In this solo episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley shares his proven framework for hiring senior leadership in ecommerce. Drawing from personal experience, Josh outlines the costly pitfalls of bad hires and emphasizes the value of securing top 1% talent. He details a structured, three-part interview process focused on track record, culture alignment, and role competence, offering actionable tips for assessing candidates. Josh also discusses the legal and financial implications of hiring, underscoring the importance of systems and focus for business growth. The episode concludes with a call to share and review the podcast.

Hiring the wrong person can be a costly “hiring mistake” for any business, impacting your bottom line significantly. This video dives into effective “recruitment” strategies and a robust “hiring process” to help you avoid these pitfalls. Learn about crucial “interview questions” and how to “how to hire” the right talent to propel your e-commerce brand forward. 💥 #BusinessTips #EcommGrowth #HiringSmart #shorts

Timestamps:

00:00:00 The Pitfalls of Charismatic Hires
Josh warns against hiring based on charisma and first impressions, emphasizing the high cost of bad hires.

00:00:30 Introduction & Podcast Context
Josh introduces himself, his ecommerce background, and the purpose of the episode: hiring top 1% senior leadership.

00:01:59 Early Hiring Mistakes
Josh shares his initial lack of process, reliance on generic questions, and gut feelings when hiring.

00:04:10 The High Cost of a Bad Hire
Breakdown of the financial, operational, and legal costs associated with hiring the wrong person.

00:06:05 Legal and Tax Implications of Remote Hires
Explains state-specific legal and tax burdens when hiring remote W-2 employees.

00:08:07 The Power of Great Hires
Discusses the transformative impact of hiring the right senior leaders and the compounding effect on business growth.

00:09:07 Overview of the Senior Leadership Hiring Framework
Introduction to the three-lens framework: track record, culture alignment, and role competence.

00:10:03 Track Record of Performance Interview
Details the first interview: assessing lifelong patterns of achievement, leadership, and initiative.

00:11:06 Conducting the Track Record Interview
Step-by-step walkthrough of questions and techniques to uncover a candidate’s career trajectory and motivations.

00:13:30 Truth Serum Questions & Reference Checks
How to use reference-based questions to get honest answers and verify candidate claims.

00:17:07 Identifying Top 1% Patterns
What to look for in high school, college, and career history to spot elite performers.

00:23:50 Red Flags and Non-Redemption Policy
Why you shouldn’t hire candidates with inconsistent success or those seeking a “redemption” opportunity.

00:24:49 Culture Alignment Interview
Importance of culture fit, how to structure the interview, and why it’s non-negotiable for senior hires.

00:27:40 Core Values Deep Dive
Examples of core values (Extreme Ownership, Relentless Innovation, Integrity) and how to probe for real-life demonstrations.

00:29:42 Role Competence/Technical Interview
Evaluating if candidates can perform at a high level, think clearly, and bring deep expertise.

00:30:40 Metrics and Business Impact Questions
Key questions to assess if candidates understand how their role drives business results.

00:35:25 Case Studies and Test Projects
How to design and use practical assignments to verify real-world competence, and tips to prevent AI misuse.

00:39:10 Scoring and Rubrics for Test Projects
The importance of objective scoring, rubrics, and not advancing candidates who underperform in practical tests.

00:40:03 Summary of the Three-Stage Framework
Recap of the three interview stages and their combined power to identify and hire elite senior leaders.

00:42:07 Closing Thoughts and Call to Action
Josh encourages listeners to implement structured hiring, leave reviews, and share the episode with peers.

Links and Mentions:

Tools and Websites
“Indeed“: “00:05:01”
“Workable“: “00:05:01”
“ChatGPT“: “00:37:15”

Books
“Who by Jeff Smart and Randy Street“: “00:11:06”

Videos
“Seven Step Hiring Process Video“: “00:38:11”

Core Values
“Extreme Ownership”: “00:27:40”
“Relentless Innovation”: “00:28:40”
“Integrity Above All”: “00:29:42”

Interview Frameworks
“Career Track Record of Success Interview”: “00:40:03”

Podcast Platforms
“Spotify“: “00:42:07”
“Apple Podcasts“: “00:42:07”

Transcript:

Josh Hadley 00:00:00  And honestly, one of the biggest mistakes that you can make is hiring somebody that is very charismatic, that can talk really eloquently in an interview and come off as though they are really polished and well put together. But then when they actually have to do the work, that’s where they fall apart. And at that point it’s way too late. You’ve already incurred some massive expenses in the business once you’ve actually initiated those hires for your business. Welcome to the Econ Breakthrough Podcast, I’m Josh Hadley. I’ve scaled my own ecommerce brand from 0 to 8 figures, and I’m actively building towards nine figures in sales. This podcast is where I document that journey and share the systems, the strategies, and the lessons learned in real time so that you can learn what actually matters and scale your own business. Have you ever made a hire and then 30 days later, regret that decision and realized that you just made a bad hire? And would you like a framework that could increase your odds and success rate of hiring the right person and being confident that you have found top 1% talent? That’s what I’m going to be diving into today.

