Josh started his career at American Airlines (AA) and spent 5 years in their MBA leadership development program. Josh’s experience at AA further refined his leadership abilities and strategic decision making skills. While employed at AA Josh and his wife Becca started Hadley Designs. As the CEO of Hadley Designs, Josh led the business to gross $100,000+ in revenue within it’s first year and in 2022 Hadley Designs crossed the eight figure mark, grossing over $10,000,000 in revenue.

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> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

In this podcast episode, the speaker, an experienced entrepreneur and host of the “Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast,” shares a detailed seven-step process for hiring management-level staff using AI tools. The speaker emphasizes the importance of conducting a time study to allocate hiring resources effectively, creating detailed role profiles and scorecards, and leveraging AI tools like ChatGPT for efficiency. They discuss innovative techniques such as group interviews and AI-driven resume screening to streamline the hiring process. By implementing rigorous vetting processes and thorough reference checks, the speaker provides actionable insights for scaling businesses to eight figures and beyond.

Here are 3 short, actionable takeaways from the podcast summary:

 

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Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started Hadley Designs in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then go to www.EcommBreakthrough.com (that’s Ecomm with two M’s) to learn more.

Josh Hadley 00:00:00  Today, I’m going to be walking through how we’re going to be leveraging AI to hire management level staff anywhere in the world. Okay. And I’m going to be showing you guys kind of the filters, everything that we’ve set up. There’s a lot to dissect in 20 minutes. So we’re going to be flying through all of this. But the good news is Jim and Mimi, those two things that you talked about AI and hiring leaders, like, that’s exactly what I’m talking about today. All right. So this is the easy way to use AI to find incredible management level contractors overseas. as Bryce mentioned. Who am I? So first and foremost, father of four, husband to a beautiful wife. We had a baby six months ago. Five months ago. His name is Harvey and Harper. She’s the one here. She’s a she’s my second and she’s six years old. So happy to have her with us. And then we started our brand on Amazon back in 2016. We’ve been an eight figure brand on Amazon for three years straight now and then.

Josh Hadley 00:00:49  I’m also the host of the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast, where I share strategies to scale from 7 to 8 figures and beyond in the e-commerce world. All right. So first up, I want to share a story. So all of us have heard the amazing opportunity to go higher $3 an hour. Filipinos that can revolutionize our business, right? Everybody’s talked about that. Okay, so this was me back in 2017 being like, oh, everybody’s hiring these Filipinos for $3 an hour and doing amazing things. At the time it was called oDesk. Okay. So I went on to oDesk and I looked up some Filipino contractors that could come work for me, had hundreds of applicants. I was like, oh, this is exciting, but this is my first time hiring somebody. So I was like, oh crap. Like, what do I do? Well, this is me sitting in my car because we’re in a tiny home. We have kids, and I and I scheduled all my interviews to be the Filipino daytime.

Josh Hadley 00:01:30  So it’s like 11:00 midnight for me, right? So I’m in my car being like, this is the only quiet place I can be to have these conversations. First thing, I get on to my first interview. Their Wi-Fi connection was terrible. I was like, I can’t even understand you. Like, that’s a bust. Next one comes on. I can barely even understand you. Like, you speak English, but not the English that I speak. Right? So I’m just like, this is not going well. So. And I had like probably ten interviews back to back to back and I like basically wasted the entire night from that experience. I said like, there’s got to be a better way. Like there’s smart people over in the Philippines. There’s smart people everywhere in the world. How do I find them? And that’s kind of where my seven step process was born. So I’m going to be running through all of this. And if you can twist Jim and Mimi’s arm, maybe I can extend a little bit further.

Josh Hadley 00:02:10  So we’re going to walk through each of these seven steps, but I’ll start here first. The time study. This is one of the most critical things that most entrepreneurs kind of like. You almost rush into hiring somebody just because you’re like, oh, sales are growing. We’re getting so busy. Like, we just need another warm body. We need another whatever it is, customer service or sales rep or whatever. Okay. And you rush into it. However, as the entrepreneur, as you’re scaling up, one of the most important things to do is to continue to buy back your time. You’ve probably heard the book Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell. Great book. If you’re scaling up your team, one of the most important things to do is buy back your own time and allow yourself to focus on more higher leverage opportunities in the business. So every six months I do this process where it’s like you go through your writing down in 15 minute increments, what you do over two weeks, okay.

