Welcome to the Hire Power Radio Show, where entrepreneurs and business leaders learn to hire with confidence and precision. Hosted by Rick Girard, this show is your go-to resource for avoiding costly hiring mistakes and securing the right talent to drive your company’s success. We dive deep into hiring challenges each week, featuring candid conversations with top-performing rebel entrepreneurs, disruptors, and industry experts. Join us every Tuesday at noon (PT) on LinkedIn Live for actionable insights, proven strategies, and the latest trends to give you the hiring edge. Subscribe now and join the movement to transform your hiring game. Do you have thoughts or questions? We’d love to hear from you!
Episodes
Thursday May 05, 2022
Thursday May 05, 2022
Let's face it, a lot of people are BAD at interviewing on both sides of the table.
It is easy to understand that candidates or job seekers are bad for numerous reasons. Being nervous, out of practice, and under pressure to do well because of NEED, create a large margin for error. For seasoned interviewers, it becomes easier to perform because the person has a lot of practice interviewing. That practice is what eventually makes it easier to land a job.
On the company side, interviewers get a lot of practice asking the same questions as everyone else, but the lack of structure & coordination does very little to uncover evidence to support the decision. The problem with that is that only surface information is gathered and at the end of the day, the hiring decision is made on circumstantial evidence, assumptions, and bias.
Guest Bio:
Varun Puri is the Founder of Yoodli and an Entrepreneur in Residence at Paul Allen's AI Institute. Yoodli uses AI to help people improve their public speaking and interviewing skills without the pressure of an audience.
Prior to Yoodli, Varun worked on a GoogleX project to bring high speed internet to unconnected regions using invisible lasers. He also ran special projects for Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder.
Today we discuss:
- Why it is important to practice your interview (or any presentation)
- How to practice effectively for an interview
HIRING STORY:
- Struggle getting someone to hire him…
- Now getting people to hire for his startup
- The key to getting people to bet on you is how you communicate with them
PROBLEM:
- Smart people on both sides of the fence (interviewers and candidates) who miss dream job and miss dream candidate
- Outcome: Missed hiring on both sides
- Hiring managers may not represent companies in the best way
Challenges today?
- Communication skills are an amorphous training concept. No clear way of measuring progress or diagnosing issues (we’re dealing with peoples’ deep insecurities). We practice in front of the mirror, camera, and stopwatch. Or worse, avoid it altogether
Why is this important to the company?
- Individual:
- Land your dream job. Get access to the opportunities you deserve and don’t miss out on them because of how you speak
- Corporation:
- Get your dream candidate
- Ensure your team is aligned
- Help people become more confident communicators and leaders
Rick’s Nuggets
- We don’t set Expectations
- Allow people to prepare
- Makes interviewers seem unimpressive - demonstrate
- Unable to
How do we solve the problem?
- 3 pronged solution needed:
- Be aware of your biases/ way you communicate
- Collaborate with your team to ensure you’re all saying the same story
- Diagnose the issues and work on them
- Solution:
- Practice interviewing skills for hiring managers:
- Be aware of your biases/ way you communicate
- Stay on company brand
- Collaborate with your team to ensure you’re all saying the same story
- Don’t say the wrong thing (non inclusive language, berate competition)
- Diagnose the issues and work on them
- Time stamped feedback
- Convey energy
- Be aware of your biases/ way you communicate
- Practice for candidates
Rick’s Nuggets
- Interview Structure- expectations
- Repeatable & predictable process
- Timing and Steps in process
- Interview question scripts
- Feedback loop
- Interview training
- Documentation habits
- Interview preparation
- How to prepare the candidate
- How the interviewer prepares
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! (Value):
- Align with your team with a set of interview questions you want to ask and follow up with the Why questions to dig deeper.
- Conduct the work as a team
- Watch the post-game highlight reel & critique
Guest Links
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/varun-puri001/
- Company: https://www.yoodli.ai/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/yoodli/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/yoodli
Host Links:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
- Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
- Podcast: https://www.hirepowerradio.com
- Authored: "Healing Career Wounds" https://amzn.to/3tGbtre
- HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
Show Sponsor:
Friday Apr 29, 2022
Friday Apr 29, 2022
Sometimes an innocent conversation during an interview can have horrific consequences, especially if you end up not hiring a person.
The biggest problem every company faces during the hiring process is the interview.
Two people go into a room together for a conversation and no one knows what transpires. Conversations flow and curiosity carries the conversation.
As we all know, curiosity killed the cat… and possibly your company.
Let’s replace curiosity with consistency.
Because the lack of consistency is what breeds unfair interviewing practices by promoting assumptions and cultivating bias. By simply eliminating assumptions & bias from the interview, we can create a process where evidence is gathered that supports the decision.
Minimizing your exposure to future litigation.
Guest Bio:
Victor Xu is attorney extraordinaire in the Fisher Phillips Irvine office where he represents companies in all aspects of labor and employment litigation, from inception through trial, in state and federal courts throughout California.
Victor also has significant experience in conducting internal investigations into alleged employee/supervisor misconduct, including harassment and discrimination, and has provided recommendations for remedial measures, including preparation of new company policies.
Today we discuss:
- Ways your interview might be harming your company
- How to set a process that minimizes potential litigation
Challenges today?
What gets you in trouble when interviewing
- Telling people “you are a perfect candidate”
- California is pro-plaintiff
- People grasp on to certain words
Having a standard in place where interviewers are not just shooting from the hip in the interview
- Mitigate risk
- What kind of music do you like?
- Fishing questions
- Trying to be personal but it is going too far
- Too much feedback
Why is this important to the company?
- Serial interviewees who doesn't get the job claiming discrimination
- Going after tech companies
- Puts handcuffs on the company to settle
- People catch wind of who was hired
Rick’s Nuggets
- Interviews tend to be shallow and decisions are made on assumptions & bias
How do we solve the problem?
Train people to interview and use trained people exclusively
- Select interview team
- All people trained
- Stick to the interview outline and consider a list of no-go questions.
- Training limits the liability of what is said/asked (extra layer of protection)
Create an interview guide of objective questions
- Consistent & fair process
- Questions for everyone & role specific questions
- Questions vetted to mitigate risk
- Off-handed comments
- “Your a perfect candidate”
- “Youthful culture”
- Religious assumptions - questions about drinking, etc.
- “What's your ethnic background?”
- Relating to the candidate can get you in trouble
Honest response for hiring choice
- We are going to pass at this time: Thank you for applying, but we have decided to pursue other applicants. We wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.
Values cannot be discriminatory, Legitimate business reason- values
- Information to disclose
- We decided to go with another person
Rick’s Nuggets
Tie your interview questions to values
- Assign the questions to a specific interview position (ie: interview #1)
- Remove opinion from the decision making process
- Score card ranking - highly subjective
- Weigh values alignment above skills
- Evaluate skills based on performance metrics for the role
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! (Value):
- Brewery of the perks that you offer candidates and understand their consequences.
- Ensure employees are properly classified even where both sides agree.
- Train and prepare your team on appropriate interview questions.
Guest Links
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victor-xu-b43bba25/
- Company: https://www.fisherphillips.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fisher-&-phillips-llp/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/labor_attorneys
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fisherphillipsllp/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHCDdUXOnEjfOtUYu6OqTxA
Host Links:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
- Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
- Podcast: https://www.hirepowerradio.com
- Authored: "Healing Career Wounds" https://amzn.to/3tGbtre
- HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
Show Sponsor:
Friday Apr 22, 2022
Friday Apr 22, 2022
As a company founder you have A LOT on your plate. So much, that it is often overwhelming so you scramble to delegate the things you don’t like to do as quickly as possible.
At the top of the delegation list is offloading hiring. Today I'm going to challenge you to own your people function for as long as possible because it is so critical to your success!.
Last week our guest, Steve Newcomb, exposed his key principles for building successful companies. The most important element in building a successful company is … the foundation.
“Do the big things right and then everything becomes exponentially easier”. This means doing the hard things first because if the foundation isn't right, everything else will be more difficult.
Getting really good at the things you hate… recruiting, interviewing & hiring, translates into onboarding the strongest people early and builds personal credibility in you as a leader.
Today we’re going to discuss:
- Why you as the founder needs to own hiring as long as possible
- How to build your foundation to enable your business to grow exponentially easier
Challenge today?
- Founders can't wait to delegate hiring
- Not good at it
- Don't want to invest the time to learn
- ROI?
- Buy into the belief that there is no “Right Way” to hire
- Don’t believe
Why is this important to the company?
- To Build a company:
- Having a founder that is excellent at recruiting makes it easier to succeed
- Build a company that matters,
- Bonus: something with a mission that’s embedded into the product
How do we solve the problem?
- The Foundation
- Pre-determine the Interview questions
- Assign positions in the interview process
- Assign interview responsibilities
- Role play to gain competence throughout the interview
- The interview
- Start with the Discovery Call
- Determine Positioning & Value
- Positioning: Does what the interviewee desires align with what your organization is?
- growth?
- Value: Is this person an A-player?
- Evidence of impact that was made in the current role?
- Step by step
- Start with the Discovery Call
- Founder leads recruiting (Steve Newcomb)
- Communicate expectations to team
- Shoot for the Moon
- You can hire a-players
- Treat everyone like gold
- Do not waste the team's time with duds.
- Team Interviews scripted
- Easy to gain evidence to support a decision
- 3-4 questions each person for 45 minutes
- Hell Yes….. or No
- Skills Interview
- Real life problem that will give an accurate experience of how the team will work together to solve problems
- Prepare candidate for success or failure
- Get & give feedback
- Empower people to make the decision at each stage
- Trust their decisions
- Let the interviewee provide feedback
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Strong foundation makes everything exponentially easier
- Own hiring as long as you can
- Set teams up for success by scripting the interview questions
Host Links
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
- Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
- Podcast: https://www.stridesearch.com/hire-power-radio
- Authored: Healing Career Wounds (Amazon)
- https://www.amazon.com/dp/B094TL14CD/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
- HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
Thursday Apr 14, 2022
Thursday Apr 14, 2022
Let’s talk about why your company is not stacked with A-players. It is not because you cannot afford them.
At its root, the reason is narrowed down to one thing, your foundation
We tend to think of hiring as an activity rather than an essential function like product or finance or even your pitch deck. So much time is invested into these activities. Yet, hiring is the most critical component of building a successful business. In fact, most investors' decisions are heavily influenced by the people who are onboard.
Solidifying a foundation for hiring requires the same amount of care and work as do the other components of your company. It cannot be outsourced. Hiring needs to be owned by leadership, documented and taught to everyone in the organization.
Foundation is what attracts high performers to want to join your company, not the paycheck.
Guest Bio:
Steve Newcomb is a product/engineering led serial entrepreneur who has co-founded four successful venture backed mission-driven startups. He’s best known for co-founding Powerset (now Microsoft Bing) and scaling its engineering team, culture, and operations.
He is the author of some of the most fundamental essays on hiring, culture, and scaling engineering teams, including the original “Cult(ure) Creation” and “In Defense of Introverts”
Today we discuss:
- Building a strong hiring foundation
- How to execute an outstanding interview
Challenges today?
Foundation: Do the big things right and then everything becomes exponentially easier
Be the valedictorian of Stanford. Do the hard things early
- Money tier 1 VC
- Mission
- Product that represents a true and novel breakthrough
- Purpose above just flipping the company
- Oh my god…
- Founder that is technical, thought & cultural leader, good @ recruiting
- excellent at recruiting- study how to speak to people, how to talk to introverts & inspire them. How to be inspiring.
- Have founders that are technical, thought, and culture leaders
- Have a company that matters, something with a mission that’s embedded
- Be a Super A
- Have a founder that is excellent at recruiting and is a Super A
- Track everyone who has ever worked for you. Keep in contact
- A=A, B=C
- Get the right people in early
- VPE needs to be a baller!
- Why buy silver when you can rent gold
- Friends that want to be founders- get them to help 3 days a week?
- Often worth 10 engineers
- Obvious Yes then there is everything else = automatically hire slower
Without this?
- How to hire good people?
- Lie to them & pay them a lot of money
Rick’s Nuggets
Chad Walters from Powerset
- Foundation = Structure & Process
- Structure- steps, timing & interview questions
- Process - flow of the steps, transition & feedback timing, decision
How do we solve the problem?
Principles of doing good interview process. Treat everyone like gold.
You interview me
- Earn your job first
- Change the power dynamic
- De stress
- Have they done any research to come up with questions
- Do not negotiate
- Pay should be at the 50th percentile not pay above market
- When you have to pay above market the worse your product is
- Tier one vc firm gives - data
- Design for introverts and socially awkward situations
- Don’t repeat
Creative Tactics: Don't work without good fundamentals
- Look for “Thank you’s” in IRC/stack overflow
- Reverse layup- founders reverse lookup on everyone that follows you
- Already interested in what you have to say. Know who they are
- Sit down with your A’s
- Ask who they know, names
- Release from the social awkwardness of asking their friends
- Who follows your A’s?
- Super A’s are how you fire fast
- Jr engineers
- Hack reactor- meet everyone and ask ”who is the best engineer is”
- Kill the weeds
- Don't need a unanimous vote to say yes
- If you build trust, they trust you to hire the right people
The interview
- Assign jobs
- Assign interview responsibilities
- Founder leads recruiting
- Do not waste the team's time with duds.
- The highest level Founder/Exec does the filtering so that every candidate that makes it to a full spread interview is a Super A, or an A.
- Do this well, you build trust, followers. Do this poorly and you deserve to fail.
Rick’s Nuggets
- Purpose is to get to the TRUTH
- Script the questions
- Discovery call
- Positioning & Impact
- Value aligned interview
- Do behaviors align with the values, mission & vision of the business
- Working session
- Real life scenario of how the team will work together
- Solve a real problem
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! (Value):
- If the foundation is right. Everything else becomes easier
- Spend all your time getting the first people done right
- Be relentlessly creative
Guest Links
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenewcomb/
- Blog: https://medium.com/@stevenewcomb
- Website: http://famous.co/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/stevenewcomb
Host Links:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
- Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
- Podcast: https://www.hirepowerradio.com
- Authored: "Healing Career Wounds" https://amzn.to/3tGbtre
- HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
Friday Apr 08, 2022
Friday Apr 08, 2022
Let’s talk about what really draws people to your company… and keeps them there. Trust
Trust is what drives better decision making, customer experience and profitability. But trust is not gained after a person starts working for your company. It is established during the interview process.
You see, people’s job mindset has evolved over the past few years. We are being judged throughout the process for clarity, purpose and structural integrity. Elements that demonstrate that you take your business seriously and are playing to win.
When hiring, start with the end in mind. Focus on retention, with the intention of building trust through the experience for maximum engagement & long term growth.
Guest Bio:
Ville Houttu is the Founder and CEO of Vincit USA. Previously, he helped Vincit Finland to reach 350 employees and make it public on Nasdaq First North marketplace. After the IPO, Ville moved to California to start Vincit’s local subsidiary.
Ville and the company have been recognized by several notable institutions, including 5000 Fastest-Growing Companies in America List. In 2020, he led the company to rank top-50 on the FAST Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators list.
Ville is a known public speaker and his leadership has been featured in several leading publications, including TechCrunch, Forbes, Inc. Magazine, and Entrepreneur.
Today we discuss:
- Why and how to build trust
- Concept of the CEO of the Day
Challenges today?
- title wave of people leaving your companies
- Don't want to work for people who don't trust them
- Not looking for dollars & sense anymore
- People want a culture that fits
- Let your people build the culture
Why is this important to the company?
- It builds trust
- We are at the end of us telling employees what to do
- Keeping employees happy, healthy and engaged
- Make the Inc 5000 list
- *** how this translates to business!
- Up 65% year on year growth over last year
How do we solve the problem?
- CEO for a day every month
- How to deploy in your organization
- Get everyone on board
- One person who will be the first CEO of the day
- Management team needs to step aside
- Open discussion agreeing to not get involved
- No approval needed from management
- It’s your call
- Decision based on what you feel the people need
- The Question: does the decision make the workplace better tomorrow than it is today?
- Value in engagement far outweighs the cost
- Goal: helps sales, marketing, operational, engineering
- Can be a very focused area of improvement
- Unlimited budget, everyone gets a turn, no one goes twice
Here’s how CEO of the Day works:
- Every month we select one employee to be a CEO for the Day.
- He will have an unlimited budget to improve our workplace.
- Whatever the CEO of the day decides, we all live with.
- We encourage discussion among colleagues, but I do not weigh in.
- The CEO will announce his decision in our monthly meeting.
- After sharing his decision, the CEO selects the next CEO of the Day.
- All employees will get their turn, but nobody goes twice.
Rick’s Nuggets
- What if someone (me) wants to buy a Ferrari?
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! (Value):
- Join the movement of companies making their employees CEO’s of the Day, and TRUSTING them to build a culture that FITS. Because when you do, you will see that BY TRUSTING your employees you will EARN their trust and LOYALTY in return. And with employees like that, there’s no STOPPING where your business can go.
Guest Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vhouttu/
Company: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vincit-oyj/
LinkedIn: https://www.vincit.fi/en/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Vincit_Plc
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VincitOyj
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vincit_plc/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/VincitFlix/featured
Medium: https://medium.com/vincit
GitHub: https://github.com/Vincit
Host Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
Podcast: https://www.hirepowerradio.com
Authored: "Healing Career Wounds" https://amzn.to/3tGbtre
HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
Thursday Mar 31, 2022
Thursday Mar 31, 2022
In 2021 38 million people left their jobs and found new ones. This accounts for 57.3% attrition for US-based companies. It seems as the trend continues as 4.3 million people quit in January of this year as well.
A lot of companies are experiencing turnover today and It makes one wonder, who is winning?
The companies that are winning today are those that focus on their people. Focusing on setting systems to enable productivity, fostering personal growth, career-pathing, and quite frankly, listening to what their people want.
Gone are the days of providing free snacks and providing a ping pong table. What people want is much deeper now and requires more effort. what are you doing that is improving their lives and professional growth? If you are unwilling to provide it, they’ll just go somewhere else.
Guest Bio:
Nicolas Vandenberghe is the co-founder and CEO of Chili Piper, a SaaS platform helping B2B companies double their inbound conversion rates. Since its founding in 2016, the SaaS platform has thrived with a 100% remote work culture.
Nicolas is a four-time serial entrepreneur, in diverse verticals from consumer software to biometrics. He builds his companies under the principles of flexibility, professional growth and communication.
Today we discuss:
- What makes people stay or jump ship
- How to make your company sticky for retention
Challenges today?
- Great resignation
- People quit managers
Why is this important to the company?
- Internal promotions keeps people growing
- Teaching management
- Avoid hostility in communication
- Non violence communication training
- Especially applicable to managers
- Avoid conflict without avoiding disagreements
- Conflict around the disagreement- NOT GOOD
How do we solve the problem?
