EntreLeadership - The 4 Phases of a Good Hiring Process with Jeremy Hezlep

Episode Date: March 15, 2021

You need to hire great people to move your business forward—duh. But when you’re pressed for time and resources, how can you ensure you’ve got a rock-star candidate and not a bad apple? Go behind the curtain at Ramsey Solutions as Jeremy Hezlep, our very own director of recruiting, explains the four essential phases of an effective hiring process and gives practical tips to help you beef up your recruitment strategy.   entreleadership.com/podcast Ramsey Solutions' website Get a peek behind the scenes at Ramsey on Instagram  Follow us on LinkedIn and keep up with the latest at Ramsey Solutions Ready to do work that matters? Learn more HERE DISC assessment The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni The EntreLeader's Guide to Hiring EntreLeadership Partners Schedule a call with Tim, the Producer   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

So if you've been in business more than about two minutes, you know that hiring is so important and it can be super painful. I mean, you've got to put the applications up, then you've got to interview everybody, read through the resumes. It's just, it can take a lot of time. But you also know that if you rush this process and you hire the wrong person, it can cost you a lot of time later, not to mention thousands of dollars of opportunity cost. from the Ramsey Network. This is the Entree Leadership Podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and the profits. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty, and my guest today is one of our own, Jeremy Heslip.

Jeremy is the director of recruiting here at Ramsey, and he and his team are hiring dozens of people every month now. We've got a team of about 1,000 team members, and we're on our way to 3,000, and so, man, we got this hiring thing dialed in. But before you check out and say, well, you guys are in a lot of, a different class. You're way bigger than we are. I want you to remember that we started exactly where you are. And the same principles that guide our hiring process today are the ones that we learned early on from mistakes and failures, as well as the successes that we've refined into

how we do it at Entree Leadership. What a love about Jeremy is he didn't necessarily start his career in the HR space. He started on the business unit side, just like me, just like you, he's had skin in the game. He's felt the weight of making sure that we have really good hires. So I spent eight years on the financial peace team. And then you're in a leadership role before that. Yeah, I had a few different positions,

but I ended up as director of sales. So that's part of the transition to getting into the HR side and the recruiting was that hiring was a regular part of my life for about five years. So we had a pretty big team somewhere, it varied somewhere in the 40 to 50-ish range at all time. So we were always interviewing, finding different salespeople,

finding different levels. Sometimes it was finding a sales development rep. Sometimes it was a support person. Sometimes it was an account executive. So my wife and I used to joke around and say that the spousal interview that we do, that was actually like our date nights when our kids were little. We did so many of them. It felt like every month we had two to three.

Yeah. Well, and for people who don't know listening, in our organization today, kind of the way it works is HR is helping with recruiting and finding people, but then the business unit, there's somebody that's, I guess we would call like the hiring manager that's really kind of the decision maker. They're the one that puts the role in the budget, makes the business case for the role, goes to our budget committee, gets it approved, and then really should be identifying who is this person that we need to be hiring, and what are the skills and that kind of thing. And then partnering with HR,

our hiring managers feel a lot like the men and women listening to this show, who are small business owners with a handful of employees. And it typically is that business owner who, you know, is getting the candidates, having the interviews, deciding if they're going to hire them or not. I mean, it's one of those like this has to ROI. I think small businesses can look at where we're at today at Ramsey and go, man, you guys have this huge thousand person organization. You've got dedicated HR people.

But many of them are just in the trenches. Just they're wearing that hat themselves. Absolutely. You know, and we were that way until about 100 team members. I mean, we didn't have an HR, a dedicated HR person here until we were about 100 team members at Ramsey. I would say it was a little too late. I wish we would have started somewhere around 40 or 50 team members to get somebody on board. But if you're in that south of 50 team members, talk a little bit more about that mindset of that business owner or in our case, the hiring manager.

You mentioned the pressure. It's on you. It can make a break where your business unit's at. Yeah, sometimes when I think of hiring, sometimes you're starting from scratch. Sometimes you have this need for, I need this role. It's the first time that you've had that. And sometimes you're replacing someone. So it comes from different angles.

So when you have that mindset first, you're trying to figure out, what am I really trying to do? If I'm just trying to replace, maybe I had somebody who was underperforming, or maybe I had somebody who was a rock star. But they're different approaches. If you're starting from scratch, sometimes you're doing some extra legwork than you've ever done before. You know I need this other person to do this task. and that's when you start thinking about it. And sometimes people are thinking about it for the first time. That was the thing that really got me whenever I started leading people.

And all of a sudden, I'm like, man, I think I got this. I know what to do. And I'm like, okay, you need to hire a person. I'm like, wait, what? I don't know how to do this. And I like to think the more time that I've spent in this world of hiring, the more I realize that no one is just born instantly being a fantastic interviewer. you might be a solid communicator

It's kind of encouraging. Hopefully it was for me because at first I thought, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm going to have to fake this. And then I realized like, oh, wait, you know what you're doing because you've done this a hundred times.

And eventually I'll be at a point where I've done this a hundred times. And so it gives some freedom at first, but there's an intentional plan that you have to take to actually get good at it. You know, I mean, I think that's true. And I've hired over a hundred times now.

And so I've got the confidence of those reps. But I remember the pressure on that first one, especially, or the first handful, you know, because if you screw it up, it's super high stakes. Right. I mean, if your team is small, you've got five people, you can only afford this one person, and they've got to pay for themselves. They've got to be a stud. They got to take us up a level in how we're doing. You know, it's a lot different than, you know, if we're going to go bowling, you go, hey, your first one, you're probably going to have a gutter ball, but the good news is another ball is. coming up and you just throw another one and you figure out how to hit the pins. You can get a lot

of reps in and eventually you're knocking down the pins. It's like, oh, it's fun, but it's also a game. Right. And it's a lot of reps. Whereas in hiring, it's like, it can make or break your whole area. Oh, yeah. And it's not just reps. It's a person. It's someone's livelihood. Like, you don't want to have to let this person go, especially if they're moving across the country or something. So how did you, in that space when the pressure was really high, how did you give yourself permission to get those reps, it still not be sloppy? Well, one of the first things I did was I started shadowing those who have done a bunch. I called out, hey, I don't really fully know what I'm doing.

And so I started listening. I sat in on some interviews, even if some people who actually weren't in any area that I was overseeing. I just started seeing how they were asking. And then I started actually really relying on the recruiter. In our world here, I always tell hiring leaders who are new, like really rely on your recruiter to help guide you through this. Let's talk through what interviewing is like. Let's do some role playing. For you, it's sometimes the interruption is the extra thing that you're doing. But when you're talking to somebody who's a recruiter, this is literally their world.

They talk to people every day, all day long. And so it's the combination for myself. I think I stumbled through it for a little bit. I think if I was honest, I'd look and I probably made some bad, bad hires. or lucked out. You know, you look in the thing. Sometimes I think that that happens and you're like, everyone's so, oh, that's such a good, good hire. And you're like, I didn't really do anything. They just kind of applied. And then other times you realize, like, no, I really knew what I was doing.

And I weeded out the right person. So, you know, it seems like it'd be good. If you're a small business owner and you've been doing a lot of the interviewing, like get some people on your team to shadow you. I mean, that's such a great thing because it's kind of like you're already doing the interview. You have somebody sit in. Then you've got somebody to debrief with. You're teaching them, you're mentoring them. At some point, as the owner, you shouldn't be doing all the interviews, at least the initial screening.