Josh Hadley 00:02:49  It’s painful. It’s tedious. It’s not fun. I get it right. But when you do that, what you’ll realize is like, Holy smokes, most of my time is going to X, Y, and Z. I thought, like, if I were to ask you guys, where do you spend most of your time. 80% of you after doing this time study would answer that that question incorrectly. What you think you’re spending most of your time on is actually not what you’re doing, spending most of your time on. So when you do this every six months and you repeat it, you understand the constraint of the business is currently supply chain or IT sales and marketing or it’s finance. And then what you do is you focus on hiring that role that’s going to free up your time. Okay. All right. So here’s just a book that I recommend. Clockwork is a really good one that talks about kind of doing that time study. All right. Step number two. Now we’ve done our time study.

Josh Hadley 00:03:31  We know exactly what role we need to buy back our time with. We’re going to go into our role profile okay. And you’re like Josh there’s no AI yet. When is the AI coming? It’s coming. All right. So this is you need to define the role that you’re needing to hire by completing this magical role profile template. Again, most people fail at hiring the right person because guess what? You don’t have expectations other than, hey, I want you to go sell a bunch of people. And that’s that’s your entire expectation, right? And so what this forces you to do is, you know, you’ll list your company, vision, mission, core values. And don’t worry, those of you taking pictures and stuff, we’re going to be going so quick. I’ve got slides. You can scan the QR code at the end. You can have it all. Okay. Step number two creating a scorecard. This is the most important aspect of this entire role profile. Identifying the the KPIs, the key performance indicators.

Josh Hadley 00:04:11  How you’re going to hold these people accountable. How do you know whether this team member doesn’t matter what role they’re in finance, customer service, sales, operations it doesn’t matter. You’ve got to have KPIs. This becomes the scorecard. Okay. Who wants to go watch an NBA basketball game where they don’t keep score? It’s not very fun right? Who goes and watches the exhibition games before the preseason starts? Right. It’s like yeah, it’s not great because it doesn’t matter. So likewise, guess what happens in your business if you don’t have a scorecard? You don’t know if your team member is winning. And also they don’t know if they’re winning or losing. So it gets really hard to kind of encourage people and help them know whether they’re succeeding or not. So here’s where the eye starts to come in. All right. So secret tip right here is if you’re stumped and you’re like, I don’t know how am I going to actually measure. Like what are some KPIs? One of the most important things is like the KPIs can’t be subjective.

Josh Hadley 00:04:53  It can’t be like, hey, for supply chain, make it more efficient. Okay? Hey, I saved you a dollar on that shipment. Is that efficient? Sure. But how efficient is it? Right. It’s got to be specific and measurable. It’s got to be black and white. You either achieve this, yes or you did not know, right? It cannot be subjective. So best thing to use ChatGPT. I’ve got some prompts here okay. And then what I’m hoping to do is I get 20 different ideas from ChatGPT, and then I’ll go ahead and modify these and tweak them to make it make sense for my business. Okay. And then we’ll go through what does success look like. List. The 2 to 3 primary objectives is that 80 over 20 principle okay regular work activities etc. etc., etc. etc.. And then when you’re done, this is what kind of it looks like. So this is fairly comprehensive. Now this used to take me like to really sit down and think about like and try to set this roll up for success.

Josh Hadley 00:05:38  I’d be spending 10 to 20 hours at least making sure, like I had thought through, what is this role actually going to do and how do I set this person up for success? Okay, so here’s the role profile template okay. So this is the Google doc that you could kind of like fill in the blank if you’d like. So you can scan that first. But then I’ll make your lives ten times easier. All right. So this let’s talk about AI. So how about doing that? I just told you it took me like 10 to 20 hours to create that. What if I told you you could do all of that in one minute right there. So I created a custom GPT and basically load it in how I methodically walk through, setting up the role profile. So it spits out like consistent results over and over again. Now again, what it’s going to do is going to give you like 20 different KPIs for you to measure. Like that’s not don’t use 20 KPIs to measure your team member, but like take what’s there and add on to it.

