Stop Hiring the Wrong People, Use This Interview Structure Instead | Kevin "KD" Dorsey | Ep. 287 (Lead)

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Everybody. And welcome to this leadership episode of 30 Minutes to President's Club. My name is Armand Froak and I'm here with my co host, Nick Skelski and we are back in Studio with KD. He has run over four $100 million sales orgs, two unicorns, and he's currently the CRO over at finally and has probably put on the single most tactical episode on hiring we've ever done. Nick, why should people listen?

There's a couple different things you're going to get from Katie about how he thinks about hiring. One, you're going to learn why he tells applicants the questions he's going to ask in the interview in advance. Two, he gets into how he defines the ideal candidate profile and how he screens candidates using things like video submissions and having two managers interview one person as opposed to the typical one on one interview. And then in the end we get into the best and worst type of interview questions to ask. Phenomenal episode about hiring. Let's get into it.

Alrighty, kd, welcome back to the show. You know, it's been a long time since we've had you back on the show, so I need to remind you that every show starts with your top three actual takeaways. So let's get your three.

I woke up thinking about these three takeaways. I'm going through it right now. So number one key takeaway is define what you're actually looking for and like really define it. Too many companies, if you were to talk to the VP versus the director versus the manager in terms of what they are looking for, you will get completely different answers across the board. And that is what's going to cause a very, very dysfunctional setup of a team. You have to define what am I actually looking for both in terms of experience, culture, but then also going into number two is the characteristics. You have to define what you're looking for and then you actually have to make sure that you are screening for characteristics, not just experience. Too often people like, oh, they've got five years experience over here, they're going to be great. And like I use the word experience as code word for we can't train you. Like, if you're just looking for people that have experience, it means you don't know how to train your people. Right. And so they miss out on the characteristics required to succeed because they're focused too much on the experience. You miss out on great candidates, but also you hire people that were never going to succeed at your org. And then the third tip on Here is, then you have to build the interview process in a way that actually lets you know whether or not these people have these skills. Right? You know, I have my own company I work at. I get to, to go into companies over the past year. HubSpot, Atlassian, Clearwater Analytics, Presidio, Personio, Databird. Like, I get to go into these companies and I get to talk about interviewing. And it's like, hey, so like, do you have a structured interview process with set questions that everyone knows what a good answer is? Oh, right. So then the, the process doesn't even match what you're looking for. So those would be my big three define what you're looking for, characteristics over experience, and then a process that actually can screen for what you're looking for for.

Well, you got so excited, you gave us all three takeaways in the first one, right?

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I want to zoom in on the definition of what I guess good looks like for the profile that you're looking for. And one of the things that I've been confused about in the past is if I think about if I were hiring a rep, what I would want a rep to be. I think of someone who is Superman or superwoman, right? And I'm thinking of someone who's going to freaking knock it out of the park and teach me. And then I look at what we're Actually able to pay. And I'm like, those things don't always match up when you're thinking about the definition. How do you reconcile those things? And maybe you could give me an example of what a good definition looks like versus a bad definition.

If we talk about, you know, what you can pay versus what you can get, that actually only applies to experience. It does not apply to characteristics. So if you can't pay much, then you can't pay for experience. So you have to be focused heavily on the characteristics that lead to success. And you all know this. I'm very granular things. So even like, oh, I want Superman. Well, what. What does that actually mean?

Right?

What are the characteristics of Superman that could be fearless, unfallible, unbreakable, bounces back easily, strong, confident. It's defining the characteristics of what that actually looks like. You can pay for experience, but you can find the characteristics of the people. No company I have worked for has ever paid top dollar on the market. In fact, quite often, we've almost always been on the lower end when. When I join. So it's like, I pay for experience, but you can get characteristics at any level.

So you gave me a couple characteristics that you might look for. What is a bad definition?

Sound like, oh, goodness. So people like confidence.

I'm looking for a confident rep. That's it.

Cool. The hell does that mean? Actually, I'm gonna ask you all to do this. You're gonna write this down, then you're gonna read it.

Okay. Rasher is on.

