The 10 Step Hiring Framework - April Pulse - Episode #97

David Politis: People are not your most important asset. The right people are. The reality is that we're winging it. And the cost of winging it is very, very high. The cost of hiring the wrong person there could be literally millions, if not tens of millions of dollars of enterprise value. We know whether at any company we've ever been to, those right people are game changers. Those right people really do change the trajectory of the company. When you're interviewing someone, for a roll and they can't get into the details, the weeds, that's worrisome. You're getting away from the polished surface level answers and you're getting levels deeper to the real reasons, the real why. you Hello everyone, David Pledis here. Today's episode is gonna be a solo one and I'm gonna be talking about a 10 step interview framework that will help you hire the best talent. Now this is important to say if you're listening to this, you can listen to the whole episode here but if you wanna see the slides that accompany this, you can go to YouTube or Substack. All right, so this is a framework that I've developed over the last 20 plus years. based on my own experiences, interviews with almost 100 CEOs for the podcast, as well as training that I have been through, third-party training over the years, many different trainings, and I put all of that together into this framework. So let's jump right into it. Look, right out of the gates, we know, I think we all know this, even in the age of AI and everything, people. are your most important asset. And actually, I love this quote from James Collins, the book is Good to Great, where he says, people are not your most important asset, the right people are. And we all know that. We know whether, at any company we've ever been part of, our own company now, previous roles, we know those right people are game changers. Those right people really do change the trajectory of the company. Now the challenges many of us have never been trained on how to interview. Actually, when I've gone out and surveyed the different companies I've trained using this framework and I asked people how many people have been formally trained, including the CEOs, and the numbers are in the single digits, 5%, 6%. So the reality is that we're winging it and the cost of winging it is very, very high. First of all, You have this poor candidate experience that can be created by winging it. I had a situation very early in my career where I was sending people in to do interviews and they were asking inappropriate, truly inappropriate questions in the interview that they didn't know were inappropriate. And we had people dropping out of the process because of that. I've had people go into interviews and ask, a bunch of just brain teaser questions, because they read that's what is done by Google or Amazon or whoever, and candidates walking out because it was completely irrelevant to their job and it wasn't who we were trying to be as a company. Point is, you can create that poor candidate experience by not having a framework yourself and not training your team on it. Also, it's a lot of wasted leadership time. If you're the CEO, if you're a leader, you probably have a number of people doing interviews. before the candidate reaches you. And when they do, and you get in there and immediately start seeing yellow and red flags, that's a problem. It's a complete waste of your time. And I've seen this. I have seen where I'll get to the interview, ⁓ I'll get to the candidate. They have an interview with five, six people before me, and then we'll get to the candidate and I'll tell them, hey, know. this job is really hard, you're gonna be doing 100 cold calls a day, and people are gonna be saying no to you, and it's a really challenging job, and they'll say, I was thinking that I was gonna be closing deals in six months, and said, ⁓ no, this is gonna be, you're gonna be an SDR for the next year and a half, and you're gonna be, it's a really hard job, and everything, and by the time they get to me, we could have avoided that misunderstanding from way earlier on. And then the wrong hires. This is the worst. mean, the cost, it's almost immeasurable, the cost of hiring the wrong people. In some levels, it's expensive because you have to hire them, train them, then fire them, then replace them. Like that's the basic level. The really expensive ones are the people who are managing people or the people who are executives. The cost of hiring the wrong person there could be literally millions, if not tens of millions of dollars of enterprise value. And depending on the company, even more than that. The cost of frustrating your team, the cost of upsetting a customer, the cost of lost quarters, the cost of the wrong technical decisions, all of that is so expensive. So how do we get better? What am I seeing across the board? There's three. parts of this. The first is we have to get better at prep and taking notes. We have to get better at asking the right questions. And then this really good 10 step framework. So I'm not gonna spend as much time on the prep and taking notes and the right questions. I will on the questions a little bit as I go through it, but this is really about that framework. So first of all, from a prep perspective, what's important is that upfront, You and your team and whoever is going to be involved in the interview process is aligned on the successes. Like what does success mean for this role? What are the must haves in a person that we're going to hire? Who is going to do what in the interview process? Who's going to ask which questions? Who's going to dig into the different areas? This is super critical and it's surprising how many people don't do this, frankly, I didn't do this for a very long time. We go in, we're saying, hey, we're hiring a support person. Everyone goes into the interviews, asks essentially the same questions, thinks that we need people at different levels, comes back and says, ⁓ you love that person? I didn't like that person. Well, because, and I said, ⁓ because we're looking for a junior person. They said, I thought we looking for a senior person. This person said, I said, ⁓ they seemed great, but I didn't get into their technical skills. The other person said, me neither, because I thought that the other person was gonna get in