Performance-Based Hiring: Reducing Bias and Hiring for Results with Lou Adler

I realized that hiring was screwed up and this is 1978. Screwed up. Managers didn't know what they're looking for. Candidates didn't know what they wanted. Closing was a superficial and simple area and it still kind of screwed up 45 years later. But I realized hiring could be a business process if you followed a certain set of rules.

As always, this is Jeff Duden with the on the Homefront podcast and this podcast is brought to you by Homefront Brands. Homefront Brands is simply building the world's most responsible franchise platform, encouraging entrepreneurs to take action to transform their lives, impact communities and enhance the lives of those they care the most about. All the while delivering enterprise level solutions to local business owners out there on the home front where it counts. If this sounds like you, check out homefrontbrands.com today and start your next chapter of greatness and build your dynasty on the Homefront. I will be looking for you and today I am extremely excited to have Lou Adler on the phone with us today. And Lou is the CEO and founder of the Adler Group, a consulting and training firm, helping companies implement Win Win hiring programs using his performance based hiring system for finding and hiring exceptional talent. More than 40,000 recruiters and hiring managers, that's 40,000 have attended his groundbreaking workshops over the past 30 years. Lou's the author of the Amazon Top 10 Bestseller Hire with youh Head and the Essential Guide for Hiring and Getting Hired. Lou has been featured on Fox News and his articles and posts can be found on Inc. Magazine, Business Insider, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. Welcome Lou Adler to On the Home Front today.

Great Jeff, thank you very much for inviting me. I look forward to chatting with you today.

Oh, it's going to be, it's going to be great. I've spent so much time going through your stuff and hiring and recruiting is a particular passion for mine built businesses over the last 30 years. And you know, I think Jim Collins talks about who luck, right? If you get the right people in the right seats, you seem to get lucky and good things seem to happen. And when you have the wrong people in the wrong seats, then things go a little bit slower or not at all. So I'd love to start with your background, Lou. Anything you'd care to share? You're from New York originally. You live in California today, went to Clarkson, got an engineering degree and then your MBA from ucla. What what would you care to share about your journey, early days growing up?

Well, the journey actually is a weird journey because I didn't hope to become a recruiter ever thought of doing that? When I was quite young, 30, 32 years old, I was running a manufacturing company. Hated my group president. He and I argued and he actually hired me for that job. But I didn't like him. And I was a young kid and yelled and screamed at each other every time he showed up every other week. So I started using recruiters at the time and after about six months to a year I said, you know, I think I can't deal with this, I'm going to look for another job, but maybe I'll start with the recruiter. They started telling me why don't you do that? And it sounded pretty interesting. I gave my notice and it was a six month notice, so it was not. And they tried to bring me back and give me a track but I didn't want to work with that guy. So that really was the catalyst for leaving. But as soon as I became a recruiter I realized that hiring was screwed up. And this is 1978, screwed up. Managers didn't know what they're looking for. Candidates didn't know what they wanted. Closing was a superficial and simple area. How we found candidates was kind of hodgepodge and it still kind of screwed up 45 years later. But I realized hiring could be a business process if you followed a certain set of rules. And that's what became performance based hiring. A sequence of steps that you follow each and every time. And if you do that, you'll actually will hire excellent people. But it starts with how you define the work. But that's the short take on it. I just quit and I've sometimes thought that was a dumb decision to do. But at 76, it might still have been a dumb decision, but it was a decision I made 45 years ago. So kind of too late to do anything about it. But that's kind of the journey how I got there, which is kind of a weird journey. But that's so be it. That's what it was.

Yeah. Thinking back to that inflection point, you're gainfully employed, you're highly degreed, you're having success in your career and then you decide to become an entrepreneur and start the Adler Group. Were you forced into that decision or was that something, were you fearful about it? Was it something you had been planning?

