How to Hire Like Apple & Google

At College Pro Painters, every franchisee had to have five core traits. They had to be strong leaders. He had to be strong in goals or attainment. He had to be strong in tenacity, that dog like work ethic. He had to be strong on fundamental ability, the ability to regulate his emotions. And he had to be strong on introspection, which is the ability to blame himself when something went wrong instead of blaming external forces. College Pro became the largest residential house painting company in the world. And every year we had to go out and recruit, hire and train 800 university students to become franchisees. But then we had to train those 800 people to hire 8,000 university students to be the painters. So we had to hire 8,800 people in six months, train them and onboard them. And then they painted $64 million in houses in four months. And every August 30, they quit and went back to school. On September 1, we had to give to the government. So this is the systems that we used to actually scale that company in good degree. Jim Collins talked about getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and everybody in the right seats. One of the things that we don't talk about in terms of recruiting is how to identify the wrong people, the toxic people, the cultural misfits, the underperformers, and how to get them out of your company quickly because the data says the cost of the wrong person is 15 times their annual salary. One of the things that I look for in the recruiting side of things is how do I attract people into my company? And I think about duck hunting. One of my grandfathers owned a hunting and fishing resort, and we would go duck hunting every fall, and he would put these decoys out into the water, and they were plastic or wooden ducks, and they were meant to attract other ducks into our blind. And I always thought about, what are the decoys that we use to attract employees to our company? Right. What are the things that we do to attract them into our brand? You know, what would Richard Branson or Steve Jobs do with your company website if they owned your company? How would they change it to attract people into that cult? Right. What would they do with your company dress code? What would they do with your company's leadership team? So think about that. On the recruiting side of things, how do your job postings read? Are they reading like a job sales letter or are they reading like a very boring typical job posting? Because you need to attract people into your blind. The other thing I learned from duck hunting was the best Employees are often not looking for a job. You know, you get lucky when you do a job posting and you find somebody like Jesse Brannan, because Jesse happened to be looking, and I got lucky. But most of the great employees have a job or your network to them already, and you can go and grab them right away, or you can use an executive recruiting firm and you can go and poach them. But the best employees, you often have to poach them and take them away from a good job because it's often just the solid B players, unless you get lucky, who are out there looking for a job right now, or your network will have them, right? The people that you're looking for, no matter how big you are, the people are going to be in your network in the recruiting process. One of the things that I've always looked for is the energy and the connection that I have with the people that we're hiring, hiring. And how do you replicate that across the organization? Right? If you're hiring 8,800 people, how do you find the cultural people that, as Steve Jobs would say, that have the twinkle in their eyes, Right? If you share with them the vision for your iPhone, or you share the vivid vision of your company, if they read it and they're excited and they're twinkling and they're vibrating in their seats, those are the people that you want to start interviewing to see if they have the skills. But don't interview people, don't start bringing them into their process until you know that they actually have that cultural vibration that you're starting to look for. I also want to make sure that you consider, does your company use job descriptions or do you use measurable scorecards to recruit people and to actually hire people? So an example of a job description would be something like this. If I needed to bring on a swimmer, right, a director of swimming, they had to be a fast, strong swimmer, experienced with all strokes, competitive and in a team player. That's a typical job description for a swimmer. But this is a measurable scorecard for a swimmer. I want a swimmer who has won Olympic gold across three to four events, someone who broke world records, someone who won in individual team events. You know, they're very measurable. Because if you hire based on a job description, this guy is very fast, he's strong, he's experienced, ball strokes, he's competitive, he's a team player. But he's going to get you solid B or solid B minus results. If you hire based on a scorecard, you end up with a very different people. Coming into your organization. I was talking to a CEO that I was coaching the other day, and he said he wanted 80% of his team to be A players. I said, that's impossible. Your A players are racehorses. Your B players are workhorses. Your C players have to go to the Blue Factory. You would probably have 10, 10 to 15% of your team are the true A player. God forbid they ever quit. People, if you can end up with a