#53 - How we find and hire unicorn team members

You only want people who really, really want the job to work for you to even apply.

This is the Doing It Online podcast with your host, serial entrepreneur, 6 and 7 figure funnel strategist and super nerd Kate McKibben. Where every week we're here talking nerdy and sharing the things that actually work to help you do what you do online. But better, easier and with a ton more profit too. Are you ready? Let's do.

Hey. Hey guys. Welcome to episode number 53 of the Doing It Online podcast. This is sort of a follow up episode from last week's episode where I talked about the difference between our six figure team and a seven figure team and we had lots of follow up questions and the number one follow up question was, okay, that's great, but how the hell do you find good people? Like how do you find these unicorns? You know, because I think there's, you know, there's definitely, there's two parts to, to growing a great team. One is knowing like what is that role and in what order that do you need them? And the second thing is getting amazing people into that role and also keeping them. So I wanted to share with you the process again that we use to help us to find and hire like those unicorns of humans, like those people who come in and make your business better, who make it a pleasure to turn up to work every day, who make it you can trust to with your baby, which is your business, to help you grow it and to be, you know, better at their jobs than what you are when you were sort of kind of half filling in their job. So true unicorns in every sense of the word, apart from having a horn poking out of their head of course. Because I think this is something that I've actually always done pretty well and it's through I can't take, you know, I can't really claim any of this. It's all bits of cobbled together advice from some amazing, amazing humans over time. And so I'm definitely going to give a shout out to them as we go through but I'm basically going to share the five little, I think golden nuggets that I've been given over the years about how to hire and know, find, hire, keep unicorn team members and then how we sort of applied them as well. So the first one, and this is one I've used for years is, and this is from my lovely friend Chantelle from Studio Expansion. She, her advice was when you're looking for, you know, someone to join your team is you've Got to make them jump through hoops to start with. And the reason for that is you only want people who really, really want the job to work for you to even apply. So it kind of has two, it has multiple benefits. One, it gets, it filters out the tire kickers because tire kickers are not who you want in your organization. I think you want people who you know are so excited to work for you and for this job in particular for your company and your job like because they are going to be better employees. So you got to make them jump through a few hoops to scare away basically the people whose heart's not in it who are just applying for whatever to see what happens. You don't want those people. You want people, people excited, really excited to work for you. So the way that we do this is, and again this was inspired by Chantel and we kind of took it around with it is the first thing we get people to do is we get them to fill out. So we don't want anyone sending us a cv. I pretty much didn't want to see their cv. We get them to attach it as a, like a nice to have but really it comes down to getting them to fill out a pretty lengthy in depth form. So that's the first thing. So we have our job description which talk about separately in a sec and then the instructions at the bottom of the job description. Click here, complete this form. And as you know, in that we ask them to also attach their resume. But we do that again. Like I said, we want to scare some people away. We don't just want those people copying and pasting like shooting you the exact same resume they sent to 50 other people copying and pasting their cover letter. And yes, it will scare away some people and that's good. They're not the right people for you. And so it means that there's less. And also the other benefit is if you scare away those time wasters, you have less applications to read through. And those applications are of a higher quality. We get, you know, we ask them lots of questions in. It's almost like the form is almost like a little mini interview. So all those questions that you probably wanted to ask in an interview anyway, we ask them in there. We ask them to share examples of work or examples of times that they've, you know, done the skill that you need. So you can kind of pre check that. We also include or ask them to complete a personality assessment. Like and there's lots of different ones out there, whether it's the anagram or the love languages, like think about which one is kind of relevant to the role. So for example, for a customer service role we want someone whose number one love language is acts of service. Like if their job is going to be about, you know, showing up and doing things for other people and you know, really enjoying their role, they've got to really like doing acts of service. So you're going to want hire someone who that is their love language. So just being a bit intentional about that, thinking about, okay, what sort of, you know, key personality traits do we need to fill this role? And then whichever, like there's so many different ones out there. I prefer the free ones and the ones that don't take them like again an hour to complete the assessment. So maybe not like a Myers Briggs or something like that, although a lot