How to Source, Screen and Select the Best Candidates for Your Agency

All right, welcome back to Agency Journey. This is your host, Gray MacKenzie from Zen Pilot. This week, I've got the pleasure of bringing on my friend Erica Zagita from Prosana.

Nice pronunciation.

Read my. My last name pronunciation on a scale of 1 to 10, and then tell us a little about yourself.

10. I read you. Your pronunciation. 10. It was really good. So, yeah. Thank you very much. A very nice introduction. I'm Erica. Yes. And I founded an agency called Persona. We primarily focus on recruitment, and we help agencies as well as E commerce companies build their teams. On the other hand, we also help a bit with processes, team structure. So we know kind of the agency setup quite well at this point.

That's awesome. How long have you been running Persona?

Oh, it's been three years and a bit, I guess. Three and a half, I guess. Yeah.

Cool. We sent some folks over your way. I don't know who's public and who's not public in terms of who's worked with you, but I just saw you're hiring again for a client who sent your way maybe a year and a half ago or something. A year ago.

Yeah.

So it's super cool when there's service providers who we're referring out to, and you see, there's so many agencies that we're working with who have needs in complementary areas. We're not in the recruiting space.

Yeah.

And so to find folks where there's been a consistent track record of sustained success is awesome. There's a lot of. With, I think, the third or fourth different recruiting firm that we've sent, you know, different folks to.

Okay.

You know, or just we'll often try it ourselves first. Not all those experiences have been great, but it's been awesome getting to getting some expertise in the agency space.

Thank you. Thank you. I mean, thank you for sending some people over. We did end up, I think, working with one or two, for sure.

Yeah. What. So let's talk about kind of who fits in an agency ecosystem, because I guess I want to start with theme. I'm listening to this right now. What. What keeps me tuned in is, like, we're trying to find great people who are a fit, both for, like, the right people and also the roles that we have and then also fit in the agency sphere. Maybe we could start and then work our way to some of the recruiting and hiring process and all that. All those kind of goodies. Maybe we could start with what makes someone a fit for the agency ecosystem specifically, because that has its own set of challenges.

Mm. I mean, I Actually I think I've heard about, because I started my career, well, kind of started my career in an agency and I think it was just natural for me because it's so fast paced. Nothing is really like staying the same for too long. Things are changing quite quickly. So I think for you to enjoy the agency life, you have to love that fast paced environment. So there's gonna be loads of challenges, lots of changes. You know, I want to say multi, multitasking but on the other hand, I just hate this word so much. But you have to be able to shift your brain from one client to another client and, and then be able to deliver the same quality service. And I think it's not for everyone. So 100% a person to fit in an agency is a person who loves challenges, fast paced environment, is not afraid to solve the problems. And you know, as, as common as it sounds like they have to have the solution oriented mindset. This is like very important. So I would say like this is the ideal person fitting in the agency.

Yeah. How do you that in this like you can put out there, hey, fast paced environment. How do you know if someone can actually hang in a fast paced environment?

It's a, it's actually very good question. I would say first of all, I mean when you go on a, on a conversation with a person, like when you do the interview, you kind of start grasping how they, you know, how they feel. You also ask certain like the situational questions and you see how they answer. But I would say a lot of the things come also from experience. You know, we've been interviewing for agencies mainly and we've been in agencies ourselves. We also know how we are and what kind of people we are. So we try to mirror that as well. I mean talking about mirroring is quite a good tactic. For example, if you have someone in the team who's really performing well, when you go out there and interview, you try to basically mirror and look for the same qualities. Another thing is of course you can do an exercise and try to understand, you know, like what, what, what is the ideal agency player in your case, in your agency and try to identify like the top players in your agency, identify the qualities they all share and then again look for those qualities in the candidates and how to look. You know, there are multiple things, multiple ways. You can ask situational questions, you can prepare certain tests. You can also do personality assessments which can also give a lot of insights. So I would say it's quite complex, but there's definitely multiple solutions to this problem.

How do you balance the wanting to deliver a good experience on the applicant side with also trying to truly vet, hey, how are you going to make it in the day to day? So I want to know can you handle some of the chaos and some of the context switching that happens in the typical agency? Um, and I want to put you through as realistic of a, you know, interview process as possible to find that out. How do you juggle those two, those two things? I don't want to stress people out completely side I also need to stress test it to figure out hey, are you actually be able to hang in our day to day environment?

