3 Tips On How To Hire The Best People | Vishen Lakhiani

I've made so many mistakes hiring really skillful assholes and then, like, seeing them, like, mess up my culture. If you hire the right people. So when faced with two people and one has slightly higher skill, okay, if the one with lower skill has a greater attitude, go for them. Because with the right attitude, they will rapidly be able to catch up on skill. But if they don't have the right attitude, if they don't have the right values, if they don't have the right culture, they. They will poison your company. Attitude is contagious. And so when you're hiring for attitude, you're actually taking something that is going to go from one person to another to another to another. Like the cold, right? Like the flu. It's contagious. You got to be really careful with this. So you want to seek the best people you can find, but you want to ensure that attitude comes first. Now, in our company, I have this simple mental model. I call it the bar of awesomeness. And every time I'm interviewing someone, I asked them, I asked myself, if I brought this person onto the team, would they raise the bar or would they lower the bar? And even if we really, really, really need a position filled, if they're going to lower the bar, you do not hire them. Because as you'll read about in the book, good to great, A players hire A players. But as soon as you lower the bar and you hire a B player, B players hire C players, C players hire D players, the lower they are, the lower they will hire. Because if you're not very good at what you do, you're insecure and you don't want to hire people who are better than you. But when you hire A players, they only want to work with A players. So lowering that bar is crazy dangerous. Lesnar Bok of Google says it this way. Have an incredibly high bar for talent and never compromise. The big mistake I see many entrepreneurs make is that they compromise. They really, really, really, really need someone to do that customer support job right away. So this guy maybe doesn't have all the right attitude, but let's hire him. Maybe we can change him. Maybe he will shift. Always a mistake. Slow down. Rather than fill a role with the wrong person. Slow down. But you must never, ever, ever drop that bar. Yes or yes? Okay, so that's the imaginary bar. Okay, so you are mentally creating a bar of awesomeness for your company and doing a gut check with every person you interview. Will they raise the overall bar of awesomeness within my company? All over it. Now, the next Thing I want you to do is, is to insist that they go beyond a resume. So this is the video cover letter technique, right? Everybody lies in resumes, guys. I lied on my resume like my first few jobs, but it's harder to lie on a video. So I asked everyone who's applying to mindvalley to create a video and to simply answer three questions. Three reasons why I want to join mindvalley, three reasons why I think I'm awesome. That's it. Now people get really creative with the video. Let me show you a couple of videos that we actually get. Now, the beauty of this is if you don't ask for a video, you get those people who randomly shoot out resumes to every open position and keep their fingers crossed. Right? That's annoying and it so wastes your time. But when you insist on a video, what happens is that you are getting people who care so much about joining you that they are investing, sometimes up to a day, creating that video. Here's one example of an incredible person we hired.

Hi, I'm Tanya Lopez and this is my video submission for the world's most awesome job. Where are you shooting from? I can see it in your camera. I think that this position is a great fit for me for so many different reasons. One of them being that it aligns perfectly with what my professional experience has been so far I've worked.

So Tanya joined Mindvalley and she ended up helping us. Working with Laura, she ended up helping us take a fest into what it is today. Right. That's the power of video cover letter. Now this is another person who joined us and this one was incredible. She spent 300 man hours creating a hand drawn animated film. To state why she wanted to join the company, obviously we hired her for our film team. 300 man hours creating a handmade animated film. She got the job. Right? So you can see you're getting incredibly dedicated people. Now, the math I found looks like this. 100 resumes equals one video. So when you ask for a video cover letter, you actually are tuning out 100 resumes and your life becomes so much easier. So that one video is truly going to be a really exceptional person because they're putting in all of this effort to join your company. So. So that's step number two. Ask for a video cover letter. Don't compromise on the bar and hire for attitude video cover letters. The great thing about them is you can really sense someone's attitude in that cover letter. Now we go to step three. Now step three is really interesting. It's called establishing a common code. So in your company, it's very important that you have a code or a series of values that kind of bring the team together. And the value should be so obvious, so clear, that everybody knows them by heart. So the values at mindvalley are very obvious. Everywhere you look. The first value is unity. And unity simply means appreciating our culture, but seeing ourselves as part of a larger planet, a larger Earth. Which is why you notice the attention we pay to 4th of July, to Canada Day, to cultures all across this room. Every time I meet someone, I'm like, where are you from? It's not because I'm trying to isolate you in your culture. It's because I'm truly interested, because I love traveling around the world and meeting culture. Unity. Now, the second value is all also very easy to see. Transformation. We're obsessed with personal growth. Everyone is growing themselves on a regular basis. People come to Mindvalley and in their first year, on average, men lose 5kg just because of healthy eating, because of WildFit, because of 10x. Right? We're one of those companies where you come and after one year, you look better, you're dressing better, you're healthier, your cognitive functioning has gone up because everyone is talking about Bulletproof Coffee or WowFit or Ben Greenfield's longevity tips, and it becomes just part of the culture. Now. The third thing is envisioning. Envisioning is really interesting. It means in anything you do, you are seeking to be the best and to create the boldest vision you can get, which is why we innovate very fast. If you look at mindvalue last year and you look at Mind Value this year, it's a massive growth in terms of the space, in terms of the number of participants. It's because of this value of envisioning. You are happy and grateful for what you've accomplished, but you're always thinking, how can I 10x this? That's what envisioning means. But here's the funny thing, right? You don't need these three particular values. That's not the point. The point simply is find a set of values. Anywhere from 3 to 7 is a magic number. Now, when we really started digging into these values, we identified around maybe 12, but these three were the strongest. So we decided to just limit it to 3 for now. And here's what you do with the values. You, you. You advertise them everywhere. We created, like the superhero artwork, Transformation. Envisioning. We created this giant sign in our office that says unity and it's just there, high on a wall, like, lit up completely. When people come for our weekly meetings, the values are everywhere. Now, why the values are important is that the values speed up decision making. So let's say, for example, we had so recently, for example, we had to make a decision, and that decision was that, do we want to give our employees two days off so that they could go deep into a retreat called Lifebook that many of you guys have heard of, to help them set their goals for their life? Now, it's not cheap because we're giving everyone in the company literally two extra days off and paying for them to go to a mountain retreat to spend a Thursday, a Friday, then a Saturday and Sunday on their own going to their Lifebook. But the decision becomes automatic and easy because it leads to transformation, and transformation is one of the values. Another example was we had a customer who was really upset with a product, but the return date had elapsed. Do we give the customer a refund? Because that might encourage more customers to get a refund. We're like, yeah, sure, why not? Because of the value of unity. Unity means you try to see things through another person's eyes. You try to respect a different point of view. We want our customers to be happy because the customers are like a family unity. So we give the refund. So values help you speed up decision making. But the cool thing about values is this. When you have these values and you establish and reaffirm these values over and over and over again, you are basically giving people what religion and church give them. You're giving people a sense of identity. And that identity means they become a deeper part of your company, a deeper part of your mission. They will stay with you longer. So it's really interesting. But human beings, we evolved as such, where we need identity, we need to feel part of a tribe. We need to feel part of a larger thing. This is how religions evolves. And religions have their own value system. They have the number of times you pray. They have the fasting month, they have the Savior. But when you create these values in a company, you're giving people the same good things that religion give people, which is a sense of belonging to. To a shared tribe and to many individuals. It makes them feel more unified. It makes them feel no longer alone because there are people around them who share these common values. Now, you want to have good values, of course, right? You want to have positive values, not negative values. They are values that might be counter to cosmocentrism, but as long as you're having good values. You are actually helping elevate people and you are unifying people because tribes have shared values.