The Talent Pipeline with Dan Martell

What's up, what's up, what's up? How's it going? SaaS Academy? Hope you're having an incredible freaking day. I am actually pumped as always to be here. But I actually want to show you guys something fun for all of you guys there attending. I'm going to show you in a second. But first I'm going to ask you to all help me do a quick tech check and let me know if you can hear me, my voice and you can see me. Good. And let me know where you're connecting from in the questions box below. Chatty chat it up. I'll just adjust my screen. I want to know where you're connecting from, what city you're in. This is going to be a highly engaging webinar because it's going to be a conversation. I'm going to teach you guys some incredible strategies and ideas around building a talent pipeline so that you can grab people on demand and have them be incredible for you. But at the same time, I want to have a conversation with everybody on this webinar. So we got Tom saying all good from Chicago. So good to have you on here, Tom. Georgia, how's it going from Toronto? Perfect, perfect. We got Dan Baer, Daniel, so good to have you on from Toronto as well. We got Georgia's video and audio is good. Okay. Second, Beautiful Toronto. Angie, so good to see. Angie, how's it going? Ben can hear and see from Wales in the uk. Pavel, how's it going, man from Toronto? Good. A lot of Toronto rep presenting coming in today. Patrick from Halifax. What's up, Patrick? Loud and clear, says Jake and Matt from the Gburg, Pennsylvania. What's up, man? So good to have you on here. John Mayer from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Sorry, it's Meyer. John, I want to call Mayer, like the musician. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. But that is not how you pronounce his name. Sorry, John, for that corrected forever and ever and ever. Now this is my little thing I want to show you guys. Check this out. How funny is this? My wife put it on my desk. This is a 3D figurine. Some people, it trips them out of me. So that's my butt. Those are my jeans. Those are actually my kicks. Look how accurate it was. Those are my Nike Metcons. Yes. Oh, is it Father's Day, Angie? Anyways, we did this at Dube. It's called the 3D Doob Store in New York City with my JFDI group if you're interested. You got to keep your fingers together because if not it would be too small. And you get big ones. We got everybody scanned. We even had Vanessa Holgate do a handstand and take the picture. Anyways, thought that was a little fun fact. Hope all of you guys got your journals ready. You got your water maker. Make sure that you're hydrated. Ooh, Happy Father's Day. Cool. That's coming up, I guess. Angie, thanks for that. And we're going to kick into the talent pipeline. Today's talk is all about bringing on incredible people into your world. But first, I have a question for everybody watching right now. Leave your answer below. What's the hardest part about hiring for you in the question box below. Let me know for you. What is the hardest part about hiring when it comes to building and growing your team? Chatty chat below. Let me know, man. Ben, you're quick, man. Just poo so fast. All right, so Ben says, location. Yes. Location is a big one. Culture fit, says Angie. Oh, we are going to talk about that today. Finding specific skill sets, says Patrick. 100%. Leave your answer below. What is the hardest part about hiring for you? In the questions box below. Just type one word, two words, three words. Adrian is finding salespeople that make more than they cost. Crazy idea. ROI required. That should almost be like a T shirt. ROI required, meaning that everything somebody does in your business should have an ROI attached to it. Training, John. 100%. Daniel. Cutting through the bullshit answers. Oh, bullshit. Bullshit referrals, bullshit resumes, bullshit answers. Totally on board with you on that one. Georgia retention. Interesting. We're definitely talking about how to ensure that we sell the position. Just like content hiring requires selling. Awesome answer, guys. You know, for me, I think there's a few core problems that need to be looked at. First off, the truth is we probably have some bad hires in our business. And because they're in our company, we're always thinking, if I fire them or remove them from my organization, then I'm going to be stuck doing all the work. And the reason why is you've probably set up the structure of how you're managing them, where you're the only leader in the business. And I just got back from spending almost two weeks traveling, catching up, doing some work on a boat in the British Virgin Islands. And we stopped at this restaurant, and there was a chicken there with their little chickadees. And I noticed that the chickadees didn't do anything that the mother didn't do first. So if they needed to eat, the mother had to find the food, start pecking down on some food and we were throwing stuff at it. I actually captured one in my hands. My wife was trying for like five minutes. She wasn't that successful. I just reached out and grabbed quickly without hesitating. And it made me think of just hiring that. If you've got a bunch of people that are to do list executors, people by process instead of people for outcomes, then you're always going to have a challenge with growing your team because if you don't set the pace, if you don't lead, then they're not going to be able to do things. So there's probably some bad hires in your organization right now that has to be resolved. The other one is you've got missed opportunities. Just think about the cost of a bad hire. Not only if you have to replace them, is there a real, you know, financial costs. But think about all the marketing you could be doing if you had a great marketing person. Sales deals you could be closing if you had a great salesperson, if you had somebody that just lead customer success and deliver real value for your customers from your product and lead engineering or product design. So there's a ton of strategic opportunities that you might be getting presented that you can't execute against and or that you want to do or you should be doing because based on our game plan session we mapped out the strategy for you. You have been executing against because you need somebody to lead that charge. It's like pushing a car that won't start. Okay, so think about the energy and frustration instead of just bringing on somebody on your team that is actually a working vehicle that's gonna pull you forward. Right now you're trying to push all these opportunities ahead and it is exhausting. Another thing is Ben mentioned just being from a place that doesn't have a deep talent pool. You feel like you have an empty pond around you of talent. Now if you live in a small town of sub 20,000 people, it's probably true. I've always built my teams with distributed workforces. That being said, in every city we're going to talk about sourcing. There is incredible talent around you and your job is to present the best place for them to work and really figure out how to sell the position to get those people. My promise for today is really big commitments and I'm going to deliver on each. One of them is one, build a pipeline of doers, Navy seal, world class, get shit done, take stuff off your plate, show up and rock it for you in your team. Two, it's going to Be a very simple process. I think most recruiting strategies are way too complicated. They ask you to fill out all this upfront work and job descriptions and all this process. I'm going to show you a way to get rid of the noise to make sure that it's a simple step to go from applicant or candidate or even identifying those candidates to get them on your team and then finally build talent on demand. Because what I learned and I learned this back in my days at Sphere Technologies, like two companies ago, the challenge we had is we were closing big enterprise deals but we didn't have the talent. And I had to build all of this process to make sure that when I sold a new client that we had the talent and there was a six week window. We built the system in the process that within a six week window we could go from I need to hire to really qualified person, job offer extended and ideally getting them starting on the team within that six week. We know obviously I only gave us four weeks but the reason why we're able to do that is we're always sourcing. It's a big theme that I'm going to talk about today. But what would happen in your business? What would you do with quality, affordable talent? I want to hear from you below in the questions box. What would you do? Who would you hire first and if you could afford them high quality and affordable? Because I think a lot of you are not hiring because you think it's going to cost you a ton of money. And what I'm going to show you guys below is fortune or compensation is number four out of five top priorities. So out of 1, 2, 3, 4 is the financial compensation. And there's a ton of stuff before. If you're not doing strategically in the recruiting process to build that talent pipeline, it's always going to be tough. But what would you do with a quality, affordable person on your team? Who would you hire? Leave your answer below. The next key hire for you would be who? Just leave that one word answer. Adrian says UI UX designer, sales manager. Product manager. Adrian's got some key hires coming up. I want to hear from everybody on the session below. Who would you hire? We've got senior product engineer, super important hire, kind of VP of Eng, Senior software engineer, Outbound sales says John Meyer. Demand generation BDR SDR says Dan, sales manager. Millie says enterprise sales leader. What's up Millie? So good to have you on here. Angie says customer success manager. Of course. That would be awesome. Hire more sales, says Heather, always sales, sales, sales. Ben, sales awesome. I'm seeing a pattern of getting people to come in and get you more customers. Those are the easiest ones to fill. They. They're ROI driven. Jake says front end. Dev Owen, senior software engineer. Awesome. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to deconstruct the process for building a talent pipeline. I'm going to show with you the model to think about how to really build a hiring bullseye and then what the steps are to make sure you don't get bogged down in just a bunch of shitty resumes. Because that's always been the case for me in hiring key people. Now I really learned this at scale working with Rick from Unbounce. He's the founder, he's one of. There were actually five co founders and CEO. And I had the privilege and pleasure to be one of the first investors in unbounce back in 2009. So it's been almost a decade. So it's been nine years. And what I love the most is this summer. So Rick and I are just some funny people because we both grew up in Moncton, both went on to build software companies. I did mine in Silicon Valley, in San Francisco, Rick's done his in Vancouver. But we both live. I live here, he visits in the summer. And last summer we were sitting actually down there in my sunroom talking about life. And, you know, one of the big thing was just around, you know, they've been public about hiring a coach to make sure that their executive leadership team really understood how to be top performers because they didn't want to just hire external talent. They really wanted to grow their talent. And I asked them, I was like, so how's things at work? Is it stressful? I know they were going through a kind of a transition year in 2017 to really make it up this year, 2018. And he says, you know, the truth is I don't have a lot of stuff to do. I've been really diligent about hiring incredible people. And we talked about the scorecard system that I'm going to share with you guys today. And because we've done a great job of just bringing in great talent, it's really freed him up from not having a lot of responsibilities. So the funny part is he says, most days I go in and I'm asking if anybody needs me to do anything. And most of them got everything handled. So all they asked me to do is like, you can go work on culture stuff or, you know, give back programs or just go talk some new Hires, but whatever, pretty much. He wants to do everything from engineering to product to marketing to sales to HR to all these different customer success. All those areas are well staffed. And that is the power of the talent pipeline in making sure that you get key people executing and taking stuff off your plate to really drive things forward. There's actually a really great quote that I want to. Oh, I don't have it. I had it written down. But it's really all about, you know, hiring people. You can't teach somebody to smile before you hire them. They need to come smiling. So think about that. I think that's one of the big principles that I hope you take away from this is I think in the early days we do a lot of things to kind of like, you know, because we don't have the