Josh Hadley 00:00:58  So today I’m going to be diving into the senior leadership, hiring and interview framework that I use in my own business to be able to assess whether I have a level talent, the top 1% talent, because this is honestly one of the best competitive advantages that you can have in your business, bar none. I don’t care what happens with AI, I don’t care what happens with the economy. I know that one thing will always exist throughout the entire lifetime of us as humans, and that is the arbitrage opportunity that comes from hiring the right person. The right person can have an outsized, massive ROI better than any stock return that you could possibly have, better than any new sales strategy that you’re going to implement. Hiring the right person can provide an infinite ROI for your business. And that’s why I’m so adamant about nailing this for my own business. So today, what I want to share with you is really what came over a period of time. First and foremost, my name is Josh Hadley. I am a man of faith.

Josh Hadley 00:01:59  I am a husband to a beautiful wife and a father of four. I have also been in the e-commerce game for over a decade, and I’m an eight figure brand owner selling multi millions on multiple channels TikTok shop, Shopify and Amazon. And I am also the host of the number one business strategy podcast for ecommerce, Ecom breakthrough. Today, I’m going to be diving into the problem that I ran into first and foremost. When I began hiring for the first time, I started just jumping on zoom calls with people and kind of having like no clear process as to the questions I’m going to ask people as to how I’m evaluating candidates. I just started jumping on calls to just like, talk to people because I didn’t really know what the right framework was. I would ask generic questions. I would ask, what’s your biggest weakness? What’s your greatest strength? Because those were the type of interview questions that you would find on Google or AI recommending, just like generic questions. But that still wasn’t helping. If I didn’t love somebody’s personality in that first call that I was interviewing them for, like I was automatically writing them off, whereas just because they don’t have like a very, like a bubbly personality that I connect with on the first call doesn’t mean they’re not going to be an extremely intelligent operator.

Josh Hadley 00:03:12  They can make some massive moves in your business. And lastly, I had no clear way to actually evaluate the candidates and how to compare them one to another, because ultimately I was just going off of vibes and my gut feeling and oh, I just like this person. I could talk forever with this guy. That’s not the way to hire. And honestly, one of the biggest mistakes that you can make is hiring somebody that is very charismatic. They can talk really eloquently in an interview and come off as though they are really polished and well put together, but then when they actually have to do the work, that’s where they fall apart. And at that point it’s way too late. You’ve already incurred some massive expenses in the business once you’ve actually initiated those hires for your business. And so that’s why it’s so important to have not just a single interview process that you’re going to have people go through. You’re going to have three different ways and a framework that I’m going to be sharing with you today to actually identify, hey, it’s not just off of good vibes or I connect well with this person’s personality.

Josh Hadley 00:04:10  It’s more about, hey, I want to make sure that they fit the culture of the business. I want to make sure they have a track record of success, and I want to make sure they can actually do the job. They have the technical skills and abilities to do that. But let’s talk about why this is such a big problem. The cost of getting a high or wrong is massive. We’re not even going to talk about opportunity cost in this, but just the actual true cost to your business. Okay, the estimation of a bad hire is starting at $17,000, and it goes as goes as high as over $240,000. And this is according to a Business News Daily. But to help calculate those potential costs, like here are some of the things that you need to be considering. Number one, the hiring cost. This is like that tracking platform. Or if you are running indeed sponsored ads, or if you were, you know, hiring on workable and you had to pay for that job listing.

Josh Hadley 00:05:02  Like those are all significant like sunk costs at that point. Okay. You also have training costs. So you’re probably taking either your time, which honestly is the most expensive time in the business, or you’re taking your team’s time to go and train this person. You also have interim job replacement coverage. So who needs to cover that person’s job if that’s not the right hire and you need to exit them, great. You’re starting over from square one. Now that person again, you’re stealing another team members. Time to go cover for somebody else. Which means something else in the business is going to drop. Right? So that the costs just continue to compound. You also have those turnover costs. So great. Now you got to go light up that LinkedIn sponsored ad again. You got to light it up on indeed all over again. And just like prime the engine and again spend that same amount over and over again okay. And then you also have like the potential loss of property reputation Incurred liability. Like, here’s one of the worst things that you could do, right? If you’re a remote organization and you go find somebody, let’s say they live in the state of, wow, let’s call it Washington.

Josh Hadley 00:06:05  And if they’re in the state of Washington and you hire them and then you hire them as a W2 salaried employee, guess what you’re going to do? If the if Washington’s not the state that you actually are from or where you’re headquartered, you’re going to have to go register with that state that you’re doing business there. You have to then go register for unemployment and all of those things in that state. And now guess what? That’s also going to impact you best be collecting sales tax in that state. You best be paying income tax in that state. Because now that you’ve just raised your hand, you have now informed everybody, hey, by the way, I’m I’m here doing business in your state. Let’s say that team member does not work out. And 30 days later they’re gone. Well guess what? All of those reporting requirements, the unemployment, continuing to file sales tax and income tax and keep your business registered in that state. Never goes away ever, until you actually literally like, close down your business as a whole.

