Fletcher Wimbush Live on Shally's Alley

All right, what is going on everybody? I hope you're not frozen out like I am in Atlanta here. It is snowpocalypse, but we warmed up and defrosted and you are live on Shelly's Alley, January 10th, our second episode of the January season. I keep getting all these alerts that say weather storm watching Warning, stay home. It's like, oh my God, stop annoying me. I get it already. Okay. Anyway, so happy winter to those of you that have snowed in. I heard it snowed in Texas too.

Yeah.

You got any snow up there?

We got fire. So the worst fires LA has ever seen, basically. Yeah.

Oh, that's terrible. Yeah. Let me send you some snow.

Yeah. Send us some snow.

It's crazy.

NorCal's been getting some rain and snow, but SoCal's like dry as a bone. And I can't remember in my, you know, 42 years, uh, fires this bad. I mean, I think they've said it's the worst ever, but I can't remember. Can you breathe the air? Well, luckily, luckily I'm in Orange County, so I'm not all that close to the fires. But, you know, we know people up there and, you know, we've been, you know, watching it. And yeah, the smoke kind of starting to build and, you know, we're all in a bunch of valleys, right? So it's in and yeah. But I just got out of the water. I was surfing. So I guess, like, oh, bummer.

Wow, that's a little early. Well, actually, I guess not.

Yeah, you know, it's 10 o'clock here.

So, right, right, right, right, right, right. Well, for everybody that doesn't know who you are, our special guest today on Shelly's Alley is Fletcher Wimbush, and he is an expert in, how shall we say, pre-employment assessment and Talent assessment is what I— Talent assessment, OK.

Collectively.

Pre and post. Gotcha.

Well, mostly pre, but, you know, yeah, I mean, you think of preemployment assessments is where we started with formal assessment, structured tests. But, you know, there's more to it in assessment tests, per se. Right.

It's not just a test.

Yeah, or assessments. I mean, they're not not, you know, personality or behavioral assessments aren't tests, by the way. Like, there's not, there's not a right or wrong answer to a behavioral or a preferential type of question right now, as opposed to an aptitude test or a skill test, whether or not you can do the skill, right?

Or you have a lot of folks in recruiting, right? Right. Yeah. A lot of folks in recruiting don't have much to do with the, with the assessment. Stage, usually that's something a company will have designed or hire out. And so recruiters will send them the assessment and then package. But most of the people that I think are out there listening probably haven't had the opportunity to evaluate and select assessment vendors or anything like that. So it's good that we kind of demystify that. I'm glad that you brought that up, that it's not a test. Or I mean, there can be, but you started, your father started an assessment business long ago, right?

And you, and you like 40, 1980. So when are we at 45 years this year in February before the internet, right? So the anniversary is coming up here. Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, uh, or maybe it was, it was like leap day. It's weird. I have the articles of incorporation, you know, from a leap.

So 3, 4 years you have an anniversary.

Yeah.

So yeah. So like breaking down the components you've got. You've got like the assessment stage can include interviewing and recruiters should know how to do that. And so you have some interviewing. They're part of it.

They're part of that process.

Right. And then you've got the assessment, which could, which could be questions that are open-ended. Don't necessarily have like, some people might know, what are some of the famous ones? Like, uh, um, like DiSC or Myers-Briggs. Myers-Briggs. Yeah.

There you go. Yeah. Some of those.

And then you have tests about someone's skill and aptitude. And then they have, you know, so there's different things. Um, but so, and folks may not know this, you're, you're pretty, you get around, you're pretty famous, pretty well known in, in the circuit and you've conducted what, like over 10,000 interviews and advised with like more like 1,500 companies or something like that. In your experience, what are the most common but overlooked red flags? During hiring? Part 1 of a 2-part question.

Yeah. So the most common but overlooked— Overlooked.

Yeah. Not the most common red flags, but the most common red flags people miss. By the way, a red flag, for those of you that might not know that because you're in a different culture, a red flag is a warning sign, or it's something that alerts you to the fact that there may be something off, or this may not be the right candidate. Or the right fit for the organization. So think of a red flag as—

okay, I got it. That finally— so this is, this is a tough question, by the way, because I mean, I think of things like job hopping, and I'm not a fan of job hopping. So, you know, all you recruiters out there who are defending job hoppers, you're wrong. There's actually science says you're wrong too, by the way.

Well, yeah, well, it depends if it's a contractor though. I want to make sure that we— yeah, well, because people who do contract, like, I, I had a friend Eric, who Eric Jake with, who was a, uh, an avid contractor and he would specifically set up 3 to 6 month gigs on purpose, but there was consulting and you had a beginning and an end.

So, and think about it this way, you want to hire the person to work for you for 2 years, 5 years, 10 years.

But not in this case.

He wasn't hiring. So what if then you're hiring somebody for a 6 month, 12 month gig, right? So that would be. Misinterpreting what you see on a work history by saying, oh, this person, you know, job, you know, sticks around for jobs for 1 to 2 years. And, and part of my ideal candidate profile is that somebody will be with me for the next 5+ years because they'll grow. I'm going to hire them. I'm going to develop them. I'm going to, you know, I want that. My goal for this person is to progress within the organization. When you hire people with that kind of track record, they've told you everything you need to know about what they're likely to do. Now, if I was hiring a contractor, if I needed I need a Salesforce implementation or whatever, you know, like then I would look at contractors and I would say, do they have experience working as a contractor? Because actually I don't want to hire the person who's been at their company for 10 years to do that job because they actually don't know how to operate as a contractor in a 6-month engagement. That doesn't fit their mode of operation naturally. I mean, could they do it? Yes, potentially, but it would be a red flag.

Like, so what you're saying is if you're looking for somebody to do a short-term gig, hire someone that's done short-term gigs. But if you're looking for a long-term employee, Um, you got to look for people that have that ability to have long-term potential, but growth potential. Yeah. But I'll ask you how often within a what period of time, right? Like somebody might have gotten a job and their company was acquired or, um, and this happens a lot on resumes I've noticed where it looks like a different job. So like I started working for company X and then on my resume it says company X and then company Y, and it looks like one year at each one, but really I never switched jobs. It was just two different companies. So you gotta be careful not to—

Yeah, for job seekers, I highly recommend like helping the, the resume, like the reader of the resume, like make that connection.

