← Build with Leila Hormozi
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What I want to talk about days, I want to tell you guys a little story because the last three days, I've had a lot of interviews and a lot of, you know, coaching our portfolio company CEOs on, so their interview processes with roles that maybe, like, they're not equipped with or they've never hired for before. Like, they don't know what that role does. And so we're gonna get tactical today, and I want to break down, you know, some of the stuff that, you know, I know it's not sexy, and I know it's not, you know, like, the new marketing hack or this that. And I always feel so lame talking about hiring. Honestly, it's so fucking important. It pisses me off that people don't get it. Like, it really, like. And I think I feel pissed because, honestly, this is something that I struggled with in the beginning. And because of that, it really led to a ton of mistakes in the business. And I just. Just don't want other people to make those fucking mistakes because they suck. And so I'll tell you the story, which is, you know, when we were growing gym launch, in the beginning, I was over all the hiring, and so I was over hr. I was over the hiring. I was super involved in all the interview processes. And. And it got to a point where, you know, we grew really quickly. You know, I think the first year we did, and I'm not the numbers person, I think it was the first year, 17 million or 25 million. I don't remember. It was. That was the first or second year. So either way, it was a lot of money. And I'd never done this before. I had no experience. I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. And because of that, you know, we're scaling, and people are saying, like, Layla, like, you really need to let go of hiring. Like, you can't be this involved in the process. You know, you're just. You're so busy. You have so much on your plate. You know, look at your days. Cause I was working, you know, from 5:00am until, you know, 10:00pm most days. But I did love it. You know what I mean? Like, I was like, you know, all these people, like, they're more experienced than me, and, you know, they have a track record, and I don't. And I'm just like, this inexperienced person who's never even managed a human in my life. So, like, I should listen to them for sure. And everyone said, you know, you've got to delegate some of this stuff. And particularly hiring, like, especially with the amount that you have to, because the business is growing so quickly. And I think what, what was missing in that piece of advice was it wasn't like ill intent by anyone telling me that. It was that there's a lack of context and nuance, which is if I'm not involved in the hiring process and I'm the most, I am out of the whole business, the most potent source of, you know, culture, values, et cetera, I know what we need more than anybody. And there's a lot of inexperienced people on the team. Is it the right idea to delegate that to them? Well, probably in that situation, the answer is no. And so I didn't know that. And there was no context for those who were kind of, you know, helping me out with those decisions. And so I did delegate the hiring process and I delegated to a couple of the higher level managers. And, you know, I said, hey, but I want to always keep a pulse and take the last interviews. And eventually got to the point where they were like, hey, Layla, you're really becoming a bottomless on the last interviews because my schedule was just really full. And I was like, fuck, okay, well, all right, well, maybe what I'll do is I'll just meet with people after they're hired. And so over that, you know, I want to say it was like a five month span that I went from being super involved in the recruiting process and into whom we let in the company to really letting it go and delegating it and letting other people handle it. I just watched the culture just really crumble quickly. There's like, no really other way to put it. Like, it literally just became an absolute fucking shit show. And I started meeting with these people after we brought them on and I would literally be in a meeting and to be like, hot, like angry, like sweating, it's like, who the fuck thinks this person should work here? Like, they literally don't even believe in our values. Like, they don't embody what we're trying to, you know, have on this team. They don't fit this culture. And it felt so overwhelming because, you know, I'm sitting there thinking, well, I can't be doing all the interviewing and hiring. And, you know, then I'm telling myself things like, oh, well, maybe, you know, maybe they know and, you know, maybe I just haven't get to know this person well enough. Like, you know, I'm sure the managers know what they're doing and like, they really get our core values and like, you know, I should trust them more. I Need to trust my team. Like, I need to trust my team. And because of that, you know, I. I talk about it in my video. My biggest mistake. But, you know, we got to the point where these managers overhied. They hired the wrong people. I woke up one day and we'd done our biggest month ever, 4.5 million. And I was like, I fucking hate this company. And, you know, because of that, I had to make the decision, which in my option, my mind, the option was never like, you give up and shut down the company. It was, you have to change this into the kind of company that you would be excited to show up to every day. And so that's why this topic is actually really important to me. Because I think a lot of people look at that and they say, like, what can you do to protect your culture? How do you prevent people, the good people, from leaving? How do you make sure you keep the wrong people? I'm like, it all starts with the hiring process. So, like, when people. It's very similar to Customer Churn. Everyone looks at Customer Churn, they say, oh, I need more exit interviews, I need more surveys. I need more ways to make sure they don't know how to cancel. Like, that's fucked up. That's not how you fix turn. How you fix turn is onboarding and activation and making sure you're selling the right fucking customers. It's the same with your hiring process. If you have a shitty culture, if things aren't going well, if there's a sense of accountability, if you feel like people on your team are not the kind of people you want on your team, it starts with the hiring process. Doesn't start with like, oh, I need more of this and this and