Josh Hadley 00:07:01  None of those, like, obligations go away. That is a massive, massive expense. And so number one, if you’re going to hire somebody W-2, you best darn sure be that they are 100% the right candidate for this job, and they are going to honestly be a miracle worker in your business. If you’re going to hire somebody as a W-2 in another state, that is not your own. So there’s just some advice. And why do I know those things? Because I’ve made those mistakes. And and so I’m, I’m talking from actual real lived experience. So we talked about the cost of of a bad hire. But let’s talk about like the power of getting it right is massive. So yes, hiring mistakes at leadership level are among like the most expensive decisions an organization can make. However, when you get this right, the leadership team becomes a force multiplier for growth. Raising the standards, driving performance and compounding your culture. So just as important as it is to be cautious about hiring a senior leader in your business and really going after somebody that has a top 1% talent, okay.

Josh Hadley 00:08:07  Being wary of choosing the wrong person, but also understanding the massive upside that sits there. Like I said earlier, I believe that hiring and developing that skill set to spot, identify and develop 1% talent is one of the best competitive advantages that you can have in any business. Bar none. And it’s going to last for all time and eternity. That is why this is so important, and that’s why any CEO should be focused on this. Number one thing of always trying to find and recruit the number one talent out that is out there. So let’s dive further into this. So what is our kind of like framework look like as we as we vet candidates? Now again I’ll also segue this to say I’ve got an hour and a half long YouTube video and podcast that is about my entire seven step hiring process. This is a process that I use to hire people all the way from Vas, all the way to, let’s call it like mid-level management in your business. But what I’m going to share with you here is like, this is how we kick it up a notch.

Josh Hadley 00:09:07  So take all of those seven steps that I show you in that other video, hour and a half long video of how to find A-plus talent in your organization. Okay, take that and then layer this. Everything that I’m showing you here, this these interview frameworks. This is how we’re vetting senior level talent in the business, which is going to be director level and above okay. So our hiring philosophy, it really comes down to like three different lenses that we’re looking at. And every candidate is a is evaluated across all of these. And they kind of get like a combined score. And together it’s important that you don’t just silo this off and make a decision after like a one successful interview. But it’s together that we are ensuring that we’re hiring only the top 1% of available talent. So what are these, like three hiring philosophies and interviews that we have people go through? Number one, we have a track record of performance. I want to see patterns of achievement, leadership initiative across a lifetime, not just isolated events or moments in their career.

Josh Hadley 00:10:03  Interview number two I want to verify culture alignment. So I want to see that like just the natural embodiment of our core values displayed and demonstrated through actual real experiences that they’ve had in their life, whether it be personal or whether it be in their career. And then third and final interview. This is where I like determine like a role competence. So do they have clear thinking, strong frameworks and deep expertise that prove that they can actually perform and drive growth in whatever role that I am hiring them for? Let’s dive deep into each of these three hiring frameworks, and why each of them are so important. And the actual tactic tactics of how to conduct these interviews. Interview number one the track record interview. So elite performers need to be able to demonstrate a lifelong pattern of achievement, leadership, and initiative in this interview. This interview walks through the candidate’s entire life timeline all the way back to high school, college, early career, and their most recent career. And I’m going to go deep on each of these, and I’ll walk you through kind of the pattern that I go through.

Josh Hadley 00:11:06  So this kind of came about from the book Who by Jeff Smart, Randy Street, really good book. And I think, like if you read that book, you can glean a lot of these kind of like similar mindset and ideas from this. But ultimately, what you’re trying to do is uncover a track record of success throughout their entire career, all the way back to high school. So what does that look like when I join an interview and I’m going to first ask them, hey, number one, in the next 3 to 5 years, if you could have your dream job doing anything in the world you want to be doing, what would you be doing and why? And what’s your title? Okay. Because I want to know what is this person like kind of shooting for? And do they actually have a goal and vision and plan for their life? Because if they’re going to say that they are interviewing for my Director of Operations role, but they just responded to that question of like, hey, I actually would love to, you know, be an artist.

Josh Hadley 00:11:54  I think it would be really cool to open up my own kind of like, paint shop and sell my own artwork like that. That honestly would be my dream. I look at that and say, that’s a great dream. I don’t think that the jives with kind of like the person I’m really looking for. I’m looking for somebody over the next 3 to 5 years that wants to become a CEO of a business, and not just any business, but $100 million plus business. That’s the type of person that I’m looking for. So I’m going to start there. Then I’m going to work backwards and say, okay, well, number one, why are you looking for a switch right now or are you currently unemployed? Like what’s going on right now? Why are you either a looking for a job or be like obviously wanting to move from your current job? Like what? What’s the desire here? And then I’m going to go through every single one of their roles and I’m going to say, okay, great.

Josh Hadley 00:12:41  You are currently the well, let’s call it a general manager at a company and you’ve been there for the last five years. Tell me about that role. What were you hired to do? What are some of the accomplishments that you’ve completed there? What were some of the low points, the most difficult points during that job? Who are some of the people that you worked with, and why are you wanting to leave that job if they’re currently employed? I want to know that answer. And here’s what a bad answer looks like. You know, just me and my boss don’t really get along like I have these ideas. He’s just not. He doesn’t want to work at the pace I want to work at, or it doesn’t matter what it is. If any excuse comes down to like, I just don’t get along with like leadership. Not a great sign. Not a great sign. And guess what? You’re probably going to uncover a pattern here. And that’s what I’ll walk you through next. But here’s one of the key things that you’re going to do as you walk through that role.

