Hiring Decisions Should Be Hard

I'm Alex Charfen and this is the Momentum Podcast, made for empire builders, game changers, trail blazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers, and creates of all kinds. Those among us that can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can rollover bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny, we define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop, and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. Instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world, because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be.

Hiring decisions should be hard. As entrepreneurs, we crave momentum. We are driven by that feeling of moving forward, of creating progress, making things happen, changing the world around us and improving it in the way that we see fit, where we think we should change things. If you are a driven enough entrepreneur, sometime in your career you get to the point where the momentum you can create on your own is no longer enough. You have to go out and find other entrepreneurial personality types just like you and me, to join your team and help it grow. Help it do more than you can. Help it do more than you can do on your own. When you bring a team in, and you involve them, and you incorporate them into the business, they will help you achieve heights that you can't on your own. This is just math.

On our own as entrepreneurs, we can accomplish only so much. When we learn how to manage a team, how to motivate a team and how to hire the right team, everything in our entrepreneurial world changes. You know, I've said this before. It's like becoming Iron Man. Iron Man gets into that suit, he hits the button, and his entire body is coated in this protection. Every sense, every capability he has is expanded. He's stronger. He can do more. He can fly. He can do incredible things, because he's Iron Man. Well, when you're an entrepreneur, and you build your company around you, and you put the right people in place, and you have a team that you trust of true believers, you will feel like Iron Man. Because you get up in the morning and on a daily basis, your organization is accomplishing exponentially more than what you could do on your own.

Now, I introduced this podcast this way because that is why to me, hiring the right people is one of the most important things we do as entrepreneurs. Here's what happens to so many. We're growing our business. We start getting some momentum. We start getting some traction. We start selling. We start getting overwhelmed. We finally hit that place where the decision has to be made where we need to hire someone, and then we want it to be easy. Then it's like, how fast can I hire someone, the easiest way possible? What do most entrepreneurs do? They look up and say, who do I know? Who's proximal to me? Who can I ask to fill this position right now, like tomorrow, like yesterday? That's why so many entrepreneurs end up hiring friends or friends of friends or family members, or people who are near them, or someone who lives on the street. That is way too easy if you expect things to work out for you longterm as an entrepreneur.

Now, I will give you this warning. Every once in a while somebody does that, and they get lucky. You have a friend, or a neighbor, or somebody that's recommended to you and you hire them on the spot, and they come in, and they are the exact person you needed. They fill in the gaps that you have. They help you grow the company. But I'm going to tell you something. That is 100% luck. I stopped trying to run my businesses based on luck a longtime ago. I like the odds. I like to play the percentages. I want the heights percentage chance of success. We're going through this right now as a company. We're actually in the hiring process right now. I want to share with you what I mean by hiring decisions should be hard. When you're hiring someone you should always be making a choice out of the absolute best candidates available. If you're not choosing from three people who you would give the job, then you don't have the right sample size. You're not looking at the right people. You're not talking to the right people.

Let me share with you a quick example. Right now, our company is exploding. We have several open positions, and we've just filled several open positions in just the past few weeks. We're looking at several more. One of those is a camera person to come in, work with me a few days a week and start putting out some documenting the journey type videos. The same thing that Russel does. The same thing that Grant does. The same thing that just about ... Bright Campbell, my friend in Australia's doing. We want to mirror that, and I want to have a videographer, an editor with me a couple days a week. Now, that is a hard position for me. It's difficult to hire that position because it's someone who's going to be around me, and I'm insanely sensitive about having people around me. I'm sensitive about having people in my space. I'm sensitive about how people feel and what their energy is like. They have to be a cultural fit to me. I have to be excited about them and who they are, and excited about seeing them succeed.

This is not an easy process, but Lee Ann who works with me, is amazing at going out and finding people. What she's done is she's made this hiring decision really hard, because in the past two days, I've had three videographers here. Again, remember these are people who are up close and personal. They're in my personal space. We're sharing space a lot of the time. If they're going to be my videographer, they have to direct me. They have to say hey, come back here. Do this again. Open the door again, I need to get you walking into the room. I have to be really intimately comfortable with them. Here's what Lee Ann's done. She's made it so it's a hard choice between the three. Legitimately, an incredibly hard choice between the three, which for me is exactly where I want to be when I'm hiring someone.

I want to make sure that I have three people in front of me that if you said, you have to take, and then insert one of the three names, I would be okay with it, and I would be excited about it. Because then I know I'm looking at three candidates where we're getting good comparative information. We're looking at the right things. I'm excited about all three of them. I know we followed the process right. Then here's what happens. When I select one of the three, my confidence level is going to be off the charts, because I know we compared them to people who were that good that I would have taken anyway. That's going to help us commit to this person. That's how you know that you are going to be successful with somebody who's in a new position.

