The Ultimate Guide to Hiring A-Players for Your Team

What I do in my interviewing process is I don't look at any of the resumes. What I did was I sent them a message saying, please send me a two to three minute video about why you want this role. And here's the vivid vision for our company. What is it that you're excited about? And then I only watch the videos of the people who responded to that. I don't care about the other ones in the process at this point. So again, if somebody can't follow basic instructions, they can't put the words hire me in a subject line. They can't send a two to three minute video. Why am I going to sit and actually review it? What we're going to talk about today is in the recruiting and interviewing process is how to attract and interview and bring on the right people. And one of the core areas to start with is in your recruiting is to make sure that they're very aligned with your core purpose for your organization. Employees need to understand in the job posting, in the recruiting material, in the interviewing, in the communication, what the core purpose of your organization is. So they're starting to apply for more than just the job. They also understand the core purpose of the organization. Simon Sinek, who I've known Simon was on our board at 1-800-got junk way before anyone had ever heard of Simon, before he did his TED Talk five years before that he was on our board. So we had lots of discussions around core purpose and start with why. My core purpose is to help entrepreneurs make their dreams happen. So everything I do in my business is around making that core purpose happen by speaking. My coaching, my five books, the COO alliance, the Second in Command podcast, all of that is to help the entrepreneurs make their dreams happen. So when I'm recruiting people, I send them copies of my vivid vision so that they understand what the organization is, what they're joining, what my core purpose is, even before they're worried about the actual role that they're applying for. It also allows me and it allows the organization to say no. So even in the interview process, when I was interviewing salespeople recently, I had a couple of people that couldn't stay on focus for what we were doing and were very distracted with other ideas of what they wanted to bring into the business. I'm not looking for new ideas at this point. I'm very, very clear on where we're going. And I wanted people to really line up and drive that. And it allows me to very quickly filter out the people who aren't able to Stay focused on what the task at hand is going to be for the next 12 to 36 months. Second thing is core values. So really, really, really being clear around core values, being very intentional around core values. You know, one of my, my biggest things I love about Gordy, Gordy not only lives the core values for the CEO alliance, but he talks about them and references them all the time. He brings it up in conversations on our group, calls and calls with me. And it's, it's a really powerful sign that someone actually not only gets it, but that it matters to them. So make sure that your core values are deeply held and ingrained throughout your organization. Core values should not be single words. Someone yesterday riddled off their five core values and the problem that I had with them was they were all single words. Single words like teamwork or honesty or integrity are confusing. The data says the core value should be kept to a maximum of four or five core values and they should be small, single sentence phrases that need no explanation. And you should be willing to fire people who break the core values. So the real test in your organization is if you're willing to fire people who break your core values. You know, Enron had core values. They were up on their wall. But Enron never lived them from the top down. So no one really believed in it. So some of the best examples I've ever seen for core values. Deliver what you promise. Respect the individual pride in all you do. In my job postings, I make sure that the core values are not just called out, but I tell people you will be fired if you break them. Don't even apply if you're not a part of reliving them. I try to make sure the job postings exude what the core values are about. Or Jeff said yesterday, I like to push away about 50% of the applicants and pull about 50% of the applicants towards the company. But I don't want everybody to read it to apply. I want a whole bunch of people to say, oh, that sounds like a terrible place to work. Good. And I want a whole bunch of others to go, this sounds really good. That's the purpose in the recruiting of the job posting is to polarize. These are great examples of core values here. They actually just shortened them. They got rid of be a Tigger because it was confusing. It was from Winnie the Pooh and they brought it down to just 5. Deliver what you promised. Get shit done. Treat every member like your best friend. Live and breathe sports social club. Take pride in what you do. Super clear. The Only time I've ever allowed a company to have a single word for their core values was one of my clients. And their single word was simplify. And I'm like, that's good. Like when. When you can actually take a core value and shrink it down to one word and it actually fits the rule of a small sentence. Simplify is probably the only time I've seen it work. The next one is bhag, right? It's that big, hairy, audacious goal and making sure that you use that in part of your marketing and recruiting as well, so that employees think about, you know, again, they see themselves fitting into a bigger picture of what you're building. My BHAG is replacing vision statements with vivid visions worldwide. I believe the vivid vision process is the core tool to. When they can see what your company looks like, acts like, and feels like three years in the future, they can see themselves being a part of that. It's much more exciting than them joining the company today. An example of the vivid vision would be the three bricklayers who are out making bricks. Got these three people out sitting on a sidewalk making bricks. They asked the first guy, what are you doing? He said, I make bricks. They asked the second guy, what are you doing? Said, well, we're building a wall. I get to make the bricks to build a wall. He asked the third guy, what are you doing? So we're building a cathedral to worship God, and I get to build the left wall of the cathedral. I'm making the bricks to build the left wall of