Top 5 Recruiting Mistakes That Cost Me BIG (Learned the Hard Way)

These are the top five recruiting mistakes I learned the hard way from hiring the wrong people, finding out who people were after the fact, and hiring folks like this guy. By the way, I'm not going to say his name because I mentioned him at an event once. I was like, I think I tried to hire him. So this guy I hired comes in for his interview. He's got the swagger, he's leaned back in his chair, he's telling me how great he is at sales. He sold all this for this other roofing company. And what I found out is he wasn't worth anything that he said. In fact, he only had made $20,000 in commission that year. There's a whole other slew of lessons there. I should have fired him. Would have been in his best interest and mine. But my point is, if you ever hired the wrong person, if you ever thought that maybe you're not getting enough applicants, hey, let's put all of that at rest for a minute. Let's run through this list of the top five recruiting lessons I learned the hard way. Because if you can grab just one idea from this list that helps you find and keep a 1 to 2 million dollars per year producer, it's game changing. And then the skill of applies for all of the years over and over again. That you recruit. Like this is the mindset of top business leaders, is seeing the value that one idea put into business and leveraged can become a 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 million dollar concept. And I'm not kidding. The power of what I'm going to teach you is just that. So I'm grateful for you spending your time with me. And let's rock and roll. Welcome or welcome back. Adam Bensman here. Let's talk recruiting, roofing, sales is personal development in disguise and the reward for growth is life changing. I hope my content helps you create a richer life and bank account. All right, let's hit lesson number one. Lesson number one is that your job is not to give people a shot. Your job is to keep the wrong people off the team. Now, I got to give credit where credit is due because I actually learned this one from Jonathan Wissman. Jonathan Wissman wrote a book, he's the author of the book called the Sales Boss. He's also the CEO of a company called who Hire? They do AI automated recruiting. They got a really beautiful recruiting process. And Jonathan is a contributor in the RSRA community. In fact, we hosted a two day recruiting workshop at their office in Phoenix. And Jonathan and Wesley and his team just blew My mind. Like, I thought I was good at recruiting. And I heard these guys present, especially Wesley and Jonathan, on their interview process, some of which I'll be sharing with you today. But again, got to give credit where credit's due. But this mindset shift that Jonathan gave me instead of like many roofers, hey, we'll give them a shot. Let's try it out to then imagining you're the gates and like, my job is to like, okay, are you. Am I going to let you through these gates or not? And if you change your mind, change your view and your perspective when I say mind your mindset around giving people a shot to instead keeping the wrong people out. You're now a filter instead of a magnet. A filter instead of a magnet. And it's a beautiful mindset that will lead me to lesson number two, which is your job is to interview for culture fit. There was a recent discussion, by the way, inside the RSRA community. And I keep what's said in our community. That's why you don't see me airing the two to five sessions we do per week or the hundreds of comments that are happening in conversation or the connections that are made. But I'm sharing concepts with you. And we had a conversation conceptually around FIT and like hiring a sales manager and how important age was versus skill sets. Like, do I hire a demograph that, like, would someone be better if they were in a more senior position or if they're younger? And at the end of the day, my feedback was all that matters is the culture. Because I've worked. I'll never forget there was a company I worked with and they were a massive company, $55 million a year roughly by the time they sold. And they had a sales manager who was older, but everyone turned to him like a. Almost like a father figure. And the rest of the sales team was generally quite younger. And then other times that I've seen, like, we have another member of ours, the sales manager is really young. I remember when I was in the business, I was the youngest person at the company and I was a sales manager. So it doesn't. What matters isn't age and all these things. What matters is the culture. And there's different types of culture in the roofing. Well, in all of business. But in the roofing world, among roofing companies, you have like the ultra competitive culture, the personal development culture, the like, I call it broe and I don't mean it in a bad way, but like the Broie Rah rah. Let's go out and knock doors and make money together. Culture. And then you got like the party culture. And then you have religious cultures that are faith based organizations. So whatever it is that you are, you have your own ecosystem. And your job is to interview for culture, to keep the wrong people out and only let the right people in. All right, number three, this one was game changing for me and that is figuring out how people perform under pressure before you hire them. And again, I learned this one from Jonathan Wisman and I've used this