Episode 035: Conducting Effective Interviews

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show.

All right. Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. Glad to have you with us. Joining me today, Jeff Jenkins.

Josh, it's great to have you back in that seat, right?

You guys had a lot of fun without me last week though, man.

It's so uncomfortable doing the, like, leading the conversation. I'm just not made for it. That's you.

That's right, you're here for the, the color commentary.

Yeah, I'm here to make people laugh. That's the only reason, right?

Every, every Al McCoy needs a Cotton Fitzsimmons. Only Phoenix Suns fans know who we're talking about.

Well, Phoenix Suns fans who grew up in the '90s, I guess, '80s, '90s.

Malakoi's still going, he's going strong.

Yeah, but Cotton's not.

Yeah, true.

He's actually, you know, producing cotton.

Could be. So, uh, today we're going to talk about a fun episode, very timely topic. A lot of people are facing the, uh, the Great Realignment, as we call it. Great Resignation is another name it's been given. But you're probably going through and you're bringing on new team members and doing a lot of hiring and and interviewing. And we thought today, you know, it might be a great time for us to talk about how to conduct a good interview. You know, what, what a good interview process looks like. So we're not going to cover things like where to go find people and how do you recruit and how do you do all of that. You know, we're kind of assuming that you've gone through and you have somebody good that you want to, or at least, you know, that looks good on paper and you want to have a decent interview with. And what's your process look like and things like that. One of the things that we've seen, and I know this is especially true as you guys are out there trying to hire, is this idea of, you know, right now we're just kind of taking what we can get. We're in survival mode. You know, we've got our technician shortage, we've got a driver shortage. You know, basically our test, our interview process is, here, can you fog up a mirror? Perfect, you passed, and welcome to the company.

Ouch.

Yeah, it can be very difficult. Ouch. Right? You know, you just kind of take what you can get and you know, what's the saying? You get what you get and you don't pitch a fit.

Well, I heard that a lot as a kid.

Yep.

The funny thing about this is I actually have a feeling that this has been going on for years and years, way prior to the Great Resignation and everything else they're talking about right now. Like, everyone's taking what they can get. Well, you're taking what applies, right? So we already said we're not going to go into how to source and all that other stuff, but you're taking what applies for the position. And then out of those, a lot of people are taking the best candidate as opposed to taking the best fit for their company, right?

They're looking at skills versus— what's the, uh, skills versus smarts or skills versus fit?

Uh, they are because they want to hurry up and fill a position, and they think that a warm body is better than nobody, which isn't always the case.

We talk about all the time that when you do stuff like that, it really is like drinking salt water. You know, if you ever drink salt water, have you ever been out in the ocean? You know how nasty it tastes. But what ends up really happening is, you know, the story goes if you're ever stranded out on the ocean, you can't drink the salt water because you end up just getting more dehydrated than if you just hadn't had any water at all. And so the same thing happens when we hire somebody that's not a fit because we're just so desperate for a warm body, or we look at somebody and we hire them based off of their resume alone and we ignore all the other things that we're supposed to do during the interview process, that it ends up being like drinking salt water, that you end up hurting the company more in the long run than if you had just waited on the hire.

Yeah, I mean, I agree. I can count on numerous times that I was in the same predicament that a lot of you were probably in, where it's, hey, I just need a warm body to come in because I need work to get done, and having someone there is better than not. And I will tell you, 9 times out of 10, that doesn't work out, right?

It ends up being a negative to the company, you know, where things actually move slower, you have less productivity. It's all the things that you were hoping would happen it's the exact opposite.

Yes.

You know, reverses the polarity on the team almost. I know I've gone through this where I've rushed through a decision or rushed through a hiring process because I'm like, oh man, this is— they look terrific on paper. And I'll even have them come around, especially nowadays, you'll have people that really want a short interview process. And I had this once where we were interviewing a candidate, and I don't remember if it was a controller or one of our other VP slots. But basically, they were in a very competitive bid process, and they came in very early in our interview process. And as we were moving through, you know, like, we've got— we're very deliberate about our interview process. But within a week or two, you know, she had come back and she was already pushing like, hey, I've got 3 other offers on the table, you know, when are you going to have a decision made? And We just said, we're not ready for you. We have a process that we go through and you're too far downstream. You need to go figure out what's best for you. We'll move on with these other candidates. Fast or, I guess, rewind a little bit before that, and I had made the mistake of, well, shoot, we're going to lose this candidate. And it was really, it was a move of desperation, just like being on that raft and being totally thirsty and you drink the salt water. That, you know, we ended up making the hire, but it totally wasn't the right fit. But we made the hire because on paper this candidate looked incredible. It was a terrific skill fit for the job, had great ideas, but we hadn't taken the time to make sure it was a good culture fit. One, we didn't even know what our culture was. So, you know, there was an issue there. But it didn't take very long for us to realize, man, this just is not fun. This is not fun. It's not working. We're just sitting here, we're going backwards, and we would have been better off not making that hire at all than bringing somebody in who really nailed the job but was not good with the people.