resources and we're scrappy and we're bringing on cousins and friends and whoever can code or develop or design or whatever. And at a certain point it starts to hurt us because we don't bring in talent of people that can actually get things done for us. David Christel just wrote in a chat on smiling, quote, is maybe what you're looking for? No, I don't think it was Herb Keller from Southwest David. It was, I forget the individual's name. It wasn't kind of a name brand person. But I just love the idea that you need to hire people that are already smiling because you can't teach them to smile. And I think that, you know, you shouldn't hire somebody that, that isn't smarter, has already done the thing that you're gonna hire them to do than you. Because if that's the case, then why are you bringing them on? You need people, especially for a lot of you at this stage, that can lead departments, lead initiatives and really teach you things and be inspired by them. So a few hot principles to just rock your talent pipeline. Number one is prep the position. So when I think of prepping the position, it's about the upfront work that you need to sit down and decide what's going to be required by this person. And the other thing that I think are like three big areas is one, what's going to be required? Kind of the job scorecard. So like kind of responsibilities and what. I'll break that down. So what are they going to do in my organization? What does a great candidate look like? Two, what's the training and onboarding sequence for this candidate? Even if it's a high level checklist, even if it's a high level dump of here are the things they're going to do for my organization. So if you have a systems doc, a playbook, and I teach that in the playbook training, if you have that documented, that's your checklist. I think a lot of people are fearful or hesitant. I'm just thinking of like all the things holding you back from hiring great people because you haven't sat down and created that onboarding checklist. High level training. Like if somebody started tomorrow for this role, here's what I get them to do. And then the third is what's the sourcing strategy? What am I going to do to ensure that I fill my top of funnel candidates with high quality people for that specific role? So to me, as soon as I think of hiring somebody, right now I've got two hires, a new executive assistant because Kelsey is just rocking it and we're going to promote her and hire somebody else. So that's essentially two assistants in six months that I've hired, trained and kind of moved on. So the job scorecard, the training for them, luckily I've already got that built out because I did it for the previous hire. And then third is the sourcing strategy. Where am I going to find incredible people for that role? If I've got that, I've prepped the position. Just like when a chef goes to make a meal, they sit down because and if you've ever heard of this, it's called the mise en place. It's the things they put around themselves to make the meal. So they're sitting there and they're prepping and the reason why, and this is a really neat story, totally side tangent, but I'm going to tell you anyways. I was visiting my buddy Jeremy, who has a manufacturing company and one of the things that he was showing me was how they were using pedometers to measure the amount of steps taken to complete a project or a job. And the reason why is because if they are at 20,000 steps per job on average, they need to bring it down to 15,000 and that's how they're measuring their performance. And that's where the mise en place for a chef, which is their area where they cook. A great chef should be able to assemble meals around them, have everything and just turn around and grab it. And I think that's just true for prepping. The position of a key hire is if you get those things in place, what you expect them to do, how you're going to onboard and train them so they get effective and productive as fast as possible. And then also talk about how you're going to identify and source great talent. Then you've got the position prep. So that's step one that most of you guys have not started your recruiting because you're scared of that. Start there, get things prepped. The next thing is source the best. I really believe that one of the key challenges around hiring is most people are not looking at enough candidates. I would say for each one of the roles that I've hired in the past, we're looking at 35 to 50, if not 100 different candidates for the role and really weeding things down to find the best talent in that, that skill set. Now, the way I do it is there's very traditional stuff, which is all the job boards. We talked about that recently in the members area about using sites like ZipRecruiter and Indeed and other job posting boards to create top of funnel sourcing for the applicants. But there's also other stuff that I think is not very often talked about. Okay. And for me, that's one is referrals. So just using your personal network and going through and asking for referrals. Strategic. Think about this. There are people in your life that you know that talk to a lot of people. Most new job opportunities come from weak connections. So if you know those connectors, as Malcolm Gladwell would say, you know the connectors, reach out to them and like, hey, I'm looking to hire this kind of person. You know, anybody, plant the seed, they're going to go off into the world, talk to people, think about people, sleep on the idea and come back to you and give you some great recommendations. You post it on Facebook, you can post on your LinkedIn, you can post it wherever you want to. Just get some referrals. Course some great talent, because people, friends of the, you know, birds of feather fly together. There's your friends are attracting people that you would probably love to work with. Second is employees. So you already have people on your team that I'm assuming are great that could help you source great talent. So here's the way you want to think about those folks is what I do is not just this generic. Like if you refer somebody and we hire them, we'll give you a $2,000 signing bonus. That's not what I do. I literally say, do you want to work with great people that you already know? Perfect. I don't care if they're already working. But I'm just curious, who is the best person at this thing that you know and sit down with them? At their computer, pull up their Facebook friends page, scroll through that, pull up their LinkedIn, scroll through that, look through their networks, Twitter, GitHub, dribble, whatever design sites that you, you know, whatever the specific role is, just really sit down for 30 minutes to an hour and, and do that concerted effort on sourcing through your employees. That's number two. Three is deputize people. I see incredible people. I actually was going through the drive thru today at Starbucks and I met a woman, she must have just started there or she got transferred, but she was at Starbucks, she's working the window and she just had an energy about her. Now I don't have a customer service type role to be filled right now, but if I did or I knew somebody hiring, I would totally recommend they go after Natalie. I remember her name. I was like, natalie, you have an amazing day. Because she was just really great with the intro and the mic and we had an issue with the car thing, the stopper. There was no stopper inside my coffee cup. Anyways, you run into these people. What you want is you want to deputize others in your life that you know and say, if you run across great talent, just let me know. If you come across a great engineer, developer, designer, just let me know. Even if they're working at Google or Facebook, I just need to know and then you'll do what you can with that information and build that pipeline. Four is recruiters. Now here's what's unique about the way I use recruiters to source the best. But first I want to tell you a story, open that loop and then tell you a story about Scott. So one of my favorite things to do is ask people who the best developers, designers, programmers are. So I do this all the time, even when I'm not hiring. One of the key things to building a talent pipeline is to do it all the time. Not just wait when you need to hire, but always be hiring for that role. And even if you meet somebody and you don't have an open position, you just let them know, hey, we just love meeting great, passionate, talented people. And when we have an opening, we're definitely gonna let you know. So I kept asking people and over time I kept hearing Scott, this guy Scott. And I was like, who's Scott? And he's like, oh, he's my teacher at the college. And I kept asking about this guy and finally I just called the college and I said, hey, can I speak to Scott in the programming program? The developers, the software development program, they're like, okay, and they transferred me, this guy named Scott Wadden. And I got a call and I was, hey, Scott, my name is Dan Martell. I'm the founder and owner of a company called Sphere Technologies in Moncton. And, you know, funny thing is, I keep hearing your name. Every time I ask people who's the smartest, you know, programming mind that they've ever met. He's like, oh, that's funny. That's interesting. Who said that? I mentioned a few names. I said, here's the thing, Scott, is I'm working on a really tough challenge right now. I'm doing this project, and we have to re architect their data structure. And there's this challenge around speed versus scalability. And I thought, I keep hearing your name. You must potentially have some ideas. Obviously, I need to show you what we're working with, but if you're free, would you mind meeting me for coffee for 20 minutes so I can walk you through what I'm trying to migrate to and where we're at and get your thoughts on that? And Scott, because he's a teacher and most people that have jobs love to get their brains picked for things in their wheelhouse, things they know about. He. He said yes right away. So we met at a coffee shop on this road called Mountain Road. Tim Hortons for you Canadians out there. And in walked Scott. And I'll tell you, Scott looked like the Unabomber. Okay, Scott did not look like a professor. He looked like a great developer. He even had a neck beard. I want to hear from everybody in the questions area below. Do your engineers have a neck beard? Let me know if you don't know what a neckbeard is. Essentially, what happens to me when I grow my facial hair and then it goes on my neckbeard. If your engineering team, if anybody on your team or your developers have a neck beard, Adrian says, so much neck beards. Yes, exactly. That's Scott. So that was a good sign. And then we sat down and my whole thing for sourcing talent is just figuring out ways we could work together. But at the end of the day, great talent is going to take relationship. We're going to talk about that in today's session. And it's important that you start planting those seeds. And Scott ended up being. He passed on joining me for Flowtown.com and then when I started Clarity, and I remember calling him when we got acquired and said, hey, Scott, you know that moment in Pretty Woman where she walks back into the store after she's all dressed up and she's Got her bags and she's like, remember me? You work off commission, right? And they're like, yeah. She goes, huge mistake. I pretty much called Scott and kind of let him know that that was a big mistake to pass on Flowchild. So when I started Clarity fm, he was one of the first guys. So he ended up becoming a founding partner. Founding team member essentially is what we called it because I wanted to work with him and we did some small projects. We just can never timing wise and he had a big family. But I think it's important to source talent, just keep asking people. So going back to the fourth is recruiters. The way I use recruiters is not like most people that use recruiters for contingency hiring. I actually hire recruiters part time to run through the process. I just walked you through first level filters, meeting with me and looking through my personal network, meeting with everybody on my team and going through their personal networks and building pipeline. So essentially they're executing my recruiting pipeline playbook, which is what I'm teaching you today. And they're doing it per hour on contract. Most recruiters charge about, you know, 25 to $35 an hour. And, and the reason why they'll do that is because at least they're getting paid. Whereas if you hire them on contingency, they may not actually get paid if you don't find somebody. That's amazing. So some contractor recruiters will come into your team part time to help you source up roles and execute your playbook. And I love that, funny enough, shares the same name. Scott Cato out of San Francisco and he's worked with a few folks from SaaS Academy and I don't know if he's worked in that capacity. I really like that because that way he. So he logs into my