The Hiring Strategy That Leveled Up My Entire Business

I have hired hundreds of people, and in this video I'm going to share with you the trick that I use to hopefully distinguish during an interview whether or not someone's going to be really good or really bad. So many times when it comes to an interview, when someone is asking questions of the applicant, you're asking for things that are outputs. And so the big distinction today that I want to get you to think about is outputs versus inputs. And we're going to go through what these examples are, but outputs are things that a lot of times can be fudged. There is something that is true, but it's hard to quantify whether or not that's going to lead to actually good performance. And the reason that I, I started recognizing this pattern of like, I was always asking questions about people's outputs and it never led to good performance. And so what I started doing is I started asking questions about their inputs, and I realized that this showed me a much better picture as to whether or not they would perform perform well. Let's go over what outputs kind of questions and things that you can ask are, and then we'll compare it to what I feel has been much more successful, and that is asking applicants about their inputs. When we look at outputs, this could be typical questions you're asking an interview, things like, what certifications do you have? Patients, and you're like, well, that can't really be fudged. Have you ever taken a real estate license? Have you ever taken a finance license? In Washington State, for example, you can become a pastor in 15 minutes online and be a clergyman to be able to marry people and the rest of their life, they're obligated because someone signed on a piece of paper. Certifications are— a lot of them are a dime a dozen, especially when it comes to trades, especially if it's like a certificate and not like a degree. At least the degree, it shows some level of commitment for a year or 2 years or 6 months or some sort of level of commitment. But a lot of certifications, especially if they can be online, can be fudged. If somebody having a certification means they're going to be a high performer, that would be excellent. I just have not seen that be the case time and time again. People that are the most certified the most qualified, have all the credentials, and they just fall flat on their face within a matter of a couple weeks on the job. So another output is years of experience. Now, I don't want to say that you should not ask people about their outputs. These are certainly important when it comes to doing skilled work and making sure the person can actually do the job. But the ability for someone to do the job versus being successful in the role in the long term is not directly correlated. And so someone might be certified, they might do— be great at the work, but they might not fit well for your culture. They might not be the type of person you want growing inside the organization. And so if you're looking for someone that has the motivation to continue growing with you in the business, these are the things I'm going to weigh less in the equation of hiring and more focus on inputs, which we'll get to in a moment. So another output is what we always get on Indeed, a resume, this could also be just like your job titles, is amazing, especially when it comes to things like finance. It's amazing how there's so many different job titles and then you realize that there could be someone 3 notches down in terms of title outperform someone that's done another title. Why? 'Cause there was another sucker that hired them at a position they should never have been hired at. And so just because someone has a job title because someone else put them in that position doesn't really correlate to whether or not they're going to be successful in your business and in the role that you've created. Another one is— I always love this one— when they, on their resume, they give you references. If they provide references, I, I don't think I've ever called— maybe, maybe when I first started, but like now I never call references that are on their resume, people that they have literally pre-vetted to make sure they're going to say good things about them and that they have made sure that it's okay to put you on my resume. I'm going to be asking them for references during the interview process. If I'm going to be checking your references, I'm going to ask for specific people that they work for. And I'm not gonna ask for a reference. I'm gonna say, okay, so what was the name of your manager at that last position? Fantastic, Bob. Would it be possible for me to be able to get the information for Bob? That'd be excellent. A better way, if you want to take it to the next level, is, so if I contacted Bob— now that I've got their contact information— oh yeah, you can contact Bob, no problem, absolutely. All right, so when I contact Bob, what are they going to say about X, Y, and Z? Your performance, showing up on time, your work ethic. Your cultural fit, etc. References and output if they provide it. So I should say self-provided, self. If they, if they give them to you, I really take them with a big grain of salt. The next thing is prior pay rate. Again, it's just kind of assumed as like, oh, because they got paid X over here and if they're moving to my position, I should be paying them at least that or even more. Just because there was some other sucker that hired someone that is getting overpaid doesn't mean anything in terms of whether or not they're going to be successful for the role that you have. I'm trying to take all these things that are somewhat valuable to know. I got to ask these questions. I got to know about their certifications and years of experience. These are questions I am asking. But when I look at the long-term future of the team member and whether or not they're going to grow with the business, these are not things I take into consideration. These are table stakes as to whether or not they can do the work. I've got to figure out, will they fit with the cultural fit of the business and the identity that I want to build? Because that's a completely different conversation. And I find most home service business owners, including myself, getting started for the first probably 50 to 100 people I hired, I focus all my time and attention on this. And time and time again, I have realized that this has let me down and led to inconsistent performance as to whether or not the person I thought was going to do well ended up actually being a great fit for the role. All right. So prior rate, I don't care if it's dollars per hour, salary doesn't matter. I need to know what that is. But just because they got paid X