- Flexibility
- High performers - no barriers
- Anywhere in the world
- No schedule requirement (exception) scheduled meetings
- Open & accepting of everyone
- Unlimited vacation schedule
- *** Professional growth- formailized
- Quality of the work focus
- Okr’s - not kpi’s- Actions to yield to projected outcome
- Avoid ultimatums, were expectations correct
- Hired 3 coaches
- Developing a piper plan
- Getting it out to eht puclic
- Abolish performance review
- Proactive
- Communication hostility avoidance
- Method to rethink your engagements
- Training everyone on the book
Rick’s Nuggets
- Career pathing - Huge retention
- Link everything to help- core value
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! (Value):
- Professional development. Work on the foundation
Guest Links:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nvandenberghe/
- Company: http://www.chilipiper.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/chilipiper/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/chilipiper/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TeamChiliPiper/
Host Links:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
- Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
- Podcast: https://www.hirepowerradio.com
- Authored: "Healing Career Wounds" https://amzn.to/3tGbtre
- HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
Show Sponsor:
- Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Mar 24, 2022
Thursday Mar 24, 2022
Today I’d like to start with a question: What if you could 15x your company in 24 months?
We all understand that this is virtually impossible as a solopreneur. As delegation creates the space for growth.
It is very possible for you to 15x your business by dedicating yourself to becoming really good at hiring. This starts with changing your attitude. “I hate hiring”, or “I’m not good at hiring” or “I'll delegate this to someone else” will not get you where you want to go. It also sets you and your team up for failure.
Today is your wake-up call to embrace getting really good at hiring.
Because the lifeblood of Your business is WHO you hire.
Guest:
Johnny Robinson is owner of Orange Window Cleaning & Mary & A Mop (Maid Service).
During his freshman year of college, Johnny and his best friend Sergio started a window cleaning company by going door to door to small mom and pop businesses. As they continued to pound the pavement, the business started to grow through word of mouth. They started to see the potential for an actual business by building a great reputation, and doubling down on digital marketing.
Fast forward to today, Orange Window Cleaning has AT LEAST doubled every year since starting the business. One key component to this rapid growth has been hiring for performance.
Today we discuss:
- Why it is important change your relationship with hiring
Hiring Story
Johnny’s Story - employee doing cocaine at the customer's house. Left residue in the bathroom. 2 months of problems ignored. Operated out to the scarcity mindset and kept them. Confronted and they wouldn’t own up to it. The customer sent pictures. Fired them on the spot.
Shifted mindset- take hiring process more seriously
Challenges today?
- Running off emotion over kpi’s
- Hate hiring!
- Hiring whoever/ too fast
- Desperate for people
- Hiring family or friends
- Keeping people too long
Why is this important to the company?
- Hiring is hard
- Hard to see the problems when you are in the trenches
- Treat hiring like marketing-
- Keep the funnel full when you run into problems
Rick’s Nuggets:
- Don't hate hiring if you are good at it
- Tell yourself- I’m Awesome at hiring
- The lifeblood of your business is who you hire
How do we solve the problem?
- Listen to podcasts related to industry
- Home Service Expert
- Stop taking referrals from the wrong people (c- players)
- Hired 2 people from one underperformer
- Vetting with pre-qualification questions tied to core values
- Situational questions
- Hired one of their best people this way
- Always be hiring
- Funnel full of applicants
- Run ads - like sales
- Appointment setter (vetting) and Interviewer -closer
- Performance based pay structure
- Incentive based- review bonus, upsell bonus,
- Commission - selling a neighbor
- Hourly was killing morale
- rewarded for hard work
Rick’s Nuggets:
- Hire power radio??
- Document & Practice
- Treat like your pitch deck
- Internalize and teach
- Discovery call
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! (Value):
- Performance based pay structure - making sure our employees were aligned with the companies goals - growth
- ABH - Always be hiring
- Join a peer group - EO
Guest Links:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnny-robinson-a2b632120/
- Company: https://orangewindowcleaning.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/orange-window-cleaning/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/orange_windowcleaning/
Host Links:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
- Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
- Podcast: https://www.hirepowerradio.com
- Authored: "Healing Career Wounds" https://amzn.to/3tGbtre
- HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
Show Sponsor:
- Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Mar 17, 2022
Thursday Mar 17, 2022
How does one evaluate a subject matter expert when you have limited knowledge or expertise in that discipline?
Most individual technical/skills based interviews last about an hour. Where time is wasted quizzing on subject matter that may or may not be relevant to the actual role itself. Scratching the surface on the level of depth that is brought to the table.
Consider another option. What I like to call a “working session”.
Invite the person to collaborate on a real problem that is relevant to the opportunity. This gives you unbridled insight into how a person thinks, communicates and solves problems within the context of real life.
This allows you to really drill down to gain evidence to support the hiring decision either way.
Today we’re going to discuss:
- Why should I care about a working session
- How to structure and execute a working session/ skills interview in your company
Challenge today?
- Skills not matching up to what someone claimed (faker)
- Or... Claimed to be able to handle more than capable (over exaggerator)
- Or… Just here for the perks & paycheck (freeloader)
- What's happening?
- Hiring Maintainers for builder or improver roles
- Testing
- Outdated concepts - learned in college
- Focusing on irreverent problems
- How many quarters can fit in a VW van
- Smart is good, smart with people is much better
- Going too shallow
- Not knowing what to ask
- Not digging deeper to discover the truth
Why is this important to the company?
- Too shallow conceals the truth
- Smart doesn't ensure success
- Relevant skills give evidence of alignment
How do we solve the problem?
- Build Interview Structure
- Only need one technical/skills based interview
- Timing
- 2 hours- ½ day
- Pay for their time (optional)
- Who’s involved?
- Co-workers, direct team, anyone in close interaction
- Define the problem to be solved
- A current problem that needs to be solved (reason to compensate $)
- 3 components (key hires)
- Goals review- understand expectations of KPI’s
- Data or Gap Analysis- how does the candidate interpret data/requirements/etc
- Collaboration- Review the details of the problem. Work to solve!
- Example
- Goals review - (5 minutes max)
- Data Analysis / Gap Analysis - (10 minutes max)
- Marketing Plan & Strategy (1: 45 minutes)
- Let’s discuss the marketing plan starting with what you feel is the best strategy
- Really try to dig into the "Why" How would you bring this plan to life? Based on what you know, what would be your recommendations for reaching the goals? Why? What other angles can we take? What would be the priority? Why?
- Preparation for Candidate & Team
- Candidate
- Let them prepare. Send details in advance
- Set expectations and discuss next steps
- Team
- Coach to be open minded and bias free
- Ignore opinions, praise evidence
- Work true - how they act daily
- Execute to core values
- Everyone should act as to the standards of the company values
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Build a working session for each role. Becomes really easy when you get used to doing it.
- Prepare the candidate for success
- Team collaboration & buy in based on evidence not “uncertain feelings” - bias
Host Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/ Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/ Podcast: https://www.stridesearch.com/hire-power-radio Authored: Healing Career Wounds (Amazon) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B094TL14CD/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Mar 10, 2022
Thursday Mar 10, 2022
10 business days is the optimal time to bring an interview process to a successful outcome.
The way to achieve this is to tighten timelines from stage to stage and cut down the number of people involved in the process. Now I know what you are thinking, that more people should be involved. Which is incorrect.
The reason we involve more people in the interview process is because we value their “opinion” or “input” on the individual. But opinion has no value when it comes to making a hiring decision. And opinion is what you get when your interview questions are not tied to gathering evidence.
Opinion breeds assumptions, bias & personal motives. Which do NOT serve the growth of the business.
I’m Rick Girard and welcome to the Hire Power Radio Show. We help Entrepreneurs and executives WIN-WIN the strongest hires.
By sharing insights from top-performing rebel entrepreneurs, game-changers & industry leaders. Like our guest today: Nick Livingston
Nick is the Co-Founder & CEO of Honeit Software.
Formerly the Head of Recruiting at TubeMogul (Adobe), Nick and his team scaled the company from 60 to 360 employees through a successful IPO ($TUBE) in just over 26 months.
In the same two years, he attended business school at UC Berkeley, started a family (three daughters) and co-founded Honeit Software, which is the all-in-one interview platform designed by recruiters to schedule, record, transcribe, search and share interview answers for quick collaboration and higher quality hiring.
Today we discuss:
- Why anything more than 3 interviews it too much
- How to interview & hire in 3 meetings
In today’s market, a candidate doesn’t have time to speak with 8 different people in your organization.
Challenge today?
- Interview simplification
- Bad solutions that repel solid people
- Screening
- One way video interviews
Why is this important to the company?
- Interview data gets lost
- Transparency attracts talent
- Job seekers have become really savvy
- Humans have changed
Rick’s Nuggets
- Value of the discovery call is lost
- Reason why people are not showing up for a job interview
- Positioning
- What a person desires
- Are they an A-player
How do we solve the problem?
- Interview conversations as business intelligence conversations
- Competitive intelligence
- If you record business conversations, you can tag, search, and rewind the tape.
- Interview structure:
- Questions related to core values
- Questions related to the specific role/skill/need
- Who’s asking the questions? Who knows a good vs. great answer.
- Interview Collaboration
- role of the recruiter was to give ‘time back’ to hiring managers
- But recruiters are not SME…. where the phone screen falls flat..
- Coordinated questions
- Share interview data/answers/highlights.
- Record the interview
- Who are good interviewers
- What makes a good question, what makes a great answer.
- Better Interview experience
- Do we still need 8 separate 45-minute conversations for 8 people to be involved with the interview process? NO!
- Do we still need 8 separate 45-minute conversations for 8 people to be involved with the interview process? NO!
- Hiring kick off call…
Rick’s Nuggets
- Discovery call
- Interview #1 - Value alignment
- Interview #2 - Skills
- Working session
- Interview #3 - Value Alignment / offer
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! (Value):
- Interviews are two-way conversation… Candidates are interviewing YOU and your team.
- Record interviews for - transparency, accountability, to rewind the tape, to protect your company (discrimination lawsuits).
Guest Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklivingston/
Company: https://www.honeit.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/honeit/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/honeit/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/honeit
Host Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
Podcast: https://www.hirepowerradio.com
Authored: "Healing Career Wounds" https://amzn.to/3tGbtre
HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
Show Sponsor: Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Mar 03, 2022
Thursday Mar 03, 2022
The two biggest complaints I hear today from entrepreneurs are “I can't find good people” and “when I hire people, the skills don’t match up”.
The first issue, not being able to “find good people” is an easy one to solve. You're fishing in the wrong ponds! Posting & praying may be working for some roles but the more crucial roles require that more creative tactics be deployed. Go to where your audience is interacting regularly. Hint: Not job boards.
The second issue, “skills not matching” with what a person represented in the interview, is a HUGE indicator of a poor interview process.
Too often we hear what we want to hear (confirmation bias) and we quickly move to get the person to accept the position. Never digging deeper to understand the what, when & how of a person’s work.
Remember the purpose of the interview is to understand the truth of the person across the desk from you.
I’m Rick Girard and welcome to the Hire Power Radio Show. We help Entrepreneurs and executives WIN-WIN the strongest hires.
By sharing insights from top-performing rebel entrepreneurs, game-changers & industry leaders. Like our guest today: Ashish Rampal
Ashish serves as President and CEO of All Imaging Systems. He brings nearly 30 years of experience delivering high growth among, Service and Green Tech companies.
His passion for bringing strategy and innovation together has fueled a long list of leadership accomplishments. Ashish has risen to complex challenges where he has crafted growth strategies, tapped new emerging markets and energized global teams – with many successes coming within turnaround environments.
His leadership approach reflects his deep expertise in creating and leveraging teams that are driven to innovate and excel.
Today we discuss:
- How to find the right people outside of job boards
- How to dig deeper on skills to gain evidence of competency
Hiring Story
- Hire - skills did not match the skills for the job
- Kept on for 8 months moving from role to role
- Right person on the wrong bus
- Demonstrated Ashish being a weak leader
- Intention was one of care & empathy but it was misaligned with the goal of making high performance be their best
- Warning signs
- Pushbacks from key people not to have to interact with that person
- Cost 8 months of salary- $40k
- Impact to culture
- Impact the trust of his team
Challenge today?
- Finding people through social networks who are not on LinkedIn
- Resources are not digital natives
- No LinkedIn account
- Meetups
- Training programs alumni
Why is this important to the company?
- People are the path to which we scale
- To be a relevant business need to bring value over the OEM’s
- More cost effective option
- Reverse engineering to repair
Rick’s Nuggets
- Sources
- Passive referrals
- LinkedIn sourcing
- Professional groups /associations
- Meetups, repositories, college faculty
How do we solve the problem?
- Bring complex challenges into the company
- Unique business - OEM agnostic, lot of learning opportunities and exposure to different technology
- Full exposure to business life cycle
- Solving a problem with minimal competitor
- Talent is recognized
- People Feel respected
- Have a voice - Let you know when a bad hire has been made
- Love the challenge
- Like who they work with
- Failure is accepted and celebrated
- Demonstrate Leadership
- Trust through empowerment
- Focus on Morale
- Self introspection
- Culture of win or affirm, working on today, need help
- Inject energy -”try to change the weather”
- Let the team connect emotionally
Rick’s Nuggets
- Competency digging
- First discussed on the Discovery call
- Impact made in the organization
- The exact steps taken to complete the project
- Interview- Working Session
- Solve a relevant problem together with the team
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! -Value:
- You are the custodian of the culture - you define
- In times of fear or uncertainty the best response is ACTION
- Teams prefer a leader who is REAL as opposed to one who is CORRECT
Guest Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashishrampal/ Company: https://allimaging.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/all-imaging-systems/
Host Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/ Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/ Podcast: https://www.hirepowerradio.com Authored: "Healing Career Wounds" https://amzn.to/3tGbtre HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com Show
Sponsor: Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Feb 24, 2022
Thursday Feb 24, 2022
Two people sit down in an interview. What happens next??? What happens is that, well, we have no idea what happens.
But the data suggests that a decision is made on behalf of the interviewer in the first 7 minutes of the conversation. The remainder of the time is used to confirm the decision.
There is no way that a person can extract enough evidence to support making a correct decision without bias or personal motives in an unstructured process.
A perfect breeding ground for Murphy’s law- Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong
How well a person aligns with the company’s values, vision & purpose is the only way to ensure the success of the person you hire.
Today we discuss:
- Why tying values to interview questions is the only way to eliminate bias
- How to build an interview question for a company value
Challenge today?
- Interviews are purely subjective
- Still ranking candidates - Scorecards
- Compare & contrast conversations
- Evaluate exclusively for Skills
- Interviewer coordination
- Different interviewers asking same questions
Why is this important to the company?
- The wrong hire costs 3-10x annual salary
- Think of each person being worth $2M to the company.
- Perspective change?
- Wrong hire costs in employee morale & your credibility as a leader
- Think of each person being worth $2M to the company.
- People are the #1 reason for failure
- All your business problems are people problems in disguise
How do we solve the problem?
- Define Core Values
- Define attributes for each core value (traits)
- Prioritize values (rank in order of importance)
- Measurables of each value
- Agree on values (are they lived daily)
- Dig Deeper (Committed, Expertise, Curious)
- Invest the time to fully comprehend the root of your challenges
- Listen to Understand, not to respond
- Build Interview Question Library
- Craft Behavioral questions (2-3)
- Determine **Knockouts
- Agree on questions
Sample Question
Tell me about the most difficult customer interaction you encountered in your current role (Dig Deeper)
- Tell me more…
- Walk me through that…
- What were the circumstances that led to the difficulty?
- What was the root of the customer issue?
- What solutions did you come up with?
- How were you able to calm them down?
- Break down the steps you took to resolve the problem
- Why was their view important to you?
- How were you able to deliver beyond their expectations?
- How did the interaction end?
Assign Questions to Interviewer
- Easier on the interviewer
- Very little prep time for interview
- Gathers concrete evidence
- Eliminates Bias & personal motives from the interview!
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Break your Values down in measurable components to which you can evaluate a person’s fit
- Interview questions must have sub questions to keep the conversation flowing. We want deep data from each interviewee!
Host Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
Podcast: https://www.stridesearch.com/hire-power-radio
Authored: Healing Career Wounds (Amazon)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B094TL14CD/
HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Feb 17, 2022
Thursday Feb 17, 2022
When time is of the essence and work needs to be executed, we often forego formalities and hop right into execution. Hiring a contractor or friend to help you with the work.
This was the case with my friend Pat (name changed) who paid a friend to build a proprietary software product for her company. A lot of problems came up in the process and the relationship was terminated. Pat wanted the IP to finish the product but there was no formal agreement in place and Pat did not own the IP.
Long story short, the relationship went south and it ended up in litigation. The end result was an additional 7 figure payout to obtain the rights to the code so the company could finish & release the product. A very costly encounter for Pat that would have been circumvented with a written agreement.
Today we discuss:
- Why your IP needs to be protected before you hire
- How to best protect it with anyone who touches your product
Challenge today?
- Is your IP protected
- Freelancing platform
- Software / product Development contractors
- Website development
- Video creation
- Training manuals/courses
Why is this important to the company?
- Becomes a problem when…
- Changing the terms of the agreement (product development)
- Not having rights to the video content you paid for
Rick’s Nuggets
- Employment/ Co-Founder Agreements
- What happens when someone leaves
- Who owns what? Messy & difficult
- Without an operating agreement:
- You don't own and may have a non exclusive right to the IP
How do we solve the problem?
- Get this in place BEFORE you pay anyone!!!
- Components that protect you
- Outline the role/position
- Work for hire
- Fiver not protected
- CIAA
- Indicate when the relationship concludes
- Indicate that their role is either an employee or an independent contractor
- If they are employee, indicate the extent they can make decisions for the company or represent the company (or not), information they keep confidential, non-competes, etc.
- If they are an independent contractor, indicate that they are not an employee of the company, do not represent or make decisions on behalf of the company, the company doesn’t pay their insurance or taxes, they are a separate legal entity, shorter term arrangement, you don’t exert control of the contractor, etc.
- * Duty to assign the rights to you
- Whether they are an employee or an independent contractor, make sure to include a clause indicating that they have a duty to assign any materials, work product, patents, trademarks, copyrights, and so forth that they created. If they are an employee this includes any work product created during their employment and using any information or assets of the company. If they are an independent contractor, this includes any work product and intellectual property created while the independent contractor is working on the project.
- Whether they are an employee or an independent contractor, make sure to include a clause indicating that they have a duty to assign any materials, work product, patents, trademarks, copyrights, and so forth that they created. If they are an employee this includes any work product created during their employment and using any information or assets of the company. If they are an independent contractor, this includes any work product and intellectual property created while the independent contractor is working on the project.
- Exclusive rights
- To the extent that the employee or contractor maintains any rights to the intellectual property or other works, they give the business an exclusive license to the IP/works free of charge
Rick’s Nuggets
- Expectation Alignment
- Values Aligned (employee/founder)
- Clearly defined expectations
- timelines and deliverables
- Formal Service Agreement
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! -Value:
- Get agreements in place
- Know what the agreements cover
- Review/update the agreements periodically so make sure they still cover what you are doing
Guest Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/millerip/
Company: https://milleripl.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/miller-ip-law/
Host Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
Podcast: https://www.hirepowerradio.com
Authored: "Healing Career Wounds" https://amzn.to/3tGbtre
HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
Show Sponsor:
Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Feb 10, 2022
Thursday Feb 10, 2022
Those of you who have listened to the show, know that I am no big fan of “employer branding” because I believe it is generic and unrealistic. Often selling an image of unicorns & rainbows topped off with free lunch.
