Foolproof Hiring with Dr. Brad Smart

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done? I think Doxa Talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have talent. Talk to Doxatalant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatalent.com Bill G Again, that's doxatalent.com BillG. One more time. Docsatalant.com Bill G Check it out today. Hey everybody, we're talking about foolproof hiring today with the world authority in foolproof hiring, Brad Smart. Hi there. I'm Bill Gallagher and I'm really excited to bring to you a terrific new program that we've developed a for Coaching in growth. This program is based on more than 18 years of work coaching over 10,000 people around the world. And I'm really proud to share with you that our clients on average within two years more than double their companies in that time that we know of. They've raised over $2 billion. They've acquired more than 50 other companies and 10 of them have exited, including one sale, over a billion dollars and multiple IPOs. This is not a program for everyone though. You only want to apply to this program if you're between 2 and $20 million in sales, if you have at least 10 people on your team, and if you're really hungry to grow 10x or even 100x and beyond. And you've really got to be willing to do the work and to share with the other people in the community. In this program. We'll give you live coaching. We'll give you live accountability groups with an accountability coach to keep you on track to what you're planning to do and keep you from getting stuck. You'll have expert speakers every month. We'll train you in all the proven scaling up tools and the tools from the Gallup Strengths Finder Assessment. And we'll lead your annual strategy and quarterly planning sessions. We'll do all of this together in a curated community of ambitious people just like you. And this whole program will combine these things in a way that has more power than ever before, but at a fraction of the cost of typical scaling up coaching. So if you think it's maybe right for you, apply now to Secure your spot and if you're accepted in the program, I'll guarantee your satisfaction. It's a sunny day here in the San Francisco Bay area and I'm joined today by Brad Smart in Phoenix, Scottsdale, Carefree, that part of Arizona. We're going to get into foolproof hiring in just a minute. The idea of it, his latest book, which is due to come out. We'll tell you all about that. We got a groovy special offer for you at the end of the show. Before we get into all that, let me remind you that this is the Scaling Up Business podcast and I'm your host and scaling coach Bill Gallagher. We bring our show to you every week where we talk about something to do with scaling your business, growing the business, getting it right, dialing the people for sure. Big focus of today's conversation and our show last week where we talked about hiring salespeople in particular. This one's really about hiring. It's really a timely topic because hiring has been such a struggle and now things are shifted a little bit. So useful conversation today. Anyway, all our shows, hundreds and hundreds of them now and more@scalingcoach.com and like, subscribe, turn on your notifications, get them every week. If we can help you out, you'll find us@scalingcoach.com all right, with no further ado, let's get into this conversation with Brad Smart. Brad Smart is a multi best selling author. He's the world authority in hiring. He created the whole program, the platform that we know and have recommended forever, Top grading that has helped countless companies around the world, including ge, the most important company of its day. And in spite of their current strategic predicaments, their hiring lessons are brilliant to learn from and so on. And so we use and recommend many aspects of top grading and many of our clients are passionate advocates of the reference checking methods and bringing the truth serum to the conversation of doing a full analysis of tandem interviews of talent, assessing their whole team and, and, and creating job scorecards. So all the ideas in here we talked about before. But anyway, with all that said, Brad Smart, welcome to the show.

Well, thank you, Bill. Thank you for inviting me.

Yeah, it's great to have you on. You guys should know that. So we've, we were talking about sales hiring before. We've talked to some clients and some coaches before about top grading and applied in their companies and we've had Brad's son Jeff Smart on before who focuses particularly on C suite hiring. But Brad's company has brought that as he'll tell you about like the training and the, the tools that they have. And we have. I said before we'll throw a, a link up both in the show notes and on the screen at the end of the show with a special offer for one of the tools. And then he's got a new book out called Foolproof Hiring, which is available now for pre order on Amazon and comes out very soon. So I'm glad to have you on the show. Let's get into it with kind of your story. So go back to your college years. Talk about studying, talk about the disillusionment and the evolution of top grading. I think that's really helpful for all of us because we'll see our problems in it.

