INBOUND 2016: Debbie Farese "How to 'Hire Up' "

Hey, thank you for the introduction, Tom, and thank you all for coming. And I'm not just saying that. I really mean it because first of all, I know this is getting between a full day of sessions and happy hour. And also, I know I'm competing with Michael Strahan right now. And my mom's actually at the conference today, and even she is watching Michael Strahan right now. So I thank you very much, and I'm very flattered that you're here. In my mom's defense, though, she's a retired teacher, so she's not going to be doing any hiring anytime soon. But I'm sure many of you are, and I'm committed to making sure you walk away with some really good tips about effectively hiring top talent. And before I get into it, one thing I just want to make sure is I used a little play on words in the title, and I don't want to assume that you all got it, because my boyfriend is from Puerto Rico, so he's not a native English speaker, and he was like, I don't get it. So I use the term hierarchy, and it's a play on words about the term marry up. And in case you're not familiar with that term, the Urban dictionary defines it as when in a couple, someone chooses someone who elevates them who they think is a little bit above them, and it's meant to be really, really light hearted. We're not talking anything deep about caste systems or anything. It's just saying, like, wow, I married someone who's really, really smart and funny and beautiful. Like, I really married up. And I have an example from pop culture to relate that to. Who can tell me who the woman on the left is? Just shout out her name if you know it. Tina Fey. Okay, most of you knew Tina Fey. What about the man on the right? Maybe someone got it. Tina Fey's husband. Yes. Most people are like, Mr. Tina Fey. Tina Fey's husband. His name's Jeff Richmond. And with all due respect to Jeff Richmond, he's actually a successful producer. He's worth, like, several million dollars on his own. But he would probably say, I totally married up. Tina Fey is so awesome. And also, Tina, one would say, has probably even benefited as well from their marriage because they met when she was 22, and he's produced a lot of the work that she's done. So they've been a really good couple. But we're not here to talk about pop culture. We're here to talk about hiring. And the reason I use that Example is I want everyone to think about your job as a manager is to hire up, to hire people that elevate you. Because it can be really tempting, number one, to just try and fill that position really fast. Because if you're in a hiring cycle, you're probably doing a lot of extra work or things are just falling off and not getting done, your numbers might be suffering. So it can be tempting to just find someone who can just do some of this work. But if you do this right, what you're doing is you're thinking about the skills that you have, the skills that your team has, and how you can round out your team better and elevate yourself and your team as a whole. You're probably familiar with that expression that you are an average of the five people you spend the most time with, you spend a lot of time with your work team, right? So you want to think about raising that average. And on the flip side, if you don't hire well, if you end up hiring under performers, you're going to have one of the toughest management challenges that you've ever had. Number one, they're just going to drain a lot of your time. Number two, they can really corrode the morale on your team. And number three, they can just make you look bad. Right. You can lose credibility from that. So in the inverse, when you have a players, they really help make you look good. So think about how good you can look and if you're worried at all about like, wow, but if I hire people who are really good, like, they may outperform me and they may get my job or advance faster than me, just check your ego at the door and think about how good the whole team can be and it can actually help elevate you. Also, if you're still not convinced, just think about how expensive a bad hire can be. This stat from I think it's Career Builder. Yep. Career Builder shows that a bad hire costs about $25,000. I think that actually underestimates it. That's probably if that person is managed out pretty quickly, I think it can be a lot higher than that. So it just makes bad business sense as well. So we're going to go through an example today. I'd like you to meet Marketing Mark. Marketing Mark is going to be a fictional job candidate that we're going to get to know a little bit throughout this afternoon. Now we're here in Boston, so you might think I said Marky Mark. I didn't say Marky Mark. But if you don't know him. Marky Mark. His full name is Mark Wahlberg. He started his career in a hip hop group called Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. He also went on to be a very renowned actor. He also opened a food chain with two of his brothers called Wahlburgers. So I mapped it out for you here. In case anyone's craving a burger. It's about a 15 minute Uber ride from the convention center. So. But again, I didn't say Marky Mark. I said Marketing Mark. So the thing I want to highlight about Marketing Mark first is that he looks really great on paper. He has a good education. He has some related experience on his resume. He's also very polished. Like, he's friendly when you meet him in person. He's articulate and he may be a good guy, but he's just not the right guy for your job. And we're going to see why today. But if you just follow a traditional hiring process where you review resumes and then you interview him, Mark's going to get the job. But if you go through a process like the one we're going to talk about today, where you add in some extra steps, you do more preparation and you do more screening, you get teams involved when you're doing your interviewing, Marketing Mark is not going to get the job. Notice that I said the word process. To do hiring really effectively, you should have a good process. The reason for that is it builds in a lot of checks