#1 Hiring Podcast Designed Specifically For Startup Founders & Entrepreneurs Tuesdays @12PM (PST), LIVE on LinkedIn, YouTube, & Facebook Our mission is to enable values-driven startups to win-win the strongest hires by sharing insights from top-performing entrepreneurs, game-changers, & industry thought leaders. www.hirepowerradio.com www.rickgirard.com
Episodes
Thursday Nov 05, 2020
Thursday Nov 05, 2020
Values are the foundation of what your company is built upon. As we all know, without a foundation, the structure that is built can be destroyed at any time. Too often the foundation is poured after the structure has been built.
Our guest today: Darius Mirshahzadeh (Mir Shah Zaday), Founder of The Real Darius & Host of The Greatness Machine Podcast
Darius is a dad, husband, twin, brother and son who was born and raised in California and now lives in Austin Texas.
He is a serial entrepreneur, author, conscious capitalist, speaker and mad scientist CEO. He was ranked #40 in Inc 500 CEO’s in 2007 and #9 in Glassdoor’s Top Ranked CEOs in America for small to medium business. He participated in Birthing of Giants at MIT, graduated from Stagen Integral Leadership Program, is a TEDx curator and expert on core values. Darius’s new book, The Core Value Equation, explains everything on core values.
Today we discuss:
- Why values are so critical in landing unobtainable talent
- How to roll out a Core Values based recruiting machine
There is a silver bullet to hiring! Smart hiring decisions are much easier when you evaluate people for evidence of core value alignment, rather than skills.
Challenge today?
- Social proof
- Everyone pretends to be a cool company
- Catfishing-
- Making sure the best people show up
- A-players are never filling out job applications
Why is this important to the company?
- Not seducing with $$$
- Leading with core values
- Differentiating value proposition
- Value hires are stronger fits for the organization
- Cements a validation process
- You will win Hires
- You are building a better company
- You are only competing with yourself
- Foundation for a “REAL” conversation with each person
Rick’s Nuggets
- People are attracted to opportunities that have a fundamentally stronger foundation
- Opportunity for growth is greater which fuels more impactful work
How do we build a core value recruiting machine into your company? Discovery
What your values are
- Leading with values
- Content
- 2 of 3 hires are referral hires
Design
- High utility value
- Translate into the most powerful language
Roll out
- Teach team the language
- Immersed in the language
Implementation
- Nurture
- Implement in an ongoing basis
Measure
- Measure for efficacy and optimize based on results
Plug into your recruiting efforts
- Built a language for accountability in the organization
- Leading with values when contacting people
- Filter for decision making
- The people on the boat are in alignment with the values
- Dig deep in discovery for value alignment
Rick’s Nuggets
- Design: build interview questions that unearth evidence of alignment with your core values
- Implementation: Train & assign specific questions for each interviewer
Key Takeaways:
- Ultimate decision making engine
- Invisible scale - allow you to grow faster / better
- Magnet for top talent that shouldn't even consider your company (marrying outside your envelope)
Guest Contact & Links:
Darius: therealdarius.com
Book: The Core Value Equation (Amazon)
Friday Oct 23, 2020
Friday Oct 23, 2020
We are in the greatest time for opportunistic hiring! An unprecedented number of talented people are on the sidelines and now is your time to hire the people that will take your company to the next level. All it takes is some creative thinking and a plan.
Our guest today: Scott Hamilton, President & CEO of Executive Next Practices Institute (ENP)
Scott and his team of Nextworks partners provide executive and organizational programs around strategic planning & execution, internal innovation methods, performance management improvement and the pioneering use of “collective intelligence” alignment.
Today we discuss:
- Why to start executing your talent strategy next year Today
- The 3 critical elements to building your hiring plan - executing in a targeted way
I find the biggest challenge today is that business leaders have not recognized the tremendous opportunity we have in front of us. That opportunity is displaced talent.
Challenge today?
- Getting lost in the covid fog
- Getting disconnected
- Employment brand message is getting lost in all the noise
- Lost in person networking
- Need to force connections in a different way, that you don't know
- Expanding your network channels
Why is this important to the company?
- Business value proposition, new ideas come from outside our industry
- Talent: High quality talent in other arenas
- Have skills, aptitude & capabilities to be successful
- Transparency & increase communications in our marketplace
- Be found easily and understand the value in working for your company
- Diversity, Equity (level playing field) & Inclusion
Rick’s Nuggets
- Leaders are still unclear about the opportunity we are in right now!
- Disrupting your own business through
How do we build it into your company?
- Bottom up strategy
- Tap the collective IQ
- Clear on mission
- Shared purpose
- Not just say it, but live it
- Culture of learning
- Community Partner
- Talent Skills
- Valuing adaptability
- Ideation - create
- Culture that allows people to step up & take risks
- People who have good judgment
- Execution skills
- Execution
- Acting with measurable intent
- Knowing KPI’s & OKR’s
- Pace & Rhythm
- Faster cycle to fail fast, learn fast
- 30-60 days (smaller projects to allow for testing)
- Reward & recognition for hiring - referrals
Rick’s Nuggets
- Target and connect
- Build a strong referral strategy
- Communicate needs daily
- Ask for names & contact information of top performers
- Contact yourself
- Do NOT pitch your job/company/yourself
- Treat as a “get to know you” call
- Take your time
- Hire for value alignment / cultural alignment before skills
- Value growth
Key Takeaways:
- Get started now on 2021
- Business value creation
- Talent value creation
Guest Contact/Links
Friday Oct 02, 2020
Why the 30, 60, 90 Day Job Posting Wins Hires with Dan Moore of Vaporware
Friday Oct 02, 2020
Friday Oct 02, 2020
Our guests today: Dan Moore, Co-Founder & CEO of Vaporware
Dan is a trained computer scientist who helps clients craft ideas into scalable products. Always one for over-communication and compulsive attention to detail.
Dan co-founded Vaporware to help entrepreneurs take their software ideas to market. Over the past 7 years he has helped Vaporware deliver dozens of apps in Human Resources, Staffing, and Recruiting—all while building vaporware into a stellar organization.
Hiring a bench of developers, designers, and product managers is a challenge for any organization, but Dan has created 2 expert teams that combines all 3 roles at Vaporware.
Today we discuss:
- The 30,60,90 job posting; What it is & how it works
- How to build it for hiring success!
What is a 30/60/90 job posting?
- A better way to do job postings to find the right candidates.
- A list of objectives at different checkpoints (30-60-90 days)
- Designed to ensure proper onboarding and culture fit before the company invests too much.
What happened to drive this solution?
- Created out of personal desire because of the experience from prior companies- escape from past experiences
- How would we want to be hired?
- Tailoring to culture fit is much more important
- Allow people to do different things within one company
- Not looking at what they have but looking around ….
Why is this important to the company? Yes can meet those objectives!
- Limits company risk
- Shifts away from skills
- Keeping people onboard
- Retain people longer from 3-6 months to up over 4+ years
- Bottom line, higher attraction of more seasoned employees
Rick’s Nuggets
- 90 day performance metrics are a necessity for a successful hire
- Sets up the framework for the communication and expectation structure
- Clear guide of what needs to be accomplished by when
How do we build out a 90 day plan?
- Start with the end goal (6 months to a year)
- Stay with us forever: They’re bought into the mission and helping us define it
- Figure out how we can evaluate that in the first 90 days (limit our investment)
- Question what is realistic in 90 days?
- To get to 90 days
- Negotiation between desires and realism.
- Hope for the best but don’t negotiate your minimum expectations
- Define 60 and 30
- Break out what needs to happen for 90 to be successful = 60 days
- Break out what needs to happen for 60 to be successful = 30 days
- Keep flexible enough for applicant to define their own OKRs within that framework
- Post into job listing. Applicants can define OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) within that posting
- Reverse engineer what needs to be
- What are the OKRs
- Set up framework for people to self manage their goals
- Break things down into strategy
- Compelling ability to break things down for company
- Autonomy, bring people who are smarter and can teach us something
Rick’s Nuggets
- Additional formatting for the job add to attract passive people
- What’s in it for me?
- Solution
- Performance metrics
- Call to Action!
Key Takeaways:
- Align to culture first
- Have a 90 day plan
- Review and adjust the plan as you go
Full video of today's #hirepowerradio show available on YouTube
Guest Contact:
Vaporware website or Email: dan@vaporware.net
Links
Website: Vaporware
Vaporware's Sample: 30,60,90
#hirepowerradio #vaporware #hiring #founder #startup #business
Friday Sep 11, 2020
Friday Sep 11, 2020
Today's Guest: Jerri Rosen, Founder & CEO of Working Wardrobes
Jerri’s organization helps over 5,000 men, women, veterans and young adults each year re-enter the workforce with career development services and professional wardrobing.
Today we are discussing:
- The hidden gem that is the veteran pool
- How to find and hire veterans to diversify your talent pool
Why Companies don't actively seek to hire veterans?
- Bias
- Think they all have ptsd
- Not knowing the value of the training that vets get in the military
- Not knowing the true value
- Too much bad press
- Painting with a brush that is very negative
- Vets fall on hard times because they miss the discipline/brotherhood
Why is this important to the company to hire veterans?
- Intense loyalty, when treated with dignity
- Absolutely mission driven
- Path of a veteran
- Make outstanding employees
- Can help recruit -underground network
How do we find and hire veteran talent? Decide to hire outside your comfort zone
- Outstanding, dedicated people
Finding Vets
- Active duty national guard or reserves (highly under employed)
- Vet spouses,
- Military connection through working wardrobes, on your own
- Vetnet team
Interviewing & Hiring
- Understand a MOS- military status
- Translate what was done in the military to civilian language
- Look past the acronyms
- Look for the passion & talents
- Experience & gravity of the work
- Look past the stoic demeanor
- Recognize that task at hand/orders need to shift to a “going above and beyond” mindset
- Requires a bit of patience
- Hire as normal
- Understand that everything was provided for them in the military
- Learning to operate in a very different world & culture
- Different level of expectations
Rick’s Nuggets
- Dig deeper on what work was done and look for transferable skills to justify
Key Takeaways:
- Veterans become a much better employee
- Veterans also bring a network of additional talent
- Looking to hire veterans, WW can be the one stop shop. Hidden Talent Pool!
Working Wardrobes is Rebuilding Careers, and we’ve teamed up with Hire Power Radio Show & Podcast to support this initiative.
The Hire Power Radio team has created limited edition shirts, the proceeds of which benefit Working Wardrobes. Together we can make a small dent in reeducating, coaching and providing resources for our transitioning veterans, professionals and workers affected by the current world landscape.
Get yours here: T-shirts
Guest Contact:
Website: Working Wardrobes
Office Number: 714-210-2460
Thursday Sep 03, 2020
Your Local Hiring Market is Going to Disappear! Bradley Clark of RecTxt
Thursday Sep 03, 2020
Thursday Sep 03, 2020
Local hiring market is now gone! Guess what! Today, your best people will be hired outside your geographical location.
Our guest today: Bradley Clark, Co-Founder & Product Strategy of RecTxt
Bradley Clark, who is both a recruitment leader and an actual entrepreneur himself. He’s the Co-Founder of Rectxt, a text recruiting platform, and after a long consulting career working with organizations like Samsung R&D, Boeing Labs, Plenty of Fish, Best Buy, he’s now leading recruitment at Article.
Being on both the front line and talking to a number of companies and recruiters, with COVID and Work from anywhere - he’s seeing this rapidly emerging trend of where top local talent is getting scooped up from outside the market.
Today we are discussing:
- Why your local talent pool will continue to dry up
- How to counter this trend and give your company a competitive edge
Challenge today?
- Candidate experience is consumer behavior. People do have a lot of buying power right now. With remote, you are able to buy anywhere right now.
- Hiring local talent is now more competitive. Remote work will decimate your local hiring market. Already seeing it happen. Organizations say - work anywhere! Precedence to work anywhere led by tech giants.
Why is this important to the company?
- The best people in your local area, are going to be out of your market
- Transactional market/process will out bid you!
- Disrupt smaller markets
- Local discount is over
Rick’s Nuggets
- Work from home has opened the flood gates
Adjust your mindset and start adjusting your processes:
- Focus on growing your own talent
- Finding ways to build your own people
- Making them committed to you
- Rewards & recognition (your cool office, and office based perks are no longer valuable, mental health is important)
- Focus on Keeping them
- Engagement
- What the work looks like and the meaning of that work
- Flexibility & shift to output based
- Interview process as a promoter rather than a bouncer
- Mindshift change
- Rather than no… who do I say yes to?
- Speed & decisiveness
- Pre-interview process
- Understanding what the problem really is that they are trying to solve.
- What skills are needed to solve that problem
- Define what the person is really needed to do
- You need to be able to identify the “what and why”
- Interview process
- Focus on the “how & when”
- Selling the problem, how it is good for them
- Identify people that want to be a Big fish in a small pond
- Be decisive
- Communication
- Improve both the Speed of communication and keeping an open channel of communication. Get off email, this is why we created Rectxt.
Rick’s Nuggets
- Whats in it for me (not you) needs to be all you are con
Key Takeaways:
- Understand they’re no longer competing locally for top talent, so they’ll have to change to compete (business can’t be the same as always)
- Interview well with knowing what you want, then be decisive
- if/ when possible grow your own talent, then do everything you can to keep them
Guest Contact:
LinkedIn: Bradley Clark
Website: RecTxt
Thursday Aug 06, 2020
Removing Bias in the Hiring Process with Bruce Marable of Employee Cycle
Thursday Aug 06, 2020
Thursday Aug 06, 2020
“I want to work with really smart people and here is a list of schools that this person will have graduated from” said Lawrence, the CEO. “I do not want to interview anyone who has not come out of one of these schools”.
My gut reaction was to simply say, “no thanks” and exit the meeting. Afterall, this CEO was going to be difficult to work with.
My response back was simply “Confirmation Bias”
We favor information that confirms our world view and this helps us to reduce any cognitive discomfort that discounts our values and realities. As Entrepreneurs, we are more susceptible to this bias because we are so focused on the task at hand. This reduces our ability to objectively make decisions that are best for the business.
Lawrence laughed, grabbed the sheet of paper and threw it in the trash. “Ok find me smart people”!
The truth is the strongest people often surface in the most unexpected ways and your bias clouds your vision of the truth!
Our guest today: Bruce Marable, Co-founder & CEO of Employee Cycle, the all-in-one People Dashboard
Bruce is a Philly-based serial tech startup founder. When Bruce is not helping HR leaders better use data to make smarter workforce decisions, he is making music playlists on Spotify, taking self-care at the boxing gym, or hunting for the best bread pudding around town.
Today we discuss:
- Why Bias needs to be eliminated from your hiring process
- How to deliver an unbiased, evidence based interview
Challenge today?
According to Wikipedia, Bias is defined as a disproportionate weight in favor of or against an idea or thing, usually in a way that is closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair.
We all have bias. It is important to eliminate it for one simple reason… Your company’s success
Why is bias elimination important to the company?
- More diverse companies succeed
- More revenue
- Higher productivity
- Cannot properly market to diverse groups of people/customers
- Totally different backgrounds bring different ideas
- More diverse individuals create more self awareness, well rounded thought process
- Disabilities
- Sexual orientation
- Ethnicity
- Ageism
- Re entering workforce
- Incarcerated
- Parenting
Rick’s Nuggets
- Innate Biases
- Overconfidence: Subjective confidence in ideas or decisions
- Illusion of control: overestimate ability to control situation or outcome
- Anchoring/Adjustment: past experience predicts plans for future
- Confirmation: preexisting beliefs- devalue contradictory information
- Cognitive tunnel vision
- Curse of Knowledge : experts assume similar content understanding in others
- Optimism: See the positive outcomes… delusional optimism
How do we solve the bias issue?
Mindset
- Open to People who are different
- Everyone is on equal footing
- Allow people come in as being perceived as qualified
- Vs. unqualified
- Reinforce that they are qualified
- Eliminate your assumptions- college degree
Actions
- Recruit from a diverse pool of job candidates
- Remove all language in job descriptions that may have bias.
- Standardize the interview questions.
- Perform the same due diligence on all candidates whether that candidate is a referral or not
- Give all candidates the same level of respect
- Blind the resume process
- Remove bias from likability
Rick’s Nuggets
- Customer experience mindset - applicants are your customers
- More difficult to say No than yes
- Conduct a qualifying call with most
- Interview questions
- Pre-determined and assigned to the individual interviewer according to the order in which they participate
- Must gather evidence to support the decision either way
- Feedback & closure
Key Takeaways:
- Acknowledge confirmation bias.
- Review the language in your job descriptions
- Standardize your interview questions
Guest Contact:
Friday Jul 31, 2020
Friday Jul 31, 2020
Key Points for Episode:
Timeline for Video Interviews - 72 hours
1- 45 minutes
2- 45 minutes
3- 45 minutes
4- 45 - 60 minutes
Decision - 24 hours from Final Interview
You must have your questions pre-written and assigned to the individual Interviewer
Questions designed to gain evidence of cultural alignment
** DO NOT just pick random behavioral questions!
They must have purpose and be tied to your company values!
Behavioral Questions
Follow up each question with the “How & What”
The purpose of each interview is to get to the “truth” of who this person is and how they align with company core values. Our goal with each question is to find hard evidence one way or the other. Past performance is a key indicator of future performance. We are going granular to understand the core of who this person is to fill your gut with accurate information to make the correct decision.
The Behavioral Interview: The simplest way to learn the behavioral model is to use STAR methodology. Let each interviewee outline the Situation & Task first. This is just the background of the story that you need to know to make the story make sense. Clear context! Look for difficulty, complexity or size of the challenge. What was the person trying to accomplish and why?
Approach: This is where we focus on the actions taken to address the issue, complete a task, solve a problem or improve the situation. We focus on the WHY here!
Focus in on this area the most and poke holes in the answers.
Each answer needs to be tested and must be followed up with why.
Look for Key details and explore them!
Why did you take that approach?
Why was that important?
Why did that work?
Results: What is the positive outcome for the story? What were the issues? Where did they fail? We are looking for tangible, supported evidence.
Video Interviews (Same Day Ideal)
- Ideal to line up back to back
- Schedule back to back or split them up 2/2 or 3/1
- Build a knockout question for each interviewer
Interview 1 - Cultural Value Alignment I
Interview 2 - Skills Screen
- Live working session to evaluate skills/communication
Interview 3 - Cultural Value Alignment II (optional) 24 hours from interview 2
Final Interview - Cultural Confirmation III & Offer preparation (Decision Maker)
Decision / Offer (24 hours max)
- Best to give immediate feedback
- Time kills hires, be decisive
Role Play
Interview Questions
Walk me through the steps you took to prepare for your last project / client presentation (preparation)
- What made those steps the most efficient?
- How did you do it specifically?
- Timeline set?