All right. Be happy to do that and kind of explain why I'm doing this now at a very advanced age. Right. So I was a freshman at Miami of Ohio, knew I wanted a business career. Business 101 was kind of boring. Psych 101 was interesting. And there's a local management psychologist who taught a course for $1, hoping to interest some students in the profession. Well, I was one of those students. All right. So I went back home, it was Milwaukee, and went through just yellow pages and looked for firms management psychology firms, firms that interviewed candidates for executive positions. And they kind of adopted me, which is very nice of them. And so they said, you got to naturally get your undergraduate degree, Brad, but get a master's and PhD in psychology because you'll be in the business of assessing people and the deeper your insights, the better. And besides, Dr. Smart sounds good. The psychologist, right? With deep insights into people. What they will say was, you get a PhD as I did. That's a research degree. So you're sitting in an office like this, analyzing data. You're not interacting much with people. So a psychology degree with clinical applications might have been more useful, but did it. And they got me summer jobs in college and then graduate school. Very nice. And through all those experiences I saw whether it's C suite or on the factory floor or at a grocery company for stockers and checkers, the A players, the high performers, really made it happen. My wife and I had dinner last night with someone who is to top grading. And we had a fantastic waitress, probably the best in the restaurant. And so he bribed. He said, people like this really make things happen for sure. So I would get more and more excited about hiring A players, high performers at all levels. Went off to Purdue, good school. And was very disappointed. Hundreds of thousands of research studies on Leadership and selection and hiring, testing and so forth, and actually ended up taking 11 courses and tests and measurement and, and the net of it all is none of those processes work very well. Not one couldn't find any examples of companies who had boosted their A player hires to even 50%, let alone 75 or 85%, which is standard for our dozens and dozens of case studies. Well, they offered me a job. I'm not saying who they are because they're going to be a little critical. And my first week I asked the senior partner something I should have be seven years ago. How good are we at what we do? What do you mean? I said, what percent of the people we screen, we interview and test and recommend for hire and who are hired, what percent turn out to be high performers? I don't know.

Wow.

I don't know. In this world of accountability and measurement and so forth, this is the business. He said, brad, you're the new kid on the block. Why don't you go around, introduce yourself to our clients and you ask them the question. And there's some Fortune 500 companies, Rockwell's there, Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance, mid sized companies and so forth, asked the question and on the average they said 33%. One out of three of the people we recommended turn out to be high performers. Yeah, one out of three. So I went home and I told my wife, I'm not sure I'm doing the right thing here. If I were a medical doctor and 2/3 of my patients were leaving the hospital in body bags, I'd feel like a failure. So I dug in and wanted to try to identify the problems which are now known and to many of you as scaling up coaches for sure, and what the solutions are. Okay. And I had never actually conducted an interview. So within a couple of weeks I sat in on that senior partner interview of a candidate for a second level actually marketing position at big insurance company. And I was disappointed again. I thought I was joining a team of professionals who are really good at, at assessing candidates for senior positions. And his interview was kind of a walk through the resume, a few questions on competencies. There was no job scorecard per se. And so he asked me at the end of his interview, which was only about an hour and 15 minutes, Brad, do you have any additional questions for this candidate? Brathen said, yes, but it's not lunchtime. Any chance you could come back to the candidate after lunch? And he did. And now I'm thinking I didn't do lunch, so what should I do for an interview? I Certainly didn't like this kind of a shotgun.

So your lunch break was just creatively buying yourself some time. Yes.

Right. And so I thought of clinical interviews. But this isn't a clinical interview. But okay, I think I'll do a chronological interview which has led to of course, the top grading interview today. Really nice. We spent the whole afternoon and fortunately he was an A player and he was very willing to talk. So I spent the next day typing about a 12 page report and I submitted it to the senior partner. Said, is this okay if I send this over to the company? So I'm not even going to read this? Yeah, you send that over. That's, that's kind of a test. Okay, a test. So he sent his and I sent mine. And two days later. Brad. Yeah, Bill, Come into my office. Oh, what did I do now? This is, this is not very good. He said, well, there's good news and bad news and. Which you want to hear first. Well, all right, let's go with the good news. Say they like the report. They said it was the best report they've seen from our company. And that's 20 years. That is good news. That is good news. Well, what's the bad news? Well, we're paying you to do four interviews and tests. Four candidates a day, not one and certainly not one every two days. So if you want to get paid, you should embrace our approach. And besides, you might be embarrassing us. Well, I didn't change. I didn't change. And because clients were so enthusiastic, the word got out around Milwaukee and I was overloaded and working at least 12 hour days. I'm sure. But I wasn't about to go back to their approach.

