3 Weird Hiring Practices Every Business Should Have

Summary

Podcast Summary: "3 Weird Hiring Practices Every Business Should Have"

The EntreLeadership Podcast | Host: Ramsey Network | Date: March 16, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Dave Ramsey introduces a conversation between John Felkins (EntreLeadership) and Armando Lopez (Head of HR at Ramsey Solutions), focusing on the company's unconventional but effective hiring practices. They discuss three distinct and sometimes "weird" steps in the Ramsey Solutions hiring process, detailing why each is crucial for building a strong, culture-focused team. The episode is rich with actionable insights for any business leader aiming to hire better and protect their company culture.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Ramsey Hiring Philosophy (00:43 – 01:43)

• Five Hiring Criteria:
  • Humble
  • Hungry
  • Smart (from Patrick Lencioni’s "The Ideal Team Player"—but adopted prior at Ramsey)
  • Skill Set: Fit for the specific role.
  • Culture Fit: Alignment with core values and mission.
• Quote (Armando Lopez, 01:10):
  "Hire the right people. And that's the single. Everybody will tell you that, right?"

2. The Extensive Interview Process (01:26 – 02:54)

• Interview Rigor:
  • The process averages 8–12 interviews per successful candidate.
  • Emphasis initially on core values to ensure cultural fit.
  • Streamlined compared to previous years, but still notably deliberate.
• Quote (Armando Lopez, 02:31):
  "It still takes more than one, on average, I would say, eight to twelve interviews for a person to be fully onboarded."

3. Culture Fit Comes First (02:54 – 06:47)

• Early & Open Value Discussion:
  • Candidates are introduced early to the company’s mission: “We exist to provide biblically based, common sense education and empowerment that give hope to everyone in every walk of life.” (Armando Lopez, 04:15)
• Two-way “Fit” Evaluation:
  • Not just whether the candidate is right for Ramsey, but whether Ramsey is right for the candidate.
  • Candidates are encouraged to self-select in or out based on values and work style (collaborative, relational, work-in-office).
• Notable Quote (Armando Lopez, 06:35):
  “We often say we move at the speed of trust…they have to break bread together, see each other in the hallway. That’s what makes our culture unique.”

4. Talk About Compensation—Early and Often (06:47 – 08:23)

• Openness on Pay:
  • Compensation is discussed early in the process and again before the final onsite, so no one is surprised.
  • Candidates and company must both be 95% sure of proceeding before the last steps.
• Quote (Armando Lopez, 07:03):
  “No matter how much you like us...if our comp plan doesn’t work for you, you shouldn’t take this position.”

5. The “Spousal Dinner”—A Unique and Revealing Practice (08:24 – 12:17)

• Origin & Purpose:
  • A meal attended by both the candidate’s and the hiring leader’s spouse.
  • Started by Dave Ramsey and his wife to better gauge relational fit.
• Benefits:
  • Spouse offers perspective; identifies possible personality clashes.
  • Candidate’s spouse can ask questions and hear candid answers.
  • Strengthens buy-in from candidate’s household, reduces surprises.
• Memorable Moment (Armando Lopez, 08:43):
  “When you have your spouse who knows you better than anyone else and they're going, 'Hey, I think this person is going to drive you nuts just listening to them in the last 30 minutes.'”
• Notable Practice (John Felkins, 11:23):
  “One question that I always have my spouse ask is…what is your understanding of the role that they’re applying for? And we do that because it shows us how much they’ve communicated about it and what they understand.”
• Outcome:
  • Indicates real excitement and communication about the job at home.

6. Why Take So Many Steps? (12:17 – 12:19)

• Final Message:
  • The time and effort spent ensures low turnover, high morale, and strong teams.
  • Dave's closing thought:
    “Your people are your greatest asset and your greatest liability, which is why hiring well is so important and so freaking hard.”