- Potential Challenges identified and how were they prioritized for consideration?
- What were the things you missed?
- What was the result?
- Why was this important to you?
**Give me an example of something you tried that failed miserably (keep light & fun)
(innovate without fear)
- What were the circumstances that justified the risk
- How was it implemented?
- What was the potential upside if it worked?
- What was missing?
- What would you have done differently?
- Why did it fail?
- What did you learn?
Tell me about a time when it was necessary to admit to others that you had made a mistake. (accountability)
- What was the specific mistake
- How did you identify the mistake?
- How did you handle it?
- Why did you choose that particular approach?
- What was the lesson learned?
- What did you do differently going forward?
Tell me about the last project you worked on where you were major time constraints (own it/quality effort)
- What steps did you take to ensure quality?
- What shortcuts were taken?
- What mistakes were made
- How did the client receive the work?
Thursday Jul 16, 2020
Thursday Jul 16, 2020
High performing individuals come in every flavor. They can not be identified by looking at a resume! They can only be discovered by understanding who the person is, the values they hold dear and the track record of the impact they have made in the past. Every day, your company loses money when you allow personal bias to influence your hiring decisions without proper evidence. Quite often, the strongest hire is not the person you envisioned for the role.
Our guest today: Kelly Robinson, CEO of RedDotMedia.
He founded Broadbean.com Inc 2001, which was acquired by CareerBuilder in 2014. Now he lead RedDot Media, recruitment advertising agency with a particular skill in programmatic advertising campaigns. Kelly has spent the last 25 years in recruitment and recruitment technology, during which time he has grown, integrated, bought, and sold businesses in both the UK and US.
Today we are discussing:
- Why you need to consider hiring people over 45+
- How to value wisdom & hire modern elders
Why don’t employers hire older people?
- The person they are hiring probably has more experience than they do.
- Oh, why would he want to work for me,
- They have done my job for 20 years!
- They don’t have the right degree.
- Younger workers are better because:
- They have more energy.
- They're more tech savvy.
- They're more willing to give discretionary effort.
- They'll work for us for the next 30 years.
- They have less health problems.
The reality is younger workers have just as many problems as older workers.
- Older workers are better because:
- They don't have kids pulling them constantly off their game (Uh oh! Parent bias!)
- While possibly not as tech savvy, they have experience in getting things done in different ways and they won't panic when the internet goes down for 15 minutes.
- They grew up in a time when work life balance meant you worked until the job was done.
- They're willing to by loyal to you for the next 7-10 years, which is more loyalty than you'll get from anyone else you hire.
- Older workers statistically don't miss work more than younger workers.
- In the next few years, 35% of our workforce will be 50 or older.
- And 8% of them—about 13 million workers—will be 65 or older.
- It’s hard to finance a 30-year retirement with a 40-year career - Chip Conley (Airbnb 52)
The average duration of unemployment for older job seekers has dropped sharply since 2012 (though still long); it’s down from roughly 50 weeks to 34 weeks for job hunters age 55 to 64. In other words, it now typically takes about seven to eight months to find a job if you’re over 55.
About 29% of job seekers 55+ are considered long-term unemployed (looking for work for 27 weeks or more); while that’s still high, it’s down dramatically from roughly 45% in 2014
AARP surveyed 3,900 people age 45 and older, 61% said they’ve personally seen or experienced age discrimination. Among those who’ve applied for a job in the past two years, 44% were asked for potentially job-losing age-related information such as birth dates and graduation years It’s almost an acceptable bias.
Why is this important to your company?
- Older workers may be better because:
- They don't have kids pulling them constantly off their game (Uh oh! Parent bias!)
- While possibly not as tech savvy, they have experience in getting things done in different ways and they won't panic when the internet goes down for 15 minutes.
- They grew up in a time when work life balance meant you worked until the job was done.
- They're willing to by loyal to you for the next 7-10 years, which is more loyalty than you'll get from anyone else you hire.
- We all miss work for stuff. Older workers statistically don't miss work more than younger workers.
The fastest-growing age demographic of employees in the workplace is 65 and older, which has experienced a 35% jump in numbers over the past half-decade. In the next few years, 35% of our workforce will be 50 or older. And 8% of them—about 13 million workers—will be 65 or older.
- According the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, 22.2 percent of the workforce is 55 years old and over!
- Research from the National Council on Aging has shown that modern elders have lower absentee and turnover rates than younger workers.
- Ultimately, age will be less of a factor. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that those ages 65 and over will experience the fastest rates of labor force growth by 2024.
- Many people who reach retirement age now are often healthy enough to run marathons, build houses
Rick’s Nuggets
- You can NOT tell if someone is good for your company via a resume! Anyone who says otherwise is delusional
- Recruiters/hiring managers filter people out
- Ageism
- Overqualified
- Too expensive from a benefits perspective
- Not technically aware- can't learn new skills (stereotyping!)
- Not the right educational experience
- Not a cultural fit (fitting in with people in their 20’s)
How do we do it?
- Start valuing wisdom
- Appreciate that you have no choice
- Promote diversity & inclusion… which includes AGE
- D&I increases innovation
- Productivity
- Demand that those responsible for recruiting Talk to people everyone who is reasonably close
- Eliminate educational barriers
- Anyone over 5 years experience, ignore the educational background
- Develop a phone screen process to gather evidence of success
- Judge viability by gathering accurate data
- Take notes
Guest Contact:
Email: kelly@reddotmedia.co
Twitter: @KellyJRobinson
Thursday Jun 25, 2020
Thursday Jun 25, 2020
Ever finished an interview with a great person and just felt unsure or maybe you need more data to make the decision either way?
This all too common scenario is caused by a poorly executed interview process and not asking intentional questions designed to gain the evidence to support a decision either way. Today we will be discussing how to avoid the pitfalls of this conundrum when hiring for your company.
Our guest today: Steve Pfrenzinger CEO & Head Peformance Coach of Pfrenzinger Agency, Inc.
Steve Pfrenzinger is an entrepreneur, a coach to entrepreneurs and a Hall of Fame investor in entrepreneurs. He’s also an author, speaker, and Self-Awareness expert helping entrepreneurs, innovators and change agents solve big problems. Steve is also a Forbes Coaches Council member.
Using his decades of experience building multiple 8-figure businesses, where he hired over 1,000 team members, Steve has helped hundreds of clients make better decisions, plus expose their career and business blind spots that can clear their path to success.
Today we are discussing
- Why gathering evidence is critical to support your decision
- What Steps need to be taken to avoid this conundrum
Why is gathering deep evidence important
- You have found a very good candidate, but you are just a little unsure, you want one more data point
- E.G., 3 said yes and one said no or “not sure”. then what?
- Finding out how people are “wired mentally” in DISC or Myers & Briggs might impact the decision
Why is this important
- Personality type is a predictor of future behavior and key to major hiring decisions
- Knowing one’s “preferences” is key, how they “lean” in certain situations, e.g., Thinker vs Feeler
- Ask Steve to define a “preference”
4 elements to the personality
- Compare DISC styles to Myers & Briggs types. Cheat sheet below. If you know one, you know the other. If you know neither, you need to find out.
- D = ET (Dominance = Extroverted Thinker)
- I = EF (Influence = Extroverted Feeler)
- S = IF (Stability = Introverted Feeler)
- C = IT (Consciousness = Introverted Thinker)
Rick’s Nuggets
- Interview questions need to be intentional
- Digging deeper uncovers the truth…. How & Why?
- Must avoid injecting your own personal bias/agenda
How do we do it?
- Ask them for their DISC style or M&B type
- Have them take a test at www.16personalities.com
- Fast type them with Steve’s 2-page form, uses easy-to-learn computer metaphor
- Fast typing form, Steve has one for all that ask. Contact him at steve@stevepfrenzinger.com
What is Fast Typing?
- PIPO model
- Power
- Imput
- Process
- Output
Rick’s Nuggets
- Proper sequence: Interview => Assessment => Interview close
- Assessments often done too soon
Key Takeaways:
- Personality Type and the behavioral preferences (tendencies) it highlights can further insure the success of key hires.
- You can fast type others without a formal test in minutes, with the PIPO fast typing form
Check steve out at www.coachstevep.com or email him at steve@stevepfrenzinger.com He has many coaching and educational programs for executives and management teams, from entrepreneurial ventures to major corporations.
Thursday Jun 04, 2020
Why do You Need to Hire a Leader? with Ed Tyson of PerSynergy Consulting
Thursday Jun 04, 2020
Thursday Jun 04, 2020
Will a subject matter expert be a better solution to hiring a leader for your company? We can all agree that there are different types of leaders. I am going to contend that the wiring of the leader you are hiring is more important than the pedigree that is brought to the table.
Our guest today: Ed Tyson, CEO of PerSynergy Consulting.
Ed Tyson is the chief executive officer of PerSynergy Consulting, architect of LeadershipSOPs, author of From Expert to Executive: Mastering the ABCs SOPS of Leading, and executive coach and consultant to both small niche brands and Fortune 500 companies. With a mastery of leadership refined throughout his years as a Marine, executive, coach and consultant, Ed guides executives, to key findings he has learned through intimate connections with a diverse array of leaders.
Today we are discussing
- How to identify the right leader for your startup
- What steps you should take to build the right job description to find the best candidate to fill this position
- What questions you should ask to ensure your candidate is the best fit for the job
Why not hire a leader in your startup?
I think we can all agree…
- ...leaders have a tremendous impact on your culture and process. The smaller the team, the larger the impact of each individual but particularly each leader.
- Deciding to add your next leader could either be that decision which propels you forward or sets you back.
- Leaders are more expensive and more capable of damaging your culture than individual contributors - so be certain it’s a leader you need, that you are clear about the challenge you need answered, and you are confident your candidate can indeed answer it.
- For example, there is a start-up client I am working with right now, just north of here in LA county. They are in the biotech space and have hired several key leaders from a much larger, global entity in the broader pharma space.
- The leaders they have brought on were extremely competent and well-positioned to lead the functions which they were hired to run. HOWEVER, they were not prepared to engage in both the breath of strategy and depth of tactics the job requires. Further, they are struggling with the lack of defined processes and support from other functions. Consequently, project timelines are being missed and their time-to-market will be impacted.
- Going the other direction on the 5, I have a client in San Diego county in the manufacturing business who is just reaching beyond the start-up phase. They have a relatively small corporate staff but almost a third of them are leaders with big titles but very small teams (with one or two subordinates a piece). Additionally, almost every leader is an internal promotion with no professional leadership experience – this founder has placed a lot of bets on continuing to cultivate raw talent but does not have the time to do it – which is admirable but making it difficult to grow beyond his current book of business or empower these leaders to really lead.
- At the end of the day, the team is too big and too inexperienced to comprehend and reach decisions without its leader (keeping the CEOs nose in the very parts of the business he has to escape to hit his growth targets).
- Both of these companies made the same mistakes (just differently). They both failed to clarify and challenge what they needed and ensure they got it.
- So again, my first tip is don’t hire a leader in the first place… unless and until you are confident you absolutely need a full-time person whose primary role is to structure, operate and perfect a community of effort.
- If that thought makes you nervous, if you're worried who will do the work, you might need someone to lead the work, not the people. Don’t fall into the trap of mistaking a technical lead, a senior subject-matter expert for a leader.
Rick’s Input
- Focus on correctly positioned talent
- Avoid vanity hires
How do we hire leaders then?
- Purpose of a Leader
- The purpose of adding a leader to your growing team is not to add to your subject-matter expertise, it is to ensure someone other than yourself wakes up every day focused on cultivating a willing, capable and sustainable community of effort. Leaders are no longer obsessed with their craft because every step a leader takes on the career ladder is away from their craft.
- Leaders are not obsessed with technical puzzles. They are obsessed with people puzzles. Their primary work functions are to structure, operate and perfect powerful communities of effort.
- Do they need to understand the work? You bet. But their work is different from the team’s work. And the better you understand that work, the work of a leader, the more likely you are to find the type of leader you need.
- Defining Your SCOPE
- For me, it all starts with understanding the SCOPE of the community of effort you need.
- SCOPE is an acronym which helps leaders remember the five most important architectural components of a community of effort. It stands for Strategy, Culture, Objectives, Purpose and Ecosystem. You can think of it as a replacement for the old mission / vision / values mantra which still permeates business schools today. In fact, Culture, Objectives and Purpose stand for exactly those same three components. The different being, the full SCOPE acronym adds the importance of understanding the players and interactions within your ecosystem and the strategies you craft by considering that ecosystem, how you deliver value to it (i.e. your purpose), the objectives you set (from both a visionary and near-term perspective) as well as the culture you have and the culture you’d like to have.
- Your best shot at getting the leader you need is taking your best shot at defining the company SCOPE and the departmental SCOPE for the team you want this leader to lead (and do it with your existing team if you can).
- Your clarity here will allow you to differential the team’s work from the work the leader must do to be successful. This will result in a rich, leadership-focused job description based on the real work of leading.
- Then you can use the interview to pressure test key concepts in your company and departmental SCOPEs across a broad set of applicants (think of it as free consultation) and dig into the how.
- Process Not Outcomes
- Don’t fall into the trap of listening to canned lists of outcomes your candidates come prepared to throw at you. Ask about the how, the process. How did they refine the SCOPE at their last job? How will they do it here? How will they stay in alignment with the departments to their right and left? How will they stay aligned with you? How will they translate it into clear work methods, roles and responsibilities, how will they structure rewards and recognition; how will they secure the knowledge and capabilities you need to succeed? What repeatable processes do they use to inspire and engage people, drive accountability, evolve the team, etc.?
- I think the most important thing is to gain insight into their own personal LeadershipSOPs – in other words, what are their standard operating procedures for structuring, operating and perfecting communities of effort?
Rick’s Nuggets
- Job descriptions
- Person type (builder, improver, maintainer)
- Performance metrics
- Evidence of past performance
- Performance tied to process
Key Takeaways:
- Don’t Hire a Leader in the First Place!
- Throw Away Your Job Description!
- Ignore Candidate Stories about Outcomes!
Friday May 29, 2020
Friday May 29, 2020
The vast majority of companies still do not have any policy in place to support work from home. As the majority of companies have switched to remote work and plan to implement this new system going forward - companies need to understand how to make an effective switch that will align with their company goals and business development strategy.
Our guest today: David DeFrancis, CEO of IT Proactive
David started his first computer consulting business in 1998 and launched IT Proactive in 2015. He noticed a need for security and process in small to medium sized businesses was completely under-served. IT Proactive is an outsourced IT Support firm that you can trust. We offer fully managed IT solutions that are simple, affordable and all-inclusive.
Today we are going to discuss
- On boarding and Off boarding Employees
- Remote work policies
- BYOD policies
What are today’s challenges when successfully onboarding and offboarding terminations?
- No on boarding or off boarding checklist (Directory Service Accounts, email, application permissions, devices)
- 1 off policies
- Personal devices accessing the corporate network, not having a separate vLAN (Internet Only) for employees (What is acceptable in the organization)
What policies need to be in place
- Acceptable use for company equipment
- BYOD - where most companies fail
- Remote Access Policy- work from home
- Personal Device v. Corporate Device
- Its all about data integrity and security
- Equipment reimbursement
- Internet access/ security (remote location)
- VPN
- Firewall with Security Services
- BYOD- allow employees to access data
- Failure point
- - Written policy on what they can & cannot access
- - MDM- mobile device management software
- Failure point
- When people leave they can put their phone on airplane mode to access shared company files (locally synced data)
Rick’s Input
- On boarding is a continuation of your interview process. This determines your ability to retain your strongest people
How do we create an effective internal policy around remote access?
- Questions need to be asked first
- Can company data be accessed on personal devices?
- Can data be accessed remotely via web browser. (Email, Sharepoint etc)
- Protocol in place for a security breach
- If a breach is detected, who to contact, plan to notify customers / vendors
- Protocol in place for a security breach
- Are remote computers encrypted
- Are computers connected to a directory service?
- Mobile device management policy in place?
- Security protocol in place to wipe data (MDM)
Now Create Acceptable use policy for Company Devices (template)
- Taylor to specific company (Questions to ask)
- Outline what applications are acceptable to use on device
- Can the employee access personal email, social, banking, etc… for company owned device
- Websites that are acceptable to access on a work device (Personal Banking, Social Media etc)
Create a mobile device management policy
- Dependent upon server location
- Dependent upon BYOD or company owned devices
- On prem, cloud, hybrid
What needs to happen when a person starts?
- On boarding process
- Recommend providing company owned devices first!
- On boarding Checklist:
- Typically IT Managed
- Directory Services Account
- Email Account / O365 / Sharepoint
- LOB Applications
- Permissions for LOB and File Share(s) / Sharepoint
- VPN in applicable
- Mobile Device (Email, Sharepoint, Supervised v. Managed Mode MDM)
- Company Policies, delivered and signed by employee
- Off boarding
- 1. Typically IT Managed
- Remove Access to all devices during exit interview
- Force Sign Out of any BYOD devices.
- Directory Services, LOB applications, File Shares etc
- Archive devices
- 2. Do not tamper with user date until its archived
- Point in time archive- home folder, desktop image, email
- Off boarding checklist for HR & IT
- 1. Typically IT Managed
- Signed document that all company owned devices are returned
Key Takeaways:
- Start Policies (even if it has 2-3 items in it)
- Acceptable Use Policy
- Remote Access Policy
- BYOD Policy
- Create and On boarding and Off boarding Checklist
- Be in sync with HR and the members of your team when exiting an employee
Guest Contact: david@itproactive.com
Thursday May 14, 2020
Thursday May 14, 2020
There is a flood of great talent on the market and the competition for those limited positions is heating up. With this rise in the talent pool the ability to properly access applications is a major challenge. The bar has been raised! Are you leaving good people on the table?
Our guest today: Shawn Sheikh, Co-Founder & Managing Partner of Pivot CMO
Shawn is a Silicon Valley & Beach serial entrepreneur and Y Combinator alumni. His specialty is helping companies scale from $0 to multi-millions in revenue, through both conventional paid acquisition and non-conventional growth hacks.
Apart from Pivot CMO, Shawn loves to work with founders to find creative ways to scale their businesses and owns and invests in a portfolio of small to medium sized businesses
Today we are discussing
- The challenges in a heavy applicant reply market
- How to effectively screen applicants to avoid false positives
What are the issues you are finding in screening applicants
- Quality
- Response rate
- Don't want to do the case study
Right Approach?
- Reply with application (google form)
Phone Screening
- Report to person call screen
Rick’s Input
- Job description- performance metrics and call to action
- CTA: 3 questions for submittal - to be completed for all applications
- Timing of the event…. ie: when to do a test
- Phone screen for Purpose
Current process that works
- Application process does work (cuts from 3k to 300)
- 20-30 people are qualified (phone screen)
- 75-80% show up for phone screen
- 6-8 to interview
- 1-2 to offer
Referrals- from employees
- 4 all hires
- One referral from a person they
Process
- Applicant review/application
- Phone screen -50% technical/ 50% fit
- Walk through assignment
- Test
- Interview
- Offer
Rick’s Nuggets
- Interview Structure & process tied to your Company values
- “What are you capable of achieving?”