their technical skills. So aligning on the role, having an actual role kickoff specifically, getting together as a group and saying, this is the role, this is the job description, this is what success is gonna look like, this is what the person must have, and this is who everyone is going to be responsible, what everyone's gonna be responsible for in the process. The second thing is really taking the time, even if it's two minutes, just two minutes. and skimming the person's resume, LinkedIn, the greenhouse notes from your HR team. It's about taking the time to do that because you can see stuff pretty quickly. I have found that in a two to three minute scrolling through LinkedIn, Google, whatever, you can get a lot of information on a candidate and that's gonna help you understand where in the conversation you wanna dig in. Next is about capturing really good notes. If I go into people's greenhouse environments, and I've done this, and I pull out notes from different searches, it is amazing how many times you see people just put a letter or an asterisk or something into a field so that they can complete the required field. Or people who are essentially taking verbatim notes or using granola or something and literally putting like verbatim notes in there of like what the person said verbatim, and it's really not useful. When you're taking notes, and this goes for yourself, you should be taking decision grade notes. Notes that you can refer back to in three months and know who that person was, remind you of what they said. Like that's the level of detail. And for me, the critical thing is focusing yourself on capturing evidence, not just vibes. And the reason that's important is because if you think to yourself, need the details, it's also gonna force you to ask a different set of questions. So that's really important. Next, we're gonna go into this framework. And in here is where we're gonna talk about the specific questions, but I wanna kinda take us through this 10 step framework where you can use this to do the same interview every single time you talk to a candidate. And I think that is important is to have the consistency. so that you know you've taken every candidate through the same flow, you've gotten the same topics out of them, you've gotten, and so I believe having a repeatable framework is important. So here's the 10 steps. Step number one, I like to come out of the gates, asking the person, telling the person my background. So I like to come out of the gates and tell that person a little bit about myself and really break the ice. because a lot of times candidates will come into an interview and they're gonna be really nervous. And so I like to start and say, hey, great to meet you, thank you so much for coming in, thank you for joining me on the Zoom, whatever the case may be. Let me tell you a little bit about myself. Let's say I'm the founder of the company. I started the company X number of years ago, I did it because of this. This has been a really amazing journey. then I like to now start to transition to why this particular hire, Matters so much why this role matters so much so then I'll go into you know the role we're talking about is a really important role because for us You know as a support agent you're gonna be the face of the company and and you're gonna be the one that people really interact with the most and and our customer satisfaction score has been through the roof for the last five years and so you're gonna have to uphold that and this is this is a really important role doing that really starts to to set the right tone that this is gonna be a conversation. It's not just sitting there and drilling them with questions. It shows them that this is important. You're paying attention because this is a critical role. If you're someone that is not the CEO, I think it's important to tell people your journey even at that company. Hey, I actually joined like you as a support person six years ago and now I'm the director of support and it's been, wow, the growth at this type of company, it's really been great and I'm excited to have you here because the team's been growing and So it's about how do you start the conversation and set the tone the right way. Then I say, tell me your story. Five minutes, just give me your story. That's essentially where I leave it because I like to see what they are going to choose to emphasize in their story. Are they telling about their childhood? Are they telling about their career? Is it literally scripted? I have had people who when I say that, they just start reading basically their resume. Like how do they tell their story? How excited are they at different points of the story? Is most of the story them complaining about this one, they left this company because this CEO is stupid, they left this company because the head of sales was stupid and they left this, you know, how do they tell that story? Then I like to go deep with some why questions in the areas of the story that I think are interesting and relevant. So for example, the person says, ⁓ so, you know, I went to that company as a marketing person. ⁓ great. Why did you go to that company? It's kind of interesting, right? A lot of times people may start with something like, ⁓ well, it the only job I had. Okay, well that I could get. That's one answer. Or they could say, well, because I really love what that company does and I love what they stand for and I really wanted to go and work for a company like that. Really good answer for a lot of people that matters a lot. Great, now let me ask you the next question. Why is what that company does, why does that matter to you? Why do you care about that? And they start explaining that. Okay, great, so now, I don't know how to explain this except for you're getting away from the polished surface level answers and you're getting levels deeper to the real reasons, the real whys. And again, what we're trying to do here, we're not trying to trick people. Throughout this entire interview, it's not about tricking people. This is about getting the true answers versus what people have prepared for. ⁓ you went to that school. Why did you choose that school? Because it was close to home. Why did that matter? Because I wanted to be close to my family. Why did that matter? Well, because actually I've had a tough childhood and I actually take care of my