The Best Interview Framework For Finding Top Talent | Ep 72 17:32

This is the gatekeeper. This is if you, the CEO, are not the direct hiring manager, this is where you come in. And what you are intending to do in this interview is put the best interests of that person and your culture in mind. How do you create an unshakable business? I lost $100 million in net worth by the age of 28. Now I'm growing acquisition.com into a billion dollar portfolio. In this podcast, I share the lessons I've learned in scaling big businesses and helping our portfolio companies do the same. Buckle up and let's build.

Why is that shit what I want to talk about is...

interview process and the involvement of the CEO in that and just kind of creating a broad process for you to follow if you do not have a structured multi-phase interview process in your company. This gets top of mind for me because I was actually at dinner with a CEO the other day and I was asking him about his company and everything that was going on and that pretty slow growth. It seemed like he had stagnated a little bit. And then I started asking a little bit of questions about the team because it seemed like he felt like he had a lot of people he needed to fire.

It seemed like he was actually really unaware of that. You know, they were people in leadership that, you know, he was saying, you know, these people, you know, the rest of my team is saying you need to fire these people now. And I'm thinking to myself, how do you not know if you need to fire these people? And what I realized is he was very disconnected and uninvolved in not just the process of finding those people, but the process of interviewing and onboarding and hiring those people. And I think this is why, you know, people like

Howard Schultz, people like Gary Vaynerchuk, people like Dak Welch, you know, a lot of them will say, hey, I interviewed the first thousand employees. And, you know, until we got to 100 people, I interviewed every single person. And after that, they still talk to the people when they come on. And this is something that I practiced until I had, you know, a C-suite in place that could actually do those things on my behalf. And so for the better part of, you know, four and a half years, I was involving myself in most of those. Obviously, there's exceptions. Like if you have, for example, we have a big sales team.

And they go through a lot of people on the front end and, you know, often filter out people in the first 30 days just based on the side of the team and how that works with funneling people. Beside that, most positions, ones that are not in that situation or expected to be, you know, you want to involve yourself with. I see this a lot, which is really interesting to me because I think a lot of people who are, you know, below, this is the irony of it, that are below 20 or 30%

employees don't involve themselves in this process. And they might be thinking,

Well, I don't need to involve myself in that. You know, we have 20 or 30 people. The reality is I don't think that they can get above 20 or 30 people because they're not involving themselves in that. And instead, they're just spending all the time, you know, coaching and firing people because they haven't hired the right people because they were never involved in the process. And so it's really interesting to observe. And my camera keeps moving. I think that it's something that people overlook because they don't like doing it. Right. They feel like they're not good at it. They feel like interviews are awkward, et cetera, et cetera.

So I kind of want to outline a broad interview process for, you could use it really for any role. And I obviously like tweak these and change them for the roles that we have. Based on as an executive, a leader, a manager, is it a role that, you know, is turn and burn, like what's it look like? But it's a broad outline of what that could look like. The reason I think this is really important is because a lot of people spend all of this energy looking at marketing and looking at sales and diving and everything that produces revenue. But fucked up because on the back end, there's all the people who are supporting the revenue.

They're the ones delivering the product. They're the ones talking to the customer. They're the ones holding up the promises. And yet, a lot of CEOs will not even take the time of day to give 30 minutes to see if that person is the right kind of person to have on their team. Like, do you want them to be the only impression of the company that that customer is? Okay, so I think about this theme of customer service, right? Is if I'm hiring someone, that customer is not seeing my company. They're not seeing me and Erlex and all of our executives. They're not seeing me. They...

look at that one person and say, this is the company. They associate our entire company with that one person. And so that is why you have to be really careful in terms of who you bring onto the team. There's a lot of wasted money and time and a lot of slow growth because of people who don't do this. And a lot of people abdicate their responsibility early because they feel like they're not good at it. Well, no shit. You don't get good at it unless you do it like 100 to 1,000 times. People ask me, well, how many people have you fired? How many people have you hired? I'm like,

Fucking countless. I probably fired 100 people minimum, you know, like I think probably realistically 80. But, you know, you get good at something from repetition. So if you want to get good at interviewing, you've got to do it over and over and over again.