These are both the same job.

Yeah, I'm cool with all that. Of course. I mean, like these things do happen and look, there, this is, there's no hard and fast rule to it, but that's just kind of a general like way of saying, looking at a resume and saying, hey, Hey, is there high potential here or not? And a way, you know, and to filter through some of that. What I found here, 15,000 interviews later now, is every time you— yeah, now I'm up to like 15,000. That's my outdated numbers. That was from like 5 years ago, my 10,000 number. I slowed my pace by a lot. But anyways, you know, I would interview these folks and look, they always have a reason So here's the hidden thing, right? It's everybody has a good reason for why they left their jobs, but without digging into the real truth and really pressing on that hard, that's the hidden red flag, right? I left because I was laid off. Well, why were you laid off? Like, why were you laid off and not somebody else? It just begs that question, but nobody asks it, right? Well, they were bought. And acquired. And so they laid us off. Well, why lay you off and not the rest of the staff? Because the reality is that these things don't happen, right? When there's layoffs, they don't lay everybody off. When they— when a company gets acquired, they don't lay everyone off, right? So why you, not somebody, you know, as—

and the reasons could be, it could be that department was eliminated and you didn't have a choice, or it could be you were picked out of that department to be eliminated.

So then you start to go down that list though, and you go, in this other job, why'd you you leave? Well, I didn't get along with my supervisor, or, or we didn't, we had a difference of opinions, or then you go down the next one, and there's going to be like this really kind of plausible-sounding reason for every single one of those. The reality is, if you dig into those things, that the truth will come out. And if you just don't accept the surface-level answer, then you will find out a lot more. I mean, it was pretty funny. I mean, like, well, not funny. I mean, Sad. And I felt really bad for this gal. I mean, I thought she was actually a pretty marketable candidate. I was interviewing this like CPA because they're, you know, you can't find CPAs to work in public accounting, period. Like they just, they don't exist anymore. But there's a few obviously, but as a whole, they're like scarce, like rare, the rarest bird you're ever going to meet. And this gal had like, you know, a pretty nice little career, you know, right out of college, nice trajectory, worked for like a mid-sized firm. And she was let go. She was laid off. And I was like, you laid off like right before tax season? Like that's inconceivable. There's no tax firm on earth that needs it, that couldn't use an extra tax professional in their firm for tax season. There's not a single one.

What did you know about?

Yeah, the industry, the industry, right? Yeah. This is just kind of like, you know, if you're in this space, this is something that, you know, like, you know, tax season is not when you need to go find somebody to do the job. Yeah. And not when you're letting go staff you know, paring back. Like, tax firms have plenty of work to do. They have too much work to do. They need all the bodies they can get, period. So it's like, this just doesn't really add up. And I was like, so I kind of pressed her on it. And boy, you know, the truth came out. Like, you know, basically she, I mean, she was promoted beyond her ability to achieve. She was working for a partner who did not think she was doing a good job, flat out, like did not think she was capable. And ultimately she told me that. And, not so many words.

Now, that could be in that setting or in that job. Maybe there's another setting or another job where she would perform, but in that setting, in that job.

Yeah, yeah. But it makes it very difficult. And so really what the reality is, is that she was probably promoted beyond her ability. And there was mistakes probably made on both sides. But for her to come back into the market and try to find a job at that same level would have been inappropriate. She would have found herself in a very similar situation. It would have been highly unlikely that she would have been successful going into her next job at the same level. She needed to take a step back so that she could develop better her skill set so that she could take that step forward in the future. And this was an interesting scenario because she probably is, you know, somebody who has that long-term potential. What would you—

somewhere else in a different place, right, right.

But, but if you—

but you know, right in the deep end, right, it wasn't going to work for that situation. And that's why you've got to create interviews customized to your organization and, and specifically the role. But I completely derailed you because the question originally was, what are the most common overlooked red flags? And I think job hopping is something that a lot of folks, whether they sit on one side or the other of the fence, definitely don't overlook. So what's, what's a commonly overlooked one?

The over is the reasons why.

Okay.

So people take the reason why at its face value and they don't dig deep.

So what's overlooked is the reason of, okay.

Yeah. And with the people don't inspect that reason carefully enough.

Got it. So the second part of the question is failing to do so, how does that impact the long-term organization performance? In other words, um, in this case, I'm just going to jump in here and say, well, you know, they let her go in the middle of tax season, so I can assume that other people had to carry the workload, which maybe meant they couldn't take on as many clients or potentially maybe make less money. So that's short-term. But what are the long-term organizational performance issues that come up with something like that?

Yeah, I mean, those are short and midterm effects, right? But the long-term on burnout, right? You're, you know, now your best people are going to eventually leave. Constantly.

Yeah.

Because you're burning them out because you're overloading them with work. Now culture erodes, right? The more turnover you have in an organization, you cannot establish a strong organizational culture if you are burning your people out and you're having high turnover. Like, culture is developed, it grows, it evolves. And now it either evolves in the wrong direction because you're constantly turning people over—

devolves—

devolves. You can't establish it well because of that, right? Or it evolves because you start to have really loyal, high-performing people who fit your core values as an organization, and they do a great job exhibiting it and also disseminating it to Everybody else and the people who are on the fringes and the new people who come into the organization. And so all of this, you know, it's really a downward spiral, but it's a million-dollar problem.

And it just continues to erode.

Right. Yeah. It's pervasive.

It seems like an easy fix, but yeah, it's not. That's why I asked the question.

We're dealing with human beings. There's nothing easy about hiring and talent selection and there's no silver bullets in this. And it's such a nuanced problem. It's like, getting married. I mean, 50% of marriages end in divorce. Like, well, I mean, most employment relationships end in divorce too, right? But some last a hell of a lot longer than others. And that's, that's the reality. The ones that last longer are more productive. It's more beneficial for the person in the job. That means, I mean, they don't— you don't stick around in a job unless you're getting some personal, uh, reward or, you know, it's not helping you both you know, as a person, like psychologically, you're happy, you're safe, you feel comfortable, you like the environment. You— we spend more time with our coworkers than we do with our family members. I mean, so you don't stick around if you're not getting that. So that's personally good for me as a long-term employee. And then also professionally, it gives me the opportunity to grow, right? So it's hitting my personal and professional growth needs by, you know, staying somewhere longer. Every time you go into a new environment, I mean, I mean, you know, we're, we're a little, you and I are a little bit older.

