What You Can Do To Find Your Dream Hire

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All right, everybody. Hey, Matt Scologli, and welcome to the Practice Profit System podcast, uh, where each and every single week we dive in and help cash-based doctors get free from the shackles of insurance so they can treat their patients the right way. And today I have Nancy Schlesinger, who is with Vinehouse. You will quickly hear by her accent she is not from Birmingham, Alabama, but she is from Nottingham, right?

Nottingham. That's correct.

Nottingham. And where is that lovely— where is that located? Your accent is from?

Well, it's from— actually, my accent is more from the south, but right in the middle of the country, basically. You can't get further away from the sea. England.

The UK. England. England.

Yeah, the UK. England.

Long live the Queen. So here's why I have Nancy on with us today, and I think you're gonna love this. So I'm just gonna tell you right now, hiring people is a pain in the ass, okay? And most people suck at it. Am I missing anything with that, Nancy? Do I have those 2 points pretty much?

No, they're all right. Yeah.

Nancy is an expert at hiring people, and a couple of my clients have utilized her and have been very happy with the results. Uh, Nancy, actually, all their hires are guaranteed, uh, for 12 months. And yes, she does work in the US. So Nancy and I are going to dive deep into what it takes to hire people. She's going to share some of her insights. Nancy, how long have you been doing this? How long you've been hiring people?

Well, I probably hired my first people about 40 years ago, but that was when I had like a proper job and I actually hired people to work for me. And I did a load of research into how we did it so badly because it was terrible. I mean, we had— I joined as a graduate trainee at a part of Mars, and I kept thinking, why have you got all these people who aren't very good at their jobs? Why did we hire them? And so I did some research and found out that our process was good in some places, but terrible in other places. So we were actually hiring people who just were never going to be any good. And we were also, worst of all, rejecting people who actually were exactly the people we wanted.

So why is it that people screw this process up?

There are many reasons, Matt, but let's, let's kick off a few of them. The reason In that particular case, there were 2 main reasons. One was I used to be a production manager in electronics, and so I had a big production line and these people who worked on the production line. And contrary to what most people believe, people who work on a production line are generally really skilled people. They have to be very skilled. They have to be able to do the same thing time and time again to the right level of quality and just keep going like a train. Quite frankly, Matt, you'd be useless at that, and so would I.

Absolutely terrible.

We would be—

Absolutely awful. I'd shoot myself.

Oh God, you'd be bored within 5 minutes. Yeah.

Oh God, yeah.

But see, the thing is that you're great to chat to. And we were hiring people because they were great to chat to, because they like talking and were really social. The last thing you want on a production line, because that person gets bored, makes mistakes, and then not only do they not do a good job themselves, they then disrupt all the people around them. So they don't do a good job either.

Guilty as charged.

I would be, yeah.

Yeah, terrible, terrible. So that's the first thing we did. The other thing, well, one of the other things was we had a little test and we thought it was a dexterity test. So you had a pair of tweezers and had these little pins about this big and you took the tweezers, you took the pin and you put them into a little hole in a wooden block and you had to put in as many as you could in a certain space of time. And we had a cutoff point. So if you only did so many, that was it, you were out. Actually, the best people we had were the ones who had almost failed that. And the key thing was, if you're an extrovert, you're not nervous and you're, oh, this is fun, and you do loads. But after a while, you'd get bored. If you're an introvert, you're really nervous, so your hand's shaking, you're trying to do it really well, and you can't get it in the hole. But if you carry on doing it, you get better and better and you just keep going.

Ah, interesting. So what you're saying is that you learned early on To create a test to—

Well, it's kind of a different level to that. We already had these tests, but what no one had ever done was actually look at the people we'd got and then go back and compare their results from their interview and say, well, do these match up? So I did that. I went around to all my colleagues, the other production managers, and I said, okay, who are your best 3 people and who are your worst 3 people? And then I went to the HR department and I got all those forms out and all the records of their interview and everything, put them into those 2 piles, and then I just went through them. And that is where I am quite good on detail. I do love a graph and I love analyzing data. This was before computers, so just, you know, not giving away anything, but it was—

We'll just, we'll just leave the age thing off to the side.

Early 14th century.

Yeah, exactly. Gutenberg press? I just want to know, before the Gutenberg press. But yeah, okay.

So what I then discovered was that in the pile of the people we thought were going to be really great were actually loads of people who had come out as the worst people we had in the company.

Interesting.

And the other way around, the people we thought had only just scraped through were some of our absolute best performers. And I thought, well, hang on a minute, you know, let's rejig this system and improve what we're doing so we can actually hire the right people. But the thing is, Matt, a lot of people have this information and they don't use it. So they could easily go back and say, right, I hired this guy Matt to work on my production line, he's a complete disaster. Let's look back and see his application form and what he said in his interview, and let's compare that with this person here who's really good and see what the difference is, and let's go for these people. But hardly anyone ever does that, and it's all sat there.

So this is really kind of an early form of top grading, right? Obviously you're familiar with it, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And the concept of top grading is that we're gonna really find who are our best people and hire more like them, right?

Do I—

am I missing anything on that? Yeah, or find out— well, it's— you have to be a bit careful with that kind of thing because if you do that, you end up just with clones of, you know, all white men. And that sort of thing, which can be quite dangerous.

