Let's Dive into the Psychology of Hiring at ChannelCon

Kyle Empath, Christiansen.

Alex Empath, Farling.

Jesse Power, PSA Consulting, Miller.

Brian Gunther, Xceed Cyber and Compliance.

I'm CNWR Lawrence.

Dean Spicy Monday from Pillars.

When we walked up, you had said we were having a great conversation about something. I don't know what it was. Wanna give us a quick recap and maybe we have some thoughts, concerns? Oh, by the way, we're at ChannelCon. We should mention where we are. CompTIA ChannelCon. CompTIA. Yeah, over here in Atlanta, Georgia, Hyatt Regency.

Hotlanta.

Hotlanta. Apparently people were getting attacked by homeless last night trying to leave.

Yeah, that happened to me. No, they wanted to escort them to their mugging. That's all it was.

Yes.

Totally harmless.

I thought those were Tom's YouTube fans.

They just wanted an autograph. It's okay.

Okay. Do you have any crazy fan stories?

I got this picture of a guy taking a selfie at 3 AM in front of my office.

Like he sent it to you? Like on your phone? Like you woke up with a text of some guy's—

I did blur his face. He, well, it's weird. You get an alert because it's in a strip mall and there's no one in the strip mall at 3 AM. No other businesses are open. So the cameras give a notice that there's human presence detection. I'm like, why is there someone in there? Who's doing something egregious here and dumping garbage or whatever they're doing? Nope, guy's taking selfies.

It was actually framed on his mantle in his house when he woke up.

And now he has a picture of himself taking a picture of himself in front of Tom's building that Tom posted on the internet. And now he can save that forever too.

Right.

Yeah. So not too many crazies. I've met people from all over the world. That's been kind of fun. There's a guy I met from the Netherlands when I was partying down in— Kelvin? Yeah, besides Kelvin. Yeah, really. It was also Kelvin. No, we're at the Mardi Gras place.

New Orleans? Yeah, Bourbon Street.

Yeah, we were on Bourbon Street. This really tall dude, Tom. And I'm like, what does he want? How does he know my name? And first time to America, landed there because he heard it was the best party spot. And he wasn't wrong. So, and, uh, we were all drinking together and it turns out he was a fan of my channel and recognized me. And then he didn't understand where Detroit was in relation. He goes, can we see your studio? I'm like, well, it is several hours away from here. Detroit is not close to New Orleans. He goes, America's big.

I said, yes.

He was very drunk.

Texas is big. America's huge.

Yes.

That's like when people hear that I'm from San Diego, they go, oh great, I love San Francisco. And I'm like, that's like a 9-hour drive from Wait, they're not like—

It's west of the Mississippi. It's all in the same place.

Granted, I couldn't explain any European geography. It's just Europe. Wherever you live, it's Europe. I could be wrong about where he's from.

You like cigarettes, you ride on trains, we get it.

Yeah, yeah.

Most all my fan interaction has been really, really good, so I've been happy with them.

So what was it that you were chatting about?

Brian and I were talking about the psychology of hiring and kind of things that we could do when we were looking at a candidate before they even joined the team to make sure they'd have the most possible success.

Oh, let me guess, DiSC came up.

Well, but more and better.

Ah, there's better?

Yeah.

I thought DiSC was the end-all be-all that could tell me everything about an employee ever.

I mean, I like DiSC.

Okay. Well, I mean, so there's interesting research actually about personality tests, all of them by the way. Myers-Briggs even knew this in the '50s.

Yeah.

They have such a historically low retest rate. So retest rate is if I take it more than once, I'm statistically not going to get the same answer. So all of them rank in like the last percentiles of retest scores because you have confirmation bias of you want to project to the tests what you believe who you are, and they are just historically inaccurate. So I say that out of someone that wanted to get a PhD in personality psychology because I do love these things. But at the same time, what are you trying to get out of it?

I think one of the really fascinating studies that was done was they have a bunch of scientific tests they gave people like, hey, answer all these questions. Then they took a different group of people, put them in lab coats, white lab coats. All you did, wear a lab coat while you answer it. So many of the answers, even if they took the other group and put them back in, they put the lab coat on them, they got more answers right. It's like this whole thing.

Well, that goes into the Stanford Prison Experiment, right? Where they gave them prison guard outfits and told you're prisoners and you're guards, and next thing you know, they started acting like guards and prisoners, right?