group of solid A's and a really good solid group of B's, you win. But don't fool yourself by thinking that your organization is filled with Bs, because it's probably not, which is fine. But just to recognize that and have your management team recognize that you have Bs and a lot of Cs, and it's time to top grade and raise that bar. So every time you hire someone into the organization, raise the bar. If you've got eight people in marketing, the next person you hire has to raise the bar and be better than at least 4 of the people that are in marketing that you have today. So let's talk about the job interview. I want to give you some of the systems that we use to actually, and this is how we scaled College Pro Painters. It's also the systems that I brought in then to to scale1,800 got junk. And I taught everyone there and it's how we were able to grow from 14 employees when I joined the company. When I left six and a half years later, we had 3,100 employees system wide. So these are the systems that we use to interview and recruit and onboard those people. The first part is to define the traits that you're looking for on a role by role basis. So we just hired a community manager. Van's traits that I was looking for with her, someone detail oriented, someone with good energy, someone who is passionate about community. Those are very different traits than someone like Jesse. Jesse is not supposed to be detail oriented. He's in sales, he's in business development. He's supposed to be shooting from the hip and winging it. Figuring out as he goes, being outside of the box, that doesn't even exist. So if I was trying to hire Jesse to be a community manager, he'd be terrible. Jesse has to understand community and understand his members. And if I wanted to put Van into Jesse's role, she'd probably be terrible. So it's understanding the roles and the types of behaviors or traits that each role needs. At College Pro Painters, every franchisee had to have five Core traits, they had to be strong leaders. He had to be strong in goals or attainment. He had to be strong in tenacity, that dog like work ethic. He had to be strong on fundamental ability, the ability to regulate his emotions. And he had to be strong on introspection, which is the ability to blame himself when something went wrong instead of blaming external forces. So for each of those five traits, we had a definition of the trait that everyone in the company could explain. Tenacity, as an example was the dog like work ethic to get over, under or around any obstacle put in one's path. Jesse has tenacity. He's a five out of five in tenacity. So when you know what you're looking for and you can define it, then you can know how to find it. That's the core starting point. For every trait that you're interviewing for, you need to have five core questions, questions that you're going to ask to start uncovering the trait. You know, I was asked by somebody, well, if you're hiring somebody in university and they need to be strong in leadership, they're only 20 years old. They've never led anybody. I went really. Kimball Musk had led his school team. He led his underwater water polo team. He was rallying all the kids in commerce at Queens to go out and party. He'd been a leader his whole life. If you kind of checked my past, I was always doing things in leadership roles when I was in grade school, in middle school, in high school, and in university. It's obvious I'm going to be a leader later in life as well. But if you know what questions to ask, then you can actually rate people on each of the traits. So again, something we did really well at college, pro painters that we then brought over into 1-800-GAR junk was on every trait. We rated people on a bell curve. 40% of the candidates could be given a three out of five. 20% could be given a two out of five, 20% could be given a four out of five. 10% of the candidates could get a one out of five, and 10% could be a five out of five. Right. We forced people into that kind of a curve so that not all the candidates were getting a five out of five. Like, wait, you just interviewed 10 people. Only one can really be a five, two can be four. So it really forced us to interview better and to rate people. And then we decided that if you were going to move from interview one to interview two, you had to get at least a four or a five on leadership attainment and tenacity, and at least a three out of five on fundamental ability and introspection. So we knew what we were looking for. We knew how to define it with the questions to start the interview on each, and we knew how to rate people on each of those five core areas. Then we go into the actual job interview itself and the types of interviews. So the first thing that I do before I interview anyone when their resume comes in, I quickly email them back our vivid vision. And I say, by the way, here's a vivid vision of what our company looks like, acts like, and feels like three years in the future. Please read it. If this sounds like the kind of company you want to fly to the moon, reply now and put interview me in the subject line and I'll bring you in for a group interview. But I don't even read their resume until I know that they've actually read the vivid vision and like it. And in fact, I still won't read their resume until I make them jump through one hoot. And all I wanted on the video is a 2 to 3 minute video of why you want to work here, what you love about the vivid vision. I will watch the video, and if I