Leading 3,500 Recruiters: A Masterclass on Navigating Change With Admiral Jim Waters

Benjamin Mena [00:00:00]:
Coming up on this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:00:03]:
Navy recruiting is really the one command in the United States Navy that if it doesn't do its job, eventually there is no Navy. Because of the normal natural process of people leaving, you end up bleeding to death if you don't bring enough new blood in when you join the Navy, we're making generational change in many of these young people's lives. Welcome to the Elite Recruiter Podcast with your host, Benjamin Mena, where we focus on what it takes to win in the recruiting game. We cover it all from sales, marketing, mindset, money, leadership, and placements.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:47]:
I am so excited about this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast because we're going to talk about large organizational change. And when I'm talking about a large organization, I'm not talking about like five to 10 recruiters. I'm talking about over 3,000 recruiters. And the entire organization had to make a change, had to adapt in the changing world. We're going to talk about some of the things that the team had to focus on, everything from activity, but most importantly, the cultural changes. Because if this recruiting team does not fulfill their mission, it is a national security issue and lives are at risk. So guess what? The recruiting has to get done. And that's why I'm so excited to have Admiral Jim Waters sharing on the Elite Recruiter Podcast about some of the things that they're doing.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:38]:
And I know many times a talent acquisition, we're agency recruiters. But here's the awesome part. Elite recruiters are in every recruiting chair, including the military. So welcome to the podcast, Jim.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:01:50]:
Hey, thanks, Benjamin. It's great to be here. I'm excited about the conversation.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:54]:
I am so excited that Scott Love got us connected. But before we start doing a deep dive on how you ended up and all these things that we're going to talk about, quick introduction from yourself because I feel like you could do a much better one than I can.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:02:07]:
Yeah, thanks. I am a career submarine officer, nuclear power trained. I've served on four submarines throughout my career. Submarine squadrons operated all over the world. So my first 25 years of my career has been all submarines all the time. And as I progressed past that, I did a number of jobs for the Navy, moving into the flag rank or admiral rank. I did some work in personnel policy, understood the dynamics of how the people business works within the Navy, and then from there transitioned in March of 2024 to be commander of Navy Recruiting Command. Navy Recruiting Command has been around a long time, but my part of it has been just under a year now.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:02:58]:
In my previous job in personnel policy, Recruiting command responded to some of the policy decisions that were being made in the area that I worked and in some of the things that we did from there. But recruiting itself is a relatively new endeavor for me personally, and that's not atypical of how Navy works in the flag ranks. We are put in places where leadership is needed without necessarily having extensive technical background in that particular mission.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:34]:
Yeah. That's awesome. And real quick, I am very fond of the submarine world. I have many memories of Tiger cruises and the emergency dives and emergency blows. My dad was actually a submariner for 24 years.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:03:44]:
That's awesome. Yeah. So we have that in common.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:48]:
Well, okay, so for the listeners out there, let's give a quick picture of the organization. How many recruiters and how many personnel are under the recruiting command?

Admiral Jim Waters [00:03:57]:
Yeah. So there's a total of about 3,500 recruiters actively recruiting new sailors into the Navy. Supporting them are about 900 career recruiters. And these are folks that were successful as those frontline recruiters. And those frontline recruiters are sailors that came from an initial sea tour and then were trained and became recruiters. The successful ones can then transition to be career recruiters. And they guide the weapon system. The weapon system being the recruiter, the line recruiter, looking at markets and conversion rates and all those things that professional recruiters really understand.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:04:39]:
And then the total organization headquarters organization is about 6,000 people. There's a headquarters here in Millington, Tennessee. I have three regions, two that support active component recruiting for the most part, each with 13. So a total of 26 districts, which we call Navy Talent Acquisition Groups. And then the third region focuses on prior service reserve recruiting.

Benjamin Mena [00:05:04]:
Oh, wow. And for those that's listening, how important is it for the recruiter to get their job done?

Admiral Jim Waters [00:05:12]:
Yeah. So the strategic impact is enormous. The aggregation of each individual recruiter's work ensures that the Navy is continuously manned. And what I think is really important for viewers or listeners to understand is the Navy, which defends America from afar. Right. These are the same folks that are tangling with the Houthis in the Red Sea. They're, you know, shooting down Iranian missiles from the eastern Mediterranean. They're patrolling the South China Sea.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:05:46]:
This all volunteer force Navy has a normal and natural process where people leave every year. Right. So people retire, people finish their initial obligation. And for us, that means that we have to hire somewhere between 50 and 60,000 people a year to keep the natural flow going. And you might Think, well, that seems like a whole heck of a lot. Well, first of all, it is, but if everybody stayed, then the force gets older each year and no one advances. Right. Because we fill our billets based on the need.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:06:25]:
And so it is a normal and natural process. And so recruiting will always have a relatively high flow rate in any service. Navy is just the one that I know and love the most.

