Cameron Herold scaled his company to hire 800 franchisees in four months repeatedly. The secret: intensive training on interview techniques like probe questions and proof-of-behavior requests, plus hiring for cultural fit while letting domain experts handle technical skills.
Chapters
At College Pro painters, we had four months to recruit, hire and train 800 franchisees. Imagine recruiting, hiring and training 800 franchisees in four months. I hired Kimbal Musk back in 1993 as a franchisee for me. His cousin Peter rive, who built SolarCity, I hired him the same year. So imagine being in the 30 people to hire, recruit, interview and hire. And then in one month we had to train those 800 people how to interview and hire 8,000 students to paint houses. So in four months, five months, we had to hire 8,800 people. And we did it every year for seven years. We became operationally world class at interviewing. Very similar, like Brad and Jeff Smart. I know their systems inside and out, great systems. But I've been trained in it, I've practiced it, I've role played it, I've had videos of me, I've had feedback, I've watched it, I've given myself feedback. I've been trained in this stuff. I also make sure that anybody in my companies has been trained in this base level skill more than they train them on what the Genius network is or what financial literacy is. We train everybody on what we do and not on how we need to do what we do. It's kind of like Simon Sinek's golden circle. Simon used to be on our board of Advisors back in 2004, five years before he wrote the book. Start with why. But you have your why, your how and your what. Simon's obsession is the why, right? Core purpose, your core beliefs, your core values, your bhag, your vivid vision. Most companies train on the outer circle on what we do, how our systems work, what the Genius network is, all that stuff. I train on the how, all the soft skills of leadership. So the reason that interviewing is hard for you is you've never really had enough training to be really good at it. Imagine if you'd had the training on interviewing that you've had on copywriting, right? Then it gets easy. So for me, interviewing is really, really simple because I've had an obscene amount of training around it. For me, copywriting is so difficult because I've never done any work around it. You'd be like, well, have you not taken a letter and written it out? And no, I've never done that. Have you ever written Dan Kennedy stuff? No, I've never. You'd be like, how could you have not done this? Well, because I spent my 10,000 hours on the soft skills of leadership and you spent yours on marketing. I like flipping the org chart, upside Down. I like putting the CEO at the bottom of the org chart, supporting the C level and VPs who support the directors and managers who support the employees. Like an inverted pyramid with all the customers here so everyone can see the vivid vision. And then you build your company inside your core purpose and your core values. Well, one of the things I have to make sure people are good at is interviewing. Again, these are skills that aren't taught in EOS or in scaling up. We give the people the systems, but we don't give them the skills to actually manage the systems. If you want more leadership tips and systems from me, they're free at YouTube. Amronherald and that's H E R O L D. The actual question I had.
Was, how do you spot and hire true A players and avoid cultural misfits? And of course you could give a really good answer to that, but the depth of it is well, even if you say whatever it is, there's this part of me that's always had this. I've read the book. I've read the entire giant book of top grading. It's a big book. And there's this part of me that still has difficulty with it. I got it.
So the real question is, how do you spot them? The first is, be so well trained in interviewing that you actually know how to run the torque system. The threat of reference check. Be really well trained that you know how to probe and ask all the proper questions. Be so well trained that you can actually run a series of one on one interviews and then cross reference based on. So you're actually rating the same person, but three of you who have interviewed them rate them on those things. Behind the scenes, it's just being trained in it. That's number one. I'll give an example of how well trained I was to spot something. This was back 30 years ago. One of the things that someone had to be really good at to be a franchisee was time management and project management. So I really wanted someone who understood priority management. I'm interviewing this candidate and he was explaining his time management like it literally sounded like getting things done. David Allen's book is like, pick your A's and B's, number your A's, put how many times, you know, minutes for each A, put them into your calendar, color code. I'm like, God, this guy really knows time management. But my spider senses were saying he knew how to do it, but he'd never done it right. I know how to win an Olympic gold medal. Who here knows how to win An Olympic gold medal. We all know. Just be faster. Who knows how to set a world record? Who knows how to do front crawl? We all do. We would drown racing in it. Right? So I could explain how to win an Olympic record. If you hire me because I know how to do something, you will fail every time. So in this interview, I'm like, this guy, something is like, he knows how to do this. I'm like, this was back prior to PDAs. This was 93, 94. I said, where's your daytimer? He goes, it's out in my car. I'm like, and everything you've just described is in your daytimer, like, quarterly planning, monthly, your weekly. You do all this? He goes, yeah. I'm like, can you go grab your day timer? He goes, for what? And I said, I just want you to flip through your day timer and show me. You can show me from across the desk. I don't need to see the details. I want to see if everything you told me you know how to do is actually what you do. So he goes, sure. He grabbed his jacket, went out to the car. I've never seen him since. Because I knew that what I was looking for was not how to do it. I was looking for someone that had done it and could prove that they've done it. Then I can also use the torque process, the thread of reference check. So again, this is the stuff that I talk about in my invest in your leaders training. One of the modules is interviewing. You need your people to be base level certified on every skill. If I gave you the 12 core skills that people need to be good at, all of your management team, all of your leadership team, and even you should have at least a bronze level of competency on every skill. Silver's pretty damn good. Gold means you can certify other people on those skills. When you can actually bring training into your organization like that, then it gets easy to hire people and interview people. You should be interviewing for culture fit and not for actual skill set. And often when your company gets to a scale that, like as an example, we were hiring a head of engineering and IT at 1,800 got junk. We didn't know anything about engineering and IT. We didn't even know how to interview to see if they had the skills. So we brought in the head of IT from Business Objects and the head of IT from Abe Books, Boris Wortz, who had literally just sold for about 400 million to Amazon. And they interviewed our final three candidates for us when we were looking for our CFO, we brought in the former CFO of business objects, Crystal Decisions, former CFO from Arthur, from Deloitte and Touche in Vancouver. Our head of accounting, they interviewed for Skill Set and we interviewed for Cultural Fitness.