Yeah, but you were talking more in the, in the recruitment phase. Like how do you balance those two things out? I mean one, one thing and I think this is applicable in every single situation. You need to manage expectations, right? Like if you set the tone right from the very beginning and you say like this is going to be the process, we need to test it, this is important then I think the applicant also sees this whole process differently. If you of course surprise them at every stage, then they will be overwhelmed and maybe they will also drop off the process. So I would say it's managing expectations, right. And then also ensuring the transparent and very open communication and maybe even over communication at some point. Like really just being, how to say, as detailed as possible at every stage. People usually appreciate and of course kindness always helps when you're nice to people and you know, just you care about them.

Right. Makes sense. What you do a ton of agency recruiting. What are the most common positions you're.

Recruiting for the most? I would say it really depends on the agency, like what service they offer. For example, if it's like say inbound marketing based on HubSpot, then it would be lots of HubSpot positions. If it's a performance marketing agency, then paid, social, paid search positions. I would say it really depends. The toughest ones these days probably would be developers. Those are really hard. Especially shopify developers. Very much in demand, hard to find really good people. So I would say there's no one particular position but definitely performance marketing roles. Also assistant roles common.

So it sounds like a lot of specialists or individual contributor roles. Is it more common to do individual contributor roles than account manager, project manager type roles?

Very hard to say. I wouldn't say like it's only that, you know, specialists are in need. There are generalists as well who are needed. We noticed a lot, like a lot of people are looking for assistance, you know, administrative assistance, virtual assistants, executive assistants, operations assistants, and so on. And those are also quite challenging to find, mainly because you are hiring for the attitude rather than skills. And attitude is one thing it's quite hard to evaluate during the hiring process. But also another thing, usually the people who are applying for assistant positions or whom you are headhunting for those roles are usually very junior. Right. So they are quite young right after uni. And strange it may sound with generation changes also changes the work ethic. So you really need to be able to qualify those people well. So I think it's quite actually challenging also to hire junior people these days.

This is a totally off the wall question. Have you found any good assistance who grew up?

Well, how, how? Okay, how did we find, find the really good ones?

No, no, no. Have you found any good ones who, you know, grew up wealthy?

Very. Yeah, except very unique question. Gre I have to say, no, I'm not sure.

Actually. I never, never would ask this of candidates previously and now I care a lot about how they grew up. To your point about work ethic, if you find a young person with a really strong work ethic and it's weird for me to say because in my head, you know, I'm still like 24 years old. Yeah, even I'm a decade older. But when you find early career stage folks with a really strong work ethic, that's usually associated with a situation where they had to work hard from a young age. And that's, that's already built in.

You know what? Like one of the, for me, the key question we ask in interviews is what was the hardest you've ever worked in your life on like that's the key question that we ask. You know, if they say, oh, I worked hard when I was in school because I was, I don't know, you know, studying a little bit here and there, but then I also had some outside curricular activities, then I'm like, really? Did you have to work hard? But if the person says, you know, I was in university, I was full time student and I had two additional part time jobs because I had to provide for myself, then I would be like, wow, okay, that's, that's quite good. I would imagine you could, you could handle the stress.

That's an awesome question. What. So we, a little bit of kind of, hey, generally what are we looking for in agencies? What does dig into some of the hiring process? What does a first class hiring process look like?