And so to give you a broad outline of what it can look like and then kind of the candor you want to come to an interview with. I like to do interviews, the process in three phases. I don't think that when you're interviewing somebody, you should just do one interview and be done and hired. That's not how I do interviews, okay? The reason for that is because there's a lot of people in our company, there's a lot of different perspectives and people see different things in people and they can analyze different things in people, okay? And so if you're looking at what kind of process to put together, here's the steps that I would do.

And this is the minimum that I would have any company that we work with or that we take equity in. This is why I suggest them like minimum stakes. This is what I want to have in place. Okay. The first one is that, you know, you're getting in applications. You want to have somebody, and I typically suggest it be like an admin, do a phone screen. Okay. And so usually it's just a quick, I mean, it can be less than a couple of minutes, but if it's a good conversation, it might be a 15 minute phone screen. And there's two things that you want to gain from this phone screen. Okay. You want to get one, are they a fucking crazy person?

Because I've caught a lot of people on a phone space. Like, you look great on paper and they talk to you and you're fucking nuts. Right? The second is, does this person have the desire and the qualifications that were expressed on the resume? Okay. So I'm listening for tonality of voice. Do they sound excited? Are they willing to make any time work for the interview? And then secondarily, you know, just double checking what is on their resume. Hey, is this true? And oftentimes you'll find that a lot of those things aren't there. Either they sound like they're very disinterested.

They don't remember even what your company is. Okay, that's a huge red flag. Or they're not going to make time for the interview. They have 30 minutes on Tuesday at six o'clock. Or lastly, you know, you ask them about their qualifications and it's almost like they don't remember because, you know, some people budget on the resume. So that's the first piece. You want to put a phone screen in place. Now, the next three pieces are the interview process in itself. So this is what you would call the multi-phase interview, right? So the first one is the first interviewer.

So in that interview, you typically would have a hiring manager do that. A hiring manager is whoever's responsible for the entire process of interviewing the person, okay? Oftentimes, this would be like if you're hiring for sales, it's a sales manager. If you're hiring for marketing, it's a marketing manager. If you're a bigger company, you know, you'll have an HR manager who might be that person. But typically, they delegate that to the leads anyways because it's usually better to have the person that's going to be their superior doing the process. So the first interview is conducted by that hiring manager.

What is this, the purpose of this interview, okay? It is to validate and confirm history, experience, qualifications, and values. That is what you want to basically validate

confer on that call. So on your end, you want to double check all that with the candidate. On the candidate's end, you want to make sure you set the expectations with them. Yes, they read them. Yes, the phone screen probably included them. But you want to verbalize it again. What do you need for this role? What kind of person are you looking for? And what kind of company is this that we have? You cannot repeat things too often, especially when you're hiring someone. The last thing you want to do is that you didn't say it enough. And so they come in and they think the role is completely different than it was. Because you can have the same title for a role. It can mean something different. It

completely different in multiple companies. So that's the first interview that you want to conduct. The second interview is typically conducted by the hiring manager and or current employees. And the reason for this is that this is going to be a skill assessment interview. And so sometimes the hiring manager is not the best person to assess the skill based on what kind of team they have underneath of them. The second reason for that is oftentimes peers, right, when they're

When you include them in the interview process, okay, here's why they're incentivized. They don't want to work with somebody who's going to underperform. So if you bring in an A player, they're going to want to find A players to bring to work with them because they want that. People love the community. They want people that they like to work with and that are going to be productive on the team if that's the kind of culture you have, which I would assume it is. That's who conducts the interview. Now, what are you doing in an interview? You're asking them questions about real life scenarios. You're doing strength skill matches, okay? So you're making sure that the skills they have

And the strengths they have merit with what you need the role to do, right? Everyone has weaknesses. The point is, are their weaknesses going to be detrimental to the role? If not, ignore, focus on the strengths. Guys, I just want to take a quick break to thank all of you for listening to the show so far. If you enjoy what you're listening to, I would be so grateful if you would just consider leaving me a review or even sharing it with somebody who you think would love to hear the kind of content.