- Make the call based on the person’s answers rather than the resume
Key Takeaways:
- Better screening questions during the process
- Addressing people’s needs before money
- Owning who you are!
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
Using Assessments to Eliminate the Resume with Josh Millet of Criteria Corp
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
The key to successful hiring is in uncovering evidence in a person's ability to align culturally and professionally with your unique company. … None of this evidence is on a resume! How do we gather evidence? First, not short cutting the interview process. Focusing on deep behavioral questions then confirming your conclusions with data through assessments.
Our guest today: Josh Millet, Founder & CEO of Criteria Corp
Josh started the Criteria Corp in 2006 with a vision to create a SaaS-based pre-employment testing service that would make the highest quality employee assessment tools accessible to companies of all sizes.
Criteria has over 4,000 customers in more than 40 countries across the globe. Their pre-employment tests are an efficient and reliable means of gaining insights into the abilities and tendencies of potential employees.
Today we discuss
- Assessments
- Why and how to use them effectively
- A process to properly assess the person you want to hire
Why are assessments important?
With all the advances in HR tech in the last ten years that have transformed talent acquisition, we aren’t getting better at hiring when you look at results. 46% of all new hires are unsuccessful. The problem is we are relying on 70-year old tools, resumes and unstructured interviews, to gather info on applicants and make hiring decisions. These tools are letting us down. Why is it important? Immense bottom line implications.
Problem with Resumes
- Poor, incomplete, unreliable information that in the end does not predict much
- 85% of resumes contain falsehoods or inaccurate information
- Inject unconscious bias into the hiring process
- Boston & Chicago study
Unstructured interviews don’t work much better. Highly subjective, most interviewees make decision about applicants in first 5 minutes, based on highly subjective Criteria
- Evaluating for good data - using objective data to reinforce your decision
- When you think about how to gather data to make good decisions on candidates you should be focusing on:
- Accurate, reliable info
- Objective data not subjective impressions
- Removing bias from decision-making
- Being forward-looking data: how can this person learn, evolve as job does, rather than just past experience
Why are assessments the answer to resume
- Focus on good reliable data
- Things that are relevant to the job. Data that is not subjective and predicts job performance
- Ie cognitive ability (best predictor or job performance, critical thinking, attention to detail learning ability, problem solving)
- Behavioral or personality assessments - Interaction driven roles
- EQ/EI- overlapping
Rick’s Input
- Confirmation of data gathered minimizes bias
How to do it?
- Moving past the resume
- Use assessments early in the process (high applicant to hire ratio)
- Right after the application
- Resume submittal
- Link to assessment in the job post
- Most common after the application has been accepted
- Passive searches (a bit later in the process)
- Assessment become a resume substitute
Process for Active
- Choose assessments that are job related
- Measuring things important to the role
- 30-40 minutes of assessment
- Tailor the testing for the role
- Run at the Application stage or just after (automated)
- Use results to prioritize the people that are more likely to succeed
- Interview
- Assessment can generate further behavioral interview questions tailored to the individual based off their results
Process for Passive (recruits)
- Smaller number of people
- Lower number of people interviewing
- Use later in the process when the candidate is more engaged
- Assessment after the phone screen
- During the interview or just before
Rick’s Nuggets
- Must gain a personal buy in BEFORE giving tests or assessments
- People perform better when they want something
Key Takeaways:
- Do things in your hiring process to get good data
- Make sure everything you are using has a purpose that measures outcomes related to it
Tuesday Apr 14, 2020
Tuesday Apr 14, 2020
Special Episode!
Video Interviews are the new necessity. But what is the best way to run an effective process? Today we breakdown the framework to run a strong, evidence based video interview. Through partnerships with fully remote based companies, we are sharing what has proven to produce the strongest hires. RIGHT NOW is your opportunity to elevate your companies productivity by hiring stronger talent.
Key Points for Episode:
Timeline for Interview Process
- Startup- 7-10 business days max
- Review - 24 hours from submittal
- Phone Screen - 48 hours (Day 4 max)
- 45-60 minutes
- Video Interviews - 72 hours (Day 8 max)
- 1- 45 minutes
- 2- 45 minutes
- 3- 45 minutes
- 4- 45 - 60 minutes
- Decision - 24 hours from Final Interview (Day 10 max)
Interview steps
- Phone Screen - Phone / Video conversation
- Your Goal
- Learn about the person!
- Understand: Pain, Desire & Impact
- Not to pitch your company, job or yourself
- Video Interviews (Same Day Ideal)
- Ideal to line up back to back
- Schedule back to back or split them up 2/2 or 3/1
- Build a knockout question for each interviewer
- Interview 1 - Cultural Value Alignment I
- Interview 2 - Skills Screen
- Live working session to evaluate skills/communication
- Interview 3 - Cultural Value Alignment II (optional) 24 hours from interview 2
- Final Interview - Cultural Confirmation III & Offer preparation (Decision Maker)
- Decision / Offer (24 hours max)
- Best to give immediate feedback
- Time kills hires, be decisive
Thursday Apr 09, 2020
Thursday Apr 09, 2020
Remember that person who you really wanted to hire but they took a job somewhere else? Now is the time to reconnect. Through no fault of their own, great talent is being displaced due to the pandemic. Now is the time to proactively hire and raise the level of performance through opportunistic hiring! This crisis will pass. And when it does, emerge as a much stronger organization and be positioned to crush your competitors!
Our guest today: Jeff Erle, Former CEO of MobilityWare
Jeff has held numerous C-level positions throughout his career. His experience spans across start-ups, small privately-held and large public enterprises including ADP, Western Digital, MobilityWare and most recently as the COO at Blast.
Jeff focuses on building high-performing teams and evolving award-winning cultures focusing on multi-generational workforces, developing/coaching key executives, and helping companies develop strategies to scale for growth and/or exit.
Today we discuss
- Why it is a great opportunity to hire
- A-players: what are they?
- How to identify and elevate your company performance during this downturn
Why is this important evaluate and proactively hire now?
- Talent is your #1 asset
- You now have the opportunity to upgrade your talent
- Missing an amazing opportunity to settle for the first people to knock on your door
- Now you have the ability to find an abundance of a players
Obviously, the Covid-19 virus has changed the world’s landscape like never before in our lifetimes. In particular, for businesses of all sizes, the nature of the workforce has and will continue to evolve, especially given the looming changes to the large number of workers that will be looking for work. Whether already or soon to be unemployed, or working for a company whose business model has been adversely impacted, millions of people will be applying for open positions later this year unlike anything we have seen in a very long time.
What's an A-player?
- top 10% of experience, capability, for the compensation you are willing to pay for the role.
Given that, for most companies, people are their greatest assets, the challenge will be to retain your A-players. And the opportunity would be to use this historic dynamic to “upgrade” your team and your organization. We’ll focus today on the latter, using the talent either already available or soon to be to assure our businesses come out of this cycle stronger than ever before.
Rick’s Input
- SalesForce, CEO Marc Benioff (tweet- 2200 jobs open…… prioritizing referrals of friends & family who have lost jobs.
- A-player - right profile (builders/startups), cultural alignment
- Desire should be workable
How do we start?
First step is to develop a definition of what an A-player looks like for your organization.
- One who is among the top 10% “available” for the open (or too be upgraded) position
- “Available” means: they are willing to accept an offer given the compensation level offered, in a culture such as yours, in your particular industry and location, with the resources available to them, with specific accountabilities/responsibilities, and reporting to a specific person
- Discuss examples...
Second step is to take an inventory, or a snapshot of your people assets and the level of their quality on an individual basis:
- Identify the “Pioneers” (A-players), “vacationers” (maintainers), and the “prisoners” (those always complaining… but they never leave; they feel handcuffed...)
- Methods to accomplish this include: (1) performance management tools (reviews, feedback, etc.) commonly used at year end for merit increases, and/or (2) “force-ranking” individuals either within departments, or if small enough, across the entire organization. (NB: There are numerous views/debates of the efficacy of force-ranking… but I have used it successfully, especially in circumstances such as this, when economic times demand tough decisions around headcount.)
Last step is to assure your recruiting strategy, methodologies and capabilities can fulfill this goal
Be diligent
- Shift focus to finding the best; this may mean balancing identifying and vetting “passive” candidates with “active” candidates.
- This means you cant be lazy. Its easier/faster to work only with the myriad of resumes and candidates that will be applying to your company this year, but they may not represent the best pool of A-players available to you.
- Ways to assure this include:
- If you have internal recruiting teams, assure they are aligned with your remit of seeking passive candidates as well as active.
- Get a good third-party recruiting partner to find the passive A-players and focus on presenting those people to your hiring manager(s).
Embrace increased volumes and/or new modes of interviewing
- Phone screens
- Video interviews (zoom, skype, etc.)
- Learn best practices on how to do these; many do’s and dont’s lists now available
- Teach managers how to do an appropriate phone screen and video interview
- Pre interview prep and internal alignment amongst interviewing teams
- What are the top key capabilities you all want for the role?
- Who is vetting which ones?
- Who is determining cultural fit?
- Who is making the final decision? Is it unilateral, consultative, or consensus?
- Agree on Who is “buying”, who’s “selling” during the process?
Remember:
- The more time you spend up front the less time you spend in the interviews themselves
- Poor managers don't want to do the work up front to coordinate
- You need to stand out to be the memorable company to attract the A-player.
- People go to work for good leaders/managers (converse of that's what they quit), not just good companies.
Rick’s Nuggets
- Build a list and say Hi
Key Takeaways:
- Now is a great time to re-evaluate your talent, your greatest asset, and upgrade as necessary
- To do so, you will need to embrace new internal areas of focus and philosophies, and your org will need to embrace and/or learn new ways of defining, finding, vetting and attracting A-player candidates
Thursday Mar 26, 2020
Conducting A Powerful Phone Interview with Christopher Wood of Rise Recruitment USA
Thursday Mar 26, 2020
Thursday Mar 26, 2020
One of the most powerful tools in your hiring process in the phone interview. The challenge that we have is that it is treated as a screen just to find out if someone has the skills needed. And this process takes on average 5-10 minutes.
It is such an opportunity loss because your first point of contact should be about establishing the connection with the person regardless of the outcome. Your phone interview sets the stage for how you are perceived and severely affects your ability to hire.
Today’s Quote:
"When it comes to success, there are no shortcuts." - Bo Bennett
Our guest today: Chris Wood, Director of Recruiting for RISE Recruitment USA & Managing Director of theRecruitmentCollective
Chris has spent the past 15 years in the Staffing industry utilizing his background in Recruitment and Account Management to help Fortune 500 companies solve their hiring problems by recruiting top talent within the Aerospace, Automotive, Medical Device, Healthcare, Finance & Consumer Goods industries.
In 2017, he took on the role of Managing Director at theRecruitingCollective, an organization of independent, specialized recruiters and boutique firms centered around providing new, custom talent programs. His primary focus today is attracting over and retaining top talent to the Cannabis, CBD & Natural Products industries.
He previously sat on the board for National Human Resources Association – Los Angeles and is currently on the program committees for DisruptHR Orange County and San Diego. In addition, he is an advisor to numerous Recruiting Technology platforms and emerging Cannabis and CBD companies and a member of the National Association of Cannabis Businesses.
Today we are going to discuss
- Why phone interviews are a critical part of the hiring process
- How to conduct an effective phone interview
Why are Phone interviews more important now than ever?
- Understand the person
- Goals, skills & interests - Career path/motivations
- Passive recruiting - building a constant stream of qualified candidates
- Due to the lack of face to face; with Covid-19 restrictions on in person meetings, this is the only way to hire talent during these times
- Sets the tone for process
Positioning of your phone interview
- Setting a clear objective of what you want to get from the call; feel for personality fit with team, explanation/knowledge of necessary experience, understanding of career path and long term intentions
- Asking specific questions that address strengths of candidate that fills a need with your team
- Identifying interest of candidate in role & joining your team
How to conduct a phone interview
- Self reflection- identifying the hole on the team
- Understand what is really needed
- Identify characteristics of the person so you can create questioning to reveal if candidates fulfills your teams need
- How are you going to find what you need
- Creating the profile of the ideal hire
- Establishing must haves vs nice to haves
- Contact
- Asking the questions that are centered around the key things you need to know
- Strategic questioning
Rick’s Nuggets
- Purpose of the phone interview is to understand the person first
- Identify their reason for hearing (pain), what they want to be doing (desire) and what they have accomplished
Key Takeaways:
- Don't just look at the resume, definitely talk to someone. Take the phone screen very seriously
- Really get to know what the person wants. Get to know them!
Wednesday Mar 18, 2020
Wednesday Mar 18, 2020
How to evaluate for good discretion in the hiring process. Discretion is defined by Merriam Webster as an “Ability to make responsible decisions”. This is a quality that all leaders expect from their people but as we know, this is not always the case. How do you interview to uncover good discretionary habits?
Today’s Quote:
"A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake as by never repeating it." - Christian Nestell Bovee
I’m Rick Girard and welcome to the Hire Power Radio Show. We help Entrepreneurs and hiring managers to avoid costly hiring mistakes by identifying a specific problem and providing proven solutions to enable you to WIN the right hire. We share insights from top-performing rebel entrepreneurs, disruptors & industry experts.
Like our guest today: Joseph Hopkins, Founder & Senior Managing Partner of The IPRESTIGE Emerge Fund, LLC
Joseph is a thought leader in AI, authentication and security technologies, He leads an innovative emerging technologies firm that serves as a proprietary first-mover advantage IP incubation model that concentrates on growth opportunities in digital identity protection, security and advance encryption technologies.
Prior to Joseph’s AI and digital identity security work, he served in key executive management roles for Fortune 500 companies, including Kaiser Permanente, 3M, GSK, Allergan, and KPMG. He has hired Hundreds of people throughout his career.
Which makes Joseph a perfect expert for today’s topic. Joseph, Welcome to the Hire Power Radio Show today!
Today we are going to discuss
- Why it is important to Connect with people while adding value
- How to evaluate for good discretion in the hiring process
Connecting with people to add value
- Listening skills
- No one wants to hear about your problems
- Pick up on a person’s cadence
- What makes the person tick as a person
- Navigate how you engage as to their preference
- If you miss the connection, you’ll never get it back
- Pick up folks who miss the 9-5 mentality
Rick’s Input
- No one cares about the words coming out of your mouth
- While hiring it is critical to be more concerned about the other person than filling your role.
How to evaluate “good discretion”
- Trusting the gut, instincts
- Less tricky the older the person is
- More experience, the less risk
- Interest or passion in the work
- Experience
- Clear signs around eye contact, body language, smile while talking, taking themselves too seriously, jovial.
- Education - important to him.
- Live your life based on what you have learned rather than the exceptions
The ingredients that keep people engaged in an
- Balance of coolness and professionalism
- *Discretion - overly doing something can affect the relationship with the client
- The more the client is comfortable the successful the interaction will be.
Rick’s Nuggets
- Opener “open to hearing about something career advancing”
- Don’t pitch your job, company or yourself
- Find out what’s happening with you?
Key Takeaways:
- Empirical stuff- education, background & skills
- Interpretative- talk to people that have worked with you. Subjective perspective
- His Gut instinct- in conjunction with the other two
Thursday Mar 05, 2020
Building A Company On The Back Of The Gig Economy with Keith Ryu of Fountain
Thursday Mar 05, 2020
Thursday Mar 05, 2020
The grind of being a startup entrepreneur is riddled with rejection and heartache. It is often thought that you need the money before you can build your company… And that’s just not true!
The truth is there are so many ways to self fund when getting started and today we are dissecting a case study of how one company utilized the gig economy to fuel their company growth.
Today’s Quote:
"It's not the lack of resources that cause failure, it's the lack of resourcefulness that causes failure." - Tony Robbins
I’m Rick Girard and welcome to the Hire Power Radio Show. We help Entrepreneurs and hiring managers to avoid costly hiring mistakes by identifying a specific problem and providing proven solutions to enable you to WIN the right hire.
We share insights from top-performing rebel entrepreneurs, disruptors & industry experts.
Like our guest today: Keith Ryu, Founder & CEO of Fountain
Keith is quietly fueling the future of work. As CEO of Fountain, the Series A-backed hiring platform for hourly workers, the Forbes’ 30 under 30 member holds the keys to the secret engine powering the gig economy. Each month, Fountain processes nearly one million applicants and enables companies like Airbnb, Chick-fil-A, Uber, and Safeway to make over 130,000 hires. Keith initially funded fountain by capitalizing on the gig economy.
Today we are going to discuss
- Why utilizing the gig economy is a great option to get your company started
- How to fund your company through problem solving.
- Story of Fountain
How do you hire when you have no funding?
- Found a problem that customers had and started building solutions while funding the work
- Challenges with creative financing
- Creative hiring through upwork
Rick’s Input
- Project based bootstrapping solution
- Take on consulting projects
How were you able to build your company?
- Capitalized in 2 ways
- financed the company initially by selling services
- found backup engineers on upwork
- Found someone to hire. Brought in work through upwork and gave the work to their engineer to pay her
- Emailed people who raised money on techcrunch. Offering to provide solutions for their business.
Key Takeways
- Be resourceful - upwork, email lists, etc.
- Do the hardwork - be relentless
Thursday Feb 27, 2020
Thursday Feb 27, 2020
The value of being able to directly text or call a person you are needing to recruit for your company is staggering. Want people to give you the opportunity to recruit them? Then you need to contact them where they will respond. Hint: It is not through email or LinkedIn.
Today’s Quote:
"Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time." - Thomas Edison
I’m Rick Girard and welcome to the Hire Power Radio Show. Our mission is to help Entrepreneurs and hiring managers to avoid costly hiring mistakes by identifying a specific problem and provide proven solutions to enable you to WIN the right hire. We share insights from top-performing rebel entrepreneurs, disruptors & industry experts.
Like our guest today: Shafiur Rahman, Founder & CEO of Chatterworks
Shafiur has been the right-hand to founders and has built out the operational infrastructure for several companies, including Airbus Aerial, Specright and Connectifier ( acquired by LinkedIn February 2016) . He has extensive experience driving the day-to-day and long term requirements to ramp up a successful, high-growth startup.
Shafiur’s new startup helps you reach potential hires with their personal contact information!
Today we are going to discuss
- Why direct contact is critical to your recruiting efforts
- What contact information is most important
- How to find the contact information of the people you need to hire
- Typical scenario - What most do… industry best practices
Why do we need to find people's contact information when hiring?
- Low likelihood of response rate through the LinkedIn platform.