does not mean I need to pay X or above. I am looking at the inputs and asking myself, what is the rate that it demands? Again, this one's a tricky one. Just because someone else paid someone, overpaid someone, doesn't mean I'm going to overpay them. All right. Next thing we always ask about is the previous company you worked for. This is very common in home services because we have a lot of local competition. Is this good? Is this bad? You could flip a coin as to whether or not them working for one of your competitors is a good or bad thing. Just as many people will say, don't hire from your competition, get people that are new and green and you teach them. And just as many other people, they default back to, who'd you work for last? Okay, yeah, they're a decent company. Okay, how long you work for them? Okay, great. Okay, do you have the certification? Okay, fantastic. Oh, you got a resume? Fantastic. Okay, you're hired. And so outputs are the easiest thing to default back to when you're hiring because it's tangible. It's easy to just see like, Yes or no. But it's also easy to fudge these numbers because some other sucker paid you more. Some other company trained you wrong. Some reference that likes you decided you'd show up on their resume. These are the type of things that we always ask, and I have consistently seen a 50/50 split as to whether or not these folks work out. Now, there's 100 other things you could talk about. For example, I really recommend having a 30, 60, and 90-day for every new hire. So when they do get hired, they get onboarded correctly. They know the expectations for their first month, their second month, their third month. And then you have meetings with them going over the expectations for every 30, 60, and 90 days. I think that's good. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about just the hiring process and mostly just the interview process at this point. So you're like, okay, Mike, I get it. I usually ask output-based questions when it comes to interviews. What are the type of questions I should be asking? Inputs. Again, I'm not saying these are wrong. I'm saying don't just focus on these because when, when spring rush is hot and heavy and you have leads pouring in, you default back to this because it's safe and it's easy to measure. This is much harder to measure, but I have seen this consistently be the highest indicator as to whether or not someone is successful long term in the role and grows with the business. If you ask questions like this and figure out what influencers they're following, They follow. Huge indicator because whatever they're feeding on and trying to learn, who they're learning from, super valuable. If you're an electrician and you're not following people on YouTube that are doing electrician-type things, I would happen to believe they have plateaued in their learning capability. Other things you can ask them, hey, what's the most recent audiobook you listened to? What's the most recent podcast you listened to? I can promise you one thing, they didn't plan for that. They plan for talking about their last job and how they got fired, but they're going to say that it was like a misunderstanding. They're going to talk about their last— how they got references and their prior manager and years of experience. They're going to talk about all of this is what they're trained to talk about. And I'm going to take them off guard after figuring this stuff out. I'm going to— I'm going to— like, this is table stakes. I got to, like, have certain dots, I's crossed, T's. Are you 18, etc.? Great. Now I want to know, will you be a good fit for this role in the long term? And that's going to be based on inputs. What audiobooks did you recently listen to? What was the last podcast you recently consumed? I like to ask them like, how do you plan your day? I like to figure out like, do they have structure? Do they actually wake up and like have a plan for their workout and then they do X, Y, and Z, then they have a routine, like some sort of plan. I also like to think about their personal health or fitness habits. I just need people that are going to show some level of discipline and ability to be able to improve. And if someone is a complete slob when it comes to their personal life, there's a really good good chance it's going to show up at work. Hey everyone, so this is actually the front of our office, and you can see there's really nice signage. Why? So when people come in here, they want to work here. They want to be able to come inside and see what we got going on. And that's what your customers are thinking when it comes to your website. They see the sign out next to the road, they drive into the parking lot, and they look for your signage. And your signage is your website. And if it doesn't look professional, they don't even want to walk in the door. I don't care if you have the best prime rib steak in town, if it looks like everything's falling apart, I'm not going inside. And so you have a great service, you have a great business, you offer great services to your customers, but they'll never walk in that door if your signage doesn't look good. That's why at homeservicewebdesign.com and lawncurwebdesign.com, the average customer in the first year increases the amount of leads they're getting by 80%. Go check it out today, sign up for a subscription that you don't have to pay $5,000, $10,000 up front. You just get leads starting right away. We'll see you there. You're like, oh no, no. Like if they don't, don't exercise, they eat really horrible food, they stay up till 3 a.m. every single night gaming and they, they're drunk all weekend. They're going to somehow show up on Monday and be a great team member. They're going to somehow be able to contribute to your customers, to the team, to other people inside the organization. It's unlikely they might do the work of the current role, but the likelihood of them growing with the company into further roles in the future Unlikely. So this is what I would ask yourself when you look at your rubric or when you're asking your interview questions: how many of them are output, output-based, and how many of them are input-based? I don't need a ton of input questions, but one or two of these, because it's going to catch people off guard, you'll know the truth. Like, if you ask what influencers they follow in your industry and they can't name a single one, there's a good chance they're just not going to be the type of person that's going to learn and they're not going to be the type of person to watch videos or go home and Google things and figure things out. For example, a lot of people in landscaping will be like, how many years have you done landscaping? That's one way you