and balances so that you can't get dazzled along the way by people like Marketing Mark. It takes some discipline on your part, and it may seem like it's going to take a lot of extra time, but ultimately it will take you less time because you're doing things in a more logical and thorough fashion. So here's what the hiring process that I recommend looks like, and I'm calling it Hiring Steps With a Twist. I've boiled it down to eight different steps, and there are three phases for those steps. The first one is to prepare. So before you even start talking to anybody or even reviewing resumes, you're going to want to write a job description and create a job rubric. I'm going to go through all of these steps in detail, too. So I'm just giving you a preview now of what the whole process looks like, because after you're done preparing, you're going to screen candidates and then finally you're going to interview candidates. And we'll talk about a few practical tips. I'm sure most people do include interviewing today. And that's probably not new to you, but I'd love to see a show of hands. For how many of you in the room does this look like more steps than you would normally do? Okay, for a lot of you. Before I get into even step one, I want to make a little side note on search because we're here at the inbound conference, but when you're searching for candidates, this is one place where little outbound is actually okay. And the reason for that is that a lot of top performers never end up looking for jobs. People just find them. And so you should be really smart and leverage different resources that are out there. So I'm going to give you a bunch of little tips on post it notes throughout the day. This is a hacks, tips and tricks session after all. So my first tip for you is, is that Inbound.org is a community of marketers. I know we have many marketers in the room, so that's a community of marketers where there are a lot of people having conversations. It's a good place to look for talent. Another great tool to use are employee referrals. We have another stat here. This one's from Jobvite that shows that 46% of employee referrals stay for three years or longer. So in today's day and age, that's like a pretty solid amount of time, right? So. So in addition to being top talent, they're going to stay with your organization for a while. So now here's a reminder on the steps. We'll get into step number one, which is writing a job description. So many of you probably already do this step. And the thing that I want to highlight is that as in all good content, you want to make sure it's really descriptive. It should be illustrative. You can see here a few sections that you should include within your job description. The job responsibilities that will be expected of this candidate, the skills that are required, and we also recommend that you include some of the cultural qualities. Here's an example job description for you. And I've highlighted some of the text in orange to raise where these points shine through. So first of all, someone should be able to look at this and say like, wow, that's me. Or ooh, that's not me. Right? Cause you also want to use this to screen people out who aren't gonna make it through the process. So first, the first line says we're seeking a talented tech savvy data guru to take control of lead nurturing and optimization activities. So there's a Lot of people out there who would say, like, that's not me. I am not a data guru, right? So they're automatically gonna be screening themselves out. There's also a descriptive list of the job responsibilities here. I won't read that. But the one tip I'd like to give you is that it's really important to include a list of skills not only that you're looking for, but to highlight which ones are deal breakers. So you can see one here that says, we're looking for intermediate to advanced use of Excel. If you're an Excel fanatic, even better. So someone who's not familiar with pivot tables should know, I don't have the skills to do this job, and they shouldn't apply. The other thing about writing a really thoughtful job description, in addition to giving the candidate a picture of what you're looking for, is that it forces you to do the work too, to think about what the ideal candidate looks like. Taking that a step even further, I recommend that you create a job rubric. A rubric is really just a fancy name for a list of skills. So I've given you an example up here of an in process rubric. It could be one for the same job description that you were just looking at where you're looking to hire someone who has really good analysis skills. It will do you a lot of favors now and further down the line in the hiring process if you really detail out what remarkable skills look like when it comes to analysis. So here you can see I'm not going to read all the text to you again, but be very thoughtful about like, what a beginner would look like, what someone intermediate is, and what's remarkable because you may be willing for some of these skills to hire, you know, a mix of intermediate and remarkable. You may not find remarkable down every column, but this will keep you very disciplined about making sure you know, you're not getting dazzled by someone who's really strong in one skill and doesn't meet. Doesn't meet the bar in the other areas. So my tip here is to give examples of what really remarkable skills look like. A lot of hiring managers would skip this test because they'd say, oh, I just know someone really good when I see them. Like, I don't need to write all that down or go through this process. But the problem with that is there's a whole sea of marketing marks out there and you'll waste a lot of time just waiting till you find that right candidate. If you don't get disciplined about specifically what you're looking for and having the ability to weed them out. It also makes you prone to make hiring mistakes because you could miss something along the way. Okay, so onto our next steps, reviewing resumes. And some of you may be expecting me to say, like, oh, the traditional resume is dead. I actually