Very, very common characteristic that people look for in salespeople is grit. I want you to write down your definition of grit. All right, Nick, what do you got? How do you define gritty?

So I wrote down three things. One, someone who's gritty, they exhibit discipline. They're willing to do what they don't want to do, even when they don't want to do it. In addition, they're able to navigate adversity. They take punches, and they keep getting up. Someone who falls down seven times gets up eight, they lose. They get up, they lose. They get up, and they keep going, even when things get really, really hard. Come on.

When someone gets rejected for the fifth time, they get resourceful.

Now, real quick, notice two different definitions of what gritty means, which would require different types of questions to be asked to screen for it. I was with a company at the start of last year. Same idea. They're like, no, we have agreed upon characteristics. It's like, cool. What's it mean to you? Person gave an answer. It's like, was that your definition? Like, that wasn't my definition. Right. So back to like the four Ds that I talk about all the time. You have to define what does gritty actually mean, because funny enough, you used two characteristics in your definition of the characteristic. Grit's the characteristic. And how do you describe it? Disciplined. Disciplined is its own characteristic that you have to define. Getting knocked down and getting back up again is actually perseverance and resilience. It's not grit. So here's actually the funny thing about grit. I no longer screen for grit, by the way, because I realized what the word actually means. Grit actually means unrelenting, which is just another word for stubborn. And we wonder why sales reps can be so hard to manage. Sometimes grittiness actually can be a flaw. They are incredibly intelligent and incredibly gritty, which actually lets them deal with things that they shouldn't deal with because they're gritty. There are things right now in Yalls lives in your businesses that like, you just deal with because you're gritty. You just deal with it where a not gritty person would fix it because they're not gritty. Right. But you have to define what does it actually mean? Perseverance can get rejected and get back up again. Right. So both you actually describe perseverance a little bit more than gritty, which is one of the things we screen for in all of our roles. Right. They can persevere and they're resilient. They can get knocked down and get back up again. But you have to define that as a team. What does it actually mean to us? And this is actually what sets up our entire interview process is we have to define it first.

So could you articulate to me what a good definition sounds like? Maybe using finally as an example, you.

Know, we screen for perseverance. Right. So the definition of perseverance is the ability to push through hard things with enthusiasm. That is the definition. The key actually with the characteristic is not always just the definition, but examples of it. What are good examples of perseverance? Right. I send you ahead of time. What I'm looking for. Here's what we look for. Here's how we define it. Here's some of the questions we are going to ask you, and here's who you're going to be interviewing with. And the reason I do that is I want your best shot. Interviewing is a very unnatural way to get to know somebody. The amount of biases in an interview, I'm not even get them all right here. But you have lab coat bias, right, where there's a power dynamic. You have ownership bias where when you're on that side of the table, you always believe you're better than you actually are. You have inferiority complex. On the other side, you have something that I want. It is in 30 to 45 minutes in a glass room or via zoom, dressed up differently than you normally would with questions you don't know that are coming. And everyone thinks like, oh, that's how we're going to see how quickly they know. That's not how. That's not what you screen for. So I send you, right, I want your best foot forward. If I send you that and your answers still suck, what do I know?

You didn't prepare or you're just truly terrible.

I'm going to learn so much if I send that to you ahead of time and you didn't do proper research and you didn't have that right. So first of all, we send it ahead of time. But then the way we structure our interviews is all right. So one of the things we look for here, I might as persevere. Now, here's what perseverance means to us and we define it. Do you identify with that characteristic? Now, what are people going to say 99% of the time? And we like, yes, but at least now we've aligned to the characteristic. And then we say, okay, great. Can you give us an example? They're going to give us an example. And then this is where it always catches people off guard because we say, great, thank you. Can you give me another one? Everybody has one. Someone who's actually perseverant. How many examples could y' all give me of being perseverant as individuals?

A lot.

