Cameron Herold warns against hiring confident talkers without proven experience. A bad hire can cost up to fifteen times the employee's salary. He shares stories of managers who couldn't do basic tasks, and urges leaders to master interviews and check track records before hiring.
Chapters
I had a woman years ago that was working with me doing some business coaching stuff, and she sent back a budget. At the bottom line of the budget where you'd either have like net profit or profit or EBITDA, like something like that. Do you know what she called it? Revenue expenses delta. Who the fuck would call it that? Except someone who's never run a budget before. And I'm like, oh my God, she has no idea what she's doing. She's trying to sound smart by using terminology and she's never done this shit. There were so many mistakes in it. I was like, oh my God, you don't know what you're doing, do you? Who here has kids? How old are your kids? 4. You're almost out of it. Like, you're almost in the good zone now. Like, they can carry stuff to the car now and they can pick up for themselves, right? Who here has teenagers? So much easier, right? Like, psychologically fucking harder. Who here is a teenage girl? Sorry, I really feel bad, man. Like, literally, like, what the fuck, right? But they can— they don't pick up their shit, but they could, right? They can carry their suitcase. They can make their own lunches and make their own dinner. Like, there's— they can do stuff. My kids are now 22 and 24. So much easier. You need a second in command to come into your company that you don't have to tell what to do all day long. You need someone who can show up that tells you what needs to be done. You're like, oh, this is great. And they can do it. Not only do they have an opinion, but they've had the experience to do it before. Make sure that when you're hiring people, you hire people that have done it before. You don't want to hire people that just know how to do it. You need to hire someone that you trust implicitly. If you've ever found yourself after an interview when the person's starting, you're okay, I've got 90 days to know if they're going to do a good job. Who said that before? Right. It means you suck at interviewing. If you actually understand interviewing, then you would know everything about the person before they start and you would know for sure they're going to be good at it because you actually know how to do a proper job interview. Go take a look at investinyourleaders.com. It's only $350. Put yourself and anybody in your company who manages people through that content. One of the 12 modules is interviewing. It will literally be game-changing. It also has stuff on coaching and delegation and hiring and running effective meetings, all the skills that people need to be good at. You want to hire someone that has proven success before. Let me explain the difference here. I don't remember this athlete's name, but she's clearly won some medals before. Who here knows how to win an Olympic medal? Be faster or better or stronger than the other people. That's how you do it. So we all know how to do it. Who here has done it? Only her. Be careful in your interviews that you don't hire people that know how to manage people and that know how to manage projects and they know how to run meetings and they know how to delegate, but they don't do any of it. Hire people that have done it before. You're going to find that there's a lot of people, especially Gen Y, that show up with a lot of confidence, but they've never done what you need them to do. Be very, very wary of that because you'll find out 3 months later or 6 months later they haven't got a fucking clue what they're doing. They're bumbling their way through it all and making mistakes on your dime. And that's where the cost of the wrong person is 15 times their salary. You pay them $50 grand a year and don't think it's much money, but the $750,000 in mistakes that you have is huge. All right, if you're the COO of a company that does at least $2 million or greater in revenue, or you're the CEO of a company and you're in the United States or Canada, if you would like a copy of my book, The Second in Command, for free, go to cooalliance.com/freebook. That's GoAlliance/freebook, and I will mail you a copy for free. I will even cover the shipping. Jump on that one today. I had a woman years ago that was working with me doing some business coaching stuff, and she sent back a budget. At the bottom line of the budget where you'd either have like net profit or profit or EBITDA, like something like that, do you know what she called it? Revenue expenses delta. Who the fuck would call it that? Except someone who's never run a budget before. And I'm like, oh my God, she has no idea what she's doing. She's trying to sound smart by using terminology and she's never done this shit. There were so many mistakes in it. I was like, oh my God, you don't know what you're doing, do you? She'd never done it. We had another guy that we hired one time to run our call center. We had 140 people in our call center. We had to hire 30 people over about a 6-week period. And he was way behind on the recruiting. The call center was reporting to Brian, the CEO. And I said, do you mind if I Meet with him because something's going wrong. He goes, please, I don't know what the fuck's going wrong. And I sat down with Rodan and I said, have you ever interviewed anyone before? He had run the call center for Business Objects. Okay. Like a 100-person tech call center. He said, no. I said, well, when you needed more people, what did you do? He said, I phoned HR and on Monday there'd be 3 more people ready to start. So HR did all the recruiting and interviewing and hiring and some of the training. He didn't know how to do it. Though Brian assumed that because he'd led a team of people and because Brian didn't know how to interview, that he had the skills to do something. He didn't. So be careful when you're hiring a second in command that they have done what you need them to do.