like what I see and I like your response, and I kind of like the energy, then I'm going to bring you in for a first interview. Of all the video submissions I got, I got about 200 resumes. All those 200 people were sent an email response saying, reader, vivid vision. Of those, about 50 people came back saying they loved the vivid vision. I said, send me a video. Only nine people sent me a video. Of the nine videos, I only liked four of them. So I interviewed four people. Of the four I really liked two. And when I did the second interview with Jesse, it was like, done deal. I absolutely know this is a fit. So in the first video and in the first interview, I'm looking for three things so they have the skills to do what I need them to do. Are they a cultural fit and do they live the core values that our company already lives by? If they have those three things and I can prove that they have them and rate them on that bell curve, then I know that I want to bring them into a second interview to find out if I'm actually missing anything or to stress test my own biases. So the first style of interview that we do is called a group interview. But I often use a group interview where I'll bring in four or five or eight candidates at the Same time, sometimes in person, sometimes over zoom. And I'll interview six to eight candidates at the same time for the same job. And I'm asking them all the same questions. What do you do for fun? What's the most stressful time in your career? What are your passions? Everyone answers, I'm often not even listening to the answers. I'm watching for their behaviors. I'm watching for the way they interact with each other. I'm watching for who's paying attention. I'm watching for the jerks in the room that are rolling their eyes when somebody else is answering. And then the final two questions for me are when it kicks into high gear. The second last question is, if we were only hiring two people, you and someone else at this table, who else should we hire and why should I hire them? All of a sudden, the group of people that have been listening to everybody's answers, they all start pointing towards that one person that you were probably thinking was really strong as well. And you've actually just done most of your first interview because the group has actually interviewed for cultural fit and for that kind of core value side of things. The second, the last question I always ask is, how much money do you need to earn this year? And how much money would you like to be earning three years from now? And then I make sure that I can deliver on that, because I don't ever want to bring in somebody whose idea on compensation is so out of whack. And I also don't want to overpay if I don't have to overpay. But by making sure that I understand those two things, I can really bring the right people in and really make sure that I support them and help create a really great role for them. From the group interview, people sometimes do panel interviews. That's when you have multiple people from your company interviewing one person. I hate them. I think they're terrible. I think they're an extraordinary waste of time. I think you end up with a bunch of people who really want to go on different tangents in the interview and don't have time to ask the questions. So I would never, ever do a panel interview. The group interview is one person from your company interviewing multiple people. That's when you get a lot more leverage and you learn a lot more. The first interview, you're really starting to dig in around skill set and core values, and you're really actually spending time to really dig in on the person's resume. Now, your job candidates are often going to say that they have some Questions. That's great. At the end of the interview, you'll have time for you to ask your questions, but for the first 75 minutes, I'm asking all the questions. I don't even know if you're the right person yet. Why am I going to waste our company's time answering your questions before I even know if you're the right fit? So I make sure that I really grill them for 75 minutes, and then I open it up at the end to answer any of their questions for them. And then I tell them about the second interview and the rest of the interview process so they're clear on the next steps. But the first interview is to really, really check in on skills and cultural fit. In the second interview, it's when you dig deep. It's when you go back in and look at all of your notes. It's when you really probe. It's when you really ask tough questions. I'll even ask questions of things like, you know, in the first interview, you said something, and it kind of made me feel like you're a bit of a quitter. Like, do you quit at things? Or. God, your energy is like, was great in the first interview, but I feel like maybe you're going to be too much of a disturbance with the other team. Like, am I wrong? So I'm really going to ask my gut check questions to the candidate. And so rarely are they ever asked those questions that it does. A couple things I learn a lot from them, but it again, has reversed the sales process where now they're starting to sell me on hiring them and I don't have to sell them on how great our company is. They actually want to work there already. By making the job interview really tough and by really asking the questions people don't often ask, it raises their need to actually come and work for your organization versus selling and selling, selling. So don't force process over