Cameron Herold says most leaders hire for confidence instead of proven competence. He recommends hiring people who've already done the job, rating candidates 1-5 on role-specific skills, and advancing only those who score 4-5. Use pregnant pauses to probe deeper, stage your funnel to polarize early, and let reference checks reveal what interviews won't.
Questions this video answers
40% score 3; 20% score 2 and 20% score 4; 10% score 1 and 10% score 5.
At least a 4 out of 5.
Polarizing job posting (with compensation) → auto-reply with vivid vision → 2–3 minute video submission → group interview (6–8 candidates) → one-on-one interviews → resume review → reference checks (threatened as “torque”).
Blue Grace Logistics; raised $255 million from Warburg Pincus.
The Second in Command.
Chapters
When you're hiring somebody, I follow the systems from Top grading and from who by Jeff and Brad Smart. So you really are looking to hire somebody who has done what you need them to do already. Not someone that knows how to do it, but someone that has done it before. And then for the most part, you're stacking up as much responsibility as much of their core work on stuff they're really, really good at and they have the confidence to already do. As you continue to grow them and add more to their list, that's where you're going to situationally start to have to adapt your style a little bit. Where most entrepreneurial companies fail is they hire people that have got a lot of confidence but not the skill to do the work, or they hire people that are a little bit shaky on both and they're loading them up on stuff they're not really good at. They hire somebody they really like, and then, then they're kind of micromanaging and having to oversee people all the time. It's mostly because they're not very good at interviewing. Most companies have never been training their people on interviewing. Most entrepreneurs have never had any training on how to do a proper job interview. So they come in and they say, business is difficult. No, you're making business difficult because you have none of the leadership skills to actually run a company yet. The basics on interviewing, number one, is to know what you're looking for when you're going into the interview. So understand what are the behavioral traits you're looking for for that specific role, what are the skills that the person needs to do that specific role, and what are the core projects that that person's going to be responsible for over the next 12 months for that specific role. Then it's to figure out what are the questions you need to ask to uncover a rating for each of those areas. Right. How would you rate them on each of the behavioral preferences, how would you rate them on their skills, and how would you rate them on their ability to handle those projects? I like rating people on a bell curve of 1 through 5, with 40% of the people getting a 3 out of 5, 20% of the people getting a 2 or a 4 out of 5, and 10% of the people can get a 1 of 5 or a 5 out of 5. So on that bell curve, if I'm looking for those core things, for them to progress to the next round of interviews, they have to get at least a 4 or a 5 on those areas. I'm not going to hire somebody in the Middle I'm going to keep working because if you're a 4 or 5, you're in the top 30%, right? I don't want the threes or the twos or the ones. So that's the starting point, is know what you're looking for, having the questions to be able to identify it and then getting some skill development around actually asking questions, using the pregnant pause, probing, looking for gaps in people's resumes, you know, understanding how to ask questions that are a little bit deeper, looking for the different signals and body language that people give you or their intonation changes in the interview so that you know whether kind of a little bit making stuff up or a little bit fluffing so you know where to probe even deeper. It's those kinds of things that happen. Most interviewers talk too much and they don't listen enough. Right. God gave us two ears and one mouth. We need to use them a little bit more. In that ratio, we need to listen twice as often as we speak in the interview. The interviewer should be listening 85% of the time on the torque side. So the torque is called the threat of reference check. So over the group interviews, over the video submissions, the candidates are going to make over the one on one interviews. I'm going to learn the names of different people that they work with, people they managed, people they reported to, people they had problems with at work. I'm going to draw out names of people and at the end of the process, if I like this candidate enough to do it, a reference check. I'm going to say, hey, over the course of the interviews, you gave me the names of eight people or 10 people by Monday, I need you to come back to me with the email address and phone number for at least eight of these 10 names. Your C players are going to run away and hide. You'll never hear from them again. Your B players will come back to you with 7 or 8 of the 10. Your A players will come back to you with all 10 names, all 10 emails, all 10 phone numbers. Even for the ones of the people they hate or didn't like them, they don't care. Here it all is. And then torque is the threat of reference check. So I'm going to sit down and say, well, Sean, if I called Kelly, who you used to work with at XYZ company, what would Kelly say about you with this behavioral trait? When would Kelly say, you're going to drive us crazy? Where would