Use This Foolproof Framework to NEVER Make a Bad Hire Ever Again! (Part 1)

Summary

Perpetual Traffic Podcast Summary
Episode: Use This Foolproof Framework to NEVER Make a Bad Hire Ever Again! (Part 1)
Release Date: February 25, 2025
Host/Author: Tier 11 (Ralph Burns & Lauren Petrullo)
Guest: Josh Hill, VP of Employee Success at Tier 11

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Introduction

In this pivotal episode of Perpetual Traffic, hosts Ralph Burns and Lauren Petrullo delve deep into the intricacies of hiring, presenting a comprehensive framework designed to eliminate the risk of making bad hires. With special guest Josh Hill, VP of Employee Success, the discussion emphasizes the foundational elements that underpin successful recruitment and team building.

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The Importance of Core Values in Hiring

Foundation of Hiring Practices

Josh Hill underscores the critical role of core values in the recruitment process. He emphasizes that before seeking candidates, organizations must clearly understand their own values, vision, and purpose. This foundational step ensures that new hires not only possess the necessary skills but also align culturally with the company.

Josh Hill (09:20): "If you believe that in the recruitment process, the cultural component, the cultural fit, is one of the most important things, as well as skills and everything else, then it will naturally lead you to be thinking about, okay, what are our values as a company?"

Ralph Burns on Core Values

Ralph agrees, sharing his experience from the corporate and military worlds where core values often remained unintegrated. He stresses the importance of making core values actionable within departments and teams to prevent them from becoming mere statements on a wall.

Ralph Burns (09:19): "Nobody does that. They just go right to the result, like, let me throw a body at it."

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Building a Framework for Hiring

Phased Approach to Recruitment

Josh outlines a three-phase approach to hiring:

1. Preliminary Phase (Phase One): Establishing foundational elements such as core values, accountability charts, and comprehensive job maps.
2. Sourcing and Recruitment: Leveraging internal referrals, headhunting, and job boards to attract candidates.
3. Onboarding: Ensuring a thorough and supportive integration process for new hires.

Josh Hill (17:00): "Phase zero is foundational, but also at the tail end of this whole process. The onboarding... is one of the strongest indicators of success."

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The Hiring Process: Steps Outlined

1. Establishing Accountability Structures

Josh emphasizes the necessity of having a clear organizational structure before initiating the hiring process. This involves defining roles, responsibilities, and how each position contributes to the company's overall objectives.

Josh Hill (17:00): "You don't want to be hiring people randomly and just throwing them into your organizational structure."

2. Developing Job Maps

Creating detailed job maps—or "the bible of the seat"—is crucial. These maps outline expectations, vision for the role, core accountabilities, and competency levels, providing clarity for both recruiters and candidates.

3. Sourcing Candidates

Robin advocates for leveraging internal employee networks as the primary source of high-quality referrals. This internal focus often yields candidates who are already aligned with the company's culture and values.

Josh Hill (36:04): "Put your focus internally on the company before running to Indeed and job boards."

4. Utilizing Referrals and Headhunting

Combining employee referrals with proactive headhunting strategies ensures a diverse and high-caliber candidate pool. Referrals, especially from top performers, often result in candidates who are more likely to succeed and fit well within the company culture.

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Common Mistakes in Hiring

Emotional Decision-Making

Ralph and Josh highlight the pitfalls of hiring based solely on emotional connections or similarities. Such practices can lead to homogenous teams that may lack the diverse skills and perspectives necessary for innovation and growth.

Ralph Burns (28:02): "You have to take that emotion out of it. You have to be once or twice removed to a certain degree."

Hiring for Complementary Skills

Instead of seeking clones of oneself, Ralph emphasizes hiring individuals who complement the existing team, bringing in skills and perspectives that the current team may lack.

Ralph Burns (28:02): "You need to hire people who are complementary to your skills."

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Referral Programs

Incentivizing Referrals

Lauren shares insights into their successful referral incentive program, which rewarded employees for bringing in high-quality candidates. This program not only expanded the talent pool but also fostered a sense of ownership and accountability among current employees.

Lauren E. Petrulo (38:19): "Some of our best pack members have come from referrals, like, a thousand percent."

Managing Referral Risks

However, Lauren also cautions about the potential risks, such as receiving poor referrals that can affect team dynamics. It's essential to integrate referrals into a robust recruitment process to mitigate these risks.

Josh Hill (39:52): "Referrals are going to vary in terms of their quality, of course."

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Sourcing Strategies: Headhunting vs. Job Boards

Headhunting for Top Talent

Josh advocates for a balanced approach, combining job boards with proactive headhunting. He emphasizes the importance of selling the company’s vision and values to attract candidates who are not actively seeking new opportunities but are open to career-defining moves.

Josh Hill (42:49): "You need to come at it from an inverted perspective. What is it going to take for you to steal the attention to convince someone that you are the defining career move that is right for them?"

Job Boards for Broader Reach

While headhunting targets passive candidates, job boards offer access to a wider and more diverse pool of applicants. Both strategies are essential for comprehensive recruitment.

Josh Hill (41:42): "We do both simultaneously. It's always to go with the job boards."

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The Role of Onboarding

Effective Onboarding Processes

Beyond hiring, Josh stresses the importance of a thorough onboarding process. Effective onboarding ensures that new hires are well-integrated, understand their roles, and are equipped with the necessary tools and support to succeed.

Josh Hill (34:35): "Onboarding... is one of the strongest indicators of success."

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Dealing with Bad Hires and Continuous Improvement

Learning from Mistakes

Ralph and Josh discuss the inevitability of occasional bad hires and the importance of learning from these experiences. Implementing a structured hiring framework reduces the frequency of such errors and ensures continuous improvement in recruitment practices.

Ralph Burns (34:16): "You do hire slow and fire fast."