outcome. But this is a great process. For 95% of the time, in the first and the second interviews, I'm also going to come up with names of people you know. Who did you work with before? Who did you like working with? Who worked for you? Who reported to you? Who helped you solve problems? Who did you solve problems for? And I'm going to ask lots of questions about those situations, but I'm going to end up with a list of about 10 names. The third interview is what we call torque, and that's the threat of reference check. The threat of reference check is when you start to get really good insights Onto that individual. This interview process will scare away your C players, but your A players are going to want to work for you because they've really been grilled on something. And this process can be done over the course of a week. It doesn't have to last for six months. Right. It can be done quickly. These are the steps that have to happen. But you don't need multiple days or weeks in between each step in the process. The key for you as the interviewer is to be prepared. It's to really, really do your homework on this individual. I've gone so far as to drive by a CFO candidate's home. I drove by two of their homes just to see if I could learn anything about them, what they would culturally be like just by driving past their yard. One person's house was very beige. There was nothing. It was just like, nondescript. The other persons, you could actually kind of see inside a little bit. Their garden was all done. It just felt really great. And that was our favorite candidate of the two. In today's world, that would be like going on their social media profile. This was before Facebook, that I drove by somebody's house. Now you can drive by their house by hopping on their Instagram, hopping on their Facebook, hopping on their LinkedIn profile, and looking and learning a little bit more than they actually are going to give you. Preparation is by going through their resume, printing it out, and writing down all the questions that you want to ask about each of the sections of their interview. You know, what happened in between these two jobs? Why did you leave that job? Did you quit? Were you fired? Were you poached? Why did you only stay for six months? Why were you promoted? Why were you not promoted faster? There's all kinds of things that you can learn by really growing somebody and going through the resume and writing all those notes down. And then by looking for your second interview, it's reviewing your first interview notes to come up with any of your biases that you may have had so you know where to really probe on. Second thing you want to look at is the ring setup. If you don't have a good ring setup, find one. Put a background up. Make sure that your room, if you're up interviewing in person, isn't cluttered. It's clean, it's organized. Or set yourself into a space where there's no distractions. If you want any distractions at all, you want them for the candidate, not for you. Your back should be to the window. So they're looking out the window. You know, Your back should be the glass wall so they're looking out into the rest of the office space. You need to stay focused. You want them to get distracted so that you can get deeper into the interview process as well. And that's key for the room setup. A lot of the content I'm covering right now is covered in one of the modules on my invest in your leaders course. If you actually get your managers to sign up for the invest in your leaders course, One of the 12 modules is on interviewing and it's how to ask all these questions, how to set up the room. All this stuff is covered. The types of interview questions you're asking, open ended questions, tell me about a time when or closed ended questions, tell me exactly what happened here or what happened there. And then the probing questions are when you ask why, why, why, or the who, what, when, where, why and how. I may sometimes ask the same question, why three or four times in a row. And it's amazing the more time you ask why, how much they'll start to reveal in that actual interview. Your job is to use your ears and the mouth the same ratio that God gave them to you. God gave us two ears and one mouth in the job interview. Your job is to listen way more than you talk. And by asking questions and asking the why and really listening and really deploying the pregnant pause. When you deploy the pregnant pause in a job interview, people will talk because they can't handle the unconvenient or the, the silence really drives people crazy deploying that simple tool in an interview. And by the way, you need to practice these things. So if you have managers that work for you who have done job interviews, right, they've done interviews at your company, have they actually been trained on how to do proper job interview? So the opportunity is to get your team trained on the stuff that they're doing day to day. For me, the reverse sell is I'm never going to sell you on how great our company is. What you have to do is reverse the sell to get them selling you on why they're good enough to get this opportunity, get them selling you on why they're good enough to be offered this franchise. So the more the tougher I make the interview, the harder I make it for the candidate selling me, the more they actually want the job. The best people don't want to be sold. The best people want to know that you're really, really working hard to find out if you've got the right people