- Most people are not daily or even weekly on LinkedIn
- Passive people are not logging on at all
- People respond to Text directly. Much more than email.
- Limited to what LinkedIn offers/shows
- Have to work under their platform
What data is most useful
- Social intelligence
- Personal phone, email
Rick’s Input
- Text messaging has the highest response rate
- Open & Response rates
- 45% SMS, 8% email response rates
- 98% of texts are read, compared to 20% email
- Text messages has a 750% response rate over email
How do we find contact information?
- Hire a PI
- Background Check companies
- Build your own tech stack
- Piece together the various social platforms and cross reference data
- Your own personal aggregation
- Super labor intensive
- Can waste 30-45 minutes on just one person.
- Can still not get their direct contact information
Aggregate contact information?
- Build crawlers
- Buy public data
- Find tools
- Only gives you listed information, like home phone, no email
- If you want cell phone info, you have to pay for it
- Whitepages.com
- ZoomInfo - just business data
- spokeo
- ChatterWorks
- Swordfish
Key Takeaways:
- First identify who it is you want to hire
- Then get there personal contact information
- Where people respond the most, like start with text messaging
- 3rd- have my messaging down to ensure I’m touching people the right way. Not selling them, how can you help them in a career, how your job solves there problems.
Thursday Feb 20, 2020
Interviewing for Skills is Today’s Coronavirus! with David Kinnear of Vistage
Thursday Feb 20, 2020
Thursday Feb 20, 2020
Everyone in a hiring capacity has made a wrong hire in their career. I believe that this is a direct result of hiring for skills first. Here’s the scoop, a person’s skills can change, but you can't change who they are. And technical abilities are not a clear indicator of passion in the work.
Today’s Quote:
“Values should underpin Vision, which dictates Mission, which determines Strategy, which surfaces Goals that frame Objectives, which in turn drives the Tactics that tell an organization what Resources, Infrastructure, and Processes are needed to support a certainty of Execution.” — Mike Myatt
Our guest today: David Kinnear, Executive Mentor & Group Chair of Vistage International.
Dave Kinnear is a Business Advisor, Mentor and Executive Leader Coach. Through his affiliation with Vistage Worldwide, Dave convenes and facilitates peer advisory boards of Business Owners, Company Presidents, General Managers and Chief Executives dedicated to becoming better leaders who make better decisions and achieve better results.
Dave is also an executive-to-executive mentor to Executive MBA students at the UCI Paul Merage School of Business and a coach for the Center for Entrepreneurship at CalState University, Fullerton.
Today we are going to discuss
- Why a skills-based interview is dangerous
- values alignment is critical
- The framework for a successful interview
Why do people interview for competency/skills?
- Competency is easy
- This is what people focus on
- Today's workers need mastery, purpose and autonomy
- Shared values aligns well with the way decisions are made within the company
- We all want to do what's right for the tribe
- The soft stuff is not easy.
- Most CEO’s don't know what the real values are
- Profitability is what is really valued
- Transparency on the financials are missing
- Management decisions are the values
- Culture is the way things get done around here
- The way things get done is by making decisions
- Decisions are made reflective of the values
How do we Hire for Values?
- Running, Knees, shoes analog
- Know what the real values
- Ask questions to determine the person’s values
- Uncover the person’s values
- How someone works with others and makes decisions
- Ask questions that validate the core values
- Let the silence do the heavy lifting!
- When they have the values
- Reveal the mismatch in what they have now and where you align
- Skills can be learned
- The person you want is not on the street
- Hire them
Rick’s Nuggets
- Design questions around the corporate values (Amazon's leadership principals)
- Ask behavioral questions and dig deep. This uncovers the truth about who the person is
- "Walk me through a time"... Then ask why, why, why?
- Do not ask leading questions
- Ask the question and shut up!
Key Takeaways
- · Values are the foundation of an organization's culture.
- · An organization’s leader has only one critical job, and that’s to actively manage the culture
- · The leadership team must believe in and live the values every day
Thursday Feb 13, 2020
Thursday Feb 13, 2020
The truth is most of the good players are on the sidelines. Great people are inundated with mindless spam therefore most messaging is getting ignored. Here is the good news, Gallup reports that 7 of 10 people are open to something stronger.
Today’s Quote:
“Great people want to work on things that matter. Inevitably, a great person working on imaginary work will turn into an unsatisfied person.” - Jason Fried
Our guest today: Marc Hutto, Founder & CEO of Reveal Global Intelligence
Marc is the chief architect of Purpose-Driven Recruitment . This methodology focuses the talent acquisition process on the people who are hiring and being hired - as it should be. Revealing hidden and highly-valued talent in this way also aligns to Marc's stated vision for the company of delivering evidential value to every life we touch.
Today we are going to discuss
- Why you believe you can't find people
- The truth behind the myth (79 % of people on LinkedIn, polled, will not see a posting)
- A script to successfully find the people you need - A “pattern interrupt”
Why is the view that company’s can’t find people wrong?
- You can easily believe this because most people are not responding to job postings.
- Mindset - most people need to be approached.
- A lot of people approaching them
- A lot of noise, people not responding
- Only 21% of people are looking at a job posting
Reach out
- Outreach and response is the main challenge
- A lot of the same messages
- Get rid of the hooks and talk to the person
- Pitching the job is the wrong mentality
- Get into career coaching mode as quickly as possible
Rick’s Input
- Treat people all the same, regardless of where they came
- Hit people at their pain point first.
- What could be better?
How to recruit passive talent?
Mindset
- Approach people who did not come to you
- You have to be proactive
- Business owners and leaders take great care when investing in hard assets (equipment, supplies, inventory, etc.) - should we not have the same mindset when investing in a new colleague?
Reach out
- Don't pitch the job (it’s presumptuous)
- Digital video job description (digi-me.com) 1 minute
- Polite, professional, persistent - it differentiates
Coaching call
- Talk to people about them- their career/career drivers
- Look for the opportunity to provide career coaching
- Start a conversation around career drivers
Incumbent interview - document
- Why did you come here?
- Why do you stay?
- Challenges you encounter?
- Want someone to understand what it is like to work for your company?
Reasons why people stay (career drivers)
- Compensation & benefits
- Impact of the work
- Environment - culture, people, space,
- Personal & professional growth
- Leadership or management
Rick’s Nuggets
- On average 7-10 calls to get in touch a person today
- Write 5 email sequences
- Top Desires: Growth, Content of Work, Leadership
Key Takeaways:
- Hiring and being hired are big deals. Keep them humanized. Focus on Career Drivers.
- If you are an employer, you are in sales mode for top talent.
- Post and Pray has to give way to Polite, Professional Persistence.
- Purpose Driven Recruitment Toolkit: revealglobal.com/hirepower
Thursday Feb 06, 2020
Thursday Feb 06, 2020
Reference checking is so important... yet so underutilized. Why? Because it is too time-consuming! But when you fail to reference check you are dramatically increasing the likelihood of making the wrong hire. On top of that, you are missing out on a potential recruiting opportunity
Today’s Quote:
"References drive the industry." - Mark V. Hurd
Our guest today: Yves Lermusi, Co-Founder & CEO of Checkster
Checkster is powering talent decisions of organizations and providers of staffing and HR services. The company aims to improve the world's productivity and harmony by increasing job fit and work achievement, as well as personal career satisfaction and fulfillment.
Yves is a well-known public speaker and a Career and Talent industry commentator. He is often quoted in the leading business media worldwide, and has been named as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the Recruiting Industry”.
Today we are going to discuss
- Why checking references is important
- Voice reference checks vs digital reference checks
- The framework for a successful reference check
Reference checking, what’s the issue?
- People don't do
- Or they do totally wrong
Why are they doing references wrong?
- Only speaking to people that are given
- Talking to 2-3
- Talking to over the phone (filtered feedback)
Digital advantages
- Digitally people are more honest
- People pretend to be their own reference
- Consistency in the questions
Rick’s input
- Design references to evaluate against company culture
- Ability to dig deep on the answers
How to do references right
- Peers or managers recently. In direct contact
- Speak to at least 4 references - the measurement of success 80% in making a good hire vs. just 2 references
- Ask the right questions
- Relevant to the job and non-leading, (leading the witness)
- “Would you rehire?”
- Starting broad and going specific
- Do it digitally
- Saves time
Rick’s Nuggets
- How are you able to question deeper to understand the motivation of the answer?
- Written referrals don't give you the ability to recruit the person
Key Takeaways:
- Get at least feedback from 4 relevant colleagues (relevant:recent profesional close experience)
- Ask predictive questions
- Do it digitally
Thursday Jan 30, 2020
The Right Way to Advertise Your Jobs with Kelly Robinson of RedDot Media
Thursday Jan 30, 2020
Thursday Jan 30, 2020
Posting your jobs can be a very frustrating exercise. Especially when you receive little to no response. Or worse yet, you receive an onslaught of unqualified responses.
Today is all about how and where to post your jobs to attract the right people! So we are going to geek out on advertising and teach the right way to utilize postings in your recruitment strategy.
Today’s Quote:
“Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.” - Marshall McLuhan
Our guest today: Kelly Robinson, CEO of RedDot Media
20 years on the staffing recruitment and recruiting technology.
RedDot media is a recruitment ad agency with a particular skill in programmatic advertising and helping companies socialize their jobs with our Paiger platform. Prioir to RedDot Media, Kelly founded Broadbean.com Inc 2001, which he sold to DMGT in 2008, launched in the US 2009, and lead the strategic acquisition by CareerBuilder in 2014.
Today we are going to discuss
- Why Job postings fail
- Different ways to advertise
- Steps to take to implement programmatic job advertising
Where do people fail while posting jobs?
- Spray & Pray
- Pay no attention to the content
- Not thinking about what the person really looks like
- What is an important Mindset?
- Treating people who apply the same as a direct recruit.
- People who apply are just open, not sold on your company
What are the different ways to advertise?
Post & Pray - what most do now!
- Programmatic advertising
- Rule based job posting
- Only paying for results
- Click bidding to get your jobs on the top of the listOnly paying for results
Rick’s input
-
- Need understanding of what needs to be accomplished
- Performance metrics
- Content rarely touches the individual (never answers “what’s in it for me”)
How to implement programmatic job advertising
- 3 ways to do
- Use an agency to do it
- Buy a system and DYI & hire someone who is dedicated to doing it.
- Effective in duration based advertising.
- Cost per view or cost per applicant
- Best for 20+ jobs per month
Steps to maximize your job posting
- 20 or less
- Java engineer
- One-offs- start with Indeed
- Zip recruiter is good because of their advertising
- 65 mil lookers a month
- Identify 2 of 5 skills and talk to them.
- Write a good job description
- Have a lot of conversations
How to maximize relevancy
- Job descriptions: Talking to about emotional factors
- Dependent on what and where you are looking for it
- Forget the application process.
- *treat people not like an application but like they are part of the conversation
Key Takeaways:
- And as Jim Collins said it’s the Genius of the AND versus the Tyranny of the OR. and embrace the "Genius of the AND.
- Writing job ads is a skill - get better at it, AND have fun with it.
- Understand and qualify your job description ****A good question is what is NOT getting done while you don’t have this person.
- Job Applications are people who have given you permission to have a conversation with them. Your job is to figure out together if they should quit their job and come work from you.
- It’s not all about saving money a 3,6% unemployment rate!
Thursday Jan 23, 2020
Interview Qualification is a Two-Way Street with Greg Toroosian of Elevate Hire
Thursday Jan 23, 2020
Thursday Jan 23, 2020
Each individual brings a unique perspective to every interview conversation. Yet most interviews focus on “what you can do for me” almost entirely from a skills perspective. People want to know what’s in it for them before they choose to engage with you.
Today’s Quote:
"Though we may have desires or bold goals, for whatever reason, most of us don't think we can achieve something beyond what we're qualified to achieve." - Simon Sinek
Our guest today: Greg Toroosian, Founder & Managing Director of Elevate Hire
Greg Toroosian founded Elevate Hire after more than a decade in the Talent Acquisition space. Having previously worked for startups, globally recognized brands, and recruiting agencies, He believes that recruiting and retaining talent is key to having a successful company.
Greg is an expert at qualifying talent for organizations which has led to successful hires for many clients in a variety of industries.
Today we are going to discuss:
- Types of qualification
- Plan of attack on how to effectively qualify people
What is candidate qualification?
- Definition: A quality or accomplishment that makes someone suitable for a particular job or activity
- Two types of qualification
Checkbox
- Asking yes/no questions
- Requirements focused
- Doing the bare minimum
- Ineffective because you are lying to yourself
Thorough
- Have a clear understanding about what the person is actually looking for
- Clarify the likelihood of acceptance of the job
- Fit for the company
- Answer the question (Is this a good candidate)
What's important for qualification?
- Look at profile (linkedin, resume)
- Longevity, career trajectory, companies/industries, titles
- Recommendations (linkedin)
How do we avoid having a checkbox process
- Mindset of the call: don’t go into every call wanting or being hopeful that this person will work out. Ask the questions that unearth what you really need to know.
- Conversational qualification calls.
- Ask open questions, ask scenario-based questions, and ask questions that will determine if this person is a non-starter.
- Listen carefully. Be strict and be honest.
Framework for Effective Qualification
- Firstly, you need a clear understanding of the role you’re interviewing for, its scope, the immediate need, and the future possibilities.
- Be comfortable in leading the conversation so you can get the questions answered that you need.
- Conversational and open questions with enough space for the person to really say what you need to hear.
- Have a form of the questions to be asked, know what you need the answers to be, but don’t read a script.
Key Takeaways:
- Build your own qualification form to use as the foundation for every call.
- Questions that unearth a lot:
- Why are you open to a new role?
- What are you looking for from your next role?
- Talk me through your current role and responsibilities. You can tell a lot about someone's role, their involvement, and their overall understanding of their craft by hearing them speak freely about it. Take notes and then clarify any points you need to.
- After telling them about your open position, ask them how it sounds to them as a next step? What specifically appeals to them from what you shared? Get them to sell the role back to you and to sell themselves as a candidate.
Thursday Jan 16, 2020
Thursday Jan 16, 2020
Making a strong hire starts with attracting the right people. Knowing who the right hire is the first step. But in order to attract the right people there needs to be a message that resonates with the individual and motivates them to respond.
Today we are talking about hacking your hiring through the use of communication profiles.
Today’s Quote:
"Hacking involves a different way of looking at problems that no one's thought of." - Walter O'Brien
CEO of Scorpion Computer Services and executive producer of the TV series Scorpion
I’m Rick Girard and welcome to the Hire Power Radio Show. Our mission is to help Entrepreneurs and hiring managers to avoid costly hiring mistakes by identifying a specific problem and provide proven solutions to enable you to WIN the right hire. We share insights from top-performing rebel entrepreneurs, disruptors & industry experts.
Like our guest today: Christopher Hadnagy, CEO of Social-Engineer, Inc.
Chris Hadnagy is a professional social engineer, author of 4 books, and keynote speaker. He’s the CEO of Social‐Engineer, LLC, a company who serves some of the globe’s largest organizations. Additionally, Chris provides free resources, including the world’s first Social Engineering Framework, via Social-Engineer.Org, and heads the Innocent Lives Foundation, a non-profit that unmasks anonymous child predators.
So Christopher knows hacking! Which makes Christopher a perfect expert for today’s topic.
Christopher, Welcome to the Hire Power Radio Show today!
Today we are going to discuss:
- Identifying the right person
- Crafting the right messaging to attract
- Logical steps to weed out the obvious
Problem
- Really bad hires!
- People look great on the surface
- Not showing up for work
- Quitting fast
Why am I having an issue getting good employees?
- *** realize how much time you spend on the back end when you hire with the wrong people
- Aftermath
- Lost over 100 hours and thousands of dollars
- Killed company morale
- Outline the type of person you want before you start interviewing
- Thinking about the work that needs to be accomplished
- Defining expectations up front
- Managing your own expectations- avoid unreasonable tasks
- Experience expected to have
Rick’s input
-
- Create messaging around the personality profile of a successful hire
- Pain, Desire & Impact
How do we fix it?
- Determine the best communications profile first
- Write the job description with keywords that attract the right people
- Describe the words and language to attract the right person.
- Detract the wrong people.
- Logic steps to weed out the obvious
- A list of questions to determine the right fit, video interview to whittle down to 3
- Give the disc test - confirm communication style
- Weed out the wrong cultural fit
- Confirm what is really needed with who the person is
How does one determine the right messaging?
- Disc profiling roles (general)
- D- management, leadership, - Aware D - understands how they communicate
- I- Sales, public speaking, Training
- S- HR, support role,
- C- Accounting, office management - detail & organization
Rick’s Nuggets:
- One size fits all messaging does not work
- Create messaging with a call to action to minimize
- Performance metrics attract the right people
- Plan and put process in place
Key Takeaways:
- Time invested in the prework saves thousands of dollars for the company
- Define what it is that a person must have
Friday Jan 03, 2020
Hiring People Who Are Outside Your Comfort Zone! with Aaron Elder of Crelate
Friday Jan 03, 2020
Friday Jan 03, 2020
It is all too common to look for the person who brings the skills you deem necessary for your role. But the person who brings all the skills may not be the best person in the role. There are a lot of people who are in adjacent industries or sitting on the sidelines who are open to an opportunity like yours.
What does it take to find great people? Looking past the skills for evidence of success that will be transferable to your company. As we all know, past performance is a key indicator of future performance.
Today’s Quote:
“Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare.”
- Dale Carnegie
Our guest today: Aaron Elder, Co-Founder & CEO of Crelate
Aaron is a serial entrepreneur with 4 successful products, 3 companies and 2 exits under his belt. He is a designer, turned coder, turned CTO, turned CEO who is passionate about creating products people love and make the world better.
Crelate exists to help businesses continuously align people with opportunities. Aaron has a passion for taking a chance on people who are changing careers - giving people a shot
Today we discuss:
- Hiring outside the norm to combat the talent shortage
- a recipe to successfully hire
Solution to the talent shortage
- Taking an age blind approach
- Considering the skills level
- Not just a blind hire
Challenges?
- Casting a wider net- seeing through things
- Opening the holes in the net
- Look past skills to the ancillary skills
- Career shows you as a non-fact (switching careers-coming in as a jr person). Measure people based on risk rather than
- A propensity for learning new things, being innovative and growing, you will probably be able to bring that to the table
Issue of Compensation
- Is a pay cut really realistic? Taking a shot
- Until you talk to them, you don’t really know.
- *** Training and investment need to be real. The organization needs to be all in on people development
Rick’s input
- Look for transferable skills
- Adjacent industries
- Evidence of success
How do we fix it?
- Finding the people who are performers and not just seat fillers
- indicator of career changes,
- Tenacity & grit, raw materials
- Look for evidence of past success
- Hide Easter egg’s in the job post.
