How to Hire a Winning Team Member Every Time

Eric Dingler: Okay. So we’re going to get ready to record. If you’re struggling with hiring. I mean, maybe the idea of hiring somebody just absolutely scares the living daylights out of you. Maybe you you don’t trust that you’re going to be able to hire people that are going to do things as is good as you are. Maybe you’ve hired people and you just they they it didn’t work out. You know, it’s just this, you know, they weren’t the right person. They dropped the ball. It was a frustrating experience. Maybe you want to hire, but you’re like, gosh, I’m so busy. I don’t have time to train someone and and get them to do things right. It’s just faster to do it myself. If you’re having any issues around hiring the right people, I bet I can solve this for you by the end of this episode. Welcome to the Digital Nomad Entrepreneur podcast. My name is Eric. I’m a full time digital nomad traveling around the world with my wife and four kids. And I have been a serial entrepreneur, team leader, hiring hire of people for almost 30 years. Back in the day, I ran a summer camp for 15 years and you know what I had to do every summer? I had to build a team. I had to build a team onboard the team. And I’m not talking about people to take care of flipping hamburgers. I’m talking about hiring 18 and 19 year olds and preparing them to take care of other people’s children at work. I learned really quickly what works, what doesn’t. Since then, I’ve hired people from my own companies, a church that that I planted. I have hired and led and onboarded in and fired literally hundreds of people. And I want to walk through with you some some tips and what it takes to hire not just people, but hire the right people. Hiring is easy. It’s I mean, as soon you can hire somebody within the next 10 minutes hiring the right people. Now, that’s where the challenge comes in. But it’s it doesn’t have to be. It takes just a bit of organization, a little bit of forethought, a nice process, and all of your hiring woes are going to be solved. So I want to share that with you, but I also want to take a second and invite you. If you are a digital nomad, reach out and connect with me. Eric at D and E podcasts dot com. I’ll let you know where I’m at in the world as this episode comes out in the spring of 2024. My family and I are in Costa Rica. We’re going to be here until August and then will be headed to Spain. Our plans change. We are going to be heading in April, but now it’s August. And you’ve got to be flexible as a as a full time traveler, that’s for sure. But whenever you’re listening to this, reach out. Find out where I am. If we’re in the same area, I’d love to meet up with you. Now, this episode is the beginning of a five part series, a five part series. And in this series, I want to walk through the five different business processes you have to have in place to win in any kind of business. Now, in episode three, I shared the roadmap to success, and it’s the business engine that to drive businesses forward. And that has been by a good bit. The most popular episode I’ve done so far. And this is this is episode 11. And so what I want to do is I want to dove into those processes. So if you haven’t listened to Episode three, go back, you’re going to hear what these five processes are and how they help you move through the six stages of business. I’m going I’m not going to talk about the stages of business, but I am going to talk about the five processes. Now, real quickly, what they are. The first one is leadership, and that’s what I want to talk about today, hiring the right people. This is this is a leadership issue. And your leadership capacity is the capacity of your your business. Your business cannot grow beyond your leadership skills. And leadership is a skill. And so today, in this episode, we’re we’re going to unpack leadership and the processes of leadership that you can put in place. Specifically around hiring. There are others, but today it’s going to be specifically around hiring. Then next episode, I’m going to talk about lead generation. That’s the process to every dollar you’re ever going to make is going to start as a lead. Following that, we’re going to in the in the third episode in this series, we’re going to explore lead conversion. Henry Ford said nothing happens until someone sell something. Know nothing happens in business until someone sells something. And so we’re going to talk there about sales tactics, increasing wallet share, reselling referrals, all of those processes that it takes in lead conversion. The fourth episode in the series will be collecting and managing money. And then the fifth and final episode in this series will be project management. And so these are the five different systems. I don’t care what kind of business you have online brick and mortar. I don’t care. It does. It doesn’t matter. You need these five processes and as you improve each of these processes, your business grows. A big part of owning a business is just constantly improving these five processes. And as you work through improving them, each time, your business is going to grow. So leadership specifically around the idea of recruiting, hiring and onboarding new team members of one of the entrepreneurs out there that that I admire and follow and get mentoring from through his books and his podcast and his program is is Dave Ramsey. And one of the things that Dave Ramsey says, and it’s it’s one of the values of their company is to goes like this to be unclear is to be unkind. And I have found that so true for business and for leadership. And it’s easy to think you’re being clear when in reality you’re not. There are so many people that I have talked to that we’ve started talking to. They’re like, Oh, I tried to hire somebody and I brought a freelancer on board and after two months I just had to let them go. It wasn’t working out. And so, you know, I was going to hire someone, but, you know, I can’t afford somebody that already knows how to do it all. I was going to hire somebody, but there’s there’s, there’s just seems to be love. There seems to be always a but when it comes to hiring for people I talked to. And so what I want to do over the next few minutes together is I want to unpack a few different elements here. In fact, there are four things that I want to explore in each of these four. I’m going to have a couple of different parts to it, but the four things are. The first one is creating your culture. Now, you don’t wait to have ten people to create culture. You need a company culture. And there’s there’s a document that you can kind of put together that that creates culture. Culture is what it feels like to work for you, what it feels like for you to be working. I mean, even if you’re a solopreneur or right now your company has a culture. Now you can either allow that culture to happen or you can create that culture. And the reason this is important to start with is because culture trumps vision. You may have a vision. They have this grand business and have things happening and team members working independently and and you’re working 4 hours a week, which come on probably is going to happen. But, you know, you’re maybe you’re working 4 hours a day. Totally doable. Very accessible