LinkedIn, he sources candidates as me and then pretty much kicks me to Scott. Scott kind of qualifies them and gets them excited and then gets them back for me once they go through our process. So it's kind of fun having somebody else build top of funnel. Saves me time and that's how I use recruiters. But again, those four are referrals, employees, deputies and recruiters to build and incredible pipeline. So next big key principle that you've got to do is you've got to be quick to qualify. Quick to qualify. So often we want to hire people and we're quick to say yes to people that are just not great. What I want you to do is build non negotiables. I'm going to share with you how to do that when we create a scorecard, create these non negotiables that if people aren't at least a yellow to a green, if they're red, they're just, it's a pass. Like you need to hire people with certain results, things they've accomplished outcomes and if they don't have those things, then they need to not be part of the process. Right. Like I'm at the point where I'm not teaching somebody how to use Google domains or Google sheets or certain social media tools. Like if they're, you know, crazy enough to work in a position in a company that was stuck in 1997 and they didn't keep their skills up to pace, they then it's on them to figure out how to fix that. I'm not bringing them into my team. There's a certain base level of non negotiables that I think that you need to define to make sure that you do that right. And the way you do that is you create a pipeline process of those, the scorecard and also the product and walk you through those steps and then you create a scorecard and the scorecard that I'm going to walk you through, it's a worksheet so I've attached that you guys can all download if you want in the handout section is going to force you and your team to be very diligent on what you need from the candidates. And the reason why that's important is you're quick to qualify, get people out of your pipeline so you're only looking at quality. Most people hate recruiting because they hire a recruiter. They keep sending them shitty resumes or they don't have enough resumes or they're talking with people that aren't qualified. That's just not the case for me. I'm lucky that this process presents me incredibly talented people every time. And my biggest challenge is saying, man, I wish I could hire all three of those people, but I got to pick one. So quick to qualify is a key area. Now one thing I do is I allow my team to veto anybody. So we're going to walk through how to qualify. But one of the big ideas that's worth noting is I've always thought of my role as a talent developer, building a talent pipeline as presenting candidates, great people to my team and giving them 100% power to veto higher. So I've always done that and I learned this reading an incredible blog post called Creating a Cult by Steve Newcomb. So Stephanie, if you could write that resource down and find it. It's a PDF you've probably never heard of this. It's an incredible resource called Creating a Cult by Steve Newcomb. And I read this in 2009, and ever since then I've used it for every one of my recruiting processes. And one of the big ideas is to present candidates to your team and give them permission to beat them. One time we were looking to hire a developer at my company, Clarity, and we were. One thing I always did because it was easier for everybody is on Fridays we had candidates in our pipeline. We just invite them to a team dinner. So everybody would come out as a team on a Friday. And if we had like two or three candidates, we invite them to the dinner so they could meet the rest of the team. It was super efficient and they could get to know us and we could see how they interacted. And one time we were up for dinner and we went to this restaurant in Moncton here. And at the end of it, Vincent, who's one of my developers, super quiet, never says anything, pulls me aside and says, hey, Dan, is that John guy somebody we're looking to hire? And I said, yep. And he goes, just wanted to let you know that before he ordered, he asked who was going to pay for the meal. And I told him, well, Dan probably is going to pay for it, because he normally does. And afterwards, he changed his order from having the burgers and fries to the lobster and whatever. And I just appreciated that. A, I empowered Vincent enough to tell me that that happened, and two, it just gave me another data point. So what's great is I'm not going to make a decision to hire somebody or not based on that kind of scenario, because I don't think that's enough to tell the full character of somebody. But it gave me a data point and then a few other data points, like when we did our test project and he bounced at 5pm and everybody else was still in the office, and a few other things made it a pass. But what I love is Vincent was involved in the recruiting process, that he knew that he was going to have to work with that person, whatever in his gut told him, this person's a little shady. He decided to tell me. And I think it's a really important thing for you and your organization to empower your people to veto any key hires. And if you do that, then you don't force people on your team. You essentially introduce people to your team and they feel compelled if the person gets hired to really ensure that they're successful. So I'm a big fan of making sure everybody on my team meets. I sometimes use Zoom. What's the test day you mentioned? Oh, Heather, wait, there's more. But I use Zoom sometimes where I'll just have a candidate come on a Zoom session and everybody gets to meet virtually that way. But it's very important that you qualify. You be quick to qualify and empower your team to be part of that. It's a cultural thing. It's just a nuance. But I thought it was an important story to share to really build great talent. Pipeline number four is simulate the work. As Heather just asked, what does that test day look like? Here's the way I think about simulating the work is I learned this from Seth Godin. Seth Godin wrote in a blog post or in a talk I heard, I can't remember where the idea came from, but he had this concept that he can't work with you until I work with you. And Jared and I were actually running at lunch and he was like, man, I love the I can't work with you until I work with you. Because he's hiring some interns and hiring some people and he's running them to the test cases. And it's just one of those things that's so obvious in hindsight. Yet I know hundreds of entrepreneurs that still don't make this mandatory for every position in your company. How can you possibly. It's literally the most ridiculous thing in the world. How can you work with somebody? I go from conversation, conversation, maybe a third conversation, to deciding to get married. Like that's just the craziest thing in the world. So what we've always done is we've simulated the position. So I call it a test project. And the way it works is typically I time box it to 10 hours. So it's never more than 10 hours and it's doing real work. So the key for me is it's not critical path, so it's not something I need done for the company to move forward. So we usually negotiate a cool project that we both want to see come to life. If they don't have any ideas, I'll throw out some ideas. The third thing is for all the candidates for that specific hire, ux, design, sales, whatever you guys are bdr, it's the same test project. So all the candidates do the same test project. You time box it with 10 hours time limit. So you force them to only work 10 hours on what you can get done. And then there's the question of compensation. Always comes up. The way I deal with compensation is if they're full time working somewhere else. I'll suggest that, hey, this is a great way for us to get to know each other and maybe put in five hours on this Saturday, next Saturday, and that's the test project. If they're a freelancer, I'll usually ask them what their hourly rate is and offer them half of that. Because again, it's a throwaway project. It's not something we're actually gonna use for our company. It's just a way for us to get to know each other and work together. And then one of the key elements is I do is I don't give them a lot of information. I actually wanna simulate exactly how it would be working with me, which is not getting a detailed instructional design of the outcome that I want them to achieve, but at a high level point to the mountaintop, talk about what it's going to feel when we get there and why it's important, and let them off to the races and see what comes up. I want to see, do they ask good questions, do they communicate often? If it's a 10 day period where they're going to get this done over two separate weekends, do they keep me in the loop, do they update me, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You want to evaluate all aspects of that simulation. It's no different than pilots. Pilots go into simulators to learn how to run and fly these 40 million, $60 million planes. There's no effing way an airline is going to train a pilot in a real plane. It makes no sense. Yet you're going to bring somebody in your organization that potentially may not be talented, could introduce a bug in your code, could deploy an ad that makes you look stupid, could cause all this turmoil, could cause a key employee to quit. Bad hires are super expensive. And you would have probably figured out a lot of that going through this process and simulating the work before they actually get it done. So that's number four, simulate the work. And finally five is you gotta sell the future. If you're not thinking about their things they value and how you can get them into the mindset of where they wanna see their life. One of my favorite questions to ask people is if five years, if you were waking up, what does a perfect day look like for you? What, where do you live, where do you work, how do you work? What are you working on? And I want to hear what they're describing because my mission for them is in five years to make that Happen. And I'm very straight. I'm very honest about that. My mission, if you want to be an entrepreneur, give me four great years and dedicate your time to my vision and goals in this business. And in four years, if you want to go do your own thing, I will support you in making that happen. I feel super lucky to have incredible talent come into my business and support them in doing that. I've invested in companies that have left. I supported entrepreneurs as a personal mentor, et cetera, et cetera. I'm selling the future. And the reason why is, if you think about it, there's all these opportunities. If they're talented people, there's all these opportunities that they have access to. And you need to think about them as like horses. They're going to ride to run this race. And you need to convince them that you've got the horse that's going to allow them to win the race of life. And for many of you, I think you're acting as if I've got this great opportunity and you should be blessed to come work with me. I've never approached hiring that way. The way I hire is I try to find incredible talent and convince them to put their own dreams and goals and tasks in life on hold for now to come help support me. And in doing so, I'm then going to help them achieve whatever they want to achieve in life and on the way, teach them skill sets that I know are going to support them to do that. So you need to sell the future. And I want to tell you a quick story. There was this guy I was hiring a growth marketer at Clarity. Now, I built Clarity with biz dev and kind of like fundraising in San Francisco and then engineering and marketing and stuff in Canada. The challenge for me is I was trying to hire a growth hacker. Growth hacker in Moncton, New Brunswick. Here's what I knew, and many of you guys probably know, is right off the bat, they don't exist. Nobody in this city exists because it is such an advanced role. There'd be no company hiring for that position. So I knew I needed to source. So one of the things that I've learned quickly is don't bring people to your hometown outside of key seasonal time. So I knew I had a window between June, July and August to bring any Candace I want to Moncton to try to convince them that not only was the right horse for them to ride, but that it was an incredible place to live and all that other fun stuff. So I found this guy named Aaron and. And Aaron was listed as one of the top 10 growth hackers in the valley. At the time, he had worked at StumbleUpon and a few other startups. So I find out all of his preference and I want to tell you it's a sell job. It's a persuasion thing. You don't. It's not a passive thing. I found out he liked cars. Okay. I happened to race car, so I brought him as soon as he landed. We jumped in the car, we went to the track. I didn't realize that he also got motion sickness. So about seven laps in, he has to pull over. He throws up all over the place.