Yeah, I'm like reflecting just on my time here and the interviews that we've done with some of our team and how we've met some people and we're like, yeah, they're good, you know, we can see them being a fit on the team, and then you interview someone else and they blow you away.

Yep.

And they're a perfect fit. Well, if we jump the gun and we go for that person that we thought was okay, that we're not totally in love with, you can miss out on a better opportunity. Now, this doesn't mean you need to stall, always hoping there's someone better, but if you love somebody, that's usually the right decision. But if you've got things that are red flags to you, you just run. The, the, you know, I think we get into a space where we justify certain things. With people because we need somebody. Yep. They, they, oh, they probably meant this instead of actually how I heard it, or, you know, whatever the case may end up being. And, you know, it's just like today I looked at a resume and this person hadn't had a job for more than 2 years for the last, you know, 15 years. And to me, that's a red flag, right?

Yeah. And that's probably the first step in the interview process is just looking for patterns, looking for things like that as you're looking at the resumes. You know, not necessarily looking at what jobs they've had, but things like, you know, what skills have they learned, what type of companies have they worked for, how long have they worked for those companies, because that tells you a lot about a candidate as well. I think back to, you know, going back to the rushing on an interview process. We were just hiring a new controller, and I remember going through this process where we actually, you know, we had our controller resign and we were going through, and within about a month, we had identified our top candidates, had gone all the way through the interview process, and we just didn't love any of them. We ended up restarting that entire search a month in.

Yep.

And that was painful. Like, that was painful. You're just like, oh man, we've put so much time and energy into this, and I don't want to start over, uh, you know. But we, we all felt like, nope, we just need to do this again. And so we did, and we ended up finding 3 even better candidates than the ones we had originally sourced. You know, like we were ready to make an offer to somebody and thankfully they kind of like said, "Hey, I don't think this is really the right role for me," because that ended up getting us the controller we ended up did hiring. And so having patience in the process and making sure that you have a good thorough process in and of itself can save you so much headache from rushing and you know, a hiring decision.

Yeah, and in that process, you know, there was someone who we really liked who was offered another job.

Yeah.

And we told them we weren't ready to make a decision, so they took that other job and we missed out on them. But like you just said, you know, we're very happy with what we have, so we feel we made the right decision even though we lost out on someone who was a good fit for us.

And I think the mindset is the critical part of that, you know, is when you have a We talk about a scarcity mindset versus a growth mindset. When you have a scarcity mindset, you know, resources are finite, you're never going to get another shot at this person. It's a very negative mindset. And what happens when you get into a scarcity mindset is you start operating out of fear. And so when a candidate like that comes to you and says, hey, I'm going to go, I've got another job offer, um, you know, like, I, I need this from you if you're going to keep me on the, on the roster, so to speak. A scarcity mindset says, oh my gosh, we have to pull out all the stops, abandon all hope. We need to go get this candidate or else we're never going to get another candidate like this and we're going to be totally up a creek. A growth mindset, on the other hand, has more of an open mindset to how they approach hiring and they say, well, if it doesn't work out with this candidate, it'll work out with a different one down the road. This will not be the end of the road. We'll just keep figuring it out until it works. And so if you can change your mindset and how you approach the interview process, you'll realize that there's no such thing as the perfect candidate. There's just a lot of really good candidates. And even if you miss on this one, you should be able to go find another one that's just as good, if not better.

I agree 100%. Like, there's not a single person who isn't replaceable. There are other qualified people in every single role that you could possibly have. So don't, don't rush it. Don't make a bad mistake to start off with because you will end up regretting it and you'll be back at that exact same spot you were in a few months down the road. Yep.

I like that you say everybody's replaceable, and that's true from the very bottom to the very top. One of the things I love looking back is, you know, the history of our company. When my dad died, you know, like, that was a huge part of the company that all of a sudden was gone. And yet here we are, the company's surviving and thriving. Nobody's replaceable, you know, even somebody that seems so critical to the operation. The company will find a way to survive without that person. They will find a way to survive without it because the company itself is its own living organism. It finds ways to heal itself. It finds ways to fill holes because it needs to keep going. So, like, I really love that thought. It's always been a lesson to me is that I'm totally replaceable, that if something were to happen to me, I know without a doubt that this would continue moving forward. It might change. It might be different than the direction I would have taken it, but it will continue. So something to always keep in mind with your position as well, you know, if you're hiring is do you have people that you're grooming and hiring for your position? And what does it look like after you leave? Are you hiring the type of people that are going to continue what you're building, or are you hiring just anybody off the street that they could come in and shut it down tomorrow and it wouldn't make a difference to anybody? So one of the things as we look at— it's a really hot topic right now. Which is interview length. And not really interview length as it is the number of interviews you go through. I see so many polls on LinkedIn that talk about, you know, the number of interviews. You know, if you've got a 60-step interview process, it's too much. 60-step is, is too much.

