1579 - Rich Klein, Job Searchability

Foreign. Welcome Dr. James Beckett Sports Card Insights. Thanks Sponsors Beckett Media Beckett grading Beckett authentication Comc.com Burbank sports cards Mike Stadium Sports Cards Heritage Auctions Huggins and Scott Auctions Topps, Upper Deck and Panini Episode with Rich Klein, my frequent co host, had a podcast session over Zoom and split it into several parts so you'll be able to be getting Rich Klein week this week. So thanks Rich and thanks listeners. And here it is. We've talked privately about the job search episodes and you met the anonymous guy that precipitated those three episodes and you've had some other conversations with others. I think there's more out there than I thought, but it's still not as well organized and certainly not tilted in any way toward entry level jobs. I think we need and indeed or what used to be monster for the sports card world. And I know the person who I sent you the information on. I'm going to reach out to him. I think it's a good world for that because for example, I saw Beckett is hiring, I'm going to say a lead cataloger I guess because of all the grading. I saw that on LinkedIn. I'm thinking, okay, 20 years younger I just would have done that job. I was looking just on random things, I saw that pop up and I think every card store, if they're looking for people, one of the people who does my show is looking for somebody to post items on ebay for him. I think there's a world out there for both big and small. And once you get the word out that you've got all the industry contacts, you've got the ebays, you've got the collectors, you've got the Fanatics, you've got all their job listings. Hey, if you're a card store owner, do you have somebody that you're looking for? Or if you're a breaker, do you have somebody you're looking for? So there's a world out there. I know comm seat posts when they have jobs available. Usually they're internal so you'd have to be living or wanting to move to the Washington area. But there's always something out there and I think one dedicated group could make it work. You have to figure out how to make it work financially. Probably have to charge the employers to list. But I'm not that business savvy of knowing how that model works. But there's a way to do it. I have friends in that industry and it works mainly at the higher end because then you can get a fee Certainly from the employer who's looking for top notch talent. And if it's a six figure job, you can get a five figure fee. Entry level is where you and me, the company we were with for a long time, Beckett, I think our greatest success was in finding people closer to entry level that had the passion, had some skills that could be developed in the business sense, but compared to finding an executive in some other industry that was really sharp but didn't understand the hobby. But I think that's what's missing. We were very successful because of the platform of the magazine to be able to gather individuals who would apply, who would just say, I want to work for you, I want to be on your team. I've met the guys, I like them. The guys that are out on the road and you're one of the guys too. You're out there and you're meeting people and if somebody's especially sharp and is looking, that's how we got a lot of the people we got is by being out there and making a connection and encouraging them to apply. But place for multiple companies to do that. We didn't have a list of candidates. We compared notes with Krausey Publications or Sports Card Trader or Tough Stuff and we didn't poach from them either. We just thought we want to find people that want to come in and make a contribution. And then we wanted to promote from within and give them. So I don't know that I'd be looking for a lead cataloger. I'd be looking for a cataloger. Then without here, they better be a lead cataloger because of their passion and intensity and Smarts. I mentioned Mr. Blandford, who I basically recruited at one point. But I also think, to be honest, and this is to your credit, we had a really good, I'm going to use the wording, air quotes, corporate culture. People knew we had a good corporate culture. As such, they wanted to come to work at Beckett. They wanted their friends and family to come too. You were talking about destination stores. They were a destination company to work for. There was a dream when I first came that people wanted to work at Beckett. And we ended up getting a lot of really good people who had streamed their way into the hobby and they were so passionate, they're lifers. And we were selecting for that because if it's your life, you're just going to keep moving onward and upward. You're going to do the best you can and it's not even going to be like work. One of the ones you referenced for Me is this collect talent. The good thing about that is it is intending to be an aggregator but I believe their business model to make it work is to be much broader than just sports cards. Because I heard they want any collectible and I'm okay with that. But like I said, I