Benjamin Mena [00:06:39]:
Well, and for those that are listening, you know, I work around govcon close to DC so I know watch the news, see what's happening. What kind of struggles has military recruiting commands been dealing with over the past few years?

Admiral Jim Waters [00:06:53]:
Yeah, that's a great question. You know, it's been in the news, our military recruiting challenges. I would say the core issues come down to, you know, a change in the environment that we did not respond to with the agility necessary to keep up. And I'll highlight a few of the things from the key things from that environmental change. The job market's really good, right. Basically, if you want a job in the United States, you can get a job, right? And so there's not the easy, I'm going to join the military because I just can't find a job. And frankly, we don't really want that to be the reason people go in the military. And at the same time, civilian companies, civilian recruiters have adapted many of our most impactful incentives.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:07:43]:
So now in retail and fast food you see signing bonuses, you see health care, you see college, you know, degrees being able to be gotten through time in those, in those jobs. And when a young person, an 18 year old, is looking at a $3,000 signing bonus with little to no commitment in retail and compares that with a $35,000 signing bonus and a five year commitment with the Navy, for them that can be a tough decision, right. With a few more years, it becomes a much more obvious decision, I think. So we have those two things. We also had Covid and we actually were fairly successful through Covid in adapting to recruiting in a sort of a separated environment. But the thing that I would highlight that changed the environment for us is that the major impacts of COVID lasted about three years. The tour length of our line recruiters is about three years. So we have an apprentice journeyman sort of way of learning.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:08:47]:
So we essentially lost a generation of the pre Covid way, right? The kneecap to kneecap conversation at the kitchen table with a young person and their mom and dad, right? The types of things necessary to get into the schools and have those conversations, we lost that. And then the Other thing is a much more long term issue that's been building over decades and that is the American medical community has moved to much more readily diagnose and treat with medication, mental health issues in the United States. When that is combined with the institution of our electronic health record system, which split off In April of 2022, we now are able to see all of that and have to wrangle with decisions on accepting the risk of somebody with diagnosed mental health issues, which tends to be the hardest area for us to navigate through. So that start of Genesis in 22 isn't necessarily bad. It gives us more information about the risk we might be assuming in an individual. Because prior to Genesis, the majority of what we knew about a person's medical history was what they self reported and then what was revealed in the medical exam at the entrance examination at what are known as MEPs, the Military Entrance processing stations that everybody has to go through to get into the military. And then when Genesis came on and the advent of the electronic health record, which has been going on for, for, you know, more than a decade, with our target demographic of 18 to 24 year olds, we can see every encounter with a clinician that a young person has had throughout their life. So you can imagine the change in volume of what we've had to look at.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:10:47]:
So when you combine all of those things with a relatively plastic, if you will, non agile response. And we had been fairly successful with recruiting up through about 2020. So we had allowed some of our recruiting recruiter numbers to atrophy, like go down a little bit and advertising budget to go down a little bit in that timeframe. When all of that combined, it led to challenges in 22 and 23 and going into 24. Right. So environmental change, sort of more of a rigid bureaucratic, like everything's going to be okay and we're going to, we're going to just keep doing what we've always done, but do it harder was not winning. And I think all of the services felt that. But I can only really speak about the Navy.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:11:41]:
And that's when I airdropped in at the end of March 2024 with having the Navy had missed its recruiting mission, national security, important mission in 2023, and we were tracking to miss in 2024. And so that's, that's the challenge.

Benjamin Mena [00:12:02]:
And before we start talking about some of the changes that were made, you mentioned a second ago that like at first it sounded like the organization looked at brute force or just hard work is going to get us out of there?

Admiral Jim Waters [00:12:13]:
Yeah. I mean, fundamentally, when you give the United States Navy a task, we're going to get it done, and we will work however hard is necessary and put the level of effort in to get it done. We're also a thinking organization, and we recognize that that's not always the right answer. But in the part of recruiting, we were falling back to, I think, a tried and true. We just work harder. But when you have an organization that has 3,500 individuals in every state of the union, with a few in Guam and Puerto Rico, Germany and Japan. Right. Recruiting military dependents in those foreign countries, you risk not keeping that cultural unity and that unity of purpose and that sense of, you know, we can do this.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:13:07]:
We were struggling in the 23 and into 24 time frame because of those things.

