Eric Siu explains a hiring filter: use "hell yes" or "hell no" decisions based on intelligence, cultural fit, whether they'd raise the team bar, and social fit. Rushing to fill seats costs far more than waiting for the right person.
If you want to hire the absolute best people, you have to do this one thing. So when it comes to hiring amazing people, if you want to build a great team, you want to build a great company, we talk about the hiring process, we talk about screening, we talk about the different questions you have to ask using applicant tracking systems, all these different things, all these different complexities. But one of the key things you can ask yourself when it comes to hiring someone really amazing, is this person a hell yes or hell no? Or more strongly worded, is this person an F yes or an F no? And so when you're talking to somebody, you have to be thinking to yourself, okay, you might be evaluating with some proxy questions. Do I think this person's smarter than me? Do I see myself working for this person in maybe 5, 10 years or so? Do I think this person is a bar raiser? Is this person going to lift the average of the company, the average talent level? Would I hang out with this person outside of work alone? Or would I hang out with this person in a group setting? Would I bring them to a work event? Right? So you got to take these things into account. And then we also, what we like to do is we like to layer on the segments from the book, The Ideal Team Player. Is this person humble? Is this person hungry? And are they smart? If you're hungry and you are smart, but you're not humble, you're going to cause problems for the company and you might potentially even steal money. You have a lot of these kind of proxy questions, but then these all kind of lead up to— you start asking yourself at the very end, or even during the interview, might just occur to you all of a sudden, hey, this person doesn't seem like a hell yes. At that point, why would you continue? Because if it's not a hell yes, why would you commit your resources? Why would you continue? Is it because you want to solve a problem? Is it because you want to fill a seat? Because people are stressed out right now. That's not a good enough reason because if you just want to throw someone into the seat and you're skirting your processes, you're skirting your core values, and this person's not an absolute hell yes, what you're doing is going to have long-term ramifications for your team. They're going to get unhappy. Morale is going to dip, especially if this person is really smart and they can do the job, but they're not a good fit culturally and they might have an attitude problem. You're actually destroying your company from the inside. This is the type of programming that you want to get into your team and you want to You want to drive it in because a lot of people oftentimes it's just human behavior. It's incentives. Let's say I'm like a head of marketing and I really need to hire this paid media person and I can't find anybody for the life of me. Recruiters aren't doing a good job. Our HR is not doing a good job. Okay, I'm just going to find someone randomly off of LinkedIn, hire the first person that I think can do the job. You guess what? Because you haven't determined if they're hell yes or hell no, what's going to happen is down the road you're going to get in trouble because you wasted all that time hiring this person. And they stuck with you for 3, 6, 9 months or so, it's not that easy to just get rid of them. I get the whole hire slow, fire fast thing, but you wanna give people a chance, right? And so when you give people a chance, what does that mean? Additional 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, what does that look like? Those months are all lost time where you could have had someone really good in the space that you could have been training up for the long term. Like, you don't wanna be wasting time. So if it's not a hell yes, that just basically means it's a hell no. That's the proxy you wanna be using. And I would recommend sending this video to anybody on your team, anybody that's a hiring manager. People don't understand the pain Until they've actually gone through it and you actually can't afford to have everything— everyone go through that pain. It's too expensive to do that. Experience is kind of the teacher and you have— you kind of have to have scar tissue, but sometimes you just don't want people— it's too risky again. If it's too risky, then you send them a video like this and you bang it in there, right? And you don't let them make that mistake, all right? So, that is it for today. Let me know what you think in the comments below. Don't forget to hit the subscribe and the bell button and we'll catch you later. Bye.