to a lot of people. But but how do you how do you how do you get that to happen? That may be your vision, but you can’t get to it. And the reason you can’t get to it is culture trumps vision. Culture is the essence of why you’re doing what you do, how you’re going to do it, and and the way you go about accomplishing it. So we’re going to talk about what creates culture. And I’ll be honest. Every single person I talk to that has struggled with the idea of hiring somebody is missing this. This culture document, if they will. They haven’t they haven’t put to paper what they want their culture to be. And this is important because culture trumps vision. Language, words create your culture. And so you’ve got to have these words in this language and in this common voice that you’re speaking with that people say, Oh, that’s not how we do it. Here is how we do it. Here is fill in the blank that goes to creating your culture. Okay. And so we’re going to unpack that here in just a minute. And then the next is a big key to success in hiring amazing people, hiring the right people, keeping you know, you got you want to keep stupid out of the building is what you want. You need to. Do and how you do that really starts next with a great job description, position description. And there’s a couple tools in there, a couple of tricks I’m going to share with you, some Easter eggs, if you will, that will weed out a ton of losers before you waste any time even talking to them. The next part, the next. The third thing I want to talk about is an interview process. You got to have a clear interview process and know what you’re interviewing for and you can’t hire somebody from one interview. And we’re about we’re going to talk about that. So we we use for interviews. You may use three interviews, maybe even just two, but I think three is the minimum. I’m going to talk about that. And then the fourth and final one is your onboarding tool. We call it the score card, and I’ll explain that to you when we get to that. All right. So let’s go ahead and start walking through this. What are the what’s what’s our culture document that I’m talking about? Well, for us, it is just a simple one page Google document. It it contains three things. It contains your vision, your mission and your core values. Now, I know that sounds really corporate and you’re pushing like, oh, I don’t want to have a vision statement, a mission that’s so heart. Like, you know, I’ve worked everywhere. I’ve worked, they’ve had one and they just, you know, nobody knows what they are. And that’s the key. These are this isn’t going to be something you create and put on a shelf. We look at our our mission, vision, core values every single week. We have a rhythm of of looking at this. And we’ve wordsmith these so that they’re easy to say. We’ve made them portable. Okay. Because portable when when you when you make it portable, you make it remember rebel. Okay. So we want these to be portable. We want people to remember them and we repeat them over and over because what gets repeated gets remembered. And I talk about our our vision, our mission, and our core values over and over. So if you don’t have this or even if you’re a solopreneur, even if you’re a solopreneur, you need this. If you’re the first stage of business, that business goes through is ideation. And when I coach somebody that’s just at this stage, they they haven’t started doing anything yet. They’re not even 100% sure what they’re going to do. They figured it out. I always work with them in crafting a vision, mission and core values. Now these aren’t in stone. These can get adjusted. Now, I personally believe the vision should be in stone, but the mission, the mission and core values are are flexible and they’re going to grow over time and develop over time. And that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that. But you’ve got to have these things. So to simplify these, here’s how you put these together. A vision. A vision is this you’re going that you’re going to sit down with a piece of paper or your tablet or whatever, and you’re going to write down We see a future. Now you’re going to start with we even though you’re creating this, you want to say, I, this is we, this is because you what you’re wanting to do is you’re going to want people to come on board with you to be a part of this. You’re going to want them to own this. And I don’t care if it’s a freelancer when I go to if I if I’m going to hire contract with a vendor that has a white label provider, okay, they’re going to fulfill service. They’re a subcontractor. When I’m interviewing a subcontractor, I still share with them, hey, listen, here is our mission, our vision, our core. Does this align with how you do work? Are you going to represent us in the marketplace with the outcome of your work by meeting this? And if they’re not going to I am not going to partner with them as one of our vendors. So I don’t care if you’re hiring a VA, a freelancer, a team member, an independent contractor and an agency that’s a white label provider. You got to have these documents and you want it to say, we you want to own this because you’re going to want to be every everybody wants to be a part of a we okay? Everybody wants to be a part of a week and so have this vision statement. We see a future where and then fill in the blank. Now, after you do this, you may wordsmith this in a way where you get rid of. We see a future that may not be a permanent part of your statement, but this is how you discover it, what your vision is. Your vision is a picture of a preferred future. We see a future where okay, what? What is that future? What what is that going to look like for for you for your for your business? For my. Agency for my Web design agency. Our our vision is we see a world of successful and generous business owners giving to nonprofits and or missionaries who are working to eliminate human suffering. See, we have a big, compelling vision. And what I love about this is when I share this, especially with millennials, they get either really, really excited or they’ll just look at me and say, I don’t know anything to do with that. But the team that we have, they have bought into this idea and we talk about that like the work we do, the work we do, we take on, we take on business, our clients. And we, we, we, we try to do everything we can to motivate our clients to to leverage their success towards eliminating human suffering around the world. And we have lots of stories of how this happens and how we do it, how our clients do it. And this is this is a big vision. This is this is our vision. This is what we see a future of. Maybe that’s not yours. Maybe you see a future where you see a future where no one is without clean drinking water. Maybe you see a future where every business is, you know, I don’t know, is free of debt. You know, every small business free that you see, a business where every person is eating nutritional meals. What’s your purpose? What do you see? What’s the big? If you don’t have a big vision, go get a job for somebody like we want to be a business owner so we can change the world. So we can change our world, so we can impact things around us. We want to leave things better than we found. You should have something