That's very dangerous in America today.

Yeah. Exactly. So what you have to do instead is not look at, you know, the resumes and say, oh, they're all people who went to Harvard, or they're all people who did this. You have to say, what are the skills and behaviors that we're actually looking for and the values? So yeah, it's kind of more careful than that. You know, when you look, start looking at resumes and things and you, you start taking people out who've got words in because they haven't been to the right school and stuff, then you end up in All kinds of trouble, and you're losing really good applicants as well. You know, that's the bottom line.

So are those really the 3? You had said skills, behaviors, values.

Values, yeah.

Are those the 3 things that you're really kind of drilling into when you're going through that process? Exactly.

Absolutely, yeah.

Could we break those down a little bit? Would you be— can we dive in each one of those? Okay, so let's start with values, because values is a thing that I really hammer home with my doctors. You've got to define the values. I would spin my camera around, but it'd probably screw things up. My number one value in my organization is grit. So that's the number one thing that I look for. I want people that have the smoke of battle, as I like to say, you know, people that have been through hell's half acre and made it out okay, right?

Yeah.

So is that what you mean by values? Are you talking about something like that? Are you talking— tell us more about that.

Okay. So people are quite often totally unaware of their own values because they're just them and they just think they're normal because that's how they are. It's like the fish is the last one to see the water. So the easiest way to find out what your values are in this context are, what are the things that really annoy you when someone does those at work? Like it may be when someone turns up late, or it may be if someone's rude to a customer, or it may be if a poor quality item goes out.

Yeah.

Or it may be, you know, if someone just isn't very thoughtful about something. It could be all kinds of different things. And I'll give you an example, one of our clients a graphic designer, and they were hiring a sort of admin person, kind of sales admin person. And we had this candidate, and she was doing brilliantly. And I was interviewing her, client was sat next to me. This is in the old days when we used to, like, do face-to-face stuff without masks.

Pre-COVID, as we like to say.

So I asked this woman to describe a really difficult situation she'd had to handle, and she sort of told us what she'd done. And And I then said, well, why did you do it that way? And she then said, well, the customer's never going to know, so it doesn't matter. And my client, you could virtually hear his jaw hit the desk. And that was it because that was one of his core values. His accountants once said to him, because they had a big customer who just didn't pay, and it was really, it was a lot of money. And the accountant said, oh, just, go bankrupt, you go insolvent, and then just restart the company with a slightly different name and that'll be fine. And my client was like, no. And they kind of said, what do you mean no? He said, because that's just wrong. I'm not going to treat our suppliers like that. You know, this is a really bad way to behave.

Right.

So he had those really core total honesty values and never letting the customer— he actually worked all through the night once to finish the project for me because he promised it for 8 o'clock the next morning. And it wasn't ready, so he just worked through the night. So it's kind of easy to find out his values because they're really clear.

Yeah, right.

But for most of us, it's kind of hard when it's you. So the key thing is, what's the stuff that annoys you? And that will be because that's rubbing up against your values. So then you need to find out if the candidates share those values. Really, really important. Because otherwise, when you're not there, they'll do stuff you're not happy with. Right.

So is that where you always start first in the process, is the values?

No, it isn't actually. We have usually an application form that has about 14 questions on it that include skills, behaviors, and values. So we do a sort of kind of wide range of things for our very first filter because, you know, that's the easiest way to filter 99% of the candidates out.

Okay. All right. So we talked about values, then let's go to behaviors. What are you looking for when it comes to the behavior side of things?

Okay. So behaviors are how you carry out whatever it is you're carrying out, and values are why you do it that way. Okay. So to give you a different example, we had 2 companies, and both of whom had a value of respect. Now they answered the phones to people phoning in. And one of them had this thing that if anyone swore at them or was rude on the phone or anything, then they would just say, sorry, if you carry on speaking like that, I'm going to have to put the phone down. Please speak civilly, you know. And that was the way, that was the behavior they were looking for in people when they're in that situation. The other company dealt— they were actually a charity, and they dealt with people who had specific money problems. Someone had just died and they hadn't got any money, that sort of thing. Now in their case, when a customer phoned up and was really angry and upset, they had to behave in a completely different way. They had to calm that person down and help them overcome the difficulties and sort of help them to talk through what the problem was so that they could help them. So in those 2 apparently similar situations, those 2 companies expected completely different behaviours from their staff. And those came from their values, which apparently was the same value as respect. But of course, in one case, it was respect for the customer on the end, the customer handling person, the customer service person shouldn't have to deal with that behavior. In the other case, it was respect for that person who just suffered a tragic loss and was really upset, didn't know where to turn, was behaving badly because they just didn't know any better. and needed some help to get things together. So it's respect for the customer. Sort of help to clarify things a bit.

Yeah, it does.

You made me think of a situation where, you know, I think, you know, I come from a customer service background, right? So I grew up working at golf clubs. I worked for the Marriott Corporation. It's all about whatever the customer wants, right?

Yeah.