the cathedral so they can really find meaning and purpose in their work. So thinking again about, is your BHAG clear and does it resonate and is it part of your job posting? Is it part of what you're doing to recruit people into the organization? And this is what will really stand you apart. This is why 1-800-got-JUNK ranked as the number two company in Canada to work for is we recruited based on the cult ideas of core purpose, core values, and BHAG all kind of wrapped together in this vivid vision, what we used to call the painted picture. That concept is what attracts people into your brand, even in your company. Things like your core values and your BHAG and your core purpose should be parts of your company walls. These should be up inside of your businesses so that when employees come in, they can see it, they can feel it, and it can be part of your corporate websites, part of your social media material, and really calling it out in a way that it attracts people into your organization. So Then I go from if I think of a business like a jigsaw puzzle. For me, the four corners of the jigsaw puzzle are core purpose, core values, the BHAG and the One Year plan. The first side of the jigsaw puzzle are all of the people systems. So the people systems start off with getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and everybody in the right seats. Jim Collins in his book Good to Great talked about that. And it was a mantra that the Merry Pranksters used driving around the United States in the early 60s, tripping on acid. And their idea was you had to be part of the scene or not. You either had to get it or not. And they understood that if they had the wrong people on the trip, it would ruin the trip. So they only attracted the people that were really a part of the vision and what they were doing together. In your company, you only want to have the right people in your organization. If you know you have any of the wrong people, it's better to cut them now than it is to hire other good people into the company. When you get rid of the wrong people, it becomes very easy to get the right people. So the big lesson on this one for me with recruiting is I've never found a company that works hard enough at getting rid of the wrong people. We all tend to talk about interviewing and recruiting and bringing the right people into the company, but we often don't talk enough about firing the wrong people and getting them out fast enough and getting them out quickly. It's incredible how you can actually often not even have to replace those poor performers or the cultural toxic performers. You often don't even need to replace them. The business can often, often run itself even faster because of the simplification. It's multiplication by simplification. One of my grandfathers owned a hunting and fishing resort and we would be out duck hunting and he, he would talk about the lessons in business for me that he, he learned from running his. He had about 40 employees and he would talk about, about his business lessons. And one of them was using decoys to attract ducks into the blind. And he said, in your business, you have ways to attract good employees into your company. So if you think about your companies today, the things that you have, you can attract good employees into your company today. Are your company website, right? Does your company website reflect your brand? Does it reflect your mission? Does it reflect your core purpose? Does it feel like a place that other people are going to want to come to work? Or does it feel Corporate boring and stayed. Are your job postings written by a copywriter? You know, it still astounds me to think that we would have a head of HR or a head of engineering or a head of product write a job posting. Those people aren't copywriters. Now they can get the job posting to 80%, but then give it to a copywriter and have them polish it and make it pop off the page. And all of a sudden that job posting will attract people into the organization. You're again, really trying to treat every job posting like, like a marketing piece and less of a functional recruiting tool. The other thing we learned about duck hunting was that if you're going to be recruiting employees, you've actually got to go out and use the rifle based approach. The best employees are never out looking for jobs. The best employees have a job somewhere and you have to go and hunt them down. I'm a very, very big proponent of using executive search firms for the right roles. But using a recruiter can be very powerful. I also use a group interview process to screen for Culture Fit. Now what I do there, and I did not do it in this round, I used videos for hiring the salespeople this time. But when I have multiple candidates at the same time and I have a little bit more time in the process, all the candidates show up for a 90 minute interview and I'll ask them random questions. What do you do for fun? What's the biggest problem you've ever solved in your career? What stresses you out the most? You know, what do you do on weekends? And I don't even really often listen to their answers as much as watch the way that they respond. And I'm looking for who the Culture Fit people are and who the stronger leaders are within the group. I'll then pick two or three people, maximum out of eight, and bring those two people back in to do one on one interviews with later. But I use the group to interview the group. So I'll ask two final questions in a group interview. Let's say, you know, Mitch, if we were hiring you plus somebody else, who else in the room would you want us to hire? Mitch would be like, oh, I want you to hire Valerie because of this, this, this and this. And then I'll be like, Scott, who else do we think we should hire? It's going to be like, oh, I think we should hire Valerie because of this, this, this. All of a sudden everybody in the group is pointing towards two people. This. The. My last question is, how much money do you need to make this year, and how much money do you want to make three years out? It's a very, very critical number to understand the employees and where their perception is of the role, where their perception is of themselves in their career and whether or not you can meet that. Because if you can't, there's no point in proceeding into any further on in the process. Steve Jobs used to say that he had to see the twinkle in employees. Ey didn't bring them in to see if they had the skills. They won't talk about the actual role or look at the resume until they know if