To me, job advertisements feel like the car dealer who advertises a low price just to get you in the door only to sell you a lemon at the end of the day.
We all understand that every company has its challenges. So why not paint an accurate picture of what the company REALLY is once you start working there?
Simply sharing the good, bad & the ugly of your company is the first step to eliminating bad hires. It attracts the right people, repels those who don’t align with the company values and eliminates the surprises that cause people to question their decision to join your company.
Today we discuss:
- Employer branding: why & when
- How to brand in the most effective way
Challenge today?
- Employer branding:
- Marketing and branding are not the same thing
- Purpose to employer brand strategy is different than consumer brand strategy
- Talent was the commodity and technology was differentiator
- That has switched
- People leaving companies in droves
- Not connecting with the right people
- Differentiation and purpose
- Career decision is transactional
- Operating tactically
Why is this important to the company?
- C-suite are talking about employer branding
- Approach without strategy causes more problems than it solves
Rick’s Nuggets
- Employer branding is strictly a top of funnel activity
- Convinced ourselves that EVERYONE need to be attracted to the brand
- Does nothing to ensure that the right person is being hired
- Top of funnel is a vanity metric
How do we solve the problem?
- Understand the organization
- Gaps are?
- Foundation of the culture
- What the people strategy needs to align to
- Culture you have rather than the culture you need
- Strategy
- Reputation (what & why)
- Specific & tangible that aligns with the business
- Career catalyst (career path) , culture (sense of belonging, great place to work) & citizenship (impact you have on society, doing good)
- Expectation (how)
- Give & Get
- What the organization wants & needs in return
- Comfortable with what you have to give
- Adds more value, more authentic enables greater appreciation
- Uncover a clear proposition
- Things that repel most people attract the right people!
- Polarize your audience
- Reputation (what & why)
- Experience
- Validate the claim & the experience
- Navy seals- Hell week. It has a specific reason in the experience
- Employee experience is more important than candidate experience
- Know exactly where to spend your time & resource
- Job Advertisement
- Story right
- Needs to be a true preview on what to expect
- What keeps people
- “Dissuade people not to join” and you couldn't lie, what would you say?
Rick’s Nuggets
- Only need to see one person to fill one role
- Less candidate flow is the new badge of honor!
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! -Value:
- Get specific - Be clear on the talent you need to grow your company and what it takes to really thrive. This helps define the reputation you need as an employer and the proposition you have to offer to make it all worthwhile.
- Show Vulnerability - Tell a refreshingly honest story of where you are, where you’re going, what’s missing and left to build .. show people a very real picture where they can add value and find purpose in their work.
- Own the truth - Include the harsh realities and adversities of your employee experience - 99% of people may run for the hills, but the 1% of people who lean in will likely be the best candidates & employees for your company. Plus it’ll save you a ton of admin and distraction from a blizzard of unqualified candidates.
- Finally word :- this strategic view of building and defining culture with a simple employer brand can never come too soon. Do it immediately. It’s easy, free and can make all the difference especially within a scrappy startup
Guest Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryanadams1/
Company: https://www.ph-creative.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ph.creative/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/phcreative
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Ph.Headquarters
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ph.creativelife/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/PhCreativeVideo
Host Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/ Podcast: https://www.hirepowerradio.com
Authored: "Healing Career Wounds" https://amzn.to/3tGbtre
HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com Show
Sponsor: Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Feb 03, 2022
Thursday Feb 03, 2022
As an entrepreneur, we all share one thing in common. Every single one of us has made a bad hire.
Let’s define what a bad hire is. A bad hire is what happens when our need to fill something quickly overrides our logic. The interview process gets rushed, red flags get overlooked, and… Just like that, you have hired a person who is nothing more than a seat filler. We all hope that the person will work out but we know deep down we just made a bad hire.
Here’s the truth: You can still hire quickly when you slow down your interview process. Less steps, more quality time. Going deep is the only way to uncover the fit of the individual into the culture of the organization.
Today we discuss:
- Why we continually make bad hires & when to break the cycle
- How to go deeper while moving faster
Kison’s Hiring Story:
- Hired the first 5 people who responded to his craigslist ad
- Flannel shirt, BO guy who sent video rants.
- Went through a year and a half of harassment.
Challenge today?
- Hiring across functions
- Organic vs outside leaders
- Be proactive about letting people go
- Talent you need with goals your trying to achieve
- 1 of 8 hires was a bad hire in 2021
- Development function & Marketing is really mature, low attrition
Why is this important to the company?
- Learning
- When to take a passive hiring approach
- Knowing key roles, CFO, Demand Gen… get to know those people and courting
- Centralizing the hiring
Rick’s Nuggets
- My bad hire story
- Friend no more - The relationship ending was on me!
- Expectations Alignment document (write it down!)
- Friend no more - The relationship ending was on me!
- Root of the issue: expectation alignment
- Not sharing the same values
- Process allows people to take you seriously
- Interview: less questions, more depth
How do we solve the problem?
- Accountability
- Shifted from founder hiring to leaders
- Stepping back and optimizing leads
- One person that didn't work out came through a search firm
- Being systematic
- Pragmatic in having a comprehensive scope
- Do more passive recruiting
- Test project 24 hours
- Closing people
- Ended to end in 10 days
- Keeping things compressed
- *** Write the offer letter on the phone with the person
Rick’s Nuggets
For critical hires:
- Create an expectations document (Positioning & Accountability)
- Why (pain)
- Desire (do we both want the same thing?- positioning)
- “Positioning is the single largest influence on the buying decision.” -Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm
- Impact (growth plan)
- Outline & communicate your process
- People check out with time & poor communication
- Provide active feedback
- Timing
-
- Time + communication + feedback = Hire
- Less time, more depth
- Empower each person to be a decision maker
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! -Value:
- Identify and build your company's core values
- Utilize your referrals and be proactive with recruiting
Guest Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kisonpatel/
Company: https://www.mascience.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mascience/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dealroominc?lang=en
Website: https://kisonpatel.com/
Host Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
Podcast: https://www.hirepowerradio.com
Authored: "Healing Career Wounds" https://amzn.to/3tGbtre
HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
Episode Sponsor: Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Friday Jan 28, 2022
Friday Jan 28, 2022
We hear a lot about culture today as being the most important aspect of growth. Yet product development & sales are too often prioritized over people.
Let’s break this down for a quick minute. Your company's success and/or failure is determined by your people and the relationship you have with their growth. What this means as an entrepreneur is that you are responsible for creating an environment where communication and failure is embraced and celebrated.
It is only when people feel safe & important that they take ownership of their role and allow themselves to thrive.
Guest Today: Justin Erdtsieck, President of Trencore & Brix
In 2016, Justin started to focus the business on hard work, perseverance, determination, resilience, compassion, and trust, and then began relaying these core values to his team through servant leadership.
Each individual employee knows they’re valued and respected and in turn, they care for the company and the final product.
As a result of this mindset shift, Justin has grown the company from $10M in revenue to over $60M in just a few years.
Today we discuss:
- Why you must adopt the mindset shift from product to people
- Justin’s mission to put culture at the forefront of the business & the results of that work
Challenge today?
- Story:
- Stagen: coaching
- Culture was a shit show!
- Inspired by a tour of Zappos. Allowed everyone to create their own space
- Bio -
- History of the company
- Who we are as a company
- People come in with understanding the purpose
- Training
Why is this important to the company?
- 2016 - now- grew from $10M to $60M in revenue. 600 people
- People want to stay- no one has quit in 4 years
- Proactive communication has saved the company over $1M a year
How do we solve the problem?
- Review Core Values
- Weekly Standup
- Check In meetings in the field (fostering company health)
- Culture
- Creating a purpose, helping everyone understand the why
- Living by core values
- Innovative on spreading the word on purpose,
- “A place where people feel safe & enjoy the experience we call work”
- Hiring process
- Eliminate the cancer
- Starting people from the bottom and growing them
- No formal interview process
- Moved people up internally!
- Understand the culture
- Teach
- Trial by fire first… didn't work
- Stagen program for leadership
- Personal development is key
- Motivated
- Creating daily habits to hold people accountable
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! -Value:
- Document your purpose so the people who work with you understand the “WHY”
- Success comes when you stop worrying about how much money you are going to make
- Treat people well, take care of yourself & create a good support syste
Guest Links:
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-erdtsieck-a20716105/
Company: https://trencoreandbrix.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/trencore-brix/
Host Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
Podcast: https://www.hirepowerradio.com
Authored: "Healing Career Wounds" https://amzn.to/3tGbtre HireOS
inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
Show Sponsor: Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Jan 20, 2022
Thursday Jan 20, 2022
Sourcing talented people is a HUGE challenge right now. Over 38 million people quit their jobs in 2021. And a lot of them are not coming back.
Then we have the divide over pandemic policies that has driven people away from corporate America. Making it more difficult to retain good people.
But sourcing is not the biggest challenge in today’s hiring landscape. Engagement is. It is important that we utilize every viable avenue (ie: boards, postings & direct recruiting) with the objective of just starting intentional conversations. By intentional, I mean, not selling. But understanding the desires of the person first… Because It's not about you. Intentional conversations lead to engagement. Engagement leads to the hire!
About the Guest: Kelly Robinson, CEO of RedDotMedia
Kelly founded Broadbean.com Inc 2001, which was acquired by CareerBuilder in 2014. Now he leads RedDot Media, a 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. Kelly is the goto industry expert in all things job posting
Today we discuss:
- The current job posting landscape
- How to best utilize the tools available to maximize your hiring outcome
Challenge today?
- Everyone is having a staffing crisis
- Not about the job posting.
- It is about making a connection
- 14k recruiter jobs got added Friday!
- 100% more jobs available,
- 3 % of the workforce has just … quit in just one month!
- Meaningful work!
Rick’s Nuggets
- Structure is winning over $$
- What no one is talking about
- vaccination policy of the company
How do we solve the problem?
- Posting
- Depends on the position
- Indeed
- Ziprecruiter
- Linkedin-sourcing/outreach
- Sales people, marketing, recruiters
- Dice, Angel list
- Write a great ad
- Nothing’s Free - It’s all paid
- Algorithm distributes jobs equally
- PPC has gone away. Can't define what you pay per click
- Need to spend at least $250
- Should translate to 10 applications
Rick’s Nuggets
- Active Reach Out!
- 1 hour a week
- Discovery call- where the magic happens
- Buy in/opt out
- Referrals - HUGE VALUE
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! -Value:
- Yesterdays ideas dont work today
- Cant do things cheeper
Guest Links:
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellyjrobinson/
Company: https://reddotmedia.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/reddotmedia/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/reddotmedia.co
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kellyjrobinson
Host Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
Podcast: https://www.hirepowerradio.com
Authored: "Healing Career Wounds" https://amzn.to/3tGbtre
HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
Show Sponsor: Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Wednesday Jan 19, 2022
Wednesday Jan 19, 2022
We are neck-deep into a highly competitive job seeker’s market. What this means is that the feeding frenzy for talent has created a perfect storm for people to ask for a lot… and get it. The interview process has been plagued with bait and switch tactics, ridiculous compensation renegotiations (after the offer has been accepted), and outright ghosting once an offer is accepted.
The root of the issue is the transactional way your interview is being run. Evolving your phone screen into an in-depth “Discovery Call” is the first step to eliminate the huge time sink that results in a turned-down offer.
Today we are going to discuss the pivot that must take place in your hiring practice to align with what people really want. And it all starts with your first interaction.
Today we discuss:
- The changes in candidate attitude and positioning
- How to eliminate the frustration & engage people at a more human level
- Approach evolution
- Here's what I am hearing from a lot of entrepreneurs
- A lot of dishonesty
- People are being unreasonable when it comes to their demands
Challenge today?
- People are lying on phone screens
- Not showing up for interviews
- people asking for ridiculous stuff
- Problem:
- We still approach people with an “About us first”
- Educational approach with selling
- Needs to be done at the end of the phone screen
- Practice of not negotiating
- Negotiating mitigated when people want it
Why is this important to the company?
- Losing great talent
- It keeps you awake at night
Rick’s Nuggets
- I believe that a lot of the challenges are coming from two places:
- Speed
- Not taking the time to understand before selling
- Need
- Need to get this filled / off my plate
- Speed
How do we solve the problem?
- Your phone screen (aka: discovery call) sets the tone for the relationship
- If your transactional, expect that from the relationship
- If your adding value, expect that from the relationship
- Adding value:
- Seek to understand a person’s WHY (Career Wounds)
- What's broken in their career that you can fix
- What does this person want? (besides a job)
- Environment in which they will thrive
- Can they make an impact?
- Past performance is a key indicator of future performance
- Do they align with your opportunity?
- Where do they fit, where they do NOT fit
- How you solve their career wounds
- Let them connect the dots for you
- Seek to understand a person’s WHY (Career Wounds)
Host Links:
LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/dEWWWEq
Company: https://lnkd.in/dG5aMUxY
Podcast: https://lnkd.in/gyG9YDuD
Authored: "Healing Career Wounds" https://amzn.to/3tGbtre
HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
Show Sponsor: Criteria Corp: https://lnkd.in/g8YbdsH
Thursday Jan 06, 2022
Thursday Jan 06, 2022
People will only do something when it is in their own best interest AND aligns with our values.
This was a key takeaway for me from the book “What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There” by Marshall Goldsmith.
We talk a lot about aligning with values when hiring on this show. And almost everyone recognizes the importance but it is so often missed. Why?
First, the disdain that most of us share for hiring. Very few entrepreneurs enjoy the process of interviewing & hiring. But it is the single most important activity that YOU can get good at that will make the biggest impact in your organization.
Second, the path of least resistance is easy… But it is almost always the wrong path. We must remember that the purpose of the interview is to get to the TRUTH about the person no matter the source. And the truth you need to know is not in skills. It is in positioning and value alignment.
Bruce Watanabe is a serial entrepreneur whom has co-founded a number of technology and Internet ventures including, PowerBuy, MassGenie, SIRE Mobile (SMS Solutions), and SETA International (Global Systems Integrator & Solution Provider).
With over 20+ years of leadership experience ranging from start-ups to Fortune 10 companies, Bruce is proficient in corporate strategy, business development, sales, and channel development. He is actively building Powerset from the ashes of a pivot and is here to share his wisdom
Today we discuss:
- Why it is important to prioritize the thing you hate most (interviewing)
- How to balance raising capital while building a stellar team.
Challenge today?
- People are the most important aspect of a company
- As an early stage startup
- Balancing generating revenue while getting financing
- Need capital to hire the right people
- Pivot the business to powerbyte
- Lack of funding, resources
- Have the grit to power through the pivot
Why is this important to the company?
- Only a handful of people stayed
- Believed in the vision- disrupting social commerce
- CTO- grit / determination to power through
- Relaunched the company
- Second raise
- Balance the valuation
Rick’s Nuggets
- First recognize/admit that you have no idea how to hire (admit to your problem)
- Prioritize getting good at Interviewing
- Values
- Process
- Evidence
How do we solve the problem?
- Bringing the right team in place
- Referrals- all interconnected
- Advisors- only way to hire people
- Vouch for someone
- Advisors must be strong
- Prefer a strong
- At the end of the day, you can buy talent, you can't buy grit
- Would love to get good at interviewing but …
- Really hard to gauge if someone
Rick’s Nuggets
- Take an active role in interviewing
- Seek to understand- filters down through the organization.
- Poke holes & dig deep
- Understanding positioning
- What does the person really want to do?
- Desire = Passion
- Does their desire align with my goal
- Don't be just a paycheck
- Everyone gets the same interview
- Often the best person for the business is the least like you
- Evidence supports strong decision making
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! -Value:
- Make sure you know who you are getting into bed with- have a great team
- Know who your co-founders are
- If you are friends, be prepared to lose them. Rarely a happy ending
- Don’t hire on a resume/linkedin profile
Host Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
Podcast: https://www.hirepowerradio.com
Authored: "Healing Career Wounds" https://amzn.to/3tGbtre
HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
Guest Links
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/bruce-watanabe-5a661a4/
Company: https://linktr.ee/powerbuyapp
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ppowerbuy/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/powerbuyapp
Twitter: https://twitter.com/powerbuyapp
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/powerbuyapp/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDjcG5dHXE282FGzfaf2Jjw
Pinterest:https://www.pinterest.com/powerbuyapp/_saved/
TikToK: https://www.tiktok.com/@powerbuy.app?
Show Sponsor:
Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Tuesday Dec 28, 2021
Tuesday Dec 28, 2021
Most of us have a tendency to fast track anyone who comes through an internal referral. The rationalization is that we automatically trust the referral source so the person will be a great hire. Add time pressure to fill the role and we are ready to extend an offer before the interview takes place.
Yes there is an increased likelihood that the person will work out. But there is danger too.
Because a person is a referral, is the exact reason why they need to be impressed with your thoroughness in your interview process. This does not dissuade the A-players from joining you. It gives them the impression of excellence expected from everyone within the organization.
Our guest today: Todd Ausherman, CEO of Notaroo
Todd is an attorney and entrepreneur with over a decade of experience in building high growth companies in the financial services space. Having successfully exited multiple companies, while personally hiring hundreds of employees along the way, he is currently building Notaroo, a lending software platform for the mortgage industry.
Todd is here to share his experience with hiring internal referrals.
Today we discuss:
- Why it is critical to thoroughly vet internal referrals
- How to ensure the the referral fits
Challenge today?
- The internal hire from the company that acquired the company
- Build from 19-250 people in 3 years
- Went into default and took two people
- Got a hero and a zero
- The zero - had his own way
- Created a lot of barriers
- Nothing got done
- First hire power bred discontent among his tribe
- Led to a mutiny
- Unreasonable belief in his ability
- Project fell flat
Why is this important to the company?
- The team of malcontents poisoned the culture
- Ultimately the CEO unloaded a bad employee on him
Rick’s Nuggets
- Must do diligence for everyone, especially referrals
- Why is this person being referred to me?
- Do they align with our values?
How do we solve the problem?
- Culture first
- Create a lot of events
- Break down the communication barriers
- Humanize himself as a leader
- Open a channel for people to be heard, raise your hand
- Spread out the balance of power
- Minimize the possibility of a mutiny
- Team leads responsible for smaller teams
- Decentralized hiring control to the team leads
- Process that multiple people decided on the hire
- Recruiting - intro calls
- Interview conducted in groups of 2- accountability partner
- Leader final interview
- Penguin question
- Hired a person who didn't like penguins(company mascot), it didn't work out.
- Knockout question: stick to it
- Fire Fast
- Eliminate the cancer as soon as you learn of it
Rick’s Nuggets
- Values are what form your culture
- Hiring process!
- Knockout question!