You know, isn't that a funny story, like within the story right there of crushing some initiative and improvement to conform to and protect the status quo. It's really funny. And yet both, not just that's, we think of that as a big company example. But that happens in companies of all sizes, right?

Yeah. And small companies, that's kind of our specialty these days. Scaling up clients. A small mid sized range for a reason. I'll get to just in a moment. But MIS hires, I think, as we all know, are more serious in small companies. Ge, when it was the most valuable company in the world, could have a lot of MIS hires and still remain the number one company in revenues.

Yes.

So I got, I was talking with clients and clients were saying, raise your prices. It's not often we hear that when you're a consultant, but they're saying because they had heard pressure and my firm to go back to their way, and I just didn't do it. So I left and started my own firm. But I identified the main problems and I'm sure a lot of people watching this have heard what the problems are, identified the solutions, hung up my shield and went about doing it. Well, the problems, as you know, are. Well, you get fooled, right, because candidates lie on the resume. In the foolproof hiring book, we have research, dozen research studies showing that close to 70% of resumes contain significant lies. Like I attended that college, but didn't license, did not omitting companies where they were fired and so forth. That's what we're living with. That's what the world was like half a century ago and it's still that way. And the reason that candidates lie powerfully is because of social media. We thought when the social media came along and people were going to have profiles and Facebook and LinkedIn, they'd be really super, super honest because it'd be out there. No, no. And we all know that social media profiles are, are kind of profiles on steroids, hyping the positives, ignoring the negatives. And that has led, of course, to young people who are anxious and depressed and so forth because their life is not as perfect as everyone else's. But here's the key. Candidates can be pretty darn sure that you're not going to be able to verify what they said in interviews and in their resume because most companies, certainly large companies, discourage their managers or actually prohibit their managers from taking reference calls. Because you say something negative about someone who doesn't get the job, then they might sue. Actually not. So that gets into legalities. You address that in the book. But that's the world we live on.

Yes, the belief that you better keep your mouth shut. I can share just really personally, I've been both an entrepreneur CEO multiple times, but also had jobs, worked for other people either as a senior exec or early in my career in lots of jobs. And I think about some of those early jobs in early interviews and a huge amount of it was spin, right? And then I had a pretty major career setback at one point and I went into, I started a company and then I got acqua hired out to work for another company. And as I'm going through the process and they're essentially going to buy up my business and have me join the company as a senior exec, I, I had a conversation with the CEO and I'm like, listen, like, you should know this about me. I'M like this. I'm not like that. If that fits you, then great. If I'm your Goldilocks, then, you know, please have me. But I don't want to pretend to be something that I'm not. And that was a major change in my life. And today, with some money and some accomplishment security, if you were to interview. If I were to interview for a job, I'd be like, well, listen, I'm really good at this and I kind of avoid these other things, and that's how I work. And, you know, and. And in truth, that's kind of how my sales conversations go today, which is very much like a hiring interview. Right. But that's not a normal thing. Like, you know, everybody shows up, they're like, I'm a team player, communicator, self starter. I'm super scrappy, entrepreneurial. I've got an ownership mindset and really like, if I have a fault, it's like working too hard and caring too much. You right?

Well, I was lucky enough, I think, in the first couple of months to interview an A player, and it was a long interview and talking about reference checking and it's not done. He said, I'd be happy to arrange calls with the managers I've reported to. Really? Yes. Okay. Wow. So this interview, my first close to top grading interview with someone who was very willing to arrange reference calls with bosses. We found out since then, across millions of candidates, A players are happy to arrange the calls with the bosses who will take the calls. There's never, ever, ever been a problem with that. They take the calls. Not afraid that this former A player is going to sue them, for God's sake. Right. And of course, they know that their bosses will sing their praises. Those bosses. We found over the years, clients have repeated again and again and again that when they talk to the managers of candidates, they do learn about weaker points and areas for improvement. They want to help the person to be better, which is maximize strengths, but also minimizing weaker points. But the main thing in the interview, when candidates have been told, and this is principle number one in top grading, we used to call it the torque technique and the truth serum. The truth motivator. Simply tell candidates at the earliest possible time. You can even do it on a website or a tool that we'll talk about in a few minutes. And that truth motivator assures that the people you'll talk with are going to be open and honest with you. Probably they're sharp. Okay? Not necessarily the best fit. The best fit for Your company in that job. But it made all the difference in the world, Bill, to me because for several months I was told by my employer and clients, we want you to find out the negatives. It's easy to find out the positives, the accomplishments, successes, want to find out the weaker points, areas for improvement and so forth. And it's kind of like pleasantly tricking people into being honest. As soon as candidates know, then a final step in hiring. Usually when there's a job offer on the table, they'll arrange the calls. They're open, they're honest and they love the top grading interview. That's chronological, the walk down memory lane. And they, they like bragging about all they've done well, their accomplishment successes. But they also are very willing to talk about mistakes they've made and failures and how they overcame them in the next job and the next job and the next job. And it's fun, it's exciting, it's interesting and it is revealing. So you don't get fooled. There's foolproof hiring.

