Cameron Herold hires athletes from Olympic trials and uses scorecards with measurable results instead of job descriptions. He raises the bar so each new hire outperforms half the team, and keeps A-players with custom retention tactics like promotion paths and board access.
Chapters
I was hiring a guy one time and I'm interviewing this guy and I said, what do you do for fun? He goes, I run. I'm like, are you middle distance? He goes, yeah. I said, do you run 10K? And he goes, yeah. I go, what's your PB in the 10K? He goes, dude, I'm fast. I'm like, no, what is it? He goes, dude, I'm really fucking fast. His personal record in the 10K was 28 minutes and 48 seconds. And I go, dude, you're lying. He goes, no, I was 6th in the US Olympic trials. I'm like, you're fucking hired. When someone is 6th on the US Olympic trials, they're goal-oriented, they're tenacious, they don't give up. And he loved our Vivid Vision and he had the skill. You're hired. A job description shows all of the things that you're hiring for. Let's say I was hiring a swimmer. I want somebody who's fast and someone who's strong and somebody who knows all the 4 strokes and somebody who's competitive. But the scorecard is more measurable. Someone who broke a world record, someone who won a gold medal, someone who competed at all 4 strokes. Do you know how to win an Olympic gold medal? No, you do. You know how to win. Just be faster or better than everybody else. So we all know how to do it, right? Every single one of us knows how to win a world— a gold medal. We all know how to break a world record. How many of us in the room have done it? Not many. I was hiring a guy one time. We only hired athletes. We looked for triathletes, we looked for marathoners, we looked for team players, people that had competed in college and high school or above. And I'm interviewing this guy and I said, what do you do for fun? He looked like a runner. He goes, I run. I'm like, are you middle distance? He goes, yeah. I said, do you run 10K? And he goes, yeah. I go, what's your PB in the 10K? PB is personal best or personal record. He goes, dude, I'm fast. I'm like, no, what is it? He goes, dude, I'm really fucking fast. His personal record in the 10K was 28 minutes and 48 seconds. And I go, dude, you're lying. He goes, no, I was 6th in the US Olympic trials. I'm like, you're fucking hired. When someone is 6th on the US Olympic trials, they're goal-oriented, they're tenacious, they don't give up. They examine their own contribution to the problem first. They will do anything to get through those brick walls. And he loved our Vivid Vision and he had the skills. You're hired. Has anyone ever done the Vancouver Sun Run? There's 54,000 people do the Vancouver Sun Run. You know that when you do the Vancouver Sun Run, you don't have to know the course because you just follow the 20,000 people in front of you. Not Jeff. Jeff came 8th. How the fuck do you come 8th in a race of 54,000 people? When you're 8th, you have to memorize the course because there's nobody in front of you. What we do is we raise the bar every time someone comes into our organization. They have to be better than 50% of the people that work with us in that business area. Area. If I have 4 people in marketing, the next one has to be better than at least 2. I'm always raising the bar. And when you have your employees hiring people they're excited and inspired to work with, that's building a real culture. And by the way, stop saying that you have a family culture. Half of the world population doesn't like their family. Sorry, I came up in the family I love, but I'm amazed there's people that didn't have— like, they had really dysfunctional, bad families. And don't say that you're actually a team environment either. Think of it more like Cirque du Soleil, that you want to be absolutely the best in the world and you can trust the other people because their lives are at stake when they're flying through the air and you're going to catch them. Try to raise the bar. Jack Welch in his day was the CEO and chairman of General Electric. I asked his second in command, Jeff Immelt, for a system that Jack used to use at GE that they still use today. And every 6 months, every executive draws this on a piece of paper. It's a 4-box, a simple matrix. With results on the up and down y-axis, low results at the bottom, high results at the top. And across the bottom is your core values or your culture fit with low core values to the left and high core values to the right. You can think of it as a scale of 1 through 10, right? 1 through 10 on results, 1 through 10 on core values. If someone's in the bottom left-hand corner, they're below 5 on results, they're below 5 on core values. What do you do with them? Right? You fire them. That's easy. Now, what do you do if somebody is in the top right-hand corner? I'm saying like a 9 or a 10 in results, a 9 or a 10 on core values. What do you do with them? Maybe promote them, maybe hire them. You actually handcuff them to your company. You find a way to keep that person inside of your organization for at least 5 years. And there's no such thing as a golden handcuff program because every individual is completely different. If these two tables were my God forbid they ever quit A-players, out of the room of all my employees, I would make sure that every one of you has something different. For some, they want to be promoted. Some, they want more responsibility. Some want less responsibility, more access to the board. Some want more vacation time, more flex time. Some want more executive development. You have to find the things that intrinsically satisfy that person and make sure that your company is the ladder to their roof. And then when they're up on the roof, pull away the ladder.