You know, you should be training people on your team to do that. But this is one of those where you may be reluctant to hand that off to another team member. But cool idea. What about having them sit in and just shadow? So when you were shadowing different interviews, where you just, I mean, you just kind of taking notes and soaking it in? Were you asking questions afterwards? What was kind of the big takeaway from that shadowing experience? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I'm taking notes. I might add eventually if somebody brought something up. But even said it, you're surprised at how often candidates actually don't mind somebody who's learning. Because it actually puts somebody else who you've already said there's somebody else who's uncomfortable in this room isn't fully an expert. So it kind of softens it. It's not as extreme as you think. But you're not afraid to add on the things that you do know. And then afterwards you're trying to figure out, wait, why did you ask that question? What led you to dig in here? eventually what you're starting to do is starting to unpack what your style is going to be. Now, you figure that out, the more reps that you actually have is what your own individual style. Like, for me, I realized at first, I was trying to be too intimidating. And I thought at first I was like, oh, I'm going to have to be the tough guy here. They're going to have to prove this to me. And I thought, after a period of time, I realized, now, just being myself and being fun and connecting. And one, it's more enjoyable for me.

I look at the end of that time and it was like I really enjoyed this. But I felt like the person softened. They started opening up more than more comfortable that they were with me. And so I started learning, started asking questions, and then also doing some research on what are some good questions that people do ask and starting to do those kind of things. Yeah, there's a lot available out there. I mean, if you'll just hold off and just diving into the interview

and actually Google around, find some key questions, have a plan for the process. So that's what we're going to talk about today. You've got hundreds of reps at this point, maybe thousands, and actually having hired people, done it well, not done it well. And certainly today, in your seat in HR, leading all things recruiting, you've got this vantage point into this is how we do it. I mean, you've got this thing dialed in and you're training your team on what we're looking for to get somebody from out there looking to possibly come on board all the way into a successful onboarding and being set up and on the T to just really go crush it, to go win with that business unit. So you've got four

steps. Now, I want to make this clear on Entree Leadership. If you read the book, we have 12 steps to a great hire. This is not four other steps on top of that. This is just from Jeremy's vantage point as one of our top recruiters and having led this initiative. You almost would say it's the stages or the phases that you go through. So we're going to break this down. And the step number one is decide. Number two is find. Number three is interview. Number four is train. So, Let's start at the beginning. What do you mean when you say decide? Well, when it comes to, hey, I want to hire for this role, I think that one of the things

that's missing so often is actually being intentional and deciding what I want this role to be. We call a KRA key results area here at Ramsey. We say that's basically your job description. And sometimes I've found that teams really don't know exactly what they're looking for. They know I need a person to do a file. function. But they haven't invested the actual time and deciding on what I want this to be. What is the persona of the person who's going to be doing this role? Is there something unique about this? It's why, as a recruiting team, what we do is we partner with the leaders to walk through an intake meeting where you're kind of forming what does this look like. So what does it sound like? When you say a team knows they want somebody, but they don't really know specifically what they're looking for. for what do they tend to ask for? Is it like we just have this pain, help us find a live person?

Like, what's that? How do you know, like, oh, they haven't really done this work yet based on how they're talking? Well, they'll talk about in generic things. Like, they'll talk, I need a salesperson. All right. What do you want that salesperson to do? Well, I want them to call and make sales. You're like, okay, what type are we talking inside sales? Are we talking outside sales? Like you start to form this picture of what does this person look like. I wrote down what we do in our intake meetings. I find that it's actually really helpful. And one of the things that we do is we're looking at what are the top skills,

like what are the non-negotiables, what are nice to have, what's experience needed? For this role, is there any type of certification or experience that's actually required? Are there soft skills, personality, team dynamics? Are there any people on the team that right now, You're just like, I would clone this person exactly. That's a good one because if you kind of are stuck on soft skills, but you can look at somebody that embodies all those things, you can kind of just go to school on them and go, well, they show up early, they smile, they hustle,

they're always building everybody else up. They seem to be teachable. And you can just kind of go, okay, what are the attributes of that person that I love? And then kind of suck those over into part of the filter criteria for the job that you're posting. Oh, absolutely. That's when you can see a rock star, you can see someone, and then you can interview that person. And that's what we'll talk about as a recruiting team. We'll be like, well, can I shadow that person for an afternoon? Can we go to some stand-ups, see what that looks like? And oftentimes you can start to hone in on why this person does well. Well, and I think that's the key, why do they do well? You're answering that question, why are they a rock star? You know, if you just tell somebody, hey, we're looking for a rock star, it's such a vague. It sounds good, right? But it's super vague. And And you got to go, okay, what's the ingredients of a rock star? What are the character qualities? What are their skills?

Why do we call that person a rock star? And I think it's difficult because, you know, it's just, it's taking time to sit down and think and to develop a vision for the role. And I know I've been guilty of that before where I've been that guy going, I need a salesperson. And I don't have time to sit down and think. But if you don't do that thinking work and actually build out the role and we're in partner with your recruiter in this case to really give them a super clear vision, they're going to go hire somebody and then they're not going to be a fit. And they're going, but they're a rock star and you're like, yeah, I guess I didn't tell you what I meant by rock star, you know.

And this applies whether or not you're using a recruiter or you're doing it yourself. And actually spending some time deciding. That's why I really, for a while, I kicked around what is the idea, what is the word? And I just, I like action. I'm a simple person when it comes to that because when you're talking about decide, you can talk about vision, you can talk about KRA, you can talk about all these different things, but you get to be the one that decides what you want to be. Because here's the thing, you may have been replacing somebody, and this might be a great opportunity

to adjust the role. Maybe there was something that didn't work with it. One of the things I love to point out for teams is, do you know what winning looks like in this role? And quite often, the answer is no. So if you can't describe to me what somebody who came in here, what it would look like if they were actually winning, that how are you going to know when you have the right person. And so there's things like that that when you're diving into the deciding phase of hiring, there's a lot of kind of soul searching. There's a lot of brainstorming. There's filling up whiteboards of impact. There's deciding what results would look like. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, when you start to interview people, you're going to want to know when somebody's actually

could fall into this category. Because you want to set people up to win. Do you find in that decide phase that it's helpful to spend time thinking about why you haven't hired this person yet? You know, I was just, I was coaching a business leader earlier this week, and they were talking about business development as an area they need more salespeople, and they're still doing a lot of their sales. And I was just kind of pressing in going, okay, what's keeping you from making this hire? And he said, well, I'm just, I'm nervous that we've got a great reputation, and it's my name, and they might, they might screw it. up or I might bring them on board and it's a lot of overhead and if I'm committed to this overhead and they don't ROI. You know, it's interesting sometimes if you kind of go, why have I not hired this person

yet? And you might have even some emotional blockers that you haven't realized you've got to get over to give yourself permission to really fill up that whiteboard with everything that you want. You know, that's, that makes me think of something that I've thought about for quite some time when it comes to hiring because I saw it in myself. There were oftentimes decisions that I'd make. that we're all based off of fear. And what if I add the wrong person?