Yeah.

We'll teach an old dog new tricks. I mean, but you know, that's true for a 21-year-old too, man. Teach a 21-year-old a new trick too. Like I'm surprised how many young Gen Ys I interface with that suck at technology. Like people say they're great at it, but they're not actually. Like, man, I really have to work hard to get that.

You can't assume anybody's, but yeah.

Yeah, really good at it. And I mean, you have to work hard at training them to use the tools that are available. I mean, you know, you're training people on how to use all sorts of, you know, fancy tools.

Hasn't changed much. Doesn't matter how young they get.

Yeah, right. They struggle to adopt, right? I can't get my team to use AI at a high level. Like, I'm leap years above them in terms of—

That's a different skill set. Yes, it's a different skill set. That's not a technology skill set. That's a That's a critical thinking— you got to have critical thinking. But I don't want to digress too far. You, you mentioned the 50% divorce rate, and, um, that reminded me of this saying that we have that, oh, 50% of, um, interviews are correct. Like, literally interviewing is a 50/50 chance. Like, people, people talk about—

and, and it's kind of a way of saying interview is not 30, 35% chance actually, but right.

But the saying is that, you know, interview is kind of a half halfway, you don't really, you know, it doesn't really predict success. But the reason I brought that up is because I want to ask you this question. Who's to blame with a bad hiring decision?

The hiring manager?

Hiring manager?

Hiring manager?

Why not the candidate?

The hiring manager's fault.

Why not the candidate?

Look, the candidate's looking for a job. They're desperate. They're eager.

Maybe not. Maybe not.

But maybe, maybe not. But irregardless, they're looking for a job and they The hiring manager, the organization as a whole has an obligation to educate the candidate on what the job is, what the opportunity is, what the culture is, what they'll be doing, what's going to be expected of them so that the candidate can be a participant in making this decision. They do, they do have a role in this. But at the end of the day, it's the hiring manager. It's the person who's making the decision. It's the person who's saying, "Yes, hire this person." It's their responsibility to make sure that this is a good fit for that individual. Helping them make that the part, their part of the decision by giving them enough information, access, opportunity to learn and to explore and to collaborate with the organization or the team or the hiring manager, whoever, you know, whatever environment you're going to put them into, you got to give them enough exposure to that so that I, the candidate, can say, you know what, this is going to be fit me. I'm going to be happy here. I see my ability to do this job. I see my potential to do it.

If you're the hiring manager and you pull the wool over their eyes, you can't blame them.

Yeah, well, that's part of it. Or you just neglect to inform.

Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Maybe you're not pulling the wool over their eyes, but you just don't know any better. Didn't bring it up, right? The reason I was talking about this, this is why we do calibrations in organizations that have mature interviewing cycles, where we calibrate and take a look at the scorecards for interviews to make sure that we don't have hiring managers that routinely overscore or underscore. And I'll tell you that just, I'm sure you run into this a lot more than I do because I'm usually front of the funnel and most of my experience is, you know, getting people into the organization. But I've had some situations where I identified what everybody in the entire organization thought was our best interviewer. And it was someone who basically always gives everybody a 5 out of 5, occasionally a 4 out of 5. But to me, I felt like saying, I wasn't in a position to do this, but I felt like saying to the leadership team, we need to get rid of this person on the interview panel. Like, not fire them, but like, this person shouldn't be doing interviews because it's not contributing.

Yeah, it's not adding value. There's no critical feedback.

I mean, critical being everybody gets a 5. Okay, you know, not— it's not possible that every candidate is a— even especially when you have other interviewers that are, you know, calibrating on, on both sides. So it's important to take a look at the interview's, uh, scorecards to make sure that you're not, um, continuing to promote a hiring manager— not promote— continue to give a hiring manager the responsibility for interviewing when they're not exactly making a decision. They're sort of always just saying, "Oh yeah, this is great." Besides that though, besides hiring managers that like always say no, which is the other opposite, or they always say yes. What— can you walk us through the most critical and challenging step in a high-impact interview process?

Well, I'm glad you're using most— I'm glad you're using scorecards. So, I mean, you know, everything needs to have a scorecard. So using scorecards and using structured interviews. Now, structured interview doesn't mean that you don't dig deep and get curious.

No, it just means that you have a baseline. They each have different questions. They're not asking the same.

Yeah, yeah. Like core questions that you ask every single time at certain stages or certain points or core things that you do, like a working interview or a project-based interview or an assessment, right? But, you know, so structure to the process that you're consistently doing, hitting the same topics or same things or using the same core question aligned with your scorecard items. And then scoring, but also defending your score. So, and maybe in your case, with the person who's giving 5 stars or saying yes all the time, then I'd be a little harder on them to be like, "Defend your score. Why?" Like, give me evidence, not just you like them. Or it felt right, or like, because felt right or you like them is not evidence.

It's not evidence.

It's not evidence.

They were pretty, they were a good interviewer and they provided good notes, but the notes were always positive. In other words, it was one of these people that I think just felt bad writing negative things.

Sure.

So they would pick out the candidates had positive traits and negative traits. The hiring manager was basically highlighting all the positive traits, very seldom highlighting any negative ones. And I feel like it was almost like a, I don't know if it's a personality thing or what you want to be. They just didn't want to say bad things about people.

Yeah, no, it's, yeah, there are people that are like that and they, and they have their value in an organization in a role and play certain, can play certain roles really, really well. It might not be the appropriate role to put them in the selection committee necessarily, but, you know, could be plenty of other, you know, or how do you solve for that?

