Hire To Win

This is the Momentum Podcast.

The way that most entrepreneurs hire people is challenging. It's usually a family friend or an acquaintance or someone who knows somebody else. Here's the reality for entrepreneurs. Hiring decisions should be difficult and you should hire to win. In this episode of the Momentum Podcast, Alex is going to share with you the process that we use to build a life changing team, to get the right people in place and get them into momentum so we can move our business forward fast. I hope you enjoy.

I'm Alex Charfen and this is the Momentum Podcast, made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds. Those among us who 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 roll over 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. And 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.

I'm excited to share this with you today. Today, I had three final interviews for a new operations assistant in our company. We're growing, we're hiring, that's super exciting for me. And whenever we hire, whenever we bring people on, it brings up all kinds of memories for me of when I used to hire in absolutely the wrong way. And when I used to hire how most entrepreneurs hire, like try this on for size, see if you've ever done something like this, you have an open position and somebody has a friend or an acquaintance, or you know someone or someone knows someone who might be good for the position. You talk to them, you bring them in, you'll hire them. And then three to six months later, you're trying to figure out what happened. That happened to me over and over again Because I didn't really understand that hiring should be a process, that hiring should be a system, that hiring is something that is crucial and critical enough that you should put some time into it.

And so I wanted to share what that looks like in our company when we hire and what it looks like and how you can do it so that you have the highest likelihood of hiring success. Like that's the key. If you're going to go out and bring people onto your team, I want you to have the highest likelihood of hiring success. And here's what I know. Hiring the friend, the acquaintance, the person who knows someone is not the highest likelihood of success. Now I always have people ask me, but what if I want to hire a friend or an acquaintance or somebody I know, I'll tell you in just a second how you can do that in a way that's safe. But first I want to help you understand how to hire in a way that's going to improve your chances of success, bring the right people on your team and make things exciting.

So here's the punchline. So when we're showing people how to hire, there is a whole preparation process we go through to get to the interview process. But today I just want to talk about interviewing and what conditions should be present when you're interviewing. So the way I talked to our members about this, my team about this is a simple phrase, hiring decisions should be difficult. They should be hard. They should feel a little challenging. Here's what I mean by that. That when you are hiring someone, the best way to hire with that highest chance of success is to interview three people in the process and compare all three. You want to have three candidates, and here's how we explain it to our members, here's how I explain it to my team.

We want three candidates where any one of the three could do the job, you'd be excited about working with them and they would be a good candidate. And if you go through your hiring process and you interview enough, you talk to enough people and you bring in enough people where you have three and that's what Haley did today. So Haley's our director of operations. She's incredible at recruiting. And I had three half hour interviews today. And at the end of the three, I was like, Haley, you've got to tell me. This is a really hard decision. In fact, we're going to we're driving towards the decision, but we haven't made it yet because she's made it so difficult. Here's what I know when a hiring decision is hard. Here's what I know.

I know that three conditions are present. One, we have a ton of perspective. Let me explain what I mean by that. When you're hiring for a position, if you talk to one person and it's somebody friend of a friend and it looks like they'll do the job, you're not going to gain very much perspective on what's available, what type of person could fill the role, what type of people are out there for the role. Now, if you have three candidates where the hiring decision is hard, where any one of the three can do the role, you can make the assumption that there is a ton of perspective in the hiring process. Because when you're talking to enough people that you can whittle it down to three strong candidates, you get perspective as to what is the candidate pool, what kind of people are out there, who could potentially do this job, who could potentially help your company move forward. Perspective is so crucial in a hiring decision. If you only talked to one or two people who are available, who somebody raises their hand and says, hey, I might be able to do that job, you're not going to create any perspective and you're not really understanding what you could have in the position. So one, perspective is huge. It changes how you hire.

Now, two. This is a big one. If you have three people who all could fill the position, I know there's a high level of understanding of two things. One, what we're looking for. And two, what the position is. See, here's what happens in a lot of entrepreneurial hiring. Somebody comes up with an idea for a position, the next day, they tell somebody, the person says they have somebody available, they go grab that person, they bring them in and they start working with them. Well, if you're going through a hiring process and you have three really amazing candidates, here's what I know. There's been some forging there, there's been some changing there, there's been some formation of opinions, reinforcement of opinions, reinforcement of beliefs. You have a high level of understanding of what's available because you've gone through the process. And going through the process of interviewing multiple people actually does two things.