What if I don't have enough time to lead them properly? What if they get here and it's a nightmare? What if all of a sudden our business can't support this person and we have to find a new home for them? I think that there's, for a lot of business owners and a lot of hiring managers, hiring leaders, at the end of the day, fear, if you're not careful, can drive a lot of what you do

and don't do in the hiring process. Yeah, I mean, it's like that fear is there. It's good to label it. And I think also as you fill up the whiteboard with all of the things that are the value of this role, I have found that the more time I spend actually building out how great this role could be if we got the right person, the more that fear kind of shrinks. Right. Because then it's not just a person.

It's actually a solution to a problem. And I think you've got to come at it from an opportunity-based vision, not a desperate we're just reacting to pain that we have. And it takes some thinking work to actually do that. Yeah, that's why I love one of our core values of Ramsey's solutions is fear or not. And so when you start finding at the end of the day is the reason I'm not making this decision because of fear, all right, then we need to press through. If it's something else, that's different. But if it's just fear, there's always going to be fear present.

So stage one, decide you're spending time thinking about what you're spending time thinking about what you're really want. You're making a decision on these are the attributes that we're looking for. You're actually creating space to think and write down whether you're doing it yourself or you're working with a recruiter. What else in this stage? Well, one of the things, one of the phrases that I've heard quite a bit, now remember, I'm still new to recruiting. A year and a half is what I say to the actual career of recruiting. But hiring, it's five years beyond that. But I kept hearing the phrase could do versus have done. And that's something that people have brought up quite a bit. And what most of the time they mean is when you're hiring for a role, it's either going to fall into the category of this.

You're looking for someone who could do this, meaning there's universal skills that can translate or have done. An example would be, have done would be, if I'm looking for a developer that needs to code in a certain language, I need to figure out somebody who has done that in the past. versus a salesperson that might have some raw talent. But, you know, I heard that phrase quite a bit. And our head of HR, his name is Armando Lopez. He's been in this industry for 30-plus years. We've had him on this podcast. Yeah, he's great.

And I learned a lot from him all the time. One of the things he and I were talking about recently was that idea that when you talk about could-do versus has-done, you always start with has-done. It's just what you're actually looking for in the has-done section. meaning that when you're looking at a resume, for instance, and you're deciding that I need a salesperson, I might not have exactly I've sold this specific gadget before.

But what you're actually talking about is there actual competencies, their characters of people. You're trying to look for someone, do they have a theme of being good with people? Have they talked in their current role? Are they selling something totally different? But is there something that can transfer? And that's something I've been really thinking about quite a bit.

in recent weeks of that idea of everything points to has done. It's just what are you looking for in that category? I love that as an interview question, just asking somebody, what have you done? And then just shut up. And oftentimes, somebody that hasn't done anything will go to, well, I worked at this company for this many years and I kept promoted to this role. And it's like, no, no, no, what have you done? What did you do? What did you build? What did you produce? What team did you pull together that was, dysfunctional, you know, if you can talk in terms of, here's things I executed on. I mean, if you're interviewing, this is a tip if you're interviewing, speak in terms of the utility you provided the organization. What did you do? What did you make happen? And not just, well, I hung out of this organization for X amount of time. And it's important to think through your accomplishments. Like, what have you actually accomplished? And what did you learn during that time? What part of that role would you never want to do again?

there's so many things that when you start diving into the experience, I found that people love to talk about their experience. If they're not very self-aware, sometimes they'll talk a little bit too much as well. That can be a warning flag as well. So step one is this side, and once you've decided this is exactly what we're looking for, next stage is to actually go find that person. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's fine stage. You can think about it in a few different ways. Some will call it sourcing, talking about it.

how do you attract talent? There's a lot of terms of you use in recruiting. But at the end of the day, you're trying to figure out, am I using an internal recruiting team? Are we running with it? Am I going to use an outside agency? Regardless of which way you go, you're still in charge. You're the one who has to run point on all of it. Who's driving the hire? I would say that's a trick question because you're driving the hire if you're the one that's actually hiring. But there's things like the company website. How are you going to promote it? Is it easy to find do you have a section that actually can talk about career opportunities? There's a lot within social media that you can utilize.

LinkedIn, some people build out their LinkedIn as a regular part of their career in building. Then a lot of people also just only think about it when they're trying to hire. But I recommend you as a business leader making sure that LinkedIn is honed in. Like, do you have accurate information that it's appealing that you can, you have a presence you've made connections with people because that helps so much when it comes to finally needing to hire someone. And there's like Indeed, there's Glass Store, LinkedIn. All of those have ways that they will actually share what you're looking for. And keep in mind that you can network.

You can use a reference social media. There's so many different ways to do paid media. One of our personalities, Ken Coleman talks about the proximity principle. And I think that is so, so correct. Because when you're actually around people doing what you're looking for, then you tend to find them. Yeah. So you mentioned social media. I know we have an Instagram handle that's Ramsey Careers.

And we're just populating that with a lot of fun stuff about what it's like to work here. I think that's a really great resource. I mean, if you're not at the size of a company where you can have a huge HR team and tons of, you know, website dedicated to updating and recruiting and all that kind of stuff. but just an Instagram that's about your company. What kind of stuff do you put on there? What have you found to be effective? We found that there's a lot of engagement you just show real life.

We show teams celebrating. We show what we actually do. We have a lot of teams that do stand-ups in the morning. It's just a fun environment to see when we have special speakers. Jess, who runs that part for our team, she does a great job of just trying to be present and finding out what's going on. And being around and letting people know.

because it makes us, you want your company to feel like you're real. Sometimes there's this time where you put this image, but nobody ever just wants like this big, big company that's unapproachable. Now you want the people who you can sit there and talk with. I do a lot of culture interviews for people who are candidates who are coming through as kind of the final stage. And I tell you, almost every single time somebody asks if Dave is around. Is he present?

and sometimes I'll ask, why do you ask that? And I say, well, we never see our CEO. And he's just not around. And I'm like, well, Dave leads our staff meeting every Monday. He's present in the lunchroom almost every day. And he's around. And that's a rare thing. And that's something that we need to be celebrated,

is that there is an open door for, regardless of your level of leadership, whether you're on the operating board or you just got here, we're all just real people working. And when you can set that up and show you. show in environments like that, people want to be a part of that. It's really key to contrast. You know, a lot of people that are coming in and they say, we never see our CEO. I imagine often are coming from a place in corporate America that's just a massive machine

and doesn't really have a heart and they're kind of a unit of production. But small business, men and women listening to this podcast, mostly small business owners, two to 200 employees. Guys, we have a unique opportunity to contrast our small. family, fun, we're real human culture against these big corporate companies where people just feel like they're cog in the wheel. It's one of those things you almost take for granted, like, well, yeah, we're just small, we're just us. But highlighting that, highlighting the upside of all of that, you know, that, hey, we're not like corporate America. I remember we used to put in our postings

all the time, like we wear jeans to work, and we work across from the mall in case you need to go shopping on your lunch break. And I mean, we just put these fun things in there that you wouldn't expect to see in the posting on a big corporate, you know, job posting, corporate site job posting, you know, but let them see your attitude and your swagger and your humanity is really what you're saying. Yeah, when you have fun events as a company, it's not hard for somebody to take a picture and show that. Yeah, put it up. Yeah. Okay, so you got to decide and then you got to find, I want you to talk more about our, and we talk about this a lot of non-tre leadership, but in addition to indeed and LinkedIn and posting on the web, you know,

website, social media. We really encourage our team. We found that some of our best hires come from friends of current team members. And we incentivize our current team members. We actually have a bounty program that says, hey, if you go find somebody that becomes a fit here, you know, we're going to pay you a lot of cashola to say thank you for finding somebody that's a stud. Talk more about that program. Well, the employee referral program is what a lot of companies will call it. But at the end of the day, we want exactly what you just said. You know who are the thoroughbreds that we need to be in here and we'll say keep the donkeys out, keep those people out.