Yeah.

There's a lot, like I said, a lot to be said about the mindset of people when they take the test. What was there? And like you said about the retestability problem, what was going on that day? Getting in a fight with a friend, having a bad day, got a court notice.

Those are all things that— Your kids were mouthing off at you in the morning. I mean, there's all that stuff.

I always scored really— there's like that variability factor that you have, and I always score high on those because I feel like I answer them how I'm feeling that day. Right. Right? Like if I'm feeling smart that day or feeling focused that day, I score high on those. Aspects.

Well, something like a Colby, like the modus operandi one, they'll actually give you a score of you got nothing, right? Like, they've gotten to a point where if it's so variable, they just tell you you get no score. But anywho, so you were talking about the problem. Let's reel this back in. Uh, not a problem, maybe. Maybe it's more of the strategy, the optimization.

Yeah.

So where would it— where did it go from?

Well, so in the context of both my experience in MSP and what we do at Helpd, we need to interview a lot of candidates and assess pretty quickly without a lot of investment. I can't do like 4 or 5 rounds of interviews with somebody that we're paying $18 an hour to. It's not fair to them. So like, how do we figure out in a very short amount of time if someone has a reasonable chance at being successful in our organization, if they can potentially deliver on the skills they think they can deliver on? 'Cause we all, to the point, point that all of you just made. We all sometimes differentially self-assess our own capabilities. We can exaggerate our own capabilities. So we were talking about that. We were talking about questions.

Well, then you had the stressors of trying to get a new job, right? Like, I'm going to project who I think you want me to be. And I mean, so like, I think back to the Geek Squad when we rolled it out. We had to hire 15 employees for every single location the second that the acquisition happened. There was 1,100 Best Buy locations at that point. And it got to the point where we just brought everybody in. Everyone got a yes because you just need bodies at that point. But what real quickly you found out was you had all these guys that, "I'm a computer guy," and right, this is 2004, 2003. Things have evolved since then in our own community. However, a lot of them didn't understand that you're going to stand at a counter face-to-face and talk to people about their computer problems. A lot different than the ICQ channels you were in back then. So at Helped, how do you guys approach this?

So what we were talking about was how do you— I made this up, like maybe, maybe somebody else made it up too, but I call it like lowest common denominator question asking. Like what is the most dialed-in question you can ask that will allow you to not have to ask extension questions? So we were talking about it like in the capacity of networking, what What's the question that you ask to figure out if someone fundamentally understands networking so I don't have to ask high-level questions? And so I was saying it's questions around DNS. Brian—

Ask them if they understand a VLAN.

Explain VLANs to them.

Explain VLANs.

So the point I was making to Brian was if I ask somebody, "What's DNS?" and they say it's domain name service, "How does it work?" Names against IPs, all right. And now you start asking a few questions like, If I turned off DNS, could I still use the internet? If they don't know the answer to that, it doesn't matter if they know what VLANs are. And so let's say they say, well, yeah, if you had all the IPs saved, this is good. So far this person understands fundamentals of how the internet functions. Where's the first place your computer checks DNS, Jesse?

Locally.

Exactly.

Cache.

So if somebody instead said to me the DNS server, that tells me— that's not a wrong answer, but that tells me that that's where their head went right away.

They don't understand the OSI model.

Right. And you may say, well, why does that matter? Well, I'm hiring somebody now to be on a help desk. And so that difference in understanding where to troubleshoot is now hours I'm losing because they're going to have to reactively assess that they were in the wrong place by starting with the DNS server rather than the host file. So it doesn't mean they're bad and they don't know networking. It just means they likely aren't going to know what a VLAN is other than academically because they fundamentally don't get it. So how do you figure out those types of questions that will tell you if they fundamentally get it?

So let's— what was a go-to question? Like, how would you ask? And maybe Brian, if you want to key in here, what is the lowest common denominator question about that? Just what is DNS?

That was my networking one.

Yeah.

So, but that's a lot of tactical stuff, right? What about when it comes to soft skills?

Glad you asked that question. So I think it's really important when we hire people, we hire a whole person, right? So we're not just hiring somebody that can perform a skill, we want to add like an actual functioning human to our team because most of us care about company culture and have built successful businesses around that. So you have to figure that out. And if you figure that out early in the interview, and I like to do it as a non sequitur, you're going to probably get a fairly honest reaction and you can frame the interview around that. So if I get on a call with, you know, if I'm interviewing Alex here and I'm like, hey Alex, what do you like to do for fun? And he mentions that, you know, he likes to play video games, which is a common answer.