Josh Hadley 00:13:30  And you say, okay, great, you’re the general manager, who are you actually reporting to? Okay. This is what I call my two truth serum questions that you are actually going to get some very juicy details about a candidate, and they’re not going to be able to really like BSU on. And in addition to that, there’s no AI that can answer this for them. What I love about this whole kind of like track record of success interview is people can’t really come with AI. They can’t even have ChatGPT up on their screen or whatever. It is like reading to them, because this is all about them and their own life story. Unless AI has genuinely lived their entire life and it knows all the intimate details, AI is literally worthless in this. And so that’s why it like completely rules out the AI component and you’re just left like, honestly, like the candidates just left with they themselves who they are in their own story. So going back to our two truth serum questions, this is where you’re going to get people to expose themselves okay.

Josh Hadley 00:14:29  Number one, ask for the names of their previous managers okay. In that you’re going to say, okay. As the general manager, who are you reporting to? Oh, I was actually reporting to the vice president of operations. Great. What was his name? John Smith. Great. The reason I ask is because I’m going to reach out to John Smith as a reference check, and when I reach out to John Smith, I’m going to ask him the following questions. I would love for you to tell me how John’s going to reply. Number one, on a scale of 1 to 10, how will John rate your job performance and why? Ten being the highest. Okay. Anybody that gives you a seven or lower. Not good. Not good. Okay. Somebody that’s a ten. They’re pretty darn confident. And ideally you want that manager to be able to corroborate that same story. Question number two is then hey, when I reach out to John, I’m going to ask him, what is one area of improvement for Canada X, Y and Z that you gave him and why? And then guess what they need to answer.

Josh Hadley 00:15:28  And they’re not just answering like, hey, what’s my greatest weakness? It’s what is John, your your current supervisor or former supervisor? What is he going to say is your weakness? What’s he going to say. So this is no longer like, hey, what do you think? Your own personal weakness is? It’s like. No. Like what feedback has John given you? And guess what? If people can’t answer that question, be like, I don’t know. He’s never really giving me direct feedback. That’s not a good sign either, because nobody’s perfect 100%. Nobody’s perfect. Everybody that I have ever gotten references from the manager always has, has some type of feedback or area of weakness for that candidate. So that’s the two true serum questions. And guess what? They can’t really be sue because it’s that threat of reference check. And now they’re like crap. Well if he does reach out to John John’s actually going to give me a five. So maybe I’ll give myself a six. Right.

Josh Hadley 00:16:17  Like that’s the importance of this. It’s not just like figurative hypotheticals like how do you think you performed on the job? It’s like, no, literally tell me what your boss is going to tell me. And if I catch you lying like this is an easy out for me. Like, I don’t even need to consider you. And guess what we do? We go through these same questions and we over and over and over again, all the way back to high school. Okay. So somebody that’s been in there in the workforce for a long while probably has multiple different like career moves. And you do want to go through that. Ideally this is like a 60 to 90 minute interview. If this is for senior level talent like you should be investing that time. And arguably the more senior that talent is, the longer that interview should be because they should have a longer career track record for you. But here’s the key as to why you want to go all the way back to, like, their high school.

Josh Hadley 00:17:07  Because here’s the pattern that you will find time and time again for the top 1%. Okay. And again, I’m just I’m really emphasizing the top 1%. These are A-plus team members. The top 1% does the following. They at an early age, guess what? They were they were leaders in the debate club, or they were leaders of the school newspaper, or they were the leader of their basketball team. It doesn’t matter what it is. I don’t care what it was, but they were the student student body vice president. They were something. They didn’t just go to school and go through the motions. Anybody that is like the top 1%. They were all doing extracurriculars or doing something significant. Well, maybe it’s volunteer work, that’s fine. But like they were leading or guiding or very much so participating in something that was very meaningful. Okay then guess what? Same thing in college. Did you just go through the motions in college just to get your degree? More often than not, you will find the 1% that you know was in the honors program and then was, you know, leading this class or leading that class.

Josh Hadley 00:18:11  Like, it doesn’t matter what it is. I just want to see a pattern of like, if they just say like, oh, yeah, I just kind of went to school. If that’s it and you’re like, can you tell me more? Did you participate in any extracurricular activities, any honors programs, anything? Just just regular school. Okay. That’s fine. That’s good. Kudos to you on getting that far and getting it done. But like you’re not 1% talent because that 1% talent you’re going to find they were leaders at a young age. And then guess what? When they got their first job, they quickly were realized as like a a leader in that new job. And so they rose up the ranks. They were promoted in that job, and then eventually they got hired at another firm because their manager left and their manager loved working with them, and so their manager poached them. So oftentimes what you’re going to see for like the top 1% is they get pulled into opportunities rather than pushed.