don't think that. I think that resumes are still really helpful to get a snapshot of someone's experiences and more importantly, how they present themselves. Especially if you're hiring a marketer or a salesperson. And if they can't market or sell themselves, well, how are they going to do with your product or service? Think about that. But in 2016, what I do want to highlight is this should only be one small fraction of what you're looking at when you evaluate a candidate and even before you talk to someone. We are so fortunate that we now have the Internet, right? And you can find out a lot more about people these days. And I really encourage you that as you're going through resumes just to check their online presence. And I'm not talking about like looking for crazy party photos on Facebook, different people, different cultures will have different opinions about that. And I'll let everyone make their own decisions. But the tip that I want to give is, especially in the case we're using an example of hiring someone for marketing, that you want to look at their digital marketing presence. So if you're hiring someone to be doing a lot of content creation, look at what content that you have that's been published. Or if you're hiring someone who's going to need to have really great design skills, they should have an Instagram account. That's really going to flatter you, right? So you should just use Google at your side when you go through resumes. Ok, the next step, conducting phone screens. And a lot of newer managers I know either skip this step or they simply don't do it very effectively. And when they're not doing it effectively, what happens is that they just pass along too many people and they're spending too much time doing live interviews and having really long interviews. So you can see here that I highly recommend that you keep phone screens to 30 minutes and stay very disciplined about that. The way to keep things to 30 minutes is to, number one, create an outline. Think about what you want to get out of this call and what types of questions you'll ask. Also, don't spend too much time on rapport. In fact, rapport can be very harmful. Or building too much rapport can be harmful because you'll get very, very swayed by whether or not you just find someone likable. And also don't let the candidate ramble. So my little tip here is that you shouldn't be afraid to interrupt people, but of course do it politely. Here's an example of how I generally do that. I really like to ask open ended questions and I recommend that you do that too. But if someone is starting to go on too much, I'll just politely interrupt and say, oh, thank you very much. You've given me a great picture of some of your lead gen experience. Now I'd like to shift gears. Tell me about a time that you did. Blah. Right. So then they don't feel like, oh, they interrupted me. It's not rude, but you're just, you're keeping things to a schedule and you're keeping the pace, moving along. Okay, so this next step I just, I simply cannot emphasize enough. It's been really, really, really helpful for my team at HubSpot. When we're really trying to evaluate how someone's going to do on the job. This is all about giving a scenario assessment. And a scenario assessment is simply like a mock up of the type of work that they would do on the job that you can test for very oftentimes in writing or maybe through a role play. So again, since I know we have many marketers in the room, I'll start with some marketing examples. You could ask someone to write a sample blog post on a topic that you give them. You could give them notes from a customer interview, ask them to write a mock case study. You could also show them examples of some email campaigns that you've done or maybe alter those a little bit to have some very blatant mistakes and some that are more subtle and ask them to critique it, see what they do with the subject line, the design. This is also really effective in non marketing jobs and it doesn't have to be in writing. As I mentioned some examples to consider. There are, perhaps you're hiring for someone who needs customer service skills. So you could do a role play and you could play the angry customer and see how they manage you. Another example could be, you know, if you're hiring someone to do sales or to be a sales trainer, you could do a mock training session where they teach you something. So my tip here is to use real world examples. First of all, it's going to take you a lot less time because you can repurpose and just hide any confidential numbers and make things anonymous, but you can just repurpose work that you already have. And it's also going to give you the most accurate assessment of how skilled this person will be on the job. So back to our friend, marketing Mark. So a lot of people who skip this scenario assessment phase say, oh, well, I can just ask for work samples of things they already have since this is a written exercise. In the case of marketing Mark, perhaps he gives you some work samples and you know, they look really good, but how do you know that they're truly his work or his work alone? Maybe he works with agencies and his work was edited by a copywriter or his boss fixed all his mistakes. Right. Whereas if you do a more realistic job scenario, you might find like, wow, he uses a lot of jargon in his writing or he just doesn't understand the value prop of our company. Or maybe his writing's boring or he's not effective in dealing with customers. Okay, so onto our next step. So once someone's made it through, you know, these scenario assessments, you've done the phone screen, you're ready to interview. But before you're really going to interview, you want to do a lot of planning for your interviewing, which starts by assembling a dream team. Who can tell me what this team was? The dream team? Yeah, it was the 1992 Team USA Olympic basketball team. So the thing that was really unique about them, other than them all just being amazing superstars, all a players. Right. Like we're looking for, is that they had skills that really complemented other each