of people do know them off by heart. But yeah, just something like that. Adding it in, asking them to, you know, click through, find it to paste it. What they're again, it's, it's getting them to take, jump through that extra hoop and also just giving you a bit of extra information. We also asked them to submit a little video introducing themselves and we normally give them three questions to cover off in the video. So again, more hoops the set. The other reason why I like to do this video, and this is one thing that I added in is because I'm like super introverted and getting on the phone with a bunch of seemingly strangers is like my idea of a nightmare. This way I kind of get to pre meet them and pre screen them and you get that vibe of someone on video like of kind of what they're like. And I sort of, I tend to base, to hire base more on personality. I need to see that, you know, that personality and get that feeling for that person quite quickly. So that that's kind of our step one. They've got to fill out this, I said this form, do at least one personality assessment so we can kind of get a feeling of how they're going to fit. And I get them to submit the video and particularly if this, you know, this is an online business, they to be able to figure out how to record a video and either upload it to YouTube and share a link or these days is loom. So it's easier give them the instructions you want them to follow as vaguely as possible and then sort of like see how they go at figuring that stuff out. So as you can see this whole little, little ninja tricks here that this first step kind of helps you to this first Step achieves. Then once they have, you know, we go through that, we pull out our, the top ones, the ones that I sort of feel have the best skills and we got the good, best vibe from them from their video, then we will ask them to do a task. Sometimes we get them to do the video here instead of right up front, up to you. But usually we'll ask them to complete a short task that just helps them to demonstrate their skills. So an example was when we hired for our digital content producer, I asked them all to write a caption. Like I gave them an image and I said, can you write a caption for this image? And that way I could compare them all next to each other. And it gave me a good baseline as well. And then our top three we interviewed, I think actually ended up just being two that we ended up interviewing. And it just really reduced down the amount of time that I had to spend talking to strangers. Like I said, not my favorite thing. That's step one from Chantelle. So thank you, Chantelle. That was that in itself. Game changer. Make them jump through hoops. The second thing that I've found, especially in the last sort of, you know, two years, as we've been trying to make sure that we're more and more intentional about showing up as a values based business and making sure that our values are clear and they're public and that people know who we are and what we're about and that, you know, and a big part of that is making sure we're hiring people who really resonate with and align with our values, is actually sharing those values and getting, getting people to agree with them and demonstrate their agreement and how they've sort of been using that in their own life as part of that application process. So these are. We basically went into our already very lengthy form and added in a whole section around our company values and we got people to say that they agreed to them and in some cases asked for them to give examples to demonstrate how this is particularly for the more important ones, how this is something that they've demonstrated in their life or in previous employment. So that one was we got from Rachel Rogers of hello 7. I think I heard about that on her podcast. And I was like, yes, that we need to add that in. I know our forms are already damn long, but that is super, super important. Like we were already sort of going and doing a little bit of an Instagram stalk of people. And we do that with, you know, with our clients as well. Like we want to make sure that we're only bringing people into our world and our space who as far as we can see, align with the things which are most important to us. But that was just like a really nice upfront way of doing it and making sure it is really clear and for the right people. Like the people that we have hired, they loved and appreciated so much that they were there that, that, that we did have that included because I think that really helped to resonate with them that we were the right business for them as well. All right, so gold nugget number three was that you make sure that in the job description and when you're describing your company that you need to make sure that it sounds like it's somebody, it's going to be someone's dream job. So remember that when you are because this helps you to attract amazing people. Now this nugget is from Angela Lauria. She has an awesome book. If you are sort of currently going I need to hire someone or I need to improve my hiring process. She's got an amazing book on Amazon. Uh, it's called how to make them beg to work for you. Go check that out. So this again was another kind of like little light bulb moment for us because I always sort of put job descriptions as pretty matter of fact, like these are the basic duties you will be doing. This is the hours, this is the pay. You know, not very inspiring or exciting. Like you are really like when you're putting that job description out there. It's a two way ad. It is. You want people to not just be like, oh I need money, I'll apply for that. But you want people like, you want