Josh Hadley 00:19:05  So what does that mean. It means they don’t have a track record of like hey, yeah, I actually, you know, got laid off just a month ago or yeah, it was my first job and the company downsized and they let go of me. I’m sorry, but if a company is downsizing and they let go of you, there’s a reason as to why they’re letting go of somebody. It is extremely rare that a company is going to lay off somebody that is their top 1% talent, bar none. Is there exceptions to the rule? Sure. There’s always like that 1%. They’re like, oh yeah. Actually, they were the 1% and the company made a big mistake. They shouldn’t have let go of them. However, that’s the 1%. And honestly, like don’t bank on the 1%. Okay. So you are going to follow through. You are going to ask those references, those questions. You’re going to get the email addresses of their managers. They’re whoever they were reporting to get their email addresses.

Josh Hadley 00:19:59  Send this off. If this is a senior senior senior level higher like VP and above, like you’re going to want to make sure that you’re getting on the phone calls with these references to really try to like, uncover, like what it was really like working with them. But if it’s not, if it’s outside of that, like it’s okay to get just an email back. I’ve found those to be very sufficient. And you can see in these examples that I’m sharing with you, if you’re listening to the audio version, come check us out on YouTube because I’m sharing full slides. And like every single one of these things you could be implementing in your own business and like the exact copy that I use, but you want to get references that you want to get really good glowing references, just like you can see here, where a hiring manager or their direct manager absolutely loved working with them. This is what good looks like. This is what the top 1% looks like. Okay, you want to get positive responses.

Josh Hadley 00:20:49  So this is what we are looking for and listening for in stage number one in uncovering that pattern or track record of success in their career. So key signals by life. Stage number one in high school they were the team captain, the debate leader or they were. They won academic competitions. They did entrepreneurial projects. Great in college. They were leaders of extracurricular programs. They were involved in, you know, competitive environments where, again, maybe it’s the debate team, whatever it is. Okay. And they had early career initiative, right? Maybe they did a bunch of internships throughout college. It doesn’t matter what it is, but they went above and beyond okay. And then in their career, what you’re looking for is do they get promoted Consistently and instead of being pushed out the door, they are being pulled into new opportunities. So they either get poached because, hey, why did you move from this job to this job then? Oh well, actually, a recruiter reached out to me and the company that I interviewed with, like, I just loved their culture and they made me an offer that I could not refuse.

Josh Hadley 00:21:55  That’s a great sign. They’re being pulled to a new opportunity. Or again, their manager leaves, joins another business, and then that’s a really good sign of that. Manager reaches back out to somebody they previously worked with to bring them over to their new organization. Massive, massive signal of like, hey, this person’s a baller. They’re probably doing some really, really good stuff. Otherwise that that manager never would have reached back out to somebody that they worked with. Okay. The pattern that we required, they pursue excellence consistently over time. It’s not just like one moment where they had one big career move and it was like, oh yeah, I led this $100 million brand X, Y and Z. And it’s like, well, maybe you actually weren’t the person that actually led that. Maybe it was just like the economic environment. You had some tailwinds. Like anybody that was selling like home gym equipment during Covid, that was just like, hey, they launched their business in 2020, January of 2020.

Josh Hadley 00:22:47  And then they saw massive growth to eight figures just in 12 months. Like, I’m sorry, it probably wasn’t you being that good of a business leader. It was you had some massive economic tailwinds that you honestly didn’t even predict. That just occurred. And you kind of rode those coattails. However, what you will see for like those that are really, really good operators, it doesn’t matter what opportunity they’re in. Almost everything they do touches to gold, okay, whatever they touch turns to gold okay. And so that that is what you’re looking for. It’s not just like, hey, they had one good roll out of the five where they actually made some significant impact. It’s all five rolls that they were in. They shared some pretty cool stuff that they worked on and drove significant impact there. Okay. They compete to win. They take initiative without being asked. They earn leadership roles repeatedly and they produce results across multiple roles and different careers that they’ve had. Last but not least, here is probably one of the most important principles that I want to share with you when it comes to uncovering a track record of success with somebody, you are not going to be offering redemption opportunities.

Josh Hadley 00:23:50  Okay. There are millions of talented people in this world, okay, that exist in the workforce. Your responsibility is to hire and find those people that have a consistent history of repeated success and performance, period. So if anybody tells you, yeah, I got laid off like you, you could like, chalk it like it ends right there. Because if somebody’s got laid off, they’re not the top 1%. And I know that may like may come off as sound like, wow, that’s that’s very extreme and ruthless. But like there’s millions of people out there and there’s millions of people that have never been laid off. And so what would you rather do? Do you want to try to uncover that 1% person that mistakenly was a plus level talent that mistakenly got let go. And then they’re out on the job market right now. Or do you want somebody that they’ve never been let go? And every single place that they’ve been, they’ve made a significant impact. So you don’t need to be somebody’s redemption story.

