EntreLeadership - #283: 4 Steps to Avoid Hiring Mistakes with Dr. Geoff Smart

Episode Date: September 10, 2018

With only a 50% success rate, hiring is widely considered one of the single biggest problems in business today. But get it right and it can become your greatest opportunity for success, says New York Timesbest-selling author Dr. Geoff Smart. For starters, you will save time and money (on average, to the tune of $1.5 million or more a year!). Also, you’ll likely be able to grow your business and in turn, your profits. Join us as Geoff, who is also the chairman and founder of the leadership consulting firm gh.SMART, shares his simple four-step hiring method that works 90% of the time. Now those are odds we can get behind. And don’t miss host Ken Coleman’s rant on a recent Wall Street Journal article on an intriguing hiring trend! entreleadership.com/podcast Hiring Makeover from EntreLeadership Collect and Consult: How to Use a Lead Magnet to Drive a Consultation from Infusionsoft Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is Andre Leadership. Now, here's your host, Ken Coleman. Coming to you from the Music City, this is the broadcast of leaders by leaders for leaders. Thank you so much for joining the conversation. Here's what's coming up. I'm going to share some very interesting information about the hiring environment in America right now. Jeff Smart is our feature conversation.

He's the best-selling author of Who? The A method for hiring, we're going to give you a new entree leadership tool on hiring makeovers and, of course, some other goodies from Infusion Soft. Hey, we want you to share, like, and subscribe to help us grow our show. All right, let's get right to this. I want to open up today. Obviously, we've got a theme of this episode on hiring. And I want to start it off with a article that I recently read in the Wall Street Journal.

Now, this is really important. I want you to lean into this and understand that there are a couple of asterisks in this article that I'm going to share with you. Okay, so here's the context right now in America in 2018. Number one, we've got more jobs that are available than there are people who are unemployed. So that is flipping the whole supply demand. And so what's going on is this is a great time for people who want to be employed, right? I mean, they can go in and say, hey, this is how it is. This is what I want. If you don't want to give it to me, that's fine. But we have companies that are growing. The economy is doing very, very well, and they need talent, having a hard time finding talent because people aren't unemployed.

So, bottom line is, it's a good time to be a worker in America. So how does that affect you? I want to go to this article by Kelsey G, I believe, is her name, in the Wall Street Journal. And I read this just a few Sundays ago. And this is really important for you to understand what's going on. so you don't get caught off guard. Employers say they are abandoning preferences for college degrees and specific skill sets to speed up hiring and broaden the pool of job candidates. So in the past, it's always been about two things as an employer. You put out, here's your education that's required, and here is the experience that we need.

Don't even bother. Don't come calling if you don't have this education and this experience. And I'm telling you, that's still the case in a lot of places. But in even more places and it's growing, they're starting to go, wait a second. If you're a quality person, you don't have to have the experience or the education, I can teach you how to do a job. Which, by the way, can we just pause for a moment? This is how you ought to be entree leader anyway.

Don't fall into the trap of telling somebody they've got to have this degree, which you and I both know is virtually worthless. Can I get an amen somewhere out there? and podcast land. Or don't make them say, well, I've got to have this amount of experience. Wait a second. When you started something, Entree Leader, a long time ago, how much experience did you have? That's exactly right.

None. So let's focus on quality people, great character, with some raw talent, and we'll teach them the skills. That ought to be your mindset, no matter where the economy is. All right, back to the article. Quoting from the article, Amy Glazer, senior vice president of Adekko group, which is a staffing agency that has about 10,000 companies that are their clients that are using a deco to search for employees. So Amy knows what she's talking about. She said, candidates have so many options today. If a company requires a degree, two rounds of interviews,

and a test for hard skills, candidates can go down the street to another employer who will make them an offer that day. So why am I sharing with you this article? Because I think you're in competition for good people. And the environment right now, folks, has shifted. cutting job credential requirements is more common in cities like Dallas or Louisville where unemployment is lowest. Long work history requirements have also relaxed. Only 23% of entry-level jobs now ask applicants for three or more years of experience. Through the end of last year, another one million new jobs were opened up to candidates with no experience necessary. Making occupations like e-commerce and analyst, purchasing assistant and preschool, teacher available to novices and those without a degree. To attract more entry-level employers,