that motivates you. That excites you, that motivates your team, that brings them in the work. If your whole thing is you’re just looking to make money, well, then you’re listening to the wrong podcast, to be honest. This this isn’t about making money. That’s not that’s not what we’re in business for. We’re in business to make a difference. So your vision statement is we see a future where and Google vision statements for different companies, organizations and see some examples out there. But that’s that’s the first thing you have to create. What’s what’s your purpose for being. Then you go to your mission statement. Now a good formula for a mission statement is where you start with what you do and then who you do it for and then by what method you do it. So we do X for Y by Z. So that’s a that’s a good formula for creating a mission statement. At my digital marketing agency, we provide digital marketing services for organizations and small businesses by creating a customized marketing system that creates awareness, attracts leads and turns customers into raving fans. That’s what we do. That’s our mission. That’s how we help business owners become successful. So they have margin that they’re able to leverage that margin to donate to nonprofits to take care of their team. Well, to be working for eliminating human suffering around the world and whatever, whatever excites them, you know, whatever they’re passionate about, it may be an orphan response. It may be an ad in human trafficking. It what is the suffering? Maybe hunger, maybe disease and maybe poverty. Like, there’s so many things out there that that people are excited about that if they had the margins to to put towards it time to volunteer, money to donate, they would do that. Imagine helping a business succeed to the point where their entire team is able to have, you know, a week or two weeks or three weeks or four weeks built into their compensation package where we say Amazon, you get you get four weeks off to go volunteer in a year. And that’s just for us. That’s just for my agency. You’ve got to figure out what it is for you and your business. So your vision. We see a future where X, Y, Z. The mission we do. X or Y by Z. Now the final piece to this is your core values. And here’s where this makes begins to make a difference for you and hire. You might be thinking, wait a second, how is this going to help me hire people? How is this how how is a vision, mission and core values going to help me hire people, be more confident in hiring people? Well, quite frankly, it’s because when you don’t know what you want your people to do, you’re going to be too afraid to hire your people. Okay? If you don’t know how you want them to work, you’re going to struggle with, you know, being without it because you don’t have clarity, you have confidence. So your core values is this is how we do it here. This is what we’re about. So just to use an example of my company to share with you our core values. So we are our core values are we are always learning. Now I want that for everybody on my team. I want everybody on my team to always be learning or, you know, I invest in that in courses and trainings and stuff like that. My leadership team and I, we, we buy and read together books and discuss books together as a leadership team. Like, I want everybody on my team to be learning because leaders are learners and I want to grow up a team of, of leaders and in experts and, and subject matter experts. And so you can’t do that by not learning. So everybody on my team, if you’re going to come work here, then you need to be prepared to always be learning. That’s our 4/1 core value. Our second core value is a we have a we we embrace a cadence of communication. We embrace a cadence of communication. We don’t we don’t sit around waiting for things to happen. We are proactive. We have a cadence, a rhythm for our communication of when we send communication off of when we expect to hear from people, what we do when we don’t hear from them. Like communication is so important mainly in a big way because we’re a remote team. I’ve got my team is is in is in India, Bulgaria, the United States, El Salvador, Brazil, Mexico, wherever I am in the world, you know, I could be in Costa Rica, Peru, Istanbul, Turkey, like, you know, we’re very, you know, fluid is is a family. So communication is critically important. And clients and customers love to have clear communication. Our next four value is considered the third option. Consider the third option. What’s the third option? We we talk about this all the time as a company. You know, a lot of too many times people think, well, it’s it’s either option A or option B, there’s almost always an option C and we dig in to that that third option before we make decisions. We and because in that third option is where create excuse me, where creativity comes into play, where innovation comes into play Our fourth core value is discover the principle behind the practice. When we see somebody being successful, something, we want to know why? Why did that work? What made that work? What, what? What Universal Principle was at play there? And then we’ll contextualize it for our brand, for our company culture. We don’t just copy what we see other people do. We are always learning. But then we’re we’re asking ourselves, why did that work now? What could it look like for it to be at work here? Our next core value is first class experience, and we spend time talking about what does it mean to have a first class experience? Just last Friday at the beginning of our leadership team, I had everybody go around and I asked them what what has been the most amazing customer service experience you’ve ever received and what made it amazing? And you know what I was doing there, I was helping them connect the dots to first class experiences, and we talked about that. So our core we have a core value, a first class experience and results. This is how we do that. If anybody was ever go, well, I don’t know, I think it’s good enough to send it out there. I think that I think that newsletter is good enough. I think I think that blog post is going. I think this is good enough. Somebody on my team is going to go, Woo, that’s not how we do it here. I mean, you maybe maybe good enough was okay when you worked somewhere else, but here we do first class and first class isn’t good enough. First class is. This can’t be made better. Like I have a high expectation of first class experience and results. Our next core value is we obsess about our clients goals. Well, for my team to obsess about the client’s goals, everybody has to know what our client’s goals are. And we can’t know that if we’re not communicating and asking and goals change. So we’re regularly finding out. We never sit down and say, Well, let’s let’s start offering this service way. We will. We want to offer a service until we ask ourselves, does this go to meet our client’s goals? Because we’re about our clients here, we’re about our clients goals with the next value as we systematize for success. This helps create profit greater profit margins systems create profit. I love it. Systematize for success. We strive to understand the other person’s point of view. So we talk a lot about putting ourselves in other