Jeff, that's a real good question from your audience point of view. I started using, so I was running a manufacturing company, 300 people and I'm 30 years old. So I was on a good track and I knew that I could continue it I did not like the corporate politics. There was a lot of BS that goes on and I didn't like the group president. There's other people I really liked who executives but there's still a lot of corporate politics. And I said, I don't need this. So I knew as a recruiter this one guy that I was working with who my wife met because I was their biggest client. He just lived in his palatial mansion. And my wife says, hey, why don't you become a recruiter? This is, my wife was telling me this and so she supported the decision to leave. In December of 1977, I walked from the corner office with a company of 300 people reporting to me to this little cubicle, cubicle. And I was a recruiter on my own. And I kind of, oh, what a stupid decision that was. But I knew I had planned six months of income that I could pull it off. But right away I got into it and I realized, you know, I can actually do this and there is a thing that could happen. So I changed the process. So yes, I was fearful the first six months I thought it was going to fail. My wife totally supported the decision. And I've been married. I met her in 1860 and I was still married. So she supported 100%. I had a little four year old son at the time, never saw him. I mean, so there's a lot of things that went on that I said, you know, I got to do this. So when I look back in retrospect at it 40 plus years later, it was the right decision because it gave me a different kind of life. Being my own boss, not dealing with the corporate politics. And that person in particular, even if I got rid of that person, which that was an option, they said, hey, we'll give you another division at a different place where he's not the group president. I still had to deal with the corporate. So I said no, I can't do it, that's. But so I, but I was self confident enough to know that I could find something else if this didn't work out. I was running a manufacturing company at 30 to 300 people. I could find another job. It wasn't what I wanted to do, but I knew that was always an option. So I took a risk and had my wife support and that worked out real well.

Yeah, there's no shortage of people that would want you to make money for them.

Right.

And yeah, you know, I look back, I have three or four inflection points that I talk about in my journey Building a national brand and then and selling it and now creating a couple of national platforms. But usually these inflection points, they have people, people that you care about, your wife and your son, they have an adventure and an opportunity and then they've got some risk of loss. Yeah, I've found in my life that you always have to give up at least something to try to get something greater. So interested in people's journey from that. So let's talk a little bit about and I think for the benefit of our audience in particular, I know that hiring and recruiting, particularly when you got a tight job market, is absolutely imperative. Most do it, they bring people in, they have an interview and then if they like them, they don't, they don't. They're not particularly scientific about it. And if they seem to have done something similar in the past, oftentimes unsophisticated companies, they're going to get the job there. That is a travesty. A lot of times the way that that ultimate shakes out. We've used a lot of competency based interviewing. And I know that you know, your system is a performance based. I'd really like to unpack it a little bit and thinking about maybe some people, some franchisors or people that are looking at becoming entrepreneurs and becoming franchisees, you know, how are they going to get those first key people in that are going to impact their business. So maybe you could just do a little bit of an overview about performance based hiring and how we need to think about it.

So let me kind of discredit competency based hiring just in general and I'll give you a story. Everybody has certain set of competencies, results oriented, good team skills, intelligent problem solver, but without the context of the job, it's kind of meaningless. So why always say, okay, what's the most important competency you want? I always ask, well, what does that look like on the job? What does that competency look like on the job? Oh, they got to deal with these kind of people and accomplish these kinds of tasks. Fine, I'll find people who are competent and motivated to do that. But if you just make this generic competencies, the likelihood that they'll fit with that specific environment in your situation is remote. So that's why I don't like generic competencies. It's got to be related to the context of the job and the actual work itself. I am very results oriented in a certain situation. I love the job running this manufacturing facility with 300 people. I did not like the job when that Group president came down and complained and said he should do it his way. And I said, I'm not doing it your way. Fire me if you don't like my way, but just leave me alone. So he demotivated me. So even though I was perfectly competent to do that at that point in time, I was demotivated for 48 hours. Then when he left for two weeks I was fine. And then he came back and I was demotivated again. So I think there's certain situations that put people, despite their competency, to be unsuccessful. If you're a jerk as a hiring manager, well, you better hire someone who can deal with jerks, not someone who's competent and motivated to do it. I mean, that's just the reality of it. So now let me give you a story of the whole performance based hiring process. So this happened in probably, I'm going to say 1995. As a recruiter then I had the good fortune of being introduced to a number of different business groups that I could present my methodology for hiring. I didn't call it performance based hiring at that time, but that's what it was. So I remember I gave a presentation to a group of mid sized company presidents and these were companies 5 million to 50 million say. And it was great because I would get in front of him and tell him how to do this. So a couple weeks later I get a call from one of the people, president of a company. But he calls me and says, Lou, at that presentation, what were the two questions you said you must ask to candidates before you hire anybody? And I said, well, it doesn't really matter what the two questions are. I got to know the job, why don't I just. Let's just tell me about the job. He said, I don't have time, just tell me the two questions. And he was getting pretty aggravated. Just tell me the two questions that I can't just. They, they're meaningless without knowing what you're looking for. I said, why are you so insistent on the two questions? And he said, the candidate's in the hallway, that's a different issue. I said, so here's what I want you to do. I want you to walk through your manufacturing facility and it was making wood products. I want you to walk through the facility and when you get to a specific problem in that he's looking for VP operations to run it, and it was probably a 10 or $12 million company. I said, I want you to stop at every location. He said, so give me. So I said, tell me One of the problems, he said, the way we lay out raw material was terrible. I said, fine. When you get to the area of raw material stacked up and mislaid and poorly documented, I want you to stop and ask the candidate these two questions. The first question is, if you were to get this job, how would you solve this problem? And spend five minutes or eight minutes on getting his thoughts about it. But more important, ask this question next. Have you ever solved a problem similar to that? Tell me all about it. And spend another 10 to 8 to 10 minutes on the answer to that solution. Then do that for three or four other big problems you have. How would you solve the problem? What have you accomplished that's Most related? Spend 20 minutes in each of those areas and then call me when you're done. So this was kind of, I think it was 10 o' clock in the morning. He calls me about 2 o'. Clock. He said done. Uh, we walked through about two hours. Candidate was great at telling me how he'd do it, but he wasn't very good at doing anything similar. So I perceive him to be a good consulting type, but not an hands on operational guy. Why don't you come out and I'll give you the search for the VP operations. So the two, three things there, you got to know the job, you got to ask candidates what do they accomplish related to those performance objectives of the job and how would they solve the problem if they get it. That's performance based hiring. Define the job as a series of performance objectives, not a list of skills, competencies and academics. It's what people do with what they have that makes them successful. So focus on what they have. You think you need a result oriented competency? Well, it's got to be results oriented to solve the problems you got, not results oriented to solve different problems. This guy was definitely results oriented, the consultant guy. But he wasn't a hands on guy to solve that specific problem in that set of, in that environment. So I think it's tying skills and competencies to the real needs in the context of the job. That's performance based hiring.