I mean, there are a few criteria that I would recommend to have in order to have a really solid hiring process. So One is to have multiple steps in the vetting process. So multiple interviews include the testing as well, provide the test to complete. It doesn't have to be as I always say, AI generated test. It can be very practical. Two task test that usually involves the activities that they would do. So have those and have multiple people also participate in the interview. Because you can be. Humans have so many biases without even realizing that. So you want to be as objective as you can. And the best way of course is to have certain questions and know certain answers that you're looking for, but also to have multiple people participate in the process. The process that we follow that worked for us is, I mean we have quite a few different stages that we also deliver to our clients when we interview candidates for them. So we have the application questionnaire. So we don't look at CVs at all. I mean I have this weird probably opinion that CVs are outdated and it's just not the best representation of the candidate skills or work ethic or personality or anything else. Like it's just not the right approach. So instead we have a questionnaire that we prepare with very specific questions with our non negotiables that allows us very easily to like shortlist the right ones. So we have the questionnaire, then we have like a 15 minute screening call that can be on the phone, that can be on Zoom. And in that like 15 minutes screening call you can ask additional questions that are very important that would allow you to further qualify them. I mean in screening calls you can also evaluate like their language skills, like how they communicate. Because it really depends on the role. But for some roles it's really crucial that for example they are really good at communicating or that they speak English. Like if it's a international hire, then after the screening call and screening call by the way is performed by one recruiter, then the second call is the proper interview, full deep dive into the experience, understanding their cultural fit as well. And as I said, this is like a more in depth interview. And then we have the test which is a practical assessment, very important. You know, I always say you have to do it, don't take shortcut, do the test, even the simple one, because it would, it would tell a lot about their attention to detail, dedication, thinking, process, problem solving, like everything. Literally well designed test can, can reveal a lot. And then it is a client interview with the candidate just to see how effective, how well they vibe together, if they get along, what is their intake and so on. So I would say this is like a Pretty good process that's not too long, that involves just enough people, not too many to, you know, just drag the process over. And this. This actually proved quite well for us. Like, it's working quite well.

If we keep going from there, does that then go to just. Most commonly. It doesn't have to be every. It is every time. It's different for different roles. Does that go to another group interview internally or is that okay? Hey, we made a selection. Now we're moving to references and then negotiation and then, you know, signing.

Yes, yes. So basically, the interview with the can with the client can be. Can involve several people. You know, can involve the founder, for example, of the business or department lead or the hiring manager, and can involve one other person. From there, usually they already have a good idea if the person is good or not. Then we would do the reference check and then we would go into negotiation and close that deal.

Yep. Makes sense.

Yeah.

Did you have. So we've based a lot of our hiring process on the classic, like the who process. There's some top grading. There's like a handful of things. Are there any sources? Obviously you've taken it and you've modified it based on what you found works, but any sources you draw inspiration from.

I mean, a lot comes from practice, for sure. A lot comes also from reading. Just taking the best practices. There's a. There's a guy called Jeb Blount. I don't know if you've ever heard of him. You probably did. Yeah, he. I think Hiring Rock Stars was his book that Rock some. Something about Rock Stars. Took some ideas from there as well. I mean, I don't, to be honest. We've tried the scoring system as well. You know, like keeping it as subjective. Sorry. Objective as possible. I do not at this moment believe that this works as the best solution. I think really good questions with answers like. And knowing the answers you're looking for is a better approach than like just grading someone. Because even grading is very subjective at the end of the day.

Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about sourcing.

So if that's the process they already start, how do we.

How do we recruit? How do we get the right number of applicants for jobs? Are there any benchmarks you go through? Like, where are agencies finding talent?

I mean, on one end, it really depends again, on the position. For some positions, you can just put a job ad up and you will get a lot of applicants. Usually that's like junior positions. Maybe creative roles like graphic designers or video editors. You can get quite A few applicants if you just put a job ad. Otherwise I would say headhunting, sourcing, like active sourcing is the best approach. There's no set number of people you need to have in order to qualify one candidate. There's no such thing. Because it again, it depends on the role. It depends on, you know, like the quality of those applicants. I personally at this moment, unfortunately, I don't think job ads give the best result. Mainly because, you know, even in the us I think the unemployment rate is like record low. It's like 3% or something. Right. So it's, it's very low. Meaning that everyone has a job, but there are actually a lot of people passively looking for jobs and those are the people that you should reach out to, head Hunt, you know, try to sell the position and get them on a call. And sometimes, you know, I always say it only takes one good candidate to close the job.

Yeah.

So no benchmark. But sourcing is, is the way to go. Unfortunately. Unfortunately. Unfortunately, probably.

Well, it's great for, great for your business.

Oh yeah.

What? You know, in like sales, prospecting, me, everybody listening, you like. We all get quick question subject line emails like 10 times a day with sales pitches from a recruiting side. How do you reach out to somebody who you think, hey, this might be a good candidate and actually get a response from them?