Place.

My bad. But he thanked me profusely for bringing him to a track and just getting him around other cars. He thought it was so cool that there was a track like two hours away from where I live. And then the next morning, he decides to introduce me to CrossFit. First CrossFit workout I ever did was with this guy Aaron. And he almost got me back. He almost made me throw up all over the place. He was doing snatches and all these crazy advanced moves. And I was like, what is he doing? He was warming up and I was like. I was like trying to swing my arm and try to keep things going anyways. And then what I did is on the weekend, because he came up on a Friday and then left on a Sunday, is over the weekend. I brought the team in. I said, hey, let's just jam on a marketing strategy. So it's all about these test projects. Just saying, like, let's see how we work together and how this could come together. And, you know, at the end of the day, it would be such a great story if Aaron decided to take the role. But unfortunately he passed. Now he had a better offer and he wanted to do something in the political space. And he has since. And he's an incredible, talented person. But what happened is he referred to other people, and that is the power. To me, there's kind of five drivers of really getting people to want to work with you.

Okay.

Number one is fit. Do they feel like your business is a fit for their career goals and where they're at in their life? So that's one is fit. Second is family. Do they feel like you and your values and their values and the way you interact are aligned? And one of the things if Erin had a girlfriend or boyfriend or partner in life in and I could bring them with me, I would. If I would bring them to dinner with my wife, that is an absolute must. If you Want to get a key VP of engineering or a key hire. And you don't bring their spouse to dinner with your spouse. And you don't understand the game that I'm talking about playing. So that's really important when you're trying to sell. So families. Number two, three is freedom. The freedom. Because most people don't quit a company, they quit a shitty boss. And most bosses are not giving these incredible talented individuals the freedom to actually be creative and solve hard problems and be accountable for challenging outcomes. And that's what they want. So freedom's number three. Four is fortune. So as I mentioned, a lot of people start off as like, I can't afford this key hire. I can't afford to pay this person. That is not the problem. It's not fortune, it's not money. The challenge is the fit, the family and the freedom. And then compensation is, you know, and I always say there's different slices to the pie, right? So, like, you know, if somebody tells me right off the bat that they want to make 200,000 a year, I'm probably not even going to move forward with the rest of the conversation for most roles in an organization because it's just their expectations. They might as well go work with a Fortune 500 company, make 225 and call it a day. But if they're saying, like, compensation is not a primary driver for me, that's a perfect place to start. Then we can talk about work life, integration, we can talk about, you know, growth, opportunity, talk about equity. But compensation, Fortune is number four on the list. And then finally five is fun. Do they have a lot of fun working in your environment? And for me, it was important to bring the team in. So I brought the team in. We jammed on a marketing strategy, and then I got the team. Because I had the kids at the time, I think I had a new. I had a one year old and a newborn. And I. And I said, hey, team, can you take Aaron out and show them a good time in Moncton? They got him wasted. And that's why he just, like, really felt bad. He said, look, Dan, it's not a fit for me. And I know you need to hire somebody great. Here's two people that I'll put in recommendations, I'll tell them about my visit. And it was amazing. It was probably the best. 2,000 bucks, you know, cost 1,000 bucks to fly to Canada and not even $2,500. Best money ever spent because we ended up hiring. Somebody just rocked it from a marketing and distribution point. Of view and it became a byproduct of having Aaron come and visit. So the five key motivations if you're selling the position, okay, sell the future. One is fit fortune or fit family and freedom. Four is fortune and five is fun. You gotta have fun. So the five Fs of sell in the future, those are them. And you want to implement them in your conversations with key talent. Now this to me is the quote that I always go back to by Jim Collins. Great vision without great people is irrelevant. At the end of the day, you're an incredibly talented founder and you're building this company and if you want to make it easier on yourself, you got to find Scott's, you need to find Aaron's, you need to find incredibly talented people. You look at my team, Jared, world class. Most people don't realize that Jared, my videographer has done two documentaries that you can go buy on itunes or watch on Netflix. Kung Fu Elliot and Highway Gospel. He's a world class at what he does. Most of you guys probably realize that even though what he does for me is not even allowing we get to do these great microdocs. But you know, Stephanie's incredible, Kelsey's new and just rocking it. Everybody interacts with Jessica from her events. There's a process that produces world class talent. And to me, I can have the most incredible vision for software product that I want to build. But if I don't have great people, then it's irrelevant. At the end of the day, I cannot build. Most people think it's on them, it's not. It's on your people. And you actually need to be smart enough to get those people around you and get out of their frickin way. You know, my favorite story was when the JFDI group and I were down in Austin in January and we were meeting with Noah Kagan and this is all on video, it's recorded, so it's public knowledge. Maybe he didn't realize we were going to. Well, he knew we were recording, but whatever. And he talked about appsumo, how I think he grew IT to about 4 million in revenue and then finally just realized like maybe he was the bottleneck. And he brought in a manager, GM to run AppSumo and over a two or three year period he grew it to 12 million in revenue. And he only spends like one hour a month sitting down at the GM to talk about strategy and high level stuff. But it's almost like the time he put into the business versus the results there is like this negative effect the more time you put in, the worse the results. The less I put in, the better the results. So really simple math and I think for a lot of you, because you're not hiring the right people, you're not getting out of the way, you're not managing them appropriately, it's holding you back. So those are the five hot principles. I want to ask you to leave a comment below. Out of these five, prep the position, source the best. Three quick to qualify.

