Eric Siu and a co-host discuss the interview question that trips up most candidates: how to prove impact with numbers. They explain why saying you grew something 50% means nothing without a baseline, and why hiring managers should ask if candidates actually pay for their own AI tools.
Do you want to know what is super irritating to me? Because I've been spending a lot more time on recruiting, when people make it over to me and I'll talk to them, one of the questions I ask is, what are 2 of the hardest problems that you've solved? Please share numbers, right? And I don't know why, maybe this is an agency world thing, but it's always like, oh, Neil, I increased the traffic by 400%, or I increased this by 200%, I increased revenue. Even if you increase revenue by 100% or whatever, but on what? Like on $1? So is it $2 now? I don't know what it is.
What's your base? Oh, I created 364% growth. Okay, what was your baseline? Oh, we were doing $10,000 a month in MR. All right, that's not much of a growth for me.
I'll tell you what, guys, like, if you're a founder, you're going to have to continue to raise the bar more and more. And so when you're asking these people these questions, they have to report on a baseline and they have to have some type of numerical fluency. And we're constantly talking about traffic and how much percent they increase things by. You cannot afford to hire these people because They are not putting enough time to invest in themselves. And another question we asked Neil is, hey Neil, how much are you investing out of pocket in AI right now? Even if someone tells me $20 a month for ChatGPT Pro, amazing, right? But if you say $0 a month, we cannot hire you, right?