here's an example, Toymaker Hasbro has divided four marketing jobs, which it previously designed for business school graduates with MBAs into eight lower-level positions. Now, I want to press pause. Why are you telling me this, Ken? I'm going to tell you why. This is an example. If Hasbro figured it out, maybe you should too. They took four marketing jobs, and they said, previously we've said, we've got a find this candidate that has all the experience. Wait a second. Can we turn them into X amount of jobs? In this situation, they turned them into eight jobs. What was four with a big degree, they turned into eight, which didn't require a degree or experience. The new full-time roles included a marketing coordinator, retail planning analyst, and trade merchandiser, all involving more routine activities

supporting higher-level staff in the division. So wait a second. Instead of going out trying to find the rock star that you built up in your mind, they went and got a bunch of, worker bees. And the worker bees are supporting the, thank you will, the producer, Queen Bee, right? So there is a real role for worker bees. And Hasbro's figured it out. Why haven't you figured it out? So you're locked up in your office trying to figure out how you're going to find the stud and where are you going to find them and how much you're going to pay them all? Wait a second. Do you need to get the work done or do you need to hire the All-Star? I'm just going to tell you right now, if I'm building a team, I'm building a franchise. a sports franchise, I'm looking for role players. I want to win games.

I really don't care who scores how much and how much I pay them. I want to win games. So I'll take my hardworking character, average talent people, and I'll whip your prima donnas on most days. All right? So that's the deal. So we're going to get a link to the whole article because I just wanted to touch on a few of the high points here to obviously help you understand the environment that you are hiring

in right now. I mean, look, why would you be able to recruit somebody who's fat and happy somewhere else? Well, you're going to have to entice them. And you've got to figure out how you're going to do that. Or you're going to have to say, you know what? Instead of trying to entice a fat cat who's loving life, maybe I go get somebody who's really hungry and I'll teach them and I'll beat the fat cat every day of the week and twice on Sunday. All right, let's get to our feature conversation. Who is Jeff Smart.

Now, Jeff is the author of Who, the A Method for Hiring. This is a great book. It's so good. I took it home with me. In 2017 and 2018, Forbes named Jeff's company, G.H. Smart, the best management consulting firm in its industry segment. Now, folks, this is based on thousands of surveys with business leaders. This is what they do. They consult other firms on how to hire the right people. So we didn't just bring another author along here. I want you to understand. This guy is the hiring whisperer. I think it's a fantastic book, as I said, and let's get right to it. You're going to learn a lot

from Jeff Smart, the author of Who, the A method for hiring. Well, Jeff, I want to dive right into some of the data that led to this book and some of the research. Let's talk about the name of the book is Who, but let's talk about the Who that you talk to. Thirteen hundred hours of interviews with more than 20 billionaires, that's B folks, and 300 CEOs. So all of that research, comes up with what I think is an amazing book. But let's start with that. Why so many hours?

Was it one of those things you just kept finding out more and more, or you just wanted to be impenetrable? It was a wish to be impenetrable in the world of leadership and management and success books that sometimes are just one person's opinion. We wanted to write a book based on facts and lots of people's experiences. So our day job is interviewing people. for very senior level leadership role. So a lot of the interviewed time was spent just in the normal course of our daily work. The billionaires thing was interesting because I set a goal. I thought

it'd be interesting for readers to hear from some self-made billionaire entrepreneurs. You know, what are their seekers to success in hiring their teams? Originally set a goal of trying to find five of these self-made billionaires to talk to me about hiring. As it turns out, the topic was so interesting to these folks. I got over 20 of them to share their stories. Oh, my. Now, I don't want to get too far into the book. So if I'm leading you too quickly, because I want to continue to set the problem, the data that just sets this problem. But real quick, were you surprised? Anything surprising in all those hours, 1,300 hours, where you were just kind of like, huh, I didn't see that coming? Yeah, I guess the surprise was how clear these leaders felt their number

