In this talk, Ryan Deiss explains why many hiring failures stem from recruiting task‑oriented workers rather than outcome‑oriented ones. Early‑stage companies often hire people who excel at completing assigned tasks, but as a business scales it needs employees who can identify, own, and improve key performance metrics (e.g., leads, client satisfaction). Deiss argues that the interview process should shift from asking candidates whether they can perform specific tasks to probing how they would impact a target metric and move it from its current value (X) to a desired future value (Y). This mindset helps transform task‑based staff into outcome‑driven contributors and aligns hiring with growth objectives.
Chapters
When you can't get your employees to do the things that you hired them to do, it's usually not because they're an A player versus a B player or something like that. It's usually because you've hired a task person instead of an outcome person. And the difference is subtle, and it's hard because in the beginning, like zero to a million, you're almost exclusively hiring task-based people. These are people who you give them a task and they do the task effectively. And look, you can have a very good employee who, if you say, this is the task I want you to do, and if they do it on time and up to your standards, That's a good employee, but that's a good task-based employee. And as businesses scale, we want to try to take task-based people and turn them into outcome-based people, and most just don't make that transition. Because the difference is what we want is we want to say, I just need more leads, go get me more leads. And so often the people that work for us don't— they don't know how to do that. Or help grow my following, do that. Or, you know, we've got some angry clients, go fix that. That's an outcome, and so that should start in the interviewing process. So you're interviewing people to find out, have they done that? Do they understand how to impact this metric that you want to impact? And so what we need to do and the shift that we need to make in our hiring is not asking people about, can you do X, can you do Y, can you do Z? But instead of talking about the tasks, talk about the metrics they need to impact and say, this one metric here, right? Maybe it's leads or whatever. This one metric is is currently X, we need to get it to Y. What would you do to take it from X to Y?