Josh Hadley 00:06:24  Modify it. Right? All of us should know like ChatGPT great for ideas, but it’s not a copy and paste type of thing. All right. Okay, now that we’ve done that, now we’ve got this role profile. Now we’re actually ready to get started in hiring okay. And as you guys think about like when you post a job, I want you to look at this like which Amazon listing are you going to buy from the one on the right okay. So here’s my question to you. Which what type of job description or role is an a player going to kind of look for when they’re looking for a job, somebody that put a lot of time and attention to detail and like sells them on the vision and mission, or somebody was like, hey, we just need a customer service rep real quick. Hey, we’re a high. We’re we’re scaling really quickly. We just need some customer service reps. That’s all we need, right? Which one is a talent going to be attracted to the former.

Josh Hadley 00:07:12  Right. The one that has like spend the time and attention to detail. Because guess what. The A level players the ballers, they’re going to be attracted to that okay. So now that you’ve created this role profile, it allows you to easily create that job description anytime you need to moving forward. All right. So let’s talk about some of the secret tips. All right. So in that we’ll add like a secret a hidden task in there. So in the subject line within that massive description of a job right. It’s like I’ll sneak it in here. Hey, say I’m SEO material I love pizza. It doesn’t matter what it is. We’ll add a little hidden task. All right, so now that we’ve done that, let’s talk about posting the job, okay? These are going to be all the different places that we’ll post the job okay. We’ll also add LinkedIn LinkedIn onto that. But that kind of gets covered with workable which we’ll be talking about. And there will be some cool AI features.

Josh Hadley 00:07:56  Okay. So just as Cole talked about earlier, great presentation. One of the most important things is like you probably heard he briefly touched on this, but you’ve got to get a lot of applicants to sort to sort through and actually find somebody that’s like the top 1%, right. If you’re trying to find the 1%, that means you’ve got to at least have 100 applicants, right? But that’s not where we start. Like we start every role. We have to have over 1000 applicants for every job before I will consider looking at who actually came through that funnel. Okay, so the question is how do you now if you’re if you’re hiring local talent, it has to be within like a 20 mile radius. This kind of breaks. But I’m hiring at like a global scale. I can hire anywhere in the world. We’re 100% remote. Okay. And if that’s the case, like, you should easily have over a thousand applicants. Okay. If you’re not, I promise you, you’re not hiring a level talent.

Josh Hadley 00:08:42  And if you do, you stumbled upon it, so to speak. Okay. So how do we do this? Well, now you’re going to have to put on your sales hat. Okay. You have to actually go and, like, tell people about your job. This is not the build it and they will come mentality. Just because you posted the job. Your let’s call it 5% of the way there. Okay. Now what you’re going to need to do is you’re going to go to all of those platforms that I just talked about, and you’re going to set up these filters that I have screenshots of and stuff, and then you’re going to spam the living crap out of these people, okay. And that’s what my executive assistant will go out and do. So in this role we’re looking for a project manager. There’s 904 people on online jobs that have been active within the last week. And then we’re going to go through here. We’re going to message them. And then this is the message, hey, I found your profile.

Josh Hadley 00:09:22  Looks like you’ve got great experience. Come apply to our position okay. And then we just spam everywhere we can. Same thing on Upwork. We will go through here. One of the secret things to kind of like point out here on Upwork. are you guys familiar with Upwork? Yeah. Okay. Upwork. We’ve actually had pretty good success with it. We don’t pay anybody through Upwork. We hire everybody off of Upwork. But here’s the secret trick on Upwork. You don’t want to hire people that have a lot of like history on Upwork. All the A level talent that we found on Upwork just recently joined Upwork, and they have zero reviews. They’ve earned zero income on Upwork. So one of the things, like the key things that you want to look at is earned amount over there says any amount earned. And then job success, any job success. And you’re like, well, why don’t you want the people that are 90% and above? It’s like, I don’t want the people that just constantly churn, right? Which is basically what those guys are.