in interviews and it's like, it's so good. So Jonathan shared with me, this tactic he actually shared with our community is to ask this question. Okay, imagine the power is going to go out in the next two minutes because there's a hurricane coming. And everything you share with me over the next two minutes will determine whether or not I hire you. Go. And then he starts the timer on his watch and listens. And usually people will babble and they'll talk for 30 seconds. He goes, okay, you have 90 seconds left. And then he'll go. And he goes, all right, you have 15 seconds left. And what he's looking for, what Jonathan taught me, which again, I've used this in interview and I'll tell you that story about this in a second. But what that shows you is how people perform under pressure. It really doesn't matter so much as to what they say. What matters is how do they respond? Do they lean on humor? Can they talk quick on their feet? Can they blend both and be like, wow, I have never been asked that one. I actually have no idea what to say, but let me try and see what I can do. You know, this gives you such a rich insight because in our field of sales, there's a lot of times people are going to be going to be in a position of really high pressure and if they can't perform, they're not going to make it. So when Jonathan taught me that I actually was hiring and I ended up using it, the person I was going to give a job offer to, I didn't. Why? Because I watched how they performed with that question. And that question, like, I was like, oh, my gosh, there's not a chance. If they can't handle this, there's no way that they're going to perform in the real world because this is going to happen on the regular. So it's a fantastic technique. Thank you. Jonathan Wisman at whohire for that one. All right, number four. This was also game changing and something I wish I did way earlier this Number four is probably, well, I'd say arguably the most important. Number five might be a contender, but number four is identifying how coachable they are. So Jonathan shared. And I know I'm giving Jonathan a lot of his credit because he made a big influence on me on the recruiting front is we're really hiring for two things. Culture fit and coachability. Culture fit, coachability. Culture fit, coachability. And the best way to find out if people are coachable is to put them in a roleplay position immediately upon the interview. So when we ran our two day workshop, our marketing, excuse me, our recruiting workshop, I ran a marketing workshop the next month for our members. We did a mock group interview and Jonathan, what he did is he handed out the top objections to the, to the candidates because this was a mock interview. We were doing role play as an organization and had them go through the top objections and then coached them to see how quickly they could take this information, integrate it as their own and then go again and again. I used this later on through my interview process when I was interviewing for a role and I jumped into role play. Here's the objection or here's a scenario. And I'm less concerned about what they say. What I'm most concerned is, okay, great, now I'm going to give you some feedback and then I want to go again. And what you're going to find by giving feedback and seeing how, how coachable they are, it's exactly that. How coachable are they? If you're about to hire someone and you find out that doing role play is like miserably uncomfortable, they're not going to make it in sales. If you do role play and then give them feedback and they are just, it just doesn't click, why bother? Because someone who is not coachable will not improve. So that's number four, huge. Are you doing these? By the way, I'd love to know what your biggest lesson or recruiting lesson was because this is my list of five, but maybe you've got more. All right, number five is setting expectations. This I see falling short all the time, and I used to do it too, is like bringing someone on board and in your mind you're like, they'll do well or they won't. But the person you're hiring has to have a set of expectations. What is the performance that's expected of them? At what point should they either be self generating leads or achieving a close rate? If you're in retail that is appropriate to the company standards and expectations. What, what's the sales volume that's expected of them. Because one thing Jonathan taught which I freaking love was in the hiring ad to write, you will earn X dollars by this date or you won't work for us. Instead of you could earn all this. You're about to provide all of the training and resources that they need. Well, you should be at least hopefully you are. And when you do that, if people are following your system in process, then yes, they should earn that amount of money. Not like you could. If they're not earning at least X dollars by this date, that's the off. And when you set those expectations, it changes how they view onboarding and if they're held accountable or not. And I'm telling you, it will set your people up for success and make it so much easier for you to hold people accountable. So there are my top five recruiting lessons that I learned the hard way and I hope they find you a multimillion dollar producer. And if you want help finding out where to recruit from, jump into this next video and I'll show you the top nine industries to pull from for great roofing sales reps. We'll see you soon.