Josh Hadley 5:18
Yeah. You know, in my previous podcast episode, where I was talking about my five biggest mistakes that I’ve made along the way, I talked about hiring the wrong people at the wrong time. And one of the biggest mistakes I see a lot entrepreneurs make is that they just assume, hey, I’m really struggling with this area of my business, I just need to hire somebody that’s smarter than me, and they can just handle it. Well, the challenge with that, is that you have no experience in that realm. Right? You don’t know what the KPIs should be you, in your mind, you’re thinking, Oh, but I should just have more sales, right. But you’ve got to be able to clearly articulate what success looks like, from the onset. And also understand how, why is that one of the most pressing issues in your business right now? Why are you hiring them? So that’s the first step is, is actually defining the role. So what does this mean? It means you need to go through and assess in your business, where is your biggest bottleneck, and rather than just saying, Hey, I looked at all these other companies, and everybody has, let’s say, an operations manager, just because everybody else has an operations manager doesn’t mean that that needs to be your first hire, or just because a lot of people have a marketing manager, that doesn’t mean you need to go out and immediately hire a marketing manager, the best approach to take is more of a methodical approach. And what I encourage everybody to do, and especially if you’re in the e-commerce space, you’ve just cross seven figures, and you want to go to eight and beyond, you’ve got to get really good at determining what roles you need to hire for your business, so that you can then be able to replicate your own success and grow. So the way that you do this is that you identify what are all of the projects that you’re working on. I like the doing a time study. So you do a two week time study where you’re literally analyzing where you spend your time, every 15 minutes of the day, this is even personal time and your working time. And then at the end of those two weeks, take a step back and then look at the results, right? Where are you spending most of your time. And if you can identify, wow, I’m doing a lot of operational tasks, well, maybe you need to hire a project manager, or Wow, I’m doing a lot of marketing tasks, or I’m doing a lot of influence or partnerships, or whatever that might be, if you can identify that that is where you begin to say, Okay, it looks like this is where a lot of my time’s going, if I can then replicate somebody else to be doing what I’m doing at least 80%. Or better, look at how much time this is going to free up for myself. Now, all of these, let’s say it’s 30 hours a week that you’re working on this particular task or type of tasks, you now have 30 hours a week to go work on another aspect of your business. And then when you get to that point, I’m in another area of your business where you’re spending a lot of time there, you’ve got things somewhat dialed in decently well, then you hire that out, right? And so you do this methodical approach of like, hey, how do I, you know, stop being the bottleneck, understand the tasks, offload it to somebody else, continue working on revenue generating activities, and then keep offloading those and take it step by step. So many times, I think we look at venture capital firms, where immediately they get funding, and then they’re like, I need an HR staff, I need a marketing team, I need an operations team, I need it and the list goes on and on. And on. It’s like, if you’re, if you’re bootstrapping your business, you don’t have the luxury of just like, I just need everybody right now. And I also don’t think that that’s the best way to approach it in the first place. I think it’s very, very good to hire methodically, it’s a little bit slower, but you’re going to have much bigger, better success there. So to sum things up here, you’ve got to define the role. And you’ve got to define the role because you’ve actually done or you understand that role, and you’re knowledgeable about it. It’s really hard to hire somebody if you have no idea what that role entails, and how do you identify a really good person in that role? So identify that role, and then genuinely list out? What does success look like? And when I talked about what does success look like? You need to break it down into three chunks. What does success look like for the overall role itself? Okay, long term vision, like what is the perfect person doing in this role? Okay, then you break it down even further and you say, okay, in the next 90 days, what does success look like?
If I if this person starts day one, what did the first 90 days look like? So that at day 90, I can assess whether, yeah, this person is hitting all of these goals. And they’re succeeding, then you know, okay, we’ve got somebody headed in the right direction. And then finally, what does success look like? 180 days, right? So now you’ve got your six months into the job. If you can start mapping out what success looks like, you’re going to have much better success in general, in hiring the right people. And those team members are going to have a clearer understanding of exactly what they should be working on, what they should be striving towards, instead of trying to guess what’s inside your head. They know what milestones they’re looking to achieve. So that’s step number one. If you can’t do that, then I would not be creating any job listings. Anything else until you have completely solidified what that role looks like.
Chad Franzen 10:56
Difficult. What do you think’s? Yeah, how difficult is it to define the role? Like, can you give me an example of maybe the last role that you posted and hired for? And kind of what went into that, especially if it was a new role?