people’s shoes. Everybody on our team, we’ve got our disk profiles. We got our working genius assessment. Like we we study people. And when we go to communicate with our clients, we’re always striving to understand their point of view. You know, so we we avoid technical lingo when we’re communicating the clients. We don’t we don’t do it that way. Here. Here we go. The extra mile to make sure the clients understand what’s going on. Because their point of view is they don’t understand a lot of the tech stuff we talk about. So we go overboard in communicating because when we understand that their point of view is that they they don’t understand and it scares them. And information brings clarity and clarity brings comfort and comfort brings peace. Well, now we know what we’re going to look for. And our last one for us. Now, I’m a person of faith and my business is a business on mission. And so this is very 1980s. I’ll Grant give you that. But but our final core value is what would Jesus do just well, what would Jesus do? And you don’t have to believe what I believe to work it in our company, but you have to Bill. You just have to accept that. I believe it and I won’t accept what you believe. But here we ask ourselves, what would Jesus, what would the greatest prophet of all time, the greatest person that’s ever lived, what would he do in this situation? Well, he was about loving others. He was about elevating those that were oppressed. He he was about making a difference to make people’s lives better. What would Jesus do? That’s that’s our core values here. You see, when you know that your team is going to be learning, they’re going to be communicating with your team. They’re not going to just jump into decisions. They’re going to take time to consider third options. They’re going to discover universal principles before they just copy something that somebody else is doing. You know that your team understands first class experiences and they’re not going to deliver something. You’re going to send something they’re going to ship something into. It’s it’s with excellence. And it’s good to go when you understand that they’re not looking out for their selves. They’re not trying to make things easy for them, but they’re obsessing about your client’s goals. When you understand that your team is working from a system and is always looking to make systems better, so profits increase when you know that they’re not going to get an email from a client that’s frustrated and ignore it, but they’re going to go, Whoa, what’s that? What’s what’s going on here? What’s their point of view? How do how do they see this? What are they experiencing? What are they feeling right now? They’re not going to put clients off. They’re not going to wait until it’s convenient for them as an employee. They’re going to they’re going to step in and solve problems when you know that they’re going to put other people first, suddenly you’re able to sit back and go, you know what? I’m going to take ten days and go off grid and I’ve been able to do this. Last year my family and I, our two years ago now, my family and I, we went spent ten days in the Amazon jungle. I was totally off grid. We’re out exploring the jungle, fishing for Parana, you know, hiking through and, you know, checking out monkeys and slots and all the Amazon jungle things. And I never worried once about my business because I knew what my I knew how my team was going to make decisions. And I train my team to make decisions based on our core values. And every week, I talk about one of our core values to our team. I send a video to my team every week on an app called Marco Polo. I send a video out to my team. I explore that is core value. Every week in our leadership team meeting, I talk about one of our core values. I’m constantly talking about our core values. I’m constantly talking about our core values. And that is how you create culture that gives you permission to step away. So that’s the first part of putting together a process, a system to hire amazing people. And what we do is we go over this document in the before that. We send this document before the very first interview. We say, hey, read this over. If this looks like something you want to be a part of, then let’s we’ll schedule your first interview. All right. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that here after I talk about the position description. Now. If you’re listening to this point and you’re like, this is great and but but I’m not sure how I’m going to wrestle with all of this and put all of this together. I want to invite you to go over and to my website, DKNY podcast dot com and I have got on there five coaching roadmaps. These are these are 60 to 90 minute one on one one time coaching roadmap meetings. All right. Each one is $197. You can book it right there through my website. And one of the five that I have is the team building roadmap. And then that 60 to 90 minutes, I send you a document ahead of time. You put some thoughts in writing. You come up with some things, you answer some questions. And in those 60 to 90 minutes in the team builder, we’re going to we’re going to craft and get your vision, mission and core values to probably about 80, 90%. Like these are always going to be living. And so you’re going to adjust things from time to time. Every time you explain it to somebody, you might think of something and you know, but we’re going to get you one of these just so, so close and then know that after that, I’m going to give you my library of position descriptions. If you’re in the same industry I’m in, you’re going to be you’re going to get a lot out of that because you’re gonna be like, Great. I need to hire a junior web developer, so you’ll have that. But even if you’re in a different industry than I am, you’re going to have them as a as a as a framework of of what to do. And then I’m going to help you figure out your interview process and questions. I’m going to give you our interview questionnaires, and then I’m going to show you and give you a copy of our onboarding scorecard and how we lay that out. And the scorecard is amazing. It it is a self training document that you give your team where they use it to train themselves and you’re going to get ours as a starting point. And so, yeah, so you get all of these things, you get copies of all of this stuff together. We’re going to, like I said, craft your, your core hiring, document your mission vision, core values. You’re going to get my position description library. We’re going to establish your interview process and questions. I’m going to answer any questions you have, and that is $197. And you’re going to walk out of that, you know, 60, 90 minutes with with confidence that you have what you need to go out and start bringing on team members or making your next team member hires even more successful. All right. So with that, let’s continue with the second of the four things, the four things I’m talking about today. First off, culture creation. Next up now, position description. And then I’m going to talk about the interview process and our onboarding tool. So let’s jump into position description. All right. The job description. The position description. Okay. This is a document that we create every time we go to