That's great.

What's your favorite video game? And let's say he says that he plays Call of Duty because Alex strikes me as somebody who plays Call of Duty and like, awesome, that's a fun game. So right away I know he plays a multiplayer game. So I want to find out, does he like playing with people or by himself? So What do you typically, you know, what kind of character do you normally play in Call of Duty? And let's say he says he plays a sniper. Okay, that means he probably likes to play alone, which means that his natural style is probably relying on himself. Yeah, it's in support of the group, but that's not really a cooperative role. So I might ask extension questions on that to figure out if that's how his brain works everywhere else.

Gotcha.

Alternatively, if he's like, I like to be a medic, well, that's a support role. That's literally useless unless you have a team. I like that. Tell me more about that.

I want to swap this up a little bit. So Jesse, I'm curious, because when you're looking at almost an executive level, and I know you do a lot of CISO-type stuff, how does that change those questions as you go up the ladder?

Yeah, I think those questions you have to dig in with somebody on a business level. So you have to, it has to be more tactical when you're talking tactical about strategy. So you're presented with this question, how would you answer that? So for example, you're talking about vCISO services with a customer and they say, well, the CTO can handle that. How would you answer that in that meeting? And it's like, whoa, that's a heavy question, right? So I want to hear that they'd say, well, the CTO's job is to drive the product forward, right? So do you want the CTO bogged down in doing security stuff or do you want them to focus on product and have someone like us come in and provide value and drive that forward and have him be able to rubber stamp very quickly and get back to his day-to-day. So if I hear questions like, or answers like that from a candidate, I'm like, okay, wow, this guy really gets it, and this is somebody we wanna hire.

You know, the thing I like about the way both of them phrased their questions and the way they set this up is it goes back to, and my brain immediately thinks about sales. Both of these people in interviewing and in setting people up are getting their no early. And getting out.

Right.

With a question that really lets me go, this person has no clue where we're going, they're not a good fit, or I've got a question that now I can expand on with, tell me more, right? And just start to peel back the onion and figure out what the other layers are that either are complementary or that maybe take away from the interview.

Well, it's an interesting conversation because I think as you go up the ladder, those go for the no questions come a lot earlier, where if I'm hiring a 16, 17-year-old, right, I might give them some leeway in that no answer, 'cause I might have to train them up And I—

well, are you good at training somebody who doesn't know anything? Really?

Well, that's a good thing to know, right? Because if you, if you're sitting there going, I've never dealt with an employee development plan or an upskill platform. So like at Best Buy, we had to do a thing where every Geek Squad agent we brought on had to be 100% accountable within a certain number of days. I mean, the day I got hired to X number of days, I had to be able to be self-sufficient. I can clock in, I can do my job, I can bill my time. We started at 295 days it took us to get someone from zero to accountable. So that we worked backwards to getting to, I think the furthest we got was like 93, 94 days, so about a quarter to get them from zero to actionable. But that took 3, 4 years to build out a plan, to iteratively change it and adjust it and build out. We, we had something back in the day called MRI. It was a disc. A lot of people stole it on the internet because it was fantastic. You dropped the disc It was a PE bootloader. I could fix 90% of problems with a single CD. But we started to build out automation and simplistic systems because we recognized we can't have a new employee go 300 days to become accountable when, by the way, your employee lifespan was 400 days. So you're lucky to get 100 days out of the employee of full productivity. And that becomes the conversation of if I'm hiring for this person, I have to recognize how long are they actually going to be here? How long do I get full productivity? Am I willing to build a system? 'Cause recruitment becomes the next problem. I'm sure Brian, at your MSP, you run into this, right? Recruiting's so easy to find people that can do their job on day one.

Absolutely, it's totally true, right? And so we were talking about this earlier today, and so expound on this a little bit. So part of my process is I'm all about looking for the better mousetrap, right? I'm looking for a faster way of getting from point A to point Z. And so a big part of what I like to do is— You just skip point B. Yeah, and everything in between. So I mean, it's a journey, right? It's not destination. So for me, the process has always been how can I better, especially from a hiring perspective, how can I get more people in the funnel, talk to less of them, waste less time. But in the end, what I'm really looking for is the best possible candidates that I can then finalize and squeeze down to, okay, who are my top 2 candidates? And what we talked about earlier was a tool that I use called CRI, Candidate Resources, Inc. It's about $175 a test, but it's not like DISC, which is pretty easy to do, and we do in a pre-application, pre-interview process. We actually use that CRI product at the end of the road and say, okay, I now— have either of you heard of this before?