Now, let's be honest, processes can fail. Sometime people will wash out, but what we're looking for is the highest percentage chance of success. The highest percentage chance of success is when you're interviewing three people who all could take the job right now, and you would be okay with it. There's no shortcuts around this. In fact, let me share with you a quick client story. I have the privileged ... and it is like an insane privileged of coaching Mariah Coz and Megan Minns. Mariah runs the company, and she is ... She's just this incredible entrepreneur. The two of them help entrepreneurs put their skill sets online, put their talents online. They work with entrepreneurs who have a hard time communicating what they do, online, artists and healers, and teachers and people who do things that are completely out of the norm. I love working with Mariah and Megan, because they're two incredibly talented entrepreneurs.

They are hiring right now for that key operator role, the person who's going to really help them in their company. What happened was, they had a person apply who they've worked with before. They really wanted to work with her. It would have been easy. They could have just said, oh, she's back. Lets just take it. This is going to be easy. My plea with them, my instruction to them was, go continue the interview process anyway. Go drive it until you have two more candidates that you would be excited to work with, and compare them to her, and make sure that you're committed. Here's why. If you just hire her and you don't compare her to anybody else, and this is for you too. If you're thinking about hiring somebody that you've hired, or worked with before, if you just hire someone and there's no comparison, here's what happens. Invariably in the first 90 days there's going to be an issue. There always is. We're human beings. We're random variables. There's just too much going on. There's always going to be an issue.

If there's an issue in the first 90 days, and you go through a hiring process where you've compared somebody to three people, you're commitment level to that person is going to be much, much higher than if you didn't. When you interview them and compare them, and sell yourself on them by going through the process, you're actually going to show up in a much better way for them. It modifies how we behave as entrepreneurs when we have a higher level of commitment to the individual that's sitting in the seat. Mariah and Megan went through the process. They could have made it easy, but they took the time, they interview people. Mariah left me a message and she said, hey, we've made the decision, and we're going to go with the person we originally thought we were. We went through the whole process. I thought she was going to say, we could have saved a lot of time. Then she said, and we see the wisdom in it. I'm paraphrasing, but she said, we see the wisdom in it, and it really changed how we looked at this, and our commitment level today, to the person we're bringing in is so much higher than it was when we were just thinking, hey, we should bring her in. That's what you're looking for.

You want to go through the process so that as an entrepreneur, you know you're committed to the person because you went through the process and you proved to yourself that they are the best choice at the time. That helps us stay in the game, remain committed, and move them forward. When you're hiring, go through the process. Put an ad out there. Put enough information out there so that you get a pool of applicants. Screen those applicants for cultural fit. Make sure that they're somebody you want to work with. Once you've gone through the cultural fit screening, start doing final interviews with them. Whittle it down to the final three people. When you have those last three candidates, do your final interviews and make a decision. What will happen is you will dramatically increase the odds that you make an effective hire. You will dramatically increase the odds that you and this person get along longterm, and because you've gone through the process, you will dramatically increase your commitment to the person you're bringing on your team.

If you maintain this as you grow, if you continue to always require three qualified applicants, that you would take any one of the three, as your team grows, and more people get involved in hiring, and there's more positions available and you expand your company, and you grow, then you will have the process that will ensure that you consistently get the right people in every position, or the right person in every position. Because in far too many organizations they try and make hiring easy. They take shortcuts. They hire whoever's there. They bring the person in who someone knows without comparing them. Hiring decisions should be difficult. Don't try and skip steps.

When you're bringing in someone who's going to work in your organization, represent you, wear your company logo, even though we don't wear a uniform, anyone who works with you, represents your organization, so put a little time into the hiring process. Because when you put time into the hiring process, you save so much time in the onboarding and working together process. When you take shortcuts on the hiring process, you will always spend far more time correcting those shortcuts on the backend. Hiring decisions should be hard.

If you're an entrepreneur who's ready to build a team, if you know that you are ready to start expanding the team you have, if you know there's more opportunity out there than what you're really showing right now, if you know that you can do more, create more, help people with more, than I want to talk to you. Because we help entrepreneurs build teams and scale multimillion dollar organizations. If it's time for you, if you're ready to understand the process to show everyone in your company where you're going, the path to get there and the scoreboards that show them whether you're successful, we want to help you do that right now. Go to Billionairecode.com. Answer a few questions for us, and we'll give you an opportunity to book a call with a member of our team so you can understand our programs. Because if you're at the point where the opportunity is bigger than the infrastructure you have today, then we can't wait to talk to you. Billionairecode.com