Yeah, I'll tell you. And that probably avoids a lot of project and long ramps and a lot of training that you've got to do just to see if the person can perform in the role. Get somebody that can perform from day one. So are you a big fan of assessments? Pre employment assessments? Are there any that you recommend or you know, are they valuable?

Now I got to tell you another story. One of the big dominant assessment tests 20 years ago was Profiles International gave a detailed IQ test and a personality test which is very similar to predictive index. Jim Strabaski was the president of the company. He said, lou, if you say something nice about my assessment in your the second edition of Hire with your head, I will have each of my reps. And he had 600 or 800 reps buy three copies and give that a copy of that book to our customers. That was a pretty good deal.

Very good deal.

Just to give you a sense, I won't tell you what I said about it in the book. It was semi positive. When the book came out, it was number one on Amazon bestseller. And it's not because it was a great book. It's because I made the deal with Jim Strabaski, the president, Profiles International. What I put in the book was assessment test for the final three candidates are perfect, but don't use it to screen out. It's a confirming indicator, not a predictive indicator. He said, that's good enough. I'll put that in a book. Which I did. Said profiles is one I would recommend for the final three. He said, but I won't make any money by selling three tests. I make money by selling 200 tests for that same job. And he said, in lieu. I have a jet, personal jet that I travel around the world on. And you're driving a little. Whatever it was, it wasn't. It was just, you know, it wasn't a hot car, it was little, a normal price BMW. But he passed away, unfortunately. But he was a good friend. But that's what I believe about assessments. They're not predictive indicators, they're confirming indicators. And yes, I give it a hundred percent of the time to finalists, but I don't give it to applicants because they might end up. I don't want to exclude a good candidate when you think hiring as a system. The system is I want to hire a great person, not I want to do an assessment test to screen out weak candidates. I want to hire the best person. So yes, it has its place, but it has to be at the end of the process, not the beginning of the process. And that's a fundamental shift that most HR people don't recognize. The IQ test is quite predictive. So while it is a useful test and I agree with it, I would still give it in the sequence of steps. It's got to be when the candidate clearly sees this is a job I want and I'm willing to go through the rigmarole of getting it. So you got to Be careful about the decision from the point of view on whom you want to hire. Right.

So how heavily though would the hiring decision be weighted upon the results of those tests for the final three candidates?