Right.

Making sure you have a scorecard and a pipeline and get people in or out and no non negotiables. Four, simulate the work and five, sell the future. Which one do you think is going to have the biggest impact on your recruiting process going forward? Prep the position, make sure you know how to onboard them and source great talent to get the sourcing happening, deputies, et cetera. Three, quick to qualify. So make sure you bring people that have non negotiable like they have to have done these outcomes. Four, simulate the work and then five, sell the future. Which one leave your answer below 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 will have the biggest impact in your recruiting, your talent pipeline going forward. Leave your answers below. Grab a quick drink of water. Pavel says, source the best hands. 100% love that. Millie says quick to qualify and simulate the work. Two really powerful things. Millie. Patrick prepped the position. Three quick to qualify, says Owen. Awesome. Simulate the work. Yvonne, Perfect. Love the concept of sell the future. John. That's my favorite one. And you've got an incredible opportunity to do that with Lemonly. 2 and 3, says Daniel. For sure. So that's source the best, quick to qualify, source the best says Owen. You guys are amazing. Thanks so much for being active, participating, responding. Always fun to do these webinars. So I want to walk you through a quick model. So one of the things that I love to think about is really just like how to build kind of a bullseye of focus for when I'm hiring. Right. So what is a great talent, if you think about it, overlaps of separate things to finally get a person at its core. So if you haven't downloaded the workbook, you can download that in the handout section. So the talent pipeline worksheet and in there I'm just gonna open up this notes area and draw this out. But the way I think about it is it's called the hiring pipeline. Hiring or sorry, bullseye. Bullseye. And the bullseye kind of works like this. So you've got this circle, this circle, this circle. Well, that didn't work out too Good, Let me redraw this out. Um, so the bullseye is, you know, just like a target on the bullseye and like that. And we've got the core at the middle. And the way I think about it is we want to make sure that we focus on the first high level outcomes. The whole quote on smiling, I can't teach somebody smile. They have to, you know, so they have to come in smiling. So to me it's always the results. What are the results that I want this person to achieve over the next 16 months? And my role is they must have accomplished those over the next 16 months. You don't want to get into a habit of hiring people and training them all the time. Although people say that it sounds cool. But if you're starting off and you're two or three or four or five employees, if you're before the first 12, I really believe the first 12 dictates your success. It makes it hard for you to keep up with your existing responsibilities and have to cross train and train other people. So I'd rather you hire people have already achieved the thing. Wherever you're going to be in the next 16 months, make a list of all the things they're going to work on and have they achieved those outcomes of where you want to be for that. So if you want somebody managing 10,000amonth in Facebook ad spend, have they managed 10,000amonth in Facebook ad spend? If it's no, then they're a pass and that's the quick to qualify process. So first is results. Second is skills. Do they actually have the skill, the competency, the traits to be successful in your organization, whatever you need them to do? The results is the outcomes and then the skills are the things they need to know. Can they program in Ruby? Do they know how to use this infrastructure? There ideally is about three to five skills that are non negotiables to really make sure that the fit starting to narrow down on that bullseye. And then finally the third thing is responsibilities. So response responsibilities. Responsibilities are the areas that you expect them to manage. Right? So if they're going to come in, they're going to be the sales manager or sales coach, then they're going to be responsible for hiring, training and producing quotas for their salespeople. And this is what I feel like a lot of people don't test for is they don't list the responsibilities. Like if you're going to ask somebody to come in and run strategy for your marketing, like you need to interview for that. If you don't feel like they have the strategic mindset to be able to drive that innovation within that department, then why would you hire them? If you then still have to be the person to push the car to move that boulder up the mountain, then that's just going to be frustrating as heck and you're not going to get freedom from the talent you're bringing into your team. And then four. And finally is core values. This is the mission, the vision, the beliefs, the values. This is the core. If you can get people that have done the outcome and they've got the skills and they can, and they've proven being responsible around those core areas of responsibility, and then they match to the values of your organization, you test against them. You ask them to explain examples of when they've done X or Y. One of our core values is clear communication. If somebody can't clearly communicate with me in a recruiting process and do you think I'm going to hire them? No fricking way. That's part of core values, Right? You actually make it part of your interview process, in your pipeline process. So if you do this right, then that's how you get bullseye candidates, right? The hiring bullseye. You want to nail this core. So all these things overlap. They're all kind of like, here are the results I need, here's the skills, here's the responsibility, and here's the core values that I want to make sure I get from these candidates. And you put them all together, and that alignment creates the hiring bullseye to make sure you bring great people into your team. So next up, I'm going to walk you through the worksheet. It's called the new hire scorecard. If you want in the downloads area, you can download that. It looks just like so. And what we're going to do is I'm going to bring on somebody live to walk through this for a key hire that you might have going on in your organization. Just ask you some questions. It doesn't have to be a hundred percent accurate, just has to be directionally accurate. If you're interested in coming on live with me to walk through this, and everybody else download their worksheet so we can do it together. One of my rules is no homework. I'd love to work through that with you. Just leave a question or say me in the question box below. Don't be shy. I'm not gonna embarrass you. I promise. It's gonna be fun, it's gonna be done, and it's gonna be great. So if you don't mind leaving a message below in the questions box. Let me know what position you want to do this for and then Stephanie will bring you on here live to make sure that we work through this together. And then after that we're going to go through Q and A to make sure. So Jake, you're in. Stephanie, if you don't mind bringing Jake live on the worksheet project. So I'm going to let Stephanie do that. Jake, you there? We're both here. We got Jake and Matt from up launch. Oh, nice. Got Jake and Matt. You guys want to quickly introduce yourself to the group? Yeah, sure.

So Matt and Jake from UP launch. We help fitness professionals grow their businesses by building fiercely loyal relationships with their leads and clients.

Love it.

That's cool.

I just want to give context. So up launch everybody check it out. We've got Jake and Matt. What's the position that we're going to be hiring for?

So Director of Business Development. We're actually going through this right now, so it's very timely.

Perfect. I actually have ninjas monitoring everybody's office and they report back and that's how I decide what I teach. So that's great.

Cool.

So the way I think about this is it's both a scorecard for the position and then also as if you want, you can just print off copies of this and change the name of the candidate. So if I had John Doe, I would just have print offs of this and I would go John Doe and I would fill it out as a separate copy. Does that make sense? So I would just copy this, paste it, you know what I mean? And then I would have. So once we fill it out, I would just use that filled out desired results, skills competition, living core and then I would use that to do the interviews. Does that make sense, guys?

Yeah, for sure.

Okay, if it doesn't, I'll just show you how that's done after. But let's go real quick. What are the results that you want the director of Biz Dev to have accomplished things that where you want your biz dev process to be in 16 months. What are some of those results?

I mean the biggest bottom line one obviously is we're looking to about 3x our current MRR.

Okay, so you want them responsible for MRR growth, but what is the activity they're going to be doing?

Primarily running the sales pipeline, doing product demos and managing the follow up sequence afterwards.

Usually it's not called Biz Dev. So I think right off the bat you might want to, I don't know the name because like it sounds like a sales role. It is.

So it's absolutely a sales role we were trying to like, because he's gonna have some other responsibilities outside of sales as well as far as like nurturing customer relationships and stuff like that. It's not.

So here's the deal. You expect him to close demos at a certain percentage. Right?

Right.

Close. So close sales demos.

Yeah.

What else is non negotiable? Like if he doesn't, if he's never done this, that you don't want to hire them.

Manage a sales pipeline.

Yep.

Manage pipeline. Yep. What else?

Perform structured and effective follow up leading up to and after the demos.

Yep. I would say that's probably manage pipeline.

Okay.

Right. Anything else? Is he gonna have to hire salespeople? Hopefully, yeah, that would definitely be an eventual goal. Okay, so you want to make sure that he's hired salespeople so you don't have to teach them how to do that because you don't probably know how to. See what I'm saying? If you, if you bring somebody in that's got experience, closed demos, manage pipeline and hire salespeople, then you've got a great hire. Right, right. So let's. You could write four or five of those on there. So skills and competencies. Real quick. What are some of the skills they'd have to manage social media? Selling? Is that a skill?