Josh Hadley 11:09
Yeah, that’s a great question. So let me tell you a story of how we just hired our VP of Operations. This role took us six months to fill. Okay, this was not an easy role. This is this is a big role for our business. And so we were very methodical in how we went through, we interviewed multiple candidates, we went through multiple rounds of posting this job and trying to get the best candidates to apply. So when it came down, one of the first things that I had to do was sit down and discuss with my wife Baca. And because she’s part of the leadership team, not that I just consult my wife on everything, but she’s part of our leadership team. And I sat down and said, what would it look like if we’re going to be paying this person a lot of money, which we are, if we’re paying them a lot of money to come in? What type of tasks should they be offloading off of my shoulders to begin with, that will free me up? And what will I then be able to do in the business, because if there’s not going to be an ROI with this person, it’s probably not worth the hire at this point. So we were able to clearly articulate for myself, I had to do a time study. That’s the first step I went through, I did the time study identified, it looks like I’m spending a lot of my time joining Team meetings, coordinating the one-on-one, facilitating one on one conversations with my team, attending project status updates, managing the day to day operations. And that, as I broke all of those tasks down, I said, Wow, that’s that’s taking up 80% of my work week, if I can offload that, that allows me to step more into my visionary seat that I need to be in. And it allows me to go create other partnerships. It allows me to go make strategic acquisitions for the business that I’m not able to do right now. So that’s how we justified okay, there’s going to be an ROI for this person. And here’s what the tasks are going to look like. And then basically, I was able to define what success looks like by saying, Hey, here’s all the tasks that I need to offload from my shoulders, and went step by step by step. And honestly, that was a, that was a process of a month in the making. It wasn’t that I sat down on my computer and just whipped out this document in one day and was like, oh, it’s perfect. I kept going back to it. Because this is such a big role for our business, I needed to make sure I kind of encapsulated everything I would need this person to take on and what they would be responsible for.
Chad Franzen 13:43
That kind of leads us into step two, then set KPIs and day to day activities and responsibilities.
Josh Hadley 13:48
Yep, exactly. So that, you know, as you’re setting up what success looks like, the next step in step number two is actually defining how you’re going to measure that success. Right? Don’t just say, well, you’re you’re running the business. Okay, what does that what does that mean, right, you’re making sure all the projects get completed, the setting KPIs forces you to create measurable activities or events in your business. So for me, I listed one of our KPIs that I listed for our new VP of operations is that 90% of all of our team member KPIs, because every single one of our team members have their own KPIs. 90% of all of those team member KPIs that are reporting to him need to be green, like we’re meeting those targets and above, right, so that’s very clear. Like, it’s not this, Hey, I need to make sure your team’s performing well, it’s it needs to be 90% of or above and we get to measure this. Specifically, every single week. I can get a report and say this week, we’re at 80%. All right, we got some room for improvement. This week. We’re at 95%. Okay, good. We’re headed in the right direction.
So KPIs are super important. They’ve got to be measurable events. Let’s think of another role in the business. So for us, let’s go with PPC management. All right. So advertising management, the same things that I have the KPIs that I have going on with our PPC management is number one, we’ve got to be hitting a certain. We call it tacos, total advertising cost of sale for the business. So when we spend money on Amazon, we need to make sure that we’re actually getting a healthy return on that. So the KPI for our businesses, it needs to be 15% or below. And if it’s not, then that that manager is responsible for reporting back to me, here’s my plan of action to get there, right. And there’s multiple KPIs that we have established. But that’s where it all begins. Because if you can’t establish a KPI, you don’t you have not been able to clearly articulate what success looks like, your in team member is not quite sure what success looks like either. And they’re just kind of like, I think I’m doing a good job optimizing your ads, it’s a little bit more efficient, but we’re just we’re just trying, right? And so it’s very clear for both parties to say, we’re meeting this and it’s working great, or no, it’s not. And you know, those KPIs then lead to your day to day activities. Right. So from those KPIs, you list out, like, what does it take on a day to day basis, in order for you to actually hit those KPIs? Right? Hey, if I’m going to hit 15%, tacos for our business, that means I need to optimize our campaigns on a daily basis, I need to make sure that I’m reducing wasted ad spend. I’m negating keywords that aren’t working because there’s more than 30 clicks. Like you can see how detailed this becomes. But all of this stems from what does success look like big picture, that’s what we talked about in step number one. Now we’re in step number two, you’re listing out measurable KPIs, and then within that from that KPI it trickles down to like, alright, what are the levers? What are the tasks that people can be pulling and working on in order to, you know, influence that KPI?
Chad Franzen 17:15
So step three, then is listing the job on multiple sites? Are all these things that you have determined in that job posting? Or is that just handy to know when you fired the candidate?