the candidate is a cultural fit first. I don't care if you have the skills until I know that you're the kind of person that I want to hang out with or the kind of person that's going to work well in the organization. Once I know you're going to be a great fit, then we can talk about skill set second. For me, it's all around culture fit first, skill second. But you have to have both. I will never hire someone just on culture. I'll never hire someone just on skills. But unless they have the culture fit, I'm not going to see if they have the skills. So Steve Jobs used to show the wooden prototype at the back, and he said if he didn't see the twinkle in their eyes, like showing the vivid vision. If you show them the vivid vision and they're not vibrating, they're the wrong person. If they're so stuck in their own head on what they want to do, what they want to build, what they're working about or talking, they're missing the entire point of the cult connection. Building an amazing business is slightly more than a business, slightly less than a religion. It's building into a zone of a cult, and that's where it can start. So then I really like the idea of interviewing against a scorecard versus a job description. So let's say as an example, we were hiring a swimmer. And this is a weird example, but it illustrates really nicely. We really needed a good swimmer to come to our organization. Most job descriptions would be worded like this. You know, we're looking for a fast, strong swimmer, experienced, with all strokes, competitive team player. You know, Mitch, you're probably a strong swimmer. You're probably experienced, probably. No. Okay, Scott, you might be Gordy. You are. You've done triathlon, right? But let's say. Let's say we have a scorecard now for what kind of swimmer we want. I want a swimmer who won Olympic gold. Gordy hasn't done that. I want someone who won or broke world records. Gordy hasn't done that. I want somebody who won an individual team events. Now Gordy has done that. Gordy is a fast, strong swimmer, experienced little strokes, but if you hire based on job descriptions, at times, you end up with that. Now, albeit Gordy is a stronger swimmer. He's done an Ironman triathlon. I'm probably more like this kid. But if you hire based on the scorecard, you end up with that. And it's very, very different when you think about not do they know how to do what's on their list, but have they done it before? And I think Jeff copped out a little bit yesterday where he said sometimes hiring from within is better than hiring from the outside. I don't agree. The reason I don't agree is if I've got a very specific set of projects or overall tasks or things that need to be done for a business area and I'm hiring like a VP or a C level or director, I want somebody who's done it before, ideally a couple of times. I want someone who's built two companies to the size that we're going to already and they're a good culture fit. I don't want somebody who knows how to do it. The world is littered with MBAs with all kinds of theory who have never actually hired or managed or led anybody before. And if you can grow it from the inside, where you've got the culture DNA and they've been around the business long enough, they probably have so much strong DNA now built into them that might offset their ability to having run locations before, done retail operations before I agreed. But I think what we want to do is really think about what is the person you're hiring for have to get done in their job this year and have they done it before? You know, when I came in to build 1-800-got junk, there were five core things we needed to do. We needed to build a franchise marketing program. We needed to build a marketing budget and marketing calendar. We need to build a franchise coaching model. We needed to build our U.S. operations, and then we needed to build our leadership team training programs. I'd already done that two times for two other companies, all five things. So for me, coming in for the first few years at 1-800-GOT junk was very easy because it was my third time now doing it. Now, I'd never done it in junk removal, but I'd done it in house painting, I'd done it in auto body So I think if you can look for when you're hiring against a scorecard, you'll win. Our role as leaders is to grow people. If you consider that your role as the CEO and your CEO's primary role is to grow people and think about all your employees as climbing up two ladders. I've only come up with this concept in the last year. Every employee is walking up two ladders. One foot, let's say their left foot is climbing up a ladder of skills and their right foot is climbing up a ladder of confidence. And your job is to raise their skills up a foot, raise their confidence up a foot, raise their skills up a foot, raise their confidence up. As their skills get better, they gain more confidence. As their confidence gets better, they'll take on more skills. And if you cheer them on and remove obstacles, they're going to gain confidence. But if you constantly show them the stuff they're screwing up, it's like shaking that one ladder. But they're not going to want to move their other foot up because they're scared. So our role as leaders is to grow their confidence and grow their skills and grow their confidence and grow their skills and take anything out of the organization that hurts either of those two things. Our role as leaders is not to do Email. This time that we spend on the CEO alliance that you're spending on thinking about the business is some of the most powerful sessions that you spend your time on because it allows you to think about the business and think about the people and think about strategy. So every time you bring on a new person into the company, raise the bar. Think about it like a sports team for a second. If you've got four people in marketing and you're hiring a fifth, make sure that the fifth person is better than at least two of the four current people you've got. Always raise the bar. Always look to bring on somebody else a little bit more talent. You know, even if you're going to go back into sales, Jesse, who's coming into sales, maybe doesn't know our business members as well as Gordy does. Gordy really knows the COOs. He knows a bunch of entrepreneurs and CEOs, because we've been in the same circles for a number of years. But Jesse, this guy knows sales man. Of all the salespeople I've hired, and I've been hiring them for 30 years, Mike knows sales better than anybody I've met. Who. Now, if