Benjamin Mena [00:13:13]:
What were like, you know, since you got airdropped in, what were some of the first things that you looked at changing? And then those first things that you looked at changing, were those the things that you actually implemented, or did you implement some other things?

Admiral Jim Waters [00:13:28]:
That's a great question. So the first thing that I recognized is we needed to have strategic priorities that everybody could understand. So the very first thing I did, even before I got there, I published my strategic priorities. There's an alliteration to it. We do that well in the military. But recruiters, recruiting and readiness. And my number one priority from the very beginning was the line above all else. Not the recruit, not the leadership, not the support staff, the line recruiter, because we can manage perfectly.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:14:10]:
But if that line recruiter doesn't believe and do, we don't succeed. And so setting those priorities was first. The second thing that I did was to implement an innovation or transition team, basically transitioning from old to new, where I brought in some of our best recruiters, some of our best career recruiters, some of our best commanding officers of our Davey talent acquisition groups, and some thought leaders at my region staffs and at the headquarters staff. And knowing that I did not know what was actually causing recruiters to, you know, to struggle in the field. And I said, lay it all out. And in fact, I want you to scare me, give me ideas that you think there's no possible way anyone would do. And so we were able to gather together a set of initiatives from that ahead of my change of command, ahead of taking over at the end of March with the idea that as many as possible, we would implement in the first week. And so we did about 20 initiatives in seven days.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:15:23]:
Some of those were things like we identified, for example, that our recruiters were having to do extensive handwritten statements with the candidate about the purpose and history of every tattoo on their body. You might ask, well, why do we care? We care about people's tattoos because they represent, they can represent affiliations with things that we don't want in the military. Right. Extremist groups, gangs, things like that. But when I pulled a string on it, you know, and tattoos are clearly much more prevalent today than they were even 10 years ago. Although the Navy's always had a history of tattoos on sailors, they were spending hours of their day doing this. And they weren't prospecting and they weren't building trust based relationships and they weren't closing. So when I asked, because the purpose is right, we don't want people affiliated with these groups.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:16:21]:
But the recruiters know those things. We have an extensive library for them to reference on. Like this is good and this is not good and they can report it and then they can drop track on a kid, you know, that's affiliated with things that we don't want. But the handwritten statements weren't being used for anything. We're not doing that anymore. And so that saved recruiters hours, thousands and thousands of man hours of time. That's one example. Another example was medical waiver process was very slow.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:16:50]:
The review process for an individual waiver could take weeks. But we knew from data that there were a collection of conditions that we were approving at very high percentages. So they were coming in and they would take weeks and we'd get to, yes, you know, more than 85% of the time. Many of them were in the upper 90s. What the heck are we doing here? So we established an expedited waiver process for those conditions that allow the waiver to be reviewed and approved same day. So kid on deck at the MEPs, this condition comes up. We established a, essentially a shunt to the deciders here at the headquarters. So that, yep, that's the condition.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:17:34]:
Yep, we, that's the same in the band of what we have said yes to in the past. And that kid doesn't have to come back to MEPs. And that alleviated, you know, some significant pressure. Those are a couple of examples of immediate things in that list of 20. There, there were many. And really in my head, it was all about the priority of the recruiter and the amount of time that I could give them back to do recruiting. Right. To keep the funnel full.

Benjamin Mena [00:18:05]:
This just sounds funny because it's even recruiters in agency to recruiters in, you know, Internal talent acquisition. I think I was like looking on LinkedIn and there was an agency recruiter that was talking about their recruiters are spending 50 to 60% of their time just doing paperwork. And he's like, how do I get my people back on focusing on the relationships.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:18:24]:
That's right.

Benjamin Mena [00:18:25]:
So you had 20 initiatives that literally kick off the first week. Once you started going through those, did you sit back and look like, hey, maybe we need two or three more initiatives? And what were they? If you guys had that?