So let me give you another story. Predictive index is a competency based test and it's probably the most well known. They've added an IQ component which I totally support. But I still think about this. We had a big client and this was in the 90s, Avery International, it's a big company and it turned out that all our candidates had to take the predictive index personality test. And 90% of our candidates passed that test. Their candidates, only 50% passed the test. Because our focus was on if a person has accomplished a comparable job in a comparable environment successfully, how could they not pass the test? It's what people do with what they have, not what they have that matters. Not everybody who passes the test can do the work, but 90% of people who can do the work will pass the test because it's pure logic. And that really kind of says it's a confirming indicator, not a predictive indicator. Every now and then you'll find a candidate who doesn't meet the right personality profile even though you've interviewed them based on performance.

Right.

And I remember one candidate who was very soft spoken for a big director of a cost accounting job implementing a big manufacturing process, multi plant, and he was very soft spoken. I didn't think he would do well in the job. But then I started really doing some due diligence. And he had worked with the uaw, he had worked with it, he had worked with finance, he'd worked with manufacturing people and implemented some very complicated cost systems and very difficult manufacturing environments. Generally if you get a real hard nosed person and manufacture, the ego's getting away. This guy was collaborative work. Well, people liked them, the union liked them. So in some cases your mind of what you think is a good person and good personality might not be. I, by doing that due diligence with the candidate and checking references, I realized that was the right personality. And yet he didn't interview well. He was kind of soft spoken. You wouldn't have thought it well, but his results spoke for themselves. So you got to be a little bit careful when you do these things. That's why I said if they achieve comparable results in comparable situations and the personality or something doesn't seem right, you got to kind of do your due diligence. You don't always have to hire the person, but you got to do your due diligence. So it offers another series of questions you can ask to ensure you're hiring the right person.

Got it. That's, that's great. Biases. What are the, what are the types of biases that generally come into the hiring process? And, and what can you do to minimize those as best as possible?

Okay, so let me make the general statement. Is bias is the number one cause of hiring mistakes? Yes. We tend to like people in their first impression. And when we like somebody, we just relax and we start selling the person on the job. We stop listening and we discount bad answers and we elevate good answers or ignore wrong answers. We do all that stuff. When we don't like somebody, we go out of our way to ensure the person answers the process correctly. So it's almost self ordained whom you're going to hire based on first impressions. And it's all wrong, totally wrong. So what I do to minimize bias and it happened, I say accidentally in my first search assignment, it was for a plant manager in the automotive industry. First search assignment, 1978. Hiring manager gave me a list of skills, experience and competencies in academics. In this case it was handwritten. I happen to know the CEO because he was someone I had worked with in the past. But I looked at this job description. Skills, experience and competencies. I said, Mike, that's not a job description, that's a person description. What do you want the person to do to be successful? And we again, we walked around a plant, we found five or six things to turn it around. Inventory issues, processes, it doesn't matter what those stuff, stuff. And I found a person who could do that work. Defining a job as a series of performance objectives, which I call a performance based job description, is the beginning of stopping bias. And the only decision you make is is this person competent and motivated to do that work? In my environment, now that's what you have to prove. So I tend to say I think it's better if you have a phone screen before you bring a candidate on site just to get to know each other and ask the kind of he or she's accomplished, things like that. So you're already focused on their performance, not their personality. And that's really the key is has this person accomplished work needed to be done? Obviously the decision, can this person fit with my organization is a critical opponent. But I always say ask that at the end, at the end of the interview, ask yourself, is this candidate's first impression going to help or hinder that person's on the job performance? But ask it at the end of the interview when his person's gone, not being biased by it, that's hard. But we have a scripted interview that goes through that. How do you put bias in the parking lot? And I remember one of my first presentations ever, first presentations ever was to a business group where the president of In N Out Burger was there. At the time they only had 60 stores. Now they got 300 name and they're going worldwide now. But I knew them when I had 60 stores. And I just said to this business group, the biggest way to control bias is don't make a decision for 30 minutes, bite your tongue, bleed, ask these questions for 30 minutes. And it was just some basic work history review and biggest accomplishment. He calls me up a week or two later and says, Lou, I love that. Do you want to do a CFO search? Unfortunately, the president of that in Naut Burger at that time got passed away in an airplane crash. And I was my biggest client at the time, so I cried for a month. But no, he was just a great guy. So the point being is, yes, bias is critical. You do have to control it. It starts by looking at objective criteria that defines on the job performance. Throw personality out until the end. After you've interviewed Kenny, you say, hey, can this person do this work? Given the situation, and many times you'll discover that people who have a great extroverted, friendly personality, you start digging into their accomplishments, they're superficial. On the other hand, you find someone's a little bit quiet, a little bit, they'll say introverted, might not, might not be. They just feel. Everybody gets nervous in an interview, it's important. And at the end of the interview you discover, well, that person's actually better than they are. And this is the thing I found, a third of the people get worse, you thought they're great, now they're not that great. And a third of the people get better. You're not going to hire them, but they get better and, and a third of the people stay the same. You just gotta put it in the parking lot. And it's hard. It's of all the things I train, it's hard to do, but it's critical to do. But if you build a performance based job description defining the work as a series of performance objectives and wait 30 minutes using a scripted interview, you got a chance to eliminate bias.