Yeah, I would say social media for sure.

Cool. What else?

I don't know if it's too general or not, but I mean effective communication. I know that's probably true in every position, but especially being able to communicate product benefits and stuff.

Okay, so product communication. Right. So benefit. Communicate benefits. I mean this is like super basic and simple, but I think anyone that's been involved in like the pipeline process, like managing calendars and schedules and coordination like that. Yeah, yeah. So super scheduled. Right.

I think for us because we're think about tools.

What tools is. Yeah, what tools are you going to use?

So like we usually use like G Suite, Google Calendar, Acuity scheduling. We use Intercom for.

All right. Scheduling. Automated scheduling. Right.

Yep.

Intercom. Anything else?

Zoom for doing the product calls. The demo calls.

Yeah. So that's where you can kind of like, you know, you can add those things on here if you want. Right. And then for me the score is just 1 out of 10. So then you do the same thing. Responsibilities. So you talked about, you know, higher salespeople. So responsibilities might be, you know, reporting on sales. Reporting, sales metrics. Right, Definitely.

Yeah.

And you Just kind of go through the list of responsibilities again. Three, you know, three to five. I usually have five because I'm pretty, you know, I know what I want. And then we got living. Core values. What are your core values as a company? Do you guys have them defined already? Yeah, we do.

So a few of them that I think correlate specifically to this. We basically say that everyone's their own entrepreneur within the confines of their role. So somebody basically kinda like what you said, you don't have to give them the step by step procedure. Give them the end goal and let them run with it.

Entrepreneurial. Yep.

Definitely like integrity, effective communication. I mean, I feel like those are probably in everyone's core values, but they're definitely important. Another one of our core values is constant personal development. Never accept the status quo. Always try to get better and make yourself uncomfortable. All that kind of good stuff.

Growth minded for sure. Yeah. So all you do, as you can see, is you just list them out. So every time you have a new hire, you fill this out. And then what I was saying earlier about making a copy is I would actually just delete the name out of here and I'd go, make a copy, right? You can just print this off, literally. So copy paste. And then I have copies, right. So every interviewer I do, I just put their name. So I go, Matt, right? Cause that's you. And I go, hey Matt, you know, my job today is just to kind of get to know you better and ask you some questions about, you know, your previous experience and how it might pertain to what you'll be working with us at our organization around. I'm just curious, when it comes to, you know, doing sales demos, what's, you know, what's your experience around that? You know, how many demos have you done and how does that look? You know what I mean? What's your process? And then I'd listen, I'd give a score and scores from 1 to 10 the way I do. 1 is non existent and 10 is better than your competition. Right. So if you think the person has better experience than your best competitor, then there are 10 and one is non existent. Does that make sense?

Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

So essentially within a 30 minute conversation, I can go through all of these. I can leave comments in here. No sales experience. Right. Because that might be it, sales experience. And then I might add a comment like never hired salespeople. Never hired salespeople. Hey Dan, just so that will have context when we look at this again, we're not seeing you write that. Oh, oh, guys, so sorry, I did not share the worksheet. There. Now you see it. There we are. All right, so here's what I did. Yeah, so sorry about that. So essentially what you want to do is, you know, create the scorecard, which is all these elements. And then once I've outlined them, right, so I've got my living, my core values. I've got to decide results, skills and competencies, responsibilities. Then I create a copy and you can just print this off on paper if you want. Then I paste it below. And then as I have a new candidate, I just add their name here, like Julie. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

That's awesome. Then I score Julie based on those same parameters that I've defined, which is prep the position. This is prepping the position. Then what I have is I have comments that I can write in here. And if you want to be fancy and digitize this and add it to your applicant tracking system. I'm not going to talk about any of that because I really think it's just technology to automate process. And if you don't have a process, then technology just automates shit. Does that make sense?

Yeah, sure does, man.

Right. People buy technology, things going to solve business processes, but they don't have a process, so it doesn't do anything. So to me, this is what we want to do is for the key candidate, what's the desired results, what's the skills and competencies, responsibilities, Living Corvette. And then I score them one out of ten, right? And I go, okay, well, he's a seven here, he's a six there, and he's a four. Entrepreneurial. I feel like he's the one. He's never, he's always worked at the government integrity. It felt like an eight. Communication. You know, he has typos in his email. So I'm going to put six. Growth minded. He hasn't read a business book in the last few years, so I'm going to give him a two and I'll just write some of those notes. No reading seminars, you know, personal development, whatever. So you just write comments to kind of like reinforce the why of those scoring to kind of remind you. And then that way you've got a simple score structure where you can tally up all their scores and figure out who's the best candidate. Does that make sense?

Yeah, seems pretty straightforward.

So here's the cool part. Yeah, this is the cool part is you don't have to do that with everybody unless they get all the way down to this part here. Right. So what I do is this is the talent pipeline. The way the talent pipeline works is it can be a Trello board, it can be an applicant tracking system. We have Applicant Pro. So we've got Ryan, who's the founder of applicant pro and SAS Academy. We have Eve from alongside.com, which is a part of SAS Academy. And we've got a ton of other recommendations from Brizly HR to another one. Recently Dev posted in the SAS Academy Facebook group. It doesn't matter what you use for your applicant tracking system. At a high level, I want you to walk you through kind of the process. Targets is where I source candidates that haven't applied for the job. Does that make sense? So these are manually added. So that's right here. So this would be an example of me hearing a guy's name like Scott Wadden. I add him, I add some notes, and I try to move that target forward for a position.

Right.

So that's proactive outreach, kind of like cold outreach. And I'm bringing them into my pipeline. Once they've applied and they're interested to work with us, then they move over to Applicant. Right, the assessment step. So applicant is just a quick review of resume skills, all that stuff. So I'd say 95% of people just get kicked out of that. So they go to applicant and then you have somebody qualify it. And that's where like a recruiter or somebody else on your team can quickly go through the resume and just be like, this person doesn't have any of the desired results. They're just applying and it's a waste of our time. Does that make sense? Jake, Matt, you guys there? Yeah, we're good. Yeah, we're good.

Cool.

Then we go. Assessment. Assessment is a profile assessment. I use a bunch of different ones depending on the role. So, for example, for recruiting an assistant, I use the Colby A score. I've used Profile XT in the past for hiring consultants. When I was building up my company, Spheric, I've used Plum IO, which I really like, and you guys can all check out. I'm not going to talk about the specific assessment for your role, but there are ones for developers. So there's Codela that allows you to test technical skills. There's. I think it's Test4Geeks.com that lets you test for technical skills. Again, if you just search. What I do a lot is if I'm looking for a tool is I'll search especially for recruiting, called pre hiring. So search pre hiring assessment, and then Put the developer or the name of the hire. So marketing pre hiring assessment for developers. Technical talent administration. There is a hire. Select.com has a great suite of more administrative and system architecture and different assessments. But I need the assessment because it's going to help me weed out a lot of people that just don't have the cognitive abilities for the role. So many of them will get to an interview, but if you had an assessment, you would get rid of the ones that were just good at selling. Right. So people that know how to pad their resumes and bullshit their experience, they would fail the cognitive assessments. Does that make sense, guys?

Yeah, for sure.

So that's a really big step in getting rid of the noise. Just shitty, shitty applicants. Then it's the interview using the new hire scorecard and then if they end up being great, I usually try to find at least three people for the test project. Test project. Again, you come up with that per hire for developers. Sometimes I'll do something on a Facebook API or a public API for designers. I'll do things like have them go through, let's say Yelp's onboarding experience and redesign it. You just want to make sure you give them something that all of them can do and then you can test against it. So they go in there, they submit their test project, you attach that to the prospect's profile card and then finally you choose the right person, you move them over and you make them an offer. And that's where you really want to sell that you know, you're always selling along the way. But as soon as they're done in a test project, that's where you really want to talk about. And this is where you talk about money and compensation. But usually within the application process, I'll ask them about their expected compensation because if it's out of whack, I don't want to waste their time or mine to get to that point. That makes sense, guys. Yeah, for sure. Cool. That is the talent pipeline. If you do this, can you see how this would just trim all the crap out of recruiting great people and bring you qualified candidates if you did both of those steps.

Yeah, I think the worksheet solid, especially like qualifying what a 1 and a 10 is, you know, having a way to say, hey, the non existent versus better than the competition. Because I think a lot of time numerical ratings can be subjective, so it's nice to have a benchmark for it.

