Binge Factor Media

 

Can you make a media career out of your podcast? It’s possible, and our guest shows you how. Tracy Hazzard sits down for a lively and insightful talk with the host of the Pozcast, Adam Posner. Adam shares how he got into podcasting and how he built and course corrected his podcast over the course of nearly 200 episodes. Adam talks about lessons he’s learned and how he moved towards monetization of his podcast. Tune in and learn more about the podcasting biz from Tracy and Adam.

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Drive Your Podcast Media Career Forward With Energy And Talent With Adam Posner, Host Of The Pozcast

I have a podcaster who is burning things up in an interesting area in the recruiting space, which doesn’t seem like it would be super hot for podcasting. You think maybe this belongs on LinkedIn or maybe as a live stream, but he has done both and it’s done well. I’ve got Adam Posner on and his nickname is Poz. 

He is the Founder and President at NHP Talent Group, which is a boutique New York-based talent consultancy, specializing in talent access for senior-level roles in digital marketing, media, eCommerce, product and content creation at startups, creative agencies and brands. He is also the host of the top global career podcast, The POZcast, showcasing experts to help you harness your inner tenacity to drive your life and career forward. He has produced and aired almost 200 episodes with top guests like Gary Vee, Grant Cardone, Kara Goldin, and Tucker Max, to name just a few.

Prior to pivoting in the world of recruiting, Adam spent fifteen years working with the New York City advertising and marketing industry. He has led account management and digital strategy in American Express and SiriusXM, and digital ad agencies in New York City like VaynerMedia and EP+Co for major clients like Verizon, Pepsi, and British Airways. This has instilled in him a unique perspective when working with candidates to truly understand their career DNA and ensure a good fit on both sides of the recruiting equation.

In addition, he brings expert advisory around the talent acquisition process, employer branding, and recruitment operations. He has built a strong reputation by always putting relationships first and that’s exactly what he does with his podcast. His podcast is a business-to-business podcast. Meaning that he is using that guesting strategy as a way to build rapport, build clients, maybe build referral partners, and all of those things in the process. We’re going to talk to him about that. This is a good case of how to make a podcast work for your business. Let’s get to know Adam Posner from The POZcast.

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Adam, thanks so much for joining us. Let’s talk about The POZcast. How has the career and life journey of podcasting been for you?

First and foremost, thank you so much for having me on the show. Hello to your audience. Folks that may not know me, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Hopefully, you’ll want to stay connected with me after we’re done with this one. My journey has been awesome when it comes to podcasting. I’ll go reverse here. I had a conversation with a friend and my show has been out since February 2019. We were hanging out in a buddy’s backyard and he was playing the guitar. I looked over. I was like, “You’re awesome. You’re such a good guitar player.”

Maybe I had a couple of drinks at this point. I was like, “You’re great and awesome. I have no talent. I can’t sing, draw, act, dance.” He turned to me. He was like, “I’ve listened to your show. I can never imagine doing what you do week in and week out.” That was a big a-ha moment for me where I was like, “I found my art and craft.” It’s a passion for me where it brings out my sixth gear where I go into this mode. You know exactly what I’m talking about.

I go into this mode where I’m on. This is my zone, my element, my race car, my baseball field, my basketball court, my gridiron, or whatever you want to call it. This is where my best is. This is my arena. My first show, I did in mid-February 2019. I had an itch that needed to be scratched in two ways. One, I was listening to a bunch of podcasts in the marketing entrepreneurial world. Honestly, I’m like, “They weren’t that good. They weren’t that great. The host wasn’t carrying the show. It wasn’t a great conversation.”

I grew up in the world of Howard Stern. We’re not talking about the porn stars, dwarfs, and all the other crap that he used to do. That’s not politically correct anymore. Since he has gone to SiriusXM, who I worked at from 2006 to 2011, for the last number of years, Howard is able to have a long-form interview show. In my opinion, he’s the best interviewer on the planet.

His interview process is so good and most people don’t realize it at all.

That’s exactly my inspiration for it. There are two shows that he did that got me going. One, he did an interview with Hillary Clinton. I don’t know if you caught this one and I’m not talking politics here, but for the first time, she did two things. One, she said, “If I came on your show during the election, there’s a good chance that I probably would have won because I would have been able to open up to your audience and show the real Hillary.” In the second part of that interview, he got out of her the Bill and Hillary love story and how they met. I’ve never ever heard of that story before. He went all the way back. No one does that.