we can get those two together, Gordy and Jesse, I think we have a killer program coming up. Because they're going to feed off each other and grow into each other. But Jesse brought the skill level up on sales to a whole other level where Gordy's going to learn from Jesse. Gordy also though has a bunch of skills that Jesse will learn from Gordy. But I wanted one core thing in this sales role. I wanted a really great salesperson, loved to sell, was good at selling and could sell and has been selling forever. Right? So you raise the bar. So what would Jack Welch do? So Jack Welch in his day was the CEO of General Electric, Chairman of General Electric, arguably in his day, one of the top CEOs on the planet. He had a very simple system and every six months he drew this diagram on a piece of paper. And on the Y axis, the up and down axis, you've got low results at the bottom, high results at the top, and then across the X axis, the bottom, you got low core values to the left, high core values to the right. Here's the way it works. If somebody ends up in the bottom left hand corner, these are the people with low core values, low results, those are the very easy people to get rid of. Those people have to get fired. If someone's in the top right hand corner with the super high results, super high core values, and I'm saying in the very top right, they're like a 9 or a 10 on results, or a 9 or a 10 on values. Those are the people that you're going to handcuff to the organization. And it's not always paying them more money. It's often finding out the core things that are so important. It's really truly understanding how to build the organization around them, how to build the leadership team and develop around them how to really think about the organization and how it'll fulfill what their needs are. But really creating a way to handcuff them to the organization, then you end up with people that are in the bottom right hand corner. These are the, the, the low results. But high core values, these are the ones. God, we would love them. We're just not getting done what we need them to get done. Often they're in the wrong seat. Often it's about us getting them into the right seat, putting them into a different role in the organization and then allowing them to excel. And this is a really powerful part in your company, is when you get to around the 50 employee mark, that's when you can start moving people into completely different functional areas and keep the great people. But sometimes you might have to let them go into a Different organization as well. Or you have to start coaching them and growing their skill set. But before you coach them, before you train them, make sure they're in the right role. Lastly, and this is the hardest one, is getting rid of the wrong people that are on the high results, low core values. These are the kind of the assholes or the cultural cancers in the organization that might be getting great results, but they're just really, really hard to work with. They're really hard to have around. These are the ones that other people in the organization might not like spending time with. And what drives good employees crazy is when we make exceptions for the jerks. We just won't make Fred come on the retreat. Well, we'll give Fred a private office so he won't bug people. Right. Why are we giving all these exceptions to the jerk instead of creating a great work environment for the really great people? So really work to get rid of the wrong people in your organization. I think that's a powerful thing to consider inside of your business as well. I love this tool. Hireology is a really great one. Managing the entire pipeline of your interview process, your recruiting process. What I do in my interviewing process is I don't look at any of the resumes when people first apply. So as an example, we had 235 applicants for the director of sales role. I didn't look at any of the 235 resumes. What I did was I sent them a message saying, please send me a two to three minute video about why you want this role. And here's the vivid vision for our company. What is it that you're excited about? And then I only watched the videos of the people who responded to that. I don't care about the other ones in the process at this point. I also said, write the words hire me in all caps in the subject line. And if you don't do those things, we're not even going to talk. So again, if somebody can't follow basic instructions, they can't put the words hire me in a subject line. They can't send a two to three minute video. Why am I going to sit and actually, you know, review it? Another hoop that I did in this process was I actually intentionally didn't follow up with people as proactively as I normally would. I wanted to see if they were actually because they were sales. Their job is to sell me. So I was waiting for people to say, hey, I'm super keen. Are you coming back to me? What's going on? I wanted them to be getting in touch with me. Whereas in a normal sales process, you might be sitting back waiting for the hiring manager. I made that a part of my process. So instead of me looking at 235 resumes, I really only spent time with about 20 people, truly only spent time with about 10, but it was the right 10. So think about the tools that you can use to layer on top of your process. A tool like hireology doesn't work until you know what your interviewing and recruiting process is. It's a tool that will layer on top of your good process. The cost of the wrong person is 15 times their annual salary. When you have the wrong person working your company because of opportunity cost, because of mistakes that they make, because of other people that won't come and join you, because of problems that get caused, because of complexity, because of lost time, it's extraordinary. And I won't kill in this specifics, but I've had so many clients who I've coached over the years to watch some of the mistakes that they've had of some of the wrong people in the organization. This number plays out time and time again. So if you ever have that gut feeling like maybe it's the wrong person, you're probably right. It probably is the wrong person. So that's how my visualization of the the business model works. I get into all these other areas. When companies hire me to speak to their companies or speak at company conferences, I get into all of these different areas. What we covered a little bit today was core purpose, core values, BHAG and the people systems. As it relates recruiting and interviewing people.