Yeah, so. But at the end of the interview though, after the performance based piece, did you say that you spend a couple of minutes maybe on cultural fit or other things that would maybe indicate you know, how easy going they are, how they, you know, are they con? Are they congenial? Can you get along with them? Do you do that kind of stuff?

No, I, again, I think that's all superficial. Okay? I can't judge if I like you or not. Right in the 30, 40 minutes, you're not the same, but I can judge. And if you look at proxies for culture, intensity of the organization, pace of the organization, how decisions are made will kind of give you a sense of your culture. So when I do cultural fit, that's a critical issue. I don't want to minimize it. But looking at the person making a personal judgment, that's not how you do it. You got to be a little bit more disciplined and scientific. So. So I said, hey, Jeff, you know, we got a pretty intense organization. Walk me through the biggest accomplishment you had where you really had to deal under pressure. And I want to understand how you dealt with it. So that's one way to do it, is to map your organization's culture and see if that person has accomplishments and has been successful in that kind of comparable organization. I mean, that's really the issue. But from a team standpoint, I remember this is probably eight or ten years ago, a 23 year old kid, brilliant young man. He was in London, I was over there. He said, lou, I got this guy for 35, real old guy, I was 65 at the time. And I don't know if he's a jerk or not. And I don't know if he. And this kid is 22 and he looks 16. So I said, here's the way you determine team skills. Just ask him about the teams he's been on. What's the biggest team you've managed? How'd you get on that team? Who else was on the team? What happened as a result after that team. If you look at the progression of a person's team growth and skills and collaboration over time, you'll know if they have good team skills. Person's flat and has never worked with anybody else before. Year after year in different companies don't hire because there's a clue that they don't have good team skills. But on the other hand, if you have somebody on the team, ask this person, hey, we'd like you, Jeff, to be on this team, to lead this effort. And then at that effort, another group says, hey, we want Jeff on this team and that team. Whether you like the person or not, that person's got good team skills. And this, I call it the Sherlock Holmes Evidence based interview. You don't have to make the personal decision yourself. Other people have already made that decision.

So we've used something called culture index in the past. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it or not as an assessment. And it provides you 19 typical profiles. Of course. And everyone has, there's, there's, there's interpretation to it. They can get down to the fine detail. But one of the things on there is kind of an indication of somebody's battery and I found it to be very accurate. So, you know, the, the indication is so how, how long can somebody perform outside of, of their personality type to, in the fulfillment of a job? And it kind of goes to energy, it kind of goes to grit, it kind of goes to perseverance. Do you look at anything like that that says, you know, okay, I'm looking at this, I'm looking at this CV and maybe it's a young person. And you know, they were on the Women's 19U National Championship Soccer team. They, they won this, they got a black belt and something else. They, you know, got a 4.0 and they were on the, you know, all of these different things. And it looks like this person has the ability to do a lot and to accomplish a lot of things to, to, to have competing priorities and be successful within that. I mean, how much do you look at just sheer volume of accomplishments or size of accomplishments and kind of assessing. I mean, is it fair to say that, that if they've been successful in the past when faced with challenging situations or in competitive environments, that they're likely to figure it out here?

It's different hiring someone who's right at a school.

Sure.

In general, I, I am a cynic. I don't trust anything. I don't trust any generic statistical validation.

Yeah.