Because I think that's just as important as knowing, I know this person they applied. I don't think that would work. But it's creating an environment where we're celebrating that. That we have a program where we literally give $500 cash to somebody. It's something that in our staff meeting once a month will celebrate it and say this person was referred by Daniel Tarty and stand up. and count your money and celebrate. We all cheer.

We have a lot of fun with it. We do. We have a lot of fun. We actually, for developers, we pay $2,000. Just as a plug, we're always looking for good technology and creative as well. But those are two areas that we're always looking for. You know, we do that because our people who are on our mission really are the guardian of our culture.

And there's only so much you can really get. get insight into somebody in an interview process, even if it's lengthy, even if you have a lot of interviews, but somebody who's on our team who has done life with this person or seen them outside the context of interviewing where they're putting their best fit forward, they're really good at being able to say, if you make sure they know that we're counting on to do this, I mean, you've got to have some vision casting for your team here, but they're your best resource to be eyes and ears for who would be a great fit, go get them and encourage them to come on board. And then who doesn't need to be here?

I emailed you a couple months ago. I said, hey, this guy applied, don't hire him. See me if you need details. And you just wrote back, you know, 10-4, got it. But like you and I know, and we've been together so much that we just, it's like, we don't even have to have a conversation because there's something going on in this guy's life where it's going to be a problem if he's here. Right. And you know, and you really want to get your team to think like owners and think about it's all of our job to help make sure that our culture is shaped and improved by who we collectively let in and who we collectively. collectively make sure that we keep at arm's length.

There's people who we'd call the thoroughbreds. They tend to hang around other thoroughbreds. That's part of how we keep driving and how we keep experiencing growth in our own lives. So it's encouraging the team to look around to see who's already presence in their life and calling out. I've referred a lot of people here over the last 10 years.

And what I've found is how great it is when you see someone, you're like, I know you would kill it in that role. And then they get here. And referring of, like friends of friends, too. Keep in mind that if you create an environment where you're talking about this, it's present of what you do when you're having conversation, whether it's at church or friends or on a softball team, you're always kind of looking for who could join the team. Yeah, that's good. It keeps that family vibe. It keeps that, hey, we're in this together. We're not here just to punch a clock and have a job. We're in here. I mean, you spend a third of your life is working with people. And so, hello team, help build the team that you want to work with. You know, I mean, this is, this is going to be a part of your extended family here in a lot of ways. And you get to influence that when you're bringing in those, like you said, those thoroughbreds. And companies like ours that have really high volume of application, it becomes even more crucial. Like last year we had 23,000 people apply. That's amazing. And so it's sometimes difficult just to even sort through all of the applications on certain roles. And so anytime you can stand out, and that's where Ken Coleman, Coleman, when he talks about the proximity principle, when he talks about that, that's what he's saying is if you're trying to get your dream job, and it's in a place that has a lot of people, you're going to, going to need something extra to stand out. And there's no question that applies here.

I imagine a lot of listeners when they heard 23,000 are thinking, well, that must be nice. I can't even find one. How do I get the phone to ring? So you mentioned LinkedIn, indeed, these different things. But what do you say that person who's just going, hey, we're in a more remote area or we're not in a big city like Nashville or we're not necessarily high profile like Ramsey? What's the best way that we find our people? At the end of the day, we're in a more remote area. you find your best people by looking where they are, investing time to find out where the people that you would like to hire are in actually being around them. The networking thing, especially when you're a small business and you don't have a big platform, you don't have radio shows

where I interviewed actually somebody earlier today who they said, well, Dave mentioned we needed developers on the radio. And so I knew, I sat there and thought, as we were preparing, I was going to talk to the small business owners. I thought, man, not everybody has a Dave Ramsey. 15 million radio listeners. They could just put the call out. Yeah, that's, that's not what most people's experience is. But, you know, those early days, Dave talks a lot about hiring people who he went to church with. Or there would be somebody's, a friend of his kid, they said, man, this person has just working, he's actually working three jobs for no, he's just a hard working. There's some kind of great. to this person. You're just kind of paying attention. And so I think sometimes when you invest the time to find people, maybe it's partnering with a local school where you have, if you have positions that are a little bit more entry level, you're looking for some people right out of college. Sometimes it's just networking with other business owners. Sometimes it's just showing up

to their career fairs. There are places out there. But I also think that using LinkedIn, is a pretty big, big tool these days. And there's actually different levels of what you can do on LinkedIn where you can actually reach out to people. And you can do special searches to find what profiles are out there. And you can see somebody who has an experience. If I'm looking for this type of graphic designer, there are terms and things that you can look to find them

and you can actually send something to them. And there are very creative ways to do that. But I also say if you're really new, and this is something totally outside of your wheelhouse, house, when you start thinking of, I've never been in technology, but I need to hire a really high-end developer to move the needle on this, don't be afraid to talk to some agencies. Places around who actually are spending their time, their energy, their money, working to find the people to help them place. Because oftentimes that's where you can make a good hire.

You still have to go through all the other parts of the interview process and you have to own all of that. But don't be afraid to outsource that piece until you can do something on your own. So you've got to decide and you've got to find applicants. Then the third phase that we get to is the actual interview process. This is where kind of the 12 steps kick in in Entree leadership. And we're very thorough. We spend a lot of time because we want to make sure that we're getting not only great culture fit, but a great skill fit and that we don't ever rush into it. The worst hires I've ever made is when I was in a crunch and I had to hire fast. Oh, yeah. And, and Every time I fired a fast, I ended up having to let somebody go or we're stuck with somebody that's like, oh, it's not quite working, but it's not bad enough to fire them, you know, and it's just I wish I could go back there's so many times and just tell myself, just wait. The right person is around the corner, just wait. So that's part of why we have so many steps. But when you guys get to the interview process, unpack a little bit what that looks like here for our hiring managers and you guys as recruiters, because it really starts to ramp up once we've got

somebody that's kind of like, hey, we got to fish on the line. And everybody goes into action mode on the interview process. Yeah. Yeah, when we talk about it takes some time. We talk about multiple steps. I want to be clear that we're not just dragging it out just to drag it out. You know, we'll be quick within the steps because we want to be efficient. I think in the early days of hiring, we used to probably lose some people just by how long. But sometimes that was because we just didn't have things. That's a really good point. Taking a long time, I should restate that. We're not trying to take a lot of months, right? We're trying to have. a robust enough exposure to this person.

So if you got 12 steps that you take an hour, for example, you could do one hour a month, it's going to take you a year, or you could do one hour over two weeks in 12 different times and you're cram into dance. So it could be shorter in the calendar, but you still need to make sure you've got that you're thorough, I guess, is what we're saying, right? Yeah.