Like, here's one way I saw. For it is I, when I teach, you know, about the, the, the pre-screening and interview, again, it's not the full hiring like you do. It's, it's the front of the funnel. Um, it's a 3-point scorecard. Okay. And, and this is the, you're probably going to come, you're going to probably blast this to hell, but my, my, I got you on the show. So it's my chance to guess whether or not it's a good idea, right? You can correct me if I'm wrong, please. I mean, please do. But what I do is I basically have the scorecard, has the attributes that we're looking for that we're interviewing for. And there's 3 points. Basically, there's 0 if that wasn't observed. So if it's, if we're looking for salesmanship, 0 if it wasn't observed by the interviewer, 1 if it was observed by the interview. And 2, if it was observed and the person excels in the interviewer's opinion. So, let's say you have 5 things. I'm just gonna throw some out. Salesmanship, communication skills, great or persistence or whatever. So, you go down the list. You go, okay, I observed it. That's a 1. I observed it. That's 1. Didn't observe it. That's a 0. Observed it and they're pretty— like they excel. That's a 2.

And I'm going to defend that because they gave me evidence and things like that.

Right.

Yeah, no, that's exactly, I mean, that's exactly the essence of a scorecard and how it should be.

Right. But then that 5 hiring manager is, this is the problem. I'm knocking down here is that they use the 5-point scorecard. And I don't think that's really good because what usually that does is it goes negative 2, negative 1, 0, 1, 2, you know, on that scale where 1 to 5, what really means 1 is nah and 5 is yay. Most of the time people go 3 all the way down or 5 all the way down. But with a 0, 1, and 2, I feel like you really don't, you don't have the opportunity. If you observed it, give me an example when you defend. If it's excellent, give me an example with the defend. If you didn't observe it, then it's not a score. What do you think about that system?

Am I like— I love it. No, I mean, it really forces people to make a hard decision, right?

And they're not there really good.

Yeah. And like when we collect feedback on people who have been hired, right? And post-hire 3, 6, 12 months down the road, that's from a, from a science perspective, we're looking at long, like long-term, what were the outcomes there? We, it's always a 3-point scale that we force people. It's like they're either, they were not good, they were satisfactory, or they were great. Right.

You know, so you do say not good instead of not observed.

Well, this is post-hire, right? I'm saying, oh, so post-hire, it's definite. You're either got to be good or they're okay or they're great.

So obviously you have some clients, but even if you only have, you know, 2,000 clients, you don't have all the clients of all the employers in the world. And even though there are other people that do what you do and there are other people that do what I do, Still, this isn't very common. So why do so many companies completely fail to implement these kinds of systems? Why is this so uncommon? Well, in other words, why do you still have a job?

Yeah. Why do I still have a job?

Yeah.

Well, I think, you know, I mean, you know this even from your end, but I mean, hiring is obviously absolutely critical. But it's— I think most organizations forget that it should be a foundational skill set as an organization, uh, that they don't necessarily believe. They kind of think of it as this, like, it's like they think of it as maybe like doing their taxes, I guess, maybe. It's like this thing I gotta do, like, you know, we just gotta do it, right? So they don't necessarily think about it as a fundamental core function of the business. Now, some, plenty of organizations do, by the way. And the best organizations in the world think about the hiring process as a core business function in that they invest a lot of time and energy to have a system, a repeatable process, like you would in any other part of your business, like customer service or sales or product development, right? And, you know, great organizations are great at things. They have systems and processes for core functions of their business. And hiring is a core function of every business, and it should be treated as such. And it, and it should be treated with a high level of urgency and importance, because who you bring into your organization is going to dictate what happens to the success of it in the future. You know, the guy, Brian Chesky, I was just watching his interview on hiring in the— you've heard the founder mode concept, right? Founder mode. Yeah. I mean, he kind of coined this founder mode concept, right? And then he did this nice webinar or blog or whatever interview video on how that applies to the hiring process. And a lot of these like VCs and guys that are out there, they don't believe in having HR departments. HR is a compliance, that's doing your taxes, by the way. They believe in hiring managers being responsible for their hiring process.

And it doesn't mean that they were a founder building their team.

And Brian, he was like, I think the founder should be the final say on the first 450 hires within an organization too. So that's a lot, right? Because it's that important. I'm just using one guy's opinion that to punctuate what, how I feel about this, right? And why I've spent 26 years of my life thinking about talent, talent acquisition particularly talent assessment component of that. Because who you get in your organization, I mean, and I'm a big sports fan. Look at football teams, you know, look at the best sports teams, right? They hire great people who are great culture fits, and they have stability. They have stability at leadership. They have stability in their great players. Those great players stick around. Oh, by the way, I mean, I'm a 49ers fan. I mean, they did a great job of renegotiating contracts with their star players to you know, get them to maybe come down on their price a little bit to stick around. So that's buy-in. That's, I'm bought into your culture. Like, I'll take a pay cut to stay here because I believe so much in what we're doing here in this organization. Right? So these kinds of— it's so cool.

Yeah, what you're saying is active participation in the leadership team. But I think, you know, once you're more than a startup, I think founder mode is, is a little a little bit obsessive.

So then, then a leader at the leadership level and the leaders should have active participation in the— they should be treating it like their own little business, right?

Don't let everybody just kind of choose whoever. I think, yeah, cultural alignment. Yeah. Yeah.

And it trickles down perfectly, right? If I'm the VP of sales, I own this. Nobody's getting hired without me, you know, approving that. Or if the organization is massive, then it's the director of sales for the region, you know, whatever, right? That person owns the outcome.

But so let me ask you, have you, have you ever worked? Have you yourself ever worked inside a TA department?

No, I've never have.

Have you hired people for yourself?

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah. Even though you, okay. How many roughly?

Oh, I don't know.

Um, that you've hired?

Maybe 100. Okay.

Okay. One of the things that I get pushback on And the reason I was going with this, like, obviously you're an expert in the field and nobody's going to come to you and say, hey, you don't know how to hire because you've only hired 100 people. I've hired 50,000. Like, you know, that happens. Like, it just comes back to me. You know, I had one, I had a leader once that said, well, you know, you're an expert in sourcing and recruiting, but you're not an expert in hiring. You know, I hired this, this was an executive at Facebook. Like, I hired everybody in this team. It's like 6,000 people. Whatever, you know, founder mentality and everything. And I'm listening to that and I'm going, okay, um, so I've only written maybe 100 lines of code, but I can tell you when software is shitty.

I mean, right?