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• Armando Lopez on values-first hiring:
  “We're a work from work employer because we believe there is something that happens here...that cannot happen any other way.” (05:33)

• Early comp transparency:
  “If that doesn’t work, we don’t want them to come for the final on site...You’ve got to be 95% certain that if we extended an offer within that range that you would accept.” (07:42)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:43 – Introduction to the 5 hiring criteria
• 01:26 – Length and rigor of the interview process
• 03:03 – Prioritizing core values and letting candidates select in or out
• 04:15 – How Ramsey introduces their mission to candidates
• 06:47 – Open compensation conversations and their importance
• 08:24 – Explanation and origin of the spousal dinner
• 11:23 – The “what’s your understanding of the role?” spouse question
• 12:17 – Final thoughts on taking time and hiring well

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Episode Tone & Style

The conversation between John Felkins and Armando Lopez is candid, direct, and instructional but warm—reflecting Ramsey’s people-focused, values-driven culture. There's plenty of humor and practical wisdom, blending sharp insight with approachable storytelling.

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Summary Takeaways

• Hiring the right people is about aligning skill and cultural fit, not just ticking boxes.
• Be radically transparent about who you are, what you believe, and what you offer.
• Include unusual but deeply impactful steps (like spousal dinners) to ensure mutual understanding and long-term team health.
• Make the process thorough—even rigorous—because "your people are your greatest asset and your greatest liability." (Dave Ramsey, 12:19)

This episode is a must-listen for leaders serious about elevating their hiring game beyond the ordinary.

Transcript

[A]

It's been said that my company is statistically harder to get into than Harvard. Well, maybe a big reason for that is our interview process. It's difficult, it's meticulous, and that's because we are ruthless when it comes to building a healthy team and protecting our culture. Today, John Felkins from Entree Leadership is sitting down with our head of hr. They're talking about three key parts of our hiring process that will sound weird at first, but they're critical to making really good hires. Plus, these are processes that would be really easy to replicate in virtually any business out there. But before I kick it over to them, do yourself a favor and subscribe to this channel so you can keep getting game changing content like this.

[B]

Hey, everybody, I'm here with Armando Lopez. And Armando, you lead all of HR for Ramsey, isn't that right?

[C]

That's correct.

[B]

You've got your fingers in all of the hiring stuff too and really have helped develop our approach to hiring. And I'd love to talk about that today.

[C]

Excellent.

[B]

What would you say our approach to hiring is?

[C]

Hire the right people.

[B]

Hire the right people.

[C]

Yeah. And that's the single. Everybody will tell you that, right?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So you want to hire the right quantity of people for the growth that you're forecasting and you want the right quality of people so that you don't have people issues down the road.

[B]

I'd love to. I'd love to get into some. Some of the things that we do that maybe not everybody does or, or some things that we would suggest people do that they're maybe not doing. But before we do that, could you just kind of walk us through from a high level perspective, what is our process for hiring?

[C]

Yep, absolutely. So we hire for five things, John. And we started this long before I ever got here. Dave was doing it. The words were slightly different, but we were looking for the same five things. And when I got here, I was able to say, hey, these are the five buckets that we look for. Three of them. People now know very well because Pat Lencioni wrote a book about it. So the ideal team player talks about, we want to hire humble, hungry and smart people. And before Pat wrote the book, we were doing that then. We want to hire people who have the skill set for what we need. And we want to hire people who fit. Well, fit. Yeah. Fit our core values, fit our mission statement, fit the team we're about to put them on. So those are the five things that we hire for.

[B]

And how many interviews are we typically doing to get to that. Like the process.

[C]

The process is shorter than it once was. So we've gotten better and more efficient at figuring out who should move forward. And it still takes more than one, on average, I would say, eight to 12 interviews for a person to be

[B]

fully onboarded, starting with the core values. Why is that such an important thing? And then how do we go about that? What's the conversation sound like when we do that?

