My $100M Hiring Strategy

What I wanna really break down is tactically, like how do I go find A-players for business? How do I teach people to go find them? You're constantly feeling constrained and like you don't have the right talent to take your business to the next level, then this video's for you. And so what I wanna break down is the 5 practices that we have in our company that allow us to go to $100 million. So the first piece of this is application generation. Just like you generate leads for clients, you wanna generate applications for employees. So your job title is your headline. Now going with that, there's really 5 principles to a job title. We posted for a content manager and everyone that we were getting, you know, 6 to 12 months of experience and they honestly didn't have a lot of experience in that role. And so we changed the title to senior content manager. And now we're getting way better applications for that role because people are more qualified and they're used to having more people report to them. The second one is that you wanna avoid abbreviations. And so if you say senior but you just put SR instead of senior, you're gonna get downregulated. And so always spell out everything in terms of a job title because it's going to get you upregulated on the platform. When people are searching for a job, they're not searching typically with abbreviations, they're searching with full-blown words. The third, and the piece that I see often small businesses tend to mess up the most, is that you want to make it easy to understand for someone that doesn't know your business. So we had a portfolio company that was looking for essentially like a head of student happiness. If you hear that, do you even know what a head of student happiness is? Because I don't know what that is. But what that really is, it might be like a vice president of customer success. So it's a much commonly used term. It means that when you're looking for them, you want to call them and use the identification that that person actually identifies with. The fourth piece is you don't want to use like idiomatic phrases. So what I mean by that is a lot of people— and this was like 6 years ago, very popular— but people used to post, they'd be like customer success superstar, sales rock star. Those actually get downregulated on the platforms now, and a lot of people find them to be distasteful. It used to be really cool and they used to actually attract people. Now it's not that way. So if you put anything that's not necessary in the job title, it's not going to upregulate on the search. Lastly is you You want to leave out excess. A lot of people think, okay, I'm posting for a sales role, I'm going to say $100K base up to $200K something in the title. Again, last piece, really important, gets downregulated on all the sites. So overall, when it comes to this first piece of the funnel, what you want to understand is that you need to know who you're talking to and you be very specific about who you're looking for. If you know who you're looking for, you've got the messaging right. It's the same as marketing. You can nail the messaging, you've got the rest of it down. So you've got to nail the messaging for the candidate that you're looking for. The second piece of the funnel is really nurture. Okay, so 68% of candidates say that they didn't take a job because the candidate experience is so poor. And so the candidate experience is really comprised of two different kinds of communication. You've got direct communication and you've got indirect communication. Direct communication is the interview, it's the phone call, it's the screening process, it's the email you send when you're kindly declining them or when you're moving them forward in the process. Whereas indirect communication is when they Google your company, what's going to come up? What's the brand? When they look you up on social media, what are they going to see? When they watch your YouTube videos, what are they going to find? When they go look on Glassdoor, door, what's it going to say? That person is doing research on your company. Own your flaws if you want to attract candidates, because what they know is that anyone understands that any business is going to have what I like to call like bugs under the rug because they're going to find out no matter what. And so you might as well tell them yourself so that you control the narrative. A lot of people make it really high friction to apply for a job and find out about that job. And then above all of that is speed, or the average candidate cycle in terms of how long it takes you to find someone to be placed in your company is 23 days. But the best candidates find jobs in 8 days. So that means that the average company takes 3 times as long as the average top candidate to place a job because you're going to lose the best talent if you do the direct communication and the indirect communication and it's low friction and it's high education. It doesn't matter if you're slow, you're going to lose the candidate. So the third and last piece of acquiring talent or the talent acquisition funnel is really sales, which I consider sales to be the interview process. So it's just like you sell your customer on life after they purchase your product. You want to sell a candidate on life after they work at your company. Broadly going over that 5-step sales process. So I want to walk you through each of those steps briefly, just of what's most important. And here's the thing, if you have a bigger company, you're probably going to have more steps in the process. If you have a smaller company, you're going to have less steps in the process. You have to understand that done is better than perfect. It's okay if you can't do all 5 steps. Maybe you can only do 3 with the amount of resources you have right now. So the first step is screening, the 15-minute phone call with a candidate. If you're going to sell them some big pack, you don't want to set them straight to the closer because what if they're not qualified? Where you're essentially finding out like, is this the job that they want? Do they sound excited about the role? Is the pay in line with what they want for pay? Can they work the hours needed. You want to make sure all the logistics