Admiral Jim Waters [00:18:37]:
Yes. So we still have an innovation team made up of those type of folks that I mentioned. We've changed out the team to continue to bring in fresh ideas and fresh thoughts, but we've continued to innovate in its infancy. When I got here, we. We had a recruiting operations center that was really intended to be sort of a troubleshooting desk, right. Cause that had not existed before. And there was sort of this bureaucratic path to get to I need to resolve an issue. So that that was started.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:19:10]:
But it was really one sailor at a desk, you know, ready to answer the phone to help answer questions. We rapidly expanded that into a full operations center. You know, if you walked into the PAC fleet maritime operations center and you walked into the recruiting operations center, you would see a scaled down version of PAC fleet in Millington, Tennessee, where big screens on the wall with all of our salesforce data watch standers responding to query, and really centered up on creating a common operating picture for the entire recruiting force. As you can imagine, when you're recruiting, you know, over 50,000 people in a year, there's a lot of data, right? It's millions of phone calls, it's hundreds of thousands of M and A generated leads, it's referrals, all of that stuff building in so that we could keep a common operating picture. I moved all of our analytics talent at the headquarters, which was kind of spread out and some of it was in its own sort of department, sort of the department of, you know, answering its own questions department. And so I stuck them in the recruiting operations center and said, this is the data that you are focused on and the questions that you hear us talking about daily are the questions I need you to answer and develop your own questions to answer. Right. Diving into that data and we kept the troubleshooting idea, but really shortened the path.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:20:38]:
So today a recruiter can call the recruiting operations center with a question the Watts Standard can answer 90%. The rock director is a retired master chief recruiter who's a, you know, a government civilian, sits within earshot. If the watch standard can't answer it, the rock director can answer the next 4.9% and then he has direct access to my office. This happens, I don't know, a few times a week where he'll just walk in and say, I've got this and I need a decision and this is what I recommend. And we've been able to shorten that. That was another significant change that we made. Okay.

Benjamin Mena [00:21:16]:
So we, we talked about some of the tactics and I love that, like organizational shifts to make it easier for the recruiter. But you know, you can change tactics all day long, you can print out reports, but at the end of the day, one of the most important things to do is figuring out how to change the culture.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:21:31]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:21:31]:
For growth. What were some of the things that the team had to go through to really just shift the culture in that process?

Admiral Jim Waters [00:21:38]:
Yeah, well, I think these tactical things aggregate it significantly to give the recruiters confidence that our mission in the headquarters was to support them and get to.

Benjamin Mena [00:21:50]:
Yes.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:21:51]:
Rather than finding creative ways to get to know. That was an important change. Contributing to that was an overhaul of our medical waiver review process. So I told you about the expedited waiver. That represents about 15% ish of the waivers that we deal with. The other 85% are more complicated cases. And we identified the backlog because if you're taking weeks to answer, there's a pile sitting there. We instituted a very short term, we called it a battle stations, but it's essentially all hands on deck.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:22:30]:
We're going to focus on this for three days. Very early in my tour got to decisions on that, burned that pile down to zero, and then reestablished a much more efficient review process. So now we're averaging. Our mean for review is one day, it's 24 hour turnaround when it used to be in the order of weeks. We changed, we had this process which if you get a, if you get a kid, some of these medical things are like 600 pages long, where sometimes you don't have enough information, Sometimes they're only 10 pages long and you need a little bit more. And so we sent it out for a referral through the MEPs that had gotten out of hand. We were sending way too many out for referral. Some of that I took control of personally, where in order to get to know or to get to a referral, it requires my personal review.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:23:24]:
In fact, I look at medical waivers every morning. I looked at them this morning, you know, 40 something of them. By doing that combined with the other things we did in that first that sent a shockwave through the entire organization so that the recruiters were like, holy cow. The things that were actually like when sailors are, are, you know, together shooting the breeze and they're talking about me. Right. And folks up the chain that they're complaining about, we actually fixed a lot of it. Right. That made a difference.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:24:00]:
Now, that's not the only thing about cultural change to me, it's also about clear and effective communication with the entire organization. And my people, as I said, are everywhere. Right. So how do you do that? Well, well, I, I went after multi channel communications, so I do a monthly YouTube live stream, all hands call, where, you know, I talk about the things that are important that we're working on here and why we're doing it for about half of that time. And then it's like essentially a Reddit. Ask me anything. People are chatting in and, you know, whatever question they got, I'm answering on the flop on YouTube live, you know, just to the recruiters. Right.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:24:41]:
So that we can have a open conversation about anything in recruitment. So we do that. I do my own very small podcast called Uncharted Waters. It's available on YouTube, but it's aimed at the recruiter. So if you're not really a military or navy recruiting interested person, it's probably not going to be super interesting to you. But for those recruiters, they get to hear it's a longer form. It's usually about 20 minutes, sometimes 30. We've done it about weekly ish, depending on how we're doing each week.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:25:13]:
But it gives the recruiters a chance to hear from me. And I interview some folks that are interesting to them. Our national chief recruiter, our commodores, you know, things like that, so they can hear that. The other thing that I do is we have the ability to text every recruiter all at once. It's a system we can use to text prospects as well. But I periodically send out a note either encouraging or explaining a change to all of the recruiters so that they know exactly what's happening. But I don't have enough time in the year to personally sit down with every recruiter in the organization and still run the organization. And so that's my balance those things.