It's kind of a joke.

You know, but the, like, the big trend right now is that you should be able to interview and make a hire within 1 to 2 interviews.

See, which is so weird to me because I can fake for a short period of time and not be my true self. Now we do some, there's some things when we interview that kind of gets people out of a comfort zone a little bit, right? But to say that, hey, I'm going to do an initial phone screen with someone, whether it's a Zoom call or just a phone call, talk to them to see if they're a fit, then bring them in, and after one interview thinking that they're a perfect fit for us and that we can move forward with them. It's not very plausible. Now, I think that a lot of people, when they talk about a lengthy interview process, it's less the number of interviews and more how long that whole process takes.

Right? Is this a 6-week process or a 2-week process?

Exactly.

Right. But I have, like, a lot of the polls that I've seen are really like, hey, I don't want to interview you more than once or twice, which is just crazy to me. You know, and like, not even from an employer standpoint, set that aside for a second. If I'm looking for a job, it's going to take me more than 1 to 2 interviews to figure that out. Now, I can tell you right off the bat if you're a no, right? Like, I can spot somebody who's definitely not a fit, and, you know, it can rule people out pretty quickly in 1 to 2 interviews. But once you get past that 1 to 2 and you're like, yeah, you could be a good fit, it's that could be a good fit part that you have to kind of to dry down into and make sure that you're not being, you know, having the wool pulled over your eyes, or that what you're seeing is really what you're getting.

Yeah, so I actually take that 1 to 2 interviews very literal. Like, me personally, I don't want to do more than 2 interviews, but that person should be interviewed by more than just me, right? So that, that candidate will have multiple interviews with different people so that you can get an overall different perspective on that person to see if they're a good fit, not just for you, right, but for other people that are also stakeholders in that business.

You definitely want to have them meet people they'll be working with on a day-to-day basis, you know, having them interact with them, you know, in as natural a setting as you can create, just to see what the camaraderie looks like, just to see, you know, is this something that will work? Is there chemistry there, or is this like, this is just going nowhere? Yeah, we had a really fun, you know, we've been interviewing for a couple positions here at RTA and, you know, going through this process very recently. You know, there's candidates that actually got through the phone screen and got through the initial call, and then, you know, we bring them in for the in-person interview with the team, and all of a sudden it's like, oh wow, who's this person? Where'd they come from? You just recognize really quickly that, okay, and in one case, like, my gut had told me a particular thing about this individual, but I gave him the more the benefit of the doubt. But because I had built layers into our interview process, the safety net— each layer is another safety net and it keeps you from really making a bigger mistake. And in this case, we got through to the team interview and the team interview came back and says, yeah, no. And it confirmed a lot of what I saw in my one-on-one, that I was making excuses for the candidate and like, ah, no, but all these other things, all these other factors, let's bring her in and see, you know, what, how she does. Other than that, it turned out to be totally spot on. My gut was right, and the team really helped like bring that out.

I think a lot of people, like, especially when you're doing an interview, like, you like the person in general. So you like the person, you're like, man, I'd love to have them on my team, but they may not be the best fit for that role, that job, that company. So there's a lot of people I could hang out with outside of work there, you know, that I could not actually work with. Just because of whatever reason. So we've got to take ourselves out of that "like this person" and more along the lines of "does it help the company move forward?" Yeah, I do think you have to be able to like the person.

I think there's an element of, you know, especially if you're going to be spending a lot of time with them, if they constantly grate on you or if you just— eventually you're going to start resenting somebody you don't like.

Yeah, well, when I say like, I don't mean that like you hate them. But they're a good fit. When I say not— don't just because you like them, like them, right? They don't have the necessary skills, but I like them, so I'm going to bring them on just because of my personal feeling towards them, right?

So just like you wouldn't hire somebody just purely off a skill set, don't also hire them just because they're a great interactor, right?

Great interviewee.

Yeah, right. Um, again, we've seen that too before where people are, you know, they have a super— we tell it, you know, we talk about the DiSC profiles— they have a very high I very outgoing, charismatic. They like people. They're very likable. And we've seen it where likable people will get further in interviews. But once you start drilling down past the surface level and get into the deep meat of a job, all of a sudden you realize that the personality only goes so far.

