of future performance is past performance, which can make you wonder about Jesus taste in brides, but that's a whole nother podcast. But if you're interviewing and somebody's telling you what they would do and how they're gonna do this and they're gonna do that, that's all fine and well. But if you remember when I talked about self-awareness and Rusty, I love this job because it speaks to what I'm learning about myself and let me show you where I did that in four other jobs before. Show me some past performance that will indicate, and let me trust, in your future performance. So I would want to explore the curiosity and I'd want to make sure that the answers they're giving me are about concrete things that have been accomplished you mentioned something just in your scenario there, the four jobs previous.

0:21:59 - Rusty George
There are some situations where a guy has moved around a lot and it could just be it wasn't a good fit, didn't feel right there. You know, he's kind of got an apostolic gift and sets things up and moves on, but it to somebody hiring it looks like this person may have a yeah, it might be a flight risk. How do you express that? That I'm, you can trust me, I'm not gonna bail, but I have left a lot of other jobs. How do you?

0:22:24 - William Vanderbloemen
communicate that. How do you look for that? I think no matter how long somebody stayed at our job, one of the best things you can lean into is their transitions like why did they happen? You know?

interesting and and how real will the candidate be with you about? You know how many times, in the tens of thousands of interviews I've done, how many times somebody told me yeah, I screwed up and I got fired like maybe 10, maybe 10, like it's like you're in the Garden of Eden. So tell me why you left the job. Well, you know that woman, the one you gave me. She made no, it was the snake, the one that you made that like right.

Tell me about your transitions and and I try and reassure people and say and this is, this is pretty good if you're in a church, hey, listen, moving around is not bad. If by my read Jesus friends, not his enemies. His friends were forever getting mad at him for saying we got to move on. He was always going from town to town and village. They didn't know where he was. A couple times we lose him. Where is he gone? He's off somewhere, you know. So Jesus himself moved around and for most of Christendom, pastors moved around back Paul's day, nephesis, three years, that was a long time. So I'm not worried that you've moved around. I just want to hear about these transitions and and there can be no good. I made this big promise to myself. When I started this work, Rusty, I said Lord, I'm never gonna take a church a candidate that's currently unemployed.

And God's just been laughing at me for 15 years since then sometimes, you know, sometimes, pastors really do sense, a completion and in obedience they leave their job with nothing in hand, which makes no sense in the world. But sometimes pastors don't make sense, right? So I right, on the one hand, yeah, you want to look for why is? Why are there so many changes here? And then try and understand the life circumstances behind that. I tell people you know the best hirers, I know who don't use an outside firm bad about 600, and I think it's probably true for picking jobs too. Sometimes you just don't pick the right one. You didn't pray through it the right way, or it was God's call for somewhere for a short period of time. But I'm looking for patterns. You know singular instances. That's fine. But is there a power in the pattern here, is it? Oh, all five of those last five jobs you had a bad manager.

0:24:58 - Rusty George
Hmm, you know it was all their fault. Oh, that's good. Let me ask you this you mentioned the zoom call, which is obviously, you know, revolutionized everything, but are there things that you can't pick up on until you're in the room with the person, where the person? You really ought to make sure, before you say yes to the job or or hire somebody, that you get a face-to-face with that person well, I used to answer this a little more stridently.

0:25:30 - William Vanderbloemen
I think you know the pandemic has taught us that the technology really can help. Some, like goodness, gracious to you do really have to drive up to the church for the personnel committee meeting anymore. That seems stupid. We all worked, you know like.

On the other hand, I think that if, if tech were all it's cracked up to be, why didn't Jesus just zoom all this in? You know why bother coming here? I mean, really, I'm serious Like we're told in the fullness of time, born of a woman, born under the law, right, it's Paul's letters to the Galatians. Did Jesus not know the internet was coming? Like, oh dang, I wish we would have waited. We could have saved a lot of time and energy, right? No, I just think the whole message of Jesus is God with us and I think that first curse in the Bible of us not being needed to be left alone I don't think virtual can replace Now I have softened my understanding of that a little bit Hybrid can work.

I also think the type of work you're interviewing for probably should tell you something about how much of it can be done online. Are you going to be an online campus pastor. Well, that might be fine, virtually right. Are you going to be pastor of pastoral care? Probably not going to be a Zoom job for you, you know. So what kind of work are you interviewing for? And that can either make you want to get in the room more or less, and then, at the end of the day, I just don't think it's a full replacement.

0:27:14 - Rusty George
That's really good. Okay, so for church jobs, the best question well, not best, but the most common question people ask a potential pastor is tell me about your relationship with Jesus. So I'm sure you've heard some dandies of you know very flowery type of comments. As a candidate, how do you explain that? That's so personal? But so I mean, obviously you want to know. So if I'm interviewing somebody, what do I look for, and if I'm being interviewed, what do I say, so that I express it in honesty but also don't try to come off, as you know, mother Teresa.

0:27:53 - William Vanderbloemen
Well. So if you're doing the interview, first thing, first remember what you're interviewing for, okay. So if you're interviewing for a pastor over small groups, right, you say, tell me about your relationship with Jesus. You probably want to hear pretty heartwarming or pastoral care. You probably want to hear a relational. If you're interviewing for your bookkeeper, I did like and this happened not long ago CFO search and they started by talking about how their faith has been shifting and they went through a long testimony on them. Now they're counseling over it and all that and I'm like I really just need the books done. You know, like sorry for all the finance people I just made mad, but like, as you're interviewing, don't use the same measuring stick for every job because they're all different, right, and as you are being interviewed.

I don't know if your mother ever told you hey, you know, lay out all the clothes you're going to take on that trip and then put half of them back away. And you're only taking half of them with you. That's probably pretty good. I can't find any super long testimonies in the Bible. Even Paul kept it pretty short, right. So even if you read all of Stephen's testimony before they stoned him, it's like three minutes.

0:29:18 - Rusty George
So you know and that's why they stoned him, because it was that long.

0:29:24 - William Vanderbloemen
Yeah, and I would also just throw in there there's such a balance. It used to be had to show you were bulletproof. Right Now we're in an age where everybody's got to show just how wounded and they are and what trauma they've been through and all that. I know that's all very real, but there's got to be a third bullet point. You cannot come out of there looking like you have made yourself into a saint with a plate behind your head, right. You cannot come out of there sounding like a victim or a project, because that is not why you're in an interview.

0:29:56 - Rusty George
A third bowl of porridge. I love that Be a unicorn and third bowl of porridge I'm taking away from this. William, this is fantastic. I love your last book on culture and I cannot wait to dive into this Be a unicorn book. I think it's going to help out a lot of people. I think it's going to help out a lot of churches. A lot of people are pretty transient in their job right now. I'm even thinking about this book for my kids. Hey, this is the way that you stand out when you're applying for jobs. The marketplace is different and people are looking for different things. This will be really helpful for a lot of people. Thank you, thanks for being on the show again and thanks for all you're doing for the kingdom and for the church. It's just a blessing of a lot of people.

0:30:41 - William Vanderbloemen
Thanks, Rusty. I really appreciate you having me, and God bless you in all the work that you're doing. Thank you, buddy.