Totally. And again, it's not to be perfect, but it's honestly just, you know, people. When I think about core values, my rule is you hire and fire against them. So if you don't have this in your reviews, your employee reviews, or in the hiring part there, then my rule is that if somebody comes into my organization and is a bad hire, that's 100% my fault. I didn't design the system to keep them away from my team. That's, that's. So I need to then change the system. Maybe it's an assessment, maybe it's an interview question. I need to figure out how did they get into my team and fix the system that got them in there. So in the future, I never have that kind of person show back up in my recruiting process. Does that make sense?

Yeah, for sure.

And the key is you always want to be recruiting, especially for your roles like developers, marketing talent, et cetera, because you always want to have a pipeline of people to pull from. And if you have somebody else running the process, then you're only really involved here. Another thing I do to cut down on the noise in the application is I'll ask them to submit a video. So submitting a video, for a lot of people, it's a showstopper. They get blocked, they can't do it. If you're in marketing, sales role and you can't shoot a video and know how to upload it to YouTube or Vimeo or some private Dropbox link, then you cannot be part of my team. Does that make sense? Yeah. Like, I mean, simple things like that will just help reduce the number of people that end up in your pipeline. So with that, I'm going to open it up for questions. Everybody, let's thank you, Jake and Matt for coming on live bearing, you know, putting themselves all out there. I apologize for not sharing the worksheet training, but I'm just curious below in the questions box, what's been the most helpful for you in the process today so far? What's the number one takeaway? What did you learn? What did you notice? What's a distinction that was unique to the way you thought about recruiting versus how you're going to do it going forward? I want to hear from you. What are you committed to going forward when it comes to building your talent pipeline? Below in the questions box, let me know what your answer is. One word, two or three words. It just helps me understand where you're at and what you need most from me. Then we're going to open up for questions around doing different things. Millie says spouse dinner for senior roles. 100%. That's a great one. Millie Again, leave your answer below in the chat box. Jake Building a talent pool before the position is needed for sure, Always want to make sure that we've got people ready to go for those key roles, especially engineering development, marketing support. You're getting a lot of noise in your funnel, so you want to be running that Love the spouse dinner, says Owen. For senior roles, super Cool Scorecard is great for defining the role and type of person needed. Yes, Ben. And really mapping to those core values. And just like being honest about if all of a sudden when you're hiring somebody and they see that you're asking them about things around their values and their belief systems and the way they approach their work or their life beliefs, then they're going to feel a different level of commitment to those core values once they're in the company versus just coming in and saying here's our core values that we believe in and you got to follow them. It's like you didn't even ask me about any of this stuff before we started working together. So it's a really great way to do it. Georgia says, visualizing the process Kanban style for sure. I'm very visual Georgia, so I'm glad you appreciated that. So with that, Stephanie, we're going to open things up for questions. If you have any questions around hiring or anything else, honestly, be sure to post them below in the questions box. I'll answer them. We're also in the replay in the Facebook group underneath the video. We're going to post resources and stuff. I've got a ton. If you want to talk about profiling tools, we can ask about there. If you want to talk about how to figure out what to compensate people, we can talk about some sites I use for that. But any questions you have, post them below in the chat box. I'll bring you on Live real quick and we will answer them here. So Stephanie, I'm going to let you drive things and bring people on Live so I can be helpful. If you have any hiring questions, post them below.

Awesome. So guys, just go ahead and just post that you want to be unmuted or just say me anything like that and I'll get you unmuted. You can join Dan Live. I'm not seeing anything so far. And Dan, we can leave this topic if there aren't any questions related, is that right?

Yeah, pretty much on these webinars. If there's any other questions on this topic or anything else going on in your business, you can ask them and we'll answer them as well. I Will say post them in Facebook because it's always faster response. And when I can, I shoot a video or kind of answer things there. But if you have any questions just strategically about stuff going on, you want to talk about it, you can ask it and we'll get those answered there. My rule is if nobody asks questions or engages, we're just gonna wrap up the call, call it a day. So Stephanie, let's give another few minutes.

For sure and we'll have the linked up for everybody. And that'll be in the members area as well. So you can use that. Oh great. Heather's got a question. And Ben. So first we'll start off with Heather. Heather, I'm just unmuting you. Give me a second here, hon. You're all set. And make sure when you guys come on live that you please introduce yourself so that everyone in the group gets to know who you are and what you're working on. Hey, Heather. Hey, can you hear me?

Heather, what's up?

Hey, Dan, how's it going?

Amazing.

Good. Yeah. So Heather Marie here, my company, Shoppable. We provide data solutions and universal checkout technology for enterprise CPGs. And my question is just around specifically hiring on the sales side and how do you. I guess, how do you suggest, kind of how do you suggest deciding when, like when's the right time to bring on additional salespeople?

Yeah, so I mean the way I think about sales is we want to be 80% productive within six months. So if you have. Let me just add a page here. If you have a sales process. So let's say they have a 500k quota.

Dan, sorry to interrupt. Please share your screen with the.

Yes, good point. Let's do that. So if you have a 500k thinquota, so we want to kind of get them on trend to 80% in six months. And we just want to make sure we have a kind of a process for bringing them on. So I think it's not only making sure that your current salesperson is producing, but it's things like lead gen. Right. Do you have enough lead gen? Can you get them to, you know, for most enterprise sales, you know, 20 to 30 demos a week, which sounds like a lot, but I mean if you're using the rocket demo builder, they should be short to the point so it's less. You know, the timing thing to me is always, you know, these things are number one and then two can do. You have a process today that gets them to product, you know, being productive fast enough. So if you don't have kind of a sales enablement output, then I think it could be challenging because if you hire, you might have got lucky with the first hire and they got productive, then you bring somebody else on, they're going to feel flat because this wasn't well developed. So there's no good answer for that. Heather, if you feel like you have the, you know, the lead gen process, if it's outbound or inbound and your current sales guy is at capacity, then I would say especially if he's at 80% capacity, then maybe it makes sense to bring on a salesperson.

Okay. And you're saying on the lead side they should be doing. Each person should be able to have 20 to 30 brand new demos a week.

I think a salesperson should be. Yeah. If they're an account executive and their whole job is lead gen. Now this whole rule around like the 20% time, if they're paying more than 20% of their time generating leads, then you need to give that to somebody else. Right. So a lot of times what I've seen is you bring on somebody that's a full stack sales guy and really they should be just be an account exec or product specialist and you can have somebody else that's doing sdr, which is sales development rep. Right. So if this person is doing 20% more of their time on recruiting and generating leads and you can hire somebody to do SDR work and then you start to create a career path. People start in SDR and they eventually become an account. Exact.

Okay, that makes sense. Okay.

Yeah. There's no point in hiring another account exec and then them doing full stack because really, you know, it should be SDR or bdrs. You know, you have somebody doing inbound qualification, some person doing outbound qualification and that feeds into your demos and their whole job is just to, you know, get demos and close fast. Right. Velocity. Got it.

Okay.

That help?

Thank you.

Yep.

Absolutely.

Awesome. Great question, Heather. Thanks.

Heather.

Stephanie.

Yep. We're moving over to Ben. Ben's got a question about bad hires. You're all set, Ben.

Cool. Hi, Dan. Really enjoyed the webinar. Appreciated, yes, the energy that's required with hires, but the realization that you've made a bad hire. Ben, can you introduce yourself to the group real quick? Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. So my name is Ben. I'm one of the founders and CEO of PaperTrail. We help service companies into the renewable energy sector with inspection management. Awesome. We, yeah, we're. I've realized that we've made a bad hire so managing them out without affecting the rest of the team, I think it's. I've probably answered my own question, but any advice from you?

Yeah.

Here's what I would do is, you know, with every bad hires, you want to mitigate the impact to the customer or to the team, right?

Yeah.

So sometimes, you know, I always say never waste a good crisis. So sometimes you can use bad hire to actually rally the group to help take some of the work offload and get the person out of the organization. If it's that kind of scenario, then you might want to just remove them from the organization as fast as possible. Let me just. For some reason, it's not giving me a clear page. Yeah. So it's really about timelines. Is he still in the company right now? Yes.

Cool.

So let's say how quick do you want him removed next? Two months. Yeah. In terms of managing those relationships with customers and the other team, I think two months. Yeah. Yeah. So essentially what I would do is just try to take things off their plate until there's not a whole lot left. First thing is I would have them document their systems. Then I would take anything that's client facing and then kind of assign that to somebody else. And then at this point, you'd probably let them know they're no longer required in your organization and they have a decision to either cross train the new person or leave. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah. So it pretty much gives you six weeks to find a new hire to start this process. Because at this point, that person should start and they can decide if they want to cross train or just bounce. But you've already got them to document the process, so you're not left having to do too much of the training yourself. Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

And if you want to look at additional trainings, there's the camcorder method. Camcorder method. There's the playbook, the business playbook. Yeah, those. Those will get you going. Perfect. That's all I needed.