Oh yeah, absolutely. And do multiple in a day even. You know, if we talk about our actual process of what we do here, I thought that might be helpful just to lay out. Here's what it is. If you have just a normal person applies, then what we do is the recruiter or somebody will review the application. Then from there, we've added in a lot of skills challenges and just one, like a skills challenge for maybe a developer or a designer.

So like what's an example of that? Okay, so you're a writer who just applied. Well, there's going to be some kind of writing skill. Like an assignment. Assignment that's going to show us what you can do or submit your portfolio if you're a graphic. designer. There's something like that. Now, contrast that if you're like in sales, then now we're going to send you a video, like you're going to do a video interview. What we've done with this is it has given us some FaceTime. You actually get to review a video. You may invest five to 10

minutes reviewing those instead of actually having another step of taking an hour. That's a way that we've been able to be efficient. Now, that's only applicable to certain roles. Not all of them could do a video. So the sales thing, I like that because it, I mean, you could get 12 videos that are five minutes long and you knock that out in an hour. An hour. You learned so much when some of how they present themselves, their body language, the way that they enunciate, their vocabulary. I mean, being able to actually answer a question on video.

So like what's a quote, do you have them answer like one or two questions on the video? Yeah, we typically it's like somewhere around two to three questions. Yeah. And they're all centered around how would you do this or it's something where you can process very quickly, describe a situation. I love, anytime. that you get the opportunity for a salesperson to try to sell you something on the spot. Somehow you just look, but ultimately what you're trying to do is you're trying to figure out

how they communicate. And this was without any prep. You know that they don't know fully what they're doing, but you just kind of get this raw, real, quick snapshot of the person. And that has helped us quite a bit in the area of sales. It's a lot of fun to have, you know, you can have a good time with this. I remember CJ McMahon on the entree team. He's stud, one of our sales advisors and he was interviewing and I was just I was kind of trying to feel out like I'm not sure if the guys got the X factor and I had a water bottle and from me I said hey time out sell me that water bottle he goes you serious I said yeah sell it to me and dude he just goes straight I mean doesn't even miss a beat and he's like well how often you drink water I'm like uh not as often as I should have

and he's like asked another question asked another question but I mean he you know at some point he said okay would you he asked for the sale and I pulled out my wallet and we had a We were kind of laughing about it at that point. But I wasn't looking for like, obviously he doesn't have a presentation and had the time to put together on all the benefits of this water bottle. But you're looking for somebody who's, one, they're going to have fun with it. Two, they've got personality. Right. They're going to just roll with it.

Like, can you throw them a curve ball? And they just, you know, they're quick on their feet. And they just go, yeah, let's figure this out. I wasn't looking for a perfect sales presentation. I was looking for his, does this guy have heart? You know, is kind of what you're trying to feel out. but it's fun in those tests. It's not always about

acing a test. Now, in developing, that'd be different. Like, their quality of their code is super important. But some of these more personality, soft-skilled things or a sales type thing,

you know, just feel out like, what kind of person are you, you know, and create a little test that gets that kind of experience in there. Yeah, you're right. If you're a developer, you're going to actually get basically

a score when you're done and that's going to dictate whether or not you can't do that role. Or if there's going to be a high trajectory, low trajectory, that kind of thing, a lot of teaching. But after that skills challenge or video interview,

that's when there's an HR phone screen that we do. And that's great because we'll, as a recruiting team, we'll just kind of, we say it's 80% culture, 20% skill. We're just trying to figure out who this person is and why they're interested in the role and whether or not we think that that will actually be a good fit to move forward. From there, we have a hiring leader initial conversation after that, where the actual hiring leader is going to spend some time, 30 minutes, an hour, depending on the person in the role, then we do the disc. Okay. We send that, we use the disc because that's going to be helpful in how we communicate.

That's what we use as a company. We never rule somebody out because of their disk, but we use that to understand how they're going to communicate. Yeah. It's just a good indicator. I mean, that's really what all these things are. They're all, none of them are necessarily rule in or rule out based on one thing. But again, you're trying to get a robust exposure to who is this person. How do they think?

Right. You're trying to get a lot of data so that you can kind of put all that in there and find the trends across these different interviews, the personality assessment. And when you see a certain trend, you go, yeah, this is trending towards, looks like it's going to be a great fit. Or about three things are really off. And it's like, yeah, that's going to be tough to overcome. But I think it's important that we highlight. There's never one thing that's this make or break. Like we have never said, you have the wrong disc. So you can't have the job. That's dumb. It's also kind of illegal.

It's not how you approach it. But it makes for a great conversation in the next interview. Hey, you took your disc assessment. What do you think about that? Well, yeah, it's exactly me. Well, how do you see that personality thriving in this role? Well, I'm going to love it because I'm high eye and this role's working with people. And I love people.

And of course, you read in my assessment, it says I love working with people. It's all true. You know, you're looking for alignment on that stuff more than this is a past, fail kind of a thing. Yeah, you can look at mine and you can see very low C. And if I was interviewing for a role, and that's more of like your attention to detail. And if I was interviewing for a QA role that's going to be all about in the weeds, you might ask, like, hey, do you enjoy it? Now, if you're talking to me, I'm going to say, no, that sounds like a nightmare scenario for me. I'm more people. I like to talk. I like high D, high eye personality. And so you take all of these pieces. like the disc, and then you keep going with the interviews. For us, the next is the hiring leader, normally the second hiring

leader. There's normally a couple chain, maybe that was a director or a senior director that's going to be involved at the next. So you've had another set of eyes on that person as well. Then from there is when you start talking about some of the specifics, about compensation,

benefits. We do something unique with the budget. We ask for budget here. We are Ramsey Solutions, and that's not meant to be invasive to your own life. It's just for you to do an exercise to make sure that once we've gathered, you've had the comp information that you know whether or not you can afford to do this role. That's not something that passed around. It's just one of those that we want the exercise to get done.

We want the recruiter to take a look and be like, yep, it works. It's another guidepost. It's another guidepost. Really what we're trying to do is we're trying to unlock things along the way. We're trying to unlock. It's like building a puzzle. Who is this person? You're trying to, that candidate is trying to get to know us.

We're trying to get to know that candidate. And this whole time we're walking a journey where either one of us can jump off at any point. And you hope that at the end, when the right person, that it all comes together. That's good. So that next point is when we actually bring somebody in. We used to bring people who are local in for almost every interview. And then we realize that this is a lot. It's a lot to ask. Oftentimes people do have a current job, and to having to have them sneak away.

It was pretty difficult. So we limit the number of times they're actually in the building, but we utilize things like Zoom, FaceTime, those kind of tools to get some face-to-face. But ultimately, we do have what we call the half-day interview where they come in and they typically have around two to three interviews with different leaders. We still normally do have whoever's the board member, whoever sees that area, meet, and then we do a culture interview. interview as well. I can't help but think, I mean, I'm just thinking about our small business owners who are just running and gunning and need a seat filled. And hearing all that, again, it's like, oh, there's so much. Yeah, that would be overwhelming. I can see that. And y'all are a big company, and you got board members and half days, and, you know, it sounds like a thousand steps to this process. But I just want you to encourage them on, again, this is our process. It's not going to look

exactly the same in your organization. But the principle here is what you've been talking about. You're trying to get as much information as you can. And we really want to make sure we make a great decision. Yeah, and that's where you get to decide. We'll go back to that first phase of this, is just decide, what do you want the interview process to look like? You get to make this up. There's no rulebook that says what you have to do. There are companies out there that do one interview and they hire. And that's not something I'd recommend personally. But you get to look and say, I feel like if I meet, maybe I'm going to meet twice. So that way we cover a couple different topics.