one problem was around hiring and putting the right people on their teams. I mean, Jim Collins, who you've interviewed was famously said the biggest mistakes in business are not the what decisions, but the who decision. So it's not like the idea that people matter is a novel concept, but the degree to which these self-made billionaire entrepreneurs and all the other folks we talked to really just focused in on their biggest problem being hiring and putting the right people on their teams and avoiding these hiring mistakes. So in that sense, it was, it's kind of exhilarating that we felt like we were focused on a problem on everyone's mind. Okay, folks, let's really set this problem because you heard Jeff just share how clear the problem was for these leaders. The average

hiring mistake, this is from the book, costs a company $1.5 million or more per year. And then take that number and add it to the statistic that the typical hiring success rate is only 50%. So when we talk about the number one problem, we're talking about with a lot of zeros, Jeff. Yeah, that's right. So it's funny. It's one thing to say, oh, yeah, it's really costly when you make a hiring mistake, right? And any entrepreneur knows that. But years ago, we decided to put some numbers to it. So we asked a whole bunch of our clients, hey, you know, what's the cost of hiring someone? What's the cost of hiring the wrong person relative to hiring the right person? And let's, you know, let's sum it up and let's see what it is. And it turned out to be about 15 times what a person's annual salary is. And so if you take a,

you know, kind of $100,000 a year person out there, it's kind of middle of a senior manager in an entrepreneurial business, that's $1.5 million is what it costs you. Every time you make a hiring mistake. So we're here to say, hey, that's a lot of pain. And you don't have to go through that pain and have a 50% hiring success rate. Okay. So let's go to chapter one here. We're just going to pick a few content pieces to focus in on because there's so much to cover. We wouldn't be able to come close to covering it. I want to jump into chapter one. And when you talk about getting A players, and that's what this book is really about, the who, getting the right people. You've got this beautiful graph. Source, select, scorecard, and then sell. It's like an A,

source on the left side of the A, select on the right side of the A, the crossbar of the A, scorecard, and then a big giant block line underneath the A that says sell. Walk us through those four S's. Yeah, so this, I really like this part. And entrepreneurs around the world like that, this isn't just sort of a random smattering of advice about hiring. We really identified the four steps that you need to follow if you'd like to improve your hiring success rate from a dismal 50% to a best in class 90%. So these four steps, quite simply, in the order that you practice them is one is called scorecard. So a lot of entrepreneurs don't actually write down what their criteria for success are. So we say, hey, make a scorecard,

say, you know, don't just say I want to hire a marketing person, say like what it is that you want this person to actually accomplish in that role and what some of the criteria are. So writing a scorecard is like a blueprint for what success looks like in the role. The second of the yes is is source. And this is probably the most common question I get asked when I talk to entrepreneurs. They say, well, yeah, I get it. Talent's important. But like, how do you source great candidates?

And so we asked all these billionaire entrepreneurs this and a bunch of other folks. And we have a point of view on how to most time efficiently source good talented. The third part is actually, I think, the hardest step, Ken, which is how do you select the right person? Because people don't always turn out to be who you think they are, right, when you're in an interview process. So, you know, what are the best practices for selecting the right person? And then finally, the last of the steps we call sell, which is how do you sell the person that you decided to hire? All right. So, Jeff, you laid out those four methods there and how they work together. but let's get into the selection part.

That's the four interviews for spotting A players. Again, we can't cover all those steps that are all equally important. But I thought this was really fascinating. Page 67 for you folks that are going to go buy the book and dive in here. There are four distinct interviews that you and your co-author lay out to help our listeners spot those A players. Give us an overview of those four different interviews. Sure. So simply, the first one we call this screening interview.

It's kind of like, what do you talk about when you first meet a candidate? A lot of people make the mistake of trying to figure out, do we have the right chemistry? Do I like this person? And that's actually not the right question you should have in your mind. The question in your mind should be, is this person have the ability to deliver the results? We need them to deliver in this role. So a screening interview, the questions are simply, you know, hi, what are you? your career goals, what are your biggest strengths? And give me some examples. What are your biggest

areas for improvement? And give me some examples. And then, oh, hey, tell me about your last few bosses. What would they say, where are your biggest strengths and weaknesses and how highly would they rate your performance in those jobs? This is like a 30-minute interview, Ken, that gives you all the data you need to weed out a whole lot of folks who aren't a good match for a variety of reasons. And the goal is to, we say, gong fast. If it becomes clear someone's not a good candidate, there's just not a good fit. You want to move on. You don't want to make the mistake a lot of entrepreneurs make by sort of saying,

ah, you know, I like this person. Let's bring them into our office and have them meet a bunch of people and take up a bunch of time. So that's the screening interview. That's the first one. Other couple interviews are pretty straightforward. The one that's not straightforward, we call it the Who interview. This is a longer one. This is after you've whittled down your candidates.