siblings and they're at home. So, you I wanted to be close to home, you know, to be able to go and see them because they live with our grandmother. I've had that answer. You start to understand so much more about someone when you get to that third why. Then I like to go specifically to the most recent role or even previous rules, but I like to get deep on the things that I'm looking for from this candidate. So what I mean by that is that I wanna know I'm looking for a ⁓ head of engineering, but I don't need the technical chops because I have a great chief architect. What I need is the head of engineering that is a great manager, a great recruiter. a great leader, a great project manager. And so now I'm gonna ask not typical head of, just any head of engineering questions. I'm gonna focus on the things that really I'm having a problem with right now and I'm hiring this person to fix. So my questions are gonna be, so tell me about the last team, how big was that team? It was 20 people, great. How many of those people were on the team when you inherited it? 20. So you kept all 20 people? Well, actually I let go of some. Well, how many did you let go? How long did that take for you to do that? Why did you let go of them? What happened after you let go of them and you got the new people? How did you find those new people? What was the, you start to go into that deep, deep, you have someone who was running marketing. Okay, cool. So I need growth marketing right now. I don't care about brand marketing. That's just not for my business. It doesn't matter. So now I'm going into the growth marketing. Tell me what tools you use. ⁓ you use clay? How did you use it? What were the campaigns you did? What was the messaging? What was the results of those campaigns? How much pipeline did you generate when you did that campaign? How much did you do here? How did you work with the sales team to ensure that they were driving the right behavior, that they were doing the right thing to drive the people to your campaigns? It's the things that you get into about the job and the details matter. I think if I were to say a red flag, at least a yellow flag, I would say red, where when you're interviewing someone for a role and they can't get into the details, the weeds, that's worrisome. Actually for me, it's worrisome even for an executive at a bigger company, truthfully. Because especially in the world we live in today, people have to be aware of what's happening. What was quota, I'm a sales leader, what was the quota for my team? how many people hit quota, what was the average percent of quota attainment? If they don't know those things, that's a problem. Next, I like to test their strategic thinking. This is one that is easier to do as a CEO. So if you're not a CEO, you may not do this. But I like to say to the person, if you were the CEO of that last company, what would you have changed? I believe that people, great people, on the front lines, many times have the answers. I believe that. They know what needs to change. And when you ask someone this question, you're seeing, do they have something right off the top of their head? Maybe something they talked about with their colleagues every day at lunch for the last six months until they quit. Maybe something that they've been thinking about. They wrote out a long document and actually shared it with the CEO. This happened to me in one of the interviews. They said, actually, great question. I wrote up something, said it to the CEO, this is what I told them we needed. So you start to see, they thinking that way? Do they care enough about the company to be contemplating the company and what the company could be doing to be more successful? So I like to do that. Step six, maybe my favorite part of the interview, asking what is it that energizes them? And the way I ask this question is tell me about the project you've done in your life work not work doesn't matter tell me the project that you're the proudest of that you enjoyed working on the most and you can see people's eyes light up in when you ask them this and then they start giving you examples and they start talking to you about things that they really care about and and this is where the interview version of them many times, especially if you lean in and you ask questions and you are engaged, you will see that the interview version of the person goes away. ⁓ my God, I worked on this amazing event that was a charity event for someone on my team who passed away and every year we held this charity event and raised money for this foundation and. It was 400 people and it was a golf tournament. It very complicated and a real answer and just going on and on. And you can see that what excites them and what you're looking for is, is there something in the role, not the entire role, but is there something in the role that maps to what energizes them? You're trying to understand, am I going to give them something in their work? that's gonna get them this excited. Because if not, probably not a good fit. Again, there's a lot of work that we all do every day, even CEOs, maybe mostly CEOs, that they don't even, that's not their passion. But you need to have something or something close to that to keep people excited and energized. Next, I like to talk about reframing their strengths and weaknesses. So if you ask somebody, What's your greatest weakness? Which I do think is important to find out. I think we all know. People answer with the question of the answer is, I work too hard. I try too hard. I take on too much on myself. That's the answer. We're trying to get to the next level. The real answer. So there's a couple different techniques to do that. Early on, I used to say, what's your biggest weakness? Someone would answer. And then my immediate response was, what's your second biggest weakness? that always caught people off guard. It was quite awkward, but they would tell me the true answer. They would, it would take them time. They would usually go silent for a while, but then they would tell me the true answer. The other way of doing it is saying, hey, before when we talked, you mentioned that you reported to this manager. And by the way, I explicitly asked this in a previous step. You were reporting to your manager and you said that you worked with her for a very long time. you're gonna come on board, at some point I'm gonna