You would fill this entire episode. Give me. If I said the example is to push through hard things with enthusiasm, I guarantee both y' all could give me 15, 20 examples just off the top of your head, and I could probably force you to get to 50 if you really broke it down. Most people, if they're not actually perseverant, they only have one. When you ask for that second one is when you get the. Well, actually. Oh, yeah. So my senior year of high school, I tore my ACL and no one thought I was going to make it back for basketball season, but I did. Was five years ago. Yeah, I don't care. So that is actually how we structure our interviews. It's very. Here's the characteristic, here's how we define it. Do you identify with that characteristic? Yes. Can you give Me example. Great. Could you give me another example? And we go characteristic by characteristic through that process.

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Today's show is brought to you by Text Us, which helps you move your deals forward faster when timing matters. The fastest way to move a deal forward is to avoid getting stuck in the inbox. And so my favorite way to get on a text basis is literally, literally when your prospect requests a demo, just send them a confirmation text saying that you're looking forward to the meeting and that opens the text channel for you to call back on it later. Folks, we put an entire guide on how to revive ghosted deals, nudge next steps and use texting to keep deals moving forward. With Text Us, check it out, it's free. In the show notes you talked about, don't look for just experience, look for the characteristics. So I guess you have a list of 3, 4, 5 characteristics like perseverance. But my guess is you still provide your recruiting team some general screening guidance for you should be looking for a rep who's done this type of sales cycles with generally this much experience with this type of, you know, types of companies they've worked for. How do you balance looking for characteristics with also coming up with screening criteria for the right profile for the job?

Don't balance them. Balance creates the idea that they're even, right, that there's an even weighting. I am heavily weighted on characteristics first. Then there's the experience. I don't treat them as a balance because you might have all this experience, but you don't have the characteristics. I don't hire you, so there's characteristics. But then on the experience side, the biggest things, funny enough, are actually just speed. That's one of the most important things that I screen for from an experience perspective is how fast were your deals previously. And this goes both directions. If I'm hiring for an SMB rep where the sales cycle is 30 days or less and your previous cycles were six months. It's a yellow flag, not red. Red means you don't hire, period. That's a red flag. So the thing I'm looking for is similarity in speed and similarity in process. So sales cycle is one and then channel is number two. Were you an inbound rep applying for an outbound role? Were you an outbound rep now applying for an inbound role? Those are the two main things that I'm looking for. I don't care hardly at all about industry. I'll give it some weight but sometimes it's almost like a down point. So those are the main things I screen for it. But I talk about this actually in the sales leadership accelerator is it doesn't mean don't hire them. Their ramp's just going to take a little bit longer. There's some nuances they're going to have to learn and figure out similarity. If it's a six month cycle coming to 30 days, their ramp is going to take a little bit longer because there's some things they haven't done there before. But we've caught that in the interview process. So I already know going into onboarding, hey, when you're working with Nick, he's going to need to really focus on the speed of this sale. Like he's used to having multiple follow up calls, multiple decision makers. I can guarantee you're going to have to work with him on asking for the business today. It's like that type of thing. So that's what I'm looking for in experience.

What about company size? So you're at a series B company now I believe and you probably see people who are coming from Oracle or Salesforce or SAP, big established companies with tons of resources. Historically that was a red flag for me selling in the early stages. Do you give that any weight for a rep?

Not really. For a manager and leader, yes. I'm in a lot of weight there because at a rep level it really is still you day to day doing what needs to be done because everyone gives, I actually think too much weight to like oh, when you're calling from Salesforce, like everyone knows who you are so it's easier. Yeah, I think only like 40% of sellers at Salesforce hit their quota. So let's just be very clear, like it's not the layup. Everybody thinks that it is. What happens at a lot of those bigger companies is they're not doing true outbound and they say they are, they're doing outbound to the base. That is very different. That is a different process than I am screening for. It's the managers and leaders that I have a bigger problem generally coming from a big company with resources down. Because we talked about it in another episode, the Weekly wiggle. You got to build this for me. Whereas at Oracle Salesforce, that wiggle may already be defined and you've got an enablement team that's bigger than our sales team. That's where it tends to be a little bit of a. More of a yellow to red flag and then also back to speed. Right?

Yeah.

I made decisions fast, y'.

All.