Josh Hadley 00:24:49  I know it’s good. It’s good to be kind hearted to people like that. But when it comes to hiring and when it comes to like protecting your business, you got to be relentless and ruthless as to who you let in the door, because the cost of doing this wrong is massive, and that’s what you’re trying to avoid for your business. Let’s move to interview two. This is the culture interview. Here’s what I want to say about the culture interview and why this is so important. To be honest with you, this is one of those interviews that I have actually neglected for the longest period of time in my own career as a CEO. However, this is one that after I’ve had that mindset shift as to why this is so important, this is one that I will never let go of for the rest of my life. This is so, so important. Why? Why is the cultural interview so important? Well, skills can be developed. You can teach people how to run meta ads. You can teach people how to, you know, run, analyze financial statements.

Josh Hadley 00:25:42  That’s fine. But culture alignment cannot be developed. Yes, people can kind of gravitate to that, but they either are part of your culture on day one or they’re not. It’s not something that like people assimilate to over five years, someone either naturally embodies the core values of your business or they don’t. This interview tests whether the candidate has already lived your core values in previous roles or their personal life, or whether they actually even understand them theoretically. So let’s talk about what this looks like. This is how the cultural interview works. And by the way, I want three different people conducting these interviews. So we’re walking through three different interview stages. There are three different people interviewing them okay. The first person that’s interviewing them for like the track record of success is different than the person that’s interviewing them for the culture alignment, and then the final person who’s interviewing them based on like, can they actually do the job? Is a separate person. The reason why you want that is like, you just don’t want you want unbiased opinions in here.

Josh Hadley 00:26:41  So the person that’s running this cultural interview, probably somebody on your HR team or maybe an executive assistant that like you agree with, like they they embody your own core values so that they can actually speak confidently to this. So here’s how this cultural interview works. They’re going to so whoever’s conducting the interview, they’re going to read your core value out loud to the team member or to the candidate. And you are going to tell them, hey, this is our core value. And here’s a short little description as to what this actually means in our business. Then they are going to ask the candidate to provide two examples, whether it be in their personal or ideally their career, where they have demonstrated that core value. And again, that you are looking you don’t want fluff in these answers. Last but not least, you then evaluate those behaviors, the examples they shared and assess their decision making, their accountability, their leadership. Okay, forced or vague examples are a clear signal of misalignment. It means they’re just starting to talk out their rear end.

Josh Hadley 00:27:40  We are looking for candidates who take responsibilities, solve problems, proactively elevate those around them, and genuinely align with our vision, our mission, and the core values of the business. That’s why this is so important. So let me share with you the core values that we have for our business. Core value number one, extreme ownership. So what does that mean? Here’s the description for our business. We own every task deadline and outcome. We take full responsibility for results solve problems instead of making excuses. And we never pass the buck. When challenges arise, we step up and drive solutions through to completion. Then I turn around and I’ll turn to the candidate and say, so give me two examples where you’ve demonstrated extreme ownership in some of your previous roles, and then you wait and you listen. And if somebody gives you some pretty vague surface level answers, the best response is tell me more and just wait. And it might lead to awkward silence, but it does not matter. You want deep, deep answers to this.

Josh Hadley 00:28:40  You do not want. Just like surface level vague answers, you want deep answers. Core value number two relentless innovation. We constantly look for smarter, faster, simpler ways to work. Initiative, experimentation and creativity fuel our growth. We never waste a failure. Every success and setback is fueled to get better, faster, and stronger every day. This type of innovation compounds over time. So with that being said, Canada X, Y, and Z. Give me two examples where you’ve demonstrated relentless innovation in your life. And last but not least, we’re going to dive into core value. Number three integrity. Above all, we are honest, transparent and trustworthy in every action. Integrity is non-negotiable. It’s the foundation of our culture. We tell the truth even when it’s hard. We admit mistakes quickly and we do what’s right even when no one is watching. Give me two examples of how you’ve demonstrated that in your life. And that’s a hard one, because people are going to have they’re probably going to have maybe some ugly stories of maybe when they weren’t or when they needed to confess, you know, something or something like that.

Josh Hadley 00:29:42  But this is honestly one of the most important core values. How many times have I heard entrepreneurs say, yeah, somebody was embezzling funds or they stole X, Y, and Z from the company? It’s like you really want to let that into your business. The best way to weed that out is like, get people who are truthful and transparent right from the get go. Let’s move into the third and final interview. Now, this is the technical interview. At this stage, we’re evaluating whether the candidate can actually perform the job at a high level. So great operators think and communicate clearly. They operate from strong frameworks, and they’re going to bring deep functional expertise to this role. And again, I’m going to double down on the fact that like we’re hiring for senior leaders like director level and above. And so my expectations are like these people understand how to make money. How to grow the business. They understand metrics that they should be tracking. So number one I want to ensure like metrics thinking okay, what are the most important metrics for the role and why? I want to make sure that they understand how their role impacts the business.