could do it. That's output. Okay, what's the input version of that? Ask about other landscaping or lawn care channels on YouTube that they follow. I don't care if it's like Overgrown Lawns Becoming Short. I don't care if it's more business related. I don't care if it's like Keith Kalfas, Brian's Lawn Maintenance, Spencer Lawn Care. There's a bajillion of them. I just want to see, do they even find interest in their personal life around the things that I would like them to know about in business? Because there's a really good chance you will unlock discretionary effort if the things that they enjoy learning about or the things they enjoy educating themselves on happen to do with the business. And so if you're doing landscaping and you're doing lawn care and they're following influencers that do lawn care and do landscaping, there's a really good chance then they're going to come work for you and they're going to improve their skill set when it comes to lawn care and landscaping. We have found this to be true even with Augusta Lawn Care. For our technicians out in the field, if they know me and they watch my content, the likelihood of them staying is exorbitantly higher because they already know the vibe. They already understand the culture. They already are interested in something lawn care, landscaping, home service related. And they're watching this level of content that you're watching right now. There's a high likelihood they're going to move into roles of general managers, estimators, or even owning their own location one day. And so who they follow, like, look, it's really basic. You have follower and then you have people who are leading. And if you look at the person that is leading and then you look at the follower, as long as the follower is following the leader, eventually they end up approximately in the direction of where the leader is at. And so if they're following all sorts of crazy folks out doing crazy stuff and they have no interest to do anything with your industry, good chance discretionary effort will not be unlocked towards your business and discretionary effort will not be put towards their career. Career. And so as much as I want to get them to the next stage of the career, I want to see them win. I want to see them make more money. If they don't follow other leaders inside the industry, the likelihood of them making progress in this career, in this industry, is low. Another question that gets asked all the time is, what experience do you have with a specific type of service? For example, what, what kind of experience do you have with irrigation? Irrigation is a tough one when it comes to lawn care industry. It takes real skill. So you ask, what, what experience do you have? And a lot of times they're going to go to, well, this other company I worked for, then talk about their references, the years of experience doing irrigation, what type of irrigation is— they might even have a certification. Again, we are trained both as employers and employees to talk about outputs. So the other thing I might propose you ask them is, what was the last irrigation problem you Googled and learned how to fix it? Because this is an input question. When there's a problem, do they lean back on the fact they have the certification? That's not going to help them in the middle of a new problem that they never encountered, and that will happen with irrigation. But if I know that they're the type of person that goes, they follow certain influencers that do irrigation, they listen to books and podcasts about it, they're actively learning, trying to educate themselves, they're, they have a plan in place when they start their day, they're also probably the type of person that if they can Google something and figure it out, there's a good chance that when it comes to irrigation and there's a problem, I'm not going to get a phone call because they're going to figure it out. And that's an input-based question like, not just do you know how to do irrigation. It's like when you hit a problem, did you Google it? And what was that problem? And what did you learn to fix it? These are inputs. It's a matter of is this the type of person that's going to be self-directed? And when it comes to skill-based work, I need people to be self-directed because otherwise I will be the bottleneck. If you hire a bunch of people that have certifications, years of experience, but they can't figure out problems on their own, You will simply become the bottleneck when you get 8 to 10 people out in the field because everyone's calling you for every problem they encounter throughout the day. A lot of people are like, "Well, do you work hard?" And they ask questions around the output of work ethic instead of just asking, "What time did you wake up this morning?" You're like, "What does that got to do?" That's an input. If someone woke up at 9:30 AM and showed up for your 10:00 interview, I can guarantee you they will have trouble showing up to work on time. And you're like, "Oh no, but they have a great certification, years of experience." I do not care if they woke up at 9:30 for your 10:00 interview and last night they were up till 3 a.m. doing whatever. There's a really high likelihood they're not going to work out in the long term, maybe in the short term, but in the long term, as you grow the business, you will outgrow them. And inputs are really a good determining factor as to will this person grow with the business? Because great output people, great technicians, people that have the skills, they might stay with you for a little while, but they'll lack the ability to be able to continue growing as the company begins to outgrow them. All right. So let's summarize this. If we look at outputs versus inputs, you're asking yourself, okay, you've kind of spoke out of both sides of your mouth because you've said that outputs are important and we got to get the work done. But you also said that inputs are important. Here's how we can use outputs to determine certain aspects of the job and also inputs. So when we look at outputs, this is really a matter of determining starting pay. If someone has tons of experience, they have a ton of skills, etc. That could be potentially the starting pay. I also like to think of this as like, will they work now? This is why when you get into spring rush, you a lot of times go after people that have experience because you're like, I just need you to get started. Like, just can you do the work now? We default to that. So I say, I think like your starting pay and fit, initial fit. So starting pay and fit will usually be determined by outputs. Inputs usually determines their potential. And the reason I make this distinction is because people hire based on outputs. They