- Questionnaires
- Invest in Recruiters- matchmakers
- Have more conversations with people and look past the resume
- Internal training programs
- The long game is the only solution he knows.
- Short term road bumps but long term it is an investment in an approach.
- Be self-aware of the game
- optimize for the long game (bring investors on board)
- Looking to solve a long term problem - at least a 2-year problem
- Education & training which require intense focus and investment upfront.
- Benefit? -the path for retention, earned loyalty, path for mutual benefit
- If you are not growing, you will have a hard time keeping people who want to be growing
- Take more chances on people who do not have ALL the skills
- Creating training, review process that career ladder, reviews, culture for people to enjoy
- Invest in systems to automate points 1 & 2 more possible
Key Takeaways:
- Solve the talent gap/shortage by being able to take chances on people, give them a chance to tell their story and see if it fits. Look past skills to underlying achievements, velocity, grit, etc.
- Invest in the long haul - internal learning, time, training, the culture of personal growth and achievement.
- Do what you can to make #1 and #2 more efficient. That means the right tools and processes that fit those goals. Not work against them.
Thursday Dec 12, 2019
Is Fractional Leadership The Key to Startup Growth? with Matt Spooner of GigX
Thursday Dec 12, 2019
Thursday Dec 12, 2019
Seasoned leaders are out there and they are willing to work with your startup at more than just an advisory level. They are called fractional leaders and they are easier to find than you might think.
Consider the possibility that in this hiring market, seasoned veterans maybe your best hiring option for building your company!
Today’s Quote:
"We came into a broken world. And we're the cleanup crew." - Kanye West
Our guest today: Matt Spooner, Fractional Chief Business Development Officer for GigX
Matt has nearly two decades of experience within the arenas of Marketing, Sales, Business Development, and Account Management. He has built and led high-performing teams within both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. His cross-industry, cross-function experience allows him to approach opportunities and issues from a unique and valuable standpoint.
Fun fact, Matt is an avid endurance athlete who has completed 3 ultra-marathons!
Prior to joining GigX, Matt worked in the world of retained executive search. His role as a Vice President at McDermott & Bull has kept him close to hundreds of C-Suite leaders and hiring managers. Matt is plugged into the senior-level executive community - he understands what they bring to the table...and how organizations can best attract and leverage them.
Today we are going to cover
- The benefits and drawbacks to fractional leadership
- where to find fractional leadership
- How to evaluate and Hire them
Problem
What is Fractional Leadership?
Why is this important?
- Budgetary issues and/or concerns frequently limit companies from hiring senior-level leadership; This is an acute pain point for SMBs and early-stage organizations
- Frequently, these companies don’t consider and/or realize that their issues re: talent can be solved by exploring “independent” options such as fractional talent
- Even when these companies have a desire to explore fractional leaders, it’s challenging for them to find this type of talent
- There are a lot of misconceptions re: senior-level talent. Here are a few:
- SMBs and early-stage companies can’t afford them
- They only want full-time roles
- They’re too set in their ways
- They’re not as nimble
- They’re not current
How do we fix it?
- Fractional talent is the answer
- Why it is beneficial?
- Most fractional leaders are senior-level executives who’ve pivoted in their careers and are now serving multiple organizations simultaneously
- Fractional leaders bring their numerous business connections/relationships with them; In many ways, they serve as de facto Business Development professionals for the organizations they work for
- They show-up on Day 1 with an immense amount of acumen and skill
- They’re less of a “flight risk,” as their desire is to serve on a long-term basis
- Their experience, talent, and connections allow them to do the work of multiple team members
- Companies can get the acceleration and acumen that they need, and only pay a fraction of the price for it
- Steps to hire someone
- The first (and most important) step: Pursue the in-transition population! Why? Because this population represents a talent market that’s highly-skilled and readily-accessible, yet largely underutilized.
- The second step: Know the time commitment that you’re asking for. Why? This will show the fractional executives you speak with that you understand one of their top criteria for engaging with a prospective client: How much of their “bandwidth” are you asking for.
- The third step: Collaborate on expectations. Why? Because you’ll only be engaging with your fractional executive during a portion of any given week/month/year, you’ll want to have clear KPIs that you’re moving toward and monitoring. Similarly, you’ll want to set expectations around how often you’ll be “seeing” each other - whether it’s in-person and/or via a platform like Zoom, Skype, or FaceTime
Key Takeaways:
- Fractional leadership is an affordable and powerful way to bring C-Level execs into your organization
- There are thousands of overlooked, undervalued senior-level leaders that can be leveraged immediately for fractional roles
- The key to success with fractional leaders: Create clarity early-on re: time commitment, KPIs, and when/how to connect
Thursday Dec 05, 2019
How to Pipeline Talent Without a Talent Brand with Jack Copeland of Staffing Future
Thursday Dec 05, 2019
Thursday Dec 05, 2019
How are you going to attract the strongest talent for your company when people have no idea who you are? The truth is, you are not! Passive talent and those who are not on the open job market will just ignore you because you are just another me-too company.
This is why you will rely on the “I know someone” method to hire Your best source for talent is referrals. What if you can gain awareness before you reach out to someone
Today we are talking about How to pipeline talent when you don’t have a talent brand
Today’s Quote:
“Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.” - Elon Musk
Our guest today: Jack Copeland, Founder & CEO of Staffing Future
Staffing Future, a website development, and technology stack consultancy, with expertise in building, developing and managing technology solutions. The team has built over 600 staffing Agency websites and deployed innovative technology solutions with a multitude of third-party apps to create a holistic sum of their parts.
Jack has worked and consulted with dozens of recruiting software providers who are inclined to augment and develop the industry, they include top tier originations like CareerBuilder, and Tracker RMS.
Today we are going to cover
- What is a talent brand & why it is important
- Framework to build your talent brand
What is a talent Brand:
The message you want to provide to potential talent about who you are, what it’s like to work for you and why they should work for your company.
What’s the difference between a proactive and reactive Talent Brand?
Most small and medium companies don’t even think about what their Talent Brand is but a proactive Talent Brand is taking the time to understand your message, providing a platform for potential hires to engage before speaking to you and pipe lining potential hires.
Problem
- What is a reactive talent brand:
- Persuade people why you are the right company to join
- You are selling to them
- Happens late in the game
- Spend money to get people through the door
- Eliminated access to Heavily sought after talent
- Not responding, applying or know you
- No idea who you are or your value
- You have no perceived value
Rick’s input
- Talent brand is not as important as answering “what’s in it for me”
- About solving an individual problem
How do we fix it?
- Optimizing the website to maximize attraction offering a place to engage for potential candidates
- Solidify your message around who you are, what it's like to work for you and the ethics and values of your business, make sure your management team and business goals align with these internally
- Identify your target ‘finite’ talent and implement strategies to engage and nurture proactively
What are three practical things I can do:
- Understand who you are? Take the time to evaluate your business. Why would I want to work here? Why would I want to stay here? What kind of people are your looking to engage and fit with your culture? How can you retain and attract them. What kind of people are not a good fit? What is our culture and what do i want out culture to be. Summarize this
- Provide a platform for people to engage on your social and website, allow a place for people to understand your business without talking to you and your team. You have no idea who isn't taking your call, applying to your jobs or responding to your recruiters. It’s a marketing exercise to engage potential buyers just like the product you sell. If you have this is can help your convert taken to the top of the funnel if you don't have this it's a red fag.
- 3. Be proactive. For most SMB companies there is a finite resource of available talent in their location and market. E,G Python developers in Portland. How can you get them to understand you exist? Connect with potential hires on LinkedIn before you ate hiring at a C-level and have an open door policy, push out social content but focusing on working for your company and it’s values, attend or host career fairs and speak to relevant colleges. Find a meaningful way to tap into your employees network.
Rick’s Nuggets
- Perks, benefits and free lunch are not attractors
- Companies rely way too much on perks to retain people
- People development needs to be the focus
- Humanize the messaging
Key Takeaways:
- Understand who you are what your message is
- Provide a platform for highly sort after talent to understand who you are
- Be proactive in pipe lining and reaching your core talent in most cases it;s a finite resource.
Thursday Nov 21, 2019
Thursday Nov 21, 2019
Telling a story is the quickest way to gain a person’s attention. The challenge in recruiting is telling a story that is compelling to the person you need to hire. And to top it off your story is just like everyone else and it is all about you!
What if we wrote each story differently than everyone else. Would we get better results? Damn right you will, and today my guest and I are out to prove it!
Today’s Quote:
"Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is." - Tim O'Brien
Our guest today: Michael Goldberg, Founder & CEO of Hiring Transformed
Recruiting Strategist, Talent Finder, and Hiring Manager Whisperer all describe Michael who advises and coaches Talent Acquisition Leaders through roadblocks. The biggest obstacle is the ability of both recruiters and Hiring Managers to tell stories that are authentic and engaging. Michael also assists talent organizations with strategies to increase productivity, create strong recruiter/hiring manager partnerships, and lead change management initiatives.
Today we are going to cover
- The importance of storytelling in recruiting
- How to tell a better story and the framework for recruiting success
Why is storytelling important?
- Give me people now, make sure they are qualified and let’s just get them in the door and we will be able to close them.
- Don’t take the time to engage, just jump in and let’s go
- Don’t know how to kick off relationships.
- Jump right into it about the position
- Most people are not responded
People don’t respond to your messages... Why?
- Very overwhelming
- 4-5 times a day
- Information overload
- The same exact message
- Timing
- Area of interest
- Miss-targeting, misinformed
Rick’s Input
- Text, email, social feeds (paid media)
How do we do it?
- Start with a Story
- The story is told voice to voice!
- Humanize it
- Don’t run the story at 30,000 feet
- Capture their attention in a job posting or messaging
- Could be done as a video or as a blog
- Goal is to get to a phone call
Structure of the story
- Create the Hero- someone within the company
- A successful employee
- Should be a peer
- Makes it more relatable
- Mission or goal and share the obstacles are/were (targeting)
- Immediate and concrete to create rapport to create a connection
- “Have you been in a situation like this before?”
- Resolution (get over the obstacles & hit goals… or it didn’t work out, what would you do differently
- About showing, not just telling
- “Imaging yourself just completing X. You have worked with Sally and Joe and were able to overcome these major obstacles. You were able to deliver X with your team....Like selling a car “Imagine yourself behind the wheel of…”
Rick’s Nuggets
- The story should not be about you
- Try to make the person you are trying to recruit the hero
- Design the story to a specific pain that the person may have
- Make it relatable to that specific person
- Tool for crafting messaging
- Crystal Knows- messaging
Key Takeaways:
- Build trust through strategically crafted stories and will help recruiters differentiate themselves from others.
- Storytelling can take different forms depending on where the storyteller plans on sharing info. Videos, Blogs, & Social Media posts but videos prevail because it is the best way to create trust between the recruiter and the candidates.
- Storytelling should be told throughout the recruiting process. Not only by recruiters but by hiring managers and would-be peers
Thursday Nov 14, 2019
How to Really Evaluate & Hire Technical Talent with Aaron Cooley of Kunai
Thursday Nov 14, 2019
Thursday Nov 14, 2019
We’ve all done it, hired the person who looked great on paper because they seemed to possess the skills we needed. Only to have the hire turn out to be a major disaster.
Here is the truth: Technical resources have a high failure rate because of how they are interviewed. I am going to argue that Assumptions and expectations alignment is where we fail.
Today is about how to evaluate and hire strong technical talent by uncovering the Truth.
Today’s Quote:
"Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There's plenty of movement, but you never know if it's going to be forward, backward, or sideways." - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
I’m Rick Girard and welcome to the Hire Power Radio Show. Our mission is to help Entrepreneurs and hiring managers to avoid costly hiring mistakes by identifying a specific problem and provide proven solutions to enable you to WIN the right hire. We share insights from top-performing rebel entrepreneurs, disruptors & industry experts.
Like our guest today: Aaron Cooley, Lead Consultant - Security & Mobility for Kunai.
Aaron Cooley is senior technical consultant at Kunai. His specialties include high security backend applications, mobile applications, and applications that leverage video. Over his nearly 30 year career in Silicon Valley he’s worked at companies both large and small, to build teams and deliver everything from the first Java enabled handset, to Yahoo’s video player, to secure data processing for the world’s largest accounting firms. Aaron has hired hundreds of engineers throughout his career which makes Aaron a perfect expert for today’s topic.
Aaron, Welcome to the Hire Power Radio Show today!
Today we are going to cover
- How to identify & evaluate strong technical talent
- How to interview and Hire the person you company needs
Why do we fail in hiring technical talent?
- Arbitrary requirements… pass the technical coding test but failed miserably when they were hired.
- %of false positives
- & false negatives
What to be looking for?
- Desire is way more important than initial skillset!
- Really want the job, you have to jump on that
- In 3 weeks they will know what they need to know for the job
What to Avoid
- Do you know what I know? You want people who know things that you don’t know.
- Don’t do coding quizzes … it is about you, not the other person
- Don’t hire an ‘Architect’ that doesn’t write code every day. A good technical lead is 100% hands on every time, but many ‘Architects’ are actually technical product owners. They only understand technology from the perspective of a customer. They are great at making diagrams, and requirements, not great at leading technical teams to implement solutions.
Rick’s Input:
-
- Resume Bias
- Assumptions!
- Look for transferable skills, not skill lists
- Years of experience doesn't really matter
- Impact- What have they REALLY accomplished?
- Resume Bias
How do we fix it?
- Start with the resume
- What did they do
- Progression
- Are the things they have done relevant to you
- Looking for the pattern of starting & delivering
- Interview
- Skip the coding quizzes
- Make the interview about them
- What exactly did YOU do?
- Day to day work… detail it out! Dig deep
- Individual contributor vs. lead engineer
- IC focus on tasks that someone else defined. Great at delivering but not the best person to drive things. Documentation not important to this person.
- Lead Engineer: will see the need for documentation and they’ll encourage others to do the same. Comments on the code, write the new code and will see opportunities to write new code through documentation.
- All engineering like writing new code!
Two sides to the interview
- You selling to the person
- Ego in the room
- Finding out if the person is a match
- Leave your ego out of the room
- Find out what the person has really done
- If your interview process it that broken, I don't want to work for your company
Rick’s Nuggets
- Resume
- Work history
- What was accomplished. Evidence of impact
- What did you do?
- How did you do it?
- What were the results?
- Interview
- Utilize the phone screen!
Key Takeaways:
- Skip coding quizzes
- Architects and technical leadership NEED to write code!
- Make the interview about the person and dig deep with questions based on experience. What someone has done before is the best predictor of the future
Thursday Nov 07, 2019
Thursday Nov 07, 2019
Startups suck at choosing recruiting partners!
There is no magic button to push to have candidates pop out for your roles. Before you hire, put the same thought and care into your recruiting strategy as you would into every other aspect of your business. Just having a strategy will dramatically increase your chances of landing great talent as opposed to just hiring those who are ok.
Today’s Quote:
"It is rare to find a business partner who is selfless. If you are lucky it happens once in a lifetime." - Michael Eisner
Our guest today: Amy Arenz, Founder & CEO of Concero Search Partners, LLC
Amy has been in the search and placement industry for more than 25 years. Due to the high demand for her services, Amy founded Concero in 2010 to increase resources and improve the capacity to better accommodate her many clients. Concero specializes in recruiting sales, technical and go to market talent for high-growth, private and publicly listed technology companies.
Show highlights:
- Why picking the right partner is so crucial to your business’s success
- Different types of recruiting options & What to look for your particular situation
- How to uncover if the recruiting partner is right for you
Why is it important to choose a recruiting partner?
Time Savings:
- Too much on your plate
- Recruiting is kinda done
- Not really knowing what is needed
- Grouping too much profile into one person… people that don’t actually exist.
- Create more work when you use multiple firms.
- Confusing and burning the market
- Internal recruiters become process babysitters
What are the options?
- Hire multiple firms, Hire an FTE, Hire a contractor, Hire a single partner
- How to determine your needs
Challenges in
- Single Partner vs Multiple Partners
- Single Partner Advantages:
- Learns Company Brand
- Works with the leadership team that they probably hired
- Develop processes that can then be utilized
- Broad # of roles - can you fill lots of different positions or just one specialty
- Leveraging historical experience
Rick’s Input:
-
- More is better is wrong
- Retained vs Contingent
- Dependent on the level of engagement required
- Higher touch and value in a retained partner
What to ask to determine the right fit for your company
Reporting & Data
- Question: How will we know what effort has been put into our search(s)?
- Transparency of Process
- 3-4X pipeline
- Weekly reporting
- What’s in it for me?
Experience and expertise in the space
- Question: What experience do you have in our space? What recruiting tools do you use?
- Not educating the firm on the basics of what you do
- Have a network
- Come in and ramp quickly because of industry niche
It’s not just hiring
- Question: Do you have experience in helping a company set up a recruitment process?
- Job description
- Interview process / candidate experience
- branding/messaging
Rick’s Nuggets
Additional questions to ask
- What problems do you best solve?
- What does your ideal client look like? (independent of our company)
- What are the metrics to best define our expectations
- What is your Interview to placement ratio- Every good recruiter knows this!
Key Takeaways:
- Find a recruiting partner that provides transparency and gains your trust!
- Don’t fall into the trap of the more recruiters the better
- Dig into a recruiting partner’s expertise functioning in non-hiring support roles such as recruiting process design and setting up post-offer onboarding
Thursday Oct 31, 2019
Thursday Oct 31, 2019
In honor of Halloween, we are sharing interview horror stories. We all have heard campfire stories of a crazy interview or even a scary hire. Today we are going to help you identify crazy on both sides of the coin to help you avoid a tragic nightmare.
How not to get hired or have someone accept your job offer
Today’s Quote:
"If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it." - Ray Bradbury
Our guest today: LeiLani Quiray, Founder & CEO of bethechangeHR
LeiLani has a fiery passion for both Human Resources and philanthropy. She believes people are a company’s most valuable asset and they should be cared for as such but no only on a level where the business truly cares but a quantifiable basis where we measure the effectiveness of the programs we put in place to foster a healthy work environment.
be the change HR, Inc., a conscious company and social enterprise, provides fractional HR executive support, strategy and service to businesses in any facet of HR from pre-hire to post-term and everything else that happens in between.
"Be the change you wish to see in the world." - M. Ghandi
Yup...she's doing just that!
- Scary Things people do in interviews
- What scares People from your company
- Avoiding your own horror stories
Warning signs of an upcoming bad interview
- Showing up late, without a phone call
- Typos in the resume- the devil is in the details
- customer experience
- fast paste environment
- Heavy Perfume
Two Stories
- Schwane Schwiley
- Rejection Letter & his response (I have one of the emails!)