The guy wants mushroom pizza. We don't have mushroom pizza. Go get a mushroom pizza, right? Get in your car, go get mushroom pizza. It's funny because now today what I see see in our society is I see the reverse of that. I actually see the customer service representative almost thinking that they're more important than the customer, like what you were just saying. Like, they want personal respect, they want respect from, they don't want to give respect to. Very interesting, because that rubs me the wrong way. Like, I won't put up with that in my company at all. It's like, the customer wants this, just get it to them, right? Like, just figure it out a way. Right? Don't be offended. Don't take it personally. So, yeah.

Okay. But I think also, if we take that same example, one of the clients was expecting someone who could just say, I'm not going to put up with this kind of language, which is actually quite an easy thing to do. The other client was expecting a really high level of skill from their people in a completely different league of how you handle someone who is very upset And isn't speaking clearly and is angry and isn't listening and so on, which is, you know, I mean, you can learn how to do it, but it is quite hard.

You mean dropping the occasional F-bomb is not okay? So, um, all right, so then let's talk skills. And this is where what you were talking about before, like the skill, they were running the test of doing the thing, is that— yeah, what are some other things that you can do to check out skill if we're not running an assembly line?

There's a lot of different things you can do. The first thing you need to do is find out exactly what you actually need a person to be able to do. And the trouble is with a lot of our clients, they have their own companies, they're rapidly growing companies. So quite often these jobs are new jobs. Now that does make it quite hard to work out exactly what you need the person to do, 'cause it's quite often, oh, well, you know, I do most of this myself. And we think, this is gonna be tricky. So we get people to like write down everything they do over the next week. And of course it's a much longer list than they think. And a lot of the stuff is not quite as easy as they think it is, 'cause they've been doing it for years. They developed the systems, you know, if there are systems between you and me.

No, there's a system. It's up here, right? It's a—

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Center of your own universe.

Yeah. We get them to write all those things down and then we go through each one of those. Now, sometimes that could be 60 different lines. And we say, okay, Matt, so you want this person to manage these projects. Tell me about the projects. How would you know this person was managing those projects well? Give me an example of 2 different projects. What are the kinds of things that go wrong? How big are the projects? What's the budget? All those things. Whereas what we normally get is, I want a ninja project manager.

So you want somebody that's been to ninja school? Okay.

Exactly.

Yeah. And, you know, I'm married to a guy who was one of the top project managers in a massive pharmaceutical company. That's very different from running a project or like 7 or 8, you know, really little projects in a small company. Some of the skills are the same, but it is, you know, he used to have these things with like all these different layers of complexity and stuff. And yeah, you just have to really find out exactly what they need to be able to do. Now, once you've found that out, then you can find ways of testing it. Now, some of those ways are by asking questions about what the person has actually done in those jobs. So, give me an example of a project that you delivered late. What happened?

Oh, that's—

I love that.

Give me an example of a project you delivered late. Why would you ask such a gnarly question, as we like to say here in the States?

Well, because we want to know about the difficult bits. We don't want to know about the easy stuff that anyone can do. We need to know, because if you're a project manager, it's highly unlikely that you've never delivered anything late. So we want to know what actually happened. What did you do? Did you learn something from that? Do you now do things differently as a result? Did you just blame everyone else, or did you take responsibility? Did you chase people up? When did you actually spot things were off track? You see what I mean?

Mm-hmm. Gotcha. Which is, I find, very fascinating. You're actually trying to create an environment in the interview where they let their guard down? Is that kind of what you— where you can start to really see the real person?

I mean, we're not really trying to trick anyone into anything. We're just giving them an opportunity to tell us about what they do. You know, if you take that particular example, some people will say, well, you know, this happened and this, and I missed this, so now I put this system in. Here's what I did, and then I did this thing, and you think, wow, that's really impressive. Other people, like one candidate we had, just said it was all the client's fault.

Yeah, well, that's pretty much everything you need to know right there. That interview is over.

Well, I mean, weirdly, we gave him some feedback because he was one of 2 finalists, and I gave him, I think, 3 pages of A4 feedback of all the, you know, the issues and where he'd done well, where he hadn't done well. And he said, oh, but I don't really see what that problem is. That was the client's fault. You were the project manager.

Oh God.

He couldn't think of anything he could have done differently, which was unbelievable, really.

So, and now we know why he's unemployed at the time.

Um, yeah, but you see, the interesting thing there, Matt, I'll just give you this because this is really important, is he didn't see anything wrong with blaming everyone else for the situation. And that shows you his values. And that's how people just give away their values because they think they're normal.

Yeah. Well, let's, let's shift gears. I want to kind of move to a different kind of section here. You know, here in the States at the time of this recording towards the end of November, our unemployment rate is at historic lows. And there is all kinds of issues going on right now. People are leaving, especially in medical field.

Yeah.

They're leaving to go work at the hospital for an extra, you know, for a $3,000 signing bonus. And it's getting a lot of my smaller practices are having a really— they feel like they're up against the wall trying to compete with the bigger hospital groups.

Right. Would you like some tips?

Tips? I'd love some insights, like, because I really want to dive into this topic because I think it's a really important topic.

Oh, this is horrendous, Matt. And I actually prepared some figures for you beforehand because We, I mean, we operate with a whole range of different people, but they are mainly small companies run by entrepreneurs. And we have found, I mean, to put it into context, we've had 4 candidates in the last month get another job before they were offered a job by our clients. Now, we have never had that many in all the time we've been in business.

