How To Hire World Class Remote Talent With This

All right, so today I want to talk about one really effective thing I do to hire the best, not only the best marketers, but the best people in general. And I got this concept from a book called Who? That's W-H-O with a question mark. And the entire book is about hiring people. And there's this concept called the role scorecard, which I've adapted for our businesses. And it really helps outline, it clarifies your thinking because a lot of times I know I made the mistake in the past where I would say, hey, we need to, we need to hire a salesperson, right? And then we go interview process, we're kind of, you know, just going with the flow and we don't really know what we want. We don't know what outcomes we're expecting. We don't know what competencies we're looking for and oftentimes we'll probably just go and copy a job description that's out there. So those of you that can see my screen right now, I'm actually going to share it. We can see that this is a template right here. So, you know, at the top of this template over here, we have a section for outcomes. So let's say this is for a salesperson. So for this one, maybe some of the outcomes, or let's say this is for Single Grain, which is my ad agency, hit or exceed quota numbers for Single Grain, close 7-figure deals, hire and train a team of closers, win RFPs, those are requests for proposals, build inside sales pipeline by leveraging tools and audiences we already have, sell managed services for Single Grain by leveraging the power of ClickFlow and other products/services that we have. So by outlining what the outcomes are, we can now tailor our questions during the interview process, right? By the way, the interview process is— that's just the very beginning, right? There is a process where you probably have to think about how you can test them on something to test them for their actual abilities. There's a process for reference checking. There's a lot of stuff that goes into it. And the adage that people use is hire slow and fire fast. So, you know, oftentimes people are going to make exceptions. The scorecard allows you to pull back and say, hey guys, this is what we agreed on. Let's not try to skirt around the process because every time we skirt around the process, We end up shooting ourselves in the foot. And when we do follow the process, even then, it increases our chances of success, but it's by no means perfect, right? That's one section that we talked about. So you have to define what your outcomes are, but then you also have to define the competencies too. So, you know, and by the way, this is just a template, right? This is not something we necessarily use, but this— these— I'm talking about the role itself, but competencies here. So, okay, do they actually have experience closing 7 to 8-figure deals? Have they managed and recruited a team before? And what you basically do for each of these is you grade them, right? So outcomes over here, if they've done it before and they're stellar, maybe you give them an A. Maybe if they've never won an RFP before, maybe it's a D. Maybe if they have maybe hired 1 or 2 people, maybe you give them a B when it comes to hiring and training people. And you kind of go down the list over here. So you kind of rate them, that's basically it. So then, you know, we have sections for bonus. bonuses in terms of, you know, if they— this is a huge plus if they know this stuff. That's helpful to add as well. But what you're looking for here is not only for alignment in your head, but alignment with your team if you have a team that's helping you with recruiting. And, you know, those of you that are thinking recruiting is boring, maybe, but recruiting is the highest leverage thing that you can do to build a great organization. So, you got to think about how you can have the right foundation before you can start to bring on all these people. Because oftentimes, I'll tell you this much, people that are inexperienced with recruiting They're gonna make— they're gonna start to make exceptions, right? So let's say we get to the point where someone quits and we really need to replace that person, but we don't have anybody on the bench. Guess what? The team, whoever is managing that team, is very incentivized to get whoever can do the job in the door quickly as possible to solve the pain, right? Without understanding that long-term, there are long-term consequences behind it, there are second and third order effects by hiring someone that can do the job but is not a culture fit. If someone can do the job but they're not a nice person, they're an a-hole, it's not good for you long-term. And plus, that person can hold your company hostage. You do not want that to happen, right? So you're better off taking a little longer, right? It might be a lot longer to find the right person and then go from there, right? And then people will be like, oh my God, you know, this process is slowing us down. We just need to get someone in the door. Well, what are the consequences behind that, right? Right? It's really on whoever is— if you're the leader of the company, you're kind of a gatekeeper because everything kind of— the buck starts and stops with you. But also, whoever's recruiting, it's on them to make sure because they're not incentivized to solve the problem quickly, they're incentivized to solve for culture fit, right? So you got to think about that. Now, speaking of culture fit, we come down over here and we have a section for culture and you can— these are our core values. I'd suggest you come up with your own core values because some of them might not resonate with you. But growth, long-term vision, integrity, accountability, creativity, tenacity, those are— these are our 6 core values. And so now we can start to ask questions around this. So if someone is, you know, around accountability, we might say, hey, you know, part of being accountable is us holding you to hitting deadlines, you doing what you said you would do, and if you don't, getting direct feedback, right? That's how we do it. Direct feedback is very important here. And so, you know, can you tell us about a time where you got very critical feedback or something like that, right? But you're kind of setting expectations in the interview. Maybe you don't want to lead them with the question like I did right now, but you want to ask them like, hey, tell me about a time where you screwed up, right? What happened exactly? How did you get feedback? How did you take the feedback? And then you can kind of get a sense for how they work. And by the way, an interview is just an interview, right? At the end of the day, you're really not going to see how someone works until, you know, maybe you run them through a test assignment or something like that. So that's kind of what we look for. The culture fit is huge, obviously, not just doing the job. And also, are they humble, hungry, and smart? So this comes from the book The Ideal Team Player, which was written by Patrick Lencioni. And 3 traits for the ideal team player: you got to be humble, you got to be hungry, you got to be smart. And I find that it's near impossible to find someone that's kind of a 10 across the board on all of them, right? Usually there's a little bit of a, you know, usually sometimes people might be Hungry and smart, but they're not humble, right? And if they're not humble and they're arrogant, well, you know where that goes if they're hungry and smart. You might have someone that stabs you in the back later, who knows, right? So there's that. And then these 3 final questions come from Amazon. I read about Jeff Bezos asking these questions, but thinking about, you know, the person in front of you, if you're interviewing them, are they a bar raiser? Are they going to raise the bar in terms of the overall talent of the team? Right? And even if they're an intern, do you think the intern is smarter than you? Do you think long-term they're gonna raise the bar, right? You gotta be asking these questions and you gotta be thinking about as you're interviewing what questions you should ask to kind of tease these out. And do you admire this person? Is there something they've done in terms of charity, maybe something amazing they've done for their family? What's important to them, right? Figuring out where they stand there and these will kind of guide, you know, the culture fit and the kind of ideal team player questions as well. So, This is the role scorecard. I've found out, or even recently, you know, when I was thinking about this, thinking about, you know, hires that we've had in the past that haven't worked out, it's because we skirted the role scorecard process and we didn't drill it into people and say, hey, this is really important, we got to follow this. Because if we don't follow this, what happens is the train tracks start to— the wheels start to fall off the tracks. And, you know, what ends up happening is that the company goes through a lot of pain. Right? You don't want to train someone up for 3 to 6 months and then have to fire them because that ends up costing the, you know, a lot of time and that also kills morale in some cases as well. And in some cases, you might have someone that comes into the company that might be a bad apple and they start to poison the well, right? And you might not realize it till too late and then you might have 2 other or 3 other people that want to leave and that certainly happened to me before. So that is it for today. Go to levelingup.com to learn more about my upcoming book, Leveling Up, and we will catch you later. Bye.