- “My Truck was Stolen (and hit by a train) - A case of a negligent hire
Rick’s Input:
Company Fails
- Lack of clarity & setting performance metrics
- Constant re-scheduling
- Unstructured interview process
- Arrogant interview process
- Setting the environment to maximize a person’s performance in the interview
- Group whiteboard test designed to make you crack
- Adversarial
- Erase work while answering questions
Two Story Conclusion
- Schwane Schwiley
- Swifter involvement to protect employees (myself)
- Crazy is out there and you can’t control it
- “My Truck was Stolen (and hit by a train) - A case of a negligent hire
- Background checks are key
- Overlooking criminal history = negligent hiring
What do we need to pay attention to?
- The frame of mind (desperation, urgency)
- Over aggressiveness
Rick’s Nuggets
- Diligence in the phone screen
- Uncover the truth & the crazy
- Focus on the person, not the skills
- Skills-based hires breed horror stories
- Pain, Desire & Impact
- 3 behavioral-based questions designed to get under the hood
- Beware: taking credit, playing well with others & the blame game
Key Takeaways:
- Watch out for warning signs in the very beginning
- Sometimes sh!t just happens but you MUST take action quickly
- Background checks are important!
Thursday Oct 24, 2019
Thursday Oct 24, 2019
The purpose of the interview is to get the truth of who a person is and how they can bring value to the business. Common or conventional tactics do very little to do more than scratch the surface of the individual and so we still make hiring decisions based on likability and bias. Which is why we make bad hires!
The questions that you ask, are the questions that hurt you. Because they are unimpressive and do very little to showcase your organization as outstanding.
This show is proudly sponsored by Vidoori
Today’s Quote:
“Experienced managers interview to qualify. Inexperienced managers interview to disqualify” - Mark W Boyer
Guest Bio:
Robert Davis is the CEO of Communities for Cause. He is a seasoned CEO and entrepreneur who enjoys the challenges involved in trying to run and scale companies. Building the structure and creating the company culture required to commercialize a company's passion and grow business by turning great ideas into concrete, actionable steps that yield revenue, repeat customers, and increased cash flow.
I’ve always been a transparent person who doesn't shy away from conflict. I find great satisfaction in working with teams to identify what may be missing and addressing those challenges head-on to effect positive change and rapid evolution.
Show Highlights:
- Preparing for the interview
- Conducting the interview
Why is it important?
- Interviews are riddled with assumptions - king of all F-ups!
- Creating a judgment by the assumption
- Bias
Interview preparation
Create questions on the front end and determine “why” you are asking that question
- Filter down to the questions the most applicable
- Taylor the questions specific to the position
- Wants don’t count in the interview process
Qualifications
- Personality- can be a qualification
- Make sure there is a fit
- Skills/experience
- View of where you want someone to go from and to.
- Growth, mutual path and where the person will fit
- Remove likability from the ultimate decision
Preparation
- What does the business need?
- Align with company values
- Prepare questions designed to understand WHO the person is
- Amazon Behavioral method
- Do not use the resume as your guide!
- Prepare the interviewee on what to expect in the conversation!
Conducting the Interview
- Don’t treat interview casually
- (no cup of coffee at Starbucks), or meet for dinner alone.
- The Start and the stop need to be formal
- Perpetuate bad interview practices unknowingly
- Group meals are fine
- Personal questions- don’t ask (anything about personal lives) If they share, fine
Rick's Nuggets
Interview
- Be organized!
- Put into practice a formal structure, stick to the time, provide feedback
- Structure
- 3-5 people for onsite, 45 minutes per person
- Predetermined questions 3-4 max
- Challenging & Take out of comfort zone
- Eliminate questions that elicit canned response
- Behavioral questions are the most revealing… follow up with why, why, why?
- Amazon does it!
- Sample Behavioral question
*Do you consider yourself to be Lucky? (Positive or Negative outlook on life)
- Explain
- Or Why?
Key Takeaways:
- Be clear and concise with yourself on the information you need to extract
- Don't make it very personal from your perspective
Thursday Oct 17, 2019
Thursday Oct 17, 2019
Founders, the quickest way to attract investment is to already have a team in place and the wheels in motion. People will join your startup prior to raising capital when they are committed to you as a leader and the mission of the company.
You do not need money to hire exceptional talent. You need to know who the business needs first. Then bring value to them personally and/or professionally based on their pains & desires.
Today’s Quote:
"Teamwork makes the dream work, but a vision becomes a nightmare when the leader has a big dream and a bad team."
- John C. Maxwell
Our guest today: Carey Ransom, President of the newly formed OC4 Venture Studio & Host of Accelerate OC
Carey is an entrepreneurial thrill seeker and company builder, serving team members and customers along the way. He has a founder attitude, even when he joins a business already underway, or take over the reins of a company. Carey excels in business and corporate development, technology and product strategy, marketing, sales, and channel partner development, and has led many startup-to-growth companies to successfully pursue breakthrough business opportunities. He’s done millions of dollars of business via LinkedIn as well!
Today we are going to cover:
- Why you should build your team BEFORE you try to raise capital
- How to recruit people when you have no money to pay them
Why is it important to build your team before you start to raise capital?
- -Sell the idea, gets people excited about it.
- Convince people to join, but the employee experience on the inside suck
Where do Entrepreneurs get stuck?
- Pretending you have it all figured out is really dangerous
- -the opposite of the strong figurehead, being vulnerable
- -we are looking for help and we are willing to listen
Rick’s Input:
- Best way to prove your company has legs is to have a team
- Allow people who are involved to become invested by active participation
- Utilize their talent and keep engaged
- “Once I get the Money” syndrome
Mindset:
- High ego to start,
- Be selfless as you can and give it away.
- Want everyone to be a founder in their mind
- Being transparent & vulnerable
- Not having to make every decision
- Not always having to be right
How does one build a team without having the Money?
- Create a Safe Environment for people to take risks without penalization
- Encouraging risk - leader fails first- set the example
Rick’s two cents:
- Network
- Get to know your teammates before you approach to hire
- Understand their career pains & desires
- Look for alignment (do not force it…. Nurture Campaign)
- Plant seeds
- Seize the Opportunity
- Ask for help!
- Gain involvement (advisory to start)
- Communicate and keep involved
- Allow the relationship to grow & evolve
- Create the ecosystem for each person lean in
- Give what you can
- Equity
- Title
- *maintain high integrity
Key Takeaways:
- Look at every single person as an investor. Be open to different types of arrangements
- Be careful to not oversell/overstate your advisor involvement
- Find people who will be really real to keep you grounded. Ultimately the best team wins!
Thursday Oct 10, 2019
The Challenges & Benefits of Hiring Refugees with Chris Chancey of Amplio Recruiting
Thursday Oct 10, 2019
Thursday Oct 10, 2019
We are in a negative unemployment market and there are just not enough workers on the open job market. The solution might be taking a different avenue... Hiring Refugees.
There is great value to expanding beyond your scope of the limited talent pool into unfamiliar waters. Consider people who are motivated, engaged and reliable to elevate company performance.
This show is proudly sponsored by Vidoori
Today’s Quote:
"We must find a way to balance our tradition as a state welcoming of refugees while ensuring the safety and security of our citizens." Bruce Rauner - Former Governor of Illinois
Guest Bio:
Amplio Recruiting is a staffing agency placing refugees into jobs across the US. Chris Chancey launched Amplio in 2014 after moving into a refugee community outside of Atlanta, GA and now leads a team that has placed over 5000 refugees from 40 different countries into full-time employment at over 300 US companies.
As a social entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author of Refugee Workforce, a book articulating the economic impact of refugees in America, Chris believes in leveraging business to create greater stability for the 70M displaced people around the globe.
Show Highlights:
- Why refugees make great hires
- Dispel some of the beliefs
- Provide a How-to guide to locate and hire
Why is this a good pool of talent?
- Legal to work
- High retention (80% @ 3 months & 70% after 1 year)
- Drug-free- zero
- Increase of productivity - high growth mindset
- Company's reporting back double quota
- Mostly Congo, Burma, middle east
What does a company need to know about hiring refugees?
- Language barrier
- They learn English faster when they have a job
- Software to help train
- Transportation
- Rely on public trans
- Mostly blue-collar
- Only 10-20% have advanced skills
- Cultural Awareness
- Diversity welcome
How does a company tap into the Refugee pool?
- First, open the culture to diversity thinking
- Are safety and other relevant signs posted in the native languages of employees to assure a full understanding of a safe environment?
- Do you have an intra-company multicultural calendar to avoid scheduling important events or meetings on major cultural holidays?
- In the onboarding process, are materials offered in both English and the employee’s native language?
- Are meet-and-greets, building tours, team lunches, and other activities in place to ease the new employee into a comfortable atmosphere?
- Are training materials or presentations reviewed before introducing them to employees of different cultures to see if anything needs to be modified or explained in a different way?
- Top-down approach
- Promote inclusivity: the focus is not diversity, the focus is inclusivity
- Specific examples:
- Systems in place to accommodate onboarding:
- Slow onboarding time: What you would typically cover in two days, with a traditional employee, spread it out over a week or so. It’s better to over-communicate on the front-end than have to make amends for lost time, resources and relationships on the back-end.
- Don’t leave anything to chance: Communicate, communicate, communicate. Be direct with instruction and don’t assume the other person immediately understands. Overstate tasks and ask questions to assess comprehension. Avoid demeaning tones and be patient with questions, and don’t assume employees understand even the most basic cultural norms.
- Second, search “refugee organizations near me” on google to connect with local non-profit refugee agencies. They will be willing to educate you on the community and can invite you to local community events. If you share a job description with them, they can help refer to potential candidates.
Key Takeaways:
- Recognize the value of refugee community (buy the book)
- Connect with your local refugee community
- Consider ways you can employ refugees at your company
Thursday Oct 03, 2019
Stacking the Deck with A-Player Talent with Kevin Lawrence of Lawrence & Co.
Thursday Oct 03, 2019
Thursday Oct 03, 2019
Today we are making a commitment to hiring excellence! To do this you must change your mindset, your expectations and your hiring method. The transition away from “best practices”, what everyone else is doing, is necessary to stand out.
Fill your staff with A-players! Develop your B-players into A-players and significantly increase the likelihood that your company will crush it. Today’s insight is the spark to set your standard in building an amazing company.
This show is proudly sponsored by Vidoori
Today’s Quote:
"Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work. " - Vince Lombardi
Guest Bio:
Kevin Lawrence is the CEO of Lawrence & Co. CEOs typically place their first call to Coach Kevin with a crisis to solve. They stay because of his business acumen and no-holds-barred, tell-it-like-it-is style. Kevin’s worked with hundreds of CEOs and executives, helping them to break through business challenges, grow their companies and find personal success along the way.
These experiences inspired Kevin’s book, Your Oxygen Mask First, in which he reveals the 17 habits every leader must know to transcend the perils of success and achieve even more.
Today we are going to cover:
- The philosophy behind poor hiring practices (attitude)
- What A, B & C players look like
- Implementing a methodology to fill every position with A-Players
The all too common Philosophy of most startups
- Aspirations are equivalent of a beer league hockey team with NHL aspirations
- Entrepreneurs drag mediocre people with them and they wonder why they don't win
- In your own business, you don't think it applies to them, yet if they were able to take
- Founding entrepreneurs
- Don't have good mentors that they
Understanding what the Hiring perspective should be
- Most leaders don't scrutinize hires enough
- Discipline and rigor around the hiring
- The result from hiring quickly in the beginning
- As they become a bigger business they use the same methodology
- Insanely critical all of the time. Each hire can make you or break you… especially you as a leader
You Must understand this
- True A-players are being taken care of…. It is a lot of work to dislodge them. A-players never get laid off.
- Patterns of A-players
Rick’s Input:
- Treat every hire like it is a Million dollar hire, changes your perspective on time investment to the hiring process
- Keep raising the bar!
How do we make the transition to hiring excellence?
- You Have to believe that you deserve and NHL caliber team
- The belief puts you into a different trajectory
- Review each of the key people in the business:
- A, B or C player - Philosophy is A to stay
- Strive for excellence. With a quarterly portfolio review
- Calibrating talent every 90 days. Take action, give feedback, support, development,
- -treat your review like an investment portfolio
How to Identify the A player
- Crystal clear on what you are looking for- a mathematical job description
- Get to know who they are… before the offer. It may take 3-4 hours to dig deep
- Understanding character, patterns
- Being able to rate someone accurately during the interview
- Steps Implementation
- Have an expert in the methodology
- Require key hire diligence & review the summary report before the hire.
- Reference checks- Talk to the managers only…. A-players easily give references and the managers will talk to you
- *mediocrity cant find their bosses
- *** Default to having an amazing team
- Find the smartest people who have built systems and follow them
- Earn the right to tweak a system. Systems work when you follow them completely, Humans screw it up.
- Relentless execution of the basic principles
Rick’s two cents:
- Deep behavioral discussion
- Gathering evidence of success
- Situational / Hypothetical interviews are a waste of your time!
Key Takeaways:
- Need amazing people to create amazing performing company
- Deep scrutinization is critical for all hires and promotions - these are million-dollar decisions.
- You have to focus on your own strength & Resilience to have sustainable success
Friday Sep 13, 2019
Tapping into Veteran Talent Pools! with Brian Erickson of Vidoori
Friday Sep 13, 2019
Friday Sep 13, 2019
A lot of companies shy away from hiring veterans because they don’t understand the value that they may bring to the table.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Cisco & Walgreens have programs in full force but the majority of startups have yet to really get on board. The diversity in thought that comes from hiring a vet may be the competitive edge that your startup needs to propel your business ahead of your competition.
This show is proudly sponsored by Vidoori
Today’s Quote:
"We hire military veterans because they make great employees. They bring proven technical and leadership skills. They understand teamwork, and they're adaptable. Bottom line, hiring veterans is good for business."
Randall L. Stephenson - CEO of AT&T
Guest Bio:
Brian Erickson serves as the Vice President, Strategy and Solutions at Vidoori, Inc. He leads company expansion strategies bringing the Vidoori brand to the west coast. Brian has over 26 years of experience in Naval Aviation, Cybersecurity, Information Technology, Information Operations, Strategic Programs and sourcing/acquisition. Brian is a retired Senior Naval Officer (Captain/O6) with proven experience and expertise across numerous technical domains bringing a warfighters perspective to Vidoori’s mission of delivering excellence.
Brian holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Economics from San Diego State University, a Master of Business Administration (Financial Management) from the Naval Postgraduate School, a Master of Science (Information Technology) from the Naval Postgraduate School and an Executive Management Certification from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. Additionally, Brian holds numerous defense and industry related certifications to include: CISSP, GSLC, CISSO, CISSM, DAWIA Level 3 PM, DAWIA Level 3 IT, CKM, ITIL.
Show Highlights:
- The benefits of hiring veterans
- Challenges in the crossover
- What is needed to hire veterans today
Why hire veterans?
- Advantages of hiring veterans
- Hard workers
- Trained
- All the same, competencies that civilians do +1
- Life experience
- Much harder workers, disciplined
Why do companies not hire veterans?
- Language Translation - understanding of Military terminology
- Skills Mismatch -
- Negative Stereotypes / Bias - too rigid, formal, chain of command
- “Alpha” mentality
- Aggression / PTSD / disability fears
- Cultural Fit
- Fear of future deployments
Rick’s Input:
- Military ranking & conditioning
- Diversity in thought
- Requires a shift in mindset
- Impactful behavior transfers
How to Successfully hire Veterans
Preparation is Key!
- Process & Structure
- Checklist oriented
- Understand rigidity in the government process
- Outline the Framework, Training & Direction
Rick’s two cents
- Embrace the differences in Mindset
- Seek to understand the mindset
- More important to have a structured interview process
Key Takeaways:
- Have an established interviewing team that works well together; bring in a technical “ringer” as required to round out the depth and breadth of conversation.
- Hire military...highly technical, lots of experience, trustworthy, bang for your buck
- Transactional vs relational (stick with relational)
Thursday Aug 29, 2019
Thursday Aug 29, 2019
We have all experienced it….Trying to coordinate calendars to accommodate an interview. It is a BIG time suck from someone’s day!
How to eliminate some of the administrative tasks and shift into more productive work that moves your business forward.
Today’s Quote:
"There's a lot of automation that can happen that isn't a replacement of humans but of mind-numbing behavior." - Stewart Butterfield
Guest Bio:
Olivia Melman leads DigitalOcean’s Recruiting Operations team, having joined the company as the People team’s first Program Manager in March 2017. In addition to managing the Recruiting Coordinators, Olivia is focused on automation and collaboration within the full-cycle recruitment process, and owns all data and tooling associated with recruitment strategy. She also manages DigitalOcean's external partnerships with talent acquisition and branding vendors, and runs point internally on headcount planning alongside the FP&A team. Olivia started her career in Financial Services as an HR Management Analyst, and most recently, was a Customer Success Manager for LinkedIn’s Talent Solutions business.
Show Highlights:
- The issues around Calendar management
- The challenges with just coordinating & scheduling interviews
- Solution to optimize your interview calendaring issues
What are the challenges in scheduling interviews today?
My team’s responsible for coordinating interviews -- at a really high volume (averaging 200 hires a year), but the challenge we’ve run into is really how to maximize time in meaningful ways.
- Limited interviewer availability and limited candidate availability -- coordinating calendars effectively becomes really difficult
- 70% of my team’s days are spent browsing Google calendars to schedule interviews (more specifically, onsite interviews where we are bringing candidates in to meet several people from our hiring teams)
- Interview scheduling ties to candidate experience, employee experience (hiring teams) and the experience of those on my team (it’s frustrating staring at Google Calendar all day!)
Why is it important?
- Time spent where people are not contributing their maximum potential/value to the team -- once you’ve mastered how to schedule, you don’t learn from each instance
- At this kind of junior level role, it’s important to me that my teams gaining relevant experience beyond the task at hand (scheduling) -- and is in fact as an operations leader, I need them to gain system implementation experience -- program management and change management experience so that I can effectively delegate down the road
- (personally, I want to make sure that everything my team is doing is contributing to their individual growth and development).
- Navigate gaps- communication upfront
Rick’s Input:
- Always one person- have an alternate
- A bench of back-up dancers (interviewers)
How do we solve this problem?
- Using a new technology platform to automate interview scheduling and eliminate the “calendar Tetris” of trying to schedule onsite interview panels / back to back interviews.
- The tool essentially enables the user to build the interview panel or team (select interviewers, interview duration, format, location -- set times) and then the tool does the work for us by using AI to pull in Google Calendars and find time slots where the selected interviewers are available back to back and for the assigned formats/durations.
- Cut to 40% of the time using system administration skills rather than scheduling role (30% time savings)
How did we go about finding a solution?
- Discovery and assessment -- figuring out exactly what the workflow looks like now (in terms of people, process, and systems)
- People -- do we have the right people executing? Who are the stakeholders? Is that who they should be?