It refines your impression of what you want, but it also refines your impression of what the position is. So as those two things get better, as those two things clarify, as those two things get stronger, you actually do better and better at recruiting for that position. So when I'm sitting down and I have three strong candidates like I did today, I know there's perspective. Like I just said, I know there's understanding.

Now here's the third thing. This is big. This might be the most important out of all three. But before I tell you, I want to tell you why. When we're hiring people and when we're bringing people onto a team, here's what I can tell you with like 90% of people in the first six weeks, you're going to have a snag. You're going to have a challenge. There's going to be a disruption. There's going to be some confusion. They're going to miss something, make a mistake, have a challenge somewhere. And if you've gone through a hiring process where you've talked to enough people that you've driven it to a candidate pool of three strong candidates that could fill the role and you chose your candidate in that first six week period, when there's a stumble or a hiccup or a challenge, your commitment to that person is going to be very high. Consciously or unconsciously, it's not like you haven't even have to think about it. Because you've gone through the process, your commitment to that person is going to be very high.

Now here's the challenge. If you hire the friend of the friend or the person who's available and you hit that snag in the first six weeks, what do you have to fall back on that tells you, you made the right decision? When the answer is really not a lot and your commitment won't be there. And so when you hire, when there's only one person, here's what will happen. I've got somebody calling me while I'm live. Sorry. I just had somebody try and call me live. So here's what will happen when you hire ... Jeez, leave me alone. When you hire a person who you don't have the commitment to, who you haven't put the time and effort into having three different candidates where you haven't gone through the process and you haven't created the commitment. Here's what happens.

You will end up in a place where, when there's a snag, when there's an issue, when there's a challenge, it's very difficult to overcome because you haven't gone through the process, there's not a commitment to that person, that human being. And like I said, this is either conscious or unconscious. If you go through the process, however, then your commitment to that person goes up. When you hit a snag, you coach them through it. It'll be easier to get them through it. If you don't go through the process, when that person's working with you, whenever there's a challenge or an issue or something happens, you are going to have massive doubts.

Now, all of this being said, driving to three candidates, making sure they're all good. That gives you perspective. That gives you understand. That gives you a commitment. I always get the question. Well, Alex, what if I want to hire a friend, a family member, an acquaintance? How do I do that? Well, I'm one of those coaches that I actually support hiring friends, family members, acquaintances. I mean, I've done it in my company. I think amazing people know amazing people. So often we get a friend of one of our team members. Sometimes we even get a family member of one of our team members. Here's how we ensure that we should hire them if we make the decision to do it. We put them through this process. It's that easy.

If you have a friend or a family member or somebody who is the acquaintance, like if somebody comes to you in that way and you want to have a high level of commitment to them, put them into your interview process, do your initial interview with them, bring it down to the last three candidates. If they make it to that three candidate pool, interview them on final interviews. And if they're the right one, hire them, even though they're a friend, family member or acquaintance. But here's what will happen. Consciously, subconsciously or less than consciously, you've gone through the process, you've created a high level of commitment. And here's what's interesting. That high level of commitment will actually protect them. If it's a friend, family member or an acquaintance, I think this process is infinitely more important.

Because if you put a friend, family member or acquaintance through the process and they are the winning candidate and you hire them, here's what you will know. You'll know you interviewed enough to get to three people. You would have taken any one of the three. This person really did stand above the rest and you hired them because they were the right person, because of merit, not because of your relationship. And then in that first four to six week period where you hit the snag and you're going to hit it again and again, your commitment level will be high, you'll coach, you'll push through and you'll be able to make it work.

So the punchline is hiring decisions should be difficult. And if you are going to hire people, hire to win. Make sure that you have three candidates that are amazing. You would take any one of the three. And then you know you are going to make a strong hire. And you know you've gone through enough to get perspective on the position, understand what you really want and be fully and totally committed to the person you hire. It's a game changer if you go through this process, when you're building your team.

Now, if you're an entrepreneur, who's building your team and you want some help, you do not have to do this all yourself. Let us help you. We work with visionary entrepreneurs who have incredible ideas and want to get the team, the business, the infrastructure around them, so they can execute it, go out and build their empire and change the world and we'd love to help you. If you're interested in the structure, process and routine that helps entrepreneurs build businesses fast, go to predictablebusinesssolutions.com, that's predictablebusinesssolutions.com. Answer a few questions for my team and set up a call with one of us. We will spend some time with you to help you understand what your business really needs to scale right now. And all you have to do is go to predictablebusinesssolutions.com. We look forward to talking to you.