No.

Candidate Resources, CRI. So it's a product that essentially takes the job, let's say it's a systems or network engineer, right, and takes that specific job and overlays it against the database of thousands of other people that have applied for that job, that have taken that examination. So they've really winnowed down the details and the results and how people answer and who's going to really be the best fit for that very specific job. So it's quite granular and detailed in its output.

Well, that even goes though— you said something very detailed job. You have to be able to say what that detailed job is. And a lot of times you think that you know what that job role is and what that employee is going to do. And you keep it in your mind because you don't know how to explain it or quantify it or measure it, right? All of the smart stuff that's out there. But then the employee just fails because you can never communicate to them what their expectations are, right? And your expectations become read my mind on what you think you need to be doing today.

Right.

And then you get upset that they grabbed a tier 3 ticket and they ruined it when they're like, dude, I'm 17 and I just learned how to turn the computer on.

Right.

Wasn't that the cousin? Of like, you're going to help us define your job role. Yeah, like that's the same type of mentality. We have a general idea of the vision, but not exactly what your part is going to be.

Well, because in the early days, and I'm sure Tom, you can relate with this even on the MSP level, you're just hiring to hire, right? Like, you're like, I've got my X number of clients, I need— I only have this many hours, I need a body in, so I just need somebody, anybody to help me.

Something I wanted to bring up too, kind of related to what Dean said about the video games, I look for what I refer to as adjacent curiosity. I sit down and do the interviews with people and I'll find out that they're really into 3D printers or phone hacking. And you kind of probe them on that a little bit, like, "Oh, what'd you do?" And we actually have someone, and I won't out them too much because of the Pokémon stuff they do, but let's just say they have an entire farm of phones that they built and hacked and GPS spoofing the entire thing. Like, the more you talk to them, you're like, you're doing A Kubernetes cluster with iPhones? Okay. Explain this further. Oh, wow. And you do what right now? Oh, I happen to work at a print shop. I think I want to work in tech. Yeah, I think you may have some knowledge working in tech. Turns out he's a really bright guy. One of the other staff, when I sat down, he very shy, very introverted, highly introverted, I would say, didn't like to talk. I met him through his mom, says, please give my son a job. I think he's smart, but everyone thinks their son's smart. I kind of said, fine, I'll interview because I like her. She's nice. And I couldn't get him to say much until I asked him about phone hacking. He's also into— right away wanted to show me how he rooted his phone, swapped out all the interfaces. Then we got onto other home lab topics, see it done. I'm like, okay, this guy's got this really strong curiosity about technology, which means if I can— if they have an interest in working here and they have an interest in diving deep, and you know, he's worked for me for 8 years now. Well, he transferred over from my company, CNDBR. Still a good staff, still has these weird, as we call them, chasms of knowledge because he's willing to go deep and he goes Oh, that's neat. Automation. Oh cool, we can script things. And then he takes the time to learn it because that becomes a very fascinating topic for him. So you find some of that adjacent curiosity to something and you're like, okay, they kind of, they get it. And they're probably someone who would also be willing to learn.

I was just going to say, as you and I talk a lot with in sales and account management, do you need the technical skills? And we talk about this adjacent thing.

Well, sometimes the skills are when you get into tech skills on a people role, the tech skills are almost a disadvantage because I'm no longer curious, I'm no longer asking questions. The value of somebody who's smart enough to learn is super powerful, whether they know what you need to teach them or not, because they're smart enough to learn and they're willing to learn. I was talking about this with the Bering McKinley Group up in Boston a couple weeks ago, and we were talking about how do you find a VCIO? Like, what a weird role. I need somebody who can talk to people about their technology decisions, but who doesn't understand technology enough to go down the nerd words road and ruin it for all of them. And it really came down to the room. We had MSPs from $5 to $10 million in the room. Everybody was struggling with that hire. And most of them said the most successful they'd been with that was through acquisition. And it was another business owner that they brought in who had sold their MSP, wasn't ready to retire, wanted to do something, but didn't want to be that technical anymore and kind of want to step back and step away from it. And so I think that's a really tough role. You guys were talking about like at the $18 an hour job, like, or $15 an hour job, whatever, how we have to go through people quickly to be fair to them and not take up too much of their time in the interview. At the high end, it's almost flipped. Like, we need to find that perfect person who's going to be with us for a while, 'cause it takes a long time to get someone who doesn't have that skill set into a VCIO or VCSO role. Those are jobs that are just really, really tough.