Benjamin Mena [00:25:57]:
Well, I was definitely going to ask you on the communication front because it's hard to communicate with like 6,000 people. And it sounds like you're doing it better than some of the recruiting teams I've, I've seen work with.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:26:08]:
Yeah, it's, it's been, it's been amazing. So what I get out of the visit, the actual visit, is I get to hear whether it's landed right like and interestingly in the Reddit and it's not really Reddit, but the ask me anything thing that happens at the all hands call. There's good hard questions coming back from the line, you know, the E5 line, recruiter, you know, out there asking about, you know, strategic policy changes and making suggestions because they know that if they make a suggestion, it will actually do it in many cases.

Benjamin Mena [00:26:40]:
That's awesome. And you mentioned earlier in the interview the mission of the recruiters and you have it like lined out. Was it prospect, relationship and closing?

Admiral Jim Waters [00:26:51]:
Yeah, it's prospecting, building trust based relationships and close it. That's what I want the recruiters to focus on. Right. Everything else is time away from the primary mission. And the recruiter's primary mission is our primary mission. And as we talked about earlier, you know, Navy recruiting is really the one command in the United States Navy that if it doesn't do its job eventually there is no Navy because of the normal natural process of people leaving, you end up bleeding to death if you don't bring enough new blood in.

Benjamin Mena [00:27:28]:
And I love how you have that as like the focus of the recruiters because as organizations change and grow, I've actually seen it with like so many different organizations, like you start to lose track of like the full focus of what a recruiter is supposed to do and you have to keep on talking about that and tell the mission and talk about the mission. And I love that you've broken it down into almost like there are many things, but three simple. Three simple parts.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:27:50]:
Yeah, absolutely. It's helpful to be able to communicate in those simple terms. Right. Same as with the priorities, you know, recruiter recruiting, readiness. And I can talk about at length if you need me to about each one of those things so that they understand what do we mean by that? It's not just because there's alliteration, it's because each one of those has powerful meaning and what the priorities of the organization are.

Benjamin Mena [00:28:19]:
You don't have to go to into like super length about it, but I think it's important to talk about because I think like there's something that recruiters can learn from about like, you know, this is what the focus is going to be, but the thought process behind the focus.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:28:32]:
Yeah. So as I thought about those priorities, recruiters, I think pretty obvious, but actually making recruiters your number one priority is hard. Right. A lot of people will say the line folks are the number one priority and then don't always, you know, walk the walk. I prioritize, you know, acting on their suggestions. We've done things like there are things that the recruiters have wanted in Navy recruiting for a long time that we just did. And as you can imagine, it's not just my decision, not who gets paid what, but we got that across the line for line recruiters. They wanted to wear the recruiting badge, this badge right here that we wear on our uniform to indicate that we're a recruiter.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:29:16]:
They wanted to wear that with our camouflage uniform. And these are things that are important in the recruiting world to help identify that recruiter that had been a big no for many years. And we got that across the line, right. So it's actually acting on the things that are important to the recruiter, the recruiting. And this is advancing the art and science of recruiting, recruiting. So some of it's the recruiting operations center or affectionately known as the Rock and really being data focused. So where the data tells us we should be prospecting, we should go there and we should help the recruiters, we should guide the weapon system there. Another element of that, advancing the art and science of recruiting is ensuring that recruiters are prepared to recruit.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:30:03]:
So as an example, we historically have, they have come from the fleet, gone to our recruiter school which is in Pensacola, Florida and then taken their inter tour leave, then gone to their first recruiting station, settle in and in the end we take about four to six months for that recruiter after they finish school, counting leave and settling in and all that before they're all up round recruiting. Effectively we've changed that. So now they go from their tour, their ship or aircraft squadron, they go directly to their recruiting station, they get their family settled in, they take leave, they do ride alongs with recruiters, they haven't been to school yet, they get assigned their territory, they get issued their phone and their laptop, then they go to recruiter school. And we have established a policy that you don't normally take leave post school. So you graduate on a Friday, on Monday morning you're back at your station and you're recruiting, right? There's a time delay, right, because you do orders a year out, all that stuff, we're just at the front end of that, you know, hitting. And so we'll see how that goes. But our expectation is that that will lead to more immediate effectiveness as they come out of school and more learning at the school because they're better prepared for the school Right. So that's recruiting readiness was particularly important to me because when you're in a crisis, which we were in something of a recruiting crisis, you can abandon this idea of setting conditions for future success.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:31:45]:
But it was super important to me that we don't ignore the future of recruiting while we're fixing today's problem. That is about ensuring that that recruiter school is as good as it can be. So we've added, for example, some specific salesforce training, which is our platform, our customer relations management platform that we use in the Navy so that recruiters have a better sense to how to use that system. That's our key enabler of success. We are building continuing training standards and a training library. We have that training process that happens around the country continually, but it isn't standardized to the level that I want it to be standardized so that we can ensure that those recruiters have what they need. And then implementing the navies what they call a culture of excellence, what it really focuses on is all of the people programs. We have a, a process that the Navy has rolled out over the last year or so of how to manage those people programs that support sailors in many, many ways.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:32:57]:
I've made that a priority within the organization so that each sub organization has evaluated themselves to that we've provided assistance. And then it's about, you know, are we giving them the leadership training and the focus that they need. So we're piloting, for example, commercial coaching with one of our organizations so our recruiters have access to a professional coach that can talk about everything from sales, you know, recruiting stuff to sleep management and stress and other things. My theory, we put this in run four months ago. We're collecting data on it. My theory is that we're going to be able to use that kind of program with some of our key leadership positions to enable them to be most successful. So we've identified that one of the core positions within our organization is our provisional leading chief Petty officer. So the way the organization is broken down is inside the Navy talent acquisition group there are divisions and each of those divisions has multiple stations with the recruiters at them.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:34:08]:
Those division leading chief petty officers, that's the first time they have to lead at a distance. It's the most critical position to effective production. And so my theory is that we will eventually get to a place where we can provide that type of coaching to that critical position.