- What activities are these individuals working on that isn’t adding value? For example, what is being executed that doesn’t bring 1) learning 2) development or maybe 3) revenue or however YOU define value for your org
- Let’s break out those individual activities we identified and first, look internally to solve with automation (an example where we did leverage internal resources was with a web-based candidate resource library -- so that we could stop attaching docs to every email and updating links in a zillion place, just have one link do.co/candidates)
- If nothing internally available, then go to market to see what external vendors or technology partners exist
- Vendor selection: Speak to DO philosophy on vendor selection (simple and elegant, ability to inform product design, contribute to vendor success) → this led us to Interview Schedule!
Rick’s two cents:
- Standardize a process where anyone can step in
- Assign questions to each person in the process
- Evaluate based on the company values
- Pre-schedule days for interviews
Key Takeaways:
- People, process, then systems -- nothing will work if you don’t have the right people in place
- Implementation -- making sure you think through user adoption and change management
- Metrics for success -- any time you are investing in automation ($$), making sure you have a clear vision for what success looks like
Thursday Aug 22, 2019
Thursday Aug 22, 2019
We are talking today about the importance of keeping your people informed about what hiring is taking place and allowing your people to become brand ambassadors!
The benefits of keeping your people informed are tremendous as employee referrals harness the highest ROI. Reduce time to hire (55%), Cost of Hire ($3k), improve the quality of hire by 88% and increase retention @45% (after two years).
This all starts with continually marketing internally first, then expanding outward!
Today’s Quote:
"Internal marketing is probably much more important than external marketing. That's even more true today than it's ever been."
- Tom Stewart
Guest Bio:
Angelo Ponzi is the Founder & President of The Ponzi Group. He is a marketing and branding strategist that works with small to middle-market companies as their fractional Chief Marketing Officer in defining market opportunities, developing competitive profiles, audience personas, brand realignment, and strategies, to strategic, integrated marketing plans that help businesses compete in an ever-changing marketplace.
He focuses on three strategic pillars for success: Insights, Brand, and Plan to develop effective and efficient programs for building enduring brands and sustainable business growth.
Angelo is also the host of the radio show/Podcast, Business Growth Café.
Show Highlights:
- Employment Marketing
- What is it? Why is it important
- How to Structure a solid marketing campaign
What is Employment Marketing?
- Promotion of the company’s mission, values, products/services to its own employees
Why is it important?
- Improve employee engagement
Problem
What are the challenges facing today
- In most companies, this is non-existant
- Marketing is left up to recruiting
- When it comes to marketing, companies focus externally and do not educate everyone internally.
- Internal marketing
- Creating brand ambassadors for hiring
- Everyone has a role in marketing, and need to get involved in what is happening. Get everyone to embrace what they are doing.
- Huge risk of alienating potential hires because they do not know how to market the company. Internal communication, internal operations, functionality
- Avoid potential issues
Who’s responsibility is it?
- C-suite & Marketing
- Recruiting
Rick’s Input:
- Internal referrals are your strongest source of talent
- Informed employees are continually on the lookout
- Required Talent Acquisition & Marketing collaboration
- Cultivate a referral program
- Brand messages reached 561% further when shared by employees vs the same messages shared via official brand social channels (Source: MSLGroup)
- Content shared by employees receives 8x more engagement than content shared by brand channels
Ingredients for good candidate Experience
- How to deploy an internal marketing program
- Set up a monthly meeting- internal chat or social platform to
- Get information to everyone
- Make the messaging visible as possible
- Internal email
- Exposure to marketing materials
- Educate employees on how the work they do fits into the overall business to build a better understanding of their contributions.
Steps for executing a plan - Process
- Conduct an internal survey to better understand the level of knowledge
- Develop an internal marketing plan, similar as you would for external marketing
- Empower an individual to be the internal marketing champion...not just an additional duty, but true responsibility with KPI’s
Rick’s two cents
- Align recruiting & marketing
- Cultivate a referral initiative
- Encourage promotion through social channels (Gamify)
Key Takeaways:
- Incorporate information about the company, markets and brand into the on boarding process
- Update employees at least once a quarter, if not monthly on any changes that can impact their jobs and/or give them the ability to talk about the company beyond their function
- Make sure employees are marketed to first, so they are aware of campaigns prior to the external marketing activities. This builds loyalty and inclusiveness among the staff.
Thursday Aug 15, 2019
Cracking the Bootstrapped Startup Hiring Code with Meetul Shah of DemandMatrix Inc.
Thursday Aug 15, 2019
Thursday Aug 15, 2019
Why is raising capital more celebrated than building a business that is actually profitable? It may be a smarter play to join an actual business rather than a "concept company".
A bootstrapped company should be more attractive to people but for some reason, it is not. Today we are out to prove that driving a good business does not require venture capital and You do not need VC money to attract and hire the right talent.
Today’s Quote:
"Bootstrapping is a way to do something about the problems you have without letting someone else give you permission to do them."
- Tom Preson-Werner, co-founder of Github
Guest Bio:
Meetul Shah CEO of DemandMatrix, Inc., is a tech entrepreneur, having successfully built 3 companies prior to starting Demand Matrix. His “entrepreneurial” vision and inspiration comes from his desire to create and bring products to the marketplace that can help solve problems he himself has faced in his career. The combination of his years as a successful entrepreneur combined with his tenure at Microsoft has given a strong shape to his business acumen and technical expertise.
Meetul has been featured in several major publications, like CIO, NYT, WSJ, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Venture Beat, and more.
If you were to ask him to introduce himself in less than 5 seconds, he’d probably just say he’s an idea machine, health freak, and wine lover! He is deeply passionate about Sales and Marketing Productivity given his time working for and selling to enterprise companies like Microsoft, DocuSign, Google, Cisco.
Show Highlights:
- Bootstraping! What is it?
- Challenges & benefits to hiring in this type of organization
- A Process to hire when you do not have money to burn
What is Bootstrapping?
- A bootstrap is a business launched by an entrepreneur with little or no outside cash or other support.
Why Bootstrap your company?
- When you take the capital, you take more risks in hiring. You make bad hires under the pressure of VC money.
- The pressure to hire outweighs common sense.
Challenges faced while hiring
- Viewed like you don't have money
- May not be able to afford people because salaries are supported by the business.
- Lowering standards because people are not biting.
- Desperation takes over and you hire whoever you can.
- Hiring is misunderstood in startups
- False perception- you have money, you hiring
- Early-stage it costs the company a lot when you make a bad hire!
Rick’s Input:
- VC money opens doors but it
- Attracting people who are brainwashed by funding yet you will probably won't get a dime when the company exits
Solutions (what you learned):
As an Entrepreneur, where to Start?
- Understanding yourself, who you are
- Supplement & compliment people to support core values.
- Hiring community understand and can divide and conquer
Structure your process to allow for successful hiring
- Hire a really good TA person
- Build a recruiting process.
- -find a recruiting process, glassdoor
- Don't be desperation and be non-bias and do not ignore the warning signs
- Badmouthing employer, blaming others, sharing things they should not share (internal information), bad culture, bad boss
Rick's Process:
- Determine what the business needs, set performance metrics
- Build interview questions to gauge with company value alignment
- Formalize an interview structure for “Purpose”
- predetermined questions
- Timed
- Behavioral-based interviewing (like Amazon)
- Communication/Feedback channel
Key Takeaways:
- 1. Know yourself, and the values you care about
- 2. Pay attention to the warning signs
- 3. Build a solid business foundation so you can use VC money "as a fuel in the fire" to align incentives/goals
Wednesday Jul 31, 2019
Ryan Malone: Building a High Scale, High Performing Remote Company!
Wednesday Jul 31, 2019
Wednesday Jul 31, 2019
Today we are talking about building a high scale remote company. Try this on for size, a 75-person company without an office! The advantages are different than you might think yet you really must be mindful of who you are hiring.
A remote workforce is a time to talent advantage not a save money advantage
Today’s Quote:
“Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.” — Stephen Covey
Guest Bio:
Ryan Malone is the CEO of SmartBug Media, which he founded to give clients amazing results and employees a lifetime of memories. Before SmartBug, Ryan ran marketing at several venture-backed and public companies. Ryan enjoys the gym, live music, people watching, and playing terrible guitar. He lives in Orange County with his wife and two amazing daughters.
Show Highlights:
- Challenges & benefits of a remote organization
- The importance of cultural fit
- Interview structure for hiring remote employees
Challenges:
Why??
Building a business is hard enough. Why make it more difficult by building a remote business?
- Be part of the team and be part of the family
- Hire better and faster by being able to hire talent from around the country
- Only option to build the tribe
Talent Strategy:
- Recruit ahead- create a waiting list. Always interviewing.
Building a Marketing culture:
- People are bought in when they join
- Structure work culture
- Deep challenging relationships
- First people hired should be a marketing/pr person. Attract people who are already qualified to the process.
- Peer-based reference reviews prior to the interview. Inbound recruiting, skill survey
- Video submissions
Benefits of building a remote workforce:
- The talent pool is vast
- Work/ life integration-
- Flexibility
- The world will not end if you are not at your desk
Interview process:
- Inbound resume flow (into ATS)
- No headhunting
- ATS- kicks out instructions to make a video to submit
- Schedule an interview
- All video interviews, mix of behavioral interviewing
- One person focuses on skills, values, tools, cultural
- Look for Clean work environment, evidence of value, perseverance, curiosity
- Are you an additive to the culture?
Interview structure:
- A 30-minute call with everyone on the team
- Flexible work model
- Psychological permission be available for your customers/ team but the schedule
Key Takeaways:
- Hire marketing & pr first
- Use video as a screening tool
- Reference peer review early in the process
- Designate people to be experts in the interview process
- Always be interviewing
Thursday Jul 25, 2019
Martin Herrington: I'm Down With H1B... Yea, You Know Me!
Thursday Jul 25, 2019
Thursday Jul 25, 2019
Going old school with the title, don't judge!
STEM (science, technology, engineering & mathematics) hiring today is brutal as there are just not enough people to support the demand. Without bringing policy into the conversation we are going to tackle the challenge of how to hire around the limitations.
Today’s Quote:
"To maintain their own competitiveness, workers need to attain and stay current on the qualifications needed to advance in a constantly evolving economy." - Elaine Chao - Secretary of Transportation
Guest Bio:
An avid entrepreneur from University onward, Martin Herrington established a service industry business before graduation, partnered a real estate development company, and co-founded The Herrington Teddy Bear Company to move to the United States, creating a multinational sensation. As Chief Financial Officer and Managing General Partner, Martin was responsible for all aspects of the business including Sales, Production, HR, IT, and operations of the corporation before seeking additional challenges. Mr. Herrington holds a very distinguished record of service in non-profit organizations in Canada and the U.S. with his most recent focus growing the Youth Motivation Task Force of Orange County. An entrepreneurial graduate of the prestigious Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary with a Bachelor of Commerce, Martin also advanced his education credentials into the Series 7 and Series 66 US Securities Licenses and held the Wealth Advisory Associate role with Morgan Stanley before becoming a Financial Advisor as part of his creation strategies.
Martin is currently a founding partner and Vice-President with TEKCORUS Consulting, a Recruiting & RPO Agency based in Orange County, California specializing in recruiting high tech talent Recruitment Process Outsourcing Services. Martin has been a Toastmasters International member for many years, and speaks regularly at community events, business meetings, and consistently competes in Toastmasters International speaking contests.
Show Highlights:
- What an H1 is
- The benefits & challenges to hiring
- How to effectively hire someone under H1 status
Problem:
What is an H1?
- Long Term but not permanent work authorization / visa that is sponsored by employer.
Benefits of Hiring an H1
- Already has an h1b-
- wider pool of talent
- 3rd party intervention
- Better technical skills/expertise
- Better rate
Things to be Aware?
- Beware of agents
- Lying
- Different people showing up for different parts of the interview
- H1B is looking for a path to Green Card only
Quirks of Engineers - Knowing the individual to prepare for the interview
- Biggest challenge
- -Technically sound
- -asking basic questions
- -build a database of technical questions
How to sniff out the quirks, personality & culture fit
- Problem lies where
- Creating the right environment for an interview
- Knowing enough about your clients to be able to properly prepare candidates for interviews
Rick’s Input:
- Hire people who are already holding an H1b- Transfer
- Timing is S L O W - elimination of premium processing
Steps to Hire H1’s
First step - Go over resumes
- Watch for duplication - some resumes look too “familiar” or even identical!
- Look for excessively long resumes - ie. filled with same info. at each job experience
Second Step - initial phone call - screening for good communication skills - can be a challenge and if you cannot understand them, then your client or the team will likely not be able to either
- Go over each job experience by asking what they did and what technologies were used - making sure that it matches the resume, dates, etc.
- Listen for delays or background talking; candidate should know all details her/himself
- Confirm relocation details - do they have friends/family in New City; what is the likelihood that they will actually show up in New City? (ie. verify “Relocation Anywhere” and vet out tire kickers.
Third step - in-person or Skype interview
- Making sure the same person from phone call shows up for the in-person/Skype
- If by Skype - Watch for lip syncing, other people in the room speaking or signalling;
- Screening for communication,
Fourth step - get commitment for duration of contract;
- If necessary, contact Agency holding Visa to confirm
Rick’s two cents
- Communicate!
- No assumptions
Key Takeaways:
- Be diligent in your communications
- Find out Visa details; request copies of Visa/paperwork; allow extra time!
- Coach candidates through interview process
Friday Jul 19, 2019
Friday Jul 19, 2019
The usefulness or uselessness of AI & Employment branding in Recruiting.
Today’s Quote:
"This is what Steve Jobs understood: Brands are defined not by the best thing on the product but by the worst thing."
- Robert Scoble
Guest Bio:
MJ Shores is a Chief Marketing Strategist and technology trends analyst. With a rich and diverse professional background in public policy, business, and technology, she is sought out for her far-reaching, cross-industry and cultural insights. MJ has been a panelist and keynote speaker at industry and special interest events around the globe. She has been featured in Business Week, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, China Post, and other media.
MJ developed her expertise through a career that spans working as a policy analyst at a think tank, serving in leadership roles at top global business schools (e.g., Wharton School of Business, UCLA, University of Moscow – Russia), and leading marketing efforts at technology firms (e.g., SaaS software, digital streaming or OTT), and others. She is involved in the local business community, where she is an acting Senior Strategic Advisor for Executive Next Practices (ENP).
Show Highlights:
- The role AI plays in employment branding & hiring
- What works & what doesn’t
- A road map of where & how to invest your time
Problem:
Challenges:
What is the relationship between AI & employment branding?
- Your brand is created by the experience people have with your brand. AI helps you determine the truth between your perspective and what the market thinks.
- How you brand your company and serve your prospects.
Where is it working?
- Routine functions *** open up time for HR to engage with People ***
- Extracting data
- Automated process for scheduling & auto response
- Monitoring your brand for good/bad feedback
Where does it now work?
- Tasks that require judgement
- Inferences between intent and keywords
- Still really in beta, not quite ready for primetime
Rick’s Input:
- Administrative tasks
- Resume screening- Both fail here
- Does not engage people
Solutions:
How to best use AI
Roadmap
- Spend $ on Training HR to identify and use technology.
- Rely on IT to identify and recommend tools. But IT does not understand Recruiting problems
- Start with a simple chatbot to automate scheduling and response to website querrys/candidate questions
- Social listening tools- candidate identification/sourcing
- Red flag/background check piece as a final step
- ethics & morality of this step
Rick’s two cents
- AI cannot replace human interaction!
- You still need to pick up the phone and find out the truth
- Do NOT rely on tools or resumes to filter people in our out!
Key Takeaways:
- Brands are No Longer Owned by Companies (in an era of skepticism of companies and traditional marketing, the voice of potential candidates and the public are central to your brand)
- AI Enhances the Candidate Experience & Talent Acquisition
- AI Will Enable HR to Become Human Again
Thursday Jul 11, 2019
Ben Mones- Need to Fill VS. Cultural Alignment
Thursday Jul 11, 2019
Thursday Jul 11, 2019
The Battle between your Need to fill a role vs. hiring for cultural alignment.
More thought needs to go into “Who” you are going to hire than “What” you are going to hire. Meaning proven performers with transferable skills, not shiny objects.
Today’s Quote:
“Acquiring the right talent is the most important key to growth. Hiring was - and still is - the most important thing we do.”
- Marc Bennioff, Founder, Chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce
Guest Bio:
Ben Mones is the co-founder and CEO of Fama, an AI-based solution that identifies problematic behavior among potential hires and current employees by analyzing publicly available online information. He founded Fama in 2015 to address the needs of organizations everywhere that are grappling with the challenges of protecting their workplace culture and preventing harassment.
Prior to Fama, Ben held a number of executive roles at a variety of startups in the Bay Area, including Acceleprise, an independent accelerator focused on enterprise technology, where he served as Entreprenuer in Residence as well as Lanetix, a leading provider of cloud-based customer relationship management platforms as director, revenue operations. He also spent two years at content analytics and insights company Chartbeat. Ben has been tapped as a guest lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, UCLA Anderson School of Management and USC Marshall School of Business, and has also been featured in CNBC, Fast Company, Los Angeles Times, TechCrunch and the Wall Street Journal. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Vanderbilt University and is based in Venice, California.
Show Highlights:
- Why & How culture shapes your business
- Ego over common sense- Hiring rock stars
- Lessons learned and a structure to follow
Problem:
Why is it important to invest in culture?
- Shaping the culture of your business.
- Human behavior drives business outcomes.
- The virtue of power, ability to destroy or drive excellence
- When you need a function desperately filled, how do you balance your need to fill with the cultural value
- People want to align with products and services that they are passionate about
Why does Ego make decisions over common sense?
Anybody with a legitimate amount of responsibility makes a difference.
Rockstar engineers, leaders, need to fit into the organization, not the other way around
*** first-time founders Story:
- They decided to bring in some rockstars. Someone to groom.
- Didn't really fit the culture, demographics, hustle & grit. They went for the big dog name!
- Knew almost immediately and he took a position of superiority
- Hostile, no empathy… what they thought was not the reality
Lesson Learned
- Hired but got rid of that person quickly.
Rick’s Input:
- Cultural alignment/values alignment increase productivity
- One wrong egg
- Hire Performers, not “Rockstars”
- Rockstars
Solutions:
What road map should leaders follow?
- Get to know yourselves first. What is important to your business to ensure your success, mission & values to drive success. Team-based decision
- Structured interview process. Strong candidate experience, all voices/perspectives are heard in the decision process… treat each person like a new hire from the very moment they get in contact with you
- If you think you have talked to enough people, talk to a few more.
- Confirmation bias
- Be swift. Hire slow, intervene quickly! A closer look on the first 60 days. Course correct early on! With more transparency
- Driving synergy is more important than putting a rockstar in a seat
Rick’s Framework
- Treat each Person as if they are your only person
- mindset eliminates bias
Key Takeaways:
- Human behavior drives business outcomes
- Before identifying the talent that can help drive your business forward, critical to dig-in and understand the values and culture drivers within your business.
