← Epic Success with Dr Shannon Irvine
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Foreign. Welcome to the Epic Success Podcast. I AM your host, Dr. Shannon Ervin. On the Epic Success podcast, we unpack the neuroscience of success and really help you become a hardwired CEO and also hardwire your business to scale. All right, this is what we're doing here on the Epic Success Podcast. So glad you're here. Think of your last bad hire. Did they lie to you in the interview? Or did you just not know the right question to ask? Most interviews only tell you if someone can do the job on paper. They don't tell you if they'll own the job when things go sideways. In this video, I'm going to walk you through a three layer A player interview framework you can use to separate A players from from B players before you make the offer, not three months after they're on your payroll. By the end, you'll have the exact questions to ask, what to listen for, and one exercise to customize for your business. This week. If we haven't met, I'm Dr. Shannon Ervin. I've been a business owner for over 20 years. I'm the author of the bestselling book the 67 Day Year and I help established business owners build self scaling companies that can grow without them being glued to every decision and every buyer. So if you're somewhere between about 150k to 3 million in revenue with a real team and you keep ending up with nice hires who still hand every problem back to you, this is for you. You're not bad at spotting talent. You haven't just had a simple way to test for ownership capacity until now. So let's start with the first layer. So layer number one is confidence. Can they technically do the job? This is where 90% of interviews stop and it shouldn't be. So you absolutely need a basic filter. Do they have the skills, the experience, the track record? Can they do the job? But here's the trap. A strong layer one answers can only hypnotize you into ignoring the most important layers. That's how you end up with someone who sounds great on paper and has all the right bullets on their resume and still can't own an outcome to save their life without you. So here's some scripted questions like walk me through your experience with insert the skill that you need for the role or what's a project that that you led that is closest to what this role will require? You're going to score this a pass or fail. That's it. If they fail here, they're done. If they pass, they move on quickly but here's where the real separation starts. Next, for leadership roles, I always, always test metrics fluency. Here I'll ask what were the three to five numbers on your scorecard in your last role and what did you do when one of them went red? They can't answer that. Clearly. They probably don't have real operating experience in that role. Layer one qualifies them for the conversation, but it should never be the reason that you hire someone. So layer two is ownership behavior. Now here's the key. With ownership behavior, layer two is where you stop asking can they do the tasks? And you start asking do they act without being told? Some when something breaks, this is where A players and B players start to separate. So here's the core question here. So tell me about a time that something went wrong that wasn't technically your job to fix. What did you do then? Be quiet. Let them tell the story. Uncover who they really are. So what do you listen for when they're telling the story? Well, an A player is going to answer. They're going to name the moment that they noticed something was off. They'll tell you the decision that they made and they'll describe the action that they took and the outcome of without anyone asking them to. A B player answer, very, very different. They describe the problem in detail. When they escalate and wait for direction or let someone else act, you're not just listening for awareness, you're listening for unprompted action. This is the separator right here. I call this post traumatic B player syndrome. You make the hire, you hand them the role, and three months later you realize, oh my goodness, they always see the problem. They never truly own the fix or the outcome. That's not because you're a bad judge of character. It's because you never tested for ownership behavior in the interview. So doing this layer fixes that. So some optional follow ups you can do here is things like what did you do in the first 24 hours? Or who else did you involve and why? Or if you could go back, what would you do differently? You're checking if their default is this is my problem now or this is someone else's problem. So you're checking for that discrepancy in how they think after the fact. So it's strong layer one with a weak. Layer two is the classic B player profile, technically solid, multiple, emotionally safe in the interview and is still handing everything back to you once they're actually in the role itself. So now I want to talk about layer three. This Is decision making capacity. Layer number three in decision making capacity is the one almost nobody builds. Can a person make a real decision in the kind of messy situations your business actually has? Not on a whiteboard in the real world. So how on earth do you build your layer three questions? Well, rule number one is it must be real, like pulled from an actual situation in your business. Rule number two is it must be unresolved. There is no clean textbook answer that you're looking