this. Like, a lot of people try to fix things through volume and effort, when in reality, it's like one simple hinge that you need to change, change. And so often when the people are feeling that in their team, it's not that you need to change all these things. You need to be like, training, more, more accountability, more this, more just camera. It's like, no, you have the right wrong people. The right people wouldn't feel so hard with, like, it's already going to be hard enough if you're inexperienced and have never done it before. You might as well not make it doubly hard by having the wrong people there. And so that being said, what I wanted to break down is really, I have really tried to hone in. And as we, you know, built prestige and built Alan. You know, Alan, I made sure. That I approved any hire. I was really involved in the recruiting process for almost every role. And then with acquisition.com, you know, I'm involved in the process through and through. So I'll take first interviews and I'll take last interviews. Like, I don't give a shit. Because I am dedicated to making sure that we have the right team and I know how important it is. So after having, like, I'm not in a position where I need to be doing that, but I want to because I know it's what's right for the business and it's going to set the foundation. And so I wanted to share kind of few stories and a few lessons that I've learned about hiring that I think would be applicable to you. So if you have a team and maybe you feel like you're struggling because maybe you feel like, I don't even know if these are people. Everything's feeling really hard. It's feeling chaotic. It's feeling like nobody's rowing in the right direction. Maybe they're not all rowing the same boat. Or maybe. Maybe you have delegated the hiring process and you're like, I don't even know some people on the team, blah, blah. Which, by the way, people make that like it's a good thing. I'm like, not a fucking good thing. If you don't have thousands of people, you should know people on your fucking team. I don't know where that got cool. Anyways, because of that, I wanted to kind of break down what I have learned. And what it is is really, I've dialed in, being able to spot my own biases during hiring. Like, what is my brain doing during the hiring process? Like, how does our. And how does this apply to hiring people and getting the right people on the team? And I think that a lot of people don't understand the biases that we use when we hire people. And because of that, they kind of end up with like an accidental team, an accidental culture. And they wonder, like, how am I so bad at hiring? And so I kind of want to expose what I've seen to be the, like, five top reasons people just suck at hiring, or they hire the wrong people because of these misinterpretations. And so it's really not that you suck, it's just that you're unaware of these things. And so I would like to expose them to you so that you don't have to make those mistakes, because I made them and they were painful as fuck. So the first one is that we all have confirmation bias, right? So get this. 60% of interviewers will make a decision about a candidate in the first 15 minutes, okay? So you can have an hour long interview. 60% of people decide in the first 15 minutes. So basically what they do is they decide in the first 15 minutes based on some, typically one thing that that person says or does and then they spend the rest of the interview trying to justify or confirm their bias. So I'll give you some examples. If somebody comes on and at first they're shy or they're not smiling or their camera's off, it's a zoom interview. You will spend the rest of the interview most likely trying to confirm why that person isn't a good fit because of that one action. Now, I've seen this backfire because I've had people hop on and they don't have their camera on. And you know, I'm like, somebody has told me before, they're like, yeah, oh, I don't want to hire them because they don't have their camera on. I'm like, do they know it was a zoom interview? And then, you know, I go back and ask the person when I interview them and they're like, dude, I'm so sorry. I thought it was a phone interview. Like, I thought the invite didn't even say. And you know, the last three interviews I've been on, they were all phone. So I'm like, oh, right. Because we tend to assume rather than lead with curiosity. Another example of that would be, you know, if someone hops on and let's be really real, their personality, like, they're not enthusiastic, they're more quiet. And you're the like driven, excited, enthusiastic entreprene. And you're like, oh, I just immediately don't like this person like that. What you say is, you say they're not a culture fit. Just because someone's less enthusiastic and they're not as upbeat as you does not mean that they're not a good culture fit. That just means they might be quiet. And I've had some of the like absolute killers be people who are very quiet on interviews and they take time to warm up to you. And they've been some of the best people I've ever hired. But we have this confirmation bias. And so when we think something immediately in an interview, we tend to then use that as everything else. That kind of, it's like what Tony Robbins says, right? He's like, if you want to. If you see, if you look for Brown, you find Brown, like once you get the one thing, you just pull that string and everything else is evidence as to why that con, that bias was correct and why you shouldn't hire that person. And so I would say that what I've tried to do for myself is lead with curiosity rather than assumption. So even if someone hops on right away and they don't have their camera on, I will literally ask like, oh, did you think this was a phone interview? Oh, I'm sorry. As your last job, did they not have cameras on? Like, I'm not even being condescending. I just genuinely want to know because I seek to understand. I'm not trying to judge this person. If you judge somebody, you will never influence them, and they certainly won't work well on your team. But if you can understand them and you seek to understand them, you have the ability to do that. And so that's. The first one is really confirmation bias. The second one is expectation anchors. So what that is is that our brains use one piece of information about candidate in a hiring process to make a decision. So an example for that is one that's very typical is if you're trying to backfill a role