[C]

When you think core values. Right. We want to make sure that we hire people that are going to be comfortable here, that are going to bring their whole selves to work, that this lines up with who they are. Because we tell people, bring your whole self to work. And so we want people that are already leaning in the direction that we are. They're already geared to care about other people, to be selfless. They're already team players. They have a natural disposition to say, I'm collaborative in nature.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

Right. So those individuals will do a lot better. And so to be able to let people select in and select out, by knowing what our core values are, by being able to talk about them early and often, it gives people the opportunity to say, you know what, this sounds like someplace I would do extremely well in. I'm wired this way already. And so it makes it go a lot faster.

[B]

Yeah. So I want to press in a little bit on that, because when you say we let them know what our values are, like, you know, I'm a hiring leader here at the company, and we have a guide that we use, and there's some very specific things we say to convey our values. And even talking about the company and. And things that we hit on. Talk a little bit about how we go about that.

[C]

Sure. So when you think about in the past, Right. When we hired people, most people knew who we were, and so they applied here on their own. And they already knew something about Dave Ramsey from the radio show. They knew something about Ramsey Solutions. They had either taken Financial Peace University or participated in Entrez like they knew something about the company. But we reach out to a lot of people today that don't know much about the company. And so we want to be very intentional that they understand. Understand who we are. And so that's why we hit on, hey, we're a missional driven company, and we exist to provide biblically based, common sense education and empowerment that give hope to everyone in every walk of life.

[B]

And we don't hold back on that.

[C]

No. And when we say that, sometimes that's the first time this person has heard it. Yeah. And so we want to give them the opportunity to say, hey, what does it mean to give hope? What does it mean that it's common sense? When you say education, what do you mean by that? When we say biblical principles, what does that mean? So we want to give people the opportunity to be able to understand who we are as a company. Most places they apply are immediately rolling into the interview, are you good enough for us? Right. So most places you apply in your first interview, they're wanting to know if you have the skill set, if you have the availability, if you're able to do the job they're hiring you for. And really they don't spend a lot of time talking about the culture fit of that individual into that company. But some companies don't even know what their core values are, right? And they don't talk about that. They talk about the individual as an individual that is a cog in a wheel. They're going to perform this function for eight hours a day and they leave and that's it. We talk about bringing your entire self to work and we talk about you're going to be a part of something. We're extremely relational as a company. We're extremely collaborative as a company. We're a work from work employer because we believe that there is something that happens here, being here eight hours a day, five days a week that cannot happen any other way. You don't build trust over a screen. And so for our team to be able to trust each other, and we often say we move at the speed of trust, for our team to be able to trust each other, they have to have communication, they have to break bread together, they have to see each other in the hallway. They have to be able to walk by each other and go, are you okay? You don't look like you're having a good day today or man, you're extremely happy. Oh yeah. Let me tell you what happened at home, right? So all of those things are what make our culture unique.

[B]

Very different. I see sometimes the surprise in people's eyes when I start asking those, those questions in interviews. Let's talk a bit about comp. Of course, we're a, we're a finance oriented company, right. We're helping people get out of debt. We talk pretty freely about comp in the interview process. Explain that a little bit.

[C]

We do. We want people to know that we pay fairly. We want them to how we get to ranges, how we go to market. And we want people to understand that, hey, no matter how much you like us, no Matter what you think about our culture, no matter the fact that you love the organization and what you're hearing about it, if our comp plan doesn't work for you, you shouldn't take this position. And so we want to talk about compensation early and then we talk about it again before the what we call a final on site. So before somebody comes in for their final round of interviews, we let them know there's going to be a specific phone call to talk about compensation and where at the beginning they received a range.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Now in this phone call, we've narrowed that range down because we know what their skill sets are, we know what they're bringing to the table, we know how they scored if we, if there's assessments involved. So we know that you're going to be somewhere between this range and this range. And it is very narrow. Within a couple of thousand dollars. Yeah. If that doesn't work, we don't want them to come for the final on site. Right. We say you've got to be 95% certain that if we extended an offer within that range that you would accept. And we've got to be 95% sure that we want you to be here. And so we want to make sure those things are happening.

