Cameron Herold says the old "hire for attitude, train for skill" advice is wrong. You need both attitude and proven skills, plus rigorous interviews and reference checks to verify what candidates actually know.
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There's a secret factor in team performance that most CEOs and COOs miss, and it's not what you think. And it's changing how the top leaders build their teams. I'm going to cover it in this video for you. I've been hiring people in my career for the last 35 years, but don't stop the video now just because you think I'm old. I'm not old. I've just hired hundreds if not thousands of people that I've actually done interviews for. And I'm going to give you the key secret that I was educated in early in my career and how that's really radically changed for the way that we're doing business today. When I was 20 years old, I was actually trained formally on how to do proper job interviews. And by the time I was 23, I personally had done over 500 interviews for people that I was then responsible for hiring and training and getting results through. One of those key employees was Kimbal Musk, Elon's younger brother. I hired Kimball in 1993 and I hired him based on the rule that I'm going to give you today. I also hired his cousin, Peter Reeve, who went on to build SolarCity. And this rule is critical, but I'm going to again walk you through how it's evolved and changed over the last 30 years. If you're the kind of leader who only follows this old adage, and the old adage is hire for attitude, train for skill, you're going to fail. In fact, I get so tired hearing people talk about this old adage. It was very famous back in the 1970s and 1980s, but business was very different back then. You could actually hire someone and you had two, three, four years to train them because nothing really changed over that time. And people were very loyal to their job or careers for sometimes decades. That's not the case today. Gen Y and Gen Z are going to join you for six months, maybe two years maximum. And you have to hire for more than just attitude and train for skill. So we're going to talk about that because if you don't, your business is actually going to fail if you hire. Based on that old saying of hire for attitude, train for skill, you're not going to get the results out of the people that you need to in this fast paced environment. You need to today be hiring for attitude and proven skill set. So you need to remove that saying from your business. It's going to cost you too much money if you're trying to train for skill later, it's going to cause turnover inside of your business. If you're trying to hire for attitude and train people, and if you're only hiring people that have the skills but they don't have that right cultural fit that's going to completely destroy your company like a cancerous tumor inside of your body will kill you. Imagine if you had a mantra or a saying inside of your company that everyone could rally around. A mantra that was so simple as hire for attitude, train for skill. But imagine if you had a new saying that every manager, every leader, and everybody in HR understood. They understood the reasons if you broke them, how it hurt your company, but they understood the benefits if you live them would help your company kind of soar. I'm going to give you that mantra right now. The new saying that you're going to embed inside of your company that you're going to train everyone on is higher for attitude and for proven skillset. And again, the proven is a keyword inside of this saying. There's often people make mistakes where they hire people that know how to do something, but they've never done it before. A really good example of that would be, let's say you're looking for a swimmer. It's a weird analogy, but stick with me for this one. Let's say you were hiring somebody to come into your team that knew how to do front crawl, that they knew how to win an Olympic record, that they knew how to break a world record. That's very different from somebody who has competed in front crawl, someone who won the Olympics, somebody who broke a world record. You want to hire someone that has proven the skills that you're hiring them to do, and they culturally fit inside of your company. So often people hire somebody that is really good at what they've done. They're good, solid skill set. They've proven that they could do it before. But culturally, they don't really line up with everybody inside of your company, that's going to kill you. And if you hire people that are great culture fit, and you're going to wait to try to skill them up over time to give them the skills that they're going to need over time. By the time they have those skills, your business has completely changed. So the key is to make sure that you're looking to hire people that have the right cultural fit, right hiring for attitude, and the right proven skill set. It's very dangerous to hire just the proven skill set or just the cultural fit. That old adage of hire for attitude Train for skill no Longer works. The new mantra that your company will live by is hire for attitude and proven skill set. On the hiring for attitude component, you want to look to hire people that actually live your company's core values today, that they already obsess over those core values today. You don't have to train them. You want to hire people that you like hanging out with, people that culturally vibe with you, people that are going to quickly be able to join the company and fit in and make friends and others you're going to like to work with. You want people that are going to wear your company colors and live the company motto. Those are the cultural fit people, the proven skill set that requires proper interviewing, that requires proper reference checks. I actually cover that in my invest in your leaders course. You can also read books like who by Jeff Smart or Top Grading. You really need to get the skillset deep inside of your company so people understand how to do proper interviews, how to do proper reference checks, how to leverage a system like Torque that I cover in my invest in your leaders course so that you have a lot of predictability, that you're hiring people with the right proven skills. The match of those two things, perhaps the cultural fit and the proven skill set will help you build incredible companies in the future. One of the things that I like doing to attract the right people into the company to attract these A players that are already going to live my core values and have the proven skillset, is I share our Vivid Vision document. The three to four page document that describes what my company looks like, acts like, and feels like in the future. I share that with anyone who applies to work with my company. It quickly pushes people away that don't want to line up with that. And it also attracts people like a magnet who are so excited about what we're building that they desperately want to be a part of that process. Then we're going to grill them like crazy because the A players like to be challenged in an interview. If you're selling too much, if you're trying to sell how great your company is, A players are going to run away. So you need to actually understand how to use proper interviews, how to grill them to make sure they have the proper skill sets in place and leverage that Vivid Vision concept so that it's like a magnet to attract the A players into your company. Hire for Attitude and proven skillset. Now that you know what makes a great team, do you want to build a great company culture? Watch this next video below. And these seven steps are going to help you build a successful company.