the cream of the crop. You're looking for unicorns here. Okay, so you, they, these people have options. They're going to be looking for that next best fit for them. Something that hopefully they can sink their teeth into, stay with for a long time. Like they want to be excited about your company, about the job, about the prospects, about all the other things that working for you brings to them. And when you are an online business, like we have a lot of extra perks that we, you know, it's good to include like, you know, small. There are a lot of perks of being in a small team, of having flexibility of hours, of being able to work from home. So talking about things like that, talking about, like I said, the values of the company, talking about what it's like to, you know, day to day is like, what the sort of culture is like, all of that stuff. Don't forget to include that in your job descriptions. Don't just bullet point it out. Make this sound like something that people are going to be so, like the right people are going to be so, so excited to apply for and you will attract really, really amazing, amazing people when you do Gold number four. Gold nugget number four, sorry. Is when you're actually out there looking is first of all, share it with your community. And secondly is don't forget to post it on non traditional. Sorry. On traditional job sites. I think again, we get a little bit wrapped up in our little online world and bubble here and we sort of start fishing from a very small pool. But we have to remember that there are people out there in nine to five corporate jobs who still have the skills and the personality and stuff that we want. Yes, they may not be familiar with our particular business model, but come on guys, it's not rocket science that that stuff we can teach. So you want to make sure that like you're both like, this is why I say make sure you advertise it to your community because it can be really amazing. If someone is in your community already understands your brand, is evangelical about your brand to bring them on, that also has its benefits. But if there isn't that right person in your community, don't forget like don't just post it in Facebook groups hoping that someone good will see it. Go put it on Seek or Monster or indeed or whatever is the best one for you. We used Seek for our last one. It was great. It. Yes, it does mean you usually have to pay to list that ad. I know some people put theirs on LinkedIn jobs as well, but, you know, that's a small investment to find which pays off massively. I'm not saying you need to go list them on all of them, but just pick one, list it up there just to make sure that you are, you know, opening yourself and your job up to the biggest pool of amazing people possible. I can't remember who gave me that gold nugget, but it is definitely one that has made a big difference to us. And final gold nugget, Gold nugget number five is. And this one is from Servitude Branson. Is that make sure. Well, his advice was to always pay above market rate. I know not everyone can afford to do that. So my advice, my altered advice is that to always pay as well as you can afford to. Don't go looking for a bargain here, guys. Like, you know, it's. If, particularly if you're wanting to keep these people for a long Time, you've got to make sure that not only they enjoying their work and they're, you know, feeling fulfilled that way, but you've got to make sure that they are, you know, they're feeling valued and they're being rewarded for their time. Because that's one of the things that people make people start looking around and that's what you don't want. You don't want an employee who's kind of got one eye constantly on new job opportunities. You want them to love where they are, to feel like they getting rewarded for what they're doing, that it's, you know, that they're not feeling at all like they're being sort of taken advantage of or anything like that. So make sure you always can afford, you always pay as much as you can afford to. And then when you can afford to and it's appropriate, don't forget about giving things like bonuses and regular pay increases and things like that as well. Like that is how you keep people long term. It is always, always more advantageous to keep an employee for a long time than it is to be constantly trying to get new cheap employees and trying to train them up. Like there's so much more effort. And where you're going to be able to feel like you're in that real CEO role is when you have people who have been in their roles a long time and they understand not just the ins and outs of their role, but of the company of you. And that's the gold. And that takes time and you want to try and obviously preserve that as much as possible. So those are my five little gold nuggets, guys, on how to find and hire unicorn team members. I'd love to know if you're going to try any of these. So make sure you hit us up or DM me or tag me over on Instagram at hellofunnels so we can see. Let us know. You know, if you do hire that unicorn person, make sure you let us know so we can celebrate with you. And for now guys, that is it for me this week. I hope you found this super useful. I hope you're taking lots of notes and I can't wait to jump into your earbuds again. That sounds gross. I didn't mean it to. Same time next week? Alrighty guys, until then, bye.

Thanks so much for listening to the Doing it online podcast. If you love this episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. And if you're ready to take your online course sales to the next level with your own six or seven figure funnels. Let Kate show you exactly how today@Stealmyfunnel.com.