Like, I'm like, hold on a second, timeout. I didn't hire 6,000 people, but I can tell you that there's certain things that you, you know, sometimes it's like, I feel like the pushback, well, Well, that's hilarious that these organizations have that. They're quite frankly, if you've hired 6,000 people, you probably made a few hiring mistakes. And what I'd like to know is how many of those 6,000 people stayed past their, their whatever, you know, expiration date and like, just were rated as top performers or, you know, yeah. Like just because, right. So my question is, um, this still becomes a, this still becomes a really critical factor. In the success of an organization. And simply having interviewed 5,000 people and said everybody was a 5 doesn't really— like, that's not contributing.

Doesn't mean anything. Yeah.

Yeah. So why are we so bad at this? Why do we still today— it's, it's freaking 2025— why do we still suck at hiring?

Because we're humans. That's why. Um, yeah, kids are humans. And, you know, you talk about AI now.

Why do we still still got machines.

Well, because the, the AI has been— is only as good as the instructions that humans give it and the way they structure and, and execute it. So, you know, it's, it's, it's crazy. But yeah, it's because we're human beings. And, you know, this is why, you know, when I took this over— I think it's 12 or 13 years, I can't, can't remember now— but, you know, I made— and I was 31, and I was a leader in a business where Hiring was my responsibility, and I had to hire a lot of people in lots of different roles across from frontline to management roles. I was hiring all levels of the organization underneath me. And, you know, I had a recruiting and HR department, but they were separated. So I had a dedicated recruiter on my team. But all they did was, you know, like kind of source, find, screen, and deliver a, you know, minimally viable candidate. Fit, right? You know, that passed the, you know, basic criteria. And then it was up to me and my leadership team to figure out whether that person was actually a fit. So I had that experience working for a large privately held company where I got to be in that sort of, that founder mode as a leader, as a, and, and act like a CEO within my own domain within the organization. And so I, you know, yeah, that obviously I'm biased towards that. I'm greatly affected. But then I go into this world where now I'm in this kind of consulting, teaching side. And I said, well, nobody's going to believe me. You know, I'm 31. What are they, you know, what are they going to think about me? And that's why I interviewed 10,000 people to start. And now I'm at over 15,000 people. And I'm a Malcolm Gladwell fan. And I, and I did that with a high degree of intentionality. So I set out and I understood what the most scientifically, statistically best practices are. So structured interviews, scorecards, behavioral assessments, integrity assessments, aptitude—so cognitive ability, people EQ, skill sets—reference checking, and working interviews are all in the top 6 to 7 most predictive things that you can do. And if you, you know, study any of the gurus or any of the science or any of the people, who, you know, who preach this stuff. This is, this was, you know, inspired by then. And then I took that a step further saying like, well, I don't know, how do I believe this? Well, we partnered with Bowling Green State University, who's the top IO psychology program for talent assessment in the world. And they are our academic advisors. And we spent a lot of time researching and co-authoring scientific journal articles on these subjects. As well as just using external studies. So we knew, like, these are statistically the levers that are going to move the needle. And then we practiced. We did it with intentionality. So that's the difference between what I do and versus the person who gives everybody a 5-star. That 5-star person has no method to their madness. No, no, that's what I was thinking. There's no intentionality, right? So intention—

now, now when we make these things— So you use for your systems, you use like DiSC or something? Yeah, it's—

all of our assessments are proprietary, but the personality component, one of the personality components, is a DiSC style of assessment, the Four Personality, the DiSC, Dominant, Influenced, Steady, Conscientious style of personality.

Similar to the Myers-Briggs kind of—

Myers-Briggs or something like that. And then we do have Big Five assessments. We're a big fan of those too. But, you know, there's a little bit Application, choosing the right assessment, using the information that you learn from those assessments is, that's also another skill set though. Like you're applying the science correctly is a whole nother nuance to this. There are like 40 different things that you gotta do to get hiring right. So there's a lot of little levers. Now, if you do like, okay, that answers my question.

Why not everybody gets it right?

Yeah. If you do like 10 to 15 of them really, really well, you will move the needle. In a big, big, big way too. Right.

Right. You don't have to do all 40.

Yeah. I mean, ideally you would, but yeah.

What about, let's switch over to the AI kind of, I caught the AI bug here from our conversation. Isn't, hasn't there been some, like, I don't know, backlash around AI in assessment? Of resumes or AI in like candidate assessment, aren't there? If I'm not mistaken, this is not my field, it's your field, but I heard that there were like some laws passed like in New York around that. Where do you think that, where's that gonna go? I guess the question is what's happening with that?

I don't know where it'll go. I, well, I think, you know, I'm not a politician and you know, I mean, I think with, you know, the latest developments in our political shifts. I mean, I think, uh, everything's gonna be more deregulated. There's going to be less— I mean, you're already seeing like retractions and DEI stuff. And, you know, I think there's, there, there's some kind of like— it's a little overkill to some degree, but these departments, like the EEOC, is going to get gutted in their ability to regulate and to come down on organizations, is going to get, you know, de-restricted. So, I mean, I don't know, that's just my observations from the political climate, from what's going to happen, or states and municipalities. Is the federal government going to ever come down on this? I doubt it. But it could. At the end of the day, though, actually, we're co-authoring a scientific journal article with Virginia Tech, and it hasn't been released yet, but it's ready for release. And we looked at AI rating of resumes versus human rating, and the AI raters were significantly less biased and less ad— created almost zero adverse impact versus the humans. So basically the humans are racist and biased and discriminatory and the AI is not. So like, you know, pick your poison, guys. Right. So nothing can be perfect. It's like a self-driving car, Waymo. Right. Well, yeah. Do they get in accidents? Do they kill people sometimes? Yes. But they do it at like 90% less often than a human does. So what do you— What's better?

Yeah, I don't know. That's why I'm asking. That's why I'm asking the expert.

I mean, you know, you've got— everybody's got to make their own opinion on that, but I mean, the facts are— but wait, the whole 9 seconds though— this stuff is better than the human. So are you—

yeah, exactly. So what you're saying is that if a robot's really good at hammering nails, then why not let it hammer nails? Yeah.

And if it makes a mistake every once in a while, it's gonna make it. It's probably— and it does it 90% less often than the human, then, then yeah. Right, so we're expecting to have a robot doing it.

We're expecting the robot to be 100% flawless. Yeah, exactly.