coming in. I also want to make sure that I Close off each of the interviews by actually telling them the next step in the interview so they know what's clear. Don't let them leave the interview and wonder for the next three days what's coming. Tell them right away. So by the way, the next steps are this so that you can kind of keep them on that breath and maybe you give them another hoop to jump through something else that they actually have to do for you. Even if it's down to pour over our website. Find three areas of improvement for our website now. It's a great way to actually get tweaks on your website given to you. And then after you've done the interviews, go back through and rate the candidates, right? Then don't go back to work, don't get sucked back in your email. Spend five minutes and rate them on those five behavioral traits. Rate them on the scorecard areas. Really sit down and think about for each of these things we're hiring for, how would I rate them as a 5, 4, 3, 2 or 1? And make sure you leave the actual interview with that core rating as well. The course Invest in youn Leaders covers things like situational leadership coaching, time management, interviewing, project management, email management, one on one meetings, running effective meetings. Kind of the core 12 skills that I think everyone needs to be a high functioning leader. On the interviewing side, I cover the whole recruiting process, the interview process, the ring setup, types of questions in more detail is what I try to do is give everybody what I say is like a bronze level skill in that area. You know that if I think of everyone's skills on interviewing, if I can get them to a bronze right now, they probably have no skill. They can go to a silver, then they could go to a gold. Right now just going through that course would get you to a bronze. Maybe reading the book, who would give you a bronze? Maybe sitting and then talking about it. I talk about classroom teaching as one of the modules in the course that for every skill area that I train somebody on, abstract conceptualization, right? You all got today some of the abstract concepts around interviewing. The next stage is the active experimentation. It's practicing it, it's role playing it, it's trying it out together. It might be in breakouts, trying it out off site, trying it with your team. And then you go into the concrete experience of actually doing job interviews and actually trying these things in a job interview. And then reflective observation is thinking about the job interview and thinking about what you've learned and what went well. What didn't go well. What can I Try better on my next job interview. And then you go back to the abstract concept again, you watch the content again, you read the book again. So that's the cycle of learning that adults go through. What I'll do when I do the reference check is I say, look, I love this person. He told me to call you. I'm probably going to hire him. But I need to ask you the really tough questions. If you don't tell me the real, it's going to drive me crazy about this guy. In three months, I'm going to chase you down the street, beat the shitty with a baseball bat. So tell me the good. I've used that phrase and I laugh when I say it. I have used the phrase chase you down the street, beat out of you with a baseball bat a hundred times on reference check calls. And people will always give me the good. Or I'll be like, no, no, come on. Like, don't tell me they're too precise. I mean, tell me they drove you crazy because they can't manage your emotions. They punched a hole in the bathroom wall. That's the stuff I want to hear. And then they do. So we're human, we're wanting to be given the door to really do something. So that's how I approach them. I just ask the tough questions in a way that kind of nobody else does. Yes, I use them for very senior roles. The only time I don't use the group interview process is for extraordinarily senior roles for companies that are proprietary, non public information, like a public company CFO. I would recruit eight other CFOs together. We were hiring a head of people at 1, 800. God, junk. We were at the time around 2,000 employees, about 180 at the head office. We needed a real head of people and we were going to do group interviews. And Helen Sheridan, one of our candidates, came in. She was the head of People for Business Objects. She's like, I'm not coming to a group interview. And I'm like, well then you're not going to work here. And she's like, what? I'm like, no. Like that's the way we do things. And if you want to work here. But we'd created such a brand and so much of a magnetic force into 1 800, got junk that she's like, I'll come to the group interview. And so she knew what she was coming into, or as did the other six candidates. Helen walked into the group interview wearing a blue wig, which was over 1, 800, got junk used to wear for all of our marketing. So she owned the room right away. She owned us right away because we were all laughing when we saw her walk into the company wearing a blue wig for the interview. And then as she walked out 90 minutes later at the group interview, she turned to me and she said, if I don't get hired, you have changed my view of recruiting forever. Thank you for that process. And this was the former head of a major company's, you know, people department. So yeah, you can do it with senior people. The key is to make sure they understand, going to have fun. I'm just interviewing