I also thought she was funny there. I was like, “She is a funny grandmother.” You could see people would like her, but you didn’t like her on the road. He really brings something. If you can do that in your show, that’s something you want to bring to it.

There's no greater zone than being live. Click To Tweet

A big takeaway there is the relatability as a host. That’s what I modeled myself after as a host. It’s very much from a Howard Stern perspective there. I push when I need to. I do a ton of research in preparation and get to know my guests to make it a good show. In my prep, I have my outline and notes. When I started the show, I had fully formatted questions that I would fully write out and read. About fifteen episodes in, I realized that one of my good friends is a professional media coach. This is what she does for a living. She was like, “Adam, let’s talk. I listened to a couple of your shows.” She stopped me right there fifteen episodes in.

The biggest lesson I learned from her is to listen to the guests instead of I asked Tracy a question and as Tracy is answering the question, I’m already thinking about the next question. I’m listening to hear if there’s a piece of a golden nugget in that that I want to go off on a tangent on, something interesting and be able to riff on that. Now, 200 episodes later, I could do that automatically like muscle memory. If I didn’t make that course correction fifteen episodes in, and listen and stop talking, I don’t think the show would ever be what it is now.

It has been quite a journey. It started as a show focused on recruiting HR people careers because that’s what I do for a living as a recruiter, but then the show morphed into more interesting life stories and journeys with that common thread about the career. It’s always staying centered on it but the idea is, “Let’s talk about your early career. Let’s talk about when you fell on your face, when you were at your lowest, or when you made these huge mistakes, where you could look back on it now and say, ‘If I didn’t have that situation, if I didn’t go through that, if I didn’t have those lessons learned, I would never be where I am now.’” That’s what the show is all about and bringing that to life and unpacking folks’ career journeys.

There’s a big difference in the show from the beginning. You’ve got over 177 episodes. You’ve got quite the distance that you’ve run in that. When I check out everyone’s show, what I do is I go to the first, the last, and then something in the middle, I pick because it attracts my attention. I got to listen to one that’s enjoyable.

The first ones are always rough. I do it so I could see that journey through your show and how far you’ve come. The difference in it is this high comfort level in the most recent shows where you are in total conversation with someone. We’re getting to have that preview into it. You’re right. It was very formal in the beginning.

It was very formal but it’s interesting too. Once every six months, I’ll go back and listen to a couple of the first ten to see how far I’ve come, but there’s also still a sense of confidence in those first few episodes that I still have now. There’s still a cadence and personality, but there are so many subtle nuances that I wouldn’t realize then that I do now. I’ve stopped the ums and uhs.

You’re also doing lives now and you weren’t in the very beginning. How has that changed how you do things?

I don’t edit my shows too much. I only edit my shows for two reasons. One, if there’s a technical error like if you lose internet or the guests loses and a technical error there, I’ll cut that out. I’ve recorded about 195 episodes, not counting the live streams that I’ve done, and there have only been a couple of episodes where a guest has asked me afterward to cut something out. I’m not even going to go into the details because that’s between the guest and me. The guest had said, “I thought about it. Maybe I should have said this for some reason.”

I usually have 4 to 5 weeks in between recording and airing in the can. I go, “No problem. It’s your show. I have no agenda to put you on blast or anything.” That certainly has changed the show a lot, but when you go into the live shows, that is the ultimate. When I talked about being in the zone, there’s no greater zone than being live and I love doing that. That’s like me doing a standup comedy.

There’s an energy about doing the lives that changes your podcast. If you do them separately, you’ll still see that difference in a podcast.

What’s interesting about that is I did about 100 live streams in the two years during the pandemic. I front-loaded a lot of them very early on. I was doing almost like 4 or 5 a week from my den. I set it up on a coffee table. Before I had this office, studio and everything, I had my Yeti and then my little Samsung mic and headphone. The camera was on top of my computer. I got the nice mantle and TV behind me and it was fun, but there’s something about being live.

You keep on doing the live that’s keeping you much more locked in because you have that live audience. It keeps you much more on your toes. I’m on my toes when I’m doing a proper recording, but it doesn’t compare. Honestly, it’s almost like a game for me. I’m not going to say I prepare less, but I write less for a live show. I still do the same amount of prep because that never changes. You don’t want to be off your game when a guest comes in. Have you ever been a guest on a show and it’s so blatantly clear that the host did not do any prep and you almost want to hang up on them?