And then I'm going to have this other leader or this other person I respect meet. And that's going to be the interview process. What you want to do is make sure that you spend enough time that you actually start to reveal who the person is. And for them to fully understand the role and ask the questions that they have as well. Yeah. Yeah. You do get to decide. You have authority and you're sovereign in that regard.

if you're the owner. I want you to say a little bit about this dynamic. We've talked about this a lot through the years as we've been growing. It's sometimes a tendency to kind of get tunnel vision on. We're hiring for the role we need today and lose side of, okay, based on where the organization is growing and who we need this person to be growing into in a year from now. I'm always looking for somebody that can kind of grow with us or help even drive that growth. How do you kind of tease out in the interview process? Maybe all the boxes are checked

and it's like, yeah, they're going to be a good fit for when they drop in right now. But do they have a propensity towards self-development and growth? Are they the kind of person who's going to be maturing over time and helping lead the organization, whether it's in a formal role of leadership or just like culturally helping us lead as we go forward? Yeah, one of the ways that we have found that, because I agree with you completely. And not everybody can make the turn as you grow. within your business. We've isolated that there are five things that we hire for. And I've found that when all five things are present, that is extremely helpful for understanding the growth and potential of that person. So we say that we hire for people who are hungry, humble, smart,

we would hire for their skill and also their fit. Okay. Now, those first three humble, hungry, and smart, they might sound familiar if you've read the book, The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lensione. That describes the humility, and it actually talks in depth. I highly recommend that book if you're hiring people, because that has been the most helpful book that I have used for hiring. Because you get this idea of what does humility look like. Are they just all talking about themselves? Are they going to be a nightmare to work in a team? Or are they going to work with each other? Do they have hunger? Is there this drive that you can tell that they want more? They are looking, there's a difference between I'm looking for the next thing. And it's someone who's just

asking about what are the opportunities. What does this look like to grow? How do I succeed? There's a hunger element that's present. Smart is people smarts, not intelligence. We're talking about, did they know how to read the room? Did they connect well with others? You build those three and you kind of assess from there and you get, do you have people who are excellent in those or even good or excellent in all three of those, it's a pretty big deal. Then, of course, there's the skill. They have to have a skill to do the job

that they're actually going to take on. And then fit separates into two categories. The team fit and the company fit. Both are important. Fit feels a little squishy. Like, what are you looking for when you say fit? Is it culture? The culture, for sure.

When we look, look here, we have a very clear mission statement. Then we also have 14 core. values. So we always make sure that every person who's interviewing has had a chance. We do it at minimum in the culture interview when they're here on their half day to talk about the mission statement. What does that mean? Ramsey Solutions provides biblically based common sense, education and empowerment. They give hope to everyone in every walk of life. Every person who's come on board has heard that mission statement. And then when we've talked about the core values, we know that there are some key ones that every people, every candidate,

it will always hear. Those are ways that you can help people to one self-select if they actually want to be a part of that. But also, you give them an opportunity to answer the question, what does that mean to you? Does that resonate with you? What does that mean to you when we talk about being a part of a crusade? When you do that, and then the team fit, there's just this element of, does this work in this environment? Do I have a group of people who's just extremely serious and I'm going to drop this extreme practical joker in the midst. Now, maybe we needed that dynamic because it was kind of a stuffy team. But you want to make sure that there's going to be a fit with the leader who's going to be leading, whether that's you or somebody else, and the actual

person. There has to be something that's like, I want to actually spend some time with this person. Guys, this is why we harp so much on core values. Like, if you don't have those core values landed, you can't use them in the interview process and you end up getting people on board that are not a good fit, but you don't know why because you didn't use that as a filter. I really, you know, the core value one, it's super important that that's coming up in the interview conversation. And you've got to be careful because, you know, you've talked about this. The experience you have with them in the interview is the best you're ever going to get them. So if you go, you got to be careful how you ask the question. If you say, do you like this core value? What's everybody going to

say? Yeah, yeah, that's great. Versus we're on a crusade. And here's what it looks like. We're crazy we get out there we take bullets it's hard it's emotional it's draining sometimes we're doing work that matters there's a spiritual component to it how's that feel to you um that's interesting if they say something that's more of a hesitant or just shallow answer like i'm going to drill there versus somebody going oh my gosh are you kidding that sounds like a dream job like the old place i used to work not to knock them but it was just kind of boring worrying, but man, I want a place that's on a crusade. I want to do work that matters. Like, if you see them light up around a core value, you can get a technically positive answer on how do you feel about

this core value that isn't lighting up, you know? And I think it's really key that that's a place that you camp and figure out on the culture fit piece. Are they really going to be excited about your core values? Not just in the interview process. They knew about them. And they said, yeah, sure, I could do that. That's a great indicator that they're not going to be a good fit. Totally. And keep in mind that passion looks different for everyone. There are some people who are very passionate and they are outspoken. I can tell very clearly when you are passionate about something. But when I started interviewing developers, I started realizing passion looks a little bit different. It might be quieter. It might be softer. In the culture interviews, I have a team that does that now,

especially as we scale. And one of the people who is doing those interviews with me, he will, he said that it really was whiplash. He's always hired salespeople. And the first time he handled actually having conversation with a developer, he walked away and was like, oh, man. And I'm like, man, that person was awesome. And he's like, what are you talking about? I was like, passion looks different for that skill set. This would be a great thing to unpack a bit.

Somebody who doesn't have a gregarious personality, how do you pick up on what passion looks like for them? How do you decipher whether it's passion and a more modest personality or, no, that's just a lack of passion? Right. Yeah. Sometimes I definitely have been guilty in the past of judging someone from, I wanted more out of them. I wanted their face to show.

Now, most people, when they're passionate about something, they light up. You can see them, they sit in their chair a little bit differently. Their hands start moving. They start talking passionately about it. If I'm ever curious whether or not somebody is passionate, this is like this is how much you get out of them. Maybe they've said the right things. maybe they were pretty more monotone personality. But you're like, okay, the words that they're saying we're talking about, they're really

bought in. Like, they're living in our world. Like, they're living the principles. They're connected to the core values. What I found a way to find out if they're actually passionate is to find some other area that they are no question are passionate about. What's a hobby? Do you have a sports team?

Oh, yeah. I follow the Lakers. And did they really light up when they started talking about LeBron James? And all of a sudden, now you're just to be a sports team? started seeing that they were passionate, and then you realize nothing they weren't passionate before. So I try to compare to something else, but if they were like, oh, yeah, I like the Lakers, and yeah, I've been to 150 games, and you're like, oh, okay, passion looks different for this person. That's good. I like that. That's a good exercise. So decide, find, interview a lot in the

interview process. What else before we get to making an offer? I'll say in the interview process, one of the best things you can do is pay attention. Be okay with going off script to dive in a little bit deeper. There was a guy who recently retired. His name's Rick Perry. He was the original HR director for the company. And the secret that I observed with him as he would interview people is he was willing to ask one extra question. And he showed care and concern.