Well, and if you look at the enterprise world, this is why C-suites just jump company to company, enterprise to enterprise, because how many people actually have experience being a COO of a Fortune 50 or a CFO of a Fortune 100?

Well, it's not even the experience you're looking for, it's hiring from your friends group. It's kind of part of the reason we're here at CompTIA. We're all making friends, we're all talking to people. There's some classes, I guess, going on, I heard, but you know.

Just rumor has it.

Just rumor has it. That importance of the network and the brand you build. And if I wanted a job, I've got enough people that know me. If I, I could go be a VCI somewhere, you know, if I wanted to do that. There's a lot of people in that role. That's why they're able to job hop, not just because of the background experience they have, but because people go, oh yeah, this person had a track record at this company of performance. Even if he left, everyone would pat him on the back and say, hey, I wish you best at your next venture. So having that friends network is huge when you get into the executive roles. The people I've hired, the guy who runs sales currently for CNWR, Brett, he's a longtime friend of mine. He's worked for my company, but you don't have to spend more than about 15 minutes with him and go, oh, this guy knows sales. Yeah, like you can tell he's extremely personable, he's charismatic and likable. And so it's why he kind of moves around. In fact, he left my company for a little while because he had a lucrative offer. And as a personal friend, I told him, I was like, oh, you're an idiot if you don't take this offer. I was like, I cannot pay you that. And I ended up coming back, but because he didn't even burn the bridge, he came back after 6 months. He goes, I don't like working there, and can I come back? I was like, yes. But that whole thing, that reputation you build is, is so important. And that's why you probably— like Jesse, you're friendly, you reached out to me. It's how we, you know, you see me online, we started talking, right? But I do that all the time with people. I have quite the friends list of people, and if I know someone who needs a job, sometimes I'm even a connector for it, right? Those are when you start getting those more executive roles or you're looking for a tier 3 resource.

What's funny is that my MSP, what I used to say, because we didn't do the VCIO thing, this goes back a few years. I used to say tier 2, you can fix everything. You don't need to escalate anything. Tier 3, I need to be able to walk into the CFO's office, say, hey, I know everything is burning down, but I need your credit card because that's the only way it's going to get fixed. If you can't do that as the high-level engineer, what value are you really offering us? Because we are a service company. You need to be able to service the customer. And if you're at a tier 3 level on a help desk, shit's probably burning down. People are probably getting pissed. Your number one role is to make the customer happy first, then the tech work, right? And that's the whole— and I think Jason's doing a talk on this, right? About internal IT versus MSP and how our worlds are a little bit different. And I'm really excited to see that. And my mind went somewhere and I just lost it. But I also talk— I used to hire my account managers from Nordstrom's because I knew that they could talk to anybody no matter what they were mad about, what they were upset about. And I can always tag team a tier 2 or tier 3 with them if they really needed to talk nerd, because there's such a power in networking and communicating. If they're a good account manager, you're gonna get referrals because they're gonna go, that's my buddy, I'm gonna hook him up, you need to talk to Alex because that guy knows his shit.

There was this profile on CNBC about probably 6 years ago that showed, illustrated, or highlighted an HVAC company in Florida that was just exploding. I mean, just doing really, really well, growing like crazy. And they said, the interviewer said to the owner, what's the secret to your success? He said, look, I can teach anybody how to like run and manage, install HVAC systems and maintain them, but I can't teach them his personality. Yeah. And so what I'm looking for is people that come from hospitality, restaurants, servers, that side that know how to deal with people, and I can teach them all the shit they need to know. I can't teach the people skills. So I thought that was really, really valuable. If I ever sell my MSP, I'll start an HVAC company and know where to recruit from.