 

It’s 99% of the time. I hate to say that because I guested a lot. When I have someone who is prepared, I’m excited.

I’m not going to name names, but I was on a show in 2020. One of the big cornerstones in my career story is the fact that I worked for Gary Vaynerchuk. Almost everybody knows him at this point. I got fired and pivoted into the world of recruiting. That’s my story in three seconds. I started telling my story and career journey. I was like, “I worked for Gary Vee.” He goes, “You worked for Gary Vee?” I was like, “How did you not know? That’s everywhere. I’m going to milk that for all it’s worth. Come on.”

The firing part maybe not be so much. She might not touch on that.

I do speak about that. If anybody does their research on me, they know that’s the pivotal inflection point in my career, the lowest point pivoting into my highest point. If you don’t do your research as a host, you’re failing your audience and guests.

Now, my audience is still going, “What got you fired?”

In brutal honesty, it’s for two reasons. One, in self-awareness and being able to look in the mirror, I didn’t do what they hired me for. I was a different person back then. I was to lead digital marketing for the clients that they brought me on to do. I didn’t do a great job. Two, I was not set up for success. It was the early stages of Vayner. They were not the mature organization that they are now. They didn’t have certain things in place for proper onboarding and it was a perfect storm. At the end of the day, that was what I needed to push me in this trajectory of the life of going into recruiting, eventually starting my own recruiting business and the podcast. I could finally say that I’m confident, happy and successful. I’m living a life and a career of purpose. I like what I do every single day and who I am when I look in the mirror.

You mentioned before that you started the show because you felt like there was bad stuff out there and you thought you had a place for that, but you also have turned it into a business model. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like?

When I started the show, the idea of it being a core primary business development never even cross my mind. It happened organically. That’s the greatest part about this. It was 15, 25 or 30 episodes in and the show started to pick up some speed. It started to get noticed and then I finally had some social proof where I could start to reach out to decision-makers at marketing companies and ad agencies. These are potential clients. These are decision-makers or clients that I want to do business with as a recruiter.

The next thing you know, I’m reaching out to them. I’m saying, “Tracy, I love the agency you built over at Feed Your Brand. I would love to have you on my podcast.” We start to have a conversation over email. You take a look. You see I have a podcast that’s growing. In this day and age, most people want to go on podcasts. They want to get their name out there, especially if there’s somebody that doesn’t typically get asked to be on a podcast. People are shocked. They are extremely successful entrepreneurs and business owners out there who would love to chat who have a wealth of information that never get asked to be on shows.

They’re not household names. They’re not the Mark Cuban’s of the world. They’re not the Zuckerberg’s. I started to reach out to these folks and I would have them on my show. I would not introduce or talk about my recruiting business at all. I would air the show and have my follow-up email and follow-up conversation. It was at that point where a bunch of them said to me, “What’s NHP? I see that in your email.” I was like, “Holy crap.” The light bulb went off in my head and I start to talk about business. Slowly, these guests started to convert into clients. That’s when the big light bulb went off and I said, “This is better than cold calls and cold emails.” I built out a proper process to utilize my podcast as a business development driver tool.

I would say that 50% to 70% of the guests that I reach out to book on my show are decision-makers of companies that I want to do business with. I built that entire process and flow. In fact, I put all the IP down over the summer. I’m creating The POZ Course, which is going to be teaching people not how to turn on your mic and the lights, record it and edit, how to RSS feeds or even how to ads and anything, but how to monetize in a completely different way. I monetize my guest, not my audience.

Let’s talk about that. Let’s do our three things because we’re going to get into more details. When you’re getting a great guest, what do you do in that vetting process to get the great guest to be sure that they fit your profile?

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This is a tough one too because a decision-maker at a company may be a great business prospect, but they may not be a great guest. There’s a little bit of a balance there too. You want to research their story. Sometimes a CEO may not be the best guest, but the CMO has a better story. You have to do a little bit of prep before you do your outreach. The CMO have a crazy good career story. The CEO is the decision-maker. How do you decide which one you want to reach out to? It’s a little bit of a balancing act there.