are there, and you want to also screen out, just make sure there's no weirdos. And so I open every interview with setting the expectations. Hey, I know that you've seen the job description, you've read it, we— you had the screening call. I just want to reset expectations. I want to just explain to you exactly what our company does and what this role— what this problem is solving— of that this role does. And you basically go through, here's the mission of our company, here's our values, and here's what we do in a nutshell, 60 to 90 seconds. And then you go through and you say what the role does. The best way to frame this is, what problem is this role solving? Because here's the thing, you don't want to bring people in to do activities. You want to set the tone, which is, I'm bringing you you in to solve a problem on my behalf. I don't have time to solve all the problems. I need you to come in here so you can solve the problems for me. The next piece to that is that once you've set the expectations, you want to test for culture. So say that you're a company that speed is king, then you want to ask, hey, if you get an email, how long do you let the email sit in your inbox? A day? 2 days? An hour? 2 hours? Which is one of our core values. Then I might ask the person, I might say, what does success look like to you? Why do you work? I want someone who works because work is their passion, work is what they love, and that's what they always want to be constantly progressing in life, and work is a way to do that. Now the third step of the interview process is the skill test interview. It's actually very simple. I'm gonna write out 4 of these situations or problems and I'm gonna present them to them. I'm gonna try and give them as much context as possible and I'm gonna ask them, how would you solve this problem? How would you approach this situation? And then make it a discussion. Continue to ask questions as they're bringing up how they would solve those situations. You could have them go build a funnel, but there's a lot of roles that don't have that. You know, you bring someone as an operator, you know, you're not gonna have them do your books for you. So you've gotta ask them situational questions like that and you wanna watch how they think through it. 'Cause essentially you're buying how they think. You're literally purchasing their brain. You're paying for their brain to be on your company. So you want to make sure that their brain is thinking in a way that is advantageous for your company rather than not. The fourth step to the interview process is what I call an alignment interview. And this is one that I don't think that I've seen anywhere else, but it's one that I have found is how I've saved people from coming into the company that shouldn't be there. An alignment interview is making sure that their personal goals are aligned with the goals of the role. So I want to make sure if I'm hiring someone that they have very large career goals, I want to make sure that I see a path within our company where we can align with those goals. And so that last interview in that sequence is often just a making sure that you're truly aligned. Another thing you might go over in that is, say you work from home. Have you defined what work from home means? I make sure that in all the interview processes that I explain to people what work from home means. That they're gone for 3 hours a day, or that they have another job, they're working part-time. What it means in my company is that we pretend like we're in office, but we're just at our house. And so you want to make sure that you're just looking for alignment in that interview to make sure that anything that would cause someone to be fired or quit is taken care of before you bring that person on. And then the last step in the 5-step process would be the CEO interview. In a small company, which is gonna be majority of people watching this, and that's okay, the CEO is gonna be involved in this process. And listen, if you don't have more than 1,000 employees, I don't know why you wouldn't take the last interview. I think that that is the job of the CEO to make sure that we have the right people in the company. But if you are a bigger company and you aren't involved in that process, the last interview is just the CEO interview, which essentially is the CEO telling that person, where do I see the role going? How do I see this role contributing to the team? And what do I think the problem that you solve is? And often what I've seen is that most CEOs can paint a bigger vision than that departmental leader. And so it kind of just helps show that person the potential of the role. Because sometimes too, you have to understand is that departmental leaders, they are gonna get afraid of where that role could really go if that person's really good. 'Cause what if it goes about them? And so it's really great to have the CEO come in and paint the picture for like, here's all the opportunity we've got in this company. If you crush it here, here's other opportunities that you're gonna have. And also for them to build that relationship because people who have reciprocity, they have trust, and they have loyalty with the CEO are going to be better, more efficient workers. And so that's the 5-step process or the 5-step sale when it comes to bringing candidates in. And so I wanted to cover in this video was really the hard science to it, like tactically, how do you really bring people in? I want to get you to reframe because a lot of people see this as really boring stuff. But if you can understand the same skills that allow you to acquire clients, it's the same skills to acquire candidates, then I think it's a lot more fun for your business and you're probably going to grow a lot bigger. If you guys like this video, if you found it useful, let me know in the comments. And what I would also love is if you could just let me know what is missing. What more do you want to hear? What more you want to know so that you can actually go implement this in your business. And so I'm going to have a part 2 to this to talk about, you know, now that we've gotten the A talent, how are we going to keep the A talent? Let me know what you think in the comments and I will see you on the next one.