each other. So when you think about assembling your interview team, you want to look for a dream team. You want people not only in your own team. That's the most common mistake that I see people make is they say like, oh, well, you know, they're going to work for me. So I'll have my boss on the, on the interview loop and I'll have, you know, one of their teammates that they'll work with. But at HubSpot, we round it out and we think about not just the direct teammates, but who are the stakeholders that they're going to work with. For example, I lead a sales enablement team. I always include a sales manager and a sales rep on the interview loop as well as other marketers. You also just want to think about the different personalities and how they'll react to different personalities. So think about different functions, different personalities, and how you're going to get a really round view of this candidate from people with different perspectives. And so the quick little tip I'll give you here too is that consider Including a pure culture interviewer. That's something that we've implemented at HubSpot, where they don't even talk to them as much about, you know, the job skills they just look at if this person is going to add to our culture. So it doesn't mean you're going to be looking for people who are just like me. But consider what your culture looks like today and how you can add to it, how you can find people that complement your culture and will elevate it. Okay, so now that you've got your interview dream team together, keep in mind that you're the coach of this team. So it's your job to prep this team before the interview to do a really great job for you. One way to do that is to either send a note or hold a meeting where you're gonna cover a few basics with them. Just give them a good background on the candidate. If you're hiring really skilled people, they're probably very busy people who get called on to do a lot of things above and beyond their own job at work. So make it easy for them. Give them a quick rundown of the candidate's background. Of course, they can look at the resume, too, but you can make it easy for them by making it something that just shows the highlights. You should also describe the strengths and weaknesses that you've already observed. Right. You did all this work to go through all these steps, so you should share those. And most importantly, tell them what uncertainties you have, because those are the things that they should be focusing on most during the live interviews that they're going to be conducting. And then finally, tell them what competencies to test. And that's where my next tip comes into play. I recommend that you give each person no more than two or three different competencies to test. If you don't do this, it's wasting the collective time of the group, because you may have some interviewers that'll ask the candidate the same question, which, by the way, is also just a really crappy candidate experience. Right? Who wants to answer the same questions over and over again? Also, it's just not an efficient use of time. So think about, you know, the different personalities and skill sets of the team that you've assembled and who's most appropriate to ask different types of questions and assess for different skills. Because remember, you've created a job rubric so you know what skills you're looking for, so assign those skills accordingly. You can even give people sample questions that you would recommend that they ask. If you want to Take this to the next level. So at the end of the day, you will have a better, like, all around collective picture of this candidate because you've used the time of the group most efficiently. This is another one that I find really, really important to think about. And that's where a little more upfront work may come into play. But at the end of the day, you'll be bringing in fewer candidates and spending less time. So it's going to pay off in the end. This brings us to our final actual step in the process. And I could do a whole session just on interviewing, so I'll spend a little bit of time here, but not enough for a whole session that I could go into. You want to have interviews that are going to be very objective and that are going to be conclusive because the worst thing that you can do is walk out of the room and be unsure. And one way to be really conclusive and to be really effective is again, to plan your time wisely and to structure your interview in a certain way. So here's what I recommend you do. Start with a resume review. Now, of course, you have read this person's resume, you know a bit about them, although the other interviewers in your dream team may not know as much. I always ask someone like, hey, you know, I've already read through your resume, but just walk me through it in two or three minutes. You know, tell me about your experiences. And what I'll find is, again, if you're looking for someone who's going to do marketing or be in sales, they should be able to really effectively market and sell themselves. They're not just going to give you bullet points of what they've done. They're going to tell you a story, they're going to tell you how it all fits together. And someone who's really, really good at this will in fact end and answer the next question that you might ask, which is, why do you want this job? Or why are you here today? They'll actually just do it automatically in the resume review and they'll say, and next, I'm looking to be the best lead nurturing marketing manager around. Because I'm like, I have outstanding analysis skills and I feel like coming to this company, I can elevate them to the next level and really help you solve problems. Xyz, right. So someone who is really outstanding at telling their own story will already be selling you on why they're right for the job. And after they've been going through their experiences, you won't even need to ask for it. But if they don't go there and do that, you should ask them for it, right? Tell them, ask them like, hey, why are you here today? That's why I made that job interest bullet