Let me add a couple personal examples of this to your principals. I remember having somebody go through an interview process once with me for an important job at a company I was running some years ago and, and they complained about our process. Oh, your process is really long and cumbersome and there's a lot of steps and like, you know, just sort of this offhand, but it was clearly a complaint. And I said, well yeah, that's because we really want to make sure that we hire the right people and that they belong and they last for a long time, that we have a great team. And then they added a second complaint about it. Well, it's just kind of too much and it's silly and other companies don't do this. And I, I said that's, you know, I appreciate, thank you for telling me that. Like I really appreciate hear thoughts and feelings on it. And I, of course we finished the interview and then I never spoke to them again. Like clearly they don't belong in our company. But like, you know, you get that kind of thing. And then I, I remember another time we had hired somebody, a senior, a general manager, general manager position for one of our things. And then we started to run into some inappropriate behavior complaints and things like that. And, and the results weren't quite there. Like it, it began to crumble. But the person had been her through the whole thing. And so we went back and, and we were looking to make sure and how we were going to dismiss this person, that kind of thing. And in the course of that are of course we had a fancy HR department and it was uncovered that nobody had checked anything on the resume and the person had lied about their degree and a whole bunch of other and their, their job history. And I'm like okay, like this is why are we checking this now? After there's the company's got some exposure and some problems and why, why not earlier? But then later learning from that I, and, and knowing the top grading approach, I started doing my interviews. Like hey, we're going to check things later. There's a pretty extensive background given the company and what we do and that kind of thing. Like there's a full background check and we verify everything. So if there's anything at all like that I might raise like it's better just if you just tell me about it. As we go through things and you know, lots of, we all have things. I've had different things. It's fine, you don't have to be a per person but we want to know and understand, not get surprised by them. Right. And that was a really, really useful thing because creating an open and you know, I've had people tell me that oh well I, my ex husband had a gambling problem and we went through a bankruptcy and you're gonna see that and like okay, that's fine. I, you know, like that, that was not a ding for them. Right?

Yes.

Sorry about your ex husband. But yeah, just endorse it and like you know, make it real.

I think, well, it becomes very real and it is for many years. Clients are saying unfortunately. We are unfortunately and fortunately we save time and we save money when we're using the top grant approach. But what is most time consuming, not the in depth interviews because if they're used and the reference checks organized by the candidates. We don't mishire people. That is a huge savings. But what the issue is, particularly in times like these where you're struggling to get candidates for many reasons, we face that through the past 50 years of top grading. So if you do boost your recruitment, you get lots of applications. You have to have a lot of applications in order to pick the best.

Right.

The A players. So if you only have three or four applications, chances are there's not an A player in the group. Okay. So we developed the pre screen snapshot that is sent to all candidates. Okay. Before you even talked with them.

Right.