Yeah, well, because a lot of people, a lot of people, most everybody, when you fill out a resume, you try to make yourself look great, even better than you actually are. Everyone does it. There's not a single person that doesn't. So you're going off of these highlights or these accomplishments that they're saying. When you get into the interview process, that's a really good time to drill into that and actually see how they accomplish those things, if they really did accomplish those things. And I'm thinking back into an interview that we had recently where someone had, you know, 3 bullet points. Hey, these are the highlights of my career. And when you start asking follow-up questions on those, there's no substance whatsoever.

Or they couldn't answer the question. Like, that was my favorite is, you know, I'm going to answer your question with a completely different answer. I'm going to say what I really wanted to say to the question I hoped you asked me, not the question you really just did ask me.

Right.

And that's, you know, like a telltale sign right there. You're going to have problems later on if you hire this person. Um, so yeah, that was actually a very fun experience. The even better part was, you know, when we did release that candidate, you know, we call it releasing is when you tell a candidate they're no longer being considered for a position. You know, it was the response that we got back from that, and it just totally confirmed everything we thought about this individual that, yep, okay, we made a great decision here. We dodged a bullet by exposing some of that, and it was a really great Interview process, it worked exactly as intended.

Yep.

So I guess it makes sense for us, you know, as if you're listening, then some of the steps that we put into our interview process and some things that you might include in yours. We've been talking about the phone screen, which pretty much after we get the resume and a job application, you know, I'm actually looking before I even make that phone call. I'm looking for things like the intangibles, you know, did they, how did they apply? You know, we'll go post on Indeed, we'll go post on LinkedIn. How did they apply? Did they send me a follow-up message in addition to the application, or was it just a one-click apply?

Yep.

Because there's some really easy ways to apply to jobs now where it requires no effort, and you'll just go through and they'll just click, click, click, apply, click, apply, click, apply, and they're just farming. You know, they're trying to find anything that kicks back and says, I might be a fit, I might not, but they're not doing any work themselves. And for us, hunger is a huge part of our culture. So I naturally want people that are going to take initiative and, you know, kind of go above and beyond just clicking the button. And so I love seeing personalized cover letters. I love, you know, if they send me a personal message on LinkedIn, if they look at my profile on LinkedIn, it tells me they're digging in a little bit deeper. They want to know more. You know, the way we write our job ads is another thing. We'll do a whole nother episode on that one. But it really goes into— it's triggering it. We want you to reach out and be engaging. So I'm looking at things like that. Indeed has a really cool thing where you do a phone screen, a pre-phone screen. They actually have a set of questions that you can record answers to and submit that to the employer.

Yep.

And so I'll look at that. Did they go through and take the, you know, and answer the questions? You know, did they send a voice response back through the platform? And it's just those little things that can separate, you know, when you get this last job that we posted, we had 80 applicants. How do you segregate 80 applicants without going through every single resume? And even then, a lot of them all look the same. Well, I'll tell you what, is the 20 who stood out were the ones that submitted a very personalized cover letter, submitted a, you know, their voice recordings about why they're a good fit for the job and just answering some pre-screening questions. You know, and those kinds of things help you stand out. The next process, we usually do like a quick 30-minute phone screen, and we're really diligent, like, don't go over 30 minutes. The temptation is to keep the conversation going. Stop it right there because, you know, especially early on, you're talking to a lot of candidates. This example, we had 80 applicants. We took that down to 20 candidates. I did phone screens with 22 22 different people for this job, which is probably still too many, but it was one of those weird job ads where it didn't really get moving for about a week. And so I had phone screens set up, and then all of a sudden all these candidates started flooding in. And yeah, so we ended up doing 22 phone screens, but had I not limited it to 30 minutes, I would have been spending, you know, 22 hours. That's 3 full working days just doing phone screens. And I'm hiring one candidate. Yeah, 3 days to hire one candidate. And so keep it limited. If you like this person and you like the conversation, you'll have an excuse to continue it later. Now's not the time. Right now you're just going off of, okay, your resume was decent enough. Now let's validate some of what we saw on the resume. And do you even enjoy talking to this person? Because if the, if the personality is not there, it doesn't come through, and this is somebody you've got to work with side by side, it's going to be a rough go. So you definitely have to find people that you can engage with.

Yeah, I— so on that, on just on the phone screen, I usually spend like the first 5 minutes or so telling them about the position, about the company. You'd hope they would do the research. Sometimes they don't.

Yep.

Um, and then, you know, ask questions just to see if they're a fit. And I always leave the last 10 minutes for them to ask questions.

Yes.

And that's a big qualifier for me on whether I actually take them into the next step. Which is to do the face-to-face interview, because if they don't have any questions for me, that tells you right away. Yes.