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! - Value:
- Sticking to your knockout question
- Mindful of your key lieutenants and what their motivations are
- Confront the uncomfortable truth of seeing a person who is a performer but the agenda is self driven. Don't hide behind a person’s performance- cowardly
Host Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
Podcast: https://www.hirepowerradio.com
Authored: "Healing Career Wounds" https://amzn.to/3tGbtre
HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
Guest Links:
LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddausherman/
Company: :https://www.getnotaroo.com/
Show Sponsor:
Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Dec 16, 2021
Thursday Dec 16, 2021
Finding the right people for your ground level startup is really hard!
As every startup founder can attest, there is just no playbook to getting the right people to join your team. It is about just getting anyone with the right skills to join the team. Often resulting in an unsuccessful endeavor.
So what’s missing? …. Positioning & expectations alignment.
Positioning is rooted in what the person you are considering, really DESIRES their professional growth. Are they a builder? A Improver? Or a maintainer?
Expectation alignment is how well the person aligns with your company values and what your expectations are for performance:
Step 1. Document your values and share them with each person. Allow them to lean in or bow out.
Step 2. Document how both parties view the responsibilities & performance standards.
Step 3. Then come to an agreement on how to keep each other accountable.
Our guest today: Craig Conlee, Executive Advisor & Former Founder & CEO of Zealr
Craig Conlee has over 25 years of selling enterprise software for giants like IBM and HP with over $110M in total software sales. In 2015, Craig decided to startup a ML/AI B2B SaaS company to solve a problem he faced as a sales person. Craig graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a major in Political Science. As a student athlete, Craig is still the shortest rower in the 150 year history of CAL Crew.
Craig Conlee grew up in Newport Beach, CA where he met his wife. Currently, he is living in Orange County with his family.
Today we discuss:
- Why alignment is so critical when hiring
- How to align with people so they lean in to your opportunity
Challenge today?
Getting people that understand the work involved with a startup
- Around location, mindset
- Maybe a social thing?
- A lot of people want to join a startup but want to be paid
- Don’t understand equity
- Right mindset,
- Easy to check out
- Your not paying them
- Let people join the team that don't fit the values
- All equity based
- Guilt for asking them to do work because you are asking a lot
Why is this important to the company?
- Gravitate toward people who understand
- A lot of education of the reality
- You have to be very upfront as to where you are in the stage of my startup.
- Which allowed me to clearly understand if they want to join or not.
How do we solve the problem?
- Process in which you get to know people better
- Repeatable & consistent way of interviewing
- Every conversation was different
- The good hires were just “lucky”
- Remove the luck from hiring
- Worst gambler, yet a startup founder
- Understanding what they want and what to expect
- What they want
- Avoid
- Leading the witness
- Selling rather than listening ***
- Expectations
- High risk of not succeeding
- Equity as compensation
- People getting offended by perceived value
- Want a mix of cash & equity
- Hire slow, fire really fast. Have knowledge base centralized for quick transition
- What they want
- Don't let yourself be held hostage
- Avoid paying salary & equity balance- if they leave you have to start all over again
- Balance keeping them from leaving
- Conflict of interest in terms of valuation
- Equity only
- If it doesn't work out, it wasn't meant to be
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! - Value:
- Have a sound, repeatable process of interview hiring
- Hire slow, fire really fast.
- Don't be held hostage!
Host Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
Podcast: https://www.hirepowerradio.com
Authored: "Healing Career Wounds" https://amzn.to/3tGbtre
HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
Guest Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigconlee/
Twitter:https://twitter.com/velocitydata
Show Sponsor:
Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Dec 09, 2021
Thursday Dec 09, 2021
I sent out 63 inmails through linkedin a few weeks back and received only 2 responses.
My mistake… I did not tailor my message to the individual. Now, 8 months ago those same messages were getting on average a 52% response rate, so what happened?
With all the noise fighting to get people's attention, It is easier than ever to get ignored. When the messaging you send seems way too common or anything at all like a templated message, you will fail.
Now, more than ever, the language you use when reaching out to prospective employees matters. And thoughtful messaging designed to align with a person's personality style is the most effective way to win-win a response!
Our guest today: Greg Skloot, Co-Founder & CEO of Crystal Knows.
Crystal is the app that tells you anyone’s personality. Using Artificial Intelligence, Crystal accurately identifies a person’s motivations, communication style, and other behavioral traits.
Greg and his company have been featured in Inc, Fortune, CNN, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, Wired, and the Guardian. He is the co-author of a book published by Wiley in 2019, Predicting Personality: Using AI to understand people and win more business. He was recognized by Forbes as 30 Under 30 in enterprise technology.
Today we discuss:
- Why people are NOT responding to your outreach
- How to get people to pay attention to you when you reach out to them
Challenge today?
- Tough to get people top of the funnel
- Cold writing, how to get someone to respond.
- Information overload
- Email not personalized
- Does Not speak to who they are
- Does Not communicate how they like to communicate
- Passive- no incentive to take action if the email feels like a templated email.
- Cold emails are really easy to disregard right now
- The same role needs to be marketed differently for different people
Why is this important to the company?
- More important now due to the tightness of the labor market
- Difficult to get people into the top of the funnel
Rick’s Nuggets
- Messaging from 6 months ago is really not working right now
- Way too much noise
- “What’s the opportunity?”
How do we solve the problem?
- Learn DISC
- Dominance, Influence, Compliance, Steadiness
- Free reading online
- Integrating disc within your culture
- Theory , knowledge & practice
- Behavior & characteristics that are most important for a role
- Know the Disc type of person you reaching out to
- Expectations for the role
- What the candidate's DISC profile is.
- Personality fit percentage
- Not supposed to be a disqualifier
- Adjust your communication style
- Communicate how the other person WANTS to be communicated with
Rick’s Nuggets
- Hit someone with the PAIN first
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! - Value:
- Use personality insights to break through the noise when emailing candidates cold
- Adjust how you pitch a role based on the candidate’s personality
- Consider integrating DISC into how your organization thinks about communication in hiring, team building and selling
Host Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
Podcast: https://www.hirepowerradio.com
Authored: "Healing Career Wounds" https://amzn.to/3tGbtre
HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
Guest Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregskloot/
Company: https://www.crystalknows.com/
LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/company/crystal_knows/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/crystalknowsme/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregskloot
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crystalknowsme/?hl=en
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9BjRz6BlFNdQE1WRpFGIDQ/videos
----------
Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Dec 02, 2021
Thursday Dec 02, 2021
We all have bought into the belief that following hiring best practices will ensure that we make the correct hiring decisions. Yet those best practices really do not produce consistent results. Why?
First, “best practices” are guidelines that trickle down from the big name-brand companies who all have the advantage of a much fatter wallet… And they are Transactional!
Second, what works for large companies does not work for startups. The truth is that you are needing to hire totally different people. Startup companies need “builders” to fuel company growth. And builders are not all about the $$money. They are about personal & professional growth.
This requires that you approach these people in a way that is counterintuitive to “best practices” and centered upon answering the question, “what’s in it for me”.
For those of you who are new to the show or don’t know me yet:
- Cut my teeth as an Executive Recruiter for Tech Startups in the Silicon Valley
- Coached leaders, candidates & helped to build over 200 tech companies
- Black belt in BJJ, F1 aficionado & adrenaline junkie
Today we discuss:
- Why it is critical to break away from hiring best practices
- Process to create your Own “best practices” that crush your competitors
Challenge today?
Beliefs
- There really is NO right way to hire
- Hiring Fails are acceptable (50% success rate)
- Cost of doing business
- Copy those who are already successful
- Google today is much different than Google at your stage.
- Evaluate for cultural fit… you evaluate for skills
- People from name brand companies are great hires
- They may be…. If they are builders
- Most people that are willing to leave big companies are not high performers
- High performers have “golden handcuffs” - best to rent
- More candidates give me a greater chance of success
-
- More candidates = time loss
- Target
- 1-3 people per position into the Interview process
Focus
- Top of funnel
- Reliance on job boards
Execution
- Interview training
How do we solve the problem?
What to believe
- Strong hires come from someone in your network
- Positioning before Skills
- Positioning is in a person’s DNA
- Builder, Improver, Maintainer
- Only builders will help you grow the company
Focus on the interview, not the funnel
- The Interview process is what wins hires, not the number of candidates
- Current best practices are:
- 10-15 minutes on a “screening call”
- Selling the company
- Selling the job
- Gather requirements
- Schedule an interview
- 10-15 minutes on a “screening call”
- Importance of the Discovery call
-
- Biggest time investment is to be made
- Determines a person's positioning (builder, improver, maintainer)
- Invaluable insight into a person’s pain, what they desire
- Impact they have brought into their current organization (key indicator of a builder)
Make Interviewing your strongest talent
- Solidify your process
- Timing
- from first contact to offer acceptance
- Timing of each interview (45-1 hour)
- Rules
- Interviews start and end on time!
- No meandering
- Timing
- Steps - Discovery call, Interview (video, onsite) -number of interviewers
- Content- pre determine & assign interview questions
- Questions must be designed to surface evidence of value alignment
- Not about asking questions but having conversations
- Broadcast your process
- Make it known that the interview is challenging
- Hire for Value Alignment first!
- Make it known that you foster growth for “builders”
- No Evidence, no vote
-
- Interviewers need to be trained!
- Roleplaying
- Recording conversations
- Bias has no merit
- Either a “Hell Yes” or a no
- Decision must be supported by evidence
- Interviewers need to be trained!
Rick's Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
Podcast: https://www.stridesearch.com/hire-power-radio
Authored: Healing Career Wounds (Amazon)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B094TL14CD/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
HireOS inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Friday Nov 26, 2021
Friday Nov 26, 2021
Emotional Intelligence is defined as the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically.
Over the past year, EQ has become less important to companies because of the NEED for someone to fill the seat. This is just creating more problems, as less care is invested into uncovering the fit into the organization.
We need to understand that high performers are taking their time to find the right opportunity. So this is your wake up call to SLOW down!
Now, more than ever, it is critical to cultivate our own emotional intelligence & implement intelligent hiring practices into your organization.
Our guest today: Nada Nasserdeen, Founder of Rise Up For You
With over 10 years of experience as a college professor and former top executive for an education corporation, Nada understands the importance of fusing education, empowerment, and leadership together as she works with her clients and speaks to audiences worldwide.
Her company, Rise Up For You has been featured and worked with brands such as CBS, Google Next 19, and various Fortune 500 companies as well as small businesses.
Nada has been awarded 40 under 40 professionals in Orange County, California, and Women of Influence for Entrepreneurship in 2021.
She is a #1 Best Selling Author on Amazon, Leadership and Career Confidence Coach, and 2x TEDx Motivational Speaker.
Today we discuss:
- Emotional Intelligence and Why it needs to be front and center
- How to activate emotional intelligence into your hiring process
Challenge today?
- Building technology at such a fast rate
- Learning is not catching up
- Result: Huge gap in human skills
- Most values are human skills
- Not looking as values as a benchmark to hire
- Fostering the culture of human skills in the company so you can embrace
- Social skills are creating problems for the organization
- Active values
Why is this important to the company?
- Result
- Executives who implement Emotional intelligence in hiring
- Practicing EI- when things opened up 87% of her team, others were at 12%
- Sales increase of 325%
Rick’s Nuggets
- Feeding frenzy from the company end
- NOW is the time to SLOW down.
- Candidates are taking their time
- Easy to manage the timeline through communication
- Must progress through to conclusion
How do we solve the problem?
- Vales need to be activated around EQ
- Take each value 1 by 1 and figure out how to activate it in the culture.
- Steps to put values into action plan
- Create a value campaign
- Plan to execute the value
- Coach, train and provide development on these skills
- On going, not a 90 minute
- Enough training to be able to trainer, you no longer need a consulting company
- 6 month engagement
- Skills don't grow overnight
- Accurate company analysis
- Gauge on where the company is as far as strengths and weaknesses
- Can not make an impact unless you know the truth
- Survey to uncover where the work needs to be done
- Looking for evidence
Rick’s Nuggets
- Making the values a language
- Decisions made by the north star
- Emotional intelligence needs to be tied directly to your values
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! - Value:
- Do an assessment - understand who and where your company is
- Reevaluate the values and create a strategic map around implementation Ongoing training around soft skills to build the muscles within your team
Guest Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadalena/
Company: https://www.riseupforyou.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/riseupforyou/about/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RiseUpForYou/
Twitter: :https://twitter.com/riseupforyou?lang=en
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/riseupforyou/?hl=en
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/RiseUpForYou/featured
FREEBIE: https://calendly.com/riseupforyou/freetraining
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Rick’s Book - Healing Career Wounds:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B094TL14CD/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Thursday Nov 18, 2021
Thursday Nov 18, 2021
How do you compete against a huge company like Amazon or even a really well funded startup?
If you are competing checkbook to checkbook, you will lose… Every time!
The only way to tilt the odds in your favor today is to really understand the career wounds of the person and to be able to connect the dots as to how your opportunity fulfills their desires.
This requires you to listen. Stop selling and start understanding what is important to the individual. This will allow you to stand out from the competition and allow the person you need to hire to see value above and beyond the paycheck.
Our guest today: Michael Downing, Founding Partner of MDSV Fund
Michael is a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur, has co-founded 6 software companies over a 28 year career, 3 of his companies were acquired and one had an IPO in 2006.
For the last 3 years, Downing has focused on investing in promising early-stage tech companies via his venture capital fund MDSV. Michael has recruited, hired and managed hundreds of employees over the span of his career.
Today we discuss:
- Why leading with the checkbook is a very bad idea
- How to win talent by NOT leading with the money
Challenge today?
- People are getting paid crazy numbers
- People need to have a major passion of belief in the company
- Now this is a requirement
- Conviction & belief are the new requirement
- wild/ disruptive concepts draw in talent
- Without a big/bold vision you struggle- pirate ship opportunity- highly disruptive company
Why is this important to the company?
- Key positions are being filled by people doing side hustles
- Full Time at companies like facebook
- Necessity for side hustles
Rick’s Nuggets
- People are jumping ship because they no longer align with the company values
- Too often big salaries = lot’s of problems (attrition, toxic culture, bad leadership, undefined work)
- If someone turns you down for a higher offer, you blew your hiring process.
- “Rent gold before buying silver” - Steve Newcomb
How do we solve the problem?
- Be new, bold, unique, disruptive concept- big vision
- A new way to solve a problem, product in a totally different way
- Investor pitch- ½ people say “that's crazy”- your onto something
- Make believers in what you are doing
- Build an advisory board first
-
- Thoughtful about who the members are
- Translates to 6-12 contacts that can be team members
- Credibility
- Positioning
- Funding
Rick’s Nuggets
- Have a interviewing process (you are being judged too)
- People to take you seriously
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! - Value:
- Set Yourself Up For Hiring Success: It's got to be a Big, Bold, Kickass Vision
- Plant Your Roots Early: Your advisory board can be the single most valuable hiring resource in the earliest of days
- Don't Conform: Adapt Your Policies & Benefits to people's changing lifestyles
Guest Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldowning/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/michael.downing.7161953
Twitter: https://twitter.com/michaeldowning
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Nov 11, 2021
Thursday Nov 11, 2021
Asking for help as an entrepreneur is often a difficult thing to do. But it is the one thing you MUST do if you want to succeed.
I learned this from my friend, Lori Torres, the founder of Parcel Pending. Lori was able to grow the company from $0 to a $100M exit in six years … and the reason it was such a success is because she asked for help… a lot!
Asking for help gets people engaged. It allows them to gain insight into the business and is critical in getting over the business humps. It also sets the stage to hire outstanding people.
And guess what, people will do it because they want to help.
Our guest today: Vincent Kimura, Co-Founder of Smart Yields.
A Hawaii-based and globally recognized agriculture technology company that is revolutionizing the way small- and medium-scale farms operate.
Vincent was named the 2016 Clean Tech/Ag Entrepreneur by the Hawaii Venture Capital Association and a 2016 finalist in the Pacific Business News Business Leadership Awards.
He was also named to the Pacific Business News 2016 40 Under 40 cohort, which recognizes outstanding young business professionals in Hawaii. He lives in Honolulu with his wife Lisa and their three children.
Vincent faces the daily challenges of start-up life and is here to share his learnings.
Today we discuss:
- Why it is important to ask for help
- How to get the help you need when hiring
Challenge today?
Asking for help to support your hiring process as a startup founder?
- Understanding how a person is positioned
- How willing to take on risk
- Introductions- changing the dynamics to leverage more mentorship
- Passion for the mission of the company
- Concerned about the perception from the outside
- We end up hiring to fill a need vs. what the business needs
Why is this important to the company?
- Wasn't able to grow in a natural way
- Fully driven by the CEO
- Passion might be there but
- Less emphasis on trying people out vs. All in
- The team is the make or break
Rick’s Nuggets
- Big difference between people who want to do the work and those who do the work for the paycheck.
- Eliminate the Assumptions
Hey Subscribers! Keep an eye out for our newsletter as we are giving away 10 signed copies of Healing Career Wounds! Simply complete the linked survey and your name will be entered in the drawing. You'll also be able to download a free chapter of the book just for participating!
How do we solve the problem?
- Define what the business needs
- Core values
- The business strategy & model
- What needs to be done & when
- Understand the person's desire
- Go Slow
- Identify builders… and Improvers
- Discovery call
- Builders will tell you they need to build (bored with the work)
- Eliminate the Assumptions
- Hire what the business needs
- Your ego, wants and assumptions
- Start with contractors
- Barter
- Letting go
- Stop doing everything yourself!
Rick’s Nuggets
- Help someone else's business while they help you build yours
- Expectations alignment document- will solidify a fit for your leadership team
- Business needs - support to grow
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! - Value:
- Don’t wing it….
- Get help and plan it out…. Do your homework
Guest Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentkimura/
Company: https://smartyields.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/smartyields/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/smartyields
Twitter: https://twitter.com/smartyields
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smartyields/
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Rick's book - Healing Career Wounds (Amazon)
Thursday Nov 04, 2021
Thursday Nov 04, 2021
The reason we do this show every week is to dispel the commonly held belief that “there is no right way to hire”. Most entrepreneurs & investors believe that you just have to find the right skills and “trust your gut”. Hoping that the person works out.
The consequences of this thinking results in countless sleepless nights, missing project deadlines, unstable mental health, increased capital burn and ultimately company failure. Which is NOT good for investors, leaders or the people who follow us.
Here’s the truth... There is a right way to hire! It just requires that you learn from your peers who come on to share their hiring success. They all have developed a structure and a process that allows them to stand out from their competitors.
Lead a person through an impressive process that allows you to gain evidence of impact and you will build an amazing team.
Our guest today: Darrian Mikell, Co-Founder & CEO of Qualifi, A SaaS platform that powers the fastest phone interview experience in the world and helps recruiting teams hire great candidates faster than ever before.
Darrian graduated from Indiana Wesleyan University in 2013 with a Bachelor's Degree in Entrepreneurship and Finance. Darrian was a 2-sport athlete in both Basketball and Track & Field and was a national champion in the Long Jump. He is based in the Indianapolis area and is a dedicated husband and father of 3.