And the instructions include the truth serum three times. Final step in hiring candidates. Arrange calls with managers they've reported to. That's about all there is but candidates absolutely are honest with that. They say what their bosses and the most recent jobs, how they rate them. They know they're going to have to arrange reference calls eventually with them. A players are happy to do it. A players. So that means about one in three of the applications sent out results in the person actually filling out the pre screen snapshot questionnaire. That's the best one third. Stick with that one third and you have a much better chance of getting eight players hired. But what clients were complaining about in the absence of that, we would do phone screen interview. Phone screen interview. We do dozens of phone screen interviews. That's where the time is. Because you don't know if the person you're interviewing has a lot of bs. They happen to be my initials, by the way, Bill. Right in the resume. Well, we've solved that problem. Hello. So I was off doing my thing. Never had a salesperson, didn't do any pr, didn't do anything like this for many years. And there's someone with GE executive level. Saw my first book published. It was in the late 1980s in London. I didn't even know it was over there. So he came back, we met, he said, how would you like to meet Jack Welch? I'd like to meet Jack Welch. Top grading was embraced. And during the 1980s the market cap of GE went from 19 to 39 billion dollars. Back then that was pretty good. But with top grading and with a players hired going from 25% to over 80%. Throughout the organization, thousands and thousands of managers trained. They went up to $574 billion from 30 to 574. Now there's a decade and Jack Welch was not hiding this. You'd think, well, some companies want to hide their secret hiring approach. Nope. He wanted all the vendors to use top grading. The word got out. And then Fortune 500 company after they had Merck and Barclays and Shell and Color, all these companies embrace top grading for about 10 years. Very, very busy. Not building a company the way my son has done it, but just throwing off work to people who are trained. And it was fantastic, right? And I hit the number. What's the number? Retirement number. The lines intersected. All right, so bought an island home. And my wife and I spent winters there for 24 years. And I was playing busy. Chris Mersau, who's president, he was busy. We were busy enough, okay, Doing things, not building a company, but we were having fun doing our thing. Came back and after several more years, Chris came to me and said, you son Jeff GH Smart just focuses on the suite, the C suite. It's interviews of candidates for the most senior positions. And they're very good at that. But he's not doing what we did at GE or at Culligan or, I mean, just go through it, train all the managers. So let's do that now then, Bill. It took years to get the software up so it could be integrated. Top grading methods could be integrated with applicant tracking systems and so forth. And we have a small company version of that, but we had to do that. All right. And still clients were choking on. We conduct so many phone screening. What can we do to eliminate. Cut that way back. And this prescreen snapshot is the answer there. Because one, only the people who are very willing to arrange the calls will actually fill out the questionnaire. And it asks right on there, what's your best guess if you do arrange calls with these managers is how they'll rate your overall performance. And what we've found over all these years, when candidates know they're going to have to arrange reference calls and they say their managers will rate them excellent or very good on a scale where there's also good, fair and poor. Good is not good enough, good is not good enough, excellent and very good. Those are the people where now you want to look at the resume and do the phone screen interviews. Saves an enormous amount of time, almost 50% of the screening time right there. And as I said, it is much, much more fun. So all this is happening. I was scuba diving, but when it came back, all those CEOs are gone. They retired six, seven, the ones that were your clients. Okay. So that's why I'm more active writing the next book with Chris, doing webinars and talking with executives, talking with coaches, talking with their clients. And for any coach, if you want to, you know that we have professionals assigned to you. Call them. They're happy. To do a demo of this pre screen snapshot. Call me if you want. And I am talking with scaling up coaches two or three weeks. And I thoroughly enjoy it. I'm not charging for it. I haven't charged anything for 12 years. But I love it. They're all over the world. And Dubai, I got an invitation to go to Dubai last week. But like you to do better with scaling up, as you all know, there's a people pillar. That people pillar happens to be top grading. But we'd all, we all would like to see clients of top grading coaches do better. And we kind of put the number at 75%. If you're not at least 75% A players hired, there's something you're not doing up until you try top grading. If you say less than half the people we've hired are a players, for sure I must not be a very good interviewer. I must not be a very good leader. But that's just the real I have to live with. No, we'd say it's not your fault. You've been using hiring methods that have never worked. So give top grading a try and when you get in it with just the things we've talked about so far, truth serum, do the reference calls, use that pre screen snapshot. You will start hiring better for sure. So that's kind of where we are today. I'm back in it, not taking any money, but I'm really to help the scaling up clients and coaches do better.