hire somebody. All right. Every time we go to hire somebody, there’s there’s eight parts to it. And my process is, is this I like to hire my first I like to hire team members through. It’s called Upwork. All right, Upwork. We’ll go there and post positions on Upwork. And I’ve got a system worked out. And for the first two years, I your employee with us via Upwork, I pay you through Upwork. And I do that because I don’t have to worry about figuring out international payments for this company or that for this country or that country, you know, anything like that. There’s the my the new team members have some protections. I have some protections through Upwork totally worth doing, especially hiring a remote team. And then after that two year window, we’ll bring people out of upwork and into our h.r. Ecosystem because by then we know they’re, they’re staying and it’s, and it’s worth going through the, the process. But what we do is we go in there and we create a job posting and we tell everybody if you’re interested in this position. Download the position description. And then get back to us. Okay. So that’s what we do. We will go in there, say we’re hiring. So recently we just we’re looking for a junior web developer. So we went in, we said, you know, create a position, junior web developer. This position is going to help, you know, develop websites using WordPress. And we use a WordPress theme called Divvy. You know, you’ll not be doing design, you’ll be taking a completed design from Figma and recreating it with WordPress and divvy and that just a broad quick. This is this is what you’re going to do if if you’re interested. Read the attached job description and get back to us. Now, remember, that’s super important. Here’s why. The job description, the position description has eight parts. The first is the position overview. The position overview. This is a quick little statement. a12 sets a sentence statement that describes how this position fits into the vision and mission of the company. All right. And again, if you go through a coaching a road map coaching session that specific to this process of business, you’re going to get my line and you’ll get several examples of what that looks like. But this lets the person know right from the very first thing. On the first document, they open from you that this position contributes to the vision and mission of core values are core values or I’m sorry that core values the mission and vision of entrance studios by X, Y, Z, and we just got a statement in there. We want them to know right off the bat, this is important. The second thing we list, it’s just their supervisor who the supervisors are going to be so that they know who who they’re answering to. And a lot of times we’ll do the position, you know, we’ll do the job title of who they’re answering to. Next up is we provide the third part of this is a description. All right. And this is this is a little bit longer of a paragraph, you know, two, three, four sentences, the most that talks about what makes this position unique, but it clearly defines the win. Okay. This is the this is the statement that lets them know what a what a good day at work looks like. If you do this, you’ve done your job. Okay? This description is the win. They vary. It takes a little time to craft these, but this clearly articulates what the win is. Then the fourth element that I like to put in is a bullet point list. And it always says A day in the life of fill in the blank. So a day in the life of a junior web developer. And then it’s just typical daily things they’re going to do that day. Bullet point list, you know, you’re going to do this, you’re going to do this, you’re going to do this kind of it kind of a typical thing today. The next thing then we list is the general responsibilities that they’re going to have. Okay. What would the person be held accountable to, to complete? All right. And these these are different than the day in the life of you know, and again, you know, you go through the coaching with me, you’ll you’ll get that. But in here in this list is a Easter egg. And our Easter egg is a test question. And it says this You must reply to this job posting and start by saying Peter or Eric or Page or whoever their supervisor is going to be. Eric, I have downloaded, opened and reviewed the position description for junior web developer. The Junior Web developer. That’s it says that says in quotes. Then feel free to say anything else you like. Now, here’s the thing. Recently we just did this. I posted it. The next day, I got to my desk. I opened it up. We had 24 people in 24 hours. 24 people had replied and said, I’m interested in this position. Okay. Out of those 24. Five of them. Five of them said, I’ve read Peter. I have downloaded, opened and reviewed the position description for the junior web developer position. Okay. And it says here you must reply to this job posting and start by saying quote. Five people did this out of the others, the 19 other people. A lot said, Oh, I’ve read the job description and I will be perfect for this. Oh, I’ve looked over the job description and I can do this. The thing is, they either didn’t understand. So there, there, there, there. English level isn’t good enough to understand instructions and I need it to be. Doesn’t have to be great. Doesn’t be perfect. They’re not meeting with somebody, but you have to be able to understand our instructions. So they didn’t understand? Most likely. Almost always. What happens is they’re just lying to me. They’ve skimmed it and yellow looks good and they’re just eager to get the job. And I don’t want people that want a job for this year. A job. I want a team that has a that will pay attention to the details. When we send somebody a project brief on our team, I need to know they’re going to do it when they ring, when they get an email from a client and the client list for things that they need to happen. I need to know that my team is is, you know, that they’re going to provide first class experience by doing everything in that email the first time. Okay. I need to understand it. Then I need to know that they’re going to read the request and understand the other person’s point of view and take these things seriously. Because this those are all part of our core values. This test question immediately eliminated 19 people. I didn’t even give the time of day to. I just immediately clicked the thumbs down, which short which takes them off the list. They don’t get the time of day because they didn’t do what I asked this question. It’s so important. Okay. So those are the first five things. The overview, the supervisor, the description. A day in the Life of General Responsibilities with an Easter Egg. Next up, I list their key result measurements. All right. This is how we’re going to judge their performance. Every deadline met on time. That’s a key result measurement. Okay. Whatever it is for the position description. You know, we have a couple key measurements there that, hey, this is the thing we’re going to look at. We’re measuring you against everybody when you need. People need to remember to be unclear as to be unkind. We want people from day one to know what we’re clearly looking for. So that’s the key result measurement. Then we list any