And that's it. You know, normally when we're going through that process, we will ask that because we want to see what questions have they come up with? What are they thinking? Where's their mindset at? What's important to them? You know, if I've got somebody asking about benefits and salary and all that in the very first interview, it tells me that they're probably looking at the wrong things. You know, we're not looking for a good position. What we're looking for is, you know, a good paycheck. Yeah. And then as soon as somebody else comes along with a better paycheck, guess what? They're out. I don't want that. You know, we want somebody that's really excited about the role, excited about the opportunity. We're going to qualify and I'm going to talk about comp in that very first interview and make sure if we've got a budgeted range, you know, hey, you know, we're looking at offering somewhere between, you know, $40,000 and $60,000 for this position. Are you within that range? I'm not getting into specifics. I just need to make sure you're comfortable. We have gotten all the way through an interview process once where I had put it in the job offer. I had put it in the job ad and in the details and everywhere, but this candidate just hadn't seen it. We got all the way through the interview process and he just brings it up. He says, hey, you know, we haven't talked comp at all. I'm like, oh yeah, well, I put it in the job ad. Oh. Well, I didn't see that. Okay, well, this is the range that we're looking at. And then he just kind of stares for a second. Okay, well, that's significantly less than what I'm making now. I'm like, well, that really sucks.

He was a good candidate too.

Great candidate. And so he had a decision. Was he going to take a significant pay cut to come work for us? Or was it, you know, like this just wasn't the right fit for him? It ended up working out for us, but it could have been a total disaster. And so now one of the things I always do is that very first phone screen: Did you read the job ad? Did you see there's a salary range? And are you comfortable in that range? And you want to make sure that they're comfortable in that range because you don't want to have somebody come in that is 20-30% higher and now all of a sudden they're taking a pay cut and they— because they really desperately want to work for your company and they love everything you're about and love what you're doing. And then, you know, 6 months down the road, they can't pay their mortgage and they have to quit and they got to find another job, you know, because at some point economic reality just sets in.

Yep.

So those are the things we usually cover during a phone screen, you know, what kind of questions they have for us. I love it when they talk about, you know, culture, vision, mission, you know, when those are things that they're looking for more than comp, more than benefits. As soon as I get somebody asking about, well, what's your, you know, what's your time off look like? Yeah, you know, red flag, red flag right there. And that's why I give them the opportunity. You know, I'm not here to do a gotcha. I'm not here for trap questions, but I'm definitely going to give you the opportunity to make a fool out of yourself and just make it easier for me because I'm looking at 22 candidates and they're all decent. So please help me separate yourself. I love that you lead off with talking about the job, talking about the company. Because that's the next thing that I like doing is actually, you know, we'll give them an opportunity to self-select out. If this isn't the right job for them, if this isn't the right company for them, please make my job easier and say, "Yeah, I'm out." And we've had a couple candidates that have done that. In fact, one of the things we've gone so far— I'm going to skip ahead here. So the next interview we usually do is we bring them in in person.

Yep.

Lately we've been doing— I've been doing more Zoom, in-person than anything, but we'll do Zoom, in-person, or we'll do like— I like going to lunch. Lunch is very nice that you can meet at a neutral site and it just kind of helps keep the conversation going. But we'll go through and you do that. And again, same thing. You can dive a little bit deeper into the job qualifications, dive into specific experiences that they've gone through. But then the whole time you're focusing, there's got to be a balance between the skills and the culture. And so like, I end up in that interview, I start balancing between both. I'm looking at skill set and I'm looking at culture and I'm trying to balancing those two. And again, we'll take that. So in this case, we went from the 20, I got down to 8 that I went to one-on-one stage with. And then the whole time you're just trying to narrow it down, narrow the field, narrow the field, so you get to the point where you have about What I usually like to do is have about 3 candidates that I bring to my executive team, and then I give them kind of a choice between 3. And I like having 3 because I'll go in with a leading candidate, and this happened this time. I had a leading candidate that I was going through. We went into the team interview with 3 different candidates. We ended up bringing a 4th in. But of those candidates, my leading candidate ended up not being the one that fit best with the team. And so had I just made my decision without their input, it wouldn't have been good. And had I only given them the first 2 candidates on the list, we wouldn't have offered the 3rd candidate. So it's one of those things. I always like a choice of 3s. You know, I don't know if it's the 3-legged stool or what there is, but I'm sure there's some magical—

Third time's a charm.

Maybe. But I like having things that you can compare and contrast. A good, better, best type of thing. You know, where you're not just, well, I have choice A or choice B and they both feel terrible. Like, no, out of all these, like, I felt like this one was the best. So in, in my history of hiring, I've always found that I hire my best candidates when I look at more than 2 candidates, when I have the team look at more than 2.

Yeah, and 3 is a good number. I mean, it gives you a compare and contrast against them. And heck, you know, through this process we even talked about you know, if the one candidate that we liked wasn't someone who's going to accept the job, let's go look for different options because we didn't know if the other ones would be that fit that you talk about.

Yeah.

Which would have put us way back from where we were.