Yeah.

Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Cool.

Stephanie, thanks so much. Ben. Dave Carcello was just saying he feels bad for you. He had to let someone go and cause him any crisis, but they needed to go. So he. He feels your pain. We are jumping over to Sam followed by Pavel. And please make sure you guys introduce yourself to the group. Go ahead, Sam.

Hi, Dan. This is Sam from Kridio. We build end to end solution for WordPress. Sam, how are you going, man? Sorry, Dan. So my design, like our co. One of our co founder is a designer and the problem was that he was working most of the front end, but under the hood there was a lot of pieces missing. There wasn't enough design delivered. So at the end result wasn't really great. So what I ended up doing was going and finding somebody outside, remote and appearance, like about two grand for part time. Really. I mean, you can look at everything, their portfolio, their work experience, everything was great, but again, they weren't able to deliver. I tried to do everything, I mean, maybe I wasn't doing right, but I tried to do everything possible. But still the end result wasn't great. So I ended up designing everything that was missing from the product. So what's your advice on that? Like, I have a co founder who's a designer, is not 100% delivering and I've hired a designer, like the best designer, one of the best designer I could find. He's not able, she's not able to deliver. I ended up doing everything pretty much well.

So I mean, if you don't have enough one, if you're not following this. So desired results, like, I mean, right off the bat, you're missing something in this. You don't have a recruiting process. Sounds like you're talking to people and you're hiring people.

Right.

Did you do a test project?

Yeah, I did a test project with them. That was good.

10 hours?

No, probably no, too small.

It has to be meaty enough for you to get a real chance to see their work. Right. So it's just you're probably not setting the bar high enough to get people into your organization. And trust me, I hired a ton of UI UX designers. And I know when I hired somebody great, when they start teaching me about UI user experience flows and pixels and spacing and white space, and I'm like, holy shit. Now here's what I also know is your number one strength is always going to be your Achilles heel as you grow the business. And it sounds like your strength is design. So you need to get really good at hiring a designer by following this process.

Okay, what about the.

What's that?

Whatever the code flows are the country. What about the co founder? What can I do something to get the work? Because he's supposed to do all that work, but he's. He just.

Yeah, if you have somebody that's not performing on your team, then you got to find another seat for them on the bus or get them off the bus.

Okay.

All right.

It's just that true, right? Like at the end of the day, I've always told people if I wasn't Able to leave my organization, I would move myself out of the organization, bring somebody else that could. Like at the end of the day, my job as CEO isn't guaranteed tomorrow either. If I'm not hitting my numbers and growing and raising funding and whatever it is for me that I need to get done, then I shouldn't keep my job any more than somebody else. At the end of the day, there's a business, we're all part of it. We're gonna see this thing go and if any of us are not performing, it's gonna be very clear. Right. And the training, like the high octane team technique, I just think what you want to do is give them two weeks worth of work, see how they produce and if it was subpar, get them out. Just don't keep them around. Right. You don't need to give them a project where they spend a month on it and then find out it was shitty. You could have gave them a little piece and seen that it was shitty. That makes sense.

Yes. Thanks, Dan.

And one thing, one thing I do, Sam, is with developers especially is I'll pair program with them remotely. So I'll sit down and I'll schedule four hours to pair within four hours. Working with developer, I can tell by watching their screen if they know what they're doing or not. And that's a big time commitment. But for certain hires in the early days, that might be worth it. If you don't have that skill set, then you can hire somebody to do that for you. Right. But you have that skill set from a design point of view. So you could sit down with them and watch them design and see how they approach something and realize within a couple hours they're not a good fit.

Got it, thanks.

Does that help?

Yep.

Awesome stuff, Sam. Thanks. Have a good one. Cool. Stephanie, next.

Thanks Sam. Pavel's got a question here. Hey Pavel, you're all set to go.

Awesome.

Hi guys, can you hear me?

Amazing. I can hear you.

Awesome. Great.

So yeah, it's Pavel at Remmansky. It's not projections. We help great advisors make better financial decisions for their clients with financial planning. And here's an interesting question.

So.

How do you keep people perform consistently over time? And I have an example of a person that is in a sales role. There is a little bit of lead generation as well, but kind of mostly sales role. And I feel we've been working together for about 18 months and I feel that there is this kind of ramp up time. They perform well, but every three to four months there's kind of the slowdown and I hear I'm a little bit bored. Follow ups are hard and it drives me nuts. I just feel like throwing something against the wall. So I don't know if this is kind of, you know, am I doing something wrong or can I. How can I keep them excited about what they're doing? Is this typical? Have you seen this before?

I think the challenge typically is they don't know why they're doing what they're doing. I mean, go read Simon Sinek's book, start with why. It will probably answer at the end of the day. People aren't coming to work because they get to do another follow up call. They're not coming to work because they get to do another sales demo. They're coming to work because what that skill and what that business is doing is interesting to them long term. Right. And if that's the case, and I call these like tempo temple tempo moments, right. You need to give them these things to look forward to. So if you're, that's why I think it's important for you to grow your business. If you're not growing your business and why would you retain great talent? Great talent's not going to stick around for a business that's going 5% a month. Right. Like, it's just not interesting. Here's the crazy part. If you're growing more than that, you're not telling your team about it, then you're missing an opportunity to get them excited about the business. Right. So I don't know where you're missing the boat on your communication strategy, but one of the things we do is we do customer headlines in our weekly syncs. So we're telling my whole team what's going on with amongst our customers. We do, you know, wins at the beginning of every call. Right. So that we make sure that people understand where the rest of the team are winning. We do scorecards so that everybody understands what everybody other person's accountable for and to deliver so that they're accountable to the peer. That's the power of the peer. And then my job as a CEO is to make sure we don't run out of money. We hire great talent. I've always communicated the vision. So as long as those things are true, then if the person's not excited about what you're working on, you can't change that. But if you're not doing those things, I would say start with that stuff.

Okay, so I've been doing that. So we've implemented the two weekly team Sync and we do the customer testimonials and we celebrate wins. We do a lot of communication. We have pretty good processes. We've been running pretty quickly, although it's slowing down because I need to hire two or three people right now. Just continue the growth. And after last one on one call, I said exactly what you said earlier. So this is the why. This is why we're doing what we're doing, right? This is why you hired, this is why you were here, hired. This is why you're, you know, why you were excited when you're hired, right? And then kind of celebrate, you know, how much you've learned. And, and now I think it's going to be a test, right? I mean, because I don't know if I, if we don't get again to.

The level of excitement. Look, don't fight it. If you, if you feel you deserve somebody that's more bought into the business and I what I call a believer, then go find that person and get him out of there.

It just feels like, you know, it's every three months I have to do the same thing or just kind of.

Tell him, sit down with him and let him know, hey man, here's how I feel about our relationship. Every three months I feel like I gotta resell you on why you're working here. And honestly, I just, I don't, I don't want to keep you if you have something else you want to go do. So you tell me why you should stay, work my organization. If not, we should talk about a transition plan. Because. Because I need you to be awesome. And right now I'm just not feeling it. So let me know what's missing to make that work.

Okay, that's probably good advice because I don't have. We have pretty small team, but a really good team. So I don't have that with anybody else on the team. And I feel really good about everybody.

Else not to have that. And look, the way I think about it is if they're not being great, it's not a bad thing. It's not them, it's not you. It's just at the end of the day, if where you're going isn't aligned with what they need out of a, then I think it's just fair to both agree that this is where we're at and let's make a transition plan. Maybe they transition, cross train somebody new, you, you're a great referral for them. It's not a huge impact to the business and it's win, win, win. I've. I've very rarely fired somebody out of the blue. It's very rare for me to do that because I'm very open in my communication and my feelings about how somebody's performing.

Awesome.

Good advice.

Great question Pavel. So guys I want to make sure that I honor your time we are up. I just want to thank all of you guys for the incredible interactions, the questions, the comments, the feedback. Be sure to take these ideas and strategies implement them in your business. Grab the worksheet start writing out the scorecard for your new hire. A lot of you guys are hiring right now. It's probably why you're watching this so fill that out Build your trello board or whatever applicant tracking system you're using. Start start looking at an assessment tool and you are ready to go to hire incredible people. Build a talent pipeline. Super excited to have you guys here. Appreciate you humbled. Thank you guys so much and we'll talk soon. Peace. Later guys. Bye.