requirements. Is there anything you have to know to do? Any competencies you have to have? We don’t go too tight on these, to be honest. We’re very comfortable training people, but we do want to know what the requirements are. And then the. The last one is the essential functions. These are non-negotiable abilities that the person must have. Okay. They got to have this. This is kind of a way to protect yourself, depending on what country you’re hiring from. For example, in the United States, the United States is very adamant about being an equal opportunity employer. And they they should be. But if you need somebody to be able to do something to do the job and there’s no way around it, you have to listed in the essential functions. All right. When I was running the the the summer camp, I needed people to be able to recognize and immediately respond to emergency situations. Well, if somebody came in and applied and they were blind and deaf, I’m sorry. I can’t hire you to be a camp counselor. I can hire you for other jobs where this isn’t an essential function. But for that, that’s. That’s an essential function. So is there a language? Essential function? Okay. Is there an ability you you must be able to access the Internet reliably. Okay. That right there is an essential part. If you can’t do that, I’m not going to hire you and you can’t come back and see me or you didn’t hire me because I’m, you know, I’m from a poor place. And then the do with it, you can access the Internet. That’s why I didn’t hire you. So the essential functions are kind of a cover your butt. And then in the essential functions we list our second Easter egg. And our second Easter egg is make sure you also let us know when you reply to this job description what your favorite candy bar is. Okay. So as soon as we look the next day or the couple of days as we’re watching these, as long as it comes through in that first statement says, I downloaded open and reviewed the position description for that to do that, then we look and see did they share their their candy bar? If they did, that person is now interview eligible. They’re interview eligible. So what is the interview process? This is the third part of our overall system of hiring winners and keeping losers out of our off of our team. And that’s our interview. That’s our interview process. When I’m going to hire somebody, I’m looking for somebody that has character, competency and chemistry. All right. The first is character. If you’re a liar, I can’t get you to not be a liar. Okay. If you’re lazy, you’re late. If you’re you know, if you’re a bomb, you’re a bomb. If if you’re just looking for a job, then you’re just looking for a job. And that’s fine. Go hide. Go get a job. That’s not what I’m looking for. What I’m looking for. And it’s my business. So I get to decide what I’m looking for. So many people I talked to are like, Well, you know, I just need to get people on. If I. If I have such high expectations, I’m gonna get anybody to take the job. Oh, give me a break. That’s not true at all. I have no problem filling positions, and when I get people on my team, they stay. They stay because they fit into what we’re doing. I treat them well. I have a system and a process and everybody is like, it’s just well, it just works. It just works. And so my interview process, I’m looking for character. I’m looking for competency. Can can they do the job? Can they learn to do the job the way we want it learn? And then I’m looking for chemistry and we have a multi-step interview process right now. The first thing is I do the first interview and I’ve had some other business owners and some friends of mine say Oh, you shouldn’t do the first one. Let your team weed them out first before they get to you. You know, and I don’t do that. I’m going to weed people out right now. We’re not we’re not doing this too often and stuff like that. And and because of our Easter egg questions, I’m eliminating this, you know, significant percentage of of time. I’m not wasting time with people and stuff like that. I’m looking for that that culture fit. And so when we are going to go hire somebody, you know, I’ll, I’ll send an interview or I’ll send an email and say, Hey thanks for expressing it or send them a message. Actually, enough work. Thanks for expressing interest in our position. Please read our mission, vision and core values. And if we sound like a company you want to work for, let me know. We’ll schedule an interview. And then if they get back to me, we scheduled the interview and I get on and I just tell them, you know, I need a little bit a couple of minutes, you know, and ask couple questions, you know, why? Why they’re looking for a job and and what what what most interested them in this position. And then I do a lot of talking at the stage and I just tell them, I’m telling you, I’m just glad I asked and I just flat out I’ll just say, hey, listen, I just want let you know what we’re looking for. We’re looking for people who are ready to be on a crusade with us. Like we don’t have time to waste time. We, we. We are all about helping our customers and clients succeed. So they have margin of time and money so they can make a difference in the world. And we do the same thing. And here’s a couple of things we have going on where we’re starting. You know, we’re working in an impoverished community, setting up, you know, training centers, teaching people to build websites and stuff like that so they can go out and get work and lift them and their families out of poverty. And, you know, and explain all of this is going on. And I just hope I’ve got really high expectations for everybody on my team that you show up, that you execute, that you participate, and that you you don’t gossip. Because I’m going to tell you right now, the first thing I’ll fire anybody for is if you gossip, if you complain to anybody on the team about anything, you don’t like that that and that person has zero authority or influence over it. I’m going to fire you. Gossip is cancer in a business, and I don’t do it. We may watch drama on TV, but we don’t do drama here. Okay. There’s no place for drama. The first sign of drama. First sign of gossip. I’m going to fire you. I will give you permission to become employed somewhere else. And I just lay it out. And I’m very blunt and to the point, because here’s the thing. That’s who I am. And if you don’t like it, I don’t have time to worry about your poor little feelings. Go get a job for somebody else. This is my company. This is how we do it here. And if you want to be here, I’m going to take radically good care of you. I’m going to give you time and space and place. And we’ve got an amazing compensation package and we have crazy benefits that other people don’t have. We are radically generous for our for our team. And so we are we we love to have fun. We laugh together as a team. We have a good time. We become really close. And and we’re we we we celebrate with you. We do all these things. But it’s because we’re not people gossiping. We’re not doing drama. You know, we’re not you know, if you’re bothered by something, tell your supervisor. That’s why you’re going to meet with them every single week. It’s why you have a one on one every week. So everybody is somebody, somebody, okay? You’re