Now the reason is because I give a one year guarantee and I gave, I was the first contingency firm in the world to give a one year guarantee. I don't want to give the money back or do it over again. That's a waste of time. So I take it very religiously. If the person has accomplished stuff comparable to what you need done consistently over time and are comparable, I'm saying I give the person a shot. If the person has learned quickly and thrown in over the head and survived, I'd give that person a shot. But I wouldn't give a test of that. I'd want to see specific evidence of that thing. I'm not sure that athletics is the great example of that. Maybe it is if you got someone who sit on the bench and then was thrown in and worked real hard to even sit on the bench, then I'd say maybe that that's where I would demonstrate grit. Not somebody's naturally gifted, not somebody who's naturally got a great personality. Those people get it easy. It's people who aren't the best athletes that still achieve success, that don't have the best personality, that still achieve success, that became leaders despite their flaws. I would probably give that person more credit than someone who has got all the gifts and somehow leverages those gifts. That doesn't mean that the person with the gifts isn't good. So I don't want to say that, but I would just be concerned. That wouldn't give me the confidence that I could give a person a one year guarantee. And that's what I call win win hiring. Win win hiring means you hire for the anniversary date, not the start date.

That's what that meant, meaning a year from now.

It's good. And the candidate still says, I want to have this job that's hard to do on both sides. So. But I'm a cynic and again, I'm an engineer. I mean, you mentioned that briefly. I don't trust anything.

This thing's got to work right.

So I'm a bit of a cynic. And so I see all these things and I've been kicked out of a lot of HR conferences. I don't want to deny that because I see the world differently. I see, hey, you know, this is a serious decision on both sides and there are ways to do it right. But when you use statistical measures to do it right and assessment tests, I don't. I think you're missing a 4. Forest for the trees, but that's my opinion.

Ah, got it. I love it. Help me understand this. Don't make an offer until you're 100% sure it will be accepted. I sat and thought about that and I couldn't figure out how to do that because technically, if I'm talking to the people and I'm talking about the offer, I'm making them the offer. But what do you mean by that specifically?

Well, Jeff, let me ask you this. If we could put a nice offer package together, would you at least be interested in getting serious about it?

Absolutely.

Jeff, how would you, you know, how would you compare our job to other things you're now considering? Is it 1, 2 or 3? Jeff, on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rank our job in comparison to everything else you're looking at what would it take to be number one on your list? So all of a sudden I'm uncovering what it would take. Yeah, Jeff, we're thinking of making an offer. We've talked about that. We've already got. Forget the money. Forget the money. Do you want the job? Remember we talked about the criteria that drives on the job? Success, the work itself. Do you really want to do this work? Do you want to work with this team? Do you want to work on our company? Do you like the work? Life balance? Is this a satisfying job? Is this a job you really want? If Warren from the tell me why and how it compares to other things you're looking at, all of those are tests. Hey, Jeff, if we could put an offer together by the end of the week, when could you give us? When could you give us your notice? So if I say, Jeff, you know, we've been talking, this is the second round of interviews, and we could put a real nice offer package together. When do you think you could start? And if you can't give me a specific date? You don't want this job. It's all about the money. Because if you do want the job, after two meetings, I know you've thought about when you could start, but if you say, I got to think about it, we screwed up. So that's what testing is all about. It's just like in closing. Are you serious about this? How would you compare it? Uncovering all those issues? Oftentimes it's these minors. Oh, I didn't know about the insurance plan. I can't get my kids on the insurance plan for 120 days. No, I can't take that job.

I'll tell you. I'm going to have to give myself a few points here, Lou, because I ask a lot of those questions. That's kind of how I go about it. I, you know, those, those trial closing questions and. But you know, it's not really even trial closing. It's just that that's what makes sense. I want to gauge. Hey, I always ask at the end of an interview, scale of 1:1 to 10, how interested are you in this position?

But then the real question, Jeff, though, is ask what would it take to be number one on your list?

Whatever number.

Add a number to that and say what? Because they'll tell you why they don't like it.

Right, right, right. Yeah. You know, I also saw something that was interesting to me. It said, sometimes your worst candidates can be your best hires.

Well, I don't know that that's what it said. It said sometimes great hires or great candidates aren't great hires. The reason is if I asked hiring managers and we've given training to thousands of sure. But I said what's a great hire? Gets results. Work with the team, fits the culture, reliable, has all these personal attributes that you want. That's what a great hire. They achieve results in your situation. Then I say okay, what's a great candidate? It's got to have 10 years of this. Skills like this, these competencies, those aren't predictive, they're skills you want. And they're also screen out people because a lot of people who have those skills have a different mix of skills can still do the job. But then we interview candidates based on do they have those skills they agree with to go forward and do they make a good interviewing presentation. Well, that's a great candidate. But that doesn't mean a candidate will be a great hire. Sometimes you have people a little bit nervous who aren't great candidates. Sometimes you have candidates who have a different mix of skills and experiences. So you now excluded people could do become a great hire because you've defined the selection criteria improperly. So that's really what I said. Great candidates often don't make great hires because you've screened some of the best people out who have a different mix of skills and experiences and who aren't necessarily the best interviewers in the world. Interviewing isn't a predictive sign. I mean it's, you know, right there. We've talked about bias, first impressions determine and how many people interview properly. Very few. That's why I, when I deal with it. No, I'm going to be there when you, when you interview. I'm going to show you how to interview properly. But I truly do it from a business standpoint. I don't want to do this search over again.