Darrian is building a ridiculously successful business because he already conquered his hiring challenges.
Today we discuss:
- Why it is important to care about your interview structure
- Two Components you need to successfully hire and sleep better at night
Challenge today?
- Candidates have options
- Options are unlimited - a lot of remote options
- Workforce has expanded from local to global competition
Why is this important to the company?
- Not hiring the right people limits growth
- Hiring the wrong people -
- Wrong people take you down the wrong path
- When people doesn't work out - back to the drawing board
- Case study- grew to 73, hired over 100 people and is now 21 people.
- $7mm wasted!
- Major money waste
- 25% hiring success rate
- Wrong leaders, wrong investors
Rick’s Nuggets
- You must stand out to draw people in
How do we solve the problem?
- Planning out hiring
- Proactive to get someone in the seat on time
- Gap analysis- Knowing the gaps on the team
- Problems that need to be solved
- Structured approach to the hiring process
- Pre-planning your process and mechanics
- Use the Qualifi tool for screening
- Phone interviews
- Automated phone screen
- Pre-recorded, audio-based questions
- Every candidate gets same exact experience (makes the review process more consistent)
- Time is a huge factor in recruitment and efficiency can be an advantage
- First to candidate can be important factor
- Pre-scripted live interviews
- Assigned interview questions (round robin)
- Each person takes notes throughout the interview
- Real time feedback with the team to make a decision quickly
Rick’s Nuggets
- Phone screen (discovery call) is the biggest missed opportunity
- Opportunity to understand the person.
- Critical - positioning (what the person desires)
- Interview- eliminate bias
- Consistent plug n play- same questions for every person
- Decisions made based on evidence, not opinion
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! -Value:
- Proactively plan
- Understand who you need to hire, when you need to hire them, and how long it will take
- Plan your strategy and what each step looks like
- Plan your interviews
- Create an interview script and get agreement on it with your team before the interview starts. Be prepared to iterate.
Guest Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrianmikell/
Company: https://www.qualifi.hr/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/qualifihr/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/qualifihr
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DarrianMikell
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/darrianmikell/
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Oct 28, 2021
Thursday Oct 28, 2021
We are in full swing of this “Great Resignation” and a record 4.3 million people quit their jobs in August.
If you are one of the business leaders who have been losing people, please realize that it is not them, It is YOU! People are quitting because they no longer align themselves with your company values … especially the mandated policies in and around the pandemic.
Right now, there are much better options in the form of growth and career satisfaction. Which is why people are taking their time in locating the opportunity that they really want.
So, if you want to stop the attrition and be able to hire strong people, get solid on your values and focus on what each individual is desiring in terms of their personal career growth.
Today we are discussing exactly what you need to do to become an employer of choice to start winning great people!
Our guest today: Leilani Quiray, Founder & CEO of Be The Change HR
A conscious company and social enterprise, providing HR support for small-to-medium sized businesses in any facet of HR from pre-hire to post-term and everything else that happens in between. Her and her team also teach free job readiness courses and provide free coaching to individuals who’ve been trafficked, homeless and veterans in transition. Her team is not only HR Pros, they are Life Changers.
Today we discuss:
- What people really want today from their careers in this great resignation
- The elements you need implemented in your company to successfully hire the strongest people
Challenge today?
- Why employees REALLY are choosing new employers?
- How to become the employer of choice today?
- People think they know what people want, but they don't know
- Money
- Benefits
- Perks
- Unrealistic vision (modeling google)
- What the owner wants (I like X so they’ll like X)
- What is it that people REALLY want?
- “Experts stress that people are leaving their jobs as workers across the country are demanding higher pay, better employment conditions and critical support in their daily lives.”
Why is this important to the company?
- Companies need humans
- ethics/moral duty to have a healthy workforce
- ROI
- More engagement = more profitable of a company
Rick’s Nuggets
- Flexibility: Personal freedom is a real issue!
- Attrition is happening due to continued company vaccine policies
- Both for and against
- “Don't want to be micromanaged”
- What does not matter … as much
- Compensation
- Benefits & Perks
How do we solve the problem?
- Ask your people
- Needs are different
- Use buckets core values & data on why people choose companies/stay at companies
- Survey your people unanimously
- Use data to make decisions
- Communicate back - low morale and distrust if you do not
- Job requirements reasonable? (also think DEI and diverse hires)
- Education and where (Harvard?) - biggest hurdle
- Opens the hiring pool to disadvantaged candidates
- Compensation Analysis
- Market Value
- Free tools BLS
- By demographics too
- Market Value
- Employer branding
- What do you look like publicly?
- Core values shine?
- How awesome you are should show!
- Evil Glassdoor (aka the Yelp for employers)
- Get ahead of the bad reviews by getting good ones
- Damage control and a look at ones own org if you already have bads ones
- Take a look at who you are hiring
- Core Value Work
- Do you have them?
- Assess them
- Tool?
- Book?
- Live them
- Weave them into everything
- We ask “are we living our core values?”
- Language within the company and how decisions are made
Rick’s Nuggets
- Are your values real?
- Job requirements need to be eliminated and replaced with performance metrics
- Form of conscious bias
- Performance Metrics = Accountability
- Interview for core value alignment
- Value alignment is the only true measure to ensure performance and tenure
- No reason to move when you provide everything a person desires
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! -Value:
- Do Pulse Check Surveys!
- Rethink your recruiting strategy: job requirements, your online presence, comp analysis
- LIVE your core values!
Guest Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leilaniquiray/
Company: https://bethechangehr.org/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bethechangehr/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bethechangehumanresources/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bethechangehr
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bethechangehr/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqsQa5CXid2I0xQwiVyE2nw/featured
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Oct 21, 2021
Thursday Oct 21, 2021
While everyone is chasing the same people, ie: those who work for competitors or the 3-7 year up-and-comers, there is a huge pool of talent that are on the sidelines waiting for a well positioned opportunity to present itself.
I’d like to challenge you to think about the concept that outstanding talent comes from the most unlikely places.
Last week we heard the story of a top sales performer at Swag.com who had no sales experience at all. But the Desire alignment was through the roof and now this person is absolutely thriving in their organization. The creativity & outside the box thinking is what sets the stage for success!
Today is all about hiring outstanding sales people in an environment that is ridiculously competitive.
Our guest today: Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell
For 30 years Chris Beall has led software start-ups as a founder or early-stage developer. He believes the most powerful part of a software system is the human being, and that the value key is to let the computer do what it does well — go fast without getting bored — in order to free up human potential.
Chris and his team provide a SaaS solution for sales teams to talk to more prospects, and hosts a podcast, Market Dominance Guys.
Today we discuss:
- Why you are looking in the WRONG places for sales talent
- How to adapt your hiring model to uncover high performing sales people
Challenge today in hiring sales people?
- Can't find people
- Everyone is chasing the same (wrong) people
- Get bid up (too expensive)
- Takes forever to train
- They bounce
- Not interested in the job
- Huge untapped pool of talent (over 40)
Why is this important to the company?
- Adopting a 2 tier model you
- Flow rate of meetings is a bottleneck of almost every company
- Always invest in the bottleneck
Rick’s Nuggets
- Value alignment within the organization is more important than ever before
- Connecting the dots between values & desire avoids bidding wars
- Creating value above and beyond the paycheck
- People do not leave when they are in alignment
How do we solve the problem?
- Change your model
- Make SDR as a real professional job
- Look at different age demographics
- Identify people who come from the industry you sell to
- Huge untapped pool of talent (over 40)
- Interview like you mean it
- Test people. Have them do some work
- Have 10 conversations
- Good voice
- Can you make people laugh
- Modulating your voice
- Listen to the conversation
- Coachable
- Length of time you keep people on a call
- Good voice
Rick’s Nuggets
- “Walk me through the process how you closed your last deal”
- Scripts are king!
- Align your interview process with your company values
- To properly assess people you need to be able to evaluate them for alignment
Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! - Value:
- Take the SDR role seriously and not just as a stepping stone. (your company’s bottleneck
- Embrace real management for sales- pay attention to process
- The only thing a SDR needs to do is sell a meeting… not the product.
Guest Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-beall-7859a4/#
Company: https://connectandsell.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/chris8649
Blog: http://blog.connectandsell.com/
Podcast: https://www.marketdominanceguys.com/
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Oct 14, 2021
Thursday Oct 14, 2021
Growing your company from 2 to 10 people is the most critical time in your company's life cycle. The reason for this is every single hire that is made can make or break the company.
Every founder I meet has a story of “we hired a person that we thought was going to be a rockstar and it turned out to be a disaster”.
So where do things go wrong when a bad hire is made?
The interview was run from a position of need; where we focus on selling the opportunity. So excited to get this new rockstar on board that we totally forget to take the time to understand if the person aligns with the values of the organization.
The good news is there is a solution to avoid these sometimes deadly mistakes and it just requires structure and developing your listening muscle.
Our guest today: Jeremy Parker, Co-Founder and CEO of Swag.com
Swag.com is the best place for companies to buy and distribute quality swag that people will actually want to keep. We work with 5,000+ companies including Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify and Tik Tok.
Jeremy was named to Crain's NY 40 under 40 (Class of 2020) and Swag is #218 on the Inc 500 (2020) and #368 (2021)- Fastest growing private companies
Today we discuss:
- The importance of the first 10 hires
- Process to avoid making the wrong hire
Challenge today?
- Hiring for the resume
- People who have done it in the past
- Not about the skills but the culture
- One bad hire can destroy a business
Why is this important to the company?
Story: First 2 years just the founders. Then scaled quickly to 14 people
- Who you hire in the early days is super important. Need to be the right fit, for the right time. They could be a great person and extremely talented but if they are not the right fit for the time it can go sideways.
- Up to 70 people now and everyone is ability is important, skills not as important, as culture
How do we solve the problem?
- Stop micromanaging
- Guide & teach & trust that people will get it
- Allow people who are hiring to do the job
- Right mentality & Right focus (embracing failure)
- Failure is ok
- Embrace it!
- 4 rounds of interviews
- First meet with Department Head. If that goes well, meet with someone who is currently in that same position in the company, to make sure they feel this person can do the job well.
- If that goes well, meet with the COO,
- if that goes well, meet with CEO.
- If the candidate gets through all rounds and everyone feels they could be a good fit, we get at least two reference checks. Someone who they worked under and someone who they worked alongside.
Rick’s Nuggets
- Evaluate everyone around your values
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Being ok with failure! Nothing can go wrong when you are ok with it. Failure will get you where you need to go.
Guest Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyianparker/
Company: https://swag.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/swag.com/
Twitter:https://twitter.com/promotewithswag?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/promotewithswag/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swagdotcom/?fbclid=IwAR1TnFCOQ8kv-chtsiP5wKexliw55YISu2rESPCLGUu86tEynikmspBy9xc
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Corp
Thursday Oct 07, 2021
Thursday Oct 07, 2021
4 Million Americans quit their jobs in July of 2021 , according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. What this means is that you have a tremendous opportunity to upgrade your talent base in your organization.
The pandemic has magnified people’s career wounds in a way that every business will be impacted.
While many reasons are given as to the cause of this mass exodus, the root of the fall out is that the people leaving are no longer in alignment with the company’s values.
Value alignment is now more critical than ever to attract and hire people. Because when people align with the actual company values, they find meaning & discover their purpose.
And their purpose is far more important to them than your profits.
Today is a special episode due to the massive number of requests from our audience about this little problem called the great resignation
We discuss:
- Why it is critical to own your company values
- How to prosper in Hiring - TODAY!
Challenge today?
- My people are getting poached!
- We have come to a point where people want meaning & purpose in their lives.
- Perks, compensation & benefits no longer matter
- People are questioning their “why”
- Imbalance
- Stress & heartache
- More flexibility is not the real issue
- Inc Article https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/great-resignation-work-meaning-esther-perel.html
- Demonstrating meaning & the company cares about them as “human beings”
Why is this important to the company?
- Who’s leaving?
- Mid- career employees have the highest resignation rates! (30-45)
- You are positioned to heal a person's career wounds.
- When you align with values and provide a solution to heal, both parties WIN
- People are expecting win-win relationships with their employers
- The Great Opportunity!
- Easiest time in history to engage A-Players!
- Raise the performance bar in your organization
4 Steps to Win-Win Talent in this Great Resignation
Get solid on your Values
- Key to attracting top performers
- Who you are
- how you lead
- how people act
Understand your Recruiting Process
- Recruiting is how you identify people & get people to talk to you.
- Just because you recruited someone great, doesn't mean you should hire them
- Or that they will even accept your job offer
- What is working today
- Target and Contact & Reconnect
- Do not sell, listen
Understand your Hiring Process
- Start with an in depth Discovery call (phone screen)
- Does this person’s desires align with the company (correctly positioned)
- Not skills
- Vision for the environment in which they will excel
- Timed & structured Interview
- Values alignment first
- Skills second (working session)
- Nurture a proactive flow - allow the person to have a voice in what happens next
- What would you like to do next?
Heal the Career Wound
- Growth, Content of work, Management
- Value Alignment
- Progression, learning, flexibility
- If you cannot provide a path to the individual, don't hire
- Someone else will thrive in the role
- You will be just a paycheck (if the person joins)
Key Takeaways -Value:
- The “Great Resignation” is real and you need to be capitalizing on the opportunity that has been presented to us!
- Get tight on the company values… They are the key to a successful hire
- Don't confuse a recruiting process as a hiring process. They are two separate activities.
Rick's Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
Podcast: https://www.stridesearch.com/hire-power-radio
Book: Healing Career Wounds - https://www.amazon.com/Healing-Career-Wounds-Ridiculously-Successful/dp/173580360X
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Sep 30, 2021
Thursday Sep 30, 2021
Time and People are the most precious asset your company has on the road to success or failure.
As leaders, It is our responsibility to protect the time of our team to ensure that projects are delivered on time. It is also our responsibility to put processes in place that ensure that the strongest people are in the right seat!
Shouldn't each step of the interview process have a purpose and save time for everyone involved?
Yet Interviewing is the single point of failure in almost every company.
Too long.
Too short.
No clear direction.
Or riddled with boobytraps that repel strong people from even engaging with your company!
Our guest today: Andrew Bartlow, Founder & Managing Partner of Series B Consulting.
Which helps businesses to articulate their people strategy and accelerate their growth while navigating rapid change. He also founded the People Leader Accelerator, which is the foremost development program for HR leaders at startups.
Andrew Bartlow has 25 years of Human Resources and Talent Management experience at organizations across a wide spectrum of sizes, maturity stages, and industries. He is the co-author of “Scaling for Success: People Priorities for High Growth Organizations,”
Andrew has worked with clients like MasterClass and many others to help them overcome obstacles in a hyper-growth phase.
Today we discuss:
- Why your timing kills hires
- How to Time out your process in the most effective manner
Challenge today?
Filling roles with good people with less of an internal organization tax
Too many interviews, too much time - I’m out
- Over emphasis on consensus, 10-12 people over multiple rounds
- Giant time drag on a company
- People fall out
- Offer to close rate 60% is not good!
Why is this important to the company?
- Time - interview time takes away from productivity
- Rapid growth is usually essential. Time burns cash runway, employee time and goodwill, and competitors keep coming.
- Efficiency matters - particularly at the early growth stages
- Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Should be able to make rapid hire / no-hire decisions, and fair/reasonable separation decisions without months of agony.
- “Hire slow and fire fast?” I’d suggest looking for a goldilocks zone on both. Take the time necessary, but not one minute more than what is net value-adding to do both.
Rick’s Nuggets
- All that is needed is:
- Discovery Call
- Value Alignment Interviews
- Working Session (skills)
- 10 business days max
How do we solve the problem?
- Start by clearly defining the roles that you want to fill
- Source candidates in a scalable way
- Expand the pool
- Employer branding
- @ Series A should get beyond friends & family network
- Hire a dedicated recruiter
- Need a screen / filter before the manager sees the candidate
- Passive candidate magnet
- Check for compensation expectations & role interest; initial assessment of required skills, knowledge, and experiences
- Goal is that ZERO candidates make it to the hiring manager who have out-of-bounds pay or role expectations, and all of those candidates moving forward have experiences that reasonably match the role
- Manager vetting before meeting the team
- One and done interview process ~30 minutes 1on1 via video
- Confirm that the candidate is interested in the role and the comp budgeted - preclose the candidate
- Ask for references here!
- A candidate shouldn’t come meet with a team until / unless the hiring manager is a strong advocate to hire them. Don’t waste the broader team’s time.
- Work Product Sample (optional - often good for technical roles, but rarely for G&A)
- Give a real problem - don’t spend a lot of time coming up with hypotheticals, too many variations which will change
- Faster / easier / more accurate to work on a real problem. Just get an NDA.
- Related alternatives - Can review Github rather than request a project. Can conduct a live shared-screen working session. Can ask for examples of prior work that demonstrates a good fit for the role.
- LOTS of candidates drop out at the project stage. Don’t let this become a barrier!
- Team Screen
- One and done over video, with multiple people involved
- Cultural (watermelon @ Gusto) interviews have a risk of being counterproductive. To be effective it should be structured, interviews have good training, and the traits assessed should be really clear AND ALIGNED with the future needs of the org. Danger of holding onto the past - what got you here, won’t get you there.
- Decision
- After the team screen, there should be a hire / no-hire decision. Lots of organizations get hung up comparing candidates, not sure what they are looking for. You need to fill jobs with good people and KEEP MOVING. A hiring manager / hiring team which isn’t sure what they are looking for is the single largest waste of time and energy in the company-building process.
- Can have a calibration meeting. Maybe the recruiter supports it, but really, the hiring manager should own the decision and have the most energy around moving forward.
- Offer & Candidate Closing
Rick’s Nuggets
- Reverse engineer the time to hire and set timelines for each stage
- Set process before you define roles
- Train your people on “how you hire”
- Gain commitment from interviewers for excellence
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Streamline your process. Fill jobs with less time from the team. May or may not fill the role in fewer days, but can reduce total hours committed by the group from 100+ to closer to 10. Yes, this requires a bit more ownership and potentially a little more time (per candidate) from the HM, but should dramatically reduce the overall time by the team.
Guest Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bartlow/
Company: https://www.seriesbconsulting.com/
Speak On Podcasts: https://speakonpodcasts.com/andrew-bartlow/
People Leader Accelerator: https://www.peopleleaderaccelerator.com/
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Sep 23, 2021
Thursday Sep 23, 2021
Hire slow, fire fast is a motto we have all heard as startup founders. It makes logical sense but what really happens is quite the opposite. As entrepreneurs we shift into panic mode when we have a need and move quickly to fill the role. Completely missing all the evidence that this person will be a bad hire.
Once the person is in the seat, the dread of having to refill a role often leads to concessions made to the detriment of the business.
Hiring Slow means investing the time to really make sure the person will be a strong hire. Therefore there should be no need to fire fast. Especially if you really understand who the person is and gain evidence of the value they add to the company.
Think of each person you hire as being worth $2 million dollars to the company. Changes your perspective, right?
A lot more care and a higher talent bar would be prioritized over just “filling the seat”.