Let's break down a few of the things that you've talked about and referenced in there. So first thing is the job scorecard, right? It's really hard to do a good process of this if you haven't really thought through what does this job produce, what kinds of skills are needed, what kinds of experience, what do they actually do, what outcomes do they produce? Like if we haven't created a simple job scorecard and we have a one page one that's a version that we use a lot and you've got one that's a little bit more involved, but the structure is pretty much the same. And that's kind of the first piece we've thought through the job, right? And then you've got this application process and you've got a tool, the prescreen snapshot, that we'll put a link up for later, but people can get a free trial of it and use it. So you've got a whole software suite on the back there that can help the process. But even sometimes if your regular hiring process is you post a job posting of whatever kind with or without a job scorecard informing it, and then people send you resumes and cover letters that you read endlessly. I found that the COVID letter is the least useful thing of all of that because it's usually formulaic and not customized. And then also really time consuming and, and almost useless is the resume because it's also super prepared and that kind of thing. And I don't know, like I have to interpret it and it's really hard. But asking questions and asking specifics like you do with your pre screen snapshot or you can use with many of the applicant tracking systems There how many years have you worked in this and what did you do there? And like you can create, think about how somebody would fail. And then I have one more thing and I'm curious how you see this, but I found that after the basic sort of like if they have enough experience for the level and that kind of thing of the sort of structured questions, I like to ask three open ended questions. And reading those three open ended questions before I've even talked to them, I find more useful than a lot of things because it's. They can't think about it. Right. So I generally ask like, what about this company is of interest to you and what about this job is of interest to you and why are you a fit for this? Now three things roughly like that and, and that to me like says so much. Just reading those out of this, the, the sorted things. And then of course there are people who, who object to filling that out like. And so we don't even talk to those people at all.

Right, well those are very basic questions and good for you for asking them. And we've found that over the years as clients all saying when people were actually interviewing have been told final step in hiring, a sermon that arranged reference calls. That's not a threat to them. That's a promise and an opportunity. They're happy to do it. And they, they are always accurate. They might even guess that bosses would say their overall performance is very good when they really know it's excellent. But they never will say, my boss say it's very good if it's only fair or something like that isn't good, good enough. Remember Jim Collins? He had a whole chapter on that good isn't good enough. If you want high performers always striving. Picture this. If you're just at an airport and you had to get on a plane and there was a candidate right there and you had only a few minutes, what would you ask? I think your questions are good. But next I say, okay, the process is you arrange reference calls with managers. Here's four managers you reported to. Okay. What are their names? What's your best guess? If you were to ask them how they would rate your overall performance and you might actually have to do this eventually, what you do not want to hear is I don't think any of those four would rate me excellent. You know, I don't walk on water. And probably not very good, but I think they would all say that I'm a good performer. Does that sound like an a player, a really high performer? No. All right. And just to be clear, I said, you know, one third is what clients are saying. One third of the applicants who get that thank you note, thank you for applying. We'd like to continue the hiring process. The next step is to ask you to provide just a little more information about your most recent two jobs. All right? That's it. Okay. That's all there is to the pre screen snapshot. When you get the prescreen snapshots, best you look, right? And sure enough, almost all of them say their bosses rate them excellent or very good. And some coaches, coaches said, well then the pre screen snapshot eliminates two thirds. No, no, no, you still have their resumes. And new clients always want to go back to some of those resumes. Wow, this person really looked good. Really looked good. And they never find someone who is very good or excellent there. What they find is people who are not really interested in the job. And when you tell them what the job is now, they or, or they have that BS component, they're not about to ask their bosses to talk with you for fear they'll tell the truth. So it's wonderful that it works. And frankly, Bill ashamed. I mean, five decades later, I'm in this and the world is out there with people being fed fooled every day. And because of the pandemic, all of the scaling of clients know you have to be positive, you have to be upbeat, you have to be praising people. How do you praise people who are not performing well? You have to do it because they'll pick up and walk across the street. But the CEOs, the CEOs and scaling up coaches almost all have to be very frustrated that they did get fooled. They have these mishires. They're very costly. Mishires is fixable as we've already said the truth term.

Well, let's talk, let's talk about a thing that's going to come up. So over the course of a 40 year career, off the top of my head, I can think of two times that I was let go for not being a fit. One, I was laid off. But I know that I was not a fit and that the reason I was part of that layoff is that I was not a fit and another time that I was actually fired because I was not a fit. And in both cases there were parts of my job and aspects that I did at a very excellent level, like very, very high level parts of my job. And ultimately I was let go in different ways because I just wasn't a fit in those environments. And if you Asked me if, like, if I was interviewing today at a different stage of life, I would be straight up, like, yeah, I didn't fit. And so it's important to me never to work in an environment that's like X, Y and Z, because I'm just never gonna be great in that environment or if my job looks like this. So what do you do when somebody has that and they say no, I. Like, they would say I sucked there.