It would have reset the calendar, but again, growth mindset. We know that we would have eventually found them. I mean, shoot, we had 80 applicants. Yeah. And you never know. One of the things too, as you're releasing candidates each step of the way, is don't ghost people. Like, this is something that just drives me crazy in today's age is ghosting. Yeah, employers do this all the time to job candidates and they wonder why recruiting has such a bad rap. It's because we constantly ghost them, you know, we're not going to talk to them or do anything like that. If you've applied, you're getting a rejection email, right? Like, it, it's not going to be super personalized or anything like that, but you're getting something just to say, hey, we filled the position. If we've had a conversation, then you're getting an email from me. If we've gone all the way to where we've done a one-on-one interview and you've gone through the team interview, you're getting a phone call. You know, at each step of the way, as it gets more of an investment, you're getting a more personalized release. The key here is that you never want to burn bridges. You want to release them in as graceful a way as possible that still protects their dignity and, you know, just kills your own. Because you never know. We've had it where we've hired somebody, it was the wrong fit. We released that candidate back to the job pool and then we had to go hire again and we ended up going back to a prior candidate that like, hey, this actually, this ended up working out for both of us that they were still in the market and now we were back in the market. And so we've been able to do that before. But had we burned the bridges and just done it very coldly or ghosted them, it would have been very awkward. It just wouldn't have been an option for us.

Yeah, I think one of the things too that's important about that follow-up process when you don't select someone is giving them feedback as to why. Are there things they did or they said or their mannerism? What was it that, you know, made it that you didn't select them? Like, you know, some of the candidates that we've talked to that, you know, just had different things that they did, they should know that. So when they continue their job search, they can correct those things and hopefully get a job somewhere else. Yeah, that's just being kind and actually you know, caring about those people and wanting them to get employment.

Right. And I usually won't offer that unsolicited, but I will offer it all the time. If you'd love to hear more about why we didn't select you, you know, I've got notes and I'm more than happy to have a conversation. Not necessarily something I'll always lead off with because some of them, they don't care. They don't want to hear it. They're hurt. And so they might not be in a healthy place to hear that type of feedback. Others, you know, I've had ask me that question is, "Oh, you know, I would love to know why because I'm really disappointed I didn't get this job." And then we'll have a quick conversation. And if you do it in the right way, you know, I know there's HR lawyers out there right now that are just cringing that, "Oh my gosh, you can't tell them why because now you're opening yourself up to lawsuits and discrimination." If you do it in the right way, you handle it with grace and dignity, it just goes a long way to treating people like people. And they can appreciate that.

Yeah, well, I'm probably a little bit more cruel than you because I will just offer it when I tell them I don't select.

See, whereas I'm more empathetic. Yeah, you may not want to hear this right now, so you tell me if you want to hear this, I'll give it to you.

Well, I don't, I don't say it like, hey, you were just a douche, so you can't, you know, it's not that.

It's right, this isn't for you.

It's, hey, you know, you were asked this question and how you answered it just was not a fit with our culture, or, you know, you didn't have any substance behind your answers. I mean, there's things that you can talk about.

Well, another, so this is another reason why I do unsolicited, or I'd give it solicited feedback versus unsolicited. We had a candidate that we did reject and we got a lot of unsolicited feedback.

Yes, we did.

Right. And it just comes off as a little bit bitter and a little bit cold and a little bit— yeah. And so it's one of those things that, you know, you try to be empathetic about and just see where that's at. And if you got great rapport with this person, then, you know, you want to carry that relationship. Okay, so we do the phone screen, one-on-one, team interview. In between them, I'm usually sending things along the lines of, you know, like DiSC profiles, behavior assessments like Predictive Index or Kolbe. There's a lot of different things you can do to sprinkle into the process. And again, you're just trying to get a bigger picture of who this candidate is and how they're going to fit into the bigger team. You don't have to do any of those steps. You can just do the, the in-person interviews, but then what you're doing is you're hiring people that are just really good at the interview process.

Yes.

And so you need to make sure you do some skills assessment or some type of, you know, balance to it that makes it so that, you know, you might have somebody that really sucks at interviews but really crushes the job duties. So make sure that you're kind of taking those into consideration. One of the key things that I like to do, and this thing has worked wonders so far, is I actually have a culture primer that I've created.

It's fantastic.

Where we basically, we lay out, here's our core values, here's our mission, here's where we're going, here's what we're doing, here's who we serve. And it basically outlines all the steps that, like, what it means to be a team member here at RTA. And really specifically, it puts it on the candidate that, hey, if you don't fit any of this, please, please, please don't come work here because you're going to be miserable and you're going to make everybody else miserable. And so it really helps open the candidate's eyes to like what it means to be at RTA. And put themselves in those shoes and imagine themselves here. And am I going to be happy? And we really want to go into this full transparency where we're at, rather than them coming in and then being totally blindsided by something that we didn't say in the interview process.