Josh Hadley 17:25
Yeah, so this is listing it, like, so steps one and two, are walking through you kind of like creating a job description to mentally right. So step number three is you’ve created basically your job description at this point, you’ve, you’ve told people what success looks like, you’ve listed out the day to day responsibilities and activities and the KPIs if you do that in and of itself. And I’ve heard this numerous times from the people that we’ve hired, our job listings are so detailed, and they see the KPIs and candidates get excited, because they’re like, these people know what they’re doing. And I know what I can do to achieve those results. Like you’re gonna get a talent actually applying for your job listings, because of the way that you’ve written out your job post, right. So step number three is once you’ve kind of established that job listing, okay, then you go out and you get that thing, plastered everywhere you can right. Now, one of our areas of specialty has been being able to hire, you know, I call it management level staff, but overseas. And so we’re able to get really, really smart people, but that are working, you know, internationally and in different countries. We have somebody from Mexico on our team, we’ve got a lot of team members in the Philippines. So how do we find these people that have a lower cost of living, right, so the salaries aren’t as higher, but to them, it’s more than a livable wage. In fact, they appreciate they’re getting paid more than what they would if they just worked inside their own country, which I love. It’s a win-win relationship. So that’s where we’ve focused a lot of our hiring. So the job sites that we use to go find these contractors that are overseas, is we’ll go to Upwork, we’ll go to onlinejobs.ph. We will also post on Indeed, those are our three like easy ones. And I know that like within the US, there’s a lot of other like job listing sites, there’s monster and you know, the list goes on zip recruiter, the list goes on and on there, but specifically for independent contractors overseas, those are my three like go twos. Okay. And so you’re able to go list those jobs on those websites. And then it’s not enough to just list the jobs, you need to go invite people to apply. So on online jobs.ph We have a whole messaging system, where I have my executive assistant goes out and searches you know, there’s like filters that you can set to find different contractors you want to work with. So if we’re hiring somebody for PPC management, then I
I can say, hey, the keywords PPC Manager, let me see the list of people. And then my executive assistant messages, every single one of those people that show up, sometimes there are 1000s of people and invites them to apply to our job, we do the same thing on Upwork, right, filter the candidates message, every single one of them, invite them to apply to your job. Now, you’re not able to really do that on indeed as much. But when you do that, you are going to fill up your funnel of applicants, and it very easily will have more than 1000 applicants for any particular job by following this process. So that’s definitely something I’d recommend too many people just expect, well, I posted the job and only got like 10 people that applied. Yeah, that’s a mistake. Like you should probably be starting at 1000. So that you can whittle it down to one a player like genuinely speaking.
Chad Franzen 20:50
Wow. So you have you have 1000 applicants, and then your next step is have applicants take assessments to all 1000s take these assessments.
Josh Hadley 20:51
Yeah, yes. And that’s the way it’s like, how am I going to interview 1000 applicants, right. And that’s, I think, one of the most the biggest misconceptions that people think about in the in the process of hiring, they assume, like, oh, I don’t want to have 1000 applicants, because then I’m gonna have to review 1000 resumes, 1000 cover letters, I’m gonna have to sit on 1000 meetings with people. No, like, let’s let’s break that barrier down right now, because that’s a myth. Okay. So step number four in this process, is having the applicants take assessments. Now, the software that I use that does all of these assessments, because there’s a lot of other hiring tools and assessment sites that charge you like, per applicant that takes the assessment, that’s way expensive, I would not recommend anybody goes that route, especially if you have 1000 applicants. So the the website, I found the software is called Criteria Corp. And we’ll put that in the show notes. But it’s CriteriaCorp.com. Okay. And one of the assessments that we choose, it’s called like the C-A-T score. So basically, the gist of it is that it’s like an IQ score. Okay. In addition to that, we have like a simple like verbal and mathematical skills assessment that will assess people’s like, English speaking ability, as well as their mathematical ability, especially since we’re hiring people overseas. So immediately, we already have kind of like, here’s the criteria that people need to pass for this particular role. Right. So if I’m hiring, like a management level staff, or you know, C-suite level staff, I need to have somebody that’s got a really high IQ right? Now, I know it’s not perfect, but it’s a good predictor of success according to their their software and platform, the higher that score, what they’ve seen as it correlates to better success in any particular role, which I think is interesting. So anyways, we’ve found that to be true in our business as well. So what we’ve done is we established, hey, this needs to be at least 70 or higher, scores out of 100. So it needs to be 70 or higher for us to even consider you, right? And then your English score needs to be at least 95% or above, or else we’re not going to consider you either, right? So those are like the basic, that’s like just the minimum criteria, that honestly will whittle the candidates down from 1000 to 100, instantly. And so all you have to do is as soon as people apply, I’m not I don’t look at the resume, I don’t look at their cover letter, I don’t care what they send me, the very first thing they that gets sent to them. It’s like thanks for applying looks like you have an amazing, you know, job history and portfolio because my executive assistant is looking at them, and sends that message to them, and says, Hey, please take this assessment. That’s the next step in this process. So that’s they take the assessment, my executive assistant goes down, filters the candidates out, and now I’m left with a list of 100. Okay,
Chad Franzen 23:57
So you have you have 100, and they have passed the assessment. What is next for these for these applicants?