really think sports cards needs its own aggregation. If it's within that, I guess that's okay. But the people who wanted to work for us, they weren't contemplating whether they were going to get a job with comic books or with cards. They were a card person. Sure, there's some complimentary skill sets, but we wanted somebody that had worked in a card shop, not in a comic shop or a coin shop. It wasn't perfect, but we did pretty well. As I'm thinking about it, all the people that became execs at Beckham when you were there, they were all hires from within. Almost. Do 20 somethings get on LinkedIn? I would say probably to a lesser degree because you've got less of a track record to point out there and so less connections to be made. It's an older group. To me, that's what's missing. And viral is probably the best way one-of-one to have a warm introduction to somebody that works there, gets the word out and they have a friend of a friend or something and they come and apply. But I just think the viral aspect is what we did. We just put a notice out there and then we'd have people who would apply and we'd try to take the best one. If somebody was really good and we didn't need them, we absolutely kept them on file and would tap into em later when we had an opportunity. It's like now, Rich. We were in a growth industry at that time and now it's a growth industry. You need new good people and that's a limit to growth. People talk about Yu-Gi-Oh but if somebody doesn't really understand the industry, Yu-Gi-Oh can get you in a lot of trouble. Funny COMC story in you talked to Jade from comc. So one day I was googling something with Yu-Gi-Oh just for fun because he mentioned he finished second in some national whatever video game contest or Regional in 1989. So I decided to see if I could Google any information. Yu-Gi-Oh called Jade a she. Oh no. And I posted that and I go, I didn't know this. And we all had a good laugh. But the point is Yu-Gi-Oh just assumed the name Jade was a female name. No, it was a male name, folks. The other thing I'd like to see more of instead of like A dispassionate job board that just said, here's me, here's my credentials. I'd like to see a heavy network, not just LinkedIn, but who are the people that would vouch for you? Who are the people that you're in business with or you've done business with? Many of these individuals we both know really well. Now they were not strangers to us because we had mutual friends. That said, you need to give a strong look at this guy. He's really going to be good. He's worked for me, he worked for somebody I know. He's really going to be solid. And in most cases, 99 out of 100, that was true. So it wasn't just looking at a resume where you didn't have a face, a digital resume or a paper resume. You said, I know this guy and I know somebody that knows him. And you could easily check the references. It wasn't checking a reference of a person that you also didn't know. I'd like to see more of that. Like I said, it might not be lucrative enough to get some business minded entrepreneur to dig into that problem. But if we're going to 10x the number of whatevers, we're going to need 10x the number of employees, 10x the number of stores, you better get 10x the number of employees. Because every store needs, as opposed to these stores need somebody trustworthy, hardworking, that loves cards and doesn't want to steal the cards, doesn't love them. So I talk about the Wax Plano store, that's the training store. So I always try to be gracious in that store to everybody because a lot of times they don't know me. When I went and Beckett up the donation in red, there were two or three people there that were new hires and they lived five minutes from the store. Okay? That's why they're training in that store. Not everybody succeeds, obviously in every position, but the Wax team has done a pretty good job of getting people and they've moved people up too in their corporate structure as they've grown. There are people I know who have started as store managers that have moved up their chain too. My friend Ryan from RJ Dukes, he hired a new social media person and the one they had previously was decent. This one is faster and better than the one he had before. And he goes, my wife said she's the best candidate. And it turned out his wife's intuition was correct. You had asked me back in the early 90s when we were rocking and rolling, if such A job site had been available, would we have used it? And I think my answer would be no. I think viral is better and we had enough application that we were able to pick really good candidates. And so for whatever reason, I don't think we would have used a more impersonal thing. We put ads in the Dallas Morning News for the most part, those really didn't work. But the friend of a friend aspect was extremely valuable in building the culture that you're talking about. Word of mouth works. But when you get to a very large company like collectors holdings, PSAs, parent eBay, Fanatics, Panini, these very large companies still, I really think we enjoyed