I changed my mind frequently. You can't do that at some of those big companies, so they're not used to the speed at the leadership level. Big company for a rep, I don't care about that much. I'm still looking at speed. I'm looking at process, I'm looking at deal size. It's the manager level that I'm a little bit more concerned.

Yeah. I think about when I was hiring early stage reps at Pave, I would be like, oh God, like this SAP rep, literally, like there's no way they're going to be able to adapt to our speed and our sales process. But the reason for that is they were quarterbacking deals and they had a million sub AES and sales engineers. And I'm like, no, you're running your own demos. Like you're probably going to be implementing the customer half the way. And so it was less the fact that they were at a late stage company and it's the fact that a late stage company has so many more resources and that's what changes the sales process for them.

Process was different. They had a sales engineer and a sales onboarder and this, that and the other versus someone else. Like, no, I run my own thing.

So let's talk about the interview process itself. So you have your list of characteristics, you have general things you're looking for. What are the common ingredients in a good interview process?

So there's the screen. Right. And my recruiter is screening for one of like the key characteristics. Everyone you talk to, because most screeners, they're only doing it on experience. Oh, they've been like, no, no, no. I want you to ask them about perseverance. You have to pass that test before even getting up. It depends on the volume of applicants as well. So when it is a company or an employer market where there's a lot of candidates available, almost always I have some level of exercise very early on my Personal favorites is video Video apply send in a video. Almost always. I do that because it's going to filter out a good 50, 60% of people that we either auto applying or aren't committed enough to try to put in the effort to go through it. And no shock here, my teams use a lot of video. So when people are like, oh well that's, that could filter out like good people. Like what if they're just not comfortable on video? Then you won't succeed.

In my org, what do you ask for in the video?

So it'll either tell a story. I have to tell a story about. Hey, like we look for perseverance. Tell us your best story.

Oh, that's great.

And then we get a feel for like who they are, who they are on camera. Did they research us at all? You know, I've gotten not a lot of great videos, but I can honestly tell you, every great video I've gotten in the interview process, not only they get hired, they were a top, top five person because it shows you so much. It shows you the level of their curiosity, the amount of prep they'll do, the research that they put in, their personality, their level of like standard. Now, funny enough, I teach my own team to end it and send it, record a video and send it. But when you're interviewing, I can tell you probably did that five or six times because you wanted to get it right. I'm learning so much about you, including following directions. Here's what I want to see. Did you do it? I said under three minutes. You sent me a seven minute video. You may think that's going above and beyond. No, I said three minutes. Send it. So I love that as an early filter in the interview process. And it also helps us screen. So we have a screening mechanism like a video and you talk to my recruiter, they're screening further on the characteristic. Then it gets bubbled up to either a manager or managers. I prefer either two people in the interview with one for 45 minutes to an hour over 30 minute, 30 minute, 30 minute interviews. It is almost impossible to really do a great interview in 30 minutes. It just is when you get pleasantries out of the way. You're already down to 25. And if you want to leave any room for the candidate to ask questions, which you should, you've got 20ish minutes to try to understand whether or not this person can close $2 million a year. It's a really bad ratio there. And then it just goes on to the next person and it goes on.

To the next person.

So I'd rather have two managers in 45 minutes. And you're assigned the characteristics. You're screening for perseverance, you're screening for resiliency, you're screening for confidence, you're screening for coachability. And you're able to go through that process because I also believe very similar to role playing and coaching. If this were an interview. Well, this is an interview right now, but like different type of interview. You're asking me a question and so I'm responding to you. But what can Nick do the whole time?

He can either be observing or thinking of his next question or the thing that I might have missed.

Right. He can actually be listening first of all.

Right.

And taking notes. But it's also the observation, what's their body language? How are they conversing? Are they getting like antsy on those things? But it gives you two points of view in the interview as well to try to remove some bias.

The pressure is not on me, as the second interview were, to keep running the conversation. So while Armand's asking these questions, I'm actually able to listen way more intently because I'm the third person in the room. And then once Armand's asked a couple, I can take the pressure off of him for a second, let him sort of recalibrate, and he goes into observation mode. That's brilliant. You told me you like document almost like questions and structure of that interview. Can you walk me through that?