Embracing a Systematic Approach

Adopting a systematic and values-driven hiring process helps in consistently attracting and retaining top talent, thereby scaling the business effectively.

Josh Hill (35:32): "All of these components... contribute to a successful hire."

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Conclusion and Next Steps

Ralph and Lauren conclude the episode by inviting listeners to engage further by sending in their hiring questions via email. They announce a follow-up Part 2, where they will continue dissecting the hiring framework and address listener queries live on air.

Ralph Burns (46:25): "We have covered an awful lot here on today's show... do send us an email to joshir11.com and we'll continue the conversation."

They also encourage listeners to leave ratings and reviews on Spotify and subscribe to their YouTube channel to support the podcast and reach a broader audience.

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Key Takeaways

• Start with Core Values: Establish and integrate company values into every aspect of the hiring process to ensure cultural alignment.
• Structured Hiring Framework: Utilize a phased approach encompassing foundational planning, strategic sourcing, and effective onboarding.
• Leverage Referrals: Encourage employee referrals while maintaining a rigorous recruitment process to ensure candidate quality.
• Balance Sourcing Strategies: Combine headhunting for top talent with broader recruitment via job boards to diversify the candidate pool.
• Continuous Improvement: Learn from hiring mistakes and refine the recruitment process to enhance future hiring success.

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For more insights and to participate in the ongoing discussion, listeners are encouraged to reach out via email at joshier11.com with the subject line "Perpetual Traffic."

Transcript

[Ralph Burns]

Hey folks, Ralph here with something that could seriously upgrade your Top of Funnel ad game. If you've been a PT listener for any period of time, you know that we talk about top of Funnel all the time and how challenging it is for you to get quality Top of Funnel clients or leads or customers and then convert them typically at bottom of funnel. Well, TV advertising is one of those areas that we haven't discussed here on PT all that much. But our friends over at Ad Critter have figured this stuff out. They do connected TV ads so you can be everywhere without spending millions on super bowl ads. But they pair it with display retargeting. So you're hitting the audiences with a complete approach. You reach them, then you remind them and then you collect the revenue. It's a strategy designed to deliver and let me tell you, it really works. We're testing this at tier 11 and so far the results have been very impressive. Now with Ad Critter, creating custom audiences are so easy. You don't need to reformat files, you don't need to mess around with complex spreadsheets. You just upload any file in any format and you're ready to go. And the match rate is awesome. They make it easy to connect with the right people, the actual people that have interacted with your ads in the past and then allow them to naturally flow through your funnel so you can convert them at bottom of funnel. Now, the folks at AdCritter, we twisted their arm to get us a great deal for you, the PT listener. They are offering a special deal for y'all and that is you can get a $500 campaign credit, meaning $500 in free money to test out the platform or dollar for dollar matching on any TV campaign up to five grand. Imagine the impact of that match spend five grand. The they'll add another five grand in display. That's a huge opportunity here. Now it's only offered to you, the PT listener. Head over to AdCritter.com PT and check it out. Hey, it's Ralph here. Let me tell you about a lifestyle brand that we recently worked with where they grew their revenue by 49.8% year over year and hit eight figures in top line revenue for the very first time in their history. And they are now on track for 25 million in revenue in 2025. We are so excited to be working with this company. And the reason why is they started using Tier 11 data suite about a year ago and re reduced their unattributed traffic by 90%. That's right. They're unattributed, direct, unknown traffic that probably frustrates the hell out of you. Over in GA4 or one of those other crappy attribution tools, we reduced that unattributed traffic by 90%, uncovered $850,000 in hidden revenue revenue, and scaled their ad spend by over 3x. These results are not magic. The results of clean, accurate data and a system designed for today's privacy world where everybody is trying to block your data. If you want to see these kinds of results for your business, reach out and let's make it happen. [e-mail] apply and discover how tier 11 data suite can finally allow you to scale your business, acquiring new customers at a cost you can afford. Head on over to tier11.com forward/apply.

[Josh Hill]

You're listening to Perpetual Traffic.

[Ralph Burns]

Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns. I'm the founder and CEO of Tier 11 alongside my amazing co host Lauren.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

E. Petrulo, the founder of Mongoose Media.

[Ralph Burns]

It never fails to get that smile every time I say amazing or unbelievable. Today is an amazing and an unbelievable show, by the way, because we've got an incredible guest, one that we've hinted at, I think for at least two months. Finally we could get them. This is a continuation of our show right after the first of the year. If you haven't listened to it back on January 17, episode 663, we'll leave links in the show notes, which was how to make your present better by making your future bigger. One of the big things and big takeaways of that, as well as multiple shows prior to that one where we talk about outsourcing, we talk about hiring, we talk about how to scale your business, build your team to ultimately operate the 20% that is your unique ability, and then figure out that 80% of the tasks that you're doing today. Hire someone who's better than you at those other tasks to scale and grow the business. And this could also be very relevant to let's say you're a marketing director, you're a VP of marketing of a marketing team. How are you going to scale and grow the business? Is it something that you're doing now that maybe you should be hiring another individual to do? Maybe it's headlines, maybe it's copy, maybe it's Google Ads, maybe it's Facebook ads. Maybe you should hire an agency. You know, hint hinter11 the point is, is all of this is related back to that episode episode663. And then we did talk about this a little bit more just a few weeks back on our four C's episode. And that's the reason why we have today our HR guy. Although now he calls himself the VP of Employee Success. Just when I got used to calling him the VP of People and Culture, he now goes and changes his title. Today we actually have Josh hill from tier 11 all the way from Adelaide, Australia, by the way, on Perpetual Traffic. Welcome to the show.

[Josh Hill]

Thanks, Ralph. Thanks. It has been too long. I'm getting this stuff and I do keep changing my title just to keep you on your toes, Ralph.

[Ralph Burns]

That's true. You're just going to be RHR guy, so. And of course you pronounce HR in a very distinct way, which we're going to just make fun of you the entire show for.