moving people around. We had enough people that it'd be easier to take somebody that we knew and put them in a slot and then find another new person to do some other job where the person could assimilate faster. And so I'm wondering about that. We cross trained and I think that also helped us to not be stuck when we were understaffed. We found a way to get the job done. He also sent me this thing and it is cgc, but they're hiring second shift TCG graders and sports graders and verification specialists. They have a hiring bonus of 1000 bucks. We did hiring bonuses. So I understand that comprehensive benefits package, we had that and that really worked. Paid time off. Here's the last one though. Employee submission program. I've talked to a lot of companies over the years and the ability that you have to be a dealer as opposed to a collector, the line is blurred in some of these companies. And now to say I'm going to work for a grading company and I'm going to get some preferred card grading, submission pricing or whatever. That's a little tricky at bgs. I don't know, I guess they maybe submitted a little bit, but there'd have to be boundaries there, otherwise it'd be a great job. I'm going to learn how to grade and I'm going to grade my own cards or my buddy's going to grade my cards. There's opportunity for a problem there. Conflict of interest stuff. A lot of it's a perception and if you're evaluating somebody's application, they're related to you or like I say, a friend of a friend. You just gotta be above reproach. Another thing came up that you mentioned is that a couple weeks ago when you were at the doctor's office, you were wearing a sports card something T shirt and the woman that was helping you mentioned it and you found out that she has a second job at Fanatics in the warehouse. In the warehouse. And she was telling me how strict they are about not letting them walk out with anything. Okay, but here's my thought there. That is a job that you don't want hobby passion. So you don't want that on the job board because somebody with hobby passion is going to say, I want to come into the hen house. And so your friend at the doctor's office, her second job to do warehouse stuff and not have the hobby passion that wouldn't be on these job boards. It was just so funny because she started talking about Fanatics, the baseball card people. And she looks at my Dallas card show shirt and says, oh Yu-Gi-Oh okay, you're a baseball card person. She was talking about how strict they are there with Social Security, which I was glad to hear because you hear all these stories and yet they are doing their best, preventing anything bad from happening at the warehouse. Joel Belford, who did the mint condition newsletter a number of years ago, is dipping back in and I think he's a high potential hire for somebody with his skill set. I talked to him during the national. Actually we had about a half hour talk on Zoom during the national and he's a sharp young guy. He'd be a great hire because he's a hobbyist and he understands financial savvy too. Good skills. He has both. Both skills. I was so glad to see the newsletter came back and I know you had mentioned that you communicated with him before I did. I'm sure he'd be versatile in some respects. There's gotta be a lot of jobs out there that are open. They're looking for people. If there was a central repository, then those matches could be made. I one-of-one 10x the hobby. If it's 10 times many collectors, there needs to be 10 times many people working in the industry. And they're not all gon at the top or even in the middle. They're going to start near the bottom. But that's actually not how people start in the hobby anymore. The new people coming in, they don't want to start at the bottom, they want to start at the top. Based on their financial situation, they want to jump. Not necessarily in the deepest end, but they want to get in there and swim with the big boys. Many years ago, before I came at Com C, I remember talking to Tim Goetch and he wanted to do comc for coins. The problem was anybody he wanted to hire for coins, they were making much more money than the card people he could hire. Card people a lot cheaper than coin people but that actually may be more true of cards now that's what I was going to say exactly. They're at that level of passion even in their twenties. They're thinking entrepreneurially but as like a sole proprietor that I could be lean and mean and I can be trading up and getting advantage going to the shows, figuring out what goes where and I'm not going to buy this but I am going to buy that and I know when to sell and when to buy and all that and they're making too much money on their own right now. That's one of the problems of hiring people. You have to understand, especially if you're single and you're in your invincible twenties, you may not think you need health insurance as much as when you have a family in your 30s and 40s and you're not quite as young as you used to be and you have kids. Health insurance is important and a steady paycheck.