The simplest is characteristic definition. Do you identify? And then that is the foundation of the interview. This is also a big one. I do not ask hypotheticals. I could care less. So how would you approach X, Y and Z? I do not care. The question is, how have you approached xyz? I don't care what you would hypothetically do. I need proof of performance. P O, P. That's all I care about in an interview. Proof that you have done the thing. I also don't ask questions that I'll say, don't have a wrong answer answer, meaning there isn't an answer they would give that would actually disqualify them from being hired unless it was ridiculous. I don't ask trick questions. I don't ask things around that I'm asking questions to see can you actually do what I'm looking for. One of my favorite ones to ask that was multilayered was there would be like a sales math question. So like whether you're an SDR or you're an ae. So we'll do an AE one. It's like, all right, put you on the spot here. Sales math. They're like, okay, all right, Your quota is 10,000, your deal size is 1,000, and your close rate is 25%. How many opportunities do you need to get to your quota?

Well, the answer's 40, but you actually probably need even more because you want a little bit of room.

So it's actually not a trick question. The math is 40, right? You need 10 deals. You need 10 deals to get to your 10,000. Take the multiplicate. Cool. We've got it. What I'm actually looking for is one. Can they do it more often? Not, they can't. But what else do you think I'm looking for?

Critically thinking about how.

What did I miss? Like, there's. There's one, I'm asking, do they ask a question? Yeah, they ask any sort of clarifying question. But two, it's a phenomenal test of resiliency because a lot of them don't know how to do it. Now here's what's also hilarious. Because people don't do this. Y' all didn't do it because you're sales math wizards. But, you know, people, like, struggle on this and they never take out their phone for the calculator. They never do it. I'm also looking for, like, creativity and resourcefulness. I never said you couldn't use a calculator. Like, I can learn a lot about an individual. You'd be shocked how many people just give up. And this is what's hilarious. People say, like, I don't know. It's like, hey, that's okay. Let's move on. What did I also just learn? They never asked me what the right answer was.

Right.

So, like, that's one of my favorite types of questions that is multi layered, but it's not a trick question. I'm learning lower. People like, oh, how many marbles are in this cup? The hell am I supposed to do with that?

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So, Katie, a lot of this is testing for the characteristics of perseverance, resourcefulness. I digress. There's probably a point at which you need to test for. Do you actually know how to run a discovery call? Do you know how to multi thread? Do you have. Do you know how to negotiate? That doesn't happen in the screen. We have this hiring manager interview. Is that happening here or does it happen later in the process?

So it depends on the role. So if it's an sdr, we almost always do a like a role play session outside of it. Similarly, I actually send you the information ahead of time. Yep, here's how the role play is going to work. Here's some example of our scripting. Again, I'm looking for your preparedness. I'm looking for how well you can learn. One of the things I screen for that is so important is speed of learning. How fast can you learn something? Because if you can learn something quickly, you're going to thrive very well in in my orgs. So we do a role play on the SDR side. And similarly, I could care less how well they do on that role play. For me, it's my job to teach an SDR how to sell well. I actually don't care at all how good they are on the role play. What do you think I'm actually looking for?

Did they do the prep?

Did they prep, take the feedback? Do they take the feedback? So this is a big one. They're going to role play. We give them feedback. In my career, I think there's probably seven or eight now that this has happened where we give the feedback and we pause. There have been seven to eight reps in my career that said, can I go again after that pause? Every single one of them became a top performer because what does that show if, like, we just did the role plays? Like, okay, so I liked this. I liked this. You know, our pace was a little bit accelerated and we missed the chance to dive into that objection. And the rep goes, all right, can I go Again, phenomenal. But when we give the feedback, when I'm listening for that, how do they take the feedback? This is also why two people are powerful. I'm delivering the feedback. Nick is watching, right? Of like, okay, am I taking notes? Did I write the feedback down? Or did I go, okay, okay? And then we say, let's do it again. So always do two. I'm looking for speed of implementation. I just gave you this feedback. How quickly can you apply it? So that's on the SDR side. On the AE side, we have them walk us through recent deals. We walk me through your most recent deal, start to finish, and they have to go step by step by step through that deal. Great, give me another one. You can see the pattern here. Yeah, great, give me another one.