Benjamin Mena [00:34:26]:
I love that you guys are finding ways that are outside of the typical military box to help build elite recruiters.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:34:35]:
Absolutely. It's about giving them the tools they need to be successful. And then the other sort of benefit of improving culture within Navy recruiting is encouraging those fleet sailors that are in their first tour to be excited about the opportunity to come to recruiting. Right. Because recruiting in the military is. It's always hard, but it is different. And there's some amazing, unique opportunities. Right on the ship, you're doing technical work or you're doing kinetic work, but in recruiting, you have a phone, a laptop, and a car.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:35:09]:
You're part of a team. But a lot of your work is, you know, out in a high school or at a career fair, and you're talking to people and telling your story. And importantly, we've given them a really good product, which is service in the United States Navy that they are recruiting into.

Benjamin Mena [00:35:28]:
Hmm. Love that. Like, we've covered a lot. And before we jump over to the quick fire questions, and I feel like you actually answered some of the updated questions that I was going to ask you. So is there anything else that you kind of want to cover about, you know, the culture, the changes, the impacts? Before we jump over to Quick Fire.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:35:45]:
Questions, I think the only thing that I would just say is I can't extol the value enough of the individual line recruiter in Navy recruiting success. Those young people who are out there day in and day out making that mission, and that mission never stops. Right. So when other people are like, hey, we've worked really hard. We're going to take a day off. You know, that happens in the world. That doesn't happen as much in recruiting, because if you take a day off, you now got to work. You know, that mission's now on fewer days.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:36:22]:
Right. And so that's always on our minds. And those recruiters are out there getting that done, and this would not be successful without their amazing work to get after the mission.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:38]:
Awesome. Well, the quick fire questions, they don't need to be quick answers. Okay. But let's just say that you're in the. The AMA, the YouTube AMA, and you got someone that's actually just started, just joined the recruiting command. So this is their first tour as a recruiter, and they ask you, what advice would you give to me to have success, to be successful in this tour?

Admiral Jim Waters [00:37:01]:
Yeah. I would say be curious, look at those that are doing it now, and talk to the ones that are the most successful. Ask questions, why is it this way? Continue to be curious, and don't be afraid that your personality isn't the right fit. Every personality can work in recruiting, whether you're an Introvert, an extrovert, whatever your avert is, you can succeed in recruiting. I've talked to extreme introverts who will say that they're successful in Navy recruiting. And they will say, hey, phone power is their key to success because they can do phone power all day long. And then when they get the person into the office and they're one on one, it's their show, it's their house, they're good. The extrovert might be, you know, I'm super comfortable at the career fair walking around, chatting up everybody about the Navy.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:38:03]:
It can work no matter who you are, and the organization is here to support you. There is no alone and unafraid. There is a massive effort to support the recruiter.