Our guest today: Joseph Fung, Founder & CEO of Uvaro
A tech sales career accelerator, and of Kiite, a sales enablement platform purpose-built to provide sales teams with the information they need when they need it. Joseph’s a repeat Founder & CEO, and with multiple successful exits, and speaks frequently on the topics of sales leadership, diversity, and corporate social responsibility.
Joseph is an expert in sales, startups and building scalable culture.
Today we discuss:
- Our mentality around hiring sales people
- How to effectively attract & hire high performers
Challenge today?
- Hiring for software skills rather than problem solving skills
- No internal training- want someone who already doing what you need done
- Rely on stereotypes and gut
- Need people who can speak to a bigger variety of customers
Why is this important to the company?
- Fix the problem, you can triple the production of 1st year sales reps
- 8 months to ramp, average sales rep only achieves 60% of quota
- Ramp in ⅓ time and drive production to 80% - Training
- Churn & burn kills morale
- Cash costs are immense on the back end
How do we solve the problem and hire the strongest people every time?
- Throw out your job description
- Translate ideal customer to sales job description
- Ideal Customer Profile- go granular
- Choosing what & who to hire
- Invest in Revops & sales enablement
- 50:1 ratio Rep to SE is a start => move to 20:1
- Mindset
- Treating the organization with respect
- Thinking is you solve the problem by hiring more people
- Interview
- Culture fit interview - “Is this someone I want to have a beer with?” not
- Turn it into a behavioral interview - what behaviors demonstrate values alignment
Rick’s Nuggets
- Performance metrics are most critical component today for job descriptions today
- Accountability up front
- Understanding a person’s positioning
- Transactional Sale VS. Enterprise/Solutions Sale
- Resources available
- Builder, Improver, Maintainer
- Uncovering the impact that has been made in their current/former position
- Save time, increase revenue
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Throw out your job description . Copying others is just propagating bad habits
- Stop asking people to sell like the founders - it won’t work
- Re-think your culture fit interviews...write behavioral questions
Guest Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephfung/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/josephfung
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/josephfung/
Company: https://uvaro.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/school/uvarolife/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/uvarolife
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/uvaro.life
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uvaro.life/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/uvaro
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Sep 16, 2021
Thursday Sep 16, 2021
“There is work that needs to be done and I just need someone good to do the work”
*** sigh ***
This is what we tell ourselves when we decide to hire someone. But it is so much deeper than just getting a butt in the seat!
Growth is the most important factor here. So, we must start with the end in mind to avoid making HUGE hiring mistakes!
Yes, we need to get the work done but will this person really help your company grow? And more importantly, can your company provide the growth that the person you want to hire desperately desires?
Our guest today: Mike Zani, CEO of The Predictive Index.
Mike Zani, the Wall Street Journal best selling author of The Science of Dream Teams, is CEO of The Predictive Index, the leader in talent optimization. Prior to The Predictive Index, Mike served as president of LEDCO, a manufacturer of rugged computer peripherals. It was at LEDCO where Mike, a customer of The Predictive Index, developed his passion for the company’s vital management tools.
An avid sailor, Mike began his career in marketing and sales with Vanguard Sailboats and was a coach for the 1996 U.S. Olympic Sailing Team. He holds a B.S. from Brown University and an MBA from Harvard.
Today we discuss:
Hiring for Talent optimization
- What is talent optimization
- How to hire for it
Challenge today?
How to you hire well within the context of time & risk
- What risk are you willing to take on bad hires?
- Systems in place to support the risk
- 30, 60, 90 day check ins to support
- Do you just want t body in a seat
- Persona
- A talent optimized system allows you to train & develop
- Need to develop the programs to support
Why is this important to the company?
- We are 30 years behind sport in bringing analytics for hiring
- What is sport doing now?
- TA is the single most important function in the organization
- Need to take a maniacal approach to hiring.
- Fantasy league hiring takes more time than hiring to companies
- Data drives success
- Performance measurement
Rick’s Nuggets
- Getting the right person the the bus is FAR more important than getting work done
- If the work is that important, hire a contractor
- The mistake made is the optimism of the founder
- Assumptions
- Hire on their potential (assumed), bias (assumed) & need (get it off my plate)
- Zero time is taken to understand what the other person desires, other than a paycheck
- Consider this: The cost for every bad hire is $2M
How do we solve the problem?
- Top of funnel strategy
- Clear mission
- Hiring brand that attracts talent
- Palpable culture - Strong enough that it disqualifies people
- Great referral strategy - cash after 6 months,
- Bottom of funnel strategy
- Hiring systems
- Strong assessments -behavioral , cognitive, analytics
- Hiring process, structured interviewing
- Training- especially on cultural interview aspects
- interviewer grading, scoring, developing
- Remove people who are bad interviewers
- Post hire Strategy
- Benchmarks
- Performance systems - 30,60,90 day
- Hire for buoyancy!
Rick’s Nuggets
Mid Funnel Strategy
- The Interview
- Structured & timed
- Values aligned
- Challenging
- Does the interview produce evidence to support the decision
- Is the evidence supported by the assessment?
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Need a post-hire system!
- Can take more risk
- Need to have a feedback loop to add/subtract people from the interviewing process.
Guest Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikezani/
Company: https://www.predictiveindex.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/predictiveindex?lang=en
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/predictiveindex/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thepredictiveindex/?hl=en
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCexehrVsBrP9SiNeBm4pY7Q
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Sep 09, 2021
Thursday Sep 09, 2021
The first time I was fired was when I was 16 years old and working at Numero Uno Pizza. It happened really strangely, I went in to pick up my paycheck and the manager let me know that this paycheck would be my last one as I was no longer employed there.
No warning and no explanation.
Bewildered, I simply walked out the door, walked across the street and was hired by their competitor.
The way in which the whole experience went down, left me feeling embarrassed & resentful.
Never again did I eat at that restaurant because of the way they made me feel.
Our guest today: Lori Torres, Founder & Former CEO of Parcel Pending
The nation’s leading provider of innovative package management solutions. Prior to Parcel Pending, Lori was SVP of property operations at The Irvine Company.
She has been recognized on multiple occasions for her leadership, including being named 2017 “Innovator of the Year” by the Orange County Business Journal and chosen as one of 13 entrepreneurs admitted into the EY Entrepreneurial Winning Women™ 2017 North America class.
Lori worked to build a world class organization and is going to share her wisdom.
Today we discuss:
- Making the difficult decision to part ways
- How to fire a person in a way that leaves everyone feeling good about themselves
Challenge today?
- When is the right time to make a change and terminate someone?
- Can you afford to do it, do you have the bandwidth
- Taking the time to really understand
- Have an intervention- performance improvement plan, use to be successful
- Articulate to really improve the person's performance
- Everything possible to make sure they are successful
- Accountability tool &
Why is this important to the company?
- Benefits: often find someone better
- Help the person you are terminating to the world,
- Embrace the people management side of the business
- Termination is part of the evolution of the company
- Change needs to happen,
- This is the game we are playing, these are the rules, here’s how we move forward
- What you need at $3mil is different at $10M
Rick’s Nuggets
- Be proactive in your hiring
- Hiring for growth first - start with the end in mind
- “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” - Maya Angelou
How do we solve the problem?
- Identify performance issues first
- Candid open, specific conversation
- Time frame to meet the expectations
- Check in: not meeting expectations,
- Provide a performance improvement plan
- Whatree performance is now, when they are not meeting expectations, when we are going to convenience to review
- Termination
- Reason for termination:
- Labor attorney- worth the money to handle things properly
- Quick conversation : next step, it is not working
- Part ways with dignity!
- Severance with a legal document release of liability & non-disparagement
- Walk them out the door and wish them well
- Offer help to help them move forward
- Sample Termination
- Rick gets Fired!
Rick’s Nuggets
- Really take seriously the performance metrics that were set for your people in the job description
- Evidence to support the hire first!
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Really spend the time to hire correct people. It's like dating, Interview a lot
- When the person is not performing, invest the time to
- Have non-confrontational conversations with people
Guest Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/loritorres/
Company: https://www.parcelpending.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ParcelPending
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/parcelpending
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/parcelpending/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFj7yh4kDC7Jx5CDUYnar7A
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Sep 02, 2021
Thursday Sep 02, 2021
Answer: Linking Corporate Values into Your Interview Questions eliminates bias
I posed the question to a room of over 400 corporate executives and the results shocked me when I first asked it. Now when I ask the question, the results just make me …. Sad.
“Please raise your hand if you have had any formal interview training at any time in your career, other than what not to say in an interview”. Three hands were raised. 3 out of over 400 people!
And we wonder why hiring is “hard”. Guess what, It is not so hard for companies like Amazon who, from the beginning, have structured and trained their people HOW to effectively interview people. This is why they have always been a talent magnet, and not because they pay well.
3 out of 400 people! This was a major a-ha moment for me and it should be one for you!
Imagine the impact your company will have on this planet when you and your people get really good at hiring.
Today we discuss:
- The importance of linking values to interviewing
- How to set up and execute a values driven interview
Challenge today?
- Talk about bias elimination
- cannot happen until interview questions are designed to extract evidence
- The content of the interview cannot be left up to chance
- The fate of each interviewee is determined in the first 15 minutes at most. Sometimes in the first 5 minutes….. All based on bias
- 51% chance that your decision is wrong
- Unchallenging, unimpressive interviews only attract people who are there for the paycheck
- Talented people (A-players, change makers & high performers) do NOT want to work for yahoos!
- Informal, unstructured & unprepared interviews make you look like a yahoo.
- Offer turn downs are at an all time high
Why is this important to the company?
- One word: AMAZON
- Leadership principles (company values) are what drives decision making
- Customer Obsession
- Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.
- Hire and Develop the Best
- Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice.
- https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles
- Talent is drawn toward excellence
How do we implement values driven interviewing?
- Clearly write down your company values
- Founders- this is you & your values
- As you ad people, reassess at least bi annual- especially before hiring ANYONE
- Develop Values
- Clear definition of what the values means to the company
- What attributes characterize each value
- Measurables (how does a person live the value in their day to day life?
- Sample exercise
Value #1 Dignity
Definition: Treating yourself and others with respect & courtesy
Attributes:
|
CEO |
Co-founder |
Dept Head |
|
acceptance |
Self-respect |
self-confidence |
|
Non judgemental |
equality |
Respect for others |
|
Self esteem- elevation |
decency |
Stands tall |
|
empowered |
Treat as equals |
Measurables:
*** Empowering others
*** Respect for others
*** Non-Judgemental
- Build interview Question Library
- Behavioral questions designed to bring evidence of how people “show up”
- "Tell me about a time...." or “Describe a time when….” or “Outline a time where….” or "Give me an example of..."
- Questions must be Indirect & not obvious to the interviewee
- Evidence to support Attributes
- Support / follow up question flow
Value #1 Dignity
Attributes:
*** Empowering others
*** Respect for others
*** Non-Judgmental
- Tell me about a time you helped elevate the performance of one of your teammates (Empowering Others)
- How did you learn of the issue?
- What were the events that led to this performance being important to you?
- How much time do you dedicate to the cause?
- How do you feel you could make more of a difference?
- What makes this important to you?
- What was the outcome?
- Give me an example of a time you stood up for a person you didn't know (Respect)
- What steps did you take?
- How did this affect the other person?
- What made this action important to you?
- Describe a really uncomfortable work situation that needed to be addressed that was personal to the other person? (Non-Judgmental)
- What were you asked to do?
- How did it make you feel?
- Reinforcement & Training
- Live your values
- Make it a language by which decisions are made (like Amazon)
- Teach everyone who interviews, how to extract evidence
- Capture data - training & compliance purposes
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Invest the time to build out your corporate values - the Payoff will be HUGE
- Take the next step and connect them to your interviewing
- Train your people! Part of their job is to other high performers so give them the tools to do so
Rick's Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/
Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/
Podcast: https://www.stridesearch.com/hire-power-radio
Book:https://www.amazon.com/Healing-Career-Wounds-Ridiculously-Successful/dp/173580360X
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Aug 26, 2021
Thursday Aug 26, 2021
You are at the point in your business where the company is ready to hire the first person to head up a department (i.e.: sales, marketing, engineering). You are excited and terrified at the same time. You’re thinking “I have to get this right”... and you are right, you do!
How do you evaluate a person with an area of expertise that you are NOT familiar with?
The answer, my friends, is being prepared, digging deep and really listening! Step outside of your first impression and be aware of your tendency of confirmation bias.
Shift your focus on gathering concrete evidence and the outcome will be the correct decision every time.
Our guest today: Liam Rose, Founder of Catalina Seven Ventures.
Liam is the founder of Catalina Seven Ventures, a Southern California consumer software startup. Before forming C7V, he managed the sales team for an Orange County-based entertainment startup. As a result of his own challenges trying to juggle health, academic obligations, and personal relationships while attending the University of Richmond, Liam created a new approach to life scheduling built to enable better balance. During his time at the Robins School of Business, he was selected as a 2019 Innovator Under 25.
Catalina Seven Ventures' first product, HORUS Life Schedule, is now available for Beta testing on iOS and Android (access available through the company website)."
Today we discuss:
- How to effectively make your first departmental hire
Challenge today?
Hiring the first person within a department
- How do you make that hire
- How do we know if the person is good
- What's the barometer
- First tech person, marketing, HR or finance person
How do you know if the person is the best person do the job at the current stage
- Culture & environment fit
- Metrics & deliverables
- How well they can make the connections between metrics and the outcome
Why is this important to the company?
- They will be the departmental cultural lead
- Top quality people hiring more top quality people
- The greatest impression people get is from the interview process itself
- Set the tone on how you are going to manage the person based on the interview process itself
- Improved interview process results in a higher level of talent
- Demonstrates the ability to understand the individual
- Ignorance of the process
Rick’s Nuggets
- Every hire is critical at every stage of your start up!
- Hire slow, fire slower-er-er
- Firing fast is negligence & kills culture (reduces trust, increases anxiety)
- Cult creation- Steve Newcomb (https://medium.com/cult-creation/cult-creation-a44303564f21)
- Firing fast “kills innovation, ownership and trust”
How do we solve the problem?
- Signaling - feel a unique attraction to our company
- Job Advertisement
- Distributed via word of mouth/referrals first
- The step beyond who we are. Bold- unapologetically ourselves
- Demonstration of understanding
-
- Interview process
- Realistic expectations
- Show that people can succeed
- Difficult but not impossible
- Show professional empathy
- What is going to make you most happy?
- What does the individual want?
- Communication preference, invest in every core operation of the company
- Calling the Hotline
- Advisor de-risk
- Outside influence to identify the obvious
Rick’s Nuggets
- Prepare yourself by adopting process, engage in interview training & experience
- Process: must have a flow and timing- Start on time, end on time
- Discovery call (45 minutes)
- Interview #1 Cultural (60 minutes)
- Deeply tied to corporate values/principles/culture
- Interview #2 Working Session - judge skills (60 minutes - ½ day)
- Live example of how we work together, problem solve, communicate
- Process: must have a flow and timing- Start on time, end on time
- Interview Training
- Behavioral interviews produce EVIDENCE to uncover the TRUTH
- Assign interview questions to the individual interviewers
- Prepare the candidate for what to expect
- Experience (not yours, theirs)
- A-players are attracted to excellence
- Leave everyone feeling good about their time investment
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Their language, not your language
- Gets you the people you want rather than the people you can get
- Use experience to de risk: everyone in your network. What you should avoid with absolute certainty
Guest Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liamwrose/
Company: http://catalina7ventures.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/c7vinc
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/catalina7ventures/
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Corp: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Aug 19, 2021
Thursday Aug 19, 2021
The key to retention is growth. With looming fears of “the great resignation” company’s are unsure as to how to structure the organization. Forcing a state of flux that is not healthy for the business.
The poles tell us that at least 40% of people will quit if forced to go back into the office full time. Will your company have a mass exodus? If you have not put your people first…. Most likely.
Companies who have been fostering personal & professional growth through leadership will experience far less separation because they have put their people in front of the transaction.
Our guest today: Sam Caucci , Founder & CEO of 1Huddle
A workforce tech company that upskills, trains, and motivates employees through science-backed, quick-burst mobile games.
Sam founded 1Huddle on the belief that every worker deserves access to the job training, support, and coaching needed to win on the job. Put simply, 1Huddle is making training more fun, effective, and accessible for the entire workforce.
Sam is also the author of the #1 bestseller, Not Our Job: How College has Destroyed a Generation of Workers and How to Fix it. Sam is an expert in workforce engagement and development.
Today we discuss:
- Why struggle based learning is the key to retention
- How to build learning into your culture
Challenge today?
- Training
- Do unto others as it was done to you
- Struggle is important to learning
- Leverage technology to increase outcomes
Why is this important to the company?
- Middle management job function is more important than ever
- How do we arm them to be better coaches to the front line
- 55% of workers are Millennials & GenZ
- They like structure
- Coaching up and development
- Struggle based learning
- Game based learning 45% faster!
- “Make it Stick” -Peter Brown
- "It's the Manager” Only 15% or workers are engaged (before pandemic)- Gallop
- #1 driver to engagement is having a coach
How do we solve the problem?
Struggle based learning
- Content Audit
- What do you have now?
- Gaps - Where are the business problems?
- Finding content: buy vs. build
- Selecting Technology (learning management system)
- Accessibility, Outcomes &
- Authoring
- What kind of staff is required to manage it
- Wrap learning in a game format
- Mobile first
- 52 week calendar (never ending game)
- Continual development
- Up-skilling (stop siloing workers)
- Reskill & re-onboard
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Workforce technology is making it easy to more effectively onboard every worker from frontline to full time
- Effective skill building and retention requires struggle
- Managers need better tools and strategies to onboard, develop and engage workers.
Guest Links:
Sam Caucci:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samcaucci/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/samcaucci
Company:
1Huddle: https://1huddle.co/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/1huddle
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/1huddle/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/1huddle/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/SalesHuddleAcademy
Author of the #1 bestseller: Not Our Job: How College has Destroyed a Generation of Workers and How to Fix it (Amazon)
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Crop: https://www.criteriacorp.com/
Thursday Aug 12, 2021
Thursday Aug 12, 2021
We can all agree that running a remote business has become very challenging from both a cultural and productivity perspective. If anything the past year and a half has taught us, it is that paying attention to the needs of our people is really hard. Especially when they are remote.
So how do we progress through this challenge and continue to grow?....Take on a social mission.
We have all heard the term “givers gain”. When your culture merges with cause, it propagates purpose. And, a shared purpose attracts value-aligned people and elevates company performance.
Our guest today: Brian Roland, Founder & Chairman of Abenity
Brian is a social entrepreneur and Founder of Abenity, the 6x Inc. 5000 company that’s powering corporate perks for top brands like U.S. Bank and Mastercard.
Abenity recently exceeded $1 million dollars of total giving!
Brian lives in Scottsdale, Arizona with his family and enjoys roasting coffee, flying drones, and helping impact-driven entrepreneurs establish a social mission of their own. He has built a fully remote, purpose driven organization that absolutely crushes it!