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You're checking past performance, a lot of times asking about how they solved problems in past jobs and past careers they've held. And then oftentimes, there's one of two other things that you want to do, which is one, you want to request a portfolio. If it's a certain kind of, if it's a, you want to say a product manager, if it's a software engineer, if it's a marketing designer, a graphic designer, right?

Right. You want to say, I would like your portfolio and I would like to go over that together with you on this next call. The second one is that if it's not a role that they would have a portfolio of work from, then you want to conduct some sort of assignment and review that with them on that call. OK, so there's lots of different ways you can do this for higher level roles. It's typically situational.

interviewing or questions. So you might have them write short essays on how they would solve certain problems that have already occurred or you anticipate occurring in your business. The second piece of that is you could have them actually perform activity. So often for the marketing roles, for example, I'm going to ask them to build a funnel, make an ad, write some copy. I'm going to ask for that ahead of time and say, I would like your best three pieces based on this criteria. And that's what you want to have done in the second interview is

The assumption is that this person has experienced the qualifications and the candor to match this role. Now what you want to test is how do they actually do under pressure, right? Like in the moment, because they're going to be nervous on the interview with you, what's going to come out of their mouth? Only the truth for the most part, unless they're very well reversed, which that does happen. But that's what's going to come out. Same with the assignments. That's their best work that they're going to put forward. And that's what you have to remember about interviewing is that whatever the person says, however they act, whatever work they give you, that's

fucking best you're ever going to get. Like, when they come in, if they haven't blown their socks off in the interview, they're not bringing anything better to the table. Now they've got the job. It's like, now she's got the ring, you know, she's not going to be better than she was before, right? I'm joking. But, um...

Seriously, that's how people act. They often look at their best foot forward. And then once you get in there and you're all comfortable, then it's like, then she's wearing sweatpants and not doing her hair and not doing her makeup anymore, okay? And so that's what you have to assume with interviewing. Now, the third interview is what I call the gatekeeper interview. And so this is basically the quality assurance. This is the gatekeeper. This is if you, the CEO, are not the direct hiring manager, this is where you come in. And what you are intending to do in this interview

is put the best interests of that person in your culture in mind. And so at this point, you want to assume that skill is there. You want to assume that all qualifications, experience, et cetera, are there. But who is the most potent source of culture in your company? It's you.

And you are the one that's been able to spot it the best. And so you want to protect your culture by making sure that when you talk to this person, you believe that they have the same values, they have aligned values, and then that they can share the mission that you all have. And then on the second side of that, you want to make sure that this role is best for them. You want to make sure it wasn't oversold. You want to make sure they have proper expectations. And I like to tell people all the shit they're going to encounter. You know, I think a lot of the times,

What we do is we sell, sell, sell people on this job because we're really desperate to get people in. But that's not going to be good and that's not going to set them up for success. So I like to tell them all the stuff that they should anticipate to be shitty. And I actually like to overemphasize that often because I think that a lot of times it's uninformed optimism, right? They're like, this is going to be the best job ever. It's going to solve all my problems. I'm never going to feel anxious anymore. My boss is never going to yell at me like, oh my God, it's going to be amazing. It's like, no, here's all the shit that you're going to deal with. And so I just want you to know from here on out, this is what it's going to look like.

And so I like to paint a realistic picture because I come into that and my intention on that call is if this is not truly the role for them, I do not want them to get offered this job. I want to say, hey,

I think you're awesome. I don't think this is the role for you based on what you want your future to be, what your skillset is, and how I think you're going to match up with this culture. And so you're protecting the business's culture and you're protecting their best interests. And that is, in my opinion, the most important interview. It's where many people fall short because they're so focused on getting out of the short-term pain of not having someone in the role or having the wrong person in the role and they just want to get someone in that they're like, really, do I have to be this picky? Yes, you have to be this picky.