Wow.

That just does not happen to us. Because our candidates are treated with white gloves. They are treated really well. They go through the process, they put a lot of effort in, and by then they really want the job. We've made sure they're really right for the job. That just does not happen. It's happened, we reckoned, about 3 times before.

Really?

And it's happened 4 times this month?

Well, it's 4 times this month and 2 times quite recently before that as well. So 6 times in very recent history. That is massive for us. Now, what we're doing is we're looking at our process to see, you know, what we can do. So the first thing I would say to your people is you need to get your process very, very fast.

So you got to pick up the pace with the hiring?

Oh, not just pick up the pace, it's got to be ninja level.

Warp speed, warp speed ninja.

Exactly, warp speed ahead, Mr. Sulu. So what you're going to have to do is make sure that if you've got several steps in your process, they are really close together, or in fact, some of them, you know, try to do them on the same day and be ready to offer a candidate the job that day. We lost one of our candidates because he got interviewed second and third stage on the weekend and was offered the job at the end of the second, the final interview.

Wow.

And he was offered Quite a bit more than our client was paying. But the thing was, our client had been dragging their feet for like 4 weeks, and they could have had that guy. He was amazing.

So you've got to speed up your process. So it's not necessarily just about paying more.

It's not just about that. It's about speeding up your process really, really quickly.

But, you know, I can hear somebody asking, is— don't you run the risk then of getting a— of not doing your due diligence and making a mistake?

No, not if you've got a good process. I mean, we have a process, so we have these, you know, 60 or 70 criteria that we're searching for and we're checking. Now, we check a load of those on the application form. So people fill in an application form, we score those overnight because we have them done in Australia. So person fills out the form, scored overnight, then the next day we've got all the forms. Any that are good, our scoring people, it's like, right, these are the top ones. We send those straight through to the client and say, right, have a look at these, let us know if you want us to take them forward. We then ask the candidate to book an interview with us, which they quite often can book for the next day, right? So now we're only talking 3 days. We then interview them and we send the results of that back either that day or the next day. So now we're, you know, 1 week. That's, that's quite fast. But the trouble is our clients, you know, they're busy people, and I think some of them just have not understood just how fast they need to be at this stage. So what we're now recommending is that they have slots already booked for a final interview in case that candidate's good. So they are still being filtered really, really carefully, but you need to have, have that all organized, and you need to have your offer ready so that if the candidate's good, you've already worked that out, you know what the offer is going to be. And you can just offer them really quickly. I mean, it may be you don't want to do it right at the end of the interview. It may be you just want to have an hour or so just to check through. I'd probably advise that, but you need to be really fast. Okay.

What about pay? So this is a big thing. You know, the bigger corporations, the hospital groups, things of that nature are paying a lot more. How does a small to medium-sized company deal with that?

Let me give you some really interesting information from one of our clients. We have this client And they're in a bit of a niche. You'll love this. They are accountants for vets in Australia.

Okay?

Okay. So that's a niche, isn't it? If ever you heard one. And they are amazing. They have this software that monitors the performance of all the vets and the nurses and everyone in each of their many, many practices. Now, what they identified was that the difference in revenue generated by a candidate or an employee who is really good compared to the average employee, not the bad one, just an average one, is $100,000 or more.

Yeah.

Okay. So $100,000, and actually, you know, that is a massive difference. I think we can agree. Now, if you are quibbling about, you know, $10,000 in the pay when actually you're turning away an extra $100,000 of business, you see what I mean? People have to first of all get their head around scrimping and saving on employees' salaries at the moment is it's just going to cost you more. They're not going to perform as well, and it's going to take you longer to find the people. So all that time when you haven't got the person in the role, basically you're losing money. And if you've generally got an average performer in that role, you're then losing money as well.

Right.

So that's the first thing. Second thing is there are lots of things that small independent companies can do that big companies can't do. And I know, you know, we over here, we have loads of holidays compared to you, don't we? Vacations, I think you call them.

Um, yeah, y'all take a lot more time off than we do.

We do, yeah. We have like 4 weeks a year is just standard, plus all the national holidays and everything. Now I know for you guys, sometimes we've had clients who don't give their people any holiday for the first year, any vacation, or it's just a week. Now the thing is, what would a benefit like that actually cost one of your clients just to give, say, an extra 3 or 4 days a year?

Oh, well, I can tell you right now because I had a partner who thought like this, and he'd be like, well, that's production, right? Now production was one of his main values, right? Yeah. But he's like, well, you know, they're not in, that means that they're not making any sales that day, right? Yeah. So what do you say to something like that?

Well, here's what I say. As an ex-production manager. I did quite a lot of research into productivity. Because it's actually a lot easier in production to do research in productivity. I used to have people on day shift who did like 8 hours a day. And then people on what we call the twilight shift who did 4 hours of an evening. And guess what I discovered, Matt? Guess what the outputs were? How they compared?

Oh, I would bet the people that did the twilight produced almost as much as the 8-hour people.

They produce 2/3, yeah, of the 8, 10 people.

50% of the time they prefer— they produce 2/3.

