Recruitment Success Part 1: The Mindset required to hire Top Performers

We are going to dive deep into the power of human potential. I have a very strong belief that the value of your business is directly tied to the quality of the people that you can bring into your organization. How do you identify them, how do you recruit them, how do you get them up forming on your team? The first thing about recruiting success is really understanding exactly what you're looking for. I've broken this down into four segments for recruiting success. We're going to start with mindset. Then we're going to look at the job posting and advertising. Then we're going to look at two other areas. So the first thing for recruitment success is really your mindset. So what I teach organizations is that when you are interviewing someone or someone on your team is interviewing someone, their mindset has to be, I'm writing a half a million dollar check after that interview. How many people in your organization have the authority to write a half a million dollar check? My guess is it's not too many. And if you're going to make a half a million dollar decision, how seriously are you going to take that decision? Well, the truth is the quality of the person you bring into your organization, when you get it right, it's over a half a million dollar win in lifetime value from that employee. And when you lose, you lose half a million dollars in value. But here's what I see in roofing companies. Even almost worse than any other industry is this idea that I can have a churning door of roofing salespeople come in and it doesn't matter, right, because they're working on commission. If they don't make it, well, this is no skin off my names. That's not the way to think about a high performing company with your leadership team. Get them thinking they're writing a half a million dollar check after every single interview. In fact, when somebody's done an interview and they say we should hire Adam Sands, have them write a half a million dollar check with Adam Sands on it. On the back of that check, have them write, why? What did they believe to be true about Adam? Now what are you going to do with those checks? You're going to file those and when Adam doesn't work out, that check bounces. Whether that's 30 days, 60 days, 90 days a year, pull the checkout and look at the back and start understanding what is it that we're missing as an organization? How can we improve our process? Here's the interesting thing. If you went to the leaders in your organization, just take your top five roles in your Organization. You said, what is our turnover percentage in each of these roles? And you had your leadership team write down what they thought. How close do you think they would get? I was just out with an organization and we pulled all the numbers so we knew their exact turnover rate. Out of all the positions, the highest turnover the leadership team thought they had for any single position with 20%, the truth was, against those position, their worst turnover was 250% and their best role was 35%. There's this disconnect between what's actually happening in your business and what your leadership team thinks. So the first thing you want to nail the valuation of your business. You, the owner, the operator, the manager, the leader in the organization, have to decide that this is indeed the single most important thing you can do today. And your team's focus has to be on that. Your job is to keep imposters off the team. And despite all of the other, you know, dumpster fires we have going on in our business, when it comes time to engage in the hiring process and we have a prospective employee in front of us, it's the single most important thing we can make. So, third point, rely on data less on gut and intuition. We did the largest research study ever quantifying the performance VNA of trade employees. And the goal was to say, could we predict free hire, how somebody's going to perform in that job, and how likely are they to stick and stay? Right? Because isn't that the. When you're talking about a return on investment in employee, it's one, will they perform at the highest level? And then second, right next to that is will they stay around long enough after I've trained them that I can get a return on that investment? A guesstimate about what makes a roofing salesperson or an installer or a technician or a dispatcher or a leader within a trades organization will work out. As part of this study, we got hundreds of companies representing over 10,000 employees actually doing the job every single day. And so we assessed all of those employees against 450 attributes. You can see some of those on your screen. Which of those even matter? Which of them are good to have, which of them are bad to have? You know, if you're baking a perfect recipe for a meal, you're going to serve someone. If you think about these as ingredients for the perfect human, the perfect salesperson inside of your roofing organization, which of them matter? So we assessed over 10,000 people and got this data on them. We took those same data points. We skinnied Those down to 90 that had really high value. Meaning when a human had these or lacked these traits, their performance changed. It either went up, it went down, or maybe it was static. And then those same companies gave us the performance data on those employees. So from their service time or whatever system of record they're using, we got the actual performance date. What were the sales numbers? What were the callback rates? Right. What were the customer satisfaction for? And then every manager also filled out a report individually about each of those employees on all the stock things that you don't necessarily easily measure. So we fed that into a machine learning algorithm. That's just a fancy word for multivariate regression analysis, which is really just the fancy terms per se. Which of these things impact other things? Like when these things are true, what does it mean over here? That's really all AI is. What's the pattern? And so for every role inside of an organization, we developed what we call a Reggie blueprint. You're seeing one on the screen now that is predicting sales rep candidate performance plus flight risk. These items on the side are the things that matter when it comes to a sales rep performance forming inside of your organization. It takes the candidate about 14 minutes. Answering some online questions. You notice these are the things we're measuring. And then we output a score, 0 to 100. How are they going to compare to those employees whose performance we already know? And then our system is guessing about how this person in front of you, Adam, was going to do in that role that you have for them. And then second, we're also giving you a flight risk score, 0 to 100. Obviously you want a lower flight risk, a higher performance. The fourth point is that you should always, for every role, have a drop dead date and clear performance metrics before you hire them. What do I mean by that? Well, if it's a sales role, I'm just going to use that because it's pretty easy to understand. You can say, look at day 90, you have to be producing X. If not, you can't keep working for us. And you can do that for every role in the organization. What does that allow you to do? Well, if you have a drop dead date and clear performance, every interaction with that prospect leading up to the hiring. Right. So your job ad, your emails, your scheduling, your interview, your interview, follow up, every single interaction, you can talk about your drop dead date and what those performance metrics are. Superstar performers want to work for a winning team. If you want to get winners on your team, start talking like winning matters and that you know what winning looks like. So that's one ancillary benefit. The second is, here's what's going to happen. Have you ever thrown good money after bad? You know, if they could. If I can just get them, maybe I've been busy. I haven't given them enough training. Maybe if I just stick with it another 30 days or stick with another 60 days and pretty soon you're six months into somebody you knew you should hire. Three months. What's going to happen with your leadership team here? They say, yes, let's hire Adam. And they fall in love with that because they wouldn't have hired him if they weren't going to. And Adam is a great guy. And Adam might not hit his drop dead day clear performance standard. And the day is there when Adam needs to be fired and the leadership on your team is going to say, let's give Adam a little more time. And you're going to say, nope, we have a drop dead date and clear performance. And no matter how much we love Adam, we got to let Adam go. And you're going to have to fire somebody that you do not want to fire. And in fact, 100% of your leadership team are going to be committed and in agreement that they don't want to fire Adam. And you'll have a decision to make to say, do our standards matter? Because a standard unmet and unmentioned and unnoticed is not a standard. Here's the power of that. I'm hiring somebody. I'm going to be their manager. And I can say to Adam, adam, I think you're going to be excellent at this. We've done all the work. You're the right person. We've got a great process in place to help you be successful at this. And as we've been talking all along, the expectation is you have $150,000 in sales and you're on that run rate by day 90. I just made up a number. Right. But whatever your standard is, here's the thing, Adam, if you don't meet that standard, I do not have the authority to keep you. My leadership team has taken that authority away from me, and I know that day 90, I'm going to like you a lot more than I do today or I wouldn't be hiring you. I'm probably going to know your kids and I'm going to know a lot about you. We might have even had a few beers together. But if on day 90, you're not meeting that standard, I have zero authority to save you. So here's what I'm going to tell you. I'll do everything in my power to help you be successful and you're going to ask me every time you need help and we're going to leave it all on the playing field. Does that seem fair? That alone with writing a half a million dollar check will completely transform your hiring process, even if you did. Nothing else I'm going to talk about today, just that's going to change your turnover by at least 10% guaranteed. Because your team is going to be focused on knowing what does it take to have somebody be successful in your organization.