Josh Hadley 00:30:40  How does your role make the company money? And then last but not least, like I want this interview, typically this is going to be done by the direct hiring manager or even myself, because I want this to be a teaching moment, because if I’m hiring a director of something, they’re probably better than me and they’re smarter than me, and they best darn better be, because my whole theory is like, I need to hire people smarter than myself. But here’s what you want. Elite candidates don’t just answer your questions. They teach you something. And you’re like, I never thought about HR that way, or I never thought about finance or operations that way. That unlocked a new learning in my mind. That’s when, you know, you have somebody that you’re like, okay, this person actually knows what they’re talking about because you’re learning from it. So here are some of those questions that I ask. Can they actually drive real results. So here’s the question to ask as a director of whatever customer success, what metrics do you measure? You want them to be able to then give you specifics and not surface level examples.

Josh Hadley 00:31:41  Okay. You look for the quality and the quantity of the metrics. If they just say like, yeah, I mean, as the director of Customer Success, I’m just really looking at your like your customer NPS score okay. Is anything else? Is there any more to that? That’s always the best question is is there anything else anything more. This is going to weed out people who, like, weed out the people who cannot drive an outcome because they don’t even know how to define the outcome themselves. Like if they can’t specifically articulate, hey, these are the metrics that I drive towards. Like if it’s HR, it may be like days to hire. Hey, yeah, I’m going to track days to hire the cost to hire. I’m also going to attract or track like our success rate from interview or sorry like maybe applicant to interview. Like what’s our percentage of of that funnel. Like those are things that I’m not naturally thinking of myself and that show that clearly demonstrates somebody that knows exactly how to like, drive results for whatever role that it is.

Josh Hadley 00:32:43  The next question, as I try to uncover, can they actually drive? Real result is how does what you do make the business money, period. That’s a very simple statement. And here’s what you’re looking for. If they cannot describe an output of their job that ties directly to revenue or profit for the business, you can be certain that they don’t know how to do it, and they won’t do it for you because they can’t even tell you how it works. That is so, so important. So if somebody is in finance and you ask them this question, you may be thinking like, oh, well, they’re not really in charge of growing revenue, but guess what they are in charge of. They’re in charge of profit. So guess what I’m expecting from them? If they’re the director of finance, they better be saying, hey, the way that I make an impact on the business is on the profit side. I relentlessly comb through the PNL statements and find wasted spend. I find ways to spend through software that’s not being used.

Josh Hadley 00:33:34  I model out whether we have the right type of headcount for every single product that we have, or sales channel, to ensure that we have the right balance of headcount so that we’re not overstaffed or understaffed. And I ensure that you never run out of cash, because my biggest job is to take whatever working capital you have in the business, and I’m going to go find ways to help that money make even more money. So while we it’s going to sit in our bank account for 30 days, I’m actually going to move it strategically to these other three banking institutions during that so that we get some interest during that time. That’s going to add up to about $50,000 a year in just interest more than what you’re doing right now, because your money’s really not doing anything in your working capital account. Right? Like that’s the level of leader that you are looking for. And so if they can’t like in any role, it doesn’t even matter. It could be like an HR role. Again, is HR directly responsible for growth or revenue? Not specifically, but how do they do this? Well, they’re going to reduce the time to hire.

Josh Hadley 00:34:33  And so that means when you do have like a new sales job that you need to hire somebody for, maybe a new PPC specialist or whatever that’s going to actually drive revenue. It’s like I can get them in in two weeks for you. So rather than you waiting four weeks or five weeks, I help you make money faster because I have a really good robust hiring process. And then secondly, I have a really good robust hiring process that it’s going to reduce your cost of making a bad hire. So instead of you, you’ve I can see your churn right now. You you hired seven team members last year. You lost four of them. I can reduce your churn and maybe you lose one person out of seven moving forward. Because we have this dialed in that’s going to save you $75,000. Brilliant. That’s what you’re looking for in the 1% top tier talent. So great. We can do this interview on a one on one setting. However, there’s also a way that you can do this through a virtual case study.

Josh Hadley 00:35:25  So at times in lieu. And this all depends on like the seniority of this person. If you are looking for your next like true like CEO level person, you’re going to want to jump on and do this like in real time, probably in addition to a case study. So what is a case study or a test project look like? I’m going to give them actual true actual work that would need to be done by this person, because I want to know that they actually can perform this job. Now, if you’re hiring for a director level or above, guess what? You’re most likely going to need to pay somebody to do this. That’s okay. But like this becomes like a like an essential aspect of the job. Like I have to know that you can actually do this, okay? Especially like I’m not hiring a VA where I’m going to train, you know, quite the contrary. You’re coming in and you train me because you’re so senior and you have examples. So again, I’m just sharing with you an example of a test project in a case study here that we’ve done for this was for a creative director for the business.

Josh Hadley 00:36:22  But again, there’s like a loom video that we’re walking through the role for people so that they get to know what it is that they’re actually like up against and what the expectations are. And then we give them actual like tangible things to go work on. We’re giving them live files, live Excel files. We may dummy up the data. That’s fine. But like this is like legit stuff, like you’re actually working to solve these problems. I want to see how you think through this. And I want to see your response. And so again, how do you prevent AI from basically just doing this project for them? You require them to record a loom video that shares their video and their face at the exact same time so that you can see, hey, are you just reading off a script or did AI just produce this report for you and you’re just reading it? Or if somebody is actually like actually genuinely thought through it, they’re going to be very articulate. They’re going to have a reasoning behind all of the different decisions that they made.