Well, and I think this goes full circle, 'cause you mentioned that Brett left at one point. As you find these all-stars, they are going to leave you at some point, right? As MSPs, we can't pay what a Microsoft pays or what a Google pays. And this comes full circle with Dean, and I think Alex and I's business partner Wes, he talks about this talent factory. He likes to talk about how you're more like a college football team than a professional football team. You can't franchise tag your tier 3 engineer, your VCIO, 'cause eventually they are gonna walk away, and you want to be like, high five, good for you, you're making all of this money. So at some point, you are gonna recycle them. And I think you're probably seeing this, especially Jesse, with, the rise of the CISO and the CIOs now going, hey, do I want to become adjacent to cyber or go into cyber? How do I replace that other guy?

There's an interesting kind of dynamic happening right now where CISOs, because the regulatory environment in the Fortune 500 and in mid-market is so high pressure, and really they're just being put in an impossible place. You would not believe how many DMs I get from people being like, I want to get out of the CISO role, I want to be a VC, so how do I do that? And so I think there's a unique opportunity for MSPs to start building those talent pipelines and scoop some of those people up. And like you said, they're willing to take a pay cut for less stress. And that's what you could offer as an MSP if you build your program the right way, right?

When you're young, sure, you can work those crazy hours and deal with stress. I did that. I was working 80 hours a week when I was 20 years old, but I am not doing that right now.

That's right.

Yeah, there's more opportunity. Not everybody is monetarily motivated as everyone assumes. There's this constant assumption that, I can't afford those people. I'm like, happiness goes a long way. Having a good work environment, having a good place to work. Yeah, there's a reason there's a lot of people that stay in the small business market. There's a reason I came back to it.

And I wanna talk about that mindset for a second because I love that you said that, Tom. The mindset of, first of all, you're saying, I wish you best of luck, you shouldn't take that job. And you're not even just not burning bridges, you're promoting them, you want what's best for them.

Right.

And that right there, that says the world about you as a person, but also what you want for them, that you really wanna help them. First and foremost. And if you do that for everybody out there, if we did that for more people, again, that's, I mean, talk about empath, right? I mean, that's really kind of the way of the world, right? If we all were that way more.

Well, and that's also though having that communication ability to say, where are you in your journey? Are you still happy here? In a world where if you got offered your dream job, would you take it? And I think we get so fearful of those questions because—

We talk about culture and how culture is so tough at in so many MSPs because it's a high-pressure situation. Owners aren't necessarily born and bred business owners, right? They're figuring it out as they go. The culture of a company that can say, good job, Dean, but your time here's done. There's better things waiting for you. Shoo, shoo. You know, if you're willing to do that for your people, that says a lot about where you work, right?

But you know, you can't start the conversation there. And I weirded— so for those that don't know, my going through a series of acquisitions, and I weirded out one of our acquisitions that was a more mature MSP than us, 'cause they came in and they were auditing how we ran stuff down in Massachusetts, and I was walking a new hire through building out a LinkedIn profile. And they were like, "Why are you doing that?" I'm like, "'Cause I want every employee to have a LinkedIn profile and take credit for their accomplishments and to join community groups." And they were like, "But why? They're gonna find out about other jobs." I'm like, "Yes." Yes, exactly, that's the point. So I want them to be the most marketable employee possible, and then my job every day is to convince them to keep working for me. And the day that that no longer is a fit, they have a year, 5 years, 10 years of me helping them build a career. There's an immense amount of loyalty that comes from that thought process that you can then use to make somebody feel good about moving on.

It's a mindset of abundance is really what it is, because it's contrary to the scarcity mindset, right? That's so— I mean, look, even our industry, it's super prevalent, right?

Technically everyone here is a competitor, right?

Yeah, technically. But we're— look, it's competition-friendly, friend-petitors. You hear those terms all the time. But if you can take that mindset of like, look, there's enough for everybody to eat, let's work together, and everyone has their niche. We all have our specialties here.

Well, and that's what— that was Rockefeller, right? He always said competition competition's bad for business. You need to be able— like, he kind of birthed the whole oligarchy idea of, right, let's find a way to take the market and go, I'm okay with 1% of the market.

I really am.