for here. And rule number three is it must be a decision, not a task. If there's only one right way to do it, it's not testing ownership. So what are some examples here? It's the afternoon of a big shipping day and you discovered 200 units of our bestseller was mispicked and you've and already boxed. What do you do in the next 30 minutes? Do you see how you have to have them to think decisions? You notice Maybe, maybe this is one you'll notice. The cohort's completion rate has dropped sharply halfway through the program. And the next live session is tomorrow. What do you do before that? Or maybe a prospect is ready to buy but is asking for concessions outside of your standard terms and your manager is unreachable. What do you do? So do you see how this is prompting decision making? So here's what you listen for in terms of the A player in this layer. So you want to listen for the A player will commit to a call, explains their reasoning, names, what they'd want to know before to be confident, to be more confident. And a B player answers very, very differently, hands the decision right back. What would you want me to do? List a bunch of options without choosing one. You are not grading them against the way you handled it. You are grading do they decide at all? Something most people never ever think about in their interviews. So in the workshop where we teach this, the hardest part for most business owners isn't scoring the candidate, it's writing their own third layer scenario. And the truth is you can't interview someone for ownership capacity you haven't defined for yourself yet. So that's not a failure. That's just the work that you get to do is really defining what does it mean to own it? What does it mean to have a decision making layer? So here's an exercise. Let's do this together right now. Grab a pen, open up a note and answer these three prompts. The role. What role are you hiring for next? The real decision. Think of one real moment from your business where something went wrong or needed a Judgment call that you would love to hand off next time. And a question here. Turn it into a question that you can ask in the interview. So an example of this might be the role is a program coach. The real decision is the client missed two sessions and went quiet. Question might be a client has missed two sessions in a row with no explanation. What do you do before their next scheduled time? That's your first layer three question. You can refine it later, but the most important part is that it's real and it's unresolved. Getting to the real how do they operate, own and decide. So how do you actually score this and how do you use it? So here's how you put this into an actual interview. Not just a nice good idea. Layer 1 incompetence. It's a pass or fail. Either they have it or they don't. A fail. Here ends the process. Layer two, which is ownership, the behavior you're going to score one to five. You're looking for that unprompted action, not just awareness. And the third layer, which is decision capacity. You're also going to score 1 to 5 weight your final decision. Heavy. Here a candidate with a strong layer one and a weak layer two or three is exactly the profile behind your last painful hire. Confident, credentialed and unable to own outcomes without direction. That's who this framework is designed to actually filter out. So here's your next step. Don't build a 47 question interview guide. Do this instead. Add a layer two ownership question to your next interview. Write one layer three scenario for your next open role this week and score your next candidate on all three of those layers before you make your next hiring offer. And if you want help, I've put two free resources for you in the description. The A Player interview question bank, a complete set of ready to use questions by industry and role and the A player interview session guide, a one page reminder of these three layers and how to score them before every interview. Use them to upgrade your next hire, not your 20th. Okay. And if you want to go deeper and build a team that actually runs the business without needing you, your next step really is the free self scaling business diagnostic where we'll score your team, your CEO system, your team system and your profit scaling system so you know exactly which roles need true owners. Next. The links to join that are below the video. And tell me in the comments, what's one real decision from your business you're going to turn into that decision making layer in the interview questions this week? All right, there it is. How do you differentiate between A players and B players in the interview? And never hire a B player again. Right? That's what I have for you this week. Go ahead and register for the self scaling Business Diagnostic where we'll deep dive into your specific business and your system's capacity to scale until I see you there live. Bye for now. Thanks thanks again for listening to the Epic Success Podcast. If you loved the podcast this week, do me a favor, would you give us a five star review? And over in Instagram please share with me in the DMs. What was it that you loved about it? How did it resonate? And I always say for podcasters those reviews are our big warm hug. And of course if you want to go deeper or see this on video please follow my YouTube channel at Dr. Shannon Irvin on YouTube. I cannot wait to see you next week on the Epic Success Podcast. Bye for now.