point. Why are you here today? Why are you interested in HubSpot? What stood out to you about this job in particular? Next, you should ask them some behavioral questions. And these can be a little bit confusing or tricky. It may sound like a buzzword. So examples of behavioral questions are those that start with tell me about a time that you motivated a team, or give me an example of when you created a social media campaign that had results even better than you expected. Or tell me about a time you failed and what you learned from it. The reason you want to ask behavioral questions is that past performance can be a really good predictor of future performance. And when someone answers these, well, they're going to give you answers about things that they've learned, like how they generally tend to work, how they interact with other people. So they can be much, much more effective than just going through someone's resume and doing the kind of general resume screen. Next case questions. These are really effective for testing someone's analysis skills, testing their creativity. And again, I'll give you an example because people often think of like, oh, how many ping pong balls would it take to fill this room? And those can be effective for some jobs. But if you're hiring for a marketer or a salesperson, you can think of some others. For example, you could say to them, okay, I want you to walk through a scenario with me. Let's design a campaign together. You have $50,000 and you have two months to generate X number of leads. What channels are you going to use? How are you going to design this? Notice that that's not a one sentence answer. They'll probably be asking you lots of clarifying questions and you just make it up along the way. You should have a realistic scenario in your head going into it. Or you could give them a whole set of data and then work with that. Another example of a case question could just be simply like, teach me something new. Maybe you notice a hobby on their resume or something in their job experience and you could say, oh, you know, teach me how you would do XYZ and have them walk you through that. Another example I like to use for salespeople and specifically is you could have a pricing negotiation that's a really, really telling indicator, right? You could set out a pretty simple scenario where they play the sales rep and you Play the customer and you tell them that they're trying to get to a certain price, and you'll have in your own mind a certain price that you're trying to get to. Just like play out that scenario and see where it lands. That will give you a really, really good assessment of their negotiations skills in general. So I already gave you a little tip here. My tip for you, and this is related to the having conclusive interviews, is that if you walk out and you're like, maybe, like, the person seemed pretty smart, but like, I'm not really sure that's a no hire, right? We're looking to hire a players here. So if you have any uncertainties, then that means that this is not the right person for the job. This person is not remarkable. Okay, so back to our friend, Marketing Mark. Let's think about how this method of conducting interviews would surface things about Marketing Mark that you wouldn't necessarily see through a traditional, what I would call resume review. Remember from the beginning that Mark is a really articulate, really likable guy. He has some related experience. So if you're just doing a resume review, you're gonna think, great, I'll definitely hire this guy. I enjoyed spending these 45 minutes with him. But if you do this more dynamic interview, you may understand, like, he doesn't understand the metrics of a marketing funnel and he doesn't really have a track record of results. So he's not gonna get hired. So basically the difference here is that Marketing Mark is really relatable. You can relate to him because he's likable, he has really good skills, but he's just not remarkable. He doesn't have a track record of doing really remarkable things. And this style of interviewing and this whole process, in fact, is the way to uncover that. Okay, so we made it through. We made it through all eight steps. We also talked about some tips along the way. I'm not going to read all of these off to you, but I know you're getting the slides, so this could be a handy one to keep around. So I'll highlight a few that I think resonate really well with managers that I've talked to in the past. Which is, number one, creating that rubric. That's something that not a lot of people do but can be really helpful. And in that rubric, you definitely want to make sure you detail out with the remarkable skill skills look like another thing that I really want to emphasize, I emphasized it before, is giving those scenario assessments. And the tip there is to use real world scenarios. Again, it helps save you time. It's a much more accurate predictor of how they'll do on the job. And then the other one is around assembling that dream team and prepping or coaching that interview team, which is giving each person two to three skills that they're going to look for so that you can use the collective time of the group most efficiently rather than just asking each person to do an interview. Okay, so you'll get those. So I'm not going to talk you through each one, but hopefully what you've seen is that this has uncovered things that you wouldn't have normally seen about marketing Mark. All right, how many of you, when I kept saying marketing Mark, still had marketing Mark in their head? Yeah. All right, so now I think you'll see how you can hire a lot of these A players. These like, awesome, awesome, Tina Fey like people when you go through this hiring process with a twist. I've written a blog article on this topic, so I just want to make sure you all have the URL. If you want to just jot this down, the URLs available to you here. Again, you'll also get access to all of these slides. The blog article has a slightly different spin on it, but it goes through a lot of these and I think collectively they can be really helpful for you.