Sometimes you can balance both. If you’re getting good with the CMO, he is going to talk you up to the CEO or whoever the decision-maker is within that company. You have to vet it out. I always tell people, “Google the crap out of your guests before you reach out to them. See if there’s a YouTube clip, social media, or podcast out there just to see if they’re lively.” You don’t want to put a dud on your show. The worst thing is a host pulling out the plug. You don’t want to be pulling the plug out of a guest. The worst thing you want to do is duck a show.

You said to me that you have business-to-business and that’s obviously this model that your podcast is, but you’re a business-to-consumer also because that’s where your listeners are. How do you increase those listeners engagement because that’s a divergent effort?

It’s crazy because it comes together. The audience are job seekers. They’re folks that are interested in entrepreneurial stories and career journeys that want to hear the gold. I love to ask my guests who are usually pretty seasoned executives and key decision-makers in companies. By the time a candidate gets to you in the interview process, they’ve been vetted for their skillset. Now, they’re coming to you to see if they would be a good addition to your company culture-wise. What are your go-to questions to see the character in a 30 to 45-minute interview? That’s the gold that people want to hear. I had Bracken Darrell, the CEO of Logitech. I asked him those questions. Who doesn’t want to hear from a seasoned executive what their interview questions are?

That’s going to get around. Especially if your candidate is doing their homework on the companies that they want to at least be at or their ideal company. They should be checking that out. It’s naturally building up that listenership. Do listeners engage with you and ask you questions?

Not as much as I would expect one. I’ll be honest. There’s full transparency there. My biggest mistake as a host and I regret this and I’ve been doing a lot of work on this, is not building a good community early on or not building a community at the start. I just put my show out there. I didn’t build too much fanfare around it. I didn’t do that. Looking back on it, I wish I did because I have 15 or 16 years of marketing media and social media experience before I went into recruiting. It’s the analogy of the plumber with a broken toilet in his house.

I never did a good job of it. I’m playing catch-up all the time, but I have an incredible loop on LinkedIn. I do get a decent amount of DMs. I’ve had someone say to me exactly to your earlier point. They were interviewing at a company of a guest that I had on. They found it so insightful and they found it through a Google search. They never listened to my show before. They were interviewing at the company and my show came up third on SEO for that guest. That’s natural SEO. I don’t put any money into SEO and they found those insights.

That’s where the real power is that I find. People don’t understand that at the end of the day, if you’re putting it on your website, you have a lot more SEO power than you think. That’s where the residual value is long-term.

I’ve never spent a penny on SEO and my show consistently ranks. The POZcast ranks and it’s not the only name that has The POZcast.

There are three of them out there. That’s the first thing I checked because I thought, “When I type this in, you have your POZcast as one word.” I tried separating them because sometimes it doesn’t work in somebody else’s show. Your show is up every time. It’s awesome. You did a good job getting that show.

Here’s an interesting thing. I don’t talk about this much. There’s another slang for what POZ means. In the HIV community and the LGBT community, POZ means HIV positive. I was about ten episodes in and I start to get a lot of angry emails and notes from folks in that community. I took a moment to pause and say, “I’m only ten episodes in. Let’s talk about this.” It affected me because it’s the last thing I want to do. I never want to offend somebody, especially someone going through AIDS.

I reached out to a number of my friends in the community and they were like, “That has nothing to do with your show. You don’t have a show against AIDS. You’re not talking about AIDS. You’re not doing anything about AIDS and it’s your name.” My last name is Posner. People mispronounce it as Pozner. My nickname growing up was Poz. That’s why the show is called The POZcast. I own it. This is my show and I haven’t looked back. I still get maybe 1 or 2 a year but I handle it very respectfully. I explain my story and they say, “Thank you for addressing that.”

 

It’s not like you don’t have a subtitle on there. It’s pretty clear you have career and life journeys. You do say that there. You’ve done the right thing by keeping it strong. You’ve been winning the SEO war within the search engine that is Apple and Spotify and others, not just on Google.

That’s what it’s all about. It speaks for itself. Anybody out there, I handle it with compassion and empathy. Even if they get nasty about it, I handle it maturely because I need to understand where they’re coming from with their message.

Let’s hit into that third thing, monetization. I call it alternative monetization. You’re making money in an alternative way than people typically think is going to be their podcast. They’re going to make money on ads, although you do have ads too. That’s where the money is being made. Talk about that path to it. How do you track and monitor it?