Benjamin Mena [00:38:18]:
And we have your back and kind of like on. On the same thread, but you're dealing with somebody that's a career recruiter and they've been part of this mission for a good amount of years. But, you know, I hate to say that sometimes, like, recruiting gets a little old, but they're just like, hey, you know what? I'm coming to the table. I want to get better. What are some of the things that I need to do? Since I've been doing this for a.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:38:38]:
While, I think get out to where the recruiters are doing the work. Watching those young Navy recruiters looking sharp in their dress uniforms, talking to high school kids, career people at career fairs is super motivating. So that's, that's one. And the second thing is look for something different within Navy recruiting, because the beauty of military recruiting is you're not stuck in a particular location, in a particular job for more than. You don't have to be more than about three years. There is a next. There is an up. There are also lateral opportunities.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:39:20]:
So for example, there's burnout in production. Go to the schoolhouse and teach young kids to become great recruiters. Super motivating. I'll tell you, whenever I need a little bit of energy, I'm all about going to Pensacola to our recruiter school. They are so pumped up.

Benjamin Mena [00:39:41]:
That is awesome. Has there been a book or a mentor that has helped you get to where you are now?

Admiral Jim Waters [00:39:48]:
Yeah, I think the book that I would highlight is Range by David Epstein that came out in about 2019, I think, and it highlights that generalists actually can succeed in a world, in a complex world. Right. It's a book about sort of dispelling the myth of the 10,000 hours, which is sort of popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. That 10,000 hour thing, the book postulates Range postulates that it works in simple environments. It works for classical music and specific things where the world is not hyper complex. Right. Golf is a controlled environment. Still hard, but it's a controlled environment in the real world where you have hyper complex factors.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:40:40]:
A generalist, somebody that doesn't specialize until later, actually has an advantage because of the breadth of the background that they have. And that's given me really good perspective on my own career. It's given me confidence that the things that I am doing here at Navy Recruiting, although I didn't grow up with 10,000 hours of recruiting experience, it actually makes sense in that context. And that's been a pretty, pretty impactful book for me.

Benjamin Mena [00:41:13]:
I feel like maybe like AI might be baked into Salesforce, but are you guys starting to look at utilizing artificial intelligence anywhere within the organization? And also in me saying that I know that you guys have a lot more hoops that you would have to go through to utilize AI? Yes.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:41:28]:
So anytime you're talking personal information in the government, there's a process to get there. We are using natural language processing, which is sort of a base layer before you can call it officially AI within the electronic health record system. Right. So when you have a 600 page record, we can quickly identify all of the things in that 600 page record that don't align with what we would want in the military and kind of evaluate. So it helps shorten that. We are exploring the use of AI in helping us qualify leads so that, you know, you can identify well historically these leads from this area or these, you know, types of folks convert at a higher rate. So it can give us some lead scoring. We are experimenting there and looking at how can you use AI in maintaining a relationship with somebody that isn't a hot lead, for example, somebody that expressed some interest, but not right now.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:42:31]:
So, you know, pushing things to them to keep them aware of Navy, the benefits of the Navy without costing recruiter bandwidth excessively. And then once it warms up again, reestablish the human relationship.

Benjamin Mena [00:42:45]:
What is one of your favorite tools? Because your organization is so large, what is one of your favorite tools that you use to help manage or communicate with the organization?

Admiral Jim Waters [00:42:55]:
Yeah, I've talked about some of those things. I mean, Salesforce in particular has given me the ability to see deeply within the organization. I don't typically drill in all the way down to the individual recruiter. I mean, you can within Salesforce, but what it does is it, it provides a very strategic picture on a continuing basis. So one of the Things that we implemented here with the recruiting operations center is a daily ops brief. So every morning at 0800 we look at what happened yesterday, but we're also looking at what the projections are for the future. We're looking at problem areas and I have all of my key leaders around so that we can have that conversation. We're also looking at things like the weather, right.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:43:43]:
Because when you have a winter storm, it closes the maps. I can't ship that day. So what are we going to do to shift that load to another maps or to another time? Hurricanes are another one. When they sweep through. You can see those days in advance. So we're going to ship some people early. Right. So it's a full on operations center to, to get after those kind of problems.

Benjamin Mena [00:44:03]:
I know with the amount of years that you've been serving the country, not every day is a pretty day. How as a leader, yourself and the responsibility of many, many people, those days, they're just hard. Like, how do you manage and get through those hard days?

Admiral Jim Waters [00:44:17]:
I engage with the team here. I seek to hear from recruiters because it's always a motivating thing to talk to the recruiters about the work that they're doing because I get good feedback from them. I have a really good, you know, sort of family support network. You know, my wife is, you know, we've been together throughout my entire career. She's very supportive. So I can always have that conversation at home.

Benjamin Mena [00:44:46]:
Awesome. Well, and this is actually one of my favorite questions, like, you know, you've been through, you know, the recruiting command, you've worked with policy, you've, you know, led the submarines. If you got the chance to like go back in time and sit down with yourself, have a cup of coffee, like we'll say, your first month in to the Navy, what advice would you give yourself?