or you're trying to delegate to somebody else, right, you are typically going to look for somebody who is like either who was already in that role or who is like you. Basically, we just have this expectation of something because of something, and there's no correlation. There's no reason that because somebody is not like you, they won't succeed in that role. Well, there's no reason that because they're not like the person who was in that role previously that they wouldn't succeed in this role. But this happens all the time is, you know, we get somebody in who's very quiet and then you're trying to replace them. Maybe you find someone super enthusiastic and then you say, oh, well, you know, the person that's in this role was really quiet, so I'm looking for somebody who's really quiet. Those things are not necessarily what are important to the role, and they're actually just overshadowing, you know, the other aspects of that candidate because we have this expectation. Another example is, you know, when you're growing your business, often what you need in one level is not what you need another. So I'll give you a really good example I see all the time, which is that people typically expect an operator to be quiet, to be more passive, to be just very loves process and operations. And then when they're at 30 million or they're at 20 million, they're looking for that same thing. They're like, well, every operator I've had in the past, I've expected that they're more quiet, more passive. They just kind of work on the background stuff. I'm like, dude, I mean, if you want to stay at $5 million per year, sure, hire somebody like that, but you no longer want that. The expectation needs to change. You need someone who's a leader, someone who can lead the team, someone who can figure out why sales are low, figure out why marketing's off. Like, they're your hands, they're your integrator. It's no longer like someone that's in the background, you know, just doing of work. But we have this expectation based on what is familiar to us. So that's the second thing that I see often in interviewing, and I've done this before as well. But what you have to realize is that I've had. I have to remind myself constantly of this, is that the roles change as the business grows. And so your expectation of what it looks like in one level is not what it looks like in the next. It's often not even the same personality type. It's not the same person. It might have different, you know, character traits, et cetera. The third bias that people often tend to have or use in an interviewing process, called the halo effect, and this one is probably one of the ones that I deal with on a consistent basis, and I can give you a couple examples, which is the halo effect is similar to the confirmation bias, but it's really more on the positive side. So what it means is we focus heavily on one thing about that person, and because of that, it makes everything else look good as well. So I see this happen all the time in growing businesses where people are, you know, we tell them, especially as acquisition.com, we're like, we want to get people who have no longer just the raw ability to do the job, but they also have experience, because you no longer have the time to train everyone like you did in the very beginning, right? You have more demand than your time, therefore there's less internal resources. Trained somebody, therefore they have to come with a little bit more experience. And so, and I'm not saying they should have all experience and nothing else. Like, they absolutely need to be a culture fit. But I'm saying they can only be a culture fit with, like, zero skills. And so what happens is often people see, like, you know, graduated from Pepperdine or Princeton, or, you know, worked at this huge company that's like a big competitor or, you know, whatever. And then they send it to me and they're like, holy shit, we got this person. They're gonna be amazing. And I'm like. And I always know that they're gonna pass this interview to me, and then I'm gonna be, like, not impressed with the person. Because what often happens is we just see, like, this one thing on their resume or this one thing about them, and it overshadows everything else that we see. And I've been guil this. There was actually an instance, like, a year ago where I was helping one of the portfolio companies hire a manager, and the manager that applied was, like, literally the dream candidate in terms of, like, their experience. And they had worked at a company that was super comparable. I would say it's a competitor in the space, but they were literally 10 times bigger. And so I was like, holy shit, this guy's perfect. He knows exactly where to take this company. He's going to know exactly what to do. And I was so blinded by the fact that he was so good on paper that when I talked to him, I think that I let that get to me. And I looked at everything he said as being good rather than being able to look at what he said in isolation of those factors. And the reality is, we brought him on and very quickly realized he was not the right person because that culture of that company was very different. And so he wasn't necessarily a culture fit. And so that's something that we constantly are having to train ourselves with, because when we're looking to grow and level up our company, we often want to hire people with more experience. But you can't let that overshadow. Like, they have to be a culture fit. They have to have the values. They have to be on board with the mission, otherwise none of that's going to work. And so that always has to come ahead of experience and pedigree. And you can't get almost enamored with those, you know, the awesome, you know, schools that they went to or the crazy experience they had or the business that they worked at. We just can't get enamored with that stuff. Because, you know, the second thing to that is, you know, I know a lot of people who can put that they worked at a certain company on the resume, but if you ask the CEO, CEO doesn't know who the fuck they are. So were they actually that good? Probably not. That happens a lot. So that's the third one. Now the fourth one is again one that I see all the time, which is similarity bias. And guys, I'm so guilty of this. When we were growing gym launch, I was so bad at this. The similarity bias is basically like, we naturally want to surround ourselves with people that we like and people that are like us. And so naturally we like people who