Kelly say that you're actually a little bit under qualified on these kind of core projects. Where would Kelly say you were exaggerating on your resume? And I'm going to talk to you about all the things that Kelly would say if I called her for maybe five or 10 minutes. Then I'm going to go back to question number one, and I'm going to say, all right, Sean, what would Bob say if I called Bob? And I'm going to go through all the questions again for every single person that you talk to. I'm going to talk to you for 90 minutes under the threat of me calling these people to ask you what they would tell me. I actually don't even need to do reference checks. By the time that I've asked you what all 10 people are going to say about all those core areas, I've got you sweating. And the A players at the end of that process want the job more than they've ever wanted anything in life because they've been grilled, they know you're serious, and they want to work with other A players. Your B players are a little bit nervous, but they still want in. And the C players, halfway through, want out the door. If you haven't read my newest book, the Second in Command, go grab a coffee right now on Amazon, and you'll learn how to unleash the power of a coo. And if you already are a coo, you'll learn how to really build an incredible partnership with your CEO. This is what drives me crazy with entrepreneurial companies. People say, slow to hire, quick to fire, and then they go, yeah, but this takes too long. We. Well, then there's your 7% growth, and that's why you have shitty employees, and that's why you have turnover, and that's why you have people quitting, and that's why you're hiring people that don't know how to do this stuff. You actually put in the work, and you don't actually have to let somebody go. I was coaching a company called Blue Grace Logistics. I coached them for four years. They went on to raise $255 million from Warburg Pincus. You can read about it. It's in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, number one of the biggest fulfillment companies in the US and I coached them for four years. And when I was coaching them, Bobby, their CEO, one day said, you know, I need about 90 days after I hire somebody to know if they're the right fit for the job. And I said, that's because you suck at interviewing. And he's like, all right, teach me. So I worked through this method, taught their entire team, certified everybody on their team on how to do proper job interviews. Game changing. Because now, the day that somebody starts, they absolutely know they can trust them. They absolutely know what to do. They know the blind spots. They don't have to wait any time at all to know if the person's going to fit. That's because they were slow to hire. Right? But most companies don't want to do the work. They'd rather complain that business is difficult. It doesn't take that long to be careful to bring the right people into your organization. So here's an example of how I can help companies save money or save time on the interview process. We don't read the resumes. So what happens is I get hundreds of people to send me their resumes for a job posting because I write very polarizing, very magnetic job postings to attract people into the job. I put the compensation right at the top. I say five weeks paid vacation right at the top. We're attracting people to, to apply for the job. And then right away we give them an auto reply. We go, thanks for your resume. I'm not going to read it yet. Please read this five page vivid vision of what our company looks like, acts like and feels like in the future. Please read this recent article of us in the media. And then if you like the opportunity to work with us and you want to make our vision come true, send me a two to three minute video of what you're inspired by and how you can help us make our vivid vision come true. If we like your video, we'll bring you in for a group interview. So we look at the video submissions. If we like the video submissions, we bring them in for a group interview. In the group interview, we interview six to eight candidates at the same time against each other. So now we can really see the vibe, we can really see the pulse, we can really see the cultural fit. We might bring two of the people from a group interview in for one on one interviews. That's when we look at the resume for the first time. Because right away we're looking for the people that are vibrating with our energy. They want in, they know our vision, they know our culture, we know a little bit about them, we know their vibe, we know their behavioral traits. Now we'll see if they have the right skill set. Because actually now I have a smaller pool of the right candidates, then I can interview for skill and then I can use the reference checks. Most companies do this backwards and they're like, oh, it takes too long to interview somebody properly, so we'll just fluff our way through it and then we'll hire the person we like at the end. You're doing it backwards, by the way. It's very similar to the TV show the Bachelor. You get a girl on the Bachelor or a guy on the Bachelor looking at all the pretty girls and they're basically group interviewing them all against each other. You can tell from a room of 30 girls who've got the right energy that you want to spend time with, and then you eliminate 25 and you're down to 5. Then you do the one on ones with them, and then you do more one on ones with them and you can eliminate. We do the very similar process in the job interview process.