have to talk to that manager, what is that manager gonna say was the thing you needed to work on the most? And you see people thinking about their last review, they start thinking about should I actually say what they really said, so you can see that they're getting to the real answers. it's surprising how much that small change in how you ask the question. makes a difference. Another person, I was doing a session like this and they shared a question that they ask which is, hey, I hate surprises. I really, I can't stand, especially when I hire new people, but just generally in my life I hate surprises. What am I going to be surprised about three months after you join the company? Tell me that today so I'm not surprised. And he said he gets crazy answers to that question. It's just a reframing of the question to cut through the canned answers. Then I like to test career alignment and ambition. So I say to someone, tell me where you wanna be, three, five, 10 years, I don't even care about the timeline. I'll say exactly that. Like don't care about the time, just tell me where you're trying to navigate to in your career. And you, some people say, I don't know. But many people will say, I've thought a lot about it, I've been in a bunch of different roles at different companies, and I don't know, I think I wanna be maybe a founder one day and start a company. Okay, great, great. Do you have any ideas? ⁓ I asked, well, I have a bunch of ideas, but nothing that I really am ready to go do. Okay, great. If I'm running a 5,000 person company and this person is going to be... a frontline individual contributor at a 5,000 person company, they're not probably getting the real experiences of going and being a founder next, if that's what they wanna do next. If I'm the CEO of a 50 person company and this person is gonna come in and be an individual contributor, but on a team of three people wear 900 hats and actually sit across the office from me and they can... they're gonna interact with me every day, well, now I know that person's going to be motivated, that person is going to be driven because they're actually getting these opportunities to get to where they want to get to in their career. Now that's a very specific example around a founder, but you can think about this for every function, It's a salesperson who's joining and does this person want to go and sell? ⁓ outside sales and be traveling the country and the world and selling huge contracts and but our ASP is $12,000 and it's inside sales and it's two calls and this is not really we're never gonna get to that place as a company so they might as well just go to a company that does that today and so understanding that and making sure there's alignment I think is important. Then this is my anti-sale of the the sale of the interview process. I like to tell people the hardest parts of the job. I like to tell them, I'll say something like, hey, I know you've talked to a bunch of people, the recruiter, this, this person on the team. Did anyone tell you how hard the role is? Because this is a unique company and the expectations we have are like this and it is a hard job. I've seen the people who have not done well here in this role. It's because of X, Y, and Z. In the beginning of my career, and what I see a lot of first time founders do is they oversell the company, the job, all of that. And for me, that will backfire. It will 100 % backfire, especially early stage. It's important, if the person you're interviewing has never been at an early stage company, it should not be sugarcoated, because that is not an easy job to take, and it's not an easy company, regardless of your company, it is a hard job. and there's a lot of change and there's a lot of different hats and there could be a lot of different managers that they have over time. And so it's about making sure you're surfacing those. Then lastly, as always, you end the interview and say, so what questions do you have for me? And in today's world, always this has been the case for me, but in today's world especially, if they ask generic questions that they just say, so why is this a great place to work? What do you think the biggest opportunity is here? When it's generic questions like that, at that point, I only have ever hired someone who's asked me those generic questions, ever. After this length of an interview and all the conversations, and if they really want the job and with the AI tools that exist to do deep research and this, if they don't have good specific questions about this role, about this company. For me, ⁓ that's a big red flag. And it's not just that, it's about when asking the question, do they really care about the answer or they're just asking because they feel like they need to ask a question. You can tell, by the way, with the most junior people I've interviewed, I just interviewed someone for a company, 21 years old, right out of college. The questions were amazing, were amazing. And I've interviewed people who are leaders where their questions are just as generic as those ones I talked about. So listening and understanding how are they asking the questions, what are they choosing to focus on, that's really important. So with that, here are the 10 steps of this interviewing framework at a glance. Start with giving your background first. Ask their story. Dig deeper with the whys. go deep on their most recent role, test strategic thinking, find what energizes them, reframe strengths and weaknesses, test career alignment and ambition, surface difficult realities about the role, and then pay attention to their questions. So I hope that this was helpful. I really urge you not to wing it in the next conversation. Make sure you prepare for the meetings with diligence. capture the detailed notes, go deep with the right questions using a repeatable framework. And next, hopefully you take something from all of this and you go and practice it. I just did one of these recently, a master class on hiring, and someone wrote me afterwards and said, Dave, thank you so much. I was able to find two red flags on a candidate because of going deeper with the whys, and I really appreciate that. Just that kind of feedback is amazing for me. So if you have any of that feedback, please send it along to me, David at notanotherceo.com. And otherwise we'll see you for the next episode of Not Another CEO podcast.