There are two things that I do. First and foremost, I monetize a guest and not the audience, even though I do monetize the audience a bit as the show has grown. If I’m only getting 300 to 500 downloads an episode early on, there’s no sponsor that’s going to pay for an ad on a CPM basis, so I did two things. First of all, I went out for a sponsor. There’s a CRM platform that I use called Interseller. There’s a monthly cost to that. It’s not cheap and I use that for all my recruiting, guest outreach, and podcasts.

I broke a barter deal with them. I have an extensive amount of resources from them that helped me fuel my recruiting business and the podcast. It’s mutually beneficial. That’s money that I would have spent out of my pocket. That’s a straight-up monetization play right there because that’s money that I would have paid. Now, I’m getting it back in my pocket.

The second part which we talked about before is I book guests who are decision-makers of organizations that I want to do business with and I convert them into clients. I’m going to make a lot more money off of recruiting and retaining clients than I would on my show on a CPM ad basis. The other piece that I’m doing now that the show is picking up in popularity and now that I’m crossing certain thresholds and downloads, is then now I’m going to be able to go back out to sponsors and start to pitch traditional CPM deals.

I do it a little bit differently where I say to them straight up, “Every penny that you spend on this show goes right back into the show, into media spend, promotion, equipment, and production.” The actual show itself, at this stage, I’m not a Joe Rogan and Jordan Harbinger out there with Toyota and Microsoft as my sponsors. That’s not my core financial driver. I would rather put it into the show, make the show better, and feed the machine. They liked to hear that. Not that I scoff $100,000 an episode because that’s great, but I put it right back into the show.

Let’s talk about repurposing because you’ve talked about doing lives. You’ve got a lot of shows here. Do you repurpose them? How do you use it on social? What are you doing there? Your clients are marketers, so you have to be good at it too.

I learned from the best. I learned from Gary Vee’s content pillar. I was there years ago. The Gary Vee content pillar platform has had to take one piece of content and turn it into 100 different pieces. I take that to heart. I could take an episode. I could chop it up into sound clips, soundbites, audiograms, and social media posts. That process has been a funny one to evolve. Are you a fan of The Simpsons?

Yes.

Remember seasons 1 and 2? If you recall, The Simpsons has been on for many years. You look at those first seasons and it is garbage, the animation. I look at my first video clips. I had a high school intern doing video clips for me and it was so rudimentary. They were silly and raw. It looked like a PowerPoint version of a video. There was nothing. I look at the video clips that I put out now. I’m working with my video partner, Alex Sheridan, who is incredible. They’re works of art. There are stories and animations. They’re like music videos. That’s the evolution of what you could do with audio content.

How can you take audio content and create something completely unique? That’s what I’m doing now with Alex. We’re partnering to create this eye-catching and attention-getting because it was an evolution. It went from the audiograms. I still do video clips all the time because it’s easy and cheap for me to promote. If I could bang out four of them for $50, who cares? I’ll get them out there because it’s attention and eyeballs.

I’ll put the real time and money into these crafted clips that I’m doing with Alex, and I’ll put them all over social media. I was hesitant to do TikTok and my daughter is the queen of TikTok. She said, “Dad, let me do your TikTok account for you.” She crushes it. I give her the video. She edits and posts them. We do the copy together and it’s fun.

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They do all these cool effects that I was like, “How do you even know that this is new on TikTok and it just came out? How do you even know about it?”

Why not empower her? She is part of my show. She loves it. This is her. This is my why. This is what it’s all about. She is on the team.

Recruiting in digital marketing, I want to talk a little bit about that because that’s a hard nut to crack nowadays. What do you find are some of the things that you’re talking about on the air in your episodes that are resonating both with your guests and audience?

In this economy and market, it’s crazy. There’s such a level of frustration for job seekers out there. There are the haves and have-nots in the job hunt. The power shift going from the employer to the employee, to the candidate side right now, there’s a crazy dynamic. There’s one side of folks who are getting bombarded with recruiters reaching out for new jobs who have no interest in leaving their job versus people that have been out of work for a long time.

They’re getting ghosted and are struggling to get calls back. They aren’t getting feedback in interviews. It’s creating this great divide and us recruiters in the middle here are the punching bag. What I’m trying to do with my show and content also is to put up the good word of good recruiters doing good work. I’m trying to change that perception out there of what a good recruiter can and should do, and set a good example. It’s the Wild West out there. It’s crazy. We’ve never seen a market like this.