Let's say you're hiring a head of sale. for your entrepreneurial business, and you looked at, you know, 10 or 12 candidates you've had screening interviews with. The last two or three that you've really identified is, you know, these are potential winners. You bring them in, you spend a couple hours or more doing the Who interview, which is walking through their whole career with a fine-tooth comb. You ask them for every job, hey, what were you hired to do in that job? What did you accomplish in that job? And give me some examples, examples, examples. Third question, what were some low points or mistakes you made in that job?

Fourth question, this is one of my favorites. Who did you work with in that job? And, oh, here, let me write down that person's name. When we talk with them, what are they going to say were your strengths in weaker areas? And then finally, why did you leave that job? And if you can really piece together the puzzle of someone's career by answering those five questions across all their jobs,

you can have a very decent chance of spotting a winner and being able to weed out the folks who are going to make you regret hiring them? Yeah, and so I want to ask you, these four different interviews, is there a level that the CEO stays out of? And the way of saying that basically is that they come in at the third one, the focus interview. You know, where does the leader decide where he or she should best be if it's a team-based interview? I know at Ramsey Solutions, we have multiple interviews. So you've got a lot of different people. I'm curious with these billionaires and these six.

CEOs, where are they at in these four? So they're very involved in any direct report hires, right? So obviously, if you're the entrepreneur and you're having someone who's pretty senior reporting to you, it's ideal if you can get someone else other than you to do the screening interview because you don't want to be meeting a whole bunch of people for the first time and spending a lot of time with candidates, you're not really going to hire. So ideally, you have someone else, whether it's HR, one of your colleagues, you know, recruit or someone, anyone, someone else doing those screening interviews. But by the time it gets to the Who

interview where you're going to sit down and really dig into this person's background and also the reference interviews, we say the entrepreneur should do those for him or herself, for direct reports. For people two or three levels down, you know, as the entrepreneur, you basically just lean on your teammates to follow the same process. Hey, show me the scorecard for this role. Hey, show me your notes from your Who interview. Hey, show me the notes from your reference interviews. You can hold them accountable for following the four steps. but you don't have to personally hire everybody in your company. Yeah.

I find it interesting, Jeff, and very valuable that within these different four interviews, you give specific examples of questions. I'm going to ask a follow-up, and it comes from my background. I'm a professional interviewer. And I find that at least it seems to me, does the research back this up? Because I don't see any direct chapters focusing on what I'm about to ask you. And that is leaders many times don't prepare. They don't prepare for the interview.

And so it's this shotgun approach. And to me, it feels like if I didn't prepare it for you and I just, you know, throughout some random questions and I didn't think, well, what is it that I need to know on behalf of the Entree leadership audience? Like, I'm simply asking questions for the people listening and watching. That's what I'm doing. But if I didn't think about that and prepare for that, it's just not going to be as good in an interview.

I just want you to speak to that because I think that's a massive blind spot for leaders. They don't prepare for interviews like. I prepare to do an interview. Well, I appreciate your preparation for this interview, and it shows. Same goes for regular interview. It's even worse out there in the entrepreneurial world where, you know, folks do feel a lot of time pressure. They're, you know, running and gunning, and not only are they not prepared for the person

coming into their office to interview. They might not even have an interview method or a format. There was a guy once who was trying to tell me that he had a way of cutting the interview time down by not having to prepare, but he'd ask candidates what kind of animal they would be and why. And I thought, well, that's interesting. What are the right answers, right? And so this guy was joking with me and saying, well, you know, if they're, you know, a bear, it means this or a fish, it means that. And I thought, well, that's something. You know, who knows, maybe my research and I've missed it all along and asked him, you know, how accurate is your approach? And he said,

well, it's terrible. It's not even 50% accurate, but at least it's not boring. Oh, my gosh. That's Exhibit A to my point there. That's Exhibit A, right? That's right. You bet. So if you're going to scatter gun on it and just kind of freestyle an interview, you're going to waste time.