And we don't have that same expectation of a human. Like, what we do— I mean, people get mad when people aren't great at their job and they make mistakes, but, but somehow we put up with that.

I guess we do. I'm just— I was thinking about that. Yeah, we get mad, but we put up with it anyway. I guess with a computer, we can't, we can't like it's easier to get mad at, right? Yeah. But we also can't vent to it and be like, ah, you screwed up. The computer's not going to be like, oh, I'm so sorry.

Well, these actually, a lot of these LLMs are pretty nice, but you know, yeah, they are pretty nice, but they're also so wrong.

So wrong in so many ways. Yeah.

So, you know, obviously human supervision of the computer is important. I mean, I'm not advocating that. And I'm also advocating, you know, being transparent about these things.

Like, yeah, AI is human supervision and transparency are absolutely required in my book. If you're not doing that, then you shouldn't be messing with this stuff. Exactly.

That's, I would agree 100% on both. There's no robot.

I mean, like if a robot does exactly what you tell it to do. So if you say it goes driving a straight line, it's going to do that until it falls off a cliff and you can't then blame the robot for falling off the cliff because you told it to go to a straight line. So, yeah. Somebody's gotta be there and be like, whoa, whoa, don't hold on. Stop. That's not somewhere you wanna go. And yes, you know, AI, I think what, what I'm seeing and hearing and reading about a lot now is, is these agents. Yeah. That are the do it for you as opposed to like ChatGPT and, and, and, and Copilot and Gemini and these other tools where they're like, do it with you. And they are tools to help you. Process things and, you know, but the agents are the new autonomous robots that you tell them to go, you know, go get something and they're going to go and get it without asking you how to get it, where to get it, stuff like that. So that's where I'm a little bit more leery. Yeah. Is the, is this, is the unsupervised agents.

Look, I mean, it's going to happen. I mean, right now, I mean, we have AI assisting humans in every component of the hiring process at this point, you know, baked right into Discover, you know, like, so it's in, and I think there are other platforms that are doing similar things, but so it's already there in the sort of the human-assisted version of that is there. But the agent side of it is going to increase in the agency of the AI will increase. I, you know, obviously at the end of the day, it's still a human-to-human thing. So, is it going to be able to help you? You know, very soon, and it might even be this year, Discovered will go and find your candidate. It will go engage your candidate. It will give them a compelling value proposition on why they should engage in this process and talk to you and entertain this opportunity. It will do initial evaluations of candidates. And it will schedule that candidate on a decision-maker's calendar to make a final decision and then aid that decision-maker in their decision-making process through assessments and reference checking and all of these things. So we are like this close to, you know, agents playing a much, much bigger role in hiring.

And that's good, you think? Yeah, absolutely. Do you think that you can put yourself in a little robot box and and they don't need you anymore, just the robot?

No, not yet. And again, I think the people who are leveraging these tools and that are managing these tools and directing these tools are going to be the ones that are, you know, winning in the future of work. Right. So, and I don't think you have a choice because if you don't do it, somebody else is.

Well, if you're the founder.

No, if you're the founder, but I mean, people in the team and, you know, people who, you know, again, I, you know, I, my gripe, you know, my team knows this. My gripe is you guys need to be using AI more. You need to be thinking about how to use it. You need to be, you know, automating more of your processes and your tasks and things like that. Like, you know, we have a small lean team of 16 people. Like nobody's going anywhere on my team. Like we have no plans on letting anybody go. Like, you know, but. We're, we're not going to add headcount.

Yeah, well, you're at— yeah, you're at the size that I guess, um, I wasn't really specifically thinking about your team, but if you're— use myself as an example. Yeah, use it. Yeah, if we're building this out and, and it's, you know, a company with more than 450 people, since that's the number that we picked, um, and we're building this out I feel like there's, there's got to be some other unseen— I like to, I like to find the, um, unseen obstacles that just kind of come up and bite you, you know. Like, you just— I like to prepare for those.

Well, I think, I think the humans are going to be really bad at managing the robots, and they're going to get lazy, and they're, you know, they're not going to be as diligent as they should be, and that, that is the problem. Right.

They're going to gain too much trust in the robot and let it drive by itself and then realize that it's causing accidents.

Yeah. Not— and not intervene and not be proactive and not understand why, not take the time to understand why and correct. And it's the same thing we do with employees. We hire somebody to do a job and we don't train and onboard them very well and we stick them out there in the field and we let them break. And then we blame them for being bad at their job.

Like, but you never taught me how to do that.

You never set expectations. You never, you know, show me where the damn water cooler was for that matter. Right. And now, you know, wonder why, like, I'm, you know, you know, dying of thirst over here, but no, I, you know, so we do the same things with humans and we just hope for the best. And, you know, so sometimes we do hire great people. And we, and then we fail them. So training and onboarding is the last piece of a fact-driven hiring system. And it's also one of the most overlooked parts. Like we just do a bad job.

We onboard everybody the same way. We give them all a checklist and sometimes, you know, people in certain roles need onboarding of certain.

Yeah. Getting me to get like sign up for my health insurance is not helpful in me being successful on the job. Yes, it's important. Like we need to do that.

I need to help. Yeah. I need my health insurance, but like, I also need to know how to manage cases that come up. Yeah. So I want to go back to the assessment portion because it's the part that I understand the least, right? It's not, you know, I've only been responsible for selecting assessment tools maybe 5 times. And it was, you know, as I take everything, I just did a bunch of research and comparisons and stuff like that. From what I learned, isn't it always a good practice to assess your internal team first and have a baseline?

Baseline benchmark, we call it. Yeah. Yeah. I like, I like— Before you assess external candidates? Yeah, I think, I mean, for larger organizations—

Or is that a bad idea, I guess?

No, I think it's a great idea. I mean, the challenge I run into with large organizations is is it kind of comes back to all the same challenges. Like, A, they have like really bad data. So, and they don't like evaluate their internal people very well in a very structured, meaningful way. So then they, what they have to do then is they have to go do that, right? So not only do they have to assess a large portion of people in their workforce, I mean, you need to assess a minimum of 100 basically to get to any sort of statistically valid benchmark. Learned, right? Okay.

So, you know, that you got to have a, you know, 100 internal.