Yeah, easiest pass the best best placement. I imagine you sometimes work with startups but probably only startups that are well funded. Maybe PE backed, something like that. If you were going to help somebody or just get, you know, over a cup of coffee, advise maybe somebody who's investing in a franchise business. They're going to have five to 10 employees but their first couple employees are really critical. But these aren't, these aren't PE backed businesses. These are family people, these are corporate refugees. These are people that, that are really trying to, you know, really get their first couple of people right. How would people if they couldn't afford somebody like you, what could people do? What would be your best Advice to be as good as you possibly could in the hiring process.

So you're talking about finding them or interviewing them.

Well, I guess it would be interviewing them and placing them.

Well, let's just say interviewing. Finding them a heart. I probably want to do that through a referral basis, but interviewing them. So let me kind of go two ways. I would ask that franchise owner, define the work as a series of performance objectives. What do you want this person to accomplish? After the first year, you're going to have 20 new accounts, you're going to build a team of two or three sales reps. Whatever it is, you define the work as a sequence of steps. And clearly performance objectives. Interview. Have you ever accomplished anything like that? So go through the question, what have you accomplished that's most related? Then you ask the other question. The problem solving question is how would you do this given our set of circumstances? And I'd want good, clear answers. But just as important is, can this person handle 3 to 6 months or 10 months or 12 months before there's a lot of income coming through. I brought a lot of recruiters on board who had all the capacity to do it. But it does take three to six months to ramp up before they're making money.

Sure.

And if they didn't have money in their support of their family and wife or whatever it was, they were going to fail. And most of them were competent, could do it. But they realized the money pressure became the issue is why they had to leave. So that was the other thing I always looked at. When we brought in a recruiter who came from corporate, did that person have enough money to handle it for six months or a year making a low income? They've got to be competent and motivated to do it. Then they have to have the financial resources to do it as well and the family support to do it. Without the family support and the financial, they're going to fail.

Great, Great.

That's my good response without thinking about it, Jeff.

Well, I appreciate that. That's a great response. I guess I'll just kind of open it up. Let me describe to you really quickly our candidate process. So again, we're a franchisor. We candidates from a variety of sources. There's consultant groups in our industry who, who reach out to candidates who are maybe out of a job or looking for a new opportunity. Sometimes the candidates raise their hand. Sometimes these consultants reach out and tap the candidates on the shoulder and ask them, you know, say, hey, I'm, I'll advise you on, on your career. So they'll give them a personality assessment, they'll do an income and needs analysis, they'll ask them a series of questions about what they like to do, maybe performance or competency based, what have they done in the past, what do they like to do do? And then they'll introduce them to four or five different franchise opportunities and, and if there's a placement, they'll extract the fee from the franchisor for the pleasure. So it's kind of a recruiting thing as well. And then on the other side of the house we've got the Internet and comprehensive, you know, websites and landing pages and advertisements and the like to, to attract candidates to it. But generally, regardless of the source of the lead, we execute about an eight week process, about a 66 day process on average, starts with an application from them. So first of all we want to do a high level application to make sure that they're qualified for the opportunity financially. Maybe, you know, credit criminal. We just need to look at what the, you know, what are the basics and it looks like they're satisfied. But you also, you don't want to create too high, high of a hurdle early because you want to get in a conversation with these people. And then of course there's education about franchising, education about the industry, we're talking about education about the company, homefront brands and then, and then really down into the business and, and over time, you know, there's a series of hurdles that, that they go through. Financial qualification, doing a pro forma legal document review, talking to other franchisees. There's all these, it's a very structured process that they go through that culminates with a meet the team or confirmation day where they fly in and with a bunch of other candidates. And then after that it's, they kind of have to make a decision. It's a sales process and we want great candidates, but we've got salespeople, right, and they want to, they want to place deals. But it's really important down the road for the quality of the brand that we get the candidates, they're absolutely a best fit and going to do a good job with the brand and, and all of that. So I've tried to incorporate different assessments at different points in the process over the years. But you know, at the end of the day, are you really going to eliminate somebody before you get face to face with them? You know, it's very hard to determine in an entrepreneurial setting how hard people are going to work, what their heart is, what their needs are, you know, how Bad? Do they want it, do they want it as bad as they can breathe? Are they willing to do the work or it is an itch. They scratched and they scratch it and they're, they're, they're not doing the work. And I can tell you that you can never predict which candidates are going to be great. But do you think in the process that I described that your methods could help us select better candidates?