Josh Hadley 00:10:12  Okay. So what happens is like these are going to be you’re going to find people that are leaving their corporate jobs or they’re about to leave their corporate jobs and they’re like, I’ve heard of my friend having success on Upwork. So I posted my resume there. And if you can scoop them up, that has been our like on repeat. Like those are the best candidates that we have found. Okay. Then we’re going to spam. Like I said, we’re going to go through search for project manager. Use all those filters invite, invite, invite, invite, invite thousands of applicants. Okay, now here’s where we’ll turn it up. Even more so this is workable. AI recruiter okay, so this will do instant sourcing for you. So workable is kind of just like a it’s where we post our jobs. And then it will post it on to various other platforms. And then I’ll like wherever people apply it all brings it into one single location for you. Right? Okay. So in this one we are looking for a graphic design assistant for our expanding Amazon business.

Josh Hadley 00:10:55  Okay. In this you can see down here in the bottom it found over 3000 profiles. And specifically we were looking in the Philippines for this one over 3000 profiles. And guess what A lot of these people. Now this is a different. This I took a screenshot of when we were hiring our controller. but like, these aren’t VA’s that you’re finding. Okay. What it finds and it matches you, and it pairs you with these people. Like, look at this. This is for when we were hiring our accounting controller over in the Philippines, former assistant manager at Ernst and Young, finance and planning analyst. Manager, MBA. Like these guys are intelligent people, right? That’s that’s what I want to bring into my business. Okay. So then guess what? If you use workable AI recruiter, basically it’s like scraping LinkedIn. And then what you can do is like select all and then I’m going to spam all of those people. And that’s the message. Just like, hey, we came across your resume.

Josh Hadley 00:11:40  Would you be interested in this job? So again this goes out to 3000 people. Click of a button. Okay. All right. Now you’re probably like, Josh, I do not want to have 1000 interviews with people to find the 1%. And I agree with you because that sounds miserable. before we can move to step four, you have to have, like, experience a mindset shift in the way that you approach hiring. And this came as I actually had the author of the E-myth, Michael Gerber, on my podcast, and I asked him this question and I said, hey. Out of your years of experience and decades of experience, how have you been able to spot and identify a level talent? And he said this. He’s like, when it comes to hiring talent, do you have a vetting process that’s similar to the Navy Seals, where only the best survive? I was like, interesting. Tell me more. He was like, well, the Navy Seals have something that’s called Hell Week.

Josh Hadley 00:12:24  Okay. This is a process that they go through where on average, only 25% of Seal candidates make it through hell week. Okay, this test, everything. And this is just this is the beginning. This is, like, still like application process. Okay. So then I thought to myself, how do I create my own hell week for every applicant that comes into my business? Okay. We’re going to talk about that because guess what a level talent loves a challenge okay. And we’ve actually like it’s going to get pretty grueling here. But I’m going to share with you like why this works. And we get people like they actually enjoy the process when you when you go through it. All right. So step number four here. The nice part is it’s going to be your easy process okay. You’re going to use assessments to filter out candidates. So anybody that applies for the job if they say hey I’m SEO material I love pizza. We don’t. Nobody has looked at their resume. I don’t care what their history is, it doesn’t matter.

Josh Hadley 00:13:11  My executive assistant will auto respond to them. That is. Hey, you look great. Please complete this assessment. Right. It’s like a personality assessment and it has a little bit more to it okay. So it’s called Criteria Corp.. That’s kind of like the test bank that we use here. And it will measure there’s the criteria cognitive aptitude test personality test and the skills test. These are the three that they get. All right. If you read into this this is their criteria cognitive aptitude test according to their research. And I’m not an affiliate I wish I could be of their software. But it says cognitive aptitude as one of the most accurate job predictors of job success for any position. Okay. And that’s through their studies etc.. But basically this is like an IQ score if you’re like to really like boil it down, it’s like more of like an IQ score. So what do we do with this. So everybody that comes through is they begin completing these assessments of those thousands of applicants, you’re going to weed it down and you’re going to have 90% that will just drop out of that, that funnel immediately because they won’t pass these metrics okay.