1% of the market gets everyone fed, makes me happy, hits my life goals, and I can take that. You don't need to approach every— and this is a great sales conversation, all right— you don't need to approach everything with desperation of, I have to have you. No, I have to pick you because I only need 1%. And this is going not only do you pick your customers, but you should pick your employees. And if someone seems like they're desperate and they don't wanna work or they have all these requirements, right? You've probably seen this in interviews. We've all seen this in interviews of the, they give you the list. Here's what I should be doing, here's what I'm good at. And then sometimes you hire 'cause you hear a shiny object of, oh, you're really good at Intune. "Oh, well, we could use that. Do you sell Intune?" "You have a single client on Intune?" "No?" "Okay, then why did— why?" Know what you're looking for. So I want to wrap this up because this conversation is going a little bit long, but I think what would be fun is we all probably have one interview question we loved to ask in every interview. I want to go around the room and see— let's build a quick little interview guide. Dean, I'm gonna have you go first.

So this is usually the last question that I'll ask, but I'll ask somebody, what does an employer owe an employee?

Ooh.

That's a good one. That's good.

I don't have anything that good.

You wanna go second?

I'll go second. I would always ask them to tell me about a situation that went really, really badly and how they salvaged it. 'Cause I wanna hear, you know, what you could fix, not what you can break.

Examples are great.

Well, and you know, we're all— every human makes a mistake. We're all going to step in it at some point. It's how you fix it that proves who you are. And that's what I want to hear.

I should have been second because that's what I asked. You know, I have lit things on fire on accident. I have— sometimes I, you know, you mirror, you share. Like, I've done some stupid things. Just because I've owned a business, I didn't have a path of stupidity led me here. And so I, you know, mirror that with them and say, what dumb things have you done so far? Career that you really share and how you got through those situations. You know, like you said, it's how they handle it. You know, did you cover it up? Is there, is there a thing that is still covered up at your last— yeah, I had to leave before they found out.

Where'd they go? I ran to my manager and had him fix it.

Well, we've all written a bad script or a bad patch or whatever, CrowdStrike, like it's a— but we've all done it.

For me, it's more about the— it's not something we're talking about employees, and it's more about the humility factor. I want them to know Look, I don't know everything and I know where to find the answers.

If—

and I would rather you tell me I don't understand and say, but I know where to go to find out. If I have that mentality, that attitude, to me, I can work with that.

So what's your question?

Probably similar to what Alex said. Tell me about a situation you got into, how you got yourself out of it, and that will ultimately lend itself to identifying that outcome.

I think I don't have a really good question there because I don't have my script. I have two.

Depending on who you're interviewing. So help desk, lower executive, or non-executive type roles, I like to ask the, you know, you walk into your backyard and you see a full-grown African elephant in your backyard, what do you do? Right? And you want to hear what people say. Like, they're like, oh, I would sell tickets and bring, you know, and try and make money off of it. Or I would see if he's mad. You want to see if they're analytical. So you see kind of—

Did anyone's mind just blow on that question? Like right now I'm sitting here going, that is a genius question.

I'm just going to paint it purple. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm Marketing 101.

We're all here. You'll find out so much about the person and who— because it's disarming, right? They have to be themselves for that. And then for more tactical type roles or strategic type roles, this is a wild one too. Be like, does objective truth exist? Why or why not? Same thing. They have to like— all of a sudden think on the— and I know you like that question.

I really like that.

That one though might be a little too highbrow for a lot of people.

Yeah, well, but, but you know what's interesting though is you ask people that have no training in that and they start working it out. And if you can see if someone is a really logical and strategic thinker, they'll start working it out right in front of you. I had one guy who I did that for and I was like kind of eh, but he was— he didn't know the answer, but he started working it out with me and like his thought process.

I was like, hired.

I don't know is a fair answer.

Yeah, that's a great—

Absolutely.

But you wanna watch them think after they say that.

Exactly, yep.

So mine, I developed it when I was at Geek Squad, was what is your geek? And I ask it just because of what you said, Tom. I wanna hear their process of explaining, and I would tell them, not geek as in like nerdy, it can be a car geek, it can be a knitting geek, you can be whatever you nerd out about when you are off the clock, tell me about it. If they would look and go, "I play video games," and just leave it, I'd be like, "Okay, they're not good at communicating." They don't go into depth. They're not passionate. But if they'd go, "Man, I am into needleworking. Every home I come home—" and I actually have this example, that's why it comes to mind. Sometimes I'm working on this intricate thing where I'm trying to take a painting and they'll go through all the types of yarns that they use. I was like, "Okay, you have the ability to go deep and to communicate." It was a fantastic question for me. Anywho, guys, I appreciate your time. Thank you everyone for watching, and that's a wrap.