Josh Hadley 24:03
Yeah. So the next step in is step number five, is you have to give these 100 applicants, a test project. All right. Now, a lot of people again, I hear this both ways all the time. Oh, don’t don’t give people actual work to do unless it’s paid because that’s not fair to them. On the contrary, so I’ll give you an example a story here. When I was applying to work at American Airlines. Okay. I was a college student. And I was in my MBA program, and I was applying to be part of their MBA Leadership Development Program at American Airlines, which I got into, but one of the things that they asked me to do was they gave me a case study. They gave me a real world problem that was happening, and they sent it to me via Excel. And it was a timed assessment like a timed test project. They had
had me like schedule, the time, they said, Alright, show up at two o’clock, we’re gonna send this over to you via email at two o’clock. And then you’ve got an hour to complete it. Okay. And so I was on the clock and I remember like I, like went to like a study room in the school and I was like, I’m locked in like it was all prepped for this. And I did it. And, you know, could people consider like, I was doing free work for American Airlines, I was giving consulting work for them. Okay, sure, you could argue that, but in my opinion, like, that’s a smart decision for American Airlines, because I was then able to turn that around. And then the manager is able to be like, Yeah, okay, I like the train of thought that this guy has going, or wow, this guy is completely out in left field, like, this isn’t even worth, like, continuing in this conversation. More, one of the biggest predictors of success that we have found, as we have hired, we have 25 team members on our team now. So, again, we’ve done there, we’ve done this, we’ve been there done that, we have found that the test project that we give people, is one of the best predictors of success, how well they do on the test project, if they like just excel, and I’m just like blown out of the water, like, wow, this, this guy’s impressive that that is seen in their work performance here, as they work with us. Whereas sometimes if I’m like, Oh, it’s okay. And we end up hiring them, they end up being okay, and then maybe we have an exit conversation down the road. So it definitely has been one of the greatest predictors of, of success for any of the roles. So let me give you a concrete example of what we did with our most recent hire. This was our VP of Operations, like I mentioned. So it and you’ve got to get creative with these. I’ll share two examples with you. We hired a research and development specialist recently for the business. And we hired a VP of operations. So let me give you the context and story behind each of these. So number one with our VP of Operations, I need to see that this person has leadership capabilities, I need to see the way that they strategically think in the future and plan projects. Like this isn’t just an Excel file that I’m like, can you solve this equation? Like this is genuinely like, I’ve got to see like how strategic you are in your thinking process. All right. So what we did is step number one. So I gave them three parts to this test project. And I gave them a week to complete it, it wasn’t timed. I said, here are the three goals that we have for our business in the year 2023. Okay, one of them was like, We gotta launch 12 new products, we’ve got to do enhance brand content for 1300 listings. And the last one was that we want to partner with 10 different influencers. That’s our goal, I want you to break down, how does, how do we actually really achieve those goals in the year break down what things look like on a quarterly basis and on a monthly basis. And that’s it is, you know, I didn’t say I need to see this in Excel, I need to see a Gantt chart, I need to see it laid out in a project management tool. I didn’t say any of that. I let people just like, I put it out there and said, Show me what you’re going to show me. And obviously the results that I got almost instantly, like the it was very telling, from the moment I would open somebody’s test project be like, alright, we’re in a good wavelength here. I liked the way that you’ve structured things, you’ve communicated things properly to me, I can see that you could lead a team because you’ve communicated things well. So that was the first like test project we gave them. The next thing that we told them to do is we gave them kind of like a situation of hey, a team member hasn’t been meeting their KPIs, what, what is your conversation look like? Okay, now, I want to know, how do you interact with people, the people that said, first off was like, well, they’re gonna go on probation. And if this happens again, then we’re going to be left, then we’ll have to exit them from the company is like, wrong. That’s not That’s not the culture. One of our core values for our business is we prefer we corrected the process, not the person, we first always look internally to say, what broke down in our process? Did we not train them correctly? Is the process broken? They don’t have the tools, we first go through all of that. And then if it is a personnel problem, then yeah, we could approach that, but that’s the last resort. That’s not the first thing. So very quickly, I was able to, again, weed out people that that didn’t believe that same way, right? We’re not seeing eye to eye there. And then finally, I found a case study that was online. Okay. I just Googled like Harvard Business Review case studies about project management, operations management, and went through and just copied and pasted the, you know, case study and said, Hey, fill out this case study. Here’s the three questions I need you to answer. How would you solve this problem? And from there, you know, was able to see the results and