We’ve been growing like crazy and our hiring is a mess. It’s not in the marketing area, particularly because that’s not where we hire the most. We tend to hire in more like what we call client success, which is customer service, and on our production side. Sometimes we would make offers and then they would turn them down an hour before they’re supposed to start. There was craziness going on that I’ve never seen in my many years of hiring people.

You hit the nail on the head. There are things that we haven’t seen before. People accepting offers and then not starting day one and saying they took another offer, I’ve never seen that. What happened to keeping your word and loyalty and making a decision and sticking into your guns? It’s weird.

We’re a little luckier but we get more inundated, which is harder to sift through because everyone is remote. We’ve always been a remote company. It’s not like a new pandemic thing. We already had the systems and processes for handling that. It works well. We have training programs. It’s ideal for people. They want remote work, so we get inundated. Remote and flextime are the two keywords.

I’m not going to stand here on my soapbox and talk about it, but people have always wanted flexibility and choice. Not to feel bad that my kid has a doctor’s appointment or a school meeting this morning. When that’s over, we’re going to hop on the train or driving into the city for two hours. I could go right home, continue to work, make up that time, and not feel bad about it. The fact that my kid has baseball practice at 5:30 and then I would never be able to do that if I was commuting. Now, I could work until 5:25, run to his baseball practice and do both, be present, be home for dinner, be with your loved ones and not be burnt out, sitting on trains, planes and commuting.

Flex and choice in podcasting, that’s what I hear from a lot of podcasters. It has become one of the reasons why they chose it.

What’s cool about podcasts is you can do it anytime, anywhere. I’ve done a few shows with some folks in Australia and APAC. The time zone is terrible. New York and Australia are the two worst time zones in the world. It’s either we’re recording early morning my time or late your time or vice versa and trying to figure it out. For me, I record with them at 6:30 or 7:00 at night my time here. It’s 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning for them. They’re like, “I would rather get up early.” For me, I’m like, “I can’t do a 6:30 AM podcast. I’m better at a 7:00 PM podcast.”

I’m a night recorder too. I’m much better doing the night recording.

 

I can’t do a 7:00 PM recording with a long day. I have to build a break-in to detox. I can’t sit here in my office studio all day waiting for that 7:00 PM show.

You’re starting this program on how to create a business-to-business strategy. What other advice do you have for aspiring podcasters who haven’t gotten on the mic yet?

I do not think that podcast is for everybody. If it’s B2B and your head of marketing is like, “We need a podcast. Adam, I want you to be the host.” If you do not feel it in your heart or have a desire or an itch, it’s one thing to be scared, but at least if you have a little bit of like, “I might be able to do this,” go for it. It may not be for everybody. The other piece is consistency. I don’t think anybody realizes until they start a show how much work it takes and the consistency. One show a month is not going to move the needle. People are going to be wanting more. At a minimum, it does have to be once a week. Push yourself and set goals.

Especially if you’re doing that business-to-business model, less than four conversations a month is not going to do much for you.

I average 4 to 5. I’ve been pushing it up because I also find them recording a lot of shows. I try to move up the calendar, so shows and guests don’t go stale. Set goals for yourself. A podcaster that I deeply admire, Jordan Paris, said to me, “Push yourself to 50. Get to 50. Not many people do it.” I forget what the stat was, maybe you know, of how many shows make it past three?

Seventy-five percent of shows overall podfade and they disappear. That’s what that means. It’s not like, “I did 100 episodes and I quit.” They disappeared somewhere along the way. It’s 3, 11 and 21 for some weird reason. Ninety percent of them fade within those numbers.

That’s why I’m a top 1% podcast where my show is half decent.

I haven’t gotten to do your Binge Factor yet. I want to do it right now. Here’s the thing. I listen to a ton of shows here. I have yet to repeat myself on The Binge Factor, which I’m proud of. One of the things that are uniquely different about your show is the pace of the conversation is not forced. That’s because of that conversational style that you’ve embedded yourself in and had done so well. Sometimes we find the pace of a conversation is like, “What’s next?” Yours is not like that at all. The flow of it is wonderful and energetic. I don’t think we get that in that topic especially right. They’re so dry out there talking about recruiting and careers. Yours is the opposite of that.

That means the world to me and I truly take it to heart. I call this a reverse humble brag. I just made that up. I’m truly humbled and I appreciate that. I do mean this. For anyone reading out there, you don’t know me and this is the way I talk. It’s hard for me my entire life and career to get positive feedback. The first fifteen years of my career before I went to recruiting were hard work, failure, getting fired, getting let go, and disappointments. It wasn’t until I was able to control my own destiny with recruiting, my own business, and my own podcast that I finally started to see success.