going to have somebody that you can talk to every single week and every Friday. Our team has to submit a weekly report that asks them about their stress, their workload and their morale. We ask them three questions. What what was your morale like this week? What was your stress load like this week? What was your what was your workload this week? And everybody has to submit that report every single week. And I look over those every Monday and I look for patterns and issues and stuff like that. This is a great place to work. You want to create a great place to work. But you’ve got to make sure you’re weeding people out. And your interview process is part of that. So that’s the first thing I do. And the thing is, I see potential in everybody. I want everybody to be a part of what we’re doing. I love what we’re doing. And I am terrible then at hiring people. Because if I like you and I think. I mean, I want to hire you. But. I’m not. So I don’t I don’t make those decisions that much anymore. Okay. I’m just saying, this is who we are. This is our culture. Do you want to be a part of this? If they do, then I say, okay. The next step is your supervisor is going to interview you, your supervisor is going to interview you. And this is the competency interview and this is where they’re going to have some questions, where they’re going to ask you some specific things about the job. And we’re going to make sure that you’re you can learn and, you know, that add up. And then there’s a third interview. And the third interview is with somebody else on the team. They may be a supervisor. They may not be a supervisor. They may be a leader. You know, they may not be. But it’s going to be somebody that knows your supervisor. And what they’re doing is they’re going to ask what we do in this interview is this. We ask questions like. What makes you, you know. Well, how how do you like to get feedback from your supervisor? What makes a supervisor a great supervisor? What makes a supervisor a terrible supervisor? And what we’re trying to do is find out, is this person going to like working for Peter or Katie or or payola or Eric? Okay. And and that’s all we’re asking in those questions. And then afterwards, we all talk about like, does everybody. I need a thumbs up from everybody. Unanimous. If one person on the interview team goes, I just don’t think they’re great fit and well. Okay, then they’re out. They’re done. Sorry, it doesn’t work. If everybody goes like, Yeah, no, I think this is good. We’ve got all the thumbs up. We’ve got that buy in from everybody. Then we give the person a test project. We hired them to do a test and a lot of times we’ve got two or three people at this point and we’ll hire all of them to do one project and pay all of them to do that project. And at the end, we’ll ask, who was the most fun to work with? Who is the easiest to work with? Who? Who asks the right kinds of questions and based upon those things. And then the final product, but not not so much because the final product, honestly, we can coach on that. That’s not a problem. Recently we went through this process hiring a junior web developer and the first project, and there were some things that were like, well, that that wasn’t great, you know, but they ask the right questions. But man, they, they’re, they’re not used to designing for this certain thing. And so what we did is we said, Hey, listen, we’re going to we’re going to hire you for one more test project. And in this one, here’s some things we need you to do different. And they nailed it. They listened. They were they adjusted. They were prideful. They were open for they were open to coaching, boom, new employee. And they’re going to be a rock star. And we’re so excited to be having this young man join us on our team. It’s going to be cool stuff. So that’s our interview process. The fourth and final thing is the onboarding tool. Now, here’s what this onboarding tool is for us. It’s a Google spreadsheet, and down the spreadsheet on the left hand side are a whole bunch of things we need you to know how to do. Okay. And after that is a column of who you’re going to communicate with about that thing. The third column is any links or anything like we we need you to do talk and I’ll explain second. The fourth is any questions. It’s a place for you to put notes and questions. And then the fifth is your completion date. And then what we do, for example, is we’ll say, you know, that also. So we use it’s called hive. We use that for our project management, our team communication. Everybody’s in Hive all the time, yada, yada, yada. So we’ll say, we need you to learn hives. Now here’s how you learn. Hi. You need to follow this link and watch all of the videos. You see. Hive has an entire training library and a couple of years ago when we decided to move the hive, you know how my team and I learned how to use it? We watched the videos. We went to the knowledge base. We watched their videos and we learned how to do it. We got first generation training, and we do this with every tool we use. We say, okay, we need you to learn this tool. Go watch these training videos. Hey, we need you to know how to do this. Go watch this YouTube video. So we’ve gathered YouTube videos, knowledge base interview videos inside the apps we use. We use different services. And, you know, you know, we we use one time secret to send pass codes, passwords, stuff like that. Declined to get passwords. And so we have a training video. We’re like, hey, watch out, watch this video. I’ve got a training video that I’ve recorded. It’s a series, actually, three videos on how to communicate to clients, how to communicate to clients. And so we’re like, Hey, watch, watch this. And there’s questions we have to answer at the end of those. So we watch this. Hey, watch this video on our vision. Watch this on our mission. We’ve got we do a webinar. And so there’s a link to one of the webinars where you got to watch the webinar and afterwards let us know we’re going to ask you some questions about what was in the webinar, because I want you to understand our client’s point of view, and their point of view is the content they’re seeing come from us. They’ve seen the webinar, so I need everybody on our team to have seen the webinar, and it takes about about 50, 60 hours to go through all of this content. I don’t have 50, 60 hours to train you every new employee. Nobody does. We’re busy working. So your first week, two weeks on the job is going through the scorecard and training your self to use all of our tools to understand our core rights, to learn how we communicate. And we touch base. You touch base every day with your supervisor. They ask you a couple of questions. You move into the next thing. And here’s the beauty of this. Last year, we hired a new director of digital marketing services payola in El Salvador. And so I sent her up with her score card. And she she went through that in the second her second week. We were working in zoom across, zoom together, and she was sharing her screen. And we she was showing me a couple of things that she had worked on. And I said, actually, this would be a really good thing to do. And Hive and I mentioned something and she goes, okay, no problem. She immediately clicked on the