You're going to make costly hiring mistakes. At the highest level, preparation looks like something within GH Smart, my firm. We call it a empathic imagination. So in addition to having the interview questions, which you can get out of the Who book, to Google search the person you're interviewing, look at their LinkedIn ahead of time, put yourself in their shoes, all right, given this. Let's assume this is my background. What are my concerns?

What are my likely strengths? What are my career goals? All that to really kind of put yourself in their shoes looking at their background. And then to fine tune your interview questions accordingly can help you get to the heart of who someone really is and make a good hiring decision. Yeah. All right. So let's move to sealing the deal. So now you got the A players.

But when they're A players, Jeff, it's kind of like trying to sway that free agent. if you're a sports fan out there, you know, they can choose. They got every team lining up for their services. You've got to close the deal. Teach us a bit from the book. There's five specific ways. You cover those however you so choose. Yeah, so I asked these billionaire entrepreneurs that said, hey, not only how'd you hire your best people,

but then how did, you know, how did you convince them to join your company? And it seemed like their advice fell into five categories. And we called it then the five Fs of selling. And, you know, Ken, I think entrepreneurs are pretty good at selling generally, so they want to know, like, what am I selling? So the five things to sell when you're trying to get someone to say yes to your job offer are fit, family, freedom, fortune, and fun. So fit is you sell, you know, hey, candidate, you know, our scorecard here for what we're looking for fits your background beautifully, what you're good at, what you love doing, let me show you how. So selling the fit probably is the best of the five to really emphasize. The next one, the next one is. The next one, family, this doesn't mean asking people illegal questions like, are you planning on starting a family or anything like that? So you don't want to ask people that. Don't ask anybody whether they're pregnant or planning to become pregnant. These are stupid questions, illegal questions. That's not what this is about. What this is about is saying, hey, are significant others in your life

supportive of your taking a job at my company? And if you're trying to hire someone away from a big company to a small entrepreneurial company, you better make sure you have other key advisors or significant others in this person's family on board, otherwise they're not going to come. Next is fortune, which is I found entrepreneurs sometimes paint this overly rosy picture of, oh, you're going to make a ton of money if you come join my company. I think what's more important than painting a really optimistic rosy picture

is to paint a more practical picture. Hey, my first CFO, and this is a true story, I was telling this guy, Ron, you're going to make a ton of money here at G. And he said, well, that's lovely, but I need to, save for college and pay the mortgage. Like, how much money can I expect if we're successful? So what I did with this guy, and this is great piece of advice for other entrepreneurs, is grid out with your key hires.

Hey, look, your income, your cash and bonus, etc. is going to increase as we increase the revenue and profits of our business, you know, boop, boop, boop like this. So we made a grid. And as we grew the business, I increased the base and bonus and stock grants of this key hire, you know, right on plan. I was able to hire him. whereas if I was more vague, I don't think you would have said yes.

Let's see here. What are some of the other? We got freedom and fun. Yeah, all right. So freedom's important because everybody, it seems, these days, doesn't want to be micromanaged. They want to be able to be held accountable for results, not the how, but the what. And so just emphasizing to candidates, hey, look, you're really good. We're going to agree on goals.

And then we're going to, like, have that. And you're going to have a lot of autonomy and freedom to make it happen. And then the fun part is, you know, it's not part. parties on a Friday or foosball or that kind of thing. But really, like, what's the most fun part of your culture of the actual day-to-day work and then really emphasizing that? So if you sell a fit, family, fortune, freedom, and fun, you are essentially covering all the basis of the things people most often look for when they're saying yes to a job. All right. So again, given a great overview, because this book is just chalk full of practical goodness.

Chapter 6 is your greatest opportunity. Why do you entitle it that? Because as soon as I turn through there, I say, okay, how to install the A method. We're going to get to that in a minute. But why do you call it your greatest opportunity? Yeah, so it's hiring stinks for a lot of people. They hate it. It's a pain.