[Josh Hill]

So I'm used to it.

[Ralph Burns]

He's used to it.

[Josh Hill]

Just keep it coming.

[Ralph Burns]

Anyway, Josh is just a little bit of bragging about Josh. First off, Josh, military background. He was a captain in the Australian military, had 150 plus soldiers under his command. And one of the things that he actually did is we actually recruited him from the Australian military to be a media buyer at tier 11 and then somehow persuaded him to leave the military and come here. I don't know how the hell that happened. But now he is our HR guy. He's ascended through the ranks and has taken what was always a really good hiring process. And we've talked about our hiring process here quite a bit. Today we're going to get into it a little bit deeper because it's easy to say go hire somebody. It's easy to say go find somebody. But how do you actually do it? That's the hard part. And so today we're going to give you a framework that Josh has perfected through the years based on an original way in which we hired way back when, which was sort of an eight step formula when we first started Levin as a virtual company. Now it's even better than it ever was. And now we're even recruiting in other countries. So there's a lot going on here. So hopefully you'll be able to have some takeaways from today's show as you continue to operate in your 20% and figure out the 80% that you don't want to be doing and get somebody else to do it because there are people that are out there that want to do the stuff that you don't want to do. And that's how you scale. Anyway. Josh Maybe we can sort of take a step back here. We talked a little bit about the framework that we use, but we also discussed before we hit record, one of the core elements before even the framework itself. So maybe we can talk about that. I know it's something that's near and dear to your heart, which is core values.

[Josh Hill]

Yeah, for sure. I think the tendency for a lot of companies, business owners, I mean, it doesn't really matter what size of a team you're operating on, but the tendency to jump straight to a result and hire, I mean, to resist that urge is difficult. It's a result that a lot of people chase. They see a problem and then they go, okay, we need a body. Right. And it's one of a myriad of different ways that you can enhance your capability as a company or add resource, drive, change, increase momentum. Like, whatever your goal is, the first thing that comes to mind is, let's throw a body at it. No worries. However, I guess the system that we built at tier 11, and I think the way we approach a lot of problems and I think is the right method, is always to start foundationally with fundamentals, like truths. And we do have a lengthy kind of foundational component of our recruitment process, which is looking first at why are we hiring? What do we need? Like, what matters to tier 11, what matters to our team, what matters to our culture? If you believe that in the recruitment process, the cultural component, the cultural fit, is one of the most important things, as well as skills and everything else, then it will naturally lead you to be thinking about, okay, what are our values as a company? What's our vision? What's our purpose? What's the current status of how engaged our people are, and how do we get more people like them? Who are your best players? Who are your best people on the team, and how do you replicate those? But understanding why they're your best players and starting with core values is one of the foundational components you need to have. Core values.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah, it's something that I think is thrown around a lot. It's like, oh, you need core values. You know, you need to stand for something.

[Josh Hill]

Yeah.

[Ralph Burns]

But I think in a lot of corporate environments, which I was involved, your experience is obviously in the military. My experience is primarily in the corporate world, where there were core values, but they weren't adhered to. They're these dusty old maxims that sat on a wall somewhere at the corporate office and nobody paid attention to them. And I think when you start your own organization or your own department, like, you can have core values in your own department to a certain degree that roll up to the company. And I think that's a very important place to start. And when I talk on this, and I've talked about this quite a bit, is that nobody does that. They just go right to the result, like, let me throw a body at it. And that exactly what you're saying. And that just leads to a bad result. It's like you fill the void, but you have not found the right person, the right seat, right role that also is in alignment with your vision as an organization or as a department. And when we started hiring, we were very, very intentional about that. And we just got lucky that we hired a bunch of people that sort of knew what they were doing and were really good before we had a real system. And then all we did is we took the best person and then wrote down like, what are the core characteristics? What do they have specifically? And it was a long list and we boiled it down to like three or four things and those became our core values. And it was sort of this, what I always referred to way back then, this is seven or eight years ago now, as our character Diamond. But it's really, in essence, it was four things. And I think that's a good place to start. You haven't done that yet. As an organization, I think none of the stuff that we say in the next part of the episode really matters all that much. Am I incorrect in saying that?

[Josh Hill]

I agree completely. I think when you're looking to scale, you need the common thread in the company, you need the common DNA. And I think if you were to cross compare a lot of successful companies or startups, they would have similar attributes in their values and they would drive their values in very specific ways to not only just have them on the wall, like you were saying, that's vanity, right? Like that's again, like what we're talking about here is not just about having values. And oh, these are the values that's also a result. Being able to articulate a set of guiding principles. These values, they need to be linked to what you expect to observe through behavior, right? So when we say a value is hunger, what does that behavior look like? How is that actually observable in the business? How do you set that expectation? How do you reward for it? How do you train for it, how do you hire for it? Again, that's foundational, right? So what we're talking about here isn't just, oh, these are our values. Tick done. It's a hard, lengthy, brain consuming process to come up with values that matter and then connecting it to your operations and the journey that you have as a company, that's even more difficult because now you need to live the values and you need to inculcate them. There you go.

[Ralph Burns]

Oh, that's it. That's the word for you, Brav.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Wait a second. What $20 word are you trying to drop right now?

[Josh Hill]

That's there. It's an action, Lauren. Now, you've seen it deployed.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

You and your military language. Oh, my goodness. You've now seen it deployed. I'm sure, like, everyone else is like, okay, Josh is too smart for me right now. Can you explain what that word means?

[Ralph Burns]

I have no idea what that word is.

[Josh Hill]

The definition is to instill an idea, attitude, or habit by persistent instruction.

[Ralph Burns]

He just Googled it. He didn't know that after his head.

[Josh Hill]

I've got it up because I knew one of you would ask me, right? I knew one, so I've got it up here. Inculcate. Verb.