First of all, I mean if the company has a good reputation, you mention the company name that sells itself, right. If the company doesn't have a good rep. I'm not saying bad reputation. Well, if they are not well known, focus on the benefits, reach out and basically say what the benefits are. We do a lot of outreach, like just through connecting with people. So in the connection message you just can openly say we have this position. You know, these are the benefits. And then also of course you can compliment the person, say you know, that you see that they have a lot of potential and we see them as a potential fit for the role. Overall, I would say it's a very, I mean it's very similar to sales and prospecting, but at the same time it's different because people want to know what's out there. Not only because they are thinking about changing the job, but also because they want to see what other companies offer. Maybe they can use that information then to go and negotiate with their current employer. So yeah, I would say it's a bit different, but just complimenting, saying exactly what, what grabbed your attention in their LinkedIn, let's say profile and then mentioning the company, the benefits that Usually gets attention.

And when you said benefits like in my head, that goes to the main one is hey comp, you're an account executive. Like this role is full time role, you know, 130 to 170 on target earnings. And then I assume if there's anything outstanding about your, hey, this is a, you know, we work four days a week or 32 hour work week or whatever. But is it any benefits that you've seen, like wow, this one, should they be very unique to the company? For us, if you are a true ClickUp nerd, there's not a better place to go to go be if you are. If you love agency process development and helping people get more productive, Zenpilot's a great place to go. If you could care less about either of those two things. There's not a whole lot in terms of our positioning in the market or who we serve that you're going to be super thrilled about.

Yeah, but these are good benefits, I would say, you know, really like as a company, every company has its benefits. It just needs to identify and for every role there are certain benefits that matter most. Of course, if we're talking about the salesperson, the best benefit is going to be like what is the bonus system? How, you know, what, how much money can you earn in this position? If we're talking about like operational role, the things you mentioned will work quite well. Like you know, very structured environment like ClickUp, nerd group, like a mastermind group or whatever, you know, that will work well. So I would say if you have a position, try to understand what motivates those people in that particular position and try to use those benefits in the message. Yeah, but startups, yeah, and also something else I wanted to add. You know, like I work a lot with startups as well and they often say, oh, but we don't have those benefits that Google or Facebook or whatever has. Like what, what can we advertise? I always say startups have so many benefits and people are craving for those things like flexibility when it comes to where you work, when you work, learning opportunities, growth opportunities, feeling that you are doing something purposeful. Because usually when you're in organization like a big corporation, you don't feel that as well as like equity options. Like there's so many different things that startups can actually offer. You just need to identify those and make sure to word it in the right way to attract the attention of people.

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Let's talk about one of the favorite topics of mine listeners which is the tool side of things. Okay, what, let's say I'm a 30 person agency, you know, got somebody leading ops internally. I may use an outside service like Persona, but I want to, I want to also have a recruiting arm internally. It's definitely, it's part time. It's not somebody's full time role. It's a Steam size. But what should my tech stack around recruiting, hiring people ops look like?

If your recruitment needs are not like huge and you don't recruit lots of people at the same time, like lots of different positions, I would say keep it simple. I'm pretty sure you can utilize ClickUp for this. We use Asana and you know like we are Asana pros. So we for a very long time, especially when I was an agency myself, we've used Asana for it. So we would collect applicants through the, you know I said that we, we have this application form that was, that was Asana form. Applicants would come into Asana then we would build the funnel and then we would basically keep their cards in there. To be honest, even now we use Asana. For example, when we get the applicants from our applicant tracking system, we create the cards in Asana and that's where we keep the whole information about the candidate like interview notes, questions asked recordings and so on. So I would say if you're not recruiting for many roles, I would keep it simple and I would just utilize the tools you currently have for project management or process management. If you are recruiting a lot of positions then I would recommend to even utilize like an applicant tracking system ATS and there are so many of them out there that I cannot like say which one to use. We've tried Recruit CRM, we tried Manatel, those are like quite small ones. We've also used Brizhr. Like there's so, so many tools out there. It's incredible. I think it just makes sense that you go out there, evaluate the pros and cons and choose the one that you think will fit best.