And so those are the three interviews. Now we've got the first one, which is with the hiring manager. That's where we're going to go over the history, experience, value, qualifications. We've got the second one, which is with usually the hiring manager and or a peer interview, where you're going to go over skills, strengths, past performance, assessments, sharing a portfolio, real life scenarios. And then we've got the third interview where we're going to go over, um,

Are they, right, the right person for this company? Am I protecting the culture? And am I protecting them by making this decision? Is it in the best interest of both the company and this person that they take this job? And so those are the three interviews that you want to do. Now, if you skip one of the three, here are the scenarios that can happen on the back end. You might skip the skill interview. And so you hire someone at a great culture fit. Everyone likes them, but they come in, they have no skill at all, and they can't, right? So you better fire them.

The second is that you hire for skill and you kind of ignore culture because maybe the skill is so high. Then you have someone that comes in, they're very skilled, but they're not a culture fit. And that in itself is inherently going to block them from doing well because they cannot express their skills in its totality if they're not a culture fit and people do not accept them into the company. They don't work well with them. They don't jive with them. So it's not in best interest of either them or the company to do that. And the last one is that you could hire people with skill and with a culture fit

But it's not in their best interest. And so they won't be here for the long haul anyway. You can do that in a couple of ways, which I'll kind of elaborate on, which is if you know that somebody actually wants to have a different career and they're just taking this job because, you know, they're really excited over the company or something, but it doesn't fit with really any vision they have for their lives. You need to step in and be responsible and say like, hey, that's, you know, this is not in your best interest. So I don't think this is a fit.

The second piece is if the salary doesn't match, right? If they're willing to take a really harsh pay cut, but you know, and you can dig and say, are you really going to be able to live off this for that long? Or are they going to have to take a second job? You know, they're going to be really stressed. And that just never is good. If they're just really stressed on somebody, they're not going to perform well on their job. So it's your responsibility to ask those hard questions to make sure that person is truly going to be a fit for the company in the long haul. And so...

Those are the three interviews that I conduct and the themes of each one, right? It's like qualifications, skill, culture fit.

slash best interest. And that's the broad outline that I'll give, but I think that could work for any company of any size. I think if you're just starting out, you've only got 10, 15 people on the team, putting something like this in place isn't too difficult, okay? And it's very important. It makes a huge difference to the culture of the entire company. I think a lot of the times what happens is we kind of overlook it and we say, well, I don't want to involve too many people in that. Well, I don't want to take up everyone's time. Like they're so busy. They love, okay, I will say this.

employees and people on your team will love being involved in this process. They love feeling like they are helping contribute to building the team. And they are more than happy to say if they think that person's going to be an A player alongside of them or not. And so utilize the resources that you have. Put this structure into place. Try it. You know, if you hate it, let me know. If you love it, let me know. Or no, you know, as well. But I promise you it'll make a huge difference into the kind of

team you build in the kind of impression that people have when they enter your company. So if you think of an employee who comes in and they've had one interview with one person and they haven't had the clearest of expectations and they haven't really tried that hard for the role,

versus somebody who's gone through three or four interviews. They've talked to multiple people in the company. They've done multiple assignments. They're working their ass off to get this role. What kind of impression do they have of the company and the seriousness that you take of the kind of people on this team when they come in? These are the seeds that you sow. And when you bring people in one way, and then it's different on the inside, they're going to notice the discrepancy. If you bring people in like this, and then on the inside, it is the way that you show it, right? And it is exactly how you've interpreted it to them.

Then they're going to say, oh, okay, now they're going to help you repeat this with everyone else that you're bringing in. So it's a perpetual cycle. And so I hope this is useful for you. I'm going to do a few more on interviewing because this was extremely broad. I would really like to get into the nitty gritty of the tonality of interviewing, how to conduct the interview, the questions you want to ask and the conversations you want to have. So look out for that. It will come out soon and hopefully a great rest of your day, week, night, morning, etc.