[Ralph Burns]

Verb.

[Josh Hill]

Similar to instill and ingrain. That's funny.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Inculcate. It's infiltrating an idea.

[Josh Hill]

Yeah, basically, it's like really intentionally nurturing something. And, yeah, when it comes to hiring, it's like, yeah, you need a foundation, you need a vision, you need. You need values. But that in and of itself is a whole podcast episode. Right? Like, just how to develop and come to terms with what your values are. But if you have these mapped out, it sets you up really well for all sorts of other things, not just the hiring, but it sets you up to build a workforce that is aligned to exactly what you're trying to achieve.

[Ralph Burns]

So I guess the core values are an undercurrent of everything. By the time the candidate gets to me, I'm really thinking, all right, do they embrace those core values? And I have specific questions around those core values, because I'm either the one that has the last interview or we've already made the hire, because you guys know exactly what to look for. And then my thing is just sort of either a tick in the box or it's after they've already been hired, just to sort of make sure, because I know the job has already been done. The point is, once you have core values, they need to be layered upon. Or I look at all the steps that we're going to talk about here today. It's like it's the oil that kind of makes the engine go, and you have to constantly be thinking about it. It's not just, I am hiring for the Skill. I need a media buyer. I need somebody who knows how to do Facebook ads. Great, that's one thing. But do they embrace our core values as well? Do they have hunger? Like, the initial ones were humble, hungry, smart and the last one is marketing iq. Like those were our four core values when we first started. Humble, hungry, smart marketing iq. Because everyone had to know something about marketing. That's now changed. So it's much more simple. The point is we had something and so we hired for all those things, we promoted for all those things, we trained for all those things, we fired for all those things too.

[Josh Hill]

Yeah, that's right.

[Ralph Burns]

At the end of the day, like that is the essence of that. Inculcates that idea, inculcates all of your steps. Not to use your term or anything, but I guess I just did. So. So take us through the steps. You've got your core values. Cool, Good. You do that as an organization. How do you go about hiring? Like, where does it sort of start? What's step number one? And let's sort of go all the way through and do you have numbered steps here in your mind or is it just like, how do you look at it?

[Josh Hill]

Well, I mean, I guess if we take a step back, you can kind of divide it up into three phases really. I mean, at least that's how I look at it. You've got the preliminary like phase one, which is all the stuff we're talking about now. It's like the foundational components that will feed into hiring and are super important. Like the values and getting an understanding of exactly what type of person, common thread that you want throughout the company in terms of like their behavior and the way they show up. Right. Like some companies are all about fast moving change, some companies are about stability. And then it matters intra team as well. So yes, I think it's important to have a look at agency wide or company wide kind of the values and the culture that you're trying to nurture. But teams have their certain dynamics as well, certain roles that you're hiring for certain parts of the business, you want to nail it down even more. Like depending on the project that they're likely to take on. If they're a senior member or something, there's nuance that you need to work out first on what is their experience going to look like and demand and mapping that out. And that kind of feeds into, I guess more on that first phase, which is regarding having a clear idea of your accountability chart or your organizational structure. You don't just want to Be hiring people randomly and just throwing them into your organizational structure. You want to have an idea of the seats that you have on the bus.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

But we always do that. Everyone listening has done that at least once. We throw people at problems totally. It seems like it's the best solution. I think you can fix this, right? I didn't train you whatsoever, but I hired you, therefore I know you can do it.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah, every company does.

[Josh Hill]

Yeah, that's right. So that's being a seat based organization, you know, and there's always a push and pull between these things. I've found, you know, there's a lot of advocacy for if the person is right and they're a cultural fit and you have a need and you don't just quite know where they fit yet, get them on the bus anyway because they'll figure it out. Even if the processes and systems are sloppy, they will rise to the challenge and they will get shit done. That's a mantra, that's a perspective. But it also needs to be balanced with the fact that you should not forego or forsake the need to have a clear idea on your accountability structure and why you're hiring a seat and what, that's how to define that seat. So that is really the first phase. It's all that due diligence that needs to happen. Having a clear idea of your organizational structure and then developing the role itself, like the job map, which we call it at 2:11, which is really like the bible of the seat. It has expectations, the vision for the role, core accountabilities, competency levels. Like it's a comprehensive document standalone that you should be able to give someone and they should be able to know exactly what they need to do, how they're going to be measured, what's expected of them just from a single document. And creating that as an early exercise gets the juices flowing with why are we hiring the seat, what are the expectations, what are the measures of success? And that's another kind of foundational component I would wrap into this first prelim phase. And then once you're clear on all of those things, you've got a very good idea of what you need, why you need it, what value they're going to drive. Then we start getting into the meat of like actual sourcing and recruitment and interviews and selection simulation tasks like cultural fit assessments.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Like, I mean, wait, you do simulation tasks before someone gets hired on all positions?

[Josh Hill]

Yes, that's right. Yeah, yeah, Dang.

[Ralph Burns]

We'll get to that in just a second.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

That takes so Much time and patience.