Today we discuss:
- Why cause brings purpose to your company
- How to build a social mission
Why don't we build cause into our companies from the beginning?
- Launched into remote work with a false positive
- Shared purpose needs to be outside your brand
- Fighting for is more powerful than fighting against
- People become lost on an island without purpose
- People need something bigger than their day to day routine to stay healthy
- Hybrid is dangerous… either all remote or onsite….
- Can create a resentment culture
Why is this important to the company?
- Process of navigating back from fully remote work
- Still very uncertainty
- Doing what is best for your work routine will breed resentment with my employees
- What mix is correct?
- Potential pitfalls in onsite, remote, hybrid
- Culture is what needs to be fought for above everything else
Rick’s Nuggets
- The more structure you have in your company early on, the easier it is to attract the Strongest/value-aligned people to the company.
- High performers are attracted to excellence, not ego.
- Excellence is structure
How do we solve the problem?
- Impact plan
- Define your giving model
- Put profits towards a cause
- Give from savings - what you save in rent
- Flat fee, percentage, 1 for 1
- Create a social mission statement
- Use this template to build a Social Mission Statement:
Here's a template that you may find useful for your social mission statement:
[your belief statement here],
and that's why we [summary of your impact plan here].
With this commitment, we're communicating a powerful message, [your purpose statement here, why you care about your cause].
Here's our Social Mission statement at Abenity:
Perks are about people and that's why we sponsor children living in extreme poverty with the programs we deliver.
With this commitment, we're communicating a powerful message,
that whether you're an employee at a Fortune 500 Company, or an orphan in the developing world, you are valuable, what you do matters, and you can make a difference.
- Share your impact story
- Publish an impact report (https://prks.co/Impact)
- Market the social mission
- Brand differentiation
- Everywhere you are comfortable
- Setting up accountability
- Who are you inviting in?
- Invite the team to hold everyone (including you) accountable
- Board, investors, cpa, and/or staff
- Identify blockers
- Anything that is holding back
- Debt
- Growth commitments
- Must overcome before you can embark on the mission
- “Once we achieve this as a team, then we start our mission of giving”
- Do what you said you would do!
Rick’s Nuggets
- Define the values that align with your cause
- Understand that
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Just show up
- Download the Impact Report to start your Social Mission
Guest Links:
To download the 5-Step Impact Plan, text “Impact” to (615) 802-6853
For more on creating a 5-Step Impact Plan, read “5 Steps to Maximize Your Business Impact” https://www.brianroland.com/single-post/5-steps-to-maximize-your-business-impact
For some inspiration, check out Abenity’s Impact Report to see how they’ve funded over a million dollars of direct giving at https://prks.co/Impact
To set a perks program for your group, visit Abenity.com and use code “HirePower150” to save $150 off your first month’s services.
Brian Roland: LinkedIn
Company: Abenity Twitter Facebook YouTube
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Crop
Thursday Aug 05, 2021
Thursday Aug 05, 2021
It is time to change our mindset on how to really attract and hire the strongest people. The answer is not having the greatest recruiters or tools. It is not about having strong “employer branding” or compensation plans. The answer is really simple... It is about gathering the evidence in the interview to support the decision without assumptions & bias.
Leadership drives hiring , not recruiting or HR.
Mic drop moment: There are two critical components to your people function. Recruiting & Hiring. Recruiting is run by, well, recruiters and Hiring is run by hiring managers, executives & founders.
To land the strongest people for your organization both functions must have structure, synergy and adequate training to be successful.
Our guest today: Brian Breth, Riot games alumni & former VP of Talent Acquisition at Fair
Brian is a talent acquisition leader and US Marine Corps veteran with 20 years of experience forging, adapting, and applying best practices to complex business challenges in recruiting. He has a proven track record as an entrepreneurial leader whose ability to align teams, enact change, and build sustainable frameworks enables businesses to attract top talent and become more efficient, productive, and competitive.
Specialties: Global talent acquisition strategy and operations, leadership coaching and development, team-building and communication, process development and implementation, networking.
Brian was responsible for scaling Rubicon Project from 200 to almost 800 people in two years.
Today we discuss:
- Why Quality is more important when you scale
- How to scale without sacrificing quality
Challenge today?
- Scaling quickly without sacrificing quality
- Mindset
- Lets get people as fast as we can
- Competing for talent
- Finding the best people
- Not clear into what the values are then translating it to others
- Managing the expectations of investors
- Growth at whatever cost is dangerous
Why is this important to the company?
- A startups evolution
- Culture is the most important element for founders
- Desire for culture conflicts with the investors desires for rapid growth
- To become a competitor you NEED the best people
Rick’s Nuggets
- Understanding what you are up against today
- Flip the funnel upside down
- Work referrals at scale
How do we solve the problem?
- Acquisition
- Understand that hiring people needs to be understood by leadership
- A commitment from leadership
- Cannot just set it & forget it
- Just as important as your new product pipeline
- Alignment at the executive level as to where and how they want to compete for talent
- Realistic on what you can pay
- Value prop - speaking to what is important to the person from a more intrinsic value. What’s important to me?
- Build out the people function
- Retention
- Invest internally to retain them
- Value - a future to live into
- People leave because they no longer see a future for themselves
- Develop leader to provide the future for each team member
Rick’s Nuggets
- Understand each individual’s pain, desire & impact
- Invest in the discovery call!
- 45 minutes saves hours in the long run
- Crucial checkpoint
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Founders look at what you are investing in your people function
- What you invest in talent acquisition you should be investing into leadership training to get them really good at hiring
Guest Links:
Brian Breth: LinkedIn
Website: Riot Games Fair TechRecruit Conference
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Crop
Thursday Jul 29, 2021
Thursday Jul 29, 2021
Have you ever thought to yourself “If we only could have paid a bit more money, we would have landed the A-player we really needed to hire”?
If so, you would be wrong.
We often assume that money is the main reason for the turn down but in reality, it is our inability to demonstrate how our opportunity brings purpose to the individual. It is no longer a time where good people will sacrifice career satisfaction for a paycheck.
The balance of power has shifted and the mindset has changed. One thing we have learned from the pandemic is that purpose trumps the paycheck for almost everyone worth hiring.
Our guest today: Lorna Borenstein, Founder & CEO of Grokker.
The social health and wellbeing network that helps employees at global enterprises to move more, sleep better, eat more healthily and reduce financial stress. Her new book, It’s Personal: The Business Case for Caring, thoughtfully examines the Human Connection Movement™ in the workplace, which is fueled by a growing desire among employees to feel more connected to one another and as a result, better connected to their jobs.
Lorna’s expertise has been featured in top tier publications including Bloomberg, Fortune, and Entrepreneur. As a sought after speaker and panel moderator at leading industry conferences, Lorna presents on the current state of workplace wellbeing and engagement.
Lorna is a member of Forbes Human Resources Council and a frequent contributing author.
Today we discuss:
- The importance of Purpose as today’s main currency
- How to unearth purpose in the hiring process & beyond
Challenge today?
- Insides match your outside
- Create a high performance culture
- Connect mission vision & culture
- To drive results to not move away from humans but toward it
- Cost of not caring is the failure of your business
- Creating a safe place to be (psychological safety)
Why is this important to the company?
- To keep your people you need to treat them with empathy
- Silent revolution (they will just walk out)
- People do not want to feel alone (feel like they are part of the tribe)
- Companies on the fortune best places outperform the s&p 500 by 2:1
- 40% of employees report that managers have not asked them how they are doing through the pandemic
- Appreciation & interest as a person translates to a 7x increase in innovation
- 61% of employees will take a lower salary for better benefits
- Empathy is the new company sexy
Rick’s Nuggets
- If your understanding the person then you are transactional, and deserve to lose
- Selling, pitching, focusing on compensation
- Understand a person’s career wounds first
- “What’s happening in your current role that has you open to hearing about something potentially stronger?”
How do we solve the problem?
- State your commitment
- I'm committed to you and here's what I am going to do
- Living values inside & outside the office
- People need to feel safe and valued (psychological safety)
- Link their needs what you are going to deliver
- Listen & accommodate
- Coping accommodation - digging into tactical solutions
- Create personal/ family time
- Survey on policies and adjust
- Provide tools
- Digital tools to support healthy lifestyle
- On demand on phones
- Incentives for programs
Rick’s Nuggets
- Structure first!
- Build your interview process around your company VALUES
- Take advantage of the “discovery call” to build trust
- Understand everyone’s pain, desire, & impact
- Ensures people will show up for your interview
Key Takeaways -Value:
- 3 tiered stratification model
- What did you sacrifice that may have damaged your culture
- What is your competition doing?
- Transformational thinking
Guest Links:
Lorna's Book: It’s Personal: The Business Case for Caring, thoughtfully examines the Human Connection Movement™
Lorna Borenstein: LinkedIn Twitter
Company: Grokker Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Crop
Thursday Jul 29, 2021
Thursday Jul 29, 2021
As Entrepreneurs, we are constantly striving to get in front of the challenges we have. However we often seem to be in a constant state of fighting fires.
So now we are at a precipice where technology tools can alleviate this pain but we must first invest the time in training & understand how to best position ourselves and our teams to innovate successfully.
Let’s start to think about our human resources differently in a mind shift away from our desires to the personal & professional development of our employees. Thinking bigger attracts A-players! This fuels innovation.
Our guest today: Patrick Schwerdtfeger, Business Futurist and Keynote Speaker
Patrick specializes in technology trends including big data, artificial intelligence, Fintech and blockchain. He’s the author of “Pandemic, Inc.: 8 Forces Driving Business Failure or Fortune in the Post-COVID-19 Economy” as well as five other books, and has lectured at numerous academic institutions including Purdue and Stanford Universities.
Patrick is also a regular speaker for Bloomberg TV, founder of Trend Mastery Inc., and host of the Strategic Business Insights video blog (with over 28,000 subscribers and six million views on YouTube). Patrick has spoken about business trends, technology and digital marketing at hundreds of conferences all around the world.
Today we discuss:
- How to think bigger to attract stronger talent
Challenge today?
- Companies are not adopting technology fast enough
- Companies always feel like they’re “behind” with respect to technology
- How can companies leverage HR to accelerate technology adoption?
- Jobs of the future: (1) communication skills & (2) creative problem solving
- Thinking about your human resources differently
- Stop thinking bottom up
- NEW: How can companies attract top talent
- NEW: Millennials are “lazy, apathetic, and entitled” but they CAN be inspired
- NEW: Inspire your employees, customers, and competitors (good source)
Why is this important to the company?
- Being innovative fuels growth
Rick’s Nuggets
- Define your company’s purpose & cause
- Utilize Talent from competitor - adjacent companies
- Present Innovative technologies
How do we solve the problem?
- #1: Identify staff who are excited to learn and use software more extensively
- #2: Leverage enterprise software and get more training for your staff
- #3: Understand that technology propagates SMB through enterprise software
- #4: Break down tasks into (1) manual & (2) cognitive
- #5: Break each category down into (1) manual & (2) cognitive
- #6: Soft repetitive tasks by their level of complexity
- #7: Understand that “Innovation = Budgeting Failure”
- #8: Protecting high-gross margin products to FUND innovation
- #9: FAIL as fast and as cheaply as possible (test new ideas cheaply)
- NEW: think bigger about your business
- NEW: not 10% bigger, but 10x bigger
Rick’s Nuggets
- Train your people - Have an active training program that promotes learning, innovation, new technologies - good for retention
- Elevate top-down thinking
Key Takeaways -Value:
- #1: EVERYONE thinks they’re behind.
- #2: think more strategically, and you’ll catch up quickly.
Guest Links:
Patrick's Book: Pandemic, Inc.: 8 Forces Driving Business Failure or Fortune in the Post-COVID-19 Economy (Amazon)
Patrick Schwerdtfeger: Patrick Schwerdtfeger
Company: Patrick Schwerdtfeger Facebook Twitter
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Crop
Thursday Jul 15, 2021
Thursday Jul 15, 2021
Listening is the most critical interview tool you have. Not listening to respond (which we all do) but listening to understand.
Think of the interview as an opportunity to gather evidence to support your decision and when you understand a person’s pain & desire first, you can accurately position your opportunity as the answer to their problems.
Why do you need to understand the person before you hire them? Isn’t it enough that you know that they have the skills that are needed?
Because not understanding the values of the individual is what ultimately results in bad hiring decisions.
Our guest today: Casey Welch, Co-Founder & CEO of Tallo.
A digital platform and app that connects 1.3 million+ students and professionals to opportunities offered by colleges, companies, and organizations. Since its inception, Tallo has pioneered early talent engagement, facilitating career discovery and guidance for a diverse talent pool.
Under Casey’s leadership, Tallo serves as a virtual ecosystem leveling the playing field for all students and job seekers, regardless of traditional geographic and economic barriers. Casey is a leading expert on Generation Z in higher education and the workforce, and his insights have been featured in Forbes, FastCompany, ZDNet, and SHRM.
Today we discuss:
- The importance of proper positioning when hiring
- How to build understanding into your interview process
Challenge today? (Reactive hiring and approach to talent)
- People want to find careers that are purposeful
- After more than a year of grinding stress, workers are increasingly looking to find new jobs. In fact, according to research by Monster, 95% of workers are thinking about finding a new job, and 92% would consider switching industries for a new position.
- Gen Z agrees with this overall sentiment. According to Tallo’s recent survey of over 1000+ Gen Z individuals, 69% of Gen Z said over the past year it's become more important to find a job that is personally fulfilling.
- Products that will help people, change peoples lives
- Gen Z wants a career that brings them purpose and meaning, not just a job. They also want to make a social impact with their career, not just work the 9-5. Tallo data found that one of the three most important factors for Gen Z when thinking about their future work environment includes making an impact socially and economically (47%)
- In order to attract members of Gen Z, employers need to show prospective new employees will bring a positive change from a social and economic standpoint. This is an opposite mindset from their predecessors Millennials, who focused more on company name recognition
- Finding the workforce that is going to stay
- The top three most important factors for Gen Z when thinking about their current or future work environment include:
- Having a fair and ethical boss (72%)
- The ability to be heard (61%)
- Making an impact socially and economically (47%)
- Hybrid work environments are key: 63% of Gen Z is interested in working in a hybrid setting, while 27% want to work in the office full time and 8% want to work remotely full time.
- The top three most important factors for Gen Z when thinking about their current or future work environment include:
- Pandemic changed people's views
- More than one out of every three Gen Zers reported in a Tallo survey that they are reconsidering their career choice due to certain industries being negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Culture & environment are far more important
- The three biggest factors that motivate Gen Z to take a job include salary (78%) interest in work (70%) and work life balance (58%).
- Addressing social issues + diversity equity and inclusion in the workplace is vital. Tallo data found that Gen Z listed the following as the most important DEI initiatives they look for in an employer:
- Women in leadership (59%)
- Training and discussions (58%)
- People of color in leadership positions (53%)
Why is this important to the company?
- Understanding what the modern employees wants and needs are, and then meeting those needs is critical to improve retention and reduce turnover.
- People are leaving their companies faster than the employers can fill, which is why there’s a high demand for jobs but no supply of experienced candidates. In order to fill these positions, employers must begin a double-pronged approach of employee retention and employee outreach – and focus their efforts on Gen Z.
- When asked about future workplace settings, only 8% of Gen Z want to be fully remote. 63% want hybrid and 27% would want to be in the office full time
Rick’s Nuggets
- Understanding leads to truth
- Every person has a different set of values
- Evidence eliminates
- Assumptions
- Bias
How do we solve the problem? (Creating a proactive approach and system to hiring)
- Mindshift
- Away from transactional relationship (Two people can want to get married, doesn’t mean they want to get married to each other)
- Care more about experience and about people
- Using tools for measurement
- Purpose & Meaning - what they like and want to do
- Skills - What they CAN do
- A focus on reskilling, upskilling and learning & development (L&D) opportunities:
- Employers need to provide all their employees with new and innovative ways to reskill and upskill – especially when it comes to soft skills.
- 74% of Gen Z think soft skills (such as critical thinking, analysis, problem solving, leadership, and communication) are more critical for success in our current economy.
- Some different L&D opportunities employers can explore include:
- Technical (science, technology, engineering, software development, and design);
- Leadership (communication, management, and critical thinking);
- Learning new languages; and
- Agile (collaboration, user experience, experimentation, and continuous learning).
Rick’s Nuggets
- Mindset : who are you really?
- Blind conversations are the most fruitful & eliminate bias
- Interview questions that surface value alignment
- Behavioral Interview that is tied to values!
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Employers must place a heightened focus on recruiting the next generation of leaders into the workplace: Gen Z
- The most important factors to drives people to come work for you include considering a hybrid work environment, addressing and emphasizing the important of diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace and providing a means for employees to reskill + upskill
- Employers must fully understand what today’s modern employee wants – from salary to benefits to work environment – and meet those expectations
Guest Links:
Casey Welch: LinkedIn
Company: Tallo Facebook Twitter Instagram
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Crop
Thursday Jul 08, 2021
Thursday Jul 08, 2021
Do you have a target list of the people you desire to hire?
It is easy to plan the roles you need to hire but the “who” is what matters most. A very simple hack is to just create a spreadsheet and every time you hear of someone good, add them to your list.
Now here is the important part… reach out and seek to understand. Simply reaching out and listening to their desires is all it takes to attract a well positioned player for your company.
Our guest today: Eric Dahan, Co-Founder & CEO of Open Influence
A premiere influencer marketing company with clients that include Disney, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Under Armour, among others. The company is also a leader in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence within the ad industry thanks to its predictive analytics tools and entire influencer taxonomy, which contains over 10B data points. Eric is a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient and Inc. 30 Under 30 honoree.
Eric has hired over 100 people for Open Influence and has a strong proactive program in place.
Today we discuss:
- Why you should always be interviewing
- How to run a proactive hiring campaign
Challenge today? (Reactive hiring and approach to talent)
- Cascade risk of people getting burned out and demoralized
- Takes time to train new people
- An ounce of prevention
- Avoiding the “oh shit” moments
Why is this important to the company?
- From a p&l standpoint, building a more lucrative business
- Retaining the best and brightest that they have worked so hard to to build up
- Attracting, building, training and elevating the best people
Rick’s Nuggets
- People are harder than ever to attract
- Building a passive talent pipeline allows you to constantly raise productivity
How do we solve the problem? (Creating a proactive approach and system to hiring)
- Planning
- This is the structure
- Getting the team to buy in
- The why
- Accomplish more by delegating
- Create a strong feeder of young candidates
- In network referrals
- Inbound, through website
- Industry niche focused
- Building relationships with professors in college
- Elevate and create a management layer
- Empower managers to
- Giving a bit more time to go out and find people
- Budget for strong hires
- Role creation for strong talent
- Elevating from within
- Hired HR director to help with recruiting and building out better processes
-
- A lot of time saved with onboarding
- Point person for planning & vetting
Rick’s Nuggets
- Dedicate 1 hour a week to talent development (first 20)
- Adopt a policy of opportunistic relationship building
- ie: hackathons, hosting events
- Understand the person’s pain & desire
- Start interviewing 2 months prior the role becoming available
- Value alignment is key!