tab, went to the play. She knew exactly what to do, exactly where to go and executed it. And I hadn’t ever done any nobody had done any training with her and life. She learned it through watching the videos. She got first generation training. Here’s why this is important. Have you ever played the Taliban game? You start out with one message. You tell the next person and they tell the next. And by the end it’s like, that isn’t even close to what the first person said. That’s what can happen in training when you when you train somebody and then they train somebody and then they train somebody in the they train somebody. Over time, you lose things. Things drift. And so we give everybody the exact same training. Everybody gets first generation training. And why would you not want that? Things change. We, you know, hive, for example, changes things, processes change. All right. We’ve got Teo, one of the tools that we learned or that we use, we were doing something and she had been on the team for, you know, like two months or something. We’re talking and she goes, Well, I’ll do that over in this tool. And I was like, Wait, that does that. And she goes, Yeah, I didn’t notice that. I didn’t I didn’t know that that was a new feature, you know. And I would have never known to tell her that this onboarding scorecard saves hours and it all you got to do is build it once you make it, once you use it forever. It’s absolutely amazing. All right. So there you go, my friends. These are the four parts, the four things that come together to to work towards leadership. Now, there’s a lot more to leadership than this. Okay. And I’m going to I’m going to share a closing thought for leadership, my leadership tip of the week for you here. But this right here, this is the process that I think is crucial for you to hire a team that is of the right made up of the right people that’s going to help you move things forward Now, this has been a long episode, a lot to it. Okay. I get that. I thank you for listening to this point. You might have had it to divide this up to a couple of listening sessions. You know, we’re approaching almost an hour use and normally I’ll try to make. The episodes this long. I should have broke this down into a few different parts, but there’s I just as I’m excited about this because it works. And when I take people through this, I’ve got some people in my coaching core cohort right now, in my small group and my one on one coaching that I do that I meet with every week. And as we’ve been finishing some of the people filling this out and getting this ready for them, it’s been amazing. One guy is having so much fun. He’s like, in fact, this Tuesday and his one on one, he got on and he’s like, Man, I just want to tell you something. I’m so excited. He goes, I said no to an opportunity the other day and it felt so good to say no, but it just didn’t. He goes, Last two weeks ago, a month ago, I would have said yes and now I’d be regretting it. And this had been a pattern he had been experiencing, he said. But now that I really understand our vision, I realize that is so going to be in my way. And he goes and I said, No. And and I’m so happy I did, because this morning a new opportunity presented itself that was perfect, that I could say yes to that I wouldn’t have had the ability to say yes to if I said yes to this thing yesterday. And so he he’s getting clarity that people are bringing on their team and living this out. This isn’t theory. Okay? This isn’t theory. This is it. You know, something that I’ve studied in college and in our human resource classes and something I’ve seen of somebody else. This works for me, my team. This stuff just works. So I thank you so much for being here today. Now, like I said, I want to share a leadership tip of the week today before we’re done. But before I do that, if you’ve made it this far, I’d love for you to to to leave a review, subscribe, do all the nice things, share this if you think this was helpful. If you’re like, oh, my gosh, this there was a lot here. But, but it’s helpful. I’m so excited to, to implement some of these things. Or if you’re like, man, this is one of those episodes I’m going have to listen to again, you know, share this sentence, say, hey, listen to this, and then let’s talk about it You know, there’s so much in this when I’m going to have to go take me a while to unpack it, you know, listen to it, let’s let’s talk about it. So do all the nice things. Review, subscribe, share. If you’ve got some constructive criticism that you think would be good for me to hear, to make this better, we email me emails sent me send me an email, Erica Deeney podcast and let me know. All right. So here, listen. I listen to this episode. I think I have been better if you had done this. All right. So to wrap things up here at the leadership tip of the week, why do I why do I do this, especially after a whole episode of talking about leadership? Because your capacity as a leader is your capacity of your company. And I want you to grow in leaders are learners. That’s that’s today’s tip. Somebody once told me, if you want to know what somebody knows, read what they’ve read. And I thought that was really, really good advice. So what I’ve done on my resource page on DKNY podcasts dot com, if you go there and click on resources and scroll down near the bottom when I was 70, I’m just looking at right now I have nine books, nine books that I think are crucial, crucial to read And these are nine of the books that have influenced me the most, helped me grow and develop and get to where I am the most. And so leaders are learners, continue to learn, continue to read, continue to be inquisitive. And you can you can do this. You can you can have a business that gives you what you are looking for, that gives you what you want, that that that gives you the ability to hire people and make their lives better and have customers and clients where you’re making their lives better, whether whether you’re going to be a health and nutrition coach, whether you’re going to provide copywriting services, accounting services, whatever it is you’re going to do, whatever it is you’re wanting to do, you can do it, my friend. You can do this. And having a team is one of the best ways to make things happen. And you can hire a team you not to be afraid to hire. You’re afraid to hire because you’re not ready. You’re not ready. And it’s that lack of preparedness that makes you afraid. So get ready, create your culture document, have your position descriptions. And so with some Easter eggs in it, have an interview process. And if you’re solopreneur Eric, I don’t know who else for an interview. You’ve got friends, you’ve got colleagues. My wife used to do some of these interviews. I’ve asked other web designer when I was just and I’ve asked other well, I got other web designer to ask me to help that I have a relationship with. Hey, would you would you help me in my interviews, you know, that I’m you know, because they’ve heard me talk about it and we have a relationship and they that you can do this. All right. Well, again, thank you so much for listening. I look forward to reading your review and an upcoming podcast episode. Until next time, chase the Big Dream Lead with courage and safe travels.