2/3. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Also, I mean, our— we, we— one of our team used to be an expert telesalesperson. I mean, absolutely amazing telesalesperson. And we're hiring telesalespeople at the moment. And her first thing was—

Wait, is that a plug? So if they need it, if they have a resume, they can— you're hiring? No, I'm kidding.

Oh, if someone wants to send it through, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's a remote position. But, um, she was saying, do not hire a telesalesperson for 40 hours a week. Hire them for 20 because you will get more output. You're far better off having 2 20-hour people than you are having one 40-hour person because the output, the sales will be higher.

Well, that just confirms what our good friend and mentor Perry Marshall has always said, the 80/20.

That's right.

And the 80/20 is real. It's so real, isn't it?

It certainly is. Yeah.

Okay, so give them more time off. Well, right, what were you going to say? I'm sorry, go ahead.

It's think about what are the benefits that you can give that a big corporation can't give, because there are actually people who would rather work for a small company than a big corporation, and those are the people that you need to hire. I mean, I have all people like that working for me in my company. We all work from home. It's always been like that. Everyone has completely flexible hours. We don't have holidays. You just agree what you need to achieve, and as long as that's done, that's fine. Obviously, there are meetings we arrange, but we're, you know, we're sensible. We make arrangements around people. One of our people starts work at about 4 or 5 in the morning because she is insane, and she does like—

By the way, have you told her that she's insane?

She wouldn't know.

Okay, she knows. She's embraced the fact that she's insane.

Oh, she's amazing. Yeah, she's done virtually a day's work by the time I arrive in the office. We have another person who works till midnight or later quite often in the evenings.

Mm-hmm.

And we have another person who's had a few problems with her, you know, her parents and stuff. And she's— oh, had horrendous problems with her son. And she kind of has to go to school to pick him up and stuff. I don't care as long as the work gets done. I really don't care. And actually, the problem is usually that they work too hard. It's the other way around than people normally think. We've got, you know, our guy in Australia, he works different hours to all of us. We have our interviews, they sometimes have to work really odd hours because they're interviewing people in Australia or wherever it is. You know, it's worked brilliantly for us.

I'm sure you've seen the statistics, I'm sure they're the same in England, in the EU, is that people are working Because they've been working from home with— because of COVID Yeah, productivity in corporations are up 20— is up 20-plus percent.

That's right. Yep.

You know, I mean, right upstairs, my girlfriend Katie is on another conference call. She's in shopper marketing, works for one of the leaders in that, and, you know, their business is booming. I mean, she's busier than she's ever been.

Yeah, and it's people who've—

He hasn't been on a plane in a year.

Yeah, people have got these really old-fashioned views of how work has to be, and they are making their own businesses suffer. You know, it's, it's mad, but—

Yeah, well, I mean, so, okay, so I can just imagine my doctors listening to this and saying, but you don't understand, we have to see patients in the office.

Yes.

So, right, I mean, so there are some businesses that do require people to be there, right? I mean, you can't just have a Virtual staff.

That's right.

Um, no, but I like the idea of flexibility. What are some other things that the people—

You see, if you think of the doctor's flexibility, you know, you can do things like job sharing for reception and stuff where those 2 people just work it out between them who's going to come in when. And that can work really well. You know, we, we do a lot of that. You know, we make sure someone's always covering various things and we just work it out between us. It's fine. So there's other things, obviously other benefits are really important at the moment. You know, those are obviously all your pension stuff and healthcare packages and all those sorts of things. And it's really worth seeing if you can offer people a little bit extra on those things. Anything you can do that is a little bit of an extra above what a corporation would do, or more flexible, or, you know, just nicer, because you can have a really nice atmosphere, can't you, in a small company?

Yeah.

That's very different To a big company.

One of the things we did in our clinic is we clearly couldn't afford to provide a healthcare plan. Um, we were, you know, it was too many challenges. So what we did was we gave our managers a stipend to go get their own healthcare plan.

Yeah, great. You know, training, that's another thing.

Yep. I do a lot of— we, we found this in our clinic. So, you know, there's an old quote of what people ask, what happens if I train my people and they leave? And then the other is what happens if you don't train them and they stay? I love that. And we did a lot of training. We did weekly training and we would do like— and not like, this is how you run the aesthetics machine. No, it was like personal development stuff. Like my team today, we do our weekly calls. I always have some kind of personal development training, make them better citizens, as I like to say. And it's amazing how many people like that. Is that—

And have any of them left? Have they left as a result of that?

They say they love it the most. That's the thing that they're 15 minutes—

It's quite frankly that. Where else would they go to get that benefit? Where else could they possibly get that? So they know, they know they're really fortunate, don't they?

So is it really that employees just want to be— like, what do employees really want?

Depends on the employee, really. But I think with COVID a lot of people have had some different experiences over the last couple of years. and realized, quite a lot of them, that actually they quite like working from home and it's convenient. They don't have to do all that driving, so they save themselves hours every week. I suspect also a lot of people— well, we know at the beginning of COVID we had quite a few people who didn't get poached by another client, another company. They just decided not to leave because they wouldn't risk moving during such a difficult time because they got their benefits and their pensions, all that sort of stuff. So I think what we've now got is a lot of people who've been in a job about 2 years longer than they really wanted to be in it. So they're all leaving as well.