work for a while, 6, 12 months, but then as the business grows, you wonder, why aren't they doing good? Why aren't they improving? Why aren't they becoming a general manager? Why aren't— why aren't they wanting to move up inside the organization? Why aren't they a good trainer of someone else? Why can't they figure these things out on their own? And I can't handhold them anymore because we're growing. Why? Because the inputs that they have and the questions that you should have asked them around inputs, we didn't address that. And the potential is where will they go with the business as time goes on? This is the now. Will they work today and what's their starting pay? Inputs are going to determine what's their potential. So I need both of these things. Ideally, I love to get someone up and running very quickly. And they're well compensated and they have the skills to do the work. But ideally, these are the inputs questions. And this is why so many people will churn at $1 to $2 million in annual revenue is because they have hired a whole bunch of people that are good at doing outputs. And then as the business grew, they had to fire everyone because they didn't have the potential to grow the business. They were the type of person that was great at taking orders, great at doing the work, but not growing their skill set and having the humility to be able to gain more skills. So if we put this on a quadrant, if you have really high inputs, okay, so they show up on time, they have a schedule there. You can tell they have a gym membership. They are reading books about your industry. They are fully involved in everything that's happening—podcasts, audiobooks. Like, they're like Let's go. But if they have low output, they don't have the skills, they don't have the ability to be able to actually understand things about your industry-specific language or jargon. So now we have someone with high input but low output. So this would be someone that I would be— I'd hire them, but they're going to be an entry-level technician because they have great prospects for potential in the future. And I can teach them. They're going to be a little green, but I know they'll gain those skills because they have great inputs. But they are starting entry level. They do not have the skills. And then you also have people that are high output and low input. Okay, so that's this person over here. High output. These are— they have experience, they have the certifications, they know everything about everything. They have great references. They work for a great company, but now they have low inputs. And I would avoid hiring this person because they're going to plateau. And this is the risky hire. Because the person that solves your immediate problem, but in 6 to 12 months as the business begins to grow, they'll become a cultural snag for the entire organization. Then you got high inputs and high outputs. That's these people over here. Great. This is going to be where you pay top of the market. Okay. These people, we just avoid them altogether. They have no skills and they have no inputs. They're out. And I don't— I want to use the X's and O's to demonstrate anything very specific here. So let's do this. So Up here, high output, high input. This is a person that has tons of potential, has great engagement, discretionary effort is towards learning and educating themselves in the industry. And then high output means they have the skills, they have the experience, they have been a manager, they have done this before, they have the talents and the certifications. This is— person is going to be where you pay top of market. This is the person that you go out and you pay. For some of you, you might not actually be able to hire this person right now. Because they are expensive. They can demand pretty much whatever they want in terms of pay, and usually they get profit sharing. They're going to get a piece of the business. They're going to equity something because they're very highly competent and very hard to find. For the vast majority of us, this is actually your opportunity. People that have high inputs that as your business grows will grow with you. They will watch videos on YouTube about lawn care, landscaping, your industry. They will watch what you're doing and try to emulate it. They will ask questions about the profit and loss statement during open book management and asking about the profit and loss statement, about the pricing. They will ask these questions because they have high inputs and they have low outputs. Meaning they do not yet have skills. You will have to train them. But the good thing is, if you're smaller, you likely also don't have places to put them if they're high output, if they have all the skills and experience and they're highly competent, you don't even have the place for them to go right now. And so find these people. And to find these people, we need to ask those input-based questions on interviews. I know this video is like very much in the weeds, but it has been— this is more correlated with people that are successful in my organizations as it's been hundreds of people that I've hired and the people over on this side have consistently let me down or they have disappointed me or they have worked out for a season and then there's been a bunch of churn or they have caused revolts. They have caused problems for me, for the team. They've sued me and I've consistently seen that the people, the people on this side, the people that are having great inputs. And when I ask those questions, they're actively learning and engaging and they have the humility to know they don't know everything. As the company grows, they will grow with it. They will gain the ability to be able to earn more money. I'll be able to put them in places of leadership and they will then be able to hire the people below them that are in this position with high input and low output spots. Your whole goal as you become a— go from a talent magnet to a talent developer or a talent cultivator, you're just trying to move people up this because the best— it's like if you go to the draft in pro sports, you know, you can go out and pay someone $40 million a year, but the real skill is finding someone for $1 million and then training them and giving them the output of experience. And you get them fresh off the draft. That's the real skill of a general manager. In pro sports or a coach is how do I take these high input individuals and I see something in them in the draft for a million bucks, I make them amazing. I give them the experience and the output for their resume, but in doing so, they grow the organization. I encourage you to hire more of those people and ask more of those questions during the interview process.