Admiral Jim Waters [00:45:08]:
That's a good question. I think it's, don't think you have to do everything yourself. I put a lot of weight on myself, especially early in my career, feeling like everything that came to me was on me. And that doesn't mean I want to shed responsibility for things, but it's really about growing into that idea that it's about a team and that together that team is way, way more capable than the sum of the parts. And that part grew over time. And I would talk about that with myself early on because I think that is something that took some time to truly appreciate throughout my Navy career. And I think it's just so important in thinking about how you operate in this Environment. Because it is one of the core things that I love about the Navy is that we do things as teams.

Benjamin Mena [00:46:04]:
Right.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:46:04]:
When you're on a ship, you know, we are all living within the machine, and we live together, we serve together, and it's all about what that team can do. And it's what's kept me in the Navy, you know, for now, 36 years, the amazing work that those teams can do.

Benjamin Mena [00:46:23]:
And this next question, Ike, you can choose to. To make it about recruiting or recruiters or just in general with the people that you work with across the Navy. But so often in the recruiting chair, a leader gets asked, like, you know, how can I do this better? What tactically, can I handle this? Or, what book should I read? Or all these, like, small but important questions. But so often, like, you're, like, a leader that has to answer a lot of questions, is always thinking, like, I wish you would just ask me this one question. Like, I'm not going to sit there and tell you what it is. But if you could just ask me this one question. Do you ever think of that? And what would that question be? And what would that answer be?

Admiral Jim Waters [00:47:03]:
I think the question that people should ask is, what should my focus be? Where should my focus be? Who should my focus be? Is probably as I refine that, as we talk, it's really who. And for, you know, taking it back to recruiting, for me, it's the line recruiter. Every decision that I make has that in my mind. You know, where is the risk for that recruiter? Where is the reward? And if I put myself in their shoes, even though I've never walked a step in their shoes, how would that make me feel? That's how I think about it. But every place in the organization has to think about who is my focus.

Benjamin Mena [00:47:59]:
Awesome. Well, two things before I let you go. First of all, if anybody wants to follow you, how do they go about doing that?

Admiral Jim Waters [00:48:08]:
Yeah. So I'm on LinkedIn. You can, you know, search for my name on LinkedIn. Rear Admiral Jim Waters. And then the podcast Uncharted Waters is available on YouTube. So you can. There's 26, seven episodes of it that are out there, so you can learn about Navy recruiting that way.

Benjamin Mena [00:48:26]:
Awesome. And before I let you go, is there anything else you want to share with the listeners?

Admiral Jim Waters [00:48:31]:
I am so proud of the work that Navy recruiters are doing to make a difference for our Navy. And it's really important to recognize that the two key sort of whys behind what we do, number one, of course, is manning the Right. We talked about that before. But number two is making a difference in young people's lives when you join the Navy. We're making generational change in many of these young people's lives. Coming from modest means, joining the Navy and serving for four, five or six years, you finish with skills, you finish with, you know, the title of veteran, but you also finish with a GI Bill. Right. So your life, the trajectory of your life will be very different in those of your children and your grandchildren.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:49:32]:
You put yourself in a different place in society through service in the Navy. And that is not lost on the recruiters. It drives the energy in the system. They want the fleet, man. They want to make difference, a positive difference in people's lives.

Benjamin Mena [00:49:52]:
Well, I just, I want to say thank you so much for coming on. First of all, like, talking about organizational change, and no matter the size of the organization that you are part of, whether you're leading it or part of it, changing the direction of an organization is hard and it requires a lot of work and requires probably faster movement than we all think that it should. So, like, you know, thank you for sharing that. And then secondly, you know, I kind of mentioned it at the very beginning. I'm a Navy brat. I watched the impact that the military or the Navy, the submarine force had on my dad, and I can definitely tell that it completely changed my life, the impact of him being in the military and where it took him and saved him from, where he could have been. So if you're in that recruiting chair for the Navy, listen to that. Like, it's not just the impact that you have the kid right there, it's what their kids and their kids.

Admiral Jim Waters [00:50:43]:
Thank you so much. Benjamin, it's been a pleasure talking with you today. And I really appreciate the fact that you are a, you know, a. A living, breathing example of the trajectory, train change that I was talking about.

Benjamin Mena [00:50:57]:
And for the listeners, I want you guys to keep crushing it. Make 20, 25 the year that you make your dreams come true. Make it the year that you hit your goals, and make it the year of abundance. Talk to you guys next time.