There’s nothing more rewarding to me as a podcaster when I finish an interview and hit end record and call, and these guests who are accomplished and have been on great shows are like, “Adam, that was one of the best shows that I’ve ever done.” These are people who have been on top podcasts and nothing makes me feel better in my heart than to hear that. They say something very similar to what you said, Tracy. It’s like, “The way you flow the show, you just keep it going. It’s a natural conversation.” I take that from my influence of Howard Stern. It is a conversation. It’s not an interview. There’s a key difference between an interview and a conversation.

That’s what your show has. That’s your Binge Factor right there.

People don’t see that in front of me, I have three pages of notes that I’m making sure I hit on. You don’t see behind-the-scenes and what I’m going through to make sure I get to that.

Typically, when somebody has notes in front of them, that’s when I find them the most forced. I can hear it. That’s how attuned to it I am. I can hear that they’re scanning their notes, that they’re trying to figure this out. They’re doing like, “What’s next? What’s going on?” Your notes and the way that you flow that is so dialed in. You are in your element.

Say how you feel and mean what you say. Those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. Click To Tweet

This is your thing. You should keep going because the show is great. One thing I want to ask everyone is that’s got to be a burning question from a recruiter’s perspective. We’ve heard a lot of people who may have gotten hired and then fired because of something they said on a podcast. What advice do you have for them? You got to be a little worried, right?

I’m a big believer in, “Say how you feel. Mean what you say. Those who mind don’t matter. Those who matter don’t mind.” It’s a little hodgepodge of Dr. Seuss’ mix-up quote over there. It’s like anything with social media. Don’t say anything that you wouldn’t want other people to hear.

You have to balance between getting some visibility and being out there so there are better recruitment opportunities, and saying something that you might trip up on.

It’s a slippery slope. It’s tough too because, in this day and age of cancel culture and over-polarization, it’s tough to be moderate, to be in the middle, and have a point of view where it’s like, “I hear what the other side is saying and there are elements of that that I agree to, but let me tell you my point of view of why I’m a little bit towards this side or in the middle.” As long as you back it up with a strong point of view, whether it be with data, facts or whatever it is, even just your own confidence in standing behind something, don’t let others bring you down. If you truly believe in something, stand by it and hold your ground because there are always going to be haters out there.

What I’ve been learning too is the louder your voice gets and the more popularity you have, the more trolls and haters are going to come. It’s learning how to deal with them and shrug them off. Anyone who takes the time to troll you is going to be beneath you. No one who is ever at a point that you aspire to be or someone you look up to is ever going to troll you. Remember where the trolls are coming from.

I have a whole episode I did. It happens to women a lot faster in podcasting than it does in other places that you get trolled early on in your podcast. It’s common. I do an episode that’s for my clients and anyone else out there.

The trolling of women in general on social media, I’ve seen it on LinkedIn. In podcasting, it’s disgusting. I take a huge stance against that.

This is the thing. It’s not about you at the end of the day, even though it feels like it’s about you. It’s about them. They’re in a bad place and it’s where they are. If you can keep that separation, then maybe you can make it work, but it’s hard not to take it personally when you first get your first one. I was like, “If you don’t like it, you don’t have to listen.”

I said the same thing. Early on, I had this dude who was in the creative space. I’m a creative recruiter. He was saying, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Get off the mic. You’re giving people wrong information.” I confronted him offline and he doesn’t have much to say.

When I was an Inc. columnist, they recommended that we didn’t engage. Don’t engage was the journalist’s model. That’s what we’ve followed here. Good for you for at least trying. I’m excited that your show has hit a milestone. You’re on your way to 200 episodes. Do you have plans to celebrate?

I don’t celebrate follower count or anything but for me, 200 episodes are going to be a huge milestone. I’m doing that by attempting to book a true, amazing A-list guest for my 200th. I’m going on all of my contacts. I’m going deep. I’m reaching out to everybody. I’m calling in favors. I want it to be a very special guest. It has to be meaningful. It has to be a good one. It has to be somebody that I would never normally be able to get with a show of my size.