They get it wrong. It's expensive. So I think the topic of hiring carries with it this almost like PTSD space an entrepreneur's mind. So we try to shift it from, this is your biggest problem, to this is your biggest opportunity. Imagine if you could improve your superhero powers to get it right, not half the time, but 90% of the time. Just like imagine what that will do for your business and growing it. So it's kind of like a final pep talk on, hey, look, get good at this. Not many people are good at it. If you can get really good at hiring, you're going to be able to make more money, have more impact

on the world, have less hassles and pain and suffering as you go. And it's, And we're not the only ones, and the people in the book aren't the only ones saying this. Richard Branson, if you're a big Richard Branson fan, he's a pretty cool entrepreneur. In his last book, he said, hiring is your biggest opportunity for success in building your business. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, and his last book said hiring is your number one opportunity to be successful. You've got to get good at that skill. So it's just basically like a final pep talk that says, hey, look, this doesn't have to be a pain, and you don't have to get it wrong half the time.

It could be your greatest source of strength. All right. And so in this final chapter, you lay out 10 things that the reader, the leader needs to do to install the A method for hiring. I want to review those in a second, but let's, again, let's pull everything together we've just talked about. So they're sitting there listening, they go, okay, Jeff, we don't do it this way. In short, what is the A method? Pull it all together for them. What do they do? What's it look like from an overview? Yeah, so from an overview, the A method for hiring is moving from a gut feel. intuition kind of a haphazard approach to this problem of hiring to instead following four very clear

steps that will allow you to achieve 90% success. So writing down with the criteria, that's the scorecard. Number two, sourcing in great candidates. Number three, following one or more of those interview methods to really pinpoint who the good ones are and the not so good ones.

And then fourth and finally, using the five Fs of selling to actually get your dream candidate to say yes. So following those four steps brings you a 90% chance of success and not following the four steps gives you a 50% chance of success. So in a nutshell, it basically says stop hiring with your gut because your gut's going to be wrong at least half the time. Start hiring with a minimal level of discipline

and you're going to have more impact and more career success than you ever imagined. There you go. So folks, the reason I asked you have to do that is because when you think about how simple he just laid it out, Now it's not a function of what to do. It is, okay, we've got to do this. We've got to systematize this. We've got to take this and make this go throughout our organization. And Jeff, we've got people, you know, this is the ultimate small business audience, which in the United States is still 500 team members and less. So we've got people with 500 team members. We've got some of five. I'm asking this next question for those who have, you know, you know, multiple people within their building that are doing some type of hiring. how do you best recommend that our audience begin to implement this? Not the actual process you described. That's clear.

The book lays it out. But to begin to say, we've been doing it this way because you know people hate change, Jeff. Oh, yeah, change is horrible. Oh, he had bad pizza. He woke up at two in the morning. He read this book named Who. Now I got to do all this stuff differently. This is a bunch of nonsense.

You bet. People hate change and they hate it when you're vague about what you're, about what you expect. What they do like is simple tools to do something better. So I'm going to joke a little bit and say there's an expensive way to implement Who and then there's the entrepreneurial way. The expensive way is to hire my firm and we'll do it for millions of dollars for you, but generally our target client is billion in revenue and up, which is not your audience. So skip that one. The entrepreneur way to do this is, you know, the Who book's pretty inexpensive for free. And you don't even need to buy the book for this. I offer a scorecard template, the interview guides,

all at my Jeffsmart.com website. It's called SmartTools. So all of our books, a while back, we made a strategic decision. We didn't really want to make any money on the templates and forms and the how-to guides and that kind of thing for our books. We just wanted to help entrepreneurs. So it's free. So basically, the super easy and expensive way to do this is, if you love the book, just go grab the templates and the guides. And then, what you do, typically entrepreneurs say, hey, everybody, we're going to follow this approach to hiring, but we're going to start with, why don't you all write a scorecard for your own roles? Wouldn't it be nice to even get clear on what are my priorities, what am I focused on getting done?

So that's like one thing. And then like, hey, everybody, now that we're going to be doing these interviews, rather than have you had to memorize them or have the book open while you're interviewing people, here are these simple one-page cheat sheets on how to do these interviews correctly. So I feel really good about that. We had thousands of people downloading these free tools, and that's a great way to get started on having your team follow a process that works for better hiring. All right. So I just want to run through this so that you folks see the value here.