you against other people. At the same time. We're not going to go anywhere that's private. Like nobody's going to learn anything about your company because it's just a culture interview. The reality is for my culture, for the companies that I build, if that's really not going to work for them, they're going to hate working for us. I mean, if you're like an accounting firm, you know, everything's got to be proper, Then sure, the group interview might not be culturally what you want, but it really matched our culture. I would never brief a candidate on how to come and apply for a job. But if they're not coming in with a bunch of questions and wanting to ask me on some stuff, it's probably a big red flag that they're not going to be strong enough leaders to stand up and speak up in meetings. And they're probably not going to be the kind of people that I want working for. But I'm never going to tell them how to impress me. I need to know if they impress me. And then the other part is that if I don't have enough good candidates, I'm going to keep recruiting, right? I'm going to push out for more recruiting. The key for all of us is to make sure that we start to turn our companies into magnets for talent, to start winning the awards, to become a best place to work, to invest in our leaders growth, to turn our websites into magnets, to really, really create that magnetic force for your brand so that people want to work with us. And then secondly is to really increase our marketing and spend around recruiting talent and bring them into a competitive pool so they start to realize, wow, this is a group that's serious about wanting to pick the right people. And then the third part is do it fast. Right? So we were hiring some remote people years ago. Back 2004, I had to hire 13 regional coaches. So they were actually in different regions in the US and Canada coaching our franchisees at 1, 800, got junk. And this Tressa, one of my VPs and I flew from Vancouver to Atlanta to do all the interviews in Atlanta. And as we were on the plane, we were reviewing the final 16 people's resumes. The very next morning we did a group interview at 9 o' clock. And the second group interview was 11 o'. Clock. As people were walking out of the room from the first interview, we're like, thanks very much for coming. Really appreciate it. We selected the three of you from that group of eight to come in for one on one interviews. We're scheduling them this afternoon. Sign up for the slots. Those three were fighting for the spots because they're like, holy. And they knew they were the three best out of the eight. We did the one on one interviews that afternoon with the from the two groups. We told everyone, we're calling you at five o' clock to let you know if we're bringing for second interview tomorrow morning. Second interview. We brought in three final candidates. We made the offers that next afternoon. People were like, that was the toughest interview process I've ever been through. It only took us 48 hours to do it. You guys know you're in a competitive environment. You have to make it tough for the, for the good candidates. And you got to do the process fast. But yeah, if you take six weeks to do a process, I wouldn't work for the company either. And the first stage with the screening of videos and the, you know, getting candidates to respond with their video, that's really anyone, that's an admin ea. Anyone can make sure that happens. The screening of videos is just anyone who's a good cultural fit for the organization can see if people are a good cultural fit at least with their. Within their business area. Then in the first interview and second interview, it usually goes into the hiring manager. But because the hiring manager isn't screening a hundred resumes to narrow them down to 20, 20 to narrow them down to 9, they're only actually reading 9 people have already submitted a video. It's not a lot of time for the hiring manager to actually get into the process. I love the CEO to get involved in torque or at least at the end of the second interview. Right. I call it the sniff test. Every leader has to at least interview two layers below them. So if the CEO isn't hiring a direct report, he at least wants to interview all of his direct reports. Reports. Right. At least going two layers below. But it's. It's hard to say that if you're Elon Musk, you're going to interview everyone at SpaceX. But Elon would at least be interviewing anyone reporting to any of his direct reports. And then his direct reports would interview two layers below them as well. I'm never going to lower the bar and hire somebody who's worse just so that I can be equitable. At 1-800-God Junk, our leadership team was half women, half men. We had minorities. We didn't. All we did was hire great people with great skills with great culture who wanted to work with us. But we weren't going to try to go hire somebody to fill a box, to check a mark, to make ourselves look better, to like to fill a program. But we were never biased against somebody because of anything I've had. I've hired people that are trans openly. I've hired minorities, I've hired people that are in wheelchairs. I've hired remote. I've hired a 65 year old woman back in 2001 to work in our call center when no one was going to hire a 65 year old woman to work in a call center. I think it just comes down to your culture as an organization and really living your company's core values and not letting those get in the way of anything else.