Yeah. And they got to be like in basically the same job right now. There's some variants. It could be like, you know, tier 1, 2, 3, 4. But I mean, they got to be basically doing the same job, right? Like, and then, and then, you know, you have to, you know, have some clear criterion data like performance metrics or it could be subjective that is turned more objective, like a performance evaluation, where I'm actually grading you on a scale of, I don't know, 1 to 3, 1 to 5, whatever. We talked about that 1 to 3 scale is nice, with also some justification for that. But you got to have some quantifiable, hard data to say, hey, this person's good, this person's OK, and this person's not good. Right? And that could be, again, sales metrics, customer service metrics, you name it, performance reviews, performance evaluations. And you got to do that with a large group of people. And then you got to let the statistics speak. Because at the end of the day, we are, again, still talking about humans. It's not, there's not gonna be a one-for-one correlation. If they score like this, they will guaranteed to be great. What, what you're going to find is, if they score like this, they will be 10%, 20%, 50%, 90% better than if they're not. That's the reality, right?

So it's a probabilistic kind of approach.

It's all statistics.

So you still need to do—

there's no one-for-one in— and we all know this in hiring. Doesn't matter what structured interview, reference. I mean, any technique you do, none of it's going to produce a one-for-one outcome. Like, if you do this and they are like that, they will be good. There's no one-for-one in anything we do. In hiring, right? But we can move the needle in meaningful ways. 30% improvement, 50%, 90% improvement in the quality of— That makes sense.

That makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. So you'd have to have a little bit of a history in order to have an improvement. You'd have to have some hiring of history. Measurable. Yeah, that's a good point. In other words, if you didn't measure it before, then whoopsie. Yeah.

So what the reality happens is it evolves a little bit over time, right? You know, and ideally, try to get, we try to get organizations to participate in providing feedback into that process. And if you're a small organization, yeah, I would do the same thing. And that's typically how these journeys always begin. Hey, test 2 or 3 people. It gives you a little bit of a litmus test. You can take assessment results and compare against the other person. But the problem with that is, then they tend to rely too much on that comparison and not, you know, they're too rigid. They're like, it must be just like Joe. OK. You know, like, and it's like, well—

And that's not good either.

That's a little, yeah, you only have one sample.

Is that the biggest fallacy in assessments is overcomparing? Or what would you say is the biggest fallacy, misconception, you know, error people can commit with That it's absolute, right?

The information that you're getting is an absolute yes or no, like that it is black and white. Is, is, is that, you know, again, I mean, a scorecard, structured interviews, references, working interview, and assessments. And then you're taking all of that information. I think about it as like a T-chart. You got pros and cons. And, you know, as long as the cons aren't a deal breaker, it's done, right? But if it's pros and cons, and then hopefully weigh each other. Yeah, it might be weighted. Like, here are the 3 really important—

So the assessment is a portion of— and it— yeah, I see what you're saying. And it's great. One of the biggest problems is people just assume it's a pass or fail. Yeah, exactly. And there is no such thing as a pass or fail.

It's just like in an interview, there's no such thing as a pass or fail. I mean, we, we make it a pass or fail, but it's not actually a reality. That's just a decision we made based on the outcome of the interview. And again, You know, what you're doing in your head, whether you formalize this or not, is you're saying, well, I like this about the person. I didn't like this person. I like this person. I didn't like this. And therefore, I'm going to move forward or I'm not going to move forward.

Tell me this. Assuming that we have calibrated interviewers, in other words, we don't have all 5s or all 1s, right? We have interviewers that, that are, that are giving good reasons and they're around that, you know, and they support their They're calibrated. Let's just assume that they're calibrated. How many do we need? How many interviewers do we need in an interview? In, in, in— that's not the question.

I mean, I just, I think there's— interviewing. Yeah, I think that's just such a varied question depending on the role. I mean, you know, certain organizations or teams are, you know, multifaceted.

And, you know, you know, typically— proportional to the complexity of the organization.

Yeah, I mean, but I mean, really, I mean, it's a But again, it's that hiring manager is the primary decision-maker and should be the only one that has absolute yes or no veto power. Yeah. So, so one thing I don't like about panel interviews or multiple interviewers, and I'm not against them, again, I think there's an application for them in probably lots of scenarios, but that you shouldn't give anybody other than the decision-maker absolute yes or no power. Right.

But in a typical— oh my God, I hate this question— in a typical organization, more than 500 employees, it's not too complex, what's the maximum number of other than the hiring manager? Like 2?

Yeah, 2 or 3. You know, total 2, including the hiring manager, you're talking 2 or 3. Yeah, you got your recruiter. I don't count that, frankly. No offense to the recruiters out there, but the recruiter is a is just a gatekeeper to does this person go from a suspect to a prospect?

The recruiter is one of the things in the pros and cons. Yeah. And they'll add in, they'll throw it in. The assessment's not definitive. The recruiter's not definitive. I get it.

So the recruiter contributes. As a recruiter, I don't have time to make an absolute, complete, thorough evaluation of this candidate. I am checking certain boxes and litmus tests like, is this guy jerk or, you know, hot or whatever.

Like, but again, I'm one of the, one of the things in that. So yeah, that's what I was saying. So not including the recruiter, interviewers on the hiring manager's behalf, no more than 3, including, including the hiring manager. Yeah, I've struggled with this a lot because I've been in, in one very large organization that I was in where they had they had 7. Yeah. And it was complex, I grant that, but it wasn't like the 7 were different departments. It was like 7 people from 1 or 2 departments. Like, you know, it was just— it— I feel like at some point— and then they asked for consensus.

Yeah. So that— yeah, you know, forget about consensus. That's— no, I see this in, uh, professional services where I work, you know, like like, we work in public accounting a lot, consulting engineers, they have a lot of partners and they all like have to have consensus and because they're all kind of decision makers and this person will kind of report to like all of these people. And so it gets really messy in that sense. So, but again, I would try to minimize that as much as possible even in those types of environments. But you got the hiring manager, the leader, you've got maybe the person this person's going to work work closely with their dotted line type of person. And, you know, or dotted line from another department leader, like, okay, sales works closely with customer success. So the leader from customer success is going to interview the new salesperson, and the sales manager is going to read them. And then the best salesperson or a good solid team player, culture fit salesperson is also going to interview to give just some feedback from a peer-to-peer perspective. So those, I mean, that's your 3, right? That's how you might get to 3, right?