Josh Hadley 00:37:15  But if somebody just did it with AI, they’re just going to regurgitate exactly what’s on that sheet of paper. And that’s about it. That’s how you sniff out AI in these case studies and test projects. So if you’re wondering, hey, what’s a good test project? Like give me some ideas. My secret hack for you here is use ChatGPT or your AI platform of choice to get ideas for a test project. So the prompt that I give is hey, I need to create a test project to assess the skills of applicants for a blank, blank, blank position, which then I’m also going to be uploading the role profile again, if that’s news to you, go back and watch my other hour and a half long video about my seven step hiring process to find a level talent, but you upload that role profile so that it provides context of like what it actually is that you’re looking for this person to fulfill in this role and then give can you give me ten different test project ideas where the applicant has to deliver a tangible project that will help me assess whether they are a good fit for this role and can actually do the job, period.

Josh Hadley 00:38:11  So some FAQs about this like test project, what’s the completion rate? Well, if you send this as like a free test project before you’ve ever interviewed anybody, if you put this at the front of your funnel, which again, if you go see my seven step funnel for hiring for junior roles or mid-level management roles, I’m going to actually move this case study portion up before I even waste my time interviewing somebody. Okay, so that’s number one. You’re completion rate at that point maybe 20 to 30%. Are they going to do it for free? Yeah. For junior mid-level management roles they’re going to do it for free. Who creates it. The immediate supervisors creating this test project, the person reviewing it and scoring it is also the immediate supervisor. But here’s some of like the secret tips. Like you have to do this. Don’t just like look at the case study and just be like, oh, that was good. Like, you actually have to create a scoring rubric out of five and give it a score of 1 to 5, five being the highest, and then have specific definitions to where my five that I’m going to give somebody is the exact same five, because we have it very specific as to like what a five means.

Josh Hadley 00:39:10  When my director of operations reviews that same case study. If he gives somebody a five. It’s because, like we’re using the same rubric and his five equates to my same five. It’s not that well, he’s his subjective five. And I gave that person a subjective three. Like that’s why like you need to rule out subjectivity. So have a scoring rubric. Ask the candidate to record a five minute loom video at a minimum five minutes. And then again, don’t fool yourself. If the candidate performs poorly on these case studies like do not move forward with them. You are not their redemption story. If they screwed it up in this, like in the interview process, this is where that you should be seeing the best version of a candidate right now. And so if they’re already making mistakes just in this first version, like sorry, like close the door, move on because they are not the top 1% talent. And if someone misses the deadline for submitting the test project there, obviously you can immediately disregard them.

Josh Hadley 00:40:03  To wrap it up that those are my three hiring frameworks that I use to go through the interview process when I’m looking to hire senior level talent in the business First, to sum it all up, I have a career track record of success interview. I want to go deep and I want to understand do they have a pattern of repeated success, promotions, leadership opportunities, and amazing performance in their roles and they’ve been pulled into their roles, not pushed out of their roles. Second interview is the culture fit. In this interview, I am assessing what my core values are and whether that person already aligns with those core values or not. And where have they previously demonstrated that they can emulate these core values in their life? And again, if they can’t articulate that back to you, they’re not the right fit. Last but not least, we have our competence or like really like can you actually do the role, can you drive performance for this role? That is our third and final interview. And so when you combine all of these things together, you’re not screening for just potential.

Josh Hadley 00:41:09  We’re selecting a proven repeatable, excellent individual who has a track record of success and already demonstrates that they can be elite and raise the bar to a whole other level for your team. And here’s the really cool part. When you get this right and you raise the bar and your team sees that you hire an very exceptional person. Guess what the rest of the team does? They also raise their game to that next level. So that’s why a level talent becomes so compounding to your growth as a business. Because everybody just gets better. Everybody on the team. And then it sets a new floor for you as a leader. Once you begin to identify what really good talent looks like. Look, the nice part is like as a leader, your ability to like, hone in and identify talent only improves over time, and it’s not until you actually run into it and see what really good talent looks like that you then are able to like, repeat that process. You’re like, actually, I know what it looks like to have a bad finance manager.

Josh Hadley 00:42:07  And I’ve also seen what a good finance manager looks like. I can spot that super quick moving forward. That’s the key aspect out of all of this. Remember, systems and focus scale your business while distraction kills your business. Don’t just show up willy nilly to interviews without any process, without any focus on what you’re trying to do and how to compare those candidates. If you enjoyed this podcast, I would love it. The biggest favor that you could do is to go leave me a review on your favorite podcast platform of choice. Could be Spotify, could be Apple, could be whatever it is. If you want to mind leaving me a review would go a long way. My next ask is if you could share this episode with another operator or business owner that needs to hear it. And last but not least, if you would be so kind if you got value out of today’s episode, if you would go share this episode in a mastermind group. Maybe it’s a WhatsApp group that you’re a part of, a slack community, or a bigger mastermind group that you guys meet in person.

Josh Hadley 00:43:04  Share this with them and help spread the good word. Hope you all have a great day! Hope you learned something new.