we gave them our process of how we assess new products, right? Like, we opened up our playbook and said, Hey, here’s our process. It was like a 15 minute like training video, if you’ll call it that. So we’re giving value to these people, like we’re saying, here’s how we do the keyword research process. Here’s how we identify the competitors, so on and so forth. From there, we then had them take steps one through five of that process that we recorded for them in that training video. So they knew what was going to be expected of them at the end. Now we needed to see, can you take what you learned from this training video that was showing you, here’s how we want you to do the keyword research process. Here’s how we do the competitor analysis. Here’s how we find new ideas from different market places and merge them all into one that spits out a recommendation. And we were able to see people you know, and we had different ways that we were scoring, it was like, how well did you do on step one, and we give them a score one out of five, right? One to five, how’d you do on step two, score one to five. And so we were able to, like at the end of the day have a measurable number. For each one of our candidates, those that got scores that were 20. And above, those were the people that we ended up interviewing, having conversations with and ultimately hiring, the people that were 20 and below is like, sorry, like, it’s too much work, like we gave you the training materials and you’re not grasping it from the onset. This probably isn’t going to work in the future, either. So I help what do you think, Chad? Are those practical examples?
Chad Franzen 32:27
Yeah, absolutely. Sounds very, very, very thorough. So you started in 1000, you get down to 100. And now you’ve you’ve given the applicants, a test project, how many? How many candidates are often left for interviews?
Josh Hadley 32:40
Yeah, great question. So from 100, now we’re into step number six here, okay. Step number six is you’re going to interview candidates. So from those 100, the number of applicants that will actually probably move forward with completing your test project is going to be anywhere between like 30% to 50%. Okay, so that’s kind of the expectations that you’re gonna get from 100 applicants, maybe 30, to 50 test project submissions, okay. From those, we see that we’re able to whittle it down to five to 10 candidates pretty easily from just the test projects. And I I’m very critical of those test projects, because I’ve only got a finite amount of time, I can’t interview all 20 or 30 or 50 candidates. So I have to be very, you know, I’ve got to draw the line in the sand, so to speak somewhere. So getting five to 10 is always my ideal, and I take the best ones, whoever scores the highest on the test project. That’s how they move forward in the process. So in the interview, in the interview, I’ll set up our long conversations with people. And one of the steps that we take is we go through their whole career, but I’m not asking them like, Hey, what did you do at this job? You know, tell me an area of you know, what’s your greatest weakness or, you know, your typical hiring questions, which are just bogus, what I’m trying to do is I’m looking, I’m going through their career, and I’m looking for patterns of success, and for them to have continuously been promoted, or rise to leadership positions, in anything that they’ve done. And we’ll go all the way back to like college and even high school years, right? Because you’re going to find a pattern of people that are successful, and that are a players, they naturally rise to become the team leaders, right? So even in college when you’re doing teamwork, guess what? Typically, it’s the A players that step up and end up being like Alright guys, like let’s, let’s figure this out. How are we going to do this? Right? So you’re going through every single one of their, you know, careers right and roles that they’ve had your tell me about this role? All right, how long were you there for? Tell me what was what did you like the most what you liked the least All right. Now, have you ever been promoted? Right? And now I’m getting very deep
So that is what I would say is how you you know, the process, the process to hire, and identify a players, bring them onto your team, and have them continual, continued to produce a team a level results for the business.
Chad Franzen 39:17
Wow. Sounds like, it sounds like an amazing process. And it’s, it’s really worked out for you.
Josh Hadley 39:22
It has we’ve built an amazing team. It’s come with a lot of trial and error. So I hope that the seven tips and seven steps that I walk through today is able to help other entrepreneurs in their process in their journey of of hiring new team members.
Chad Franzen 39:36
Absolutely. Well, hey, thanks for sharing those with us, Josh. It’s been great being here and great talking to you today.
Josh Hadley 39:41
Likewise, thanks again, Chad.
Chad Franzen 39:42
So long, everybody.
Outro 39:44
Thank you for listening. Visit eCommBreakthrough.com for more information. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, the best way you can show your appreciation is by clicking the subscribe button and quickly leaving a review. See you again next time.