- Intervening and course correcting is an easier option than you might think...terminating a person is a last resort.
Friday Jul 05, 2019
Lorraine Ladd: Learning Your ABC's. Always Be reCruiting!
Friday Jul 05, 2019
Friday Jul 05, 2019
That's right people, today we are talking about our ABC’s!
The reality of the talent market. Creativity and Contact are the keys to winning talent. We are going to clue you in on where the gold nuggets are and why you are missing out on great people.
Today’s Quote:
"Great vision without great people is irrelevant." - Jim Collins - Author: Good to Great, Built to Last
Guest Bio:
Lorraine Ladd is the Associate Director of Talent Acquisition for alliantgroup.
She is an experienced sales and Talent Acquisition executive with a demonstrated history of working in the staffing and recruiting industry. Strong professional skilled in Customer Acquisition, Sales, Executive Search, Customer Relationship and Executive Coaching. Lorraine started her career while in college in radio and was a successful radio morning show personality before deciding to go into the world of staffing and recruiting.
Show Highlights:
- Why you should always be recruiting
- The Truth about responding to your job postings
- Where to find great people now!
Problem:
Bold Statement: Recruiting is easier today than it ever has been!
Why is it important to be continuously recruiting?
Creative ways to recruit talent
- Not enough talent - Why?
- Low unemployment, not tapping into the right pools
- Active candidates
The Truth: where you are missing people … about responding to Ads
- There really is enough talent, people are just not tapping into it
- A lot of people that are out of work 50-65 can't really find a job as a white male.
- Perception: Less flexible , set in their ways
Rick’s Input:
- Requirements are FLEXIBLE
- Look for reasons to screen people IN
- My experiment…. Sent out resumes
Solutions:
Where to find good people now?
- Unexpected places to recruit talent
- Retail, cold calling, conferences
- Using every tactic you can
- Pick off the 50-65 talent pool
Rick’s Answer
- You are missing the people closest to you
- Applicants, former applicants, former employees
- Target Passive Talent
- Requires different positioning
- All about “what’s in it for them”
Key Takeaways:
- Always be Recruiting
- Hire people, not roles
- Network
Thursday Jun 27, 2019
Thursday Jun 27, 2019
Engagement!
Well, not the type of engagement you might be thinking of.
Engagement in the business sense. Employee engagement is the one critical element that leads to the success of your business! Which I believe starts from the first point of contact with your organization… yes before someone is hired!
Today’s Quote:
“Not what you say, not what you do but how you make people feel.” - Maya Angelou
Guest Bio:
Steve Higginbotham is the Branch Manager of Volt Workforce Solutions. As an executive business partner and inclusive leader, Steve brings two decades’ of experience leading organizational transformations with leading companies. Changing the way Staffing Companies engage with their customers is vital. Having a deep connection with your business and an inclusive approach will continue to add value through a Total Talent Management partnership. Steve has expertise in Technical Recruiting, Business Development, Technology Consulting and Human Capital Solutions. He continues to deliver immense value to companies and business leaders through his strategic partnerships. Steve believes in a customer service approach for business success.
Steve has experience leading multiple types of organizations from Fortune 100, mid-market, private equity, & VC backed start-ups. In addition, Steve has developed 15 different divisions within eight different businesses while managing large business units & increasing enterprise accounts. His track record includes leading, coaching, mentoring and developing people into highly successful business leaders.
Steve has spent his career aligning business professionals with career opportunities. The value that he brings to companies identify with their strengths and opportunities for growth. Steve's experience coaching individuals helps improve communication. He has also conducted numerous presentations to board members and C-Level professionals with highly respected clients and industry associations.
A people oriented leader who drives business collaborative to maximize team performance while mentoring & coaching individuals through aligned approaches to achieve desired results.
Show Highlights:
- What Engagement is, what it isn’t
- Why engagement is critical today
- How to engage people to create emotional attachment!
What is engagement and why is it important? Engagement
- How you communicate with your company
Hiring managers - I want to hire the best talent, retain top talent
- What happens in the middle from what you want vs what you are getting
The company gave 3 hours of training, no orientation, on the job training.
- Employees responsibility - Who owns engagement??
Problem
3 sides of the engagement - Who’s responsibility is it these days
- If a person is not engaged correctly, they are going to bounce quickly… first 30 days.
- The company needs to train leaders to be better leaders
- The dual partnership between the company's & managers
People leave quickly or they stay and are just there because of the paycheck
Belief in mission, vision values.
Outlining issues that you cannot control
- Employee: losing engagement with the job… nothing more that is being contributed
Rick’s Thoughts
- Engagement starts with your job posting, email or phone call
- Critical in attraction & retention
- When you care, you win
Human Contact is the key
- 1:75 people call back.
- There has to be a personal approach.
Steps to maximize engagement
- Sources are not recruiters…
- Everyone with at least relevant experience NEED to be called
- train recruiters on what needs to be asked
- Discuss career worth
- Poor career planning. No mentoring, support or growth
Once they start:
- Not scaling back on your onboarding process
- Social media posts are not onboarding
- Clearly, have a process
Train your recruiters
- What information to gather
- The importance of a conversation
- Reward finding gold nuggets!
- Create a hiring bonus for people who were passed over because of a resume but are actually good
Pick up the phone and call people!
Key Takeaways:
- Differentiate yourself from the standard hiring process
- Create a structured and standardized interview process
- Train your employees to be Talent minded
Remember in engagement – how you make the candidate feel is more important – please be genuine in your approach, efforts and ensure timely and responsive feedback – always
Thursday Jun 20, 2019
Dr Deena Brown: The Hiring Power of Relationship Capital! Or You’ve Been Cat-fished
Thursday Jun 20, 2019
Thursday Jun 20, 2019
Offers do not get turned down because of the MONEY… They are turned down because you failed to Understand who the person is and then demonstrate a mutual alignment of career & personal goals to your organization.
The Truth is People turn you down because of the lack of care!
Today’s Quote:
"Truth is, I'll never know all there is to know about you just as you will never know all there is to know about me. Humans are by nature too complicated to be understood fully. So, we can choose either to approach our fellow human beings with suspicion or to approach them with an open mind, a dash of optimism and a great deal of candor." - Tom Hanks
Guest Bio:
Dr. Deena C. Brown is the founder and CEO of DC Brown International, a leadership and growth company created to pioneer innovative strategies that transform organizations into culturally diverse ecosystems.
Dr. Brown’s trademark C3 Blueprint for Success provides a strategic roadmap for organizational leaders to communicate and connect across a multi-generational workforce. Dr. Brown’s body of work includes identifying and remediating leadership gaps that are barriers to innovation and growth.
After identifying a significant deficit of women in key leadership roles, Dr. Brown founded The Leadhershift Movement. The Leadhershift Movement is designed to help women shift the way they think about themselves as women and how they develop and respond as leaders. The Leadhershift Movement provides a safe-space for professional women to get clear about their Why, confident about the What, and consistent about the How.
Show Highlights:
- Our approach
- How we humanize the process to gain greater engagement
- Process to Engage
Approach to talent
What is the problem?
- Ignoring the root of hiring. The human factor, the relationship capital
- Mindset
- Ignore the obvious
- Organizational view- transaction
- We need to fill the hole
- Disconnect on the level of importance for the person they are hiring.
- Simple things are ignored…
- Dealing with a new population of employees that are looking for more than just a paycheck
Why Offers are really Accepted or Turned Down
- We lie
- Arrogance & Ignorance
Rick’s Input
Our approach is Selfish
- We have become conditioned to believe that the company is the PRIZE
- Not the case in this market
- Positioning is a one size fits all …. Centered around perks & benefits
- Listen to understand, not to respond
Solutions
- Being aware
- transparent
What have we done about this?
- Training
- Using the data to support the discussion
- Awareness
- Brought to the attention & proper training
- Learning to remove ignorance
- Identify the gaps (pain)
- Education shift in mindset
The 3 C’s
- Clarity in Vision, Mission, and Organizational Values that paint a clear picture for potential hires.
- Consciousness about what today's workforce values such as authenticity and relatability which is more influential than a paycheck.
- Consistency in regards to expectations and responsibilities of your workforce.
Rick’s Contribution
- Engagement starts before the hire is made
- Too much focus on the money & perks
- What a person desires is far more powerful
Key Takeaways:
- Care about the Human relationship
- Having clear values … are you who you say you are
- Provide growth opportunities to augment or improve a person’s life
Thursday Jun 13, 2019
Ken Middleton: Thank You for Ghosting Me During Your Interview Process
Thursday Jun 13, 2019
Thursday Jun 13, 2019
Ghosting has come full circle now that it is a talent-driven market! There is no excuse for ghosting someone on either end of the hiring spectrum. It is a vicious circle that just breeds ill will.
Frankly, as a recruiter, company ghosting helps us to lure your best people out of your company.
Why do companies engage in such behavior? We are going to figure that out today!
Today’s Quote:
Your brand is your public identity, what you're trusted for. And for your brand to endure, it has to be tested, redefined, managed and expanded as markets evolve. Brands either learn or disappear.
Lisa Gansky
- She was the co-founder and CEO of Global Network Navigator, the first commercial website, which was acquired by America Online
Our guest today: Ken Middleton, DevOps Recruiter of yourdevopsrecruiter.com
Ken M. Middleton spent 10 years working for the largest IT staffing company in the world before deciding it was time to bet on himself. He started YOUR DevOps Recruiter to focus on connecting the best DevOps candidates to the best DevOps companies while evangelizing DevOps to the masses.
One way he accomplishes this is through his YouTube channel, The Dhub Repository, in which he posts weekly DevOps career tips, rants on what bugs him about the recruiting industry, and interviews DevOps SME's on different DevOps topic, in a segment known as DevOps Defined.
I have heard Ken rant about ghosting which is what makes him a perfect guest for today’s show!
Today we are going to cover
- What Causes Ghosting?
- How to Stop Ghosting
What is the problem?
- Clients ghosting candidates.
- No feedback or super slow feedback after long extended amounts of time with no updates along the way.
Why might companies’ ghost?
- Litigation fears
- Running too fast to pay attention
- Just lazy, inconsiderate or Arrogant …
What are the causes?
- HR representatives being overworked with numerous positions.
- Not considering quick and timely feedback is important to the candidate experience.
- Not have a clean process in place to follow up with ALL candidates, not just the ones they want to hire.
- Not giving a sh*t about candidates who they don't want to hire and just letting it fall by the wayside b/c of a feeling of superiority and snootiness towards candidates that apply to them. (i.e. they came to us for a job, right?)
Rick’s Two Cents
- Communication
- Ghosting occurs on the company side when companies are unsure about a person.
- Interviewers do not know the right questions to ask, how to dig so they did not gather enough evidence to make a decision.
- The key indicator of a bad hiring process.
- No clear structure on the information that needs to be extracted
- Without direction, people fall back on what they know.
Side Note: Your Bad Glassdoor reviews are a recruiter's best friend… How to treat people interviewing at your company
Solutions
- Stop having your HR representative work on so many positions at one time - Prioritize what's important...not what you MIGHT need down the road or later.
- Create an automated process to respond to applicants - There are CRM's that have this functionality where you can send multiple emails to candidates. Avionte, what I use, is able to do this.
- Create a better follow up process for quick feedback - Schedule the feedback meeting within 24 hours of the interview. Don't let it happen by chance. It needs to be planned and everyone has to understand the importance of it.
- Create standards for feedback to all candidates and an update process/rhythm - Just because you don't have an answer doesn't mean you shouldn't communicate with your candidates. At least once a week is a good rhythm that will keep them engaged and protect your company's brand to not be a "ghoster."
- Give a sh*t - Not Just because it's the right thing to do but because it protects/helps your company's brand and ability to recruit in the future. Understand that feedback is part of the candidate experience (some would argue the most important since primacy and recency (first and last) is often what people remember about most experiences)
Rick’s Process to eliminate ghosting
- Eliminate the transactional mentality
- Protect your company brand
- Understand the Reality of the Talent Market
- Breed the right culture
- Communication, gather feedback quickly *** Realtime Feedback!!
- Process for quick decision making & feedback
- Lead person monitoring the interview (founder, HR, Recruiter, Admin)
- Build in Knock-Out questions
- Debrief each interviewer as they exit the interview. (Max 10 minutes) - add that to the managers calendar
- Evidence to support a “No”
- If they dont pass the knockout, let them go
Key Takeaways
- Feedback (good or bad) is super important to candidates and if you want to attract the best talent and protect your company brand you need to get great at delivering this in a timely manner.
- This doesn't happen unless you make it a priority as part of your candidate experience process, and if you don't think you have a process, you actually do and I'm pretty sure it's BAD.
- We all need to CARE more. Looking for a job is sometimes one of the hardest and most difficult times in someone's life, and we need to treat people with that in mind in relations to our interactions, as opposed to just focusing on fill another job for your company.
Thursday Jun 06, 2019
Anderee Berengian: Hiring Good People is Hard....Not if You Hire for Culture First
Thursday Jun 06, 2019
Thursday Jun 06, 2019
Here’s a shocker for you guys today… Hiring Good People is Hard! Or is it? Maybe we just make it hard on ourselves because we make compromises based on need.
Today we are going to take you on the hiring journey of one startup who have managed to beat the odds to build amazing teams.
Today’s Quote:
“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” - Winston Churchill
Guest Bio:
Anderee Berengian is Co-Founder & CEO at Cie Digital Labs, an interactive development firm and Managing Partner at RezVen Partners.
With more than 20 years of experience steering corporate and product strategy, Anderee is an accomplished entrepreneur, technologist, and investor passionate about driving progress through digital innovation. At Cie, Berengian is responsible for building a world-class execution-focused team and growing Cie’s digital transformation ideas into sustainable, profitable companies.
Show highlights:
- What really makes hiring hard
- How to make hiring easier
Problem:
“Organism rejects the thing that doesn't belong”
- So why do we hire people that are wrong for our companies?
- Used to screen - look at Skills first
- Are we truly interviewing and hiring for culture?
- *** Biggest pain point is time- Interview 10-12 to get a hire.
- Streamlining the process to save time
*The top dictates the culture
- Check for cultural & skills fit
- Make people comfortable .. Casual setting, get a much better sense of who they are and how they will fit.
- *** Bring back for social interaction
- Foster a lot of team-based interactions
- -heavy screening for culture
- Promoting people who propagate the way they think and execute
Rick’s Input
- Difference between Culture & Perks
- Culture is what happens when no one is looking- how people interact, treat others
- The icky stuff
Solutions:
What needs to happen in the interview process?
- The shift in recruiting to tell the story very clearly.
- The person can self select very quickly if they want to join.
- A structured process, lead drives the process
- The interview process for onsite
- Technical- screened, test-
- Artistic-
- Recruiting team-
- Bring in to interact with people.
- Meet with people in their department, adjacent teams,
- Offer stage-
- Had one candidate they really wanted, lost to another offer
Rick’s Input:
- A deeper level of understanding/vetting on the front end… ie: phone screen, recruiting call, introduction
- Target no more than 3-5 people to bring onsite for an interview. If #1 is a fit, hire! no need to comparison shop
Key Takeaways
- Build right so the organism rejects what doesn’t belong. Look for the cultural fit first
- Take your time hiring. Hire slow and then if you need to make staffing changes, do it quickly.
Thursday May 30, 2019
Thursday May 30, 2019
Attention comparison shoppers... waiting to see a “few more people” to compare before deciding to hire? Bad Idea, Time kills hires!
Riddling your interviews with randomly placed hurdles is just madness. Making the interview process challenging is essential but there is a correct order to the journey you create. Each step in your interviewing process must be intentional.
Today we are going to help you bring order to your interview process.
Today’s Quote:
"Comparison is a thug that robs your joy. But it's even more than that - Comparison makes you a thug who beats down somebody - or your soul."
- Ann Voskamp
Guest Bio:
With the resurgence of Big Data and AI, Shane Bernstein realized the tools needed to scale the effective outreach approach were finally available! His C-level customers were continuously frustrated with no viable and consistent solution, and unable to build the teams they needed in order to have the global impact each of their businesses required. So Shane founded Rolebot.
Utilizing the power of AI, he and his team have developed software enabling companies and staffing firms to reach their goals and measure ROI. As a result, Rolebot eliminates the way in which we traditionally pre-qualify talent, from days/weeks to seconds, and increases recruitment output and engagement results by 10x.
Show Highlights:
- What is making it impossible to hire Great people
- Over Interviewing- How much is too much
- Efficient Solution to come to a decision quickly
Problem:
Over interviewing is a direct result of Not having a solid hiring Structure
- Clarity of Intention
- Clarity of Values, Cultural & Skills Alignment
- Not Knowing how to ask the RIGHT Questions to gather clear evidence to support a decision
Where are the Obstacles?
Over interviewing makes it harder to get the hire.
- Timing (time kills placements)
- Too much time kills interest.
- Time allows time for competitors to steal… not an if, but a when
- Feedback channel
HR prescreens
- HR assesses for culture fit.
- The Team should screen for culture, not HR
- Take home assignments- Give BEFORE you get… mentality
- Pre-screen is a big waste of time.
What is Over Interviewing?
Reality vs. Perception
- Comparison Shopping
- Hurdles - Mindset Issue (You are not the only pretty girl in the bar)
- Demonstrates weak leadership
- Feedback channel. Is slow when the process is slow
****people hire on gut feeling…
Rick’s Input
- Why? Company does NOT have a strong interview structure
- Treat each person as though they are your Only option!
Solutions
The Set Up
- Recruiter - recruit & ask questions
- Is the recruiter/hiring manager bringing value?
- Manipulate time to gain accepted offers
- Someone needs to own the process
Interview Process
Two step process
Phone interview - lead, manager (not recruiter or HR)
- Credentials
- Technical skills assessment
- Skills-based conversation run by a team member
Onsite
- Get it done in 1 day… do not bring them back
- Has to be vesting on both sides.
- Have a hiring team & a process in play
- Put the decision makers and the people who will have to work closely with them
- Make sure the people can sell the position & the company
- Be able to sell: Why should I take this role?
Rick’s Input
- What’s in it for me???
- Phone Interview Establish -Why, Cultural Alignment, Impact
- Point person (CEO, Founder, Recruiter (not a farmer)
- Onsite
- Timed
- Structured (3-5 person Interview team)
- Challenging
- Knock Out Questions- aligned with Core Values
- A decision in 24 hours!
Key Takeaways:
- Assess the current process, does it align with the current marketplace, what ROI does each component bring, what is % of rejected offers, etc…
- Figure out what must stay, what can be omitted, or moved around and integrated
- The goal is to strike the right balance for your organization