So that's— they're— and they've been able to sock some money away because they haven't had to pay cycling bills and take a little time to wait for the right gig.

And a lot of them, if they've been sensible, a lot of people have been doing training on other stuff while they've been at home and improved their skills. You see, the good people will be those people, won't they, who instead of thinking, oh, I'm stuck at home, this is awful, they think, right, how can I benefit from this experience at home? Oh, there's all these online courses. I can improve my negotiation skills or my other skills or my software writing skills or my Java skills or whatever it is. And that's what they've been doing quite sensitively.

Fascinating.

Okay.

Um, all right. What else is— what are some other key things or key mistakes that you see people make that we haven't covered? Anything that we haven't hit there?

Well, let's go through a few of them. One would be not being very honest in your advertisement and your job description. It's really best to be absolutely straightforward in your job description, your advertisement, because if you try to make the job sound nice and someone joins on the basis of that and then finds out it's not the job they thought, they will just leave and you'll have wasted a lot of time and money. The other thing with that is that if you don't like a job, that doesn't mean to say someone else isn't going to like it. Because we have these ideas about, oh, you know, I hate this part of my job, so I won't mention it in the ad because it's too awful. Actually, there are people around who enjoy doing that. Weirdly, there are people who enjoy clearing up after other people. Yeah, I know, but I—

Thank God there are, because I create a train wreck wherever I go sometimes.

Well, I once was told by a woman who worked for me, she said, it must be awful for you because whenever anything goes wrong, everyone thinks it's your fault. She was really sorry for me, and I loved that job. It's my favorite job. And I had— I thought everyone wanted my job. I was absolutely wrong. They didn't want it at all. They loved their own jobs. It's just my arrogance, you know, not really understanding. So be really clear about exactly what the person needs to be able to do in that role and what it's like working in that company. So that's a really— it should be an easy thing to get right, but lots of people's advertisements are just terrible.

I remember Perry once, our friend Perry Marshall, once ran an ad or something like that, and basically, clearly before he met you, but it was basically like, must enjoy working in an entrepreneurial environment where we light our hair on fire every day and run around. Looking for a way to put it out. Like, I remember seeing this like 12 years ago, but something to that effect. But I mean, that pretty much described what Planet Perry was like at the time, I'm sure.

Yeah. Well, yeah, so that was quite accurate.

Yeah. And I think, you know, but yeah, I mean, you know, we, for the ED clinics, we would say we are an erectile dysfunction clinic. We talk about penises and sex all day long in a, in the sense of a committed Yeah, relationship, right?

Like, and people need to know that because we're not running porn.

Like, I would— yeah, I would say, yeah, running porn, you know. This is a—

so yeah, give them an idea of what they're going to spend their time doing because that's really helpful. Make it as easy as possible for them to go, actually, I would love to do this job, or, oh, this isn't really for me, because you don't want to waste your time or their time for those people. So that's one really key thing. Another one is do not sort your candidates using their resumes.

I tell people this all the time. Everybody lies on their resume.

Well, you see, there are worse things than that actually. I had this lovely client, really nice guy who is like a mega brain, brain the size of a planet guy. And he did the software architecture for a massive company whose name you will know. So I'm not going to mention them. And he asked me to help him with his resume because he was hoping to leave. And I went through his resume. Oh my God, it's one of the worst resumes I've ever seen in my life. It was several pages of really closely typed, you know, with no gaps or anything, just awful. And I was kind of going through it line by line. I said, well, what's this thing here? Oh, well, that's, that's some software, you know, that I— a sort of new way of doing things that I recommended. And I said, well, just explain it to me. So I mean, I've got a degree in physics, so I can understand these things, but it was— so I kind of went through, all right, yeah, I understand that. And I said, okay, you've put that, but what was the actual benefit to your employer of this? Oh, well, you know, it saved them quite a lot of money. It's like trying pulling teeth, right? And I said to him, how much money? He said, oh, um, I think it was about, um, £10 million. I was like, £10 million? Wow.

That's a lot.

Over how many years? Oh, well, it was for 6 years. It was 6 years ago. So yeah, I suppose it's £60 million. Where is that figure on your resume? I can guarantee you, if you put on your resume, saved my employer £60 million, anyone will invite you for an interview just to find out what you did.

Oh yeah, that's right.

All you need to put You see, that's one of the big problems with resumes. People miss stuff out that is really useful. So you would have looked at his resume and gone, oh God, and you would have tossed aside an amazingly skilled individual because he's so bad at writing his resume.

Yeah, most people are lousy self-promoters, right?

Oh, terrible. Yeah, I wouldn't write my own resume. I'd get one of my colleagues to help me because it's really hard. I mean, I do it for other people, but, you know, the key thing you want to do instead is to have a decent application form that asks questions about what you really need to know about the person, and then you've got a level playing field and you can score all the applications in the same way. So you can see, oh, have they all got project management skills? Have they all got negotiation skills? Have they all worked in this—

Mm-hmm.

environment and so on. So much easier, Matt.

Okay. All right. So be honest in your advertisement. Don't sort on resume.

What else?

What are some other key mistakes?