And how much are you instructing them on what you're looking for in a deal review first? Just seeing how they run through it.

So I actually have an interview guide. You know, if we want to share it with people, we can share it with people. But in there, it actually, it's a prep sheet for the interviewer. And one of the things that we do at the beginning of the interview is like, set the scene for the interview. Like, here's what will be a good interview. You. One, Be yourself. If you put on a fake facade, we can't get to know you if you are being someone different. 2. Pause before you answer. It's okay. Think it through. You don't have to rush. Three, Breathe. Four. Specifics. We want specifics. We don't want platitudes, we don't want fluffy. So if you're going off, we might put our hand up and say, hey, bring it back, bring it, bring it back. But we tell them early on we want specifics. Right? Walk me through your most recent deal from start to finish. How you sourced it, how you ran discovery, what you did in the demo, how you closed it, and what that looked like for managers. One of the things I look for in managers is the ability to solve problems. So walk me through the most recent problem you solved for your team. What was the problem, how you identified it, how you issue diagnosed it, how you solved it, and what the end result is. So I'm telling people what I want. I think it's actually one of the most overlooked interviews. Styles is that you make. You have people guessing what it is you want and you wonder why you don't get good answers. I'm telling you what I want because then I know if the answer is good or not. So those are Examples of, I have people, like, walk things through. But also on the management side, we do a lot of work. And by the way, do you think we practice interviews teaching my team how to do? Oh, absolutely. We practice this on how to ask questions and what to listen for. Because we also define what a bad example is. If someone doesn't get specific. Right. If someone does not actually walk you through it and you say, okay, but then did you discount and they can't remember. I already know you weren't walking me either through a real deal. Yeah, but also I mentioned this. Pop. I asked for proof of performance. Slide that piece of paper across the table. It shows your name at number two for three quarters in a row. Pop. One of the easiest things to do. I'm like, okay, all right. I have proof of performance.

So typically the paradigm in an interview is they are selling you on why you should hire them. I imagine there are times where you're like, we've got to get this person. And I know they're interviewing at a couple other hot companies. And it flips to, you've got to sell them. How do you win those top performers?

It's a long lost sales technique. So I hope people are taking notes here. It's called proper discovery. I ask them what they want. I mean, what, what are you looking for in a role? What would get you excited? They will tell you everything, have everything that I need then to sell the role. In the pre show we're talking about, like, when do I get involved? Sometimes I'm at the end. But if it's like a high profile, like, role, I'm the first one. That first call is, hey, I have, like three questions for you just to make sure we're on the right lot. But today's call is all for you. I want you to ask every single question you can come up with up front. Because that way we're not three, four weeks into an interview process. And you don't even know if you want this. I want you leaving today's call knowing whether or not you want this or not. How's that sound for a first call? They love it, right? So I asked like, my three, like, you know, I call them, like, on the lot questions. Like, are we even on the right lot right now? Or did, like, you stroll on to, like, the Bentley lot? If you're looking for a Civic, you know, we might just not even be the right lot. I asked those. I'm like, hey, your turn, right? And guess what my last question is. What are you looking for for like what, what do you want in your next role? It's my last question. They tell me a lot with that. Now I have that. I can give that to all my other managers, all my other interviewers and say, hey, let's make sure we harp on this. Let's make sure we press on this. So that's, that's the key is you just got to know what people want and then one, show them they can or tell them they can't.

