Sean shares some of the secrets for the interview process. This may be the only chance to sell your company to this prospect.  Make sure they know who you are and what your culture is.  There are some red flags to look for as well. This is an important part of the team building and staffing up of your company.

Check out this episode!

Interviewing People

I want to talk about the interviewing process because this is one area of my company that I take very serious, and I get very involved in all high level hires. And the way it works is I tell my partners, and we’ve kind of have ads that we know that work and attract halfway qualified people, but I tell them you do the first interview, but I’m involved in the final one that gets them hired. They do not have the authority to make a final hire and nobody ever fights me on that because my partners realize that collaboration always is better.

On lower level hires, I’ll delegate that completely to my staff but mid to higher level hires, I personally want to be involved in those because I want to share some components about our company that probably would not come out unless I was involved in the interview process.

Interviewing Process

Pre-Interview

Before we interview anybody, now that my partners know that I’m going to be involved in this, it forces them to do due diligence.

1. What need are we filling? I want to know the job. What’s the need here? I want to know if they’re qualified. I want to know their experience. Give me an under 30 seconds why you think this person would be a good fit. I went through experience. I want their skill.
2. I want to make sure there are no red flags. Do they have a DWI in our business that can be very expensive because we provide vehicles? I need a little bit of their background because one of our businesses we send our team into people’s homes. So it’s important that we kind of have some background information on them.
3. I want to know if have you assessed their talent, in that, where do you see this person fitting long-term? We do a strategic assessment and this is where we’re looking more long term, some growth initiatives that we have and we may be looking for somebody for that.

There needs to be a reason for the interview and there needs to be some due diligence. I don’t want to sit down with somebody who’s not qualified. I don’t want to sit down with somebody who has immediate red flags, so I know I’m not going to hire him based on those red flags. So I want to know why I want the person vetted a little bit and I want to know where they’re going to fit. Where do you see this person fitting? So before we have the interview these things need to be taken care of.

Interview

• I want to share my expectations of the company. I like to tell them about our company and why I think our company is a great company to work for and that I have high expectations for any higher. I share with them our mission statement. I share with them our company history; why I started it, where it is today, some critical decisions that we’ve made along the way that has made it a really good company to work for. So I share company accomplishments, all the awards we’ve won, because I’m hoping that I’m interviewing somebody really talented and I assume the talented people have other opportunities and this may be the only time I get to pitch them.

 

• So again, I shared the expectations. I share a company history, I share our company accomplishments. I share success stories of employees, like where they are now within our company. This is how they started. This is where they are two years down the road, five years down the road, 10 years down the road. I want to share success stories.

 

• I want to share our culture. We have a great culture, but we have very high end clients and a thing that would be normal on most companies, and would be acceptable in most companies is not acceptable for us. I mean, you’re not going to use foul language; most clients don’t want that in their house. So I share the culture that we already have. I share with them, it’s a team culture, literally in our company, if you have a problem, you can send a text and within one minute somebody from our staff, from our incredible talent pool will be able the answer your question and we’ll offer to come over to your job site and help you. Well that’s the culture and I want to share that with them, and I will share with them what our customers expect of us. So I go through all these things and we haven’t talked about money yet. I want them to want to work for us because I’m not just filling a need. You know what I’ve learned? It’s easy to hire, it’s actually far more uncomfortable to fire.

 

• In the interview I want to pick up on some red flags. So I lay a couple of little hooks out there to see. One is it’s called too broke. What does that mean? There are certain people that you’re going to interview that are too broke to hire. They need to get paid immediately. They couldn’t miss a day’s pay, they would go under. I’m not trying to criticize, but there is a situation where some people are just too broke because they’re always going to be trying to borrow money and broke people do stupid things like trying to work directly with a client.

 

• Also, their personal situation is a distraction. What do I mean by that? I look at how they got to the job interview and when I see that somebody drove them, well, I know there’s a problem there. There is a transportation issue. They’re just red flags, people will share their personal situations for whatever reason, you don’t have to ask much, but I don’t want people with a ton of personal distractions, they’re just red flags.

That’s what I do in an interview process. Again, I’m involved in every interview because that’s the training process for partners. I want my partners to be able hire without me and there will be a time when they won’t need me. Occasionally I’ll give them a complete sign off because I want to test them to see how good they are at assessing talent, doing the interview and doing the hiring. But 99% of the time I’m involved. Again, I want them to see the red flags I’m looking for. I want them to see the limitation. So when we get out of the interview, I’ll say to them, “Okay, tell me what you think?” And they’ll go, “He’s too broke, or just seemed like he didn’t have enough experience. I’m not sure if that person would fit in our culture.” I love when I hear that, they’re getting it. Or they’ll say, “You know, they may not fit right now, but I could see that person helping us out maybe in another city or down the road.”

Your goal is to always staff up and you can’t do that if you can’t interview and assess talent and make a great hire.