When the person talked about their wife, he'd say, okay, you said your wife, what's your name? and our name's our name's Amber awesome how long have you guys been married like what I noticed is that he was willing to dive in deeper throughout the whole interview so that way whenever he starts diving in

on something that might be a concern he's already set the tone for this is how we communicate is we talk I ask questions we unpack that's how we communicate so there's that one extra question if you're expecting the candidate or expecting a person

to be vulnerable, you have to lead with vulnerability. Tell a story that is from the heart. Tell something about your own life. At the very beginning, we started talking about this, and I told you that my wife and I were $28,000 in debt whenever I first discovered Dave.

I will share that with people because now we just said, hey, this is a safe place to talk about specifics. It's something that if we're going to dive in and I'm going to actually ask you personal questions, not evasive, questions, but I'm just trying to get to know you, then I need to set the tone that I'm willing to do that as well. And, you know, one of the things that when Dave talks about in Entry leadership, it has this 12,

was it 12 steps? 12 steps, yep. I love the one in the one that's right up there is prayer. As a person of faith, I really spend time, you know, asking God, will you bring me the right people? Will you help me to discern whether or not this is a person that's supposed to be, around. And there's a phrase that people use all the time that I'd shy away from. And it's when my gut says not to. And the reason I say to shy away from just saying my gut says is because I bet if you spend time actually talking about what your gut says, it's actually probably just something

tangible. Yeah, I agree. That's right. There's a reason that it's in your gut. But we don't, Usually we don't have words for the tangible piece just because we haven't taken the time to unpack. What is that gut feeling? Why am I feeling that? You process it a little more. You get to something that's very concrete. Yep. When I first hired my first assistant, I didn't know what I was doing.

So I was asking around, what should I hire for? And I got this whole list of people. And I would say that I'll just kind of know when the right person's here. And I saw a resume of somebody. Her name's Meredith. And I looked in and saw that, wow, she was a Division I. college basketball player. And wow, she has all these excellent, like it wasn't that she had been an assistant for all these years. And whenever I met her, there was like this instant connection

of like, wow, I really think that she could do a fantastic job with this. Well, years later, if I unpack, you know, I know I said in that, oh, my gut says she's the right person for this role. Well, why did I actually know that she was the person? One is I knew that I had a team of around 50 people who I needed somebody to be able to communicate with that held a presence that need to say, all right, we're all going to go do training in this room. I wanted somebody to be a representation of me.

That's a very tangible thing. There was a competitiveness that I'm a competitive person. I wanted somebody who wanted to win as to who was going to be my partner. So when I spend time looking now and realizing why she is so fantastic and now she's actually supporting one of our operating board members and doing a fantastic job,

I can write out exactly all those things I said back in the day where my gut feels. And really, they were very, very specific things. So you're learning to articulate what the gut feels are. Learning to articulate what the gut feels are. That has such broad application, not just in hiring, but really in all decision-making in business. Pay attention to your gut. But then really, it's like interrogate what is that feeling and get some time to get words

and be able to articulate it. And if at the end you still feel like something is totally off, go with it. Something's off, something's off. Maybe you don't have the skills yet or you don't have the ability to articulate it. Go with it, meaning slow down and go with what your gut saying, which is pump the brakes. Yep, pump the brakes. Don't rush. Rushing in this interview process is your biggest enemy.

Yeah, no doubt. So we get through the interview stage. We get to the point that we make an offer. I know early on, and I think this comes from sales. Like when you close a deal, they got the product, you got the money, and you're moving on to the next sale. I've made a lot of mistakes in not really onboarding, almost seeing the offer is the finish line for the process.

And it took me a while to go, come on, tardy, that's their starting line. And like, they're about to come on board and merge their career into your entire organization. and you've got 90 days to really set them up for success. Or if you don't, it can really be a trajectory towards failure or a miserable first couple of years. You know, so you guys talk a lot and you've trained our business leaders on how important this is. And HR here is just incredible at helping facilitate, making sure that our onboarding is world-class, that there's lots of vision, there's lots of clarity for the candidate. There's lots of excitement and welcoming them on board, making sure that they know where everything

things at and really how to be set up for success in their roles. So the fourth step in this is train. And, you know, it's one of those words when we hear it, you go, yeah, I mean, training for the job, right? But you think it's so much more than that. Tell me about that. Yeah, you use the word onboard, which is really, it could be, you could call it onboarding, but I like the idea of train because, all right, it's go time now. Somebody has just left a job. Maybe they moved to the area. We feel as we just close the deal as soon as they say that they accept an offer. Well, what's their experience like getting here? They probably have a lot of questions because they're going to ask questions about,

where do I park? When do I show up? Who's who? How am I going to have a fob in our building to get any? How do I actually do all of these things? They have a million questions. So what we do is we have a person that helps transition somebody here. As soon as they accept an offer, very quickly, they're going to start getting a

series of emails that's really just helping them to know that they've made a good decision. Like a liaison that's going to be their point person. They're going to be their guide. We have a point person. They're going to have a cell phone number of someone who they can call. Now, oftentimes, the hiring leader by then has already shared their cell phone as well. But they're going to talk through. Some people, they might have just needed to sell their house. They're finding new schools. There's all these different things that are transitioning. It's someone in the area that they might not have any of that. So oftentimes we have people. in different stages. So we're trying to get them here. We do a two-day onboarding that is done, they spend two days with HR.

And they get to, Dave stops by every time he's coming by in the morning, just says hello. They love that. They get to, the first day is the first thing that they get to do is they get to sit in one of our staff meetings. We have arrangements for different board members, different leaders across the company will come do different talks. We talk about the org structure. We walk them around the building doing tours. We actually have a game that we do to try to find different things just to make it fun and inviting. We do a lot of different things. Roll out the books, the required reading.

But then we have these two days and then we celebrate them. And then when we turn them over to the hiring leaders, there's an expectation that they already have a plan in place of how they're going to train. You know, 10 years ago, we weren't very good at this. I was going to say two days of HR, when I started, there was about two minutes of, okay, there's your phone. The IT guys will come by sometime this week to turn your computer on. Good luck. I got to go. You know, it was just, it was so scrappy back then.

And if you're a small business owner, you might go, we can't do two days right now. But again, what you're saying is you've got to be super intentional at this state. You've got this set them up for success. And so what are the ways that given your environment, given the time that you do have, you can make sure that their first day on the job is an incredible experience where they're getting set up to win, not just they're parachuting in and it's like they're confused, they're frustrated. And this is where we talk about this a lot with entre leadership. If you're a leader hiring a new person, you've got to spend a lot of time and it's actually very inconvenient.

and you should expect a decrease in your personal productivity early on because you're investing that. You're front-loading that investment into one of your most sacred resources, which is this new team member. And it's not really going to pay off until month two or three or so where you're going, all right, I'm kind of back to my regular schedule. They're in a rhythm and now they're starting to produce. And so if you're trying to get to that ROI point in day three, you're going to be sorely disappointed and they're going to be miserable. Yeah, and when you're a small business, it's sometimes it's just, you start with the basics. Do they have a place to sit?

Do they have a computer that's ready to go? Does it make it seem like we've been planning and thought about the fact that they're going to show up? Is there a little sign that has welcome, welcome Daniel Dardy to the team? You don't have to over-complicate this. It's just being intentional and actually just spending time writing out what a schedule could look like. even if that's, you need to go read this for a little bit. Hey, watch this. Go shadow these people for a little bit.