Yeah, I actually will take them through the culture primer when we're together on that one-on-one.

Oh, interesting.

So I'll send it to them and then we'll talk about it a little bit more in depth, you know, like, hey, how do you What do you feel is your biggest strength for our 3 core values, or which one do you need the most work on? And then we'll go through the 5 dysfunctions of a team and just a very high-level, each, I guess, bullet point on your culture primer, just so they better understand. Because some people look at that and they're like, that sounds good, but they don't fully understand.

They don't understand it. Yeah. Not deeply. And it's critical that they do understand it because one of my questions during every interview process, at some point I will ask this question. And it's, are you comfortable being held to the standard? Are you comfortable being held accountable to this culture and being a part of it? Because this is how we do reviews. This is how we talk to each other. This is how we evaluate one another. And if you're not comfortable with that, this is again going to be a really bad place for you to work.

Yeah. The biggest one that we hit is the conflict, the absence of conflict and how people are so adverse.

Too nice, not kind. Yes.

You know, to wanting to confront people for the better of the organization. That's, that's a very uncomfortable thing, and there's just a lot of personalities that just cannot do it.

Yeah, so we— and we have had— this is how I know it works is because we've had candidates that have gone through the one-on-one and gone through a team interview, and they're almost ready to meet with me. And this is something else too, like, as the CEO, we're still a small company, so I can afford to do this. I meet with every single candidate that comes through the doors. 30 minutes usually, nothing too crazy, but I'm always the final check on anybody coming in to meet, you know, just in regular line-level support, engineering, sales. They're usually going to sit down with me at some point. For the executive team, my final check is my wife, and I make sure that, hey, I just want to make sure I didn't miss anything. And she's usually like my gut check, my conscience, my little Jiminy Cricket that's like, yeah, no, that's not going to work. And that's something that we'll take them out to dinner, just an informal process and get to know who they are. If they've got a significant other, we love bringing them in as well, just to get to know who they are at a deeper level than just, "Here's how I show up to work." Surface. And the idea there is that what happens at work affects what happens at home and what happens at home affects what happens at work. And we've had candidates who their spouse was not happy about them coming to work for RTA. And even though they were really excited about it, they weren't happy. We hired them anyway. And what ended up happening is the spouse, you know, and the whole time, every time they come home from work late, every time they come home from work stressed, well, you know, if you weren't working at RTA and you were back over here, you'd be so much happier. And that type of negativity, instead of getting reinforced and, you know, positivity when they go home, it was all negative. What do you think is going to happen in 6 months or a year?

Gone.

Gone because they've got no support for the role. And so we want to make sure that the spouse of any candidate feels like they've been heard. Like, hey, do you have any concerns with, you know, your wife or your husband coming to work for us? What matters to you in their job? You know, what matters to you about the company they work for? And so we want to make sure that they're here, that we understand their perspective, and we help identify spouses that just, yeah, that they're really not going to enjoy this.

Yeah. It's a very interesting perspective for you to have your wife interview. I've never heard of that before or seen it.

I can't take credit for the idea. I got to give that to Dave Ramsey.

Oh, well, I mean, your wife's got great genetics, so I can see why you would rely on her. But it's just a very interesting concept. I've never thought about that until you told me that that's what you did. Yeah, I mean, it's great.

Yeah, and it— and honestly, just taking a candidate out to dinner is a great idea anyways because they usually relax a little bit more. Um, you know, if you're into drinking, then, you know, a beer does a lot of wonders.

Yeah.

Um, you know, we don't drink, so that's usually not something we go into. Uh, and the candidates probably appreciate that because, uh, you know, loose lips sink ships sometimes, right?

Um, well, honestly, if you're getting sloshed when you're interviewing someone as a candidate, I'm like, yeah, I'm not working there.

We We talked about emotional intelligence, right? Like, so, you know, probably not very emotionally intelligent, not very smart.

Yeah.

But, you know, we look at that and that really is like our whole process. And so, yeah, and it's helped us keep the, you know, keep the ship afloat, make sure that the people we're bringing in live, breathe the core values, live, breathe the mission, you know, that they want to be here for the right reasons. And so it's one of those things that, you know, we talk about the difference between, hey, can you fog up a mirror versus, hey, can you jump through, you know, 6 different stages of interview? And we can compress it. We could do it in 2 weeks. I've done it in 2 weeks before. It's not super fun, but you can definitely crank through the interview process and, you know, the number of steps that you're doing. But if you're looking around and you're finding that, man, we just have— we're just bringing on random people and like they just— we've got a really big turnover problem or we have a huge employee engagement problem. The answer is not the most popular one. The answer is you need to add more steps to your process.