[Ralph Burns]

It does. I just want to be clear before we go on to this, because I do think the simulator task, when I explain it, when I talk about it, like, especially when we went from six figures to seven figures plus it was an application to a simulator, to a bunch of other steps before they even got to an interview, which was fascinating. And it worked so well. It's a longer process, but let's just take a step back here. The accountability chart, yeah, is super important. And now that is, if you have not. We talk about this so many times on the show, nearly 700 episodes. I think we talk about traction and EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system, like, obviously many, many times. And it's great to see. Like, when I go to some conferences for agencies, there's a lot of adoption on this system now, which is great. It's great to see because it wasn't that way five to ten years ago. When you talk about the accountability chart, we're really talking about an org chart, right? And I think when we first started, to Lauren's point, he said, oh, you're great. You fit the company culture. Just come on board. Great people will find you a seat that works to a certain degree. And one of the best business books that I reread probably every single year, not probably, because I know that I reread it or listen to it, is good to great. It's like, find the right people, get them on the bus, and then figure out the seat on the bus. So there's two schools of thought here. So I don't think one is wrong and the other is correct because it depends on where you are in your growth and in your business. Because the first way, just find the right people and then we'll figure out the seat worked for us. At a later point in time, though, we needed to have more structure. An accountability chart is basically okay. We have, let's say, CEO, then we have leadership team. And then inside the leadership team, that's going to be managers. And under those managers is going to be all these individual people that are going to be the ones that are doing the skill or doing the thing. That is an accountability chart that is like you have a. You little. Literally every quarter. What we used to do for EOS is we would truly fire everyone in our brains and restructure the organization and create a new accountability chart. It's like, what do we really need from a structure standpoint? And do we have the right people in the right seats? Do we even have the right seats? So I Don't think like you talked about that, but I don't know as if that's necessarily something that people think about quite as much. Because as you become a million multimillion dollar organization, this part becomes absolutely essential.

[Josh Hill]

Exactly the term that we use quite a bit. And I'm not sure if it's Jim Collins. Maybe it is, but it's putting people in the parking lot.

[Ralph Burns]

Yep.

[Josh Hill]

So to speak. When you're designing or reimagining or going through this due diligence of like, do I need to hire this person? Or even when we. When you're doing reviews of the company structure, it's like the ability to emotionally remove yourself from the situation because a lot of the people that you work with, you're connected to them 100%. You've built relationships with your immediate team, especially if you're a business owner. Like, it's difficult to emotionally detach yourself.

[Ralph Burns]

You have personal relationships with these people.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

You're spending more time with them than your partners and family.

[Josh Hill]

Yeah, a hundred percent, exactly.

[Ralph Burns]

I spend more time with Lauren than I do my wife.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

So actually I think that is true. I think you and I have had more conversations than you and Jen, which I'm not complaining about, but it is funny. But the fact of the matter is that like, like you're saying these are people that you personally invest in, you financially invest in, especially if you're the business owner. But then the other thing is like you assume expectations, they're coming in to what could be a well oiled machine that could be a culture that is working really, really well. And I know this is like a sidebar to it, but there's also been times where self included, and I'm certain other people listening have hired someone that's come in with a wrecking ball and Miley Cyrusd the team's groove. So eliminating that wrecking ball before it comes in has to be accounted for. And what you're talking about helps.

[Josh Hill]

Oh yeah.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Vibe check and groove check.

[Josh Hill]

Yeah. I mean hiring has the ability to destroy your business and also has the ability to take your business from good to great. It's one of the things you just can't forsake when it gets to like the 20 to 80 and removing yourself from this as a business owner or you know, just if you need to offload some of the work that's done to get to this level of hiring quality because it does take a lot of work. It's just important to remember that like, I mean, in your case, Ralph, for example, you Built a hiring process that worked. Right. And it got us to a certain position as a company. But the amount of sheer time it took for you to maintain that and for you to drive it and for you to continue iterating and improving upon it, like, you have the ability to do that as a business owner. Like, you proved it out, you built it. But you get to a point where it's just like you grow to the business to a certain point, and you need to focus your efforts on other parts of the business or even elevate as a visionary. And you can't let the hiring process degrade or diminish from that point. In fact, what you need to do is invest in it and increase its capacity and its ability, or at least maintain it where you left it. And to do that, you need to invest. Yeah. And I think a big component as well is this. Is this emotional side that's not really talked about. I don't think too much, because hiring is a process. It's a system. It's a logical flow to get people into the organization. But fundamentally, we're talking about humans, right? We're talking about when we hire people, it's not just about a job or a seat. They're fundamentally changing their lives. They're upheaving a lot of the time that they spend with their previous workforce, and they're subscribing to a new product to tier 11. And that's kind of the way we look at it at tier 11. The mentality that we're starting to approach is looking at employment, or even just the employee experience as a subscription product. Why do our employees or contractors want to subscribe to tier 11? What's stopping them from getting up and saying, you know what? I'm going to change my Netflix subscription to Amazon. I'm going to Change my Tier 11 subscription from this agency to another agency. If we approach it that way, then it forces the HR team or leaders to think about the employee experience first. And if you're thinking about the employee experience first, then you're going to develop a better hiring experience for them and also for the managers. It's a good way to frame it as well.

[Ralph Burns]

I mean, hiring is. I always sort of think back to a hiring manager that I worked with in the corporate world, where every hiring decision for him was an emotional decision because he just hired on emotion. He's like, my gut tells me this gut tells me this guy is going to be a great salesperson. Michael, based upon what criteria? And I think you have to have very Very specific criteria. You need a job map. So it is a totally in his case, he was looking for just a gut feel. He did not have a specific checklist. And he also looked at and that this is one of the things when I talk about this is don't look for people that are exactly like you. So we once had a joke. This kid was like a tall, southern, sort of athletic. Talked and had a funny sense of humor. Like actually hysterically funny. All the guys on his team were exactly like him. He had 10 all dudes all like him, Southern, funny, six foot three. You know where they ranked in the company out of 20 districts, dead last. And he was a great sales guy. And I'll never forget this. It was like that is a cardinal sin of hiring. Always trying to look for the same person as you do not look for the same person that you are look complimentary to your skills. Not complimentary like suck up kind of thing. You are the boss. The things that you don't do well, they should have that. Especially if you're hiring them for a task in your 80% that you don't want to do anymore. They should not be like you. Yeah, I always heard a joke with our coo. He's like programs on the weekends and when he has free time, he watches anime. He's so completely different than me. And I'm like, that's exactly why I love this guy. Because he's like my opposite. I don't want to hire me. And I think that's. That's a hard thing for a lot of people to get like wrap their heads around or sort of understand is and Brian Bircher was his name and everyone in his district was the exact same way. I've never forgotten that lesson. And I did the opposite. And we were number one every single year. The point is that's not. It wasn't just that, but I think there is something to this is that you have to take that emotion out of it. You have to be once or twice removed to a certain degree. And also very most importantly, look for people who are complementary to your skills.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

I think it's hard though, because when you meet someone that's just like you, you connect so well. And then because you two connect, you assume everyone else on your team will connect the same way. But then all it does is amplify all the things that they don't like about you that they now have to get it from two fronts. But it's hard. Like you meet someone, you're like, oh my gosh, you Watch K dramas, you speak Italian, you eat cookies. As its own nutritious food group. When I meet someone that has those three criteria and I'm like, show me your goodreads because you are my soulmate. I'm like, you're on the bus. But it's hard because when you're interviewing them, you're like, oh my God, you're perfect. Because our egos see ourselves in the other person. It's like I'm looking in a mirror and I tell myself every day I'm perfect. I'm kind kidding. But in the reality, like when you see those, it's hard. So anyone that's listening, it's like, oh, I've totally hired someone that's just like me. It gets frustrating because you as the business owner aren't hirable.

[Ralph Burns]

Right? So true.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

You know that you're not hireable. That's why you started a business. And so then you hire someone else that's like you. Either they're also not hireable or, well, they're actually not like you. You have shared common interests and the reason that they're applying for a job is why they're not like you. Because you didn't apply for your job, you created your job that can extend.

[Josh Hill]

As well to just simply having the same kind of interview styles or being the same level of extrovert, you know, or just jiving on the call about similar hobbies or interests. It could have nothing to do with necessarily their suitability for the role that you've developed. I think it's a very good point to raise because it's very dangerous to go into hiring and recruitment and being 100% emotionally led. Yeah, like, it's an important component, but it's important to be able to insert that like a scalpel once you've done all the due diligence that we were talking about in that first phase. Like, you need to go through and build the building blocks and the foundation so that when you get to a conversation, your intuition and your emotions play an important part and you want to have that connection and that spark, but it should not be the driving force in your decision making. And you need to cross reference and cross check that with the logical side of your brain. And you can't do that if you haven't done the logical work upfront. Otherwise you're just asking for pain. And you will end up building a team of people that you simply can be friends with and that you enjoy being around. But can't make the hard decisions, can't execute According to the job maps that you've developed or the seats that you've developed, or the vision or the values that you have. That's probably one of the hardest things about. That I found about recruitment, because naturally, I'm quite an emotional individual that likes to connect with people. I make friends with everyone. I love people. That's why I'm in hr. That's why I'm in this role, this job, is because I'm biased. But, you know, without people, you do not have a business period.

[Ralph Burns]

Right.

[Josh Hill]

You need good people. And I look at everyone and I'm like, opportunity, potential. Yes. Go you. And that. If you have too much of that in the hiring process, it's like, let's hire everyone because everyone's amazing. And then you get to a point where you're like, that person's actually really shit. You know, so.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

But if they were like you, you can't admit that because then you feel that you are shit because then you're looking in the mirror and you're like, well, wait, they were perfect. Why aren't they better? Because it's. Either you have an identity crisis.

[Josh Hill]

Wow. Yeah.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Or you take it personally 100%.

[Josh Hill]

Yeah. And then. Yeah, and then you get to a point where you get into this. This cycle of, like, protecting your decision and not considering it as a sunk cost that you've hired the wrong person.

[Ralph Burns]

And that.

[Josh Hill]

That's a whole nother kind of situation when you. You put the time and effort into hiring and it was a misfire. And that will happen, especially with the way that recruitment's heading with. With AI. And I mean, that. That's a. That's a separate conversation. But, like, the amount of applications you can get now for jobs where people look amazing and the tendency for people to.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Yeah, people lie.

[Josh Hill]

Yeah.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

And they can manipulate it. And like, even, like on socials, they can. There are so many AI tools available there to make you sound and look better than you actually are that if you're not leveraging those, you're at a disadvantage. And when you are leveraging those, you have to be like Inspector Gadget and make sure you ask about. I mean, there's tons of videos on the Internet where you'll see even at coders. So I'm not a developer. I don't do software engineering at all. But I've seen interviews where people are recording themselves being interviewed, and then they have AI open on the screen right to the right of them telling them all the answers that they need. Like, even at, like, a recent conversation, I Had with a bunch of CTOs. They were talking about how they have to do, like, live coding prompts where they have to share their screen and they have to hire specific software to make sure that they're the ones doing the coding. Because I have found this too. I've hired someone that didn't do the work. I hired someone who did really well interview style, and then they had their partner or someone living with them that did the work. And I got caught. Like, that was. That happens when you hire remotely. Like, those things are, like, so true. And, oh, I know someone else listening has a horror story. Tell me yours so I feel better. Ralph, please tell me you've had this experience too.

[Ralph Burns]

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, less so now, but yes, absolutely. It's a natural thing. It's almost like you have to go through that and the only way for you to understand the value of what we're talking about here. I know we're talking a lot on sort of step. Really step one here in a lot of ways. And then we talked about zero. We're like at step zero almost to a certain degree, is to experience the pain of having the wrong hire. So I think it's actually, it's a blessing in a lot of ways to do it the wrong way, because then you experience the pain of getting somebody on board and you never want to repeat that mistake ever again.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

I did need those blessings. I would have been okay.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah, I mean, if you keep repeating the same mistake, then you're just an idiot. And you should be listening to this show, I suppose, or reading some book on how to hire. The point is, is that everyone's going to make those mistakes. You can make them once, twice, three times. But after, like, the third time you've made a bad hiring decision, it's not them, it's you. It is you. 100%. It definitely is. And I think that the old maxim is true here. You know, when you do follow a process, you do hire slow and fire fast. You immediately figure out what your mistakes are and let those people go quickly. But it's almost like you have to hire bad people in order to realize I really do need a system and maybe I need a better way, which is hopefully what we're explaining here.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Well, would you agree to be true? Like, for me, it's. Every person I hire is an expense for me for six months. So when they join my team, I have to know that six months of their salary is pure investment.

[Ralph Burns]

Totally.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Because if they leave or they're fired within six months, they became an expense, not an investment.

[Ralph Burns]

Yeah, 100%.

[Josh Hill]

Yeah. All of these components that will eventually go into. They're all foundational. Like, they're all important. They're all interlinked. They all contribute to a successful hire. Phase zero is foundational, but also at the tail end of this whole process. The onboarding. Yeah, the process in which you onboard someone, you welcome them in, you give them the tools, the structure, the processes, the support, the nurturing to succeed. That is one of the strongest indicators of success. You can do everything right. You could even hire the right person objectively. Right. If they come in and they've got a really poor onboarding experience, you're severely undermining and diminishing everything that you've done. And there's principles of onboarding and there's so many different ways to do it. But ultimately, it's like they're in the company now. Everything is geared towards mobilizing them and getting them up to speed as quickly as possible and getting them living their job map.

[Ralph Burns]

So let's get into. We're on step zero a bit. We talked about the accountability chart. We talked about job maps, we talked about the importance of core values. Let's get into sourcing candidates. Like, you've got all that stuff laid out. Most of that is pretext here. So how do you start? This is the biggest question I always get. Where do you guys find the best people? Always the biggest question. How would you answer that? How do you do it? I know you've got sort of a very specific way in which you do it, which has led to some incredible hires. Let's talk about that.

[Josh Hill]

Well, I'm a big advocate of your employees, first and foremost, being ultimately your best hiring managers. Right. So I think they have the best understanding. I mean, okay, taking a step back, sourcing and ultimately selling the company that you're offering as that subscription product to a candidate is the essence of how to attract the best talent. Like, you need to sell your company to someone. It's not a case of you're in a position of power and I can have anyone I want. You need to come at it from an inverted perspective. What is it going to take for you to steal the attention to convince someone that you are the defining career change, the defining career move that is right for them? And it may not be right. And you don't want to oversell. It's about discovery. But initially, to attract and to source, you need to develop that level of that mindset that this is a game of attraction and selling the opportunity. And the best salesmen in that position are of course, your hiring team and yourself, your employees. They get the business. And if they're advocates of your culture and what you stand for, your vision and everything they can articulate, especially the people that are in the teams where this role would be employed. They are the best articulators of what people can expect, why it's worth their time, what value that this company can provide them. So whether it's the fact that you mobilize your people to hire through their own sources or networks, or even if you do some discovery first to talk to your employees to understand why are you here? What do you get from this subscription? What do you get from tier 11? Why is this your career choice? If you do that level of discovery, that sets you up well for sourcing and those subsequent conversations that need to happen. But that would be my first number one tip is like, put your focus internally on the company before running to. Indeed. And job boards and LinkedIn recruiter and take a step back again. It's the foundational stuff that makes hiring great. It's the phase zero. And it's before we jump into anything, you take a step back, you think you be intentional. Why am I going to go to a job board when I've got employees here that could advocate for this company and help us hire really good people? So that's the first step. And usually from there it's. It's a combination of headhunting and outreach and job boards. We can dive into both of those if you want.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Yeah, but you're saying first and foremost, it's referrals from the people that are working for you that are like, I enjoy working for this company. I know someone who's talented. They're willing to bet their name and reputation because we've done it. Some of our best pack members have come from referrals, like, a thousand percent. Like, we had one girl who gave us five referrals. It was like her whole friend group had started working for us. And her mom joked and said, are you HR or are you a copywriter for this company?

[Ralph Burns]

You just hang out with your friends all day?

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

Yeah. Like, it was amazing. It was like, wow. I was like, how else do we infect your friends? Anyone else you know? Because it was just brilliant talent after brilliant talent. But the challenge comes in is like, for us, it worked. We had a referral incentive program. So, yeah, when they had someone that was a good fit, provided that they and the other person were in good standing, they got paid out. And then we set up a process where they could take the payment at 30 days, six months or one year, depending on when they wanted to take the payout. It got bigger. So if you were willing to be like, yeah, I know this person will still be here in a year, it was like 3 or 4x the payout of 6 months. So it's like, do you want to wait? Or if, you know, like maybe it's not good. That always signaled to us if it was a good one. But then the other times where it's happened where a referral gave us a bad recommendation, the person on our team who referred it, if the other person didn't do well, they felt an obligation to compensate. And they were the first ones to say, I referred the wrong person. Please don't let this damage my relationship with you guys. So in that referral capacity, it's like, it's amazing, but it also comes with that small risk. And you've experienced that too, right?

[Josh Hill]

And I think what's important if you stand up a referral program like that, it's very important to make sure that that's just, that's just a pipeline to go into your already established, very comprehensive recruitment process. Right? Like this person isn't cutting the queue. They're not going to the front of the line. It's just an in to getting pushed front and center. Especially if it's a referral from one of your best people. And that's what I would encourage. It's like referrals are going to vary in terms of their quality, of course. I mean, typically you could correlate better referrals from your top tier performance. Right. If I've got someone at the agency or in my company that I believe to be one of them, you know, alignment to core values goes above and beyond hungry, smart and says, hey, I've got someone that I know that could do this job instantly. I'm going to be like, okay. If they're anything like you, then I'm very excited. And typically someone of that caliber is not going to be referring someone that could potentially jeopardize their reputation or their performance or anything like that. So you're usually going to find the best referrals from your best people and developing incentives for that to proactively happen is good. In absence of that, you don't need to overcomplicate it. You can just reach out to your best performers and say look, or even post it publicly to your company. It's also a good assessment and a good indicator of do people really like working at your company? You know, because if you're getting nothing back and you're hearing crickets, that's probably an indicator that maybe you need to do a bit more discovery with your people to ascertain why they're not hungry, to hire people like them or similar, to bring them to your company.

[Ralph Burns]

People always ask me, like, how do you guys recruit? I know you've got sort of a secret sauce recruiting, but also, let's talk about the paid services and where you stand there, as well as job boards.

[Josh Hill]

It's a tough one because it does depend on the role. It depends on exactly who you're hiring and what market. And I think our approach typically is to do both simultaneously. It's always to go with the job boards. We always do job boards because there's just a big market of people that are looking at job boards. And we also do headhunting on the side. So I've had mixed success with both. We've hired great people from both avenues. I think one thing to remember is the circumstance in which the engagement is happening, right? When you reach out to someone, they're not looking, you're disrupting them, you're disrupting their life, their workflow, their attention. And you are actively putting an opportunity out in front of them. And that goes back to the selling component, right? I mean, that's why it's even more important to really firmly understand what is your company vision, your values, your purpose. Why are you a better subscription product than the company that they're currently subscribed to? That's a selling process, that's a negotiation process. And you need to do that, right? And that's where the EQ comes in. You cannot be a robot. You need to be a salesman and you need to go in there and you need to fight for that candidate.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

This is so mind boggling, by the way, because if anyone's listening and that you've like poached or like you approached someone that wasn't ready, like you're saying this. I'm like, oh my God, this is so obvious. And it's never how I positioned it. Because I have the assumption, of course they want to work with us, duh, because they know everything about us. But I'm coming into a conversation, halfway in the conversation when they're like, what?

[Josh Hill]

Right, Exactly. They're like, why? Why are you talking to me? Right? Like, I'm happy right now. What can you offer me? I can offer you this, this, this and this. And that's really where it starts, that's where you start to do your discovery with the candidate and understand what matters to them. And a lot of the people that we hire, it's a lot of the same thing. It's I'm frustrated, I can't make decisions, I can't get promoted, I can't. You know, you're contacting people that have potentially reached the ceiling of their company or they're looking for growth, they're looking for the next career defining move. And you're in a position to offer that, you're in a position to sell that to them and to resubscribe them to a culture or an environment that is more attractive and can give them what they need as a professional and it's a mutually beneficial relationship. You know, you've done, you've done the job map, you've done the accountability chart, you know very clearly what they need to do and you know what to expect from them. And you can sell them that clarity, you can sell them that opportunity that you've already articulated. And candidates love it when you're confident and you understand exactly what they're walking into. And you can speak to that and you can speak to the challenges. I'm incredibly candid and transparent. When we hire, that's kind of how we approach it. Like I don't sugarcoat anything. There is a lot of change. This is happening. You're going to run into these problems. This is going to be a source of frustration if you pitch it as a challenge. High performers love that. They lap it up because high performers want growth, they want challenge and they're competitive. They're competitive 100%. If you come at it like that, the people that are not inclined to be motivated by that will fall to the wayside. So you're already doing your initial screening in the initial conversations you're having when you're outreaching by how you communicate with conviction and transparency around the opportunity. So you can see like when you headhunt, there's just a lot more propensity to get higher quality because it's more intentional. And top, top performers are not looking well majority of the time. They're not looking for jobs because they've locked in probably to a well paying job and they're providing value, they're loyal, they're loyal to their company, they're high performing, they're working hard and you're coming along and saying, I want your loyalty, your hard work, your talent over here. Whereas with a job board, I'm not saying that you don't find any Amazing talent on job boards. All of us have been on job boards. It's more so that you just have a higher chance of coming across candidates that you just got a wider spectrum of different people. So there's more to sift through to get to the needle, to get to the gold. And your systems need to be set up so you can do that sifting.

[Lauren E. Petrulo]

There's so much more to cover on this topic. Like, I don't think we should stop the conversation here. Like, no, I think we should come back and keep the conversation going. But for those that are listening and that's identifying with a lot of this or like finding confusion like how do you spelling calculate, for example. And anyone that's listening that has questions specifically that you want our head of whatever his title will be in two weeks because it's likely going to change. Send us an email to joshir11.com and we'll, we'll continue the conversation. And if someone's got some additional questions, we can bring that into the conversation. So we bring you, the perpetual traffic listener to the discussion.

[Ralph Burns]

So we have covered an awful lot here on today's show and for you, the perpetual traffic listener, I think this is one of the most important episodes that we've done in quite some time. So in that vein, what we'd like to do is do a part two with Josh, myself and Lauren going through the hiring process and then also get your feedback prior to doing show two. We want to know what your issues are with hiring and how we can troubleshoot them live and on the air. So the best way to do that is to email Josh directly. It's Josh Hill and it is joshir11.com that's T I E R spellout11.com email him your questions and make sure so that Josh doesn't miss any of these. In the subject line of the email at joshear11.com put in the subject line of Perpetual traffic and he will correlate all of those questions and then we will continue to go through the 11 step process on how to hire superstars. So really appreciate you all listening here today. Once again, his email is joshier11. Send him your questions, subject line perpetual traffic and we'll answer them on the air as we record part two in a week or so. So make sure that where you're listening, you do leave a rating or a review, especially over on Spotify. Spotify is growing like a weed for us right now, which is great to see. A lot of downloads over there. So I really appreciate all you listening on Spotify, leave us a rating and review. It really does help us to get a wider audience here. Help entrepreneurs, directors of marketing, marketers like you get better at their craft and ultimately scale and grow their businesses. So I really do appreciate that. And of course, check us out over on our YouTube channel over at perpetualtraffic.com YouTube so on behalf of my awesome, amazing co host, Lauren E. Petrulo, until next show, see ya. You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.