[B]

Yeah, we're pretty upfront about it, which I love. Cuts down on the surprises.

[C]

Absolutely.

[B]

Now, you mentioned the final on site aspect of that and there's a lot that goes into that. But my favorite part is the part that involves food. Oh, of course.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

We have this thing we call a spousal dinner.

[C]

Yep.

[B]

Now that's very, very different. Talk about that, what it is, why we do it and where that came from.

[C]

John, that's been around since early. Right. Sharon, Dave's wife, would get to sit in and listen to that final interview and really was more of a meet and greet and breaking bread. You're about to spend a lot of time with this individual. What would that look like, sound like, feel like? And so when you have your spouse who knows you better than anyone else and they're going, hey, I think this person is going to drive you nuts just, just listening to them in the last 30 minutes. Those are the people you complain about when you come home because they have 28 questions to your one statement. Yeah. And so sometimes our spouses can pick up on that. Our spouses are not there to really interview the candidate and they're not there to be able to say to the individual, I'm going to interview you now. They don't know the role per se, but they know who we are and the people that we tend to interact with and do better with. It also does a miraculous thing because the spousal dinner is not just for us, it is for the candidate and for their spouse. So things that we have said along the interview, that candidate is able to ask our spouse, hey, so how often does John bring work home over the weekends? How often is, are there events that include spouses or kids? How often does this kind of thing happen? Right. They get to hear confirmation of what we've told them all along, the interview process. Yeah. Now, I don't know about you, John, but I can never predict the questions that my wife would ask. I can never predict if my wife, if I were interviewing for this job before I came in for the interview, she would probably say, make sure you ask about this, this and this. And chances are I'm going to forget that the spousal dinner is a great way for those people who are married to say, hey, you're going to get a chance to ask all of those questions and hear firsthand the response to your questions, the things that matter to you.

[B]

And I think what I've witnessed in doing that is that spouse leaves that conversation way more bought in because they've gotten to directly ask the questions that are on their heart and they've heard answers.

[C]

That's right. And they've heard the answers from the person firsthand, not interpreted by what their husband or wife is telling them. Right. So they're hearing it firsthand, which sometimes leads to a follow up question. Well, if, did you remember to ask him about that? Well, no, I didn't think about that. Yeah, well, okay. Well, I would want to know that. Great. When we're at the dinner, you get to ask it, you get to ask questions and be a part of this interview process.

[B]

One question that I always have my spouse ask is she will, I'll have her ask the spouse of the candidate, what is your understanding of the role that they're applying for? And we do that because it shows us how much they've communicated about it and what they understand. And we've, it's generated a lot of interesting conversations. So it's always, it's always a good, a good time and you can, you can learn a lot.

[C]

You can. And so not only do you know how excited the person is, have they actually talked to their spouse about this role and what's involved and what excites them about it? Yeah, you could take it that way if you wanted to. Hey, what's the most exciting part of that role that they're about to come in to join us. Yeah. And so they get a chance to weigh in on that, too.

[B]

Yeah. And if they just kind of look at you and like, I don't know, then that kind of tells you maybe they're not as excited as you're hoping that they are. Well, hey, thanks for sharing. Thanks for being here today.

[C]

Hey, thanks for having me.

[A]

Your people are your greatest asset and your greatest liability, which is why hiring well is so important and so freaking hard. But the only way to build a strong team or with high morale and low turnover is to take more time to get clear. And that starts with processes like we've talked about today, making sure your candidate understands who you are. So if you want the complete list of the 12 components to look for in a good hire, check out the link in the show notes. That's all for today. Thanks for joining us. I'm Dave Ramsey and this is Entrez Leadership.