Josh Hadley 00:14:03  So they got to be in the 65th percentile or higher. Personality profile matches the job that we’re looking for in basic English and math skills. Okay, I’m not an affiliate, but whenever I’ve presented this, like I presented at one of the e-commerce stages and they had a bunch of signups and they reached out, they’re like, oh, what did you do? And I was like, oh, I just talked about like how we’re using your software. They’re like, yeah, we got a ton of new, new people that join. And I was like, do you have an affiliate program? They’re like, no. And I was like, okay, well, can I get a discount? And they’re like, yeah, you get 10%. And anybody else that signs up gets 10%. So there you go. all right. Step number five, test project. again. So now they’ve taken this this assessment okay. Weeds 90% out. Now the next step is we’re going to have people complete a real like active project that they would be working on in the business.

Josh Hadley 00:14:45  So for a creative director that we hired. Okay. So when we are hiring a creative director, like they’re going to be responsible for creating A+ content, all the images and the way it looks and feels and the branding on Amazon. Okay. So what did we do? We said, here’s the links to our folders. Here’s the assets, here’s our brand style guidelines. Go ahead and mock them up for us okay. And then you know send it by its due date. Now what happens is that you’re going to get 30% who will actually do the test project. Okay. And then you’re actually going to be able to see who can actually do the work itself. And do I like the work itself okay. And notice how again, we have not interviewed any of these candidates, nor have we looked at their resume. We haven’t looked at their portfolio. We haven’t looked at anything else up until this point. Okay. Now if you’re like, I don’t even know what test project I would give.

Josh Hadley 00:15:29  So I tool here use ChatGPT. Fantastic ideas. Okay. And this is the prompt that we use for anybody. Like whenever my team members need to hire somebody I’m like, hey, use ChatGPT. Go figure out what your test project is going to be. Okay. Just some quick FAQs on this. So the completion rate is about 20 to 30% of those hundred applicants are actually going to complete it. Do they do it for free? Yeah. You better believe it. They do it for free. And the reason I unabashedly ask them to do it for free is because when I applied to work at American Airlines and their MBA rotational program out of my MBA program, what did they ask me to do? A free test project. So if the top companies in the US are doing that and you’re not doing it, you’re missing the mark, right? And they didn’t compensate me. And as a student, I didn’t think twice about it. Now you will get 1 or 2% that will complain. How dare you take advantage of people this way? Oh well.

Josh Hadley 00:16:11  You’re out of the bud. You’re out, you’re out. All right. Okay. Next. I understand the potential weak points of candidates. So here’s the I recommendations from workable. Okay, so what’s cool is like if you have people applying in workable, they have their AI tools that will basically read their resumes for you. So that again, I never look at a resume. I cannot tell you the last time I looked at somebody else’s resume. I don’t do it because this will basically say like, hey, 95, 94% of what you had in your job listing is on their resume. Good. All right. Sounds like that’s a good match. Okay. So you can just see like as we filter people out, like you can see like we’re left with, like, who’s the best okay. So step number six now we’re going to do group interviews. So to walk you through the methodology I’m reviewing these test projects. Now I’m looking at 30 of them okay. And I’m going to actually look at them.

Josh Hadley 00:16:59  And I’m going to be like who would I actually want to work with based on the work that they produced? Okay. From that you’re going to be like maybe between 30 to 50% of them. You’re like, yeah, I could jive with any of these guys. I would love to learn more. So pulling a page out of Cole’s book here, it’s the group interviews. Okay, so we do group interviews. We’ve actually found this to be very successful for any position that we have hired for not just salespeople. Okay. So we’ll set up the group interviews via zoom. There’s a maximum of five candidates on that call, and then we’ll go around the room asking each candidate the same questions. These are the these are the questions. We’ll just go one by one. We’ll be like, Mary, answer this. Okay, John. Same question, Sally, same question. Okay. And we’ll just go one by one then. And what Cole said like you’ll you’ll know within the first like five minutes you’re like yep x x x.