- Judge on values, not skills
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Think about the ideal structure and what is going to make you scale. What is the break point? How do you make sure you bring it to life?
- Think of hiring as something that you will always have to do
- To really scale, make hiring continuous
Guest Links:
Eric Dahan: LinkedIn
Company: Open Influence Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Crop
Thursday Jul 01, 2021
Thursday Jul 01, 2021
Knowing at least one attribute that is shared by everyone in the organization is critical to nail down before you start hiring. This one thing becomes the cornerstone of your corporate values which shapes the company culture, attracts the right people and fuels growth.
Ask yourself, what is the one trait that is critical to the organization? Write it down, start talking about it and encourage it to grow. Allow it to be the compass by which you will evaluate the right fit.
Our guest today: Beerud Sheth, Co-Founder & CEO of Gupshup
Gupshup is the global leader in cloud messaging and conversational experiences. He previously founded and led Elance (now Upwork, a publicly listed company), the pioneer of online freelancing and the gig economy.
Beerud has built world class organizations and hired hundreds of talented people throughout his career.
Today we discuss:
- Minimizing the difficulty in hiring the right people
- How to identify your one thing to enable you to make the right hiring decision
Challenge today in finding & hiring the strongest people?
- Putting the jigsaw puzzle together
- The right set of people
- Hyper growth
- don't rush into the hire
- Make due with what you have, be opportunistic
- Collaborative Negotiation
Why is this important to the company?
- Very jr, part time roles were able to demonstrate grit & hunger and have evolved to very senior roles in the organization
- People who get stuff done
Rick’s Nuggets
- It starts with leadership!
- What is your most crucial attribute
- Define it
- Live it
How do we solve the problem?
Find Highly flexible people
- Goal oriented
- Sense of humor; not take themselves too seriously
- Missionaries, not mercenaries
- How they negotiate is key
Right people, right seat
- Give broad opportunities
- *collaborative negotiation is key
- Constructive conflict resolution
- Teamwork is all about negotiation
Empower them within the role
- Expand the scope of the opportunity
- Personalities aside
- Flexibility, teamwork, focus on the big picture
Rick’s Nuggets
- Referral network
- Content
- Evaluate people for Value Alignment
- Do they live your value??
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Business requires flexibility
- Collaborative Negotiation enables flexible execution and innovation
- Flexible teams win
Guest Links:
Beerud Sheth: LinkedIn
Company: Gupshup Facebook Twitter
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Crop
Friday Jun 25, 2021
Friday Jun 25, 2021
Are you considering hiring a team of experts offshore?
We all know that this option can give you a lot more bang for your buck. But does it really? The communication challenges, cultural differences and time variations may prove too much to manage for some entrepreneurs.
It’s important to consider this as an option only when the organization has the tools & structure to support successful communication of expectations. When aligned with company values, these hires can bring the added diversity that is needed to fuel innovation.
Our guest today: Eris Verne, Founder of AIfinder.
Eris started programming at the age of 14. While in college he started an algorithm based company which solved the problem of internet filtering called APKN. The company was acquired two years later.
After the exit of APKN, Eris discovered a flaw within a multidisciplinary field which intersects marketing, data, and behavioral analysis. So he founded Alfinder to be the most flexible behavioral data analysis solution, enabling industry leaders to predict market behaviors and learn audiences. He currently leads a team of 11 talented offshore employees who have been extraordinary since day one.
Today we discuss:
- Why to hire offshore talent
- How to effectively acquire the right teams for your company
Challenge today?
- Big risk to hire local
- Costs
- Commitments, legal issues
- Locating people for technical roles very difficult
- Taking a big gamble
- Problems faced:
- Knowing what to do with the offshore team
- Cultural alignment
- Quality
- Need a technical person to manage
Why is this important to the company?
- Frees your time to hand off work
- Offshore are in their own habitat - only need one person here to project manage
- Must be a technical founder!
Rick’s Nuggets
- Communication is the biggest hurdle
- Contracting makes sense
How do we hire offshore talent effectively?
- First Determine what you need
- It’s best to find a technical person to assist you with this
- Do not hire individuals! Hire through an agency
- Identify an agency
- They might not be technical people themselves so make sure they understand your needs.
- Agencies usually have a way of tracking their candidates, ask as many questions as needed to understand the details of how the do so
- The agency you choose should be ok with you changing, adding and removing candidates from your team regularly
- Don’t fall into the trap of letting them handle your team and get your own project manager
- Interview & Hire
- Feel free to set up your interview as you would normally
- Understand candidates backgrounds and challenge them with technical questions
- Make sure there is NOT a language barrier or move on
- Do not spend days on hiring and going through 5 interviews with a candidate
- Hire Fast, Fire Faster!
- Set everything straight
- Try not to share internal news with them
- And don’t expect them to learn a new technology while working for you
- After you find fit candidates for your needs, try to work with them on a technical level only
- Monitor their everyday work
- Set the bar as you would normally
Key Takeaways -Value:
- If you’re not a technical founder make sure you to have a technical person on your team
- Focus on the people who benefit from your software/solution rather than the people who are making it
- Hire Fast, Fire Faster
Guest Links:
Eris Verne: LinkedIn
Company: Alfinder Facebook Instagram
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Crop
Thursday Jun 17, 2021
Thursday Jun 17, 2021
People do not want to go into the office on a daily basis anymore!
In fact, the last search we completed had an overwhelming number of people that would only be interested in a hybrid or fully remote work situation. Quality of life has become far more important to people than the paycheck.
We have all had to pivot in the past year but we really should embrace & capitalize on the opportunity that has been presented to us. That opportunity is the ability to raise the bar of talent within your company that is outside your geographical locale.
Our guest today: Nick Iovacchini, Co-Founder & CEO of Kettlespace.
Nick Iovacchini is a serial founder with a proven track record of building successful ventures across a wide range of industries. Companies founded by Nick have grossed $70MM+ in revenue, sold 10MM+ consumer products, and provided hospitality to 1MM+ patrons. Nick is currently a co-founder of KettleSpace, a company enabling smart hybrid work solutions with software, workspaces, and expertise. In his role as CEO at KettleSpace, Nick oversees product, operations, and growth.
Today we discuss:
- Why the hybrid model is here to stay
- How to run an effective hybrid hiring model
Challenge today?
- Gen Z- values freedom
- People enjoying the upside to working from home
- 40% of workers will quit if they have to go back
- Operationalize hybrid & gather the right data to know if it is working
Why is this important to the company?
- Value talent- talent concern
- Power dynamics between worker and boss have changed
- Worker is in a stronger position of negotiation
- Apple revolt-
- Global shakeup
Rick’s Nuggets
- Target the strongest people -nation wide
How do we solve the problem?
- Gather task force of people
- HR, c suite,
- Look at new paradigm
- Employee input
- Establish KPI’s, Objectives & Steps to take (# days in the office)
- Success Metrics -- Engagement & Productivity Measurements
- General “Direction” for Hybrid - 50/50 vs 3 days a week vs. self-select all remote, all in-office, hybrid
- Set timelines
- Plan for Change Management / Communications
- Operationalize
- Tooling
- Decisions / policies
- Implementation
- Data Collection /
- Monitor and iterate
Rick’s Nuggets
- Target hiring: cross industry/competitors
- Personal contact information
- Performance metrics for each role- 90, 180 days
- Run HireOS
Key Takeaways -Value:
- According to McKinsey 90% of companies plan to be hybrid, but nearly 70% don’t have a plan or the tooling yet to implement it -- need to move towards solutions
- The key is accepting the fact that this environment will be changing, need to adopt a test/learn approach -- plan for adaptation
- Whether you are early or late to the hybrid party, at the end of the day this is what the talent wants and over time the majority of the workforce will demand -- early adopters will have advantages to retaining and attracting top talent
Links
Nick Iovacchini: LinkedIn
Company: Kettlespace Facebook Instagram Twitter YouTube
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Crop
Thursday Jun 10, 2021
Thursday Jun 10, 2021
You don’t need to see 50 or even 10 candidates to make a hire. You only need to see 1.
Why do we feel like we need to see a lot of people to “compare & contrast” before making a decision? Because we have been conditioned to window shop to ensure we are getting the best “deal”. But this is a transactional mindset which causes us to hire too fast with zero evidence to support the decision. Resulting in bad hires!
Let’s change your perspective...
Start by flipping your funnel. Focus on the channels that produce the strongest hiring results. Referral Network, Warm Recruits, and then supplement with applicants.
Relationships, not money, are what drive people in today’s hiring landscape.
Our guest today: Kate DeWald, Founder & CEO of OnCue.
Kate DeWald is CEO and founder of Oncue, the leading software and booking service for the moving industry. Launched in 2018, Oncue helps moving companies increase their revenue by as much as 400%, year over year, by automating many of their manual processes and enabling them to devote more time towards business growth and longevity. Prior to leading Oncue, Kate served in go-to-market roles to drive growth at industry-leading SaaS companies, including SuccessFactors and ServiceMax.
Today we discuss:
- Why hiring is a long term play
- How to gain access to high quality people
Challenge today?
- Filling the top of the funnel with high quality people
- Leadership roles
- Funnel: either too many (unqualified) or too few
- Making sure the candidate experience is stellar
Why is this important to the company?
- Time wasting
- Want to find the people that are going to be best in the business
- Find the people that are aligned on mission, vision and values
Rick’s Nuggets
- Reactive hiring results in “oh shit” hires
How do we solve the problem?
- Funnel: linkedin recruiting, cold outreach, recruiter
- Hire expert/subject matter expertise recruiting
- Write content: be authentic and write about what it’s truly like to work at your company
- Unbias interview process- doesn’t matter where the candidate comes from
- Training leaders
- Reviewing questions prior to the interview
- Play the long game - interview and connect with people before you have the roles available, help out others where you can, it’s about creating long lasting relationships with people
Rick’s Nuggets
- Referrals first: “Who have you worked with that was a strong performer in the organization?”
- Recruits: cross industry performers, competitors-
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Spend more time than you think you need on recruiting
- Be authentic in your hiring process- if you’re a startup, own it- being transparent with the candidate about what the role is really will set them up for success
- Think about Key ways you can add value - how can you add value to your candidates in the process? Make sure they have a great experience regardless of the outcome
Guest Links:
Kate DeWald: LinkedIn
Company: OnCue Facebook Twitter
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Crop
Thursday Jun 03, 2021
Thursday Jun 03, 2021
You’re hiring and just are not seeing the quality flow of people responding to your job ads. A bit frustrated, you decide to launch an email/LinkedIn campaign targeting people from your competitors. You identify the people you want to talk to and start sending messages. Hopeful that you’ll draw in the strongest talent.
But the response is underwhelming at best. Why?
Because no one cares about your company, your job or you until you can demonstrate the value of “what’s in it for me?”. The selfish way you message is the #1 reason you fail to gain a positive response. Start with a person’s pain first, then you'll gain their attention.
Our guest today: Henna Pryor, President & Executive Coach for Pryority Group
After an explosive 14-year recruitment career working with top performers, growing managers, and C-suite leaders, Henna founded Pryority Group to realize a vision that access to coaching and development is the most important asset to any individual’s continued growth.
Henna prides herself on an "empathetic but no-nonsense" approach and has been recognized quickly as a secret weapon of companies ranging from fast-growing startups to Fortune 500. She has a dual specialty in working with high-achieving women and measurably improving the performance of sales teams and growing start-up businesses through her in-demand sales messaging training programs and strategic coaching.
Today we discuss:
- Why no one cares about your messaging today
- How to structure your digital communications to gain a positive response
Challenge today?
Reaching out to candidates digitally in a noisy marketplace - getting their attention and keeping it.
Problem:
- Peoples attention span is about 8 seconds in digital communication (goldfish)
- Initial outreach is usually operating from middle school English class writing techniques
- Subject line kills you (great opportunity)
- The spotlight is in the wrong spot. People start by talking about themselves right out of the gate. People don’t want to hear about you right away. They want to be the hero of their sales message first.
- People are motivated by
- Love
- Hate
- Fear of
- Vanity
- Pride
- Longing for
Why is this important to the company?
- Even in digital communication, people buy on emotion.
- People get 121 emails a day- most of which are deleted or ignored
- Most leaders have not been taught sales writing
Rick’s Nuggets
- Pain, desire, impact
How do we solve the problem?
- Subject Line
- Must induce curiosity
- Ie: You wouldn’t believe how we do this,
- Confidential mysterious confession- top open
- “That was a huge fail”
- What's something special? What’s something you want to get away from?
- The Content
- You Perspective (“I get you, I understand where you’re coming from, I relate”
- Here’s why it might be worth chatting with me for a few minutes (features + benefits, ideally at least 3)
- Call to action
- Very clear
- Low pressure, low commitment
Rick’s Nuggets
- Strike a nerve by identifying their pain
- Be specific (growth, management, work content)
- Desired outcome by alleviating the pain
- Performance Metrics (Impact they will make)
- How’s my telepathy?
Opener
- You have been eagerly anticipating my email, but I just received your telepathic message so I apologize for taking so long to get back to you ;-).
Acknowledge the Pain
- I understand you are pretty good at your job but your talents in XXXX (personalize) may be a bit underappreciated (or underutilized, under-challenged, over-managed) in your current role.
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Attention is a currency. You might have the best opportunity with the biggest runway, but none of it matters if you don’t have a rock solid digital communication strategy to catch the attention of the right people to engage the conversation further.
- Your value proposition alone isn’t enough to attract a good candidate in this marketplace. You need to express in your outreach that you understand THEM, and then walk them through the benefits that will make your message compelling enough to want to continue the conversation.
- Using the framework shared will give you a much more compelling message to attract the candidate and give you a much better chance of starting conversations with the top passive talent as well, not just the active talent.
Guest Links:
Henna Pryor: LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/hennapryor
Company: Pryority Group Facebook Instagram
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Crop
Thursday May 27, 2021
Thursday May 27, 2021
With everyone struggling to hire, companies are looking for a competitive edge in being able to attract talented people. But the answer is not compensation & benefits. Contrary to what most people are preaching right now.
What draws people to your company is NOT the transaction. It is the substance behind what is in it for me!
Today we are discussing how your book can have a surprising effect in drawing talented people to your company by simply allowing people to understand who you are.
Our guest today: Alicia Dunams, Founder & CEO of Bestseller in a Weekend.
Alicia has helped over 2000 people become bestselling authors through her Bestseller in a Weekend® course and professional ghostwriting author services and coaching company.
Additionally, as a leadership trainer, executive coach and certified peacemaker/mediator who has worked with clients including CBS, Gap, GEICO, and Capital One, Alicia uses the foundation of healthy conversations and storytelling as the bridge to overcome conflict in the workplace and beyond.
Alicia is an expert at bringing a book to life and elevating personal & professional brand!
Which makes Alicia a perfect expert for today’s topic.
Today we discuss:
- Why a book may be the competitive edge
- How to create a book to elevate your professional brand
Challenge today?
- Can't attract the right people
- People don't want to go back to the grind
- Want flexibility in being able to work from home
- Competing from a lifestyle perspective
- Companies are competing in the same pool
- Not attracting the passive people
Why is this important to the company?
- Publicity
- Clear company story
- Insight into who you might be working for
- Shows company values
- Branding
- Omnipresence
- Sales/recruiting channel (24x7)
People who resonate with the message of your book will be drawn to the company
Rick’s Nuggets
- Powerful insight into who I will be working for
- How do one write a book while building a company?
- Determine what do you want to accomplish with book
- Outlining the target audience
- Their pain point and providing solution
- Positioning it for recruiting attraction
- Examples of culture and stories of the people who work for you
- Hire a Ghostwriter
- Find someone who resonates with you - someone who captures your voice, finding your voice
- Contact a service, like The Book Funnel ,or Authors Unite, where a book coach can pair you with a ghostwriter, and handles all the project management and author services
- 6-12 months
- Traditional Publishing Route
- Contact me
- Timeframe 18months
- Connect with a Book Proposal Writer (describe what is a book proposal)
- Contact Agent - they also have a list of book proposal writers
- Your book will be Shopped around
- Book Marketing - make your book a bestseller
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Write a book on workplace culture to attract the right people.
- This book becomes a playbook and operating procedure for your company.
- This also could be a requisite read for new hires/interviewees.
Guest Links:
Alicia Dunams: LinkedIn Website Facebook Instagram
Company: Best Seller In a Weekend YouTube
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Crop
Friday May 21, 2021
Friday May 21, 2021
It is no secret that diversity sparks innovation and fuels business growth.
But diversity for the sake of image or social pressure is dangerous. It needs to truly be embedded into the fabric of the corporate values in how people interact. It is not just checking off a box to satisfy outsiders.
This is most dangerous when someone is hired simply for their gender or race without any consideration of what the individual is positioned to contribute. Values are misaligned, expectations miscommunicated and voila …. Let the nightmare begin.
Costly mistakes that result in wrongful terminations, and hostile work environment lawsuits.
Our guest today: Venesa Klein, Executive Recruiter & Partner for Calibre One.
Since 2007, Venesa has helped some of the world's most successful companies build out the critical leadership teams that drive their success.
As Partner at Calibre One, Venesa founded its Purpose-Driven Practice, which focuses on placing executives in growing organizations seeking to create innovation with meaningful impact. Her empathy forward personality along with her strategic thinking has enabled her to successfully build diversity programs for her clients.
Today we discuss:
- Why diversity may not be right for your company
- How to correctly implement a diversity program
Challenge today? Having a real diversity strategy
- Implement a long term strategy that develops people into leaders
- Diversity in leadership to fill a role - check off the box
- Oh Shit, we need to hire a woman because we are an all male leadership team
- the structure to give opportunity to diversity
- Vanity hire
Why is this important to the company?
- Real change and a more diverse workforce equals growth & innovation
- Companies
- The reality is that a woman
- Diversity of perspective: Will the person really be valued
Rick’s Nuggets
- Hiring for core values alignment eliminates bias, promotes diversity
- Just filling a seat for diversity sake, dangerous
- Value aligned
- Empowered to thrive
How do we solve the problem?
- Bottom up approach
- Add people at the most jr level first
- Development plan
- Way of identifying people who are doing well and offering opportunity to continuously grow
- Promote into leadership
- Incentivizing organization to develop those around them
- Leadership accountability
- When you have to go out to search
- Leadership team in agreement
- Think through the obstacles in recruiting within the criteria
- Ask Why?
- Needs to be a level of honesty -that is not happening
Rick’s Nuggets
- Build your interview process to eliminate bias first
- Value alignment first
- Values come in every flavor of person
- Positioning before Pitch
- Understand the person’s desires
- Path to success
- Heal their career wounds with your opportunity
- Value alignment first
Key Takeaways -Value:
- Bottom up approach
- Strategy around developing diversity in the organization
- Looking through the lens of diversity
Guest Links:
Venesa Klein: LinkedIn Twitter
Company: Calibre One Facebook Twitter
This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Crop