Yeah. Right. Well, back to basics. And you mentioned we always start if we're going to be interviewing and. And testing if they want. But it's mostly interviewing candidates for jobs. The job scorecard.

Right.

It is shameful how so many companies have vague job descriptions and they hire against those. Yeah. And it's up to the person's on board. They find out what the job really is and whether they're really a fit. You know, and you're going to do. You have to have performance reviews, particularly these days. So why not do it before you hire people rather than afterward? But in answer to your question, what do you do if someone is very, very good in some areas? Go out of your way if you can structure the job so they will fit. Because frankly, you should be promoting from within, not always going outside. Okay. And so you look for a position where they can be an A player. And when that happens, everybody wins. But if it's impossible, then you cut it. You should always provide feedback and coaching and an opportunity for them to realize what those high standards are for them to achieve. If a player. Standards. Those are high standards. They should have known that before they were hired. And with the style. I was a total misfit for the company I worked with, the only company I've worked for. Right. And it probably been very useful for them and for me to know that they're not going to change their approaches. So you went off and in your doctoral studies, you didn't learn any ways to improve hiring, but you're focused on that now. You want us to change to meet you. Yeah. But actually the clients want you guys to change too, but they wouldn't. So that's a misfit. Keep this in mind, though, if you want to change your culture. All right. And with such high percentages of employees in the past two years, quitting, saying they didn't like their boss, they didn't feel appreciated, and so forth, maybe you should be changing your culture any number of different ways. So you define what that is. Now you're hiring for the new culture and a person coming in might you Might want that person to be a disruptor, okay, to change the status quo. But you're the CEO, you better support that person because they'll be passive aggressive, people will be throwing out banana peels trying to force that person to leave. So sometimes it's very good.

I had that once I was recruited to be a disruptor in something and to start and move something. And I went through one of those old school psychological things. They flew me to another city and they did an intelligence test and they figured out if I was a bedwetter. All the deep asked me about my mom and everything and they gave me the high sign for the job. And then I took the job and I was innovative disruptor. I'm entrepreneurial in nature. Right. But then there was some shifts, as happens in big companies, and my new boss was not at all interested in having a maverick entrepreneur, entrepreneur type person within the company. And that became a problem for me because they're like, no, you need to play nicer with people. You need to not be so pushing on that. And I stopped being a fit for that environment because of the change of the, of the leadership. Right? Yep.

But good in the sense that the world with the pandemic stresses have shown just doing it the old way almost across the board ain't gonna work anymore. So a whole lot of our clients are looking for disruptors. But there's a way you could mention the company, the company you're familiar with where a person was hired a little over a year ago to head marketing, and they have dealerships throughout the world. Fast, fast growing company. And although this person was a player, my report said, yet when you do the reference checks, talk to his bosses, you're going to hear you'll probably be able to have done more, better, faster if he wouldn't be some damn pushies from, well, say from India. And his parents who immigrated, said, you're going to have to push harder than others. You're going to have to push harder. It's true. But sometimes when you push higher, what you get is people saying, slow down. So even before he was hired, there was an agreement with the CEO, this new head of marketing that you're going to, for the first six months, go around and meet people, hear how they've done marketing. Some of them running around in Learjets and so forth. They're very successful. They're not about to hear, I'm from corporate, I'm here to help you, and you better damn well do it my way. So he did that. He just listened about Their business, listen to how they approach marketing, asked what can we do? What can I do? We do it corporate to help you. And then came back with the, with the changes. But if you had to take deep breaths and restrain that tendency to piss people off by pushing too hard, it can be done. And as you said, Bill, you know, no one's perfect. A players all have weaker points, areas for improvement and of course they wouldn't be hired if they're terrible and they're not going to fit and be a player. But figure there are ways and knowing the full person where you can maximize their strengths and help them minimize their weaker points. In this case, pushing too hard, too fast so they perform at that high level.

So as scaling up coaches, one of the things that we preach again and again is that the A player has both the fit to the job in the company and the fit to the role. Like the environment of the company, the culture, the values and the fit to the role. And they can perform. They have both of those things. But we also always say that the most deterministic thing that you can't really fix is the fit to the culture and the environment of the company. And if they don't fit your culture, they're never going to win no matter how good they are. And I see that again and again and again. People who are just a terrible fit but they're going to like burn things up, do more damage in companies than anything.