Josh Hadley 00:17:39  These guys maybe I’ll give them a little bit more love. Let’s let’s see what they can do. Here’s one of the most fascinating things. So the final question we ask I call it the peer picking probe okay. Is we ask them who would you hire from this interview. And you can’t say yourself, okay. And what you’ll find is like they’re going to start to gravitate towards like who they know are the better candidates. And you’ll see it. It’s fascinating social experiment. But one of the interesting things is like I was initially like, oh, this is do I want to ask this? Here’s one of the interesting things I continue to get every time I do that, and I do these group interviews, almost every time I get 1 or 2 candidates from every batch, they’ll be like, that was the coolest process ever. Normally, I never get to see who I’m up against and competing against. I understand why I wasn’t chosen for this role. They love it because they never see who they’re up against, ever.

Josh Hadley 00:18:23  And it’s just like a black box to them. So they love that. So I think it’s a win win on both sides. Hey, I don’t have to spend five different interviews looking at people. I’ve got 30 minutes. Five people. Scratch scratch scratch. All right, here’s the two I want to move on with. Okay. Step number seven. Then we’ll do one on one interviews and we’ll check their references. Okay. So what you’re trying to do, by the way, the interview is the worst predictor of job success out of any of these steps. I’d like to be honest with you, when you’re in the interview, I don’t I’m not asking them many questions other than I want to uncover whether they have a proven career track record of success. That’s it. That is all I’m trying to get at, okay. Because what you’re going to find is the A level talent back in high school. Guess what? They were probably like the chess club captain, or they were the captain of the basketball team, or they were like, or they were the national scholar’s honor or whatever it was in high school.

Josh Hadley 00:19:14  Okay. You go all the way back, and what you’re going to find is like a pattern of success. You’re going to be like, this guy’s been successful from high school and college. He was doing extra things or her. Right. Like, A-level talent just has a repeated pattern of success. Now, are there those opportunities where somebody hit a brick wall and they hit a rough patch in life and they stumbled, but they’re really good. They’re rough around the edges. And maybe you can be their redemption story. Yes, that happens, but there’s so many people in the world. Why take a risk on somebody like that? Right? Why don’t you go hire a level talent that actually has a proven track record? So can they drive real results? These are just some of the questions that we’ll ask in order to get to drill down two truth serum questions. So these are some of my favorite questions. So as we walk back all the way through their career all the way back to high school.

Josh Hadley 00:19:55  Okay. One of the things I’ll ask for is like, all right, so you were at IBM. Okay. What were you doing there? All right. Who was your boss? All right, well, his name was John. Okay, great. Now, the reason I ask, because I’m going to reach out to John. And when I reach out to John, how’s he going to rate you on a performance of 1 to 10? Okay, then when I reach out to John, what’s he going to tell me as an area for improvement on yourself? Right. So it’s that thread of reference check, but you’re actually going to follow up and do it. And this is the truth serum question. Like if they ask you here and like, well he’s going to give me a ten and John actually gives her a five like done. Right. Those people are out. And then we’ll actually follow through. Like and we’ll just even email their hiring manager like their manager. And also like if they can’t produce the email for their manager.

Josh Hadley 00:20:30  Oh, I can’t find it. okay. You’re done. Right. Like, we’re just turning up the heat here, right? A level talent can be resourceful to go figure out the contact information. Okay. Get responses from the references. This is what you’re looking for. Ten solid paragraph as to why I’m given that right. And then ultimately, you want to ask yourself this question. Do they raise the bar of the team? Okay. Because your team will only rise to your lowest performer on your team. So determine what level you want to set that bar, because your team will only go as high as the lowest performer on your team. And that’s how you select your select and hire amazing, amazing management level staff for pennies on the dollar. That’s the seven step process.