Well, there's two phases to that question. Given three minute overview of your process.

Yes.

I can't determine if it's any good or not, so let me just take that off the table.

Okay.

Can our process help in some way in a process that you've implement? There's absolutely no question about we help other people and franchisees to pull that off. If I just had to give you the glib response again based on what you said. How many franchisees do you have, Jeff? Just total number.

Couple hundred right now. Yeah.

Okay, so here's what I would say. Now, this is the engineer behind me. I would want to meet the best ones you've got, right, and say, okay, what did they do that made them the best? Then I'm going to try to say, okay, can I duplicate that in finding other people like that rather than start from scratch? I don't know if this started from scratch and the whole thing works. I don't know if you've seen enough good people, so I can't answer. That's why I said. But once I understand, okay, let me understand what it takes to be successful and why have these people been successful? That gives me a starting point. I said, okay, now what is the methodology in which I could find people and bring them through and design the process? So I would not design the process until I figured out what it took to be successful and why those people are successful? Then I define a process to find those people and make sure that I get the best ones in the process. So to me, the process is the last thing you do. You got to figure out, okay, what's the strategy? Or a lot of these people, where do you find them? You get them through referrals. Can you write a job posting to these recruiters? I mean, there's a whole host of ways to find them, but I don't know what success looks like, so I can't answer that. Your process is the right process.

Got it. Lou, is there anything that I should have asked you that I haven't or anything you'd care to share with the audience before we head towards wrapping up?

No, I'd say the issue that I say to people is that hiring should be a long term decision. Too many people focus on getting that person started on day one and all this criteria, what's the comp, what's this, what's that? But the real truth is people are successful based on intrinsic motivators. Do they really want to do that work? Is the circumstances, is it long term? So this is I said to the candidate many years ago and I say it all the time, don't make long term career decisions using short term data. Understand the job itself, what the challenges are and hire people motivated, competent to do it. And if you're a candidate, say is this a job I want for the long term, not for the start date package. Because you want it for the start date package. The probability is low that it's going to be successful. So that's what I say. Think long term. Don't make strategic decisions using tactical information.

That is a, that is a mouthful of truth and I really appreciate it. Lou, you've been incredibly successful. If you had one sentence to make an impact in someone's life, someone's journey, what would you offer them?

No, I think it's that term you hire, win, win, hire, hire for the anniversary date, not the start date.

Got it?

I think that's the one. I would say it's most important. Changing jobs is an important decision for the candidate. More important than the candidate in a company, maybe not your. But in general company screws up, they'll survive. Candidate screws up, that's not, it's. It's a damaging thing. So they got to think long term, not short term.

That's great Lou. Thank, thank you for sharing that with us today. And so how can people reach out to you if they are interested in talking to you about your services?

Well, I'm kind of semi retired so reach out if you want but I probably not going to do much and I say that semi superficially but it's kind of true. I have a book called hire with your head. Go to hirewithyourhead.com and I could see behind your back. I don't see my book on your bookcase Jeff, which come out. You might want to remodify that kind of put it up there. I see that is it. Well go to hirewithead.com and join our book club. We meet once every four to six weeks and we discuss different topics in the book club. You don't have to buy the book to join but you can join. That's the best way to connect with my company, hirewithyourhead.com join the book club and be part of understanding what it takes to make great career decisions, whatever side of the desk you're on.

Well, this has been brilliant, and we're very honored that you took the time with us here today. I'm sure you've helped a lot of people. You've certainly helped me rethink some of the things that we're doing in our hiring process. So really appreciate you being on and as always, this podcast brought to you by Homefront Brands, simply building the world's most responsible franchise platform. So reach out to us, reach out to lou, go to homefrontbrands.com, get connected with me through LinkedIn or on Instagram, and we will both be looking for you. Thank you very much.

Great. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you, Jim.

Okay, Lou, take care.