Cameron Herold says hire fast by updating your brand, offering recruiting bounties, and running group interviews with scorecards. Then fire slow performers immediately. Each new hire should be better than half your current team.
Chapters
We had this saying up on our wall at 1-800-got junk. We said, it's all about great people, right? Not just all about people, but it's all about great people. And in the book Good to Great, Jim Collins talked about getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and everybody in the right seats. This is the bus that he was talking about. It was driven around the United States in the early 60s where Ken Kesey, the guy standing up on the top of the bus, the one who wrote the One Floor With a Cuckoo's Nest, he and the rest of the merry pranksters were all taking acid, driving around the United States. And their mantra was, was you're either on the bus or off the bus. What they meant by that was, you're either part of the scene or you're not part of the scene. You're either with us or you're not. You're either on the bus or off the bus. But I've never found a company yet that works hard enough to get the wrong people off their bus. Now we're going to talk about the recruiting and interviewing and hiring and onboarding of people. But I want you to remember that you also have to identify the wrong people. The cultural cancers, the underperformers. And you have to get them out of your bus and out of your company. As soon as you identify those people, you don't let them stay for another six months or three years. You don't put them into private offices. That a really great culture and really great growth is a bit of a yin and yang. It's getting the right people in and the wrong people out. Well, one of the ways you get the right people into your company is you have the right decoys to pull people into your brand. One of my grandfathers owned a hunting and fishing resort. We did a lot of duck hunting back when I was growing up. And he explained how decoys would pull the right ducks into the blind so that we could then shoot the ducks. Well, your decoys are things like your company website, right? Is your website attracting people or is it pushing you away? If the industry is changing as fast as we all know it's changing, does your website reflect that you're on the leading edge of that change, or do you look like a 1990s legacy construction company who's going to get their ass handed to them? Right now, somebody is practicing, and when they meet you in head to head competition, they'll beat you. So your website needs to reflect that, to attract the people into Your business. I saw a saying years ago that said if the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business. Your website, your marketing material, your leadership team photos, you need to remember that you need to be attracting people to your business, attracting people to your customers. And you need to examine your business and say, what would my business look like today if Richard Branson owned it? Or what would my website look like? Or my office look like? Or my customer engagement? What would my on site people look like if Steve Jobs owned it? Right. Do I feel more like Apple or do I feel like an IBM from the 1980s? When you're looking to hire to recruit, you need to use the shotgun approach for getting resumes in the door, but you need to use a more of a rifle based approach to get the right people into your company. You need to actually get executive search firms engaged to go out and poach and hire the right candidates. Or you need to put really strong recruiting bonuses in place to bring people inside of your company. One of the things that I do is I tell people to take a role that you're hiring for. Let's say you've got a hundred thousand dollars person you're hiring for. I'm going to put a recruiting bonus in place of $50,000. If any of my employees get me someone who joins and takes that role, they're going to get a $50,000 bonus, but they're going to get paid $10,000 a year, five years in a row. And they're going to get paid at month 12, month 24, month 36, month 48 and month 60, provided both people are still in the company. It's that kind of an approach that's going to bring a lot of people into your company really quickly. And your best people already know your best people. Your best employees already know the best employees from other firms. Put a bonus in place that's equal to 50% of their annual salary, pay it out in five equal installments, and none of it gets paid out when the person gets hired. That kind of a rifle based approach on recruiting, on bringing people into your company, leveraging the decoys is really powerful. And then what I also do is a group interview. I never interview people one on one. I want to interview five or six candidates against each other. I want five or six candidates in the room where I'm going to ask them a bunch of questions. What do you do for fun? What's the most stressful time in your life? What are the biggest problems you've ever solved. I'm looking for who culturally do I vibe with and if I'm not doing them all in the same time, I could do some over zoom some in person. I can still get a good cultural read, but I want to see the twinkle in their eyes. I want to see who is excited about my vivid vision before I care about their skill sets. I actually share my vivid vision with all potential employees. And I say right away, by the way, thanks for your resume. I'm not reading it. Please read the vivid vision of my company and what it looks like, acts like and feels like in the future. If it inspires you, please send me a three minute video of how you can help make it come true. If we like your video, I'll bring you in for a group interview to see if we want you a part of the team. That's the process that you're using to bring the right people into your organization and to polarize and push the wrong people away. And then what I do is I do recruiting based on scorecards versus job descriptions. We all use job descriptions, right? We describe a job. Let's say we were looking to get a swimmer into our organization. Well, a job description would say that we're looking for a fast, strong swimmer who's experienced with all strokes and they're competitive in a team player. And we'd end up with a swimmer like that. Competitive, strong team player. Awesome, right? But a scorecard might say we want somebody who has won Olympic gold across three to four strokes, someone who broke world records, someone who won in individual and team events, and we end up with that person. Most of you tell people that you have A players and B players, and I guarantee you that you gave me five minutes inside your company, five minutes to talk to you about your interview and recruiting process, your reference check process, that most of you have B players and C players, and possibly some that are even not C players. Because most of you are hiring people that might know how to do something, but they've never done it before, or they're not culturally as aligned as you need them to be. And what I want you to do is raise the bar so that every single person you bring into your company is better than at least half the people that are there today.