are like us and have, have, you know, similar interests, behaviors, ways of talking, etc. And so a lot of the times what happens is in the beginning, I would say all the way up until 10 million people have really like homogeneous teams. Like, they all seem like almost the same person, same character traits, just really similar. It's almost like they talk the same way, they walk the same way, they look the same way. Like everyone's the same. A big reason that people can't get past that, Mark, is because there's really no diversity of thinking. And I think a lot of people talk about diversity and they talk about like, color of your skin, ethnicity and culture and all these things. And I'm like, dude, no offense, but, like, I don't even pay attention to that. I pay attention to the diversity of thinking. I'm like, do we have people that have. Have different points of views on this team? Because the more variety in terms of points of views you have, the better decisions you'll make as a team. And a lot of times people are just uncomfortable with what is different from them. And so because of that, they try to hire people that seem like them, you know, and that's why you see a lot of friends and families that are hired because not because the person is qualified for the job. That's actually often not the case. Typically we see the best in people that are seen like us, and we see the best in people that are familiar to us. And so we're very biased toward why they should be hired. But if someone else goes to interview them, they probably see, oh, this person's not fit at all. They don't see all the similarities because they might be different. They don't see all the good things about them because they might not be, you know, already have a relationship with them. And so it's really important in situations where you feel very much inclined towards somebody, like you really like them to have somebody else interview them, because oftentimes it's just us being biased because we like them for one reason or another. You know, Like, I remember there was a guy I was interviewing and I really liked him because he was the operator at a large company and he had very similar personality to me. And he actually was also raised in Michigan. And so I was like, dude, I just love this guy. He's amazing. But, like, I had this feeling in the back of my head that he wasn't the right fit. Like, I just, like, kind of like. And so, like, I brought in the team and I was like, guys, I feel like. I feel like you might not be. And I just, like, really like the guy because he's similar to me and we have, like, a lot of things in common. So I feel like I would like working with him. Can you guys interview him? And they were all like, dude, this is a hard fuck, okay? And so, like, I fall for it too. And that's why it's really important to have multiple people in the interview process. And then the last one is kind of going with the similarity bias. It's really the affinity bias, right? And that's when we feel a natural inclination towards somebody because of some random thing that we share in common. So it might be a school, it might be that we went to the same school when we were younger, we grew up in the same place face, we have the same color hair, we've got a matching tattoo. You know, we have the same name. Even people with the same name like people more than people that have different names. It's crazy. And I've actually done this in the sense of there was a guy that, you know, we hired in gym launch who we had a ton of similarities in terms of, like, things that we liked, how we worked, things that we did. And because of that, I hired the guy and he literally had no idea how to do the job. And so because of that, I realized I was like, oh, I continue to hire people because I have an affinity towards them, not because they're qualified for the job top. And I see this a lot with our portfolio companies and with companies that are, you know, between 3 and 10 million in revenue. It's probably one of the biggest mistakes is just hiring people because you like them, because you're familiar with them, because you have an affinity towards them. Those are probably like the top three reasons why people hire people. And I think that what is hard to get across to someone who's never had like a really great high performing team before is every time I've made the right hire and now I'm done with the buy reason. But, like, this is just overall, every time I have made the right hire, I think been uncomfortable bringing that person, I have not felt amazing about the decision. I've felt excited, yet nervous and also sort of fearful because there's this unknown because this kind of person has different thinking than me. They don't act like me. They're very different than me. And so because of that, I'm not certain how they will act. I cannot easily predict them. We typically want to bring people on the team that we like because when we like someone and we understand them, we think we can predict their behavior. When you bring someone on who has diversity of thinking, they think differently. They have different experience, they come from a different background. Typically, we feel very uncomfortable because. Because we can't predict what they're going to do or how they're going to act. And so I want to tell you, overall, above all of this, if you bring someone on and you're hiring someone and you actually feel slightly uncomfortable, not because they're bad for the role, but because they're unfamiliar to you or maybe intimidating or maybe because you feel like you can't predict them, that is a good thing. And so often in these situations, it's a little bit of going against your gut, because your gut's not going to lead you to building the best team. Your gut's going to lead you to building a team that's just a bunch of replicas of who you already are. And so with that, I hope. Hope that that video is useful for you. This thing has been on my mind a ton lately because we've been doing so much hiring with all the portfolio companies. They're all growing and, you know, kind of going past that, you know, hitting that, like, 10 million and now going to that 20 million mark. And this is probably like, the most relevant issue. And so if you feel like, again, there's chaos on your team, you can't get people to align, they're not rolling in the right direction. Take into consideration if you're hiring correctly and if you're able to slow yourself down enough to look past these five biases.