Well, people tend to be really bad at interviewing. I mean, what we used to do is we would work out all these criteria. We'd work out all these questions and little tasks for people to do to test them. And we divide them between our application form our telephone interview, and then the final interview that the clients would do. And after a while, we discovered that even when we gave most of our clients a list of, here are the questions, this is what we're looking for and everything, they still wouldn't ask all the questions.

Seriously?

Yeah. Well, being a skilled interviewer is quite hard. It's, you know, it's not easy. I mean, I am only just good enough at following procedures to be able to do it. When I do an interview with a candidate, which I hardly ever do these days, I have a bit at the bottom that's highlighted in yellow, and it says, now, this has been a really interesting interview, Matt. I've really enjoyed it. And sometimes when I enjoy it so much, I accidentally miss out a question. So do you mind if I just take a couple of moments to check I haven't missed out a question? And I have that bit highlighted in yellow. Oh, that's brilliant.

That's utterly brilliant.

Because I know that I will have missed out a question, and I don't mean to do it. I had no intention whatsoever of doing it, but I still do. Now, our clients have never been trained properly in how to do interviews, even though we've given them a really effective interview. So what we now do is we move most of those questions into the interview that we do to make sure they all get asked, and we only get candidates to do stuff in the final interview that just has to be done face-to-face, and they, they do some actual tests and— and stuff like that. So be really careful in your interviews. It is hard doing interviews well. Record them.

Got it.

Do not try to judge at all during the interview. I had a client recently, um, and he's hiring piano coaches, absolutely top-level, world-famous people these are. And He did these interviews. He, he does them really well, to be honest. He's absolutely brilliant at doing them. And I had to review these interviews he'd done, and even he had identified the wrong candidates being the best candidate. I mean, to me it was really obvious which one was the best candidate.

Who was the right one, right?

Yeah, because what I do is I put it all into a big table. I have all the questions, I score the answers, and then I sort of give them a score and I add them up. And one of the candidates had scored like, what was it, 52, and the others were down at like 41 or below that. And once I went through it with him, I said, look, here's why. And he said, oh yeah, I see what you mean. But the thing is, it's not his fault because it's very easy to be bamboozled by people who are really good at selling themselves.

Right.

And who are great to talk to and really— like Perry. I mean, Perry's been fired from 5 jobs, hasn't he, who we both know. Yes, because he's great. He's great company, really good, full of ideas, but just no good in a normal person's job.

Right. Yeah, agreed 1,000%. Yeah.

Yeah, would he be the first to tell you?

Oh yeah, yeah, he would. Okay, um, I know you've got— wait, no, we got to be a little bit careful on time here.

Um, we've got a few more minutes.

Okay, we're good. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about what you do. So you You do a lot of this for your clients, right?

Yeah, we do. Talk a little bit about Mind House.

Tell us. Yeah, so walk people through that and just help us understand.

So what we do is we try to take away from them all the bits they really, really hate and the bits that actually have to be quite skilled to do, because that's where all the mistakes happen. So the first thing is we go through really carefully exactly what you actually need, not what you think you need, but what you really do need. And that can be a little bit grueling. We try not to make it too painful. It usually takes about an hour. We go through all your material with you and Work through it. We then take all that information and we turn it to an application form, into an advertisement that's really clear and says, you know, this is exactly what we're looking for. An interview, which we've talked about, which we do as a— we do it as a Zoom, but we don't have the cameras on because it's easier to tell if someone's lying when you don't have the cameras on. There's a little tip for everyone.

Oh, really?

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah. Blind people are better at telling if you're lying than sighted people. So there you go. So we do that and we provide the final interview, which, as I say now, is a much more simplified thing to make it really easy for you. We analyze those things. So when the application forms come in, you don't see any of them until there's a good one. And we have about a 1% pass rate on the application forms for most jobs.

What do you mean by 1% pass rate?

What do you mean, like only 1% of the people who fill in the form? Only one gets through very often.

Really? Wow. So you're eliminating a lot right off the bat. So no multi—

80/20, Matt. 80/20.

Brilliant. Because I think that's the worst thing about hiring. It's terrible. All the damn— it's awful. It eats up, like, it just sucks all the time out of you.

And most people do it with resumes. So you actually can't do a good job with resumes. It's impossible to do it with resumes. Please, if you take only one thing away from this, Do not sort candidates using their resumes. It will make your life a lot better. You have to do a bit more work upfront, but it's so much better. So we do all that. So basically, when candidates apply, they get sent to the application form. Only 25% or fewer fill it in. So we're also eliminating—

So you're really just using the system to completely eliminate people?

Absolutely.

Yeah. Brilliant. Yeah.

That you just don't, you don't have to spend any of your time doing that. I mean, I suppose we look at it the other way. We're using it to spot the one or two little gems that are in there that are really good. And sometimes those people are nothing like the people you'd expect. We hired someone, a 25-year-old guy, into a job that they were thinking it would probably be a 45-year-old woman. We hired a 62-year-old woman into a job they thought was going to be a 24-year-old guy sitting in the back bedroom. because we're going on what they can actually do.

Yeah.