Hey, you're just going to walk with me for the next couple of days. Just by putting a schedule together that shows that I've thought about it, that's a great experience. And it might be way better than anything that they've had before. We've gotten to the place that now we not only have the two-day onboarding, we have 30-day, 60-day and 90-day check-ins. They're clear of books to read. we do this to empower the hiring leaders who are now leading them to do check-ins along the way, make sure that their process didn't end when we got them in the door, that we show that we're intentional. We still have right now times where Dave spends with every team member right around the 90 days.

We're starting to change that a little bit, do more quarterly to have groups of people, but it's faced time with Dave, his son, Daniel, spends a lot of time with people as well. we're giving the opportunity to talk straight to the heads of the company and get to talk to Dave and ask him questions. And just that piece alone, really people love that. It's like a good exclamation point at the end of that process. So 90 days in, they've been on boarded, and then now they're really running, right? So four stages, you've got to decide, then you've got to find the right person. lots of time and intentionality interviewing, not necessarily calendar time over months,

but lots of space there to get a lot of data and get a lot of face time with them and then training. So what else? Well, the only thing that I'll add is part of onboarding and part of that whole training time is really what you're trying to do. The reason you're investing is because you're trying to change some verbiage in their language. And hopefully by 90 days, what you're trying to do is you're trying to turn the you guys into we. You're shifting the pronouns. Shifting the pronouns. That's exactly it.

You can tell when somebody has made that change, when there's an ownership to say, this is how we do it. And that's something that Dave actually calls out and says there's an expectation. All right, you've been here. This is now we. You are part of this. That's part of growing this. That's part of helping new people.

You're no longer the new people here in the building. You're a we. Yeah, that's really key. Well, I mean, just an incredible, very practical conversation about things that, you know, this is the biggest thing, guys. You know, I mean, companies are made or broken off of who they hire. And so, you know, I know as a leader, somebody that's kind of the founder of getting, I remember entree leadership early on, it was just me. and I was desperate to get a hire, but I was still right in the middle of producing.

I was still selling. I was still doing the marketing. I was wearing all of these hats. And I wish I could go back and say, look, I know you feel that pressure, but you've got to slow down more on your hiring to actually put on paper and decide who you're looking for, to think about what you need,

to spend the time finding them, to interview, and especially that fourth one to train them. And I figured out how to do it eventually, right? And our team has gotten really good at it. I'm not as involved directly in those steps anymore these days. But it's one of those things that I've seen countless businesses that have scaled and really crushed it. And oftentimes they'll tell you we can look back and say the trajectory of our business changed when we started getting super intentional about how we hired, who we hired, and how we onboarded. And then businesses that kind of cap out and flounder, you could technically kind of cruise it.

you know, maybe you just keep making a million dollars a year for the rest of your existence, but you just hit that plateau. It's usually because as someone mentioned the other day, I felt like we were hitting an invisible wall. Like we were pushing, push and pushing, and didn't matter what we did, we just kept hitting this wall. And then we changed our hiring and everything took off. And so this is so foundational, but it's also so vital to building and growing a peak performing business. So grateful to have your insights and what you guys do here with the HR initiatives at Ramsey Solutions. It's just it's integral to everything that makes this place tick.

You know, as we wrap up, many business owners out there hearing this, taking notes in a frenzy, I'm sure, with all the gold that you're dropping. But if you could just put a bow on it and one thought of encouragement for these business owners, men and women out there fighting, dreaming, making it happen, how would you encourage their hearts as we leave today? what I'd encourage you to think about is whenever you're trying to hire somebody, you're looking to add people, sometimes you can get it all in your head about the process and there's so many steps in all of this. But at the end of the day, treat people the way that you would want to be treated through the whole process, which means if you are interviewing for this role, what would you be asking? And if you spend time at the very beginning thinking through that, through the whole process, you'd think of, well, I'd want to know what this is going to do. How much am I going to make? What are my opportunities? You have a different perspective. If you start building whatever it is that you have with that idea of treating people how you'd want to be treated, I think you're going to have a good experience. But investing the time to decide to have a good plan of finding people to interview. to train them. If you do that and you set it up, right, this is going to be so, so crucial for you. And you can do it. What would you be asking if you were in their seat? That works for hiring. That works for your team members that are already on board. That works for your customers.

That works for your vendors. Guys, business is a game of people smarts. It's a game of relationships. And Jeremy, you just so beautifully articulated the best. best place to win in relationships is to put yourself in their seat. The golden rule. How would I want to be treated if I was them? And what would I want to know? I mean, how I'd want to be treated. That's nice, right? But I love the extra piece you put on it, which is what questions would I be asking if I was in their seat? So great practical takeaway. Jeremy Heslip in the Entree Leadership Studio. This is your debut, but I hope that we could have you back. Lots of fun and really, really good stuff on hiring, recruiting, and building a rock star team. Thanks for your time today, man.

Free for a habit. All right, folks, by now you know that we at Entree Leadership think that people matter. Getting the right people, training them, investing in them, loving them, and actually treating them the way you'd want to be treated. And it all starts with hiring. When you bring people on board, it better not be for a J.O.B. It better be for an opportunity. It better be to jump into a culture that's amazing. And when you hire people, guess what?

They're going to shape the culture. They're going to create the culture. So you've got to be really, really intentional on who you let in. Now, we covered a lot today in the four stages that Jeremy goes through with everything from deciding who you're going to hire, then finding the right person, then interviewing, and then training them in onboarding. Really good stuff. Most of the questions we get are in the interview process. What are the steps? How do I make sure that I don't skip one of these steps?

Well, our coaching team has put together a great free resource to help you out with this. It's the Entree Leaders Guide to Hiring, and this is going to guide you through all 12 steps that Jeremy and I talked about in the conversation today. Dave wrote these. It's the manifesto for how we do hiring here at Ramsey Solutions. It's in the Entree Leadership book. It is the playbook, and so we don't skip a single step, and you shouldn't either. to make this easy for you and your team

when you're going through the hiring process. They put it together in a great free PDF that you can download, and all you got to do to get it is click on the link in the show notes. All right, guys, I hope you enjoyed the show today. Lots of fun, and hey, look, if you enjoyed this, be sure to subscribe and like and share. Thank you for helping us get the word out.

That's how this thing grows, and we are very grateful. Now, look, if you're a small business owner, what is small business? Well, we say it's between about two and 200 team members. If you listen to the show and you'd like to help us out a little bit, our producer Tim would love to have a live conversation with you to learn about your business, learn what the show is doing that's valuable for your business, pick your brain a little bit on how we can make the show even better.

So if you can help us out with that, we would love it. And all you've got to do is click on a link down below and he will get you squared away. Also, you can follow us on social media at Andre Leadership. You can follow me on Instagram at Daniel Tarty. This episode was produced by Tim Hull. It was edited and mixed by Will Rudder. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty, and on behalf of the entire Entree Leadership team,

thank you for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading. If you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network, like the Ken Coleman Show. Are you doing what you were born to do? I'm Ken Coleman, host of the Ken Coleman Show,

where I give you practical advice to help you discover your purpose and then map out a plan to get you there, from accounting to out of our show, advertising, from plumbing to production, you were created to fill a unique role, and the world needs what you have to offer. Join me on the Ken Coleman Show wherever you listen to podcasts.