Hello, everyone, my name is Mike Sadam, my website is down at the bottom, you can always feel free to reach out to me at any time, because I know questions will come up as we move forward. Today we're talking about recruitment and retention. Now our focus is on how to get people into our professions. And then how do we keep them once we recruit them. However, I don't think this is going to be like any other recruitment training you've ever received. Because the information I'm presenting is a little different.

I'm kind of going into this knowing that the technical skills of recruiters and hiring managers are probably well established. You probably have your programs and your policies and your processes all in place. So what we're going to do is we're going to look into human behavior and how that affects Next, what we're doing as recruiters, and what we could do to help our organizations into the future. So what you have probably experienced to recruitment before, is a set of skills, or maybe even a package that gives you a formula to use. And that's all valuable. But what we're doing today is different.

It's beyond technical expertise. It's beyond technical tactics. So what we're doing today is kind of like what Yoda explained to Luke in The Empire Strikes Back what he said about the force, and what Yoda said was, the force surrounds everything. And what we're talking about today is what surrounds people. What makes people behave the way they behave. The fact that social influences surround everything we do.

Now I look at people as social animals. And that's the basis of my work. The basis of my work is to deal with leadership. And communication through the lens of group behavior. And as you can probably already tell, this could affect everything we do in our organizations, including bringing new people into our organizations. So Aristotle once said, That man is by nature, a social animal, and that society is something that precedes the individual.

What he's talking about is the belief that social belonging and social motivation are powerful, and they could affect everything people do. So in short, my whole premise is that the identity that is important to somebody at the time is how they're going to make a decision. That's what drives behavior. For instance, right now, you're an attendee in this course. And that's driving how you behave. Because the context of the situation and the role you're playing at the time is what makes sense To what you're going to do.

This allows us to look at our recruitment and retention efforts as part of a human based system. And because of that, we get to use a lens that helps us consider recruitment and retention as more complex than what we normally do, which means it's not simple. You probably already know that because you're doing it. It's complex, because we're dealing with people. And people have competing values, competing needs and competing wants, and that can be powerful. That's something we could use to really bring people into our organizations.

And not only bring people in, but bring the right people in, and then keep them. So the theories I use are a combination of what I learned and researched while earning a Master's of Public Administration degree. And that focus was on budgeting and organizational culture and human resources also These things that normally go with businesses or public administration. And then I blended that with what I learned at the Naval Postgraduate School, where we were focused on counterterrorism studies, and I was able to focus on human behavior. Now, you're probably wondering, or you may never have imagined that you would be applying theory you used a terrorism analysis to recruitment or retention. But today, you will.

And I think that's pretty exciting. It'll give you a new lens to look through.