The feelers are out there and I’ll probably be recording it. The way it’s scheduling now is the end of 2021 and to be aired at some point in Q1 of 2022. It’s going to happen and manifest. I put all my feelers out to the universe. I’m not going to give away any of the names that I’m reaching out to, but I know one of them is going to come through.

 

Right here on the show, all of you readers out there, I’m going to make sure that Adam pings me when that happens. I can let you know so you can check out his hot guest that he is going to have for his 200th episode.

I had some back-ups. I interviewed myself. I had my mentor interview me for the 100th. I was like, “That’s a throw-away. People are expecting that.”

That’s a unique twist on it.

I did a reverse interview for my 100th.

Adam, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for putting The POZcast out there. It’s an awesome show. There are so many people who could get so much value out of it. I hope that they’re going to take a listen from knowing you on this show. I don’t know why they wouldn’t because we’ve had such a great conversation and I appreciate you.

Thank you so much for having me, Tracy. Thank you to your audience for hanging out with us. Check out the show. I appreciate it.

—

Adam is quite a conversationalist. I love how he will go anywhere you want to take him and he will go for you. This is a sign of a good podcaster who can be on both sides of the interview. He can easily have a great conversation no matter where he is. It’s the key to his podcasting success and why The POZcast is working. Think about some of the tips that he gave you for the business development drivers and how to make that work for you. Also, think about the styling and inspiration, and how he is continually improving his podcast. Those are some things that he brings a perspective on that you can benefit from if you apply them to your show and what you’re doing.

If you’re here and you already have a podcast, you’re a continual improvement junkie or you wouldn’t be here. You’re out there looking for ways. You’re looking for that next thing that might add to your show or might make something great in the way that it works. You’re always tweaking and pivoting your show. Adam is the same way. That’s what he has been doing. If you’ve listened to the shows, you do hear that transition over time because he has got enough episodes under his belt.

I’m looking forward to hearing his 200th episode and seeing who it is. I’m excited about it being a big win for him. When it happens, I’m going to shout it out on social media, but if you subscribed to our show, then you’ll already be there. You’ll already know exactly what it is before I even hear about it. Go check out The POZcast on any platform. POZcast is one word if you search for it, but it does show up if you separate the words as well. You should be able to find him just about anywhere.

I’m grateful to Adam Posner for coming on the show and sharing with us the inner workings of The POZcast. If you have some things that are worrying or concerning you or things that you would love to improve and you want me to go out there and find a podcast that will cover that for you, I’m happy to do that. Send me your questions. Send me your show that you love and that you would love for me to feature. I’m happy to do that as well. Until next time.

Important Links:

• NHP Talent Group
• The POZcast – Podcast
• Gary Vee – The POZcast Episode
• Grant Cardone – The POZcast Episode
• Kara Goldin – The POZcast Episode
• Tucker Max – The POZcast Episode
• Interseller
• Facebook – NHP Talent Group
• LinkedIn – NHP Talent Group
• Instagram – Adam Posner
• YouTube – The POZcast
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/adamjposner/

About Adam Posner

Adam Posner is the Founder and President at NHP Talent Group- a boutique NY-based talent consultancy, specializing in talent access for Senior-level roles within: Digital Marketing, Media, Ecommerce, Product and Content Creation at Start-ups, Creative Agencies and Brands. He is also the host of the top global career podcast, ThePOZcast- showcasing experts to help you harness your inner tenacity to drive your life and career forward. He has produced and aired over 175 episodes with top guests like Gary Vaynerchuk, Grant Cardone, Kara Goldin and Tucker Max to name a few.

Prior to pivoting into the world of recruiting, Adam spent 15 years working within the NYC advertising and marketing industry. He has led account management and digital strategy at American Express, SIRIUS XM and digital ad agencies in NYC like VaynerMedia and EP+Co for major Clients like Verizon, Pepsi and British Airways. This has instilled him with a unique perspective when working with candidates to truly understand their Career DNA and ensure a good fit on both sides of the recruiting equation. In addition, he brings expert advisory around the Talent Acquisition process, employer branding and recruitment operations.

He has built a strong reputation by always putting relationships first, while balancing his Clients business needs and Candidates career goals. Adam is truly a power connector. He identifies opportunities, synergies and connects the dots.

Contact:Adam@NHPTalentGroup.comwww.NHPTalentGroup.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjposner/
www.thePOZcast.com

Social Media Links: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn & YouTube:
www.thePOZcast.com
@NHPTalent
https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjposner/