← Follow The Yellow Brick Road
Follow The Yellow Brick Road
Fix This Before You Hire: Why ‘Fire Fast’ Only Works If You Prep Right
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Hiring to correct something that doesn't have a process will never work. You've got to fix the process first. I don't treat my business like it's a family. These are not my kids. These are not my siblings. These are my employees. I am their boss. I want to hire slow and I want to fire fast. And I've lived and breathed by that. If they're not interviewing me back, then they're probably not looking for a career. What is your biggest opportunity for improvement or what's your biggest weakness? If they can't answer that. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Special Ops Podcast. I'm Emma Maureenville, your host. Thrilled to be here with you today. I am going to be talking today about hiring mistakes, why they can cost you greatly or earn you tremendously. So today on Special Ops, we're going to be walking through hiring processes and why they are so important. Very often I find I did this myself as a new business owner when we first started Shockwave. Business owners tend to meet people and try to conform roles to people or they don't onboard people very well, and it creates a complete disaster and a money waste. So let's kind of run through what should happen in what order when you're looking to hire. The very first thing I want to make sure everybody understands is hiring to correct something that doesn't have a process or has a bad process will never work. You've got to fix the process first. Very often people will have issues and problems in their business and they think, oh, I need to hire someone to deal with that. When really someone just needed to sit down and think through how do we make it so that it's not a recurring problem that needs to be dealt with. And that very, very often is the case. So the first thing you want to do is sit down and write the job description. What is the role you're hiring for and what is going to be encompassed in that role? And so once you have that, you want to look at that role and you want to look at your SOP deck. Do I have SOPs for the job duties that I plan on hiring for? If the answer is no, stop. Gotta create the sops first. Now, I know when you're in the thick of things, that's a lot easier said and done. But it is massively important. You gotta have at least the standardized operating procedures in writing before bringing the person on. So now I've got the job description with the job duties. I have the SOPs that encompass those job duties. Now I'm going to look at that and say what are one to three numbers that I can look at weekly or monthly, depending on the role, in order to make sure that that person is doing a good job in the role that they hire they've been hired for. So what does success look like for this role? So let's say it's a customer service manager. It may be call handle times, it may be how many calls were issues were resolved on the first call. It may be refund rate, retention, stuff like that. So now I have my KPIs to make sure that the person is going to do great in the role. So now I've got that all built out. We've talked about building an avatar for who you hire previously. If you didn't see that episode, go back and watch it. Your values driven future is what I'm talking about there. What values do the people that you hire hold? So I've got my values that I'm looking for. I've got my avatar, the person that I'm looking for. I've got the job description with the job duties. I've got the sops for the job duties that they're going to be responsible for. Now I can go look, I can't go look. I can't go interview and I can't go hire until I have those things that's going to set them up for success and that's going to set you up as the interviewer for success for the person that you're trying to hire. The next thing that I would do and I strongly recommend preview, preview HR PR PR I V U H R I'm not sure it'll be linked in the show notes. I am not an affiliate. I do not get an affiliate payment. I just really enjoy this test. So Privuhr is going to look at more about how they learn and their personality and what they're interested in than what they know. And I like to use that test because I don't necessarily care about what someone knows. No matter what they know, I'm going to have to spend time teaching them how I do things. So do they have the ability to learn and are they interested in what I'm going to have to teach them in the way that I'm going to teach it to them. Additionally, if they're not a culture fit, I'll be able to see that because there's a bit of personality element in the preview test. I really like the preview test. So I'm going to utilize the preview test. When I'm looking at Applications. I like to put my job descriptions on job boards. I particularly like dynamite jobs, but there are a ton of different ones out there that you can use. Once you get good candidates in that you want to interview, you're going to shortlist them based off their resume. I generally send them questions that they need to answer before they get to the point of interview. We shortlist them and then we send them a preview HR test. And that allows me to see who they are, if they're a good fit. And then once we get past that component, now we're going to do an interview. And so our interviews, the first interview is generally about two hours long. If it's one of my Shockwave team members that are going to be client facing, it might go longer than that depending on their answers, but it's generally going to be between one and two hours. A customer service person is probably going to be closer to 45 minutes to an hour, whereas customer service manager will be an hour and a half. An operations person, two to three hours. So the role definitely quantifies how much time I'm going to spend with the person. So now I'm gonna take their preview HR test, which again, I love this test because on things that they didn't test strongly on, it's going to cultivate questions for you to ask the candidate based upon their personality and it's gonna tell you how to word that question so you get what you need back to make a decision. Anyway, I'm gonna go through lots of questions. I'm gonna ask them things like what is your five year goal for your personal life? What is your five year goal for your professional life? If they can't answer that, they probably aren't going to do well with me because I need people who are strategic planners and if they're the plan for their own life isn't known and they're probably not going to work out whether it be a customer service agent or a COO that I'm hiring. And then I generally ask them about their hobbies. What, what does their perfect day at work look like? How do they feel when they don't hit a KPI? What do they do when they can see that a project is due but it's off track and it doesn't look like they're gonna get it done in time. This is gonna give me a lot of insights to how they think if the first thing that they're gonna do when they see that a project is off track is double down and work harder. If the first thing they're going to do is go to a team member and see if they can help out. If they're going to sit down, rethink the project, and go to their direct supervisor and let them know the project is off and explain to them when it's going to be done, what steps they're going to take, and then ask for any advice to getting it done sooner. It's probably going to be more of my ball game. I'm going to ask them questions about how they organize. What do they like most about the project management tool that they're using? What do they like least about the project management tool that they're using? Who was their favorite supervisor boss ever and why? Who was their least favorite supervisor and why? What are some of the company cultures that they've worked in that they disliked? What are some of the company cultures that they worked with they do like? This is all going to give me insight to them. This is going to tell me, you know, if the best boss they've ever had wasn't strict and was super cool. Tells me a lot about their personality. If the best boss they ever had pushed them and taught them a lot and helped them excel in their career, that tells me a lot about them. If they give me answers that have to do with their own personal growth, that excites me a lot. They give me answers about how they get to cut corners or get extra time off or, you know, anything that doesn't sound like it's part of our culture. It gives me some good insights there. So once I've asked them a whole bunch of questions, then I'm gonna open up the floor for them to ask me. I generally don't love hiring people that didn't ask me good questions about what does success in this role look like? What is the culture at the company? Who is your favorite type of employee to work with? Who's your least favorite? If they're not interviewing me back, then, they're probably not looking for a career. And again, it does depend on what I'm hiring for. If I'm hiring for a janitor at a manufacturing plant, they're probably not going to ask me a lot of questions about culture. But if I'm hiring a director of operations and they're not asking me a lot of questions and they're looking for a job, not a career. So I want to be really diligent about making sure that they're asking me the questions appropriately for the role that I'm about to hire them for. From there, the interview concludes Again, depending on the role, sometimes I'll have my team interview the person. I'd really like to hear Richard Thiago and Saka's insights on candidates, particularly for the Shockwave team, particularly in the ops position. Because it's important to me that they're going to rely on that person. It's important to me that we hire somebody that they're going to feel like they can trust and rely on. Yo. We interrupt this pod to tell you like and subscribe. What are you doing? Why haven't you liked? Why haven't you subscribed? Just subscribe. What's the problem? In all seriousness, subscribe so that you get notifications every time we drop new content. Additionally, if you have not signed up for our Visionary vault, what the hell. Www.specialopspodcast.com Go sign up. It's free. We never try and sell you and we're putting all kinds of stuff in there to help you with the operations of your business because we're passionate about it and we want to share operational excellence with our direct response, e commerce and online selling family. So after that interview, now comes the onboarding process. A really, really good candidate will likely have another role and will likely not want to leave that role until you give them a permanent job offer. That being said, a high quality candidate is going to want to make sure if they're going to make a move that it's a good one. So I always offer them the ability to work with us on a short project before we all make the decision for forever. And when I say forever, it doesn't necessarily mean forever. But the long term. I'm hoping that if I hire someone, they're at least going to be around for the next three years. Really, I want them to have a plan of being here as long as the job can grow with their growth. I offer a working interview where they get paid to produce X deliverables. And again, it's going to very much be aligned with the role that I'm hiring for. So they're going to sign an NDA, we're going to offer them X dollars, give them two weeks. I generally give them a lot more time than it would take knowing that they're likely working another role while they're doing this. So nothing that's urgent. So they have two weeks to get me back the deliverables. They have access to the team to ask questions, to get help, whatever they need. So that way also the personalities mesh. Are they asking my team questions that could have been googled or that's sitting in a drive that they've already been given, or are they going to do their due diligence first? And we intentionally leave some things out so that we know that they're comfortable with asking, but we also make sure that they have access to many things to make sure that they're going to do due diligence before taking other people's time. Once we get past that, then the official job offer comes where it's, hey, come work with us full time and be part of our. And I say family very loosely. I don't treat my business like it's a family. These are not my kids. These are not my siblings. These are my employees. I am their boss. I understand that they understand that. But we do care about each other very deeply. So I'm going to invite them to come work with us, and then the onboarding process is going to be well laid out on Monday. I actually never start anybody on Monday. I like to start people on Tuesday. But on Monday, we're gonna do their onboarding paperwork. We're gonna give them all the SOPs for what does holidays look like? What do we do at Shockwave for pto? What do we do at Shockwave for vacation time? What are the SOPs surrounding the project management tool? How do we function as a team when someone has an issue with another team member? Like, we actually have SOPs for all this. So they're going to read all of that. They're going to sign off that they've read it all and that they understand what their role is and they have no questions. And then we're going to get started on those SOPs on Tuesday. And so each day for the first two weeks is planned out. We're a remote team, so you can't really hand somebody a whole bunch of stuff and say, go and good luck. You really got to spend time working with them to make sure that they've understood. Because again, sometimes people think they understand something and didn't. So we want to make sure that they actually understood. So in the morning, they may spend a little bit of time with Richard, and then we'll give them some sops designed around what Richard knows in marketing that they'll be handling. And so remember I said, even if you've got to go and just put them together kind of sloppily, make sure you have them. We're going to review their job duties, what they're responsible for delivering. I'm going to give them that sop. And whether that sop, I believe, is an a Plus SOP or a DSOP to they're going to rewrite the sop. As they're doing it, they're going to update it. What's the most effective efficient way to do this? We generally update all of our SOPs in my company every six months. I don't now with AI for the past year and a half that really hasn't been enough. I'm looking to figure out how we do that more often. But when I onboard someone, all the SOPs that have to do with their role, whether they've been updated two months ago or something six months ago, the person who's now gonna be responsible is gonna rewrite it and we're gonna go over it together and we're gonna make sure that it is the most effective, most efficient way. But things definitely change. Automations have changed everything. Automations are easier than ever. So as we're looking through all of our SOPs, we're challenging the person that we're onboarding to look at ways to kill automate or make more effective and efficient. Every day for two weeks, their entire day is gonna be planned where different points, points in the day they're going to meet with different members of the team to make sure that their onboarding goes well. We're going to make sure to review all their KPIs the last day of their first week. So I generally start them on Tuesday and on Friday afternoon I'm going to review the SOPs that they're going to be ultimately responsible for. And I generally put those in effect the first of the month after they start or two weeks after they start if they started like, you know, at the tail end. Can't really expect people to come up with results in the first two weeks. So I review those KPIs with them. I make sure that they can repeat to me what those KPIs are and what they need to do to reach those numbers. I want to make sure they understand what it entails. For example, our refund rate has to be 9% and this person's going to be responsible for maintaining a 9% refund rate. They need to understand that not only do they need to be checking on customer service, our click to cancel rules, they're pulling that data and making sure that they call customers that are canceling. But also looking at our marketing materials, looking at our customer experience, looking at our customer journeys and making sure those align with that percentage of refund rate. And 9% is kind of high unless you have continuity. Continuity offers is what I was Thinking there and then I want to have in the calendar the day they starts in the calendar. Their 30 day review is in the calendar and their 90 day review is in the calendar. I want to review how they're doing. I want to hire slow and I want to fire fast. And I've lived and breathed by that. And I really do live and breathe by that. So after you've onboarded them, if you're not taking time 90 days in to look at what they're doing and reset anything that they're doing wrong and very, very likely if they don't succeed at their role, it's because you didn't do that at the 90 day mark. I want to do it again. Are you on track to really be a rock star here in the next 90 days? So once you're half a year in, you should be a rock star at your role. Are we on track for that? If not, what mentorship, what resources, what things do I need to do to make sure that you are going to be successful here? So I hope you enjoyed this podcast. This was a fun one for me because I love talking about hiring. I'll do another one on mentorship here soon, on mentoring your people and how to do that effectively. But if you go to the Visionary Vault, that's going to be at www.specialopspodcast.com and you sign up for our Visionary Vault if you haven't already inside, there will be interview questions Emma likes to ask and you'll see all the interview questions that I ask. My favorite by the way, is what is your biggest opportunity for improvement or what's your biggest weakness? So I really, really like that one. Anyone who says I don't have one, I never hire. Ever. You're not self aware or I can't think of one. You're not self aware and you're not pondering how to do better. I don't want to work with you. I will say too, it's really interesting. Some of the answers I've gotten over the years. I would say that my all time favorite answer. I was interviewing a girl for a executive assistant role. I was living in Puerto Rico at the time and my role had just exploded and I needed an assistant pretty badly. I was on a call with a girl interviewing her, she lived in Florida and I said to her, what is your biggest opportunity for improvement? Or I. E. What's your biggest weakness? And she said, I'm a real badass when it comes to my job but sometimes I go on benders and disappear for a few days. At first, I thought she was joking. She wasn't. She was dead serious. She had an alcohol problem and a drug problem. And she was very honest in the interview. Of course, I didn't hire her, but I thank God I asked the question because, yeah, never know what you're gonna get. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Go grab your interview questions and we'll see you next time.