Right. Tell me this. I, I've, I've hired quite a few people for myself, my own teams, teams that I'm building over the years, and I, I've always really kind of second-guessed myself. But when I find somebody that I really, really, really, really, really like and I want to hire, it's like I know. I mean, I've, I've made offers on the spot during first interviews before And they've most of the time turned out, I'm not saying that, you know, they always, they always worked out great. Where I feel like I've gone wrong is when I've been forced to have other people weigh in and the other people weighed in with a stronger opinion of the candidate than I did. In other words, like positive. Yeah. So if I met someone and I'm the only interviewer. Her so far. And I'm like, oh my God, this is, this is the person. Yeah. Usually that works out. It hasn't. There've been a couple of times when it didn't work out really badly. Didn't work out by the way, but better than 50%. I'm just kidding. Yeah. Probably.

I mean, you're an experienced man. I mean, like, I mean, you've probably interviewed more people than I have. I mean, geez.

But, you know, like, but when I've, when, when, when my, because of policy, my manager, my boss, my leader has said, You have to have these two people interview this candidate in order to complete the three interviews. And the other two people liked them more than I did. I didn't say no, but I was like, meh. And then the other two people were like, yes. And then I've hired them.

Well, you should have done more interviews and made up your own. I mean, if you were the hiring manager and this person ultimately reports to you, it's ultimately your problem if it doesn't work out, then Again, you know, you can always do— have more conversations and try to get— try to get to the same place those other people are.

Why is it that sometimes I go, oh my God, you're it, and sometimes I'm like, okay?

So I love this scenario. I'm gonna dumb it down really simply for you. Okay, thanks. Your gut can tell you no about somebody, so I'm okay with that. Like, if you meet someone and you're just like, there's no way this is gonna work, just move on. I, I don't care what your reasons are. Now obviously, try not to be like discriminatory about that. Yeah, right. But like, again, if it's like, I don't know, like you go on a first date with somebody and you're just like, I don't see us ever falling in love, like, I don't know, you're okay, you're allowed to not just say I don't want to go on another date with you. That's fine, right? So same, same thing applies. Now, now it's— but this is the opposite. Your gut cannot sit— tell you— your gut can tell you yes, but you better figure out a way to decloud your, like, your infatuation with this person, uh, to figure out, to uncover facts and evidence that support that, to support your yes. Yes. Because, because, boy, you know, you might find out— a perfect example of this, we met a guy, it was, uh, construct, uh, site superintendent for a small construction development company. Met this guy, and really amazing resume, really amazing background. Really impressive guy. You meet him, like, you know, knows his stuff, right? Like, does everything, you know, passes assessments, does everything. We get to reference checks only and background checks only to find out this guy's been sued twice for fraud, for embezzling and creating these fraudulent schemes to skim money from his previous employers. So I don't care how much you love that person. Do not hire them. Right, right, man.

I have, uh, I got so glued into this, I, I totally went over time here. I'm so sorry about that. Um, before I let you go though, you're not gonna, you're not gonna get away with not answering my two questions. That's a double negative, but I apologize. Number one question before you go is, who should be our next guest?

Oh, that's a good one. Well, I mean, I'm a big fan of Lou Adler. You might have had him on there, so, um, but That's a good one. And I think, you know, Brian Fink and, you know, he's a cool dude.

He's been on here a few times.

Yeah, a few times, right? You know, Adam Meakinoff. Don't know him. Yeah. Spell that. I'm terrible speller. I'm going to send it to you. I'll send you his LinkedIn profile. Right. He's a good dude that I've come across here not too long ago. Uh, oh, you know who is a really good guy? He's a new partner of ours. Ryan England. I can send you him. Core Matters. And he's a really like, you know, structured hiring process. He consults. He's not a recruiter. He's a consultant.

He's a consultant.

He helps people install these repeatable hiring systems into their business. And boy, you should, you should talk to him.

And he works great.

That's good. Yeah. There you go. You're ahead.

I'm going to need that last name though, but I'll get them to you. Yeah, definitely. And then, and then the last question is, I want you to leave our listeners with, with a question to ask themselves, a question of introversion, right? Something that they should ask themselves and think deeply about over the next— a lot of people watch this over the weekend. So yeah, it could be related to everything we talked about, or it could be something different, just something that we should think about for ourselves.

Well, I know your audience is, uh, big in recruit— big recruiters, you know. Yeah, talent acquisition and sourcers and things. And I have a lot of sympathy for the role that recruiters play in the process. Is, is your desire to check the— to hit the metric of a place clouding your judgment when it comes to helping the organization construct a system to decide whether this person is going to be a top performer, a high-quality hire or not? Are you looking at the right metrics to judge your own performance? And high-quality hire should be the metric, not time to fill or how many placements. Now, those are your metrics.

Are you filling a job or are you making the best Are you supporting the best hiring decision?

Yes, exactly.

So, oh man, I hate the answer to that.

Oh yeah, I hate the answer to that. You're not— most TA people are not incentivized to produce a high-quality hire. They're produced— they're paid to produce a hire who's hireable, who the hiring manager is willing to hire as fast as possible.

But wouldn't it be nice though if we did all think about that?

Yeah, that's really cool. If everybody's in alignment and, you know, how are you going to get your leadership team to align with you in that goal and, you know, maybe adjust the time to fill expectation to get that extra oomph?

Yeah. Yeah.

At the end of the day, quality takes a little more time than just finding a resume that the hiring manager is willing to say yes to.

I love it. Yeah. Are you just filling the job or are you actually helping the organization make the best decision possible. Yeah, man, thanks a lot for being on the show. Appreciate it. Uh, hopefully you don't freeze your— well, hopefully you don't burn and hopefully everyone else doesn't freeze. Yeah. So, uh, stay safe, everybody. Keep yourselves dry and warm, uh, out there. And we will see you here next week with our guest. Um, coming up next week is Tracy Friend. You might recognize her from Well, actually, she's pretty well known in the industry. So Tracy Friend is currently VP of Talent at a global payments company called GlobalPay. So join us next week for that. Fletcher, thanks a lot. Appreciate it.

Thank you for having me.