Yeah. To your point, there's no such thing as an A player but just doesn't fit the culture. No, no, no. They have to fit the culture to qualify as that as a player.

The A player then is situational. It's situational to your company in that time. I've seen people and I actually had somebody who went through the top grading training and then made a terrible mishire because he got confused that the, that it was this, no gaps and always successive improvements and the person was like, had a blue chip resume, fantastic education, great career, but was not at all a fit for the company. And they missed that whole piece of that process and they ended up with a, with a pretty bad hire.

Yeah. And I've done research in my company with about 20,000 reports on candidates. The same with Jeff's company. And one of the key principles from that research is don't eliminate candidates just because they failed in a job or two. Most high performing people have, they've had made significant mistakes, could even be fired, but they've learned from them and learned where they're going to fit. And when they're not going to fit. And the person I had my wife and I had dinner with last night using top grading, he had run a company and he appreciated the importance of telling the truth about people. Culligan is one of our clients. And Scott Claussen says, and it's in this book, that at Culligan, job scorecards are done. And I encourage all my managers to take reference calls even on people who've been fired.

What?

Yes. Why? First of all, not many people are fired, all right? They sign on to achieving those high standards for A player, standards if they're falling short, they've been coached and trained and look for other jobs where they can perform as an A player. And they don't wait around to be fired. They know what's coming. They'll go somewhere else. And then you have a nice lunch and a cake and so forth. But that's a good process. When going back to your point again, bill the job scorecard, get that job scorecard nailed down. That's probably the first thing we do with most clients, is get several key job scorecards squared away. So they're hiring for the right thing, right?

Yes. Yes. I'm going to call out a couple of the resources and stuff in just a second. Before I do that, I'd like to remind our listeners about a couple things that we've got that I think are really useful and you can get in touch with us by dropping us an email. But first of all, we've had a couple clients graduate in the last few months. So we'll be adding one new client this next quarter and we're talking to different potential people. If you've got somebody you think that we should talk to that is really reaching for the stars, the moon, and would like a coach who's passionate about helping people fulfill their dreams for a better world, then please drop us A note to infocalingcoach.com infrastructure if you are looking for something else or some other kind of resource, if we can help you, there's 230 other coaches also out in our network. So we'll probably add one new client in the next quarter and we're looking for really the right company to help. But we've got lots of other coaches around the world and we're happy to help you find stuff. So you can send us a Note to info scalingcoach.com or go to our website, scalingcoach.com that recaps all of the work that we do in the different programs that we offer and so on the other thing to say is that I have a bootcamp coming up in April I think it is with Vern Harnish and I are leading a boot camp for a small group of CEO COO payers at Lake Tahoe and this is a week long program that I do once or twice a year with Vern and we take people through all of the core of scaling up and either help them accelerate their work or get started with it but you do it alongside a few other CEO coo so you get a lot of cross fertile stuff. So that's coming up and the links to that is in our events and calendar page@scalingcoach.com and and of course big thanks to my friend and mentor Vern Harnish for creating this whole scaling up mess that makes such a difference for so many companies. Let me then give a shout out also to some of the other things that you've got here. So there's a special offer here. Top Grading Prescreen Snapshot is this tool that we've been referencing. You want to create your job scorecard and they have those tools and resources. They provide training@topgrading.com but they have this pre screen snapshot and you can go try it for free if you like it. It's not too expensive a thing to keep using if you're not doing some kind of thing on your own. It's really helpful. Go, go try it, see if it's good for you. And then of course the book is coming out now. Foolproof Hiring and from Forbes Books and so you can pre order that on Amazon. It's coming up in a couple of months and get your copy so that you are out there and using the best Latest thinking from Brad and company. Brad, thank you so much for joining us today.

Happy to do it.

Some shout outs to the other folks to Wanda Mitchell, our show producer, her getting things ready, shows prepared. Now she's dancing in the background and and to the folks at Podfly Productions who get our show produced and out every week. Thanks so much to those guys. Thanks everyone for listening for watching. Keep scaling up. We'll talk to you again next. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our scoreboard software powered by Align, it's the official software for Scaling up With Scoreboard you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go with their mobile app. You can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with scoreboard by Aligned. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.