You have to win the right battles with candidates. We were actually just talking about a candidate internally and she has this really strong social media background and we're looking for someone who can help manage our social media, but also frankly, do a lot of team EA work and do a lot of our guest booking and guest management because we have all the webinars, all the shows and all that stuff. And we were worried that we were really selling this person on doing the grunt work of are they actually going to be willing to do that? And it almost felt like we needed to sell that person on doing the guest booking. I'm like, no, we shouldn't try to sell that person on that. We should literally like map it out and be like, this is the crap and this is the good part. Yes, if you want to do a little bit of both and you're willing to deal with the crappy part for the good part, opt in. If you are looking for 100% big brand campaigns and all that stuff, this is an entry level role and it's just going to be putting you in the wrong type of role. But the right place to sell people is if you are an in office company and they are looking for an in office job, then you do not lose that deal. Make sure that they know that you are the best in office culture in the world.

If I can give you what you're looking for, I get you because I believe I can give you what you're looking for around it. But if I can't, I'm also very upfront with that. I've made that mistake. I have sold people into roles I wanted them, but I knew it wasn't gonna give them everything they wanted to. And of course, within a year, two years, they're unhappy, they're miserable, it's not working out because they didn't get what they were looking for. There's plenty of people out there. You had. Everyone needs to be clear on expectations, everyone needs to be honest about it from the get go and that's it.

Katie, we talked about a lot of great Hiring habits. It is time to talk about a bad one. So what is one bad hiring habit that every sales leader should break so that all teams can get a little bit better?

Too many companies do not have a documented hiring process. Managers are asking random questions in random order without looking for the right things and it's not documented anywhere. So you have to document this whole process, what you're asking, what you're looking for. You have to document their answers that you can do the post mortem if someone doesn't work out. Okay, what characteristic were they missing? Ah, right here. This just happened with some reps where I was like why? Why did we hire these people? That'd be the biggest mistake is it's never defined and it's never documented. And then you wonder why it's so haphazard. That'd be. That's by far and away number one.

Unbelievable. Two shows. Everyone hang on for a 60 second recap coming up soon. Alrighty folks, it is time for a two by two recap from this episode with kd. What do you have for your two?

Number one is you send your candidates an interview kit before the interview happens. In that kit you tell them what you are looking for. Two you tell them in advance the questions you're going to be asking. And three you give them some detail about who they will be meeting with if they show up and their answers are crappy, you know they didn't do the prep or they're just not a good fit. Number two is you are never allowed to ask hypothetical questions in the interview. Everything needs to be evidence based. We are looking for POP proof of performance.

Today's tactic is brought to you by Attention which uses AI to capture all of your sales interactions, automate sales busy work like CRM updates and flag hidden deal risk. So if you want to avoid ghosted deals, end every discovery call with these three questions. Number one do you want to buy AKA validate if the deal is real? Number two when do you want to buy validate if it will close this year. And then number three, how do you buy validate that they will get you in front of power. We put together a guide on how to unblock the three biggest deal blockers in your pipeline. There's a link to get it down in the show notes. Number three, the screening video. Especially in today's market where it is frankly an employer's market, you will spend hours and hours and hours and hours on initial phone screens if you try to get through everyone manually. So what you can do is you can Send them a prompt beforehand and say, hey, send us a three minute video that is you telling a story about where you exist, exhibited perseverance, for example, and you will learn a lot about did the person do it in one take, did they clearly follow the instructions? And frankly, are they able to present themselves in a way that you'd want them to present themselves on a sales call? And then lastly, number four, one of the tests that Katie walked us through to test for sales acumen is having a rep walk through a recent deal review, where again, you're going to map them through the framework of what is important to go through in a deal review and then they will walk through every single step of how they source the deal, ran discovery, ran the demo, and ultimately closed the deal. And then from there you can jump right in and make sure that you're asking questions almost as if you were doing a live deal review with one of your reps. Alrighty, Nick, how can people help us out?

Honestly, I learn so much in these episodes. These are the ones where I'm sitting here, I'm like, wow, I could do 47 more interviews with Katie, but there are going to be links in the show notes to this, to all of the episodes we've done with him. If you've not connected with him on LinkedIn or checked out some of the stuff that he does in terms of helping leaders upskill, he is, I mean, probably top three people that I've learned from in my sales career. So, Katie, thank you for joining us, folks. We'll see you next week on 30 minutes to President's Club.