So we've got rid of basically 400 people quite often by the time you see one application form. Now, as soon as you see the application form, we ask you to go through that, pick out anything you like or don't like, let us know. If you don't like them, that's fine, you just need to tell us what the problem is, because quite often our clients, there's sort of things they forgot. That's fine, we just update our criteria, we know that happens. So If you like them, we then do our interview. That's all transcribed, you get the recording, we ask you to look at that, or you can just look at the summary. And that's what we're going to be suggesting people do now because we want to move them through really quickly.

Right, yeah, go through as quickly as you can.

And then you need to do that final interview and be totally prepared to offer them the job very quickly if they're good. And so really what we're trying to do now is get that down to like a week. maximum. Um, wow. When a candidate applies to when they are offered the job, that's our goal. I mean, I'm, you know, I know that's not always—

Yeah, yeah, no, I know. I get it. I'm just curious, how many people have you— do you think you have hired or helped your clients hire in the 40 years you've been doing this? How many people do you think?

How many is— I suppose it's a few hundred. I mean, we're not a massive company. But right, right, right, right.

So that means that you, if you've hired, you say, 400 or 500, that means that you've eliminated, helped eliminate, what, 40,000, 50,000 people?

It's loads. Yeah, yeah.

That's, that's a fascinating number to me.

Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of people. I mean, it may not be that many, but it is. Yeah, we sometimes get 2,000 people applying for a job we've had before now.

Wow. And are you running ads to it? Are you running it?

Yeah.

Posting on all the job boards, all that stuff, running ads? Yes.

Yeah, we do all that side of things. Yeah, you don't have to do any of that sort of stuff at all. It's all just— so basically what you have to do is work with us for that first bit, help us to design any little tasks so it's as close as possible to what they really have to do. So for instance, with your people, they probably have to keep up-to-date records, don't they? and sort of type in data accurately. So there'd probably be a test on doing something like that. And then we need you to review an application form, which shouldn't take you that long because you've got a summary there. It's not difficult. So like 15 minutes, 20 minutes. And then we ask you to review an interview, which, I mean, that might take you 20 minutes, half an hour.

And you guarantee, you guarantee your results for a year?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So how does that work? Well, 88% of our candidates end up still in the job a year later doing a really good job.

Wow.

The average is about 30%, but that's because our process is really thorough. It's not magic, it's just thorough. So we guarantee them if they— we just had someone, fortunately one of your people, she had some serious health problems.

She got sick. Yeah, what he told me on the call last week is like, God, I was so sorry.

But, you know, that's, that's one of those things could not have been predicted. Really unfortunate.

Yeah.

Yeah, we, we're actually going to start that again in January. He's said to us that's what he'd like us to do. But yeah, no quibbles. We had one after 11 months, got poached back by our old company, and we've occasionally had ones that haven't worked out. But then we go back to our process and say, okay, where did that go wrong? And we rehire.

The great thing I think for my clients being in the medical field is, look, we know that if we follow the process of fixing a patient, we have a high success rate, right? 80%, 85%, 90%, right? I mean, we're not curing cancer here. It's pretty straightforward. So I love it. How do people get in touch with you, Nancy? What's the best way other than fly over to Nottingham and look for the Nottingham Sheriff?

So my email address is Nancy That's a pretty easy way, just, yeah, send me an email. I'll be delighted to talk to you. I'm always happy to have, you know, a chat with someone if they just want to find out a bit more. We do also offer just a little bit of help with your process, you know, if you need it, or if you just want to, you know, work out a better ad or work out an application form or something like that. We, you know, we do that for people as well rather than the whole thing. Um, but we do get better results when we do the whole thing.

Well, um, you know, Nancy, you and I have known each other for probably, what, 10 years from the days on— yeah, at least in the world of Planet Perry. Perry Marshall is kind of a guru in our world.

Absolutely. Yeah.

You know, he's written a number of books. But, you know, the interesting thing for me is I know quite a few people in Planet— as we affectionately call it, Planet Perry— have used your services. And I have a couple of clients that have used your services. And, you know, it's just fascinating to talk to them through the process and hear it from them. And it's— it is very different. But, you know, it's the old adage, you know, it's not— you have something that you're not doing on a regular basis, you might as well hire somebody who does it all the time, right?

Yeah.

I mean, so, uh, I, you know, highly recommend that you give Nancy a— shoot her an email. It's nancy@vinehouse.com. And they could just go to vinehouse.com to find out more.

They can. Yeah, yeah. Be very happy to To see them. So yeah, thank you, Matt. This has been great fun, as you said it would be.

Yes, well, good. I always like to have fun because you know me, I like to, I like to have a good time.

Can I finish by saying to people, yes, do it as quickly as you can because you are going to lose good candidates otherwise at the moment. Really, really think about how you can do that.

It's great advice. Nancy, thanks again.

Well, thank you.

Lovely to talk. As well, and enjoy the dancing.

I will.

All right, everybody.

Thank you so much for listening. If you liked this episode, take a moment and share it with your fellow medical professionals, or post a positive comment and rate it on wherever you just listened. Now don't forget, you can get a copy of my book, The Anatomy of a 7-Figure Medical Practice, for free. Just pay $7.95 in shipping and handling. Plus, you'll get over $1,197 in free bonus material. Simply go to srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. That's srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. Thank you so much, and we'll see you next time.