The 10 things you've got to do to install it. One, make people a top priority. Two, follow the A method yourself. That's what we've really been discussing here. Build support among your executive team or peers. cast a clear vision for the organization and reinforce it through every communication with a broader team. Train your team on best practices.

Remove barriers that impede success. Seven, implement new policies that support the change. Eight, recognize and reward those who use the method and achieve results. Nine, remove managers who are not on board. And 10, celebrate wins and plan for more change. Now, again, the reason I go through those quickly, folks, is you can see Jeff and his call, they fought through this. They realize you're going to face some resistance.

Again, Jeff, you just gave us some wonderful tools on how they can begin it, but you address it. You know, you talk about this. Number four is cast a clear vision. They need to stand up and say, all right, this is why we're doing this and make the case. Then they got to train the team and everybody kind of get on board and go, this is how we're going to do it. And again, you've given them the tools to be able to implement it. But I want to focus on six and seven, removing barriers that are impeding the success of this new system. And seven, implementing new policies that support this systematic change.

I just want you to teach a bit on those, that left hook or the right jab, whatever you want to call it. Yeah. So the left hook is removing obstacles. So sometimes entrepreneurial companies have these existing hiring processes that need to get blown up. So I remember one company was telling me, oh, yeah, we have over 10 of us are involved in every interview. And I thought, oh, my gosh. I mean, at the same time, you have 10 on one interviews. 10 of you and one candidate?

Like, that's a, how can you actually have a conversation if you have 10 interviewers and one candidate? Likewise, another entrepreneurial company told me that they save time by bringing in, you know, a dozen or so candidates and then giving them kind of live fire case studies to wrestle through and you're supposed to watch and see which ones act like team members and which ones act like jerks. And that approach doesn't work because, you know, by the way, everybody, on their best behavior when they're, you know, doing an audition like that.

So you've got to get rid of what we call the voodoo hiring practices like that. Other voodoo hiring practices, the worst one is just having a gut feel interview where you just get to know a person, but you really don't get to know what they're good at, what they're not good at. So stopping doing the bad stuff. Oh, yeah, another one. This is one of the very common one. It's the, it's asking people hypothetical questions and interviews.

We see this a lot in small companies and in big companies. You know, Ken, how would you resolve a conflict with a team member? Right? And then Ken says, you know, like, what would you say, Ken? Like, how would you resolve a conflict of the team member? What would you say? Well, I would say that I would go to them very directly. And with humility and respect, I would point out how they offended me.

And, you know, there it is. That's the type of answer you're going to get. You're going to get the grade school. I'm trying to impress the teacher answer. That's right. don't try to hire people by asking them hypothetical questions. Because hypothetical questions lead to hypothetical answers, and you still don't really know much about the person.

So these are the things that you have to blow up in existing hiring systems in order to then make space for the good stuff. Yeah, it'd be funny if a candidate asked a hypothetical back when you did that. That would kind of put that down here. Well, let me ask you this. How would you react hypothetically if I handled it this way? Right. It's funny. It points out the limitation of living in hypothetical land and the value of really grounding the conversation in reality. Yeah. Well, there's so much here, and I mean this, I mean, there's a lot here. We could probably spend 30 minutes on each chapter. I think what's so valuable about this book is the examples you give. It takes to me, folks, the fear out of making these changes. And I will tell you, I asked the question earlier. I cannot recommend this book enough.

because I see it. I see a lack of preparation all the time by leaders that just not prepared for these interviews. And so it's a complete waste of time. And that's why there's so many mistakes. It's the equivalent, Jeff, of a doctor not preparing for surgery and just, okay, I'm going to go in here and try to figure this out. Right. It's kind of winging it. Yeah. There's a space in an entrepreneurial land for winging things, but hiring is not a smart place to wing it. And a lot of great resources. Again, one more time, Jeff, give us that website where they can go get all the free templates and things to begin implementing. Yeah, so entrepreneurs who want free templates, scorecard templates, hiring and interviewing,

cheat sheets, go to jeffsmart.com, and I spell my name the weird way, G-E-O-F-F-S-M-A-R-T.com, and it's called Smart Tools, and you just basically grab whatever tools you want from our various books. And the ones that we've been talking about today are from the Who book. So it's like a scorecard template. It's a, in those four interviews that you mentioned, the screening interview, the Who Interview, Reference Interview, et cetera, focus interview. The interview guides are right there.