It is. Just make sure that when you add those steps, you're not stretching out the total time frame, right? Don't do a 6-week process. No, you know, you won't have any candidates by the end of 6 weeks. No, you won't. You're— all you're doing is punting and making it more difficult for them. If someone was taking me through the process and it was taking 6 weeks Um, I'd probably bounce.

Yeah, I know for us, and it all depends on timing and things like that, but we've had most of our processes 4 weeks, you know, 1 week for the phone screens, 1 week to do the, the 1-on-1 interviews, and then we can usually get those last 2 or 3 interviews done that 3rd week. Yeah, but scheduling is what it is. We were really smart and we were hiring over the holidays, which if you thought it was really easy to juggle schedules before You try to doing it over like Thanksgiving break and all of a sudden things get real fun.

A little complex.

Yeah, especially if you're planning out-of-town trips and things like that the first week of December. So, um, I think that's good. That's, uh, we pretty much hit that topic about all the different interviews and, and how to do it.

Well, and I would just say if you are interested as listeners about more about our process, just reach out to us. Yeah, I mean, we're more than happy to share information.

You know, I forgot the biggest thing that we do in the team interview.

The cards?

The cards. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the things that we really like to do is to help put candidates more at ease so we get more natural responses instead of the ones they rehearsed in front of the mirror 30 times. And so that they're not so nervous because we've had candidates like that too that come into the process and they're so on edge and so nervous that they just, they're talking a mile a minute or they're really quiet and they don't really answer very well. You know, they give you a quick answer but not really deep.

Yeah.

So what we do is we play cards. You know, I think we're going to switch it up. We'll probably switch to Uno or something like that that requires a little less brain power. But we've played games like Scum. I do a game called Trash, which is basically, you know, like a rummy-style game where you're doing flipping over one card at a time. Um, you know, but anything like that that doesn't take a lot of things, but it keeps your hands busy and it keeps you also kind of focused on the flow of the game. And what that does is it just helps A, relax your mind, and B, it helps the candidates be more open, more honest, more genuine, and that's good for everybody.

And less rehearsed.

Much less rehearsed. And there's just something fun about when you're playing in a team setting and you play a game of cards. There's a natural camaraderie that comes out in that. That you can really see how are they going to react when things get stressful, or how are they going to react when things are, you know, just natural between the team. What's their natural reaction when, you know, when Jeff says something off the cuff? Because that never happens, but how do they react to that? So we love, we love doing cards as some of that, but they also see how the team interacts.

Yeah, in a much more loose environment, which also helps them to make a decision.

Right, because otherwise they're just going off of the questions that are asked and, you know, they never really get to get a sense of who these people are that they're working with. We've heard other examples given. I know that Patrick Lencioni talks about taking people to the grocery store, you know, just on errands. Like, hey, let's just go run some errands together real quick. He has another test that— imagine if you were having to sit in an airport with this person. Would you like taking this person on a cross-country flight? You know, like, would you like sitting next to them in a seat in the airplane for 2 or 3 hours? Because you're going to be sitting next to them on a metaphorical airplane, the company, for a while, for years.

Yep.

You know, so if you can't handle a 2 or 3 hour plane ride, you probably can't handle a 40-hour work week. And so, like, I was like that. Yeah, it costs a little bit of money to fly people, but if it's worth, it's worth doing it if you miss a bad hire.

So it's a juice worth the squeeze.

Yep. All right, well, let's wrap that up. So closing, we have the Fleet Success coming up summit, right? We're going to be talking about stuff like this at Fleet Success Summit, April 20th, 21st, out here at Mesa, Arizona, at the Sheraton Mesa Sheraton, uh, right by the home of, uh, Chicago Cubs spring training, right next door.

So not that we're Cubs fans, but no.

We're just going to leave that like that. That's going to be a fun awkward silence. Nobody wants to talk about Cubs fans.

Leave it alone.

That's poor people. Uh, I mean, it could be worse. They could be Diamondbacks fans.

Well, that's just Arizona sports fans in general.

Hey, but this year it's been a good year. You know, Monday wasn't a good day. Uh, so anyway, fleetsuccesssummit.com. Come out, register. We're gonna have some speaker announcements up there real quick.

Yep.

Uh, we're lining up all kinds of awesome speakers for you guys. Any interest or anything like that, fleetsuccesssummit.com, April 20th, 21st. Tell your friends, tell your coworkers, come out and be a part of the summit. As always, spread the word about the podcast. Love that you guys listen to us. And any feedback, any questions that you guys have for us, submit it to podcast@rtafleet.com.

Sounds great. Hey guys, word of advice, don't hire to fire. We out.

Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Fleet Success Show. If you liked our show, we'd appreciate your 5-star review. Be sure to subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and come hang out with us anywhere on social media at Fleet Success. See you next time.