Why do you use an ATS if you have the backend? Is it the you have on integration into other job boards? Is it apply with LinkedIn? What are the big benefits?

All of what you mentioned. So basically we have like integration with other job board. So when we post a job ad it goes on our website but it also gets distributed to like 20 something different platforms or jobs also LinkedIn included. So that's the benefit of having APS. You know, it's like a centralized place to store all of the candidates and at this moment we probably have over like 19,000 of candidates database, which is quite huge considering that we haven't been out there for too long. But yeah, definitely like ATS makes sense when you have multiple roles open at the same time.

Yeah, makes sense. What I think we've probably hit some of these loosely, but if I'm an agency listening and I'm thinking, should I be tackling this in house? Should I be working with a recruiter? Like, when is it the right time to use a recruiter instead of trying to recruit in house?

Okay. I would say first of all, look for certain symptoms. And the symptoms are you always leave recruitment as the last thing on your to do list. And I know that, you know, agency founders, agency leadership, they just don't, they don't like to deal with the people side of things. They'd rather do marketing, they'd rather do sales, business development because it's fun. And then the people side will get left for the last. So I would say when you feel like recruitment is the last thing on your agenda, when you are being very reactive when it comes to recruitment, when you keep on rushing through your hiring or you continuously get MIS hires, these would be the signals that you may want to actually either outsource or get an in house recruiter. Now there are pros and cons with each solution, but I would say the biggest benefit that the outsourced recruiters bring is access to a larger talent pool expertise. It can be like a much quicker process as well. And at the same time, you know, it saves basically a lot of time and a lot of headache because especially for example, with our approach, we develop like we basically vet the candidates from A to B. The only thing that you have to do is to review the candidate presentation, which literally will literally prepare with like all the recordings, our insights, notes, everything else you just review and you choose the person that you want to interview. So this is like the best thing, right, that you can get?

Sure. Yeah. That's awesome. I want to. You gave such a good nugget earlier that I want to go back to the well and see what else pull out. Okay, so your question around, you know, what's the hardest you've ever worked in your life? I think is a great one that people can take and plug in right now. Joey Gilke, who's been on the podcast before, like one of his favorite questions is kind of in the middle of he recruits or interviews a lot of sales folks. So in the middle of the interview, just kind of stop things and ask, how do you Think this conversation is going and try and throw people off a little bit. See how they respond. Are they overconfident? Are they, you know, kind of humble and grounded or they completely lose their cool. Do you have any other favorite interview questions? Whether in, in general or in specific situations?

Huh. I'm trying to think. You know, I would say for me it's not the questions that I prepare in advance, it's the questions that follow my original question. Because I mean I naturally think I'm quite good at asking questions, especially the follow up questions. So I think those, those reveal the most. But I mean when you ask the question exactly, you are looking how the person responds. You know, if they are, if they are still staying cool, if they are staying confident or if they are basically just, you know, getting a bit lost with the question. I'm trying to think if there are any other additional questions. That probably depends on the position. So for example, if I'm looking for someone who's very like motivated, I want to say motivated, but properly motivated is not the best word. Who's someone who's very ambitious, I would also ask, you know, if, for example, if they've been, or actually I know what, what is a good question. Basically what's the hardest thing you've worked in your life? That's one part. But also I always want to know like how were things when they were at school? So for example, were they a good student or were they actually doing additional things? Maybe they were in sports. Because when for someone, for example, played basketball, then you know that they are very competitive because they've been in that competitive environment. If someone was, was a good student, that means they are hard working and they will put in the effort. So I would, I would always formulate the question about, you know, tell me about your like a school year. Tell me about your, your, your, your, your childhood. You know, how you, how you were, like how you studied, how you worked and stuff. So that usually tells actually a lot.

Yeah, that makes sense. That's awesome. I keep bugging you with questions. I know where it's all good. The site is the Persona. Is that the best place to send folks?

Yes, yes. Or my LinkedIn as well.

Awesome. Cool. We'll make sure both of those make it to the show. Notes. Erica, this was awesome. Thanks for being willing to come on and let me, let me girl you around hiring and recruiting. This is super fun.

Thank you. Thank you. Great for having me. It was pleasure.