And, you know, we just like making it easy for entrepreneurs to be able to follow this simple approach to hiring because we've seen it work and we've seen it change their lives and avoid pain. That's right. Well, it's a fantastic book and it's fantastic because it's anecdotal. There's real evidence here, folks. This is a numbers game. The numbers do not.

lie here and it is, as I said, impenetrable. This research is great stuff. You need to get it. Wherever books are sold, who is the title of the book? What a fantastic title, by the way. Jeff Smart, you're a very, very wise man. I know you're busy. And on behalf of our entire audience, I want to say thanks for hanging out with us. We're much better for being with you. Well, it's a great pleasure and a privilege to be here on the podcast. And thanks so much, Ken, for an enjoyable interview. You bet. Big thanks to Jeff for hanging out with us. Again, the author of the book, Who, the A Method for Hiring Need to Go Get It, Digest It, and Implement It.

All right, let's give you some resources from the Entree Leadership Team. I talked about this at the top of the program. This week's tool is the one-week hiring makeover. Now, this is brand new. Never released this before. This is a seven-day email series. So this is going to come to you once a day. We're going to give it to you in bite-sized form so you can chew it, swallow it, digest it.

seven-day email series. Day one, how to attract the right employees. Day two, 12 components of a good hire. Day three, top interview questions to ask and answers to look for. Day four. Customize your hiring process with your core values. That's all your brain can handle. You don't even know what day five, six, and seven are because you can't handle it.

It's really, really good. Why wouldn't you get it? At the end of the seven days, you're going to get a video lesson taught by Dave Ramsey on how to hire a rock star team. He is the mogul of all moguls. He knows how to hire rock stars. This is incredible value. Listen, folks, we're not giving this to you for free. Newsflash.

You're going to have to pay for this one. This is $49. Here's the way I look at it. You're going to pay $49 to save $35, $45,000, $65,000, hiring a donkey who runs wild in your office and causes more than just their financial cost. They're going to damage your culture, damage your team. So they're giving it to $49. It's actually a pretty good deal.

Go to entreleadership.com slash hiring makeover. That's entreeleadership.com slash hiring makeover. How about Infusion Soft this episode, bringing you another great tool. It's called Collect and Consult. How to use a lead magnet to drive consultation. Now, this is about value, value, value. Infusion Soft has just figured this thing out. They really have.

I mean, they're all about providing value to customers. or potential customers, and then it's like the Venus flytrap. Just gets them right in there. This strategy is going to help you come up with a lead magnet to collect new leads and then drive them to a consultation. Here's what this tool is going to do. It's going to help you learn how to create the lead magnet, set up report delivery emails as a series, and prepare educational follow-up email series.

So again, this is all about engagement through value, which will turn into customers, business for you. Now this would make your head hurt if you try to do this on your own. Infusionsoft is going to give you the entire playbook. So you need to get this now. Go to infusionsoft.com slash collect and consult. That's infusionsoft.com slash collect and consult. All right, folks, that's going to do it.

Appreciate you so much as we leave. I want to say on behalf of Will the producer, Tim the engineer, and the entire Entree leadership team. Thank you so much for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon. Hey folks, I want to make you aware that we have other great podcasts from Ramsey Solutions. Here's a sample of the Ken Coleman Show. According to a recent Gallup poll, nearly 70% of Americans are disengaged at work.

If you dread going into work every Monday morning and you're just trying to make it to the weekend, the Ken Coleman show is for you. Everyone has a sweet spot. Your sweet spot is at the intersection of your greatest talent and greatest passion. We will help you discover what it is, you. were born to do and then we'll help you create a plan to make your dream job a reality. You matter and you have what it takes. Join the conversation on the Ken Coleman Show.

To hear full episodes, just search Ken Coleman in iTunes or go to Ken Coleman Show.com.