Adam Robinson's Blog, page 11

Serial Entrepreneur with a Background in Recruiting

Jeff Ellman is the Co-Founder of UrbanBound as well as HomeScout, Humatal, Hireology, and more. One of Jeff’s first companies was a recruiting firm and he has hired thousands of employees, raised millions in VC funding, and lead from the Co-Founder seat in several companies. Learn from his experience on this episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast.



Follow UrbanBound on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter.

Connect with Jeff on Linkedin and Twitter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Transcripts:

 

Adam Robinson:
Welcome to The Best Team Wins podcast where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson and, for the next 25 minutes, I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the program, Jeff Ellman is a founder of several companies, including his current company, UrbanBound, based out of Chicago, as well as companies such as Humatal, HomeScout, Hireology and others. Jeff is a seasoned sales leader and entrepreneur. He’s hired thousands of employees. He’s [inaudible 00:00:48] millions in DC funding, is worldly and has seen it all and, Jeff, we are excited to have you on the program today.

 


Jeff Ellman:
Thanks, Adam, I’m thrilled to be here.

 


Adam Robinson:
We are going to be sharing real live experiences over the course of your business-building career but, before we dive in, let’s set the stage for our listeners. Give us 30 seconds on UrbanBound and what you guys are up to.

 


Jeff Ellman:
Sure. We started UrbanBound about six and a half years ago. What we found was that, in corporate America, there’s a big problem, and the problem is that most companies, when it comes to hiring talent, typically they have to go outside their backyard with the unemployment rate right now being around 4.5%, and they have to relocate employees. The way relocation usually works is, “Adam, here’s $10,000 for your move. Good luck. We’ll see you on your start date or go figure out your move on your own and we’re going to reimburse you for some of the costs along the way.”

 


 
Our goal is to provide a better experience for employees by building software that allows a company to create a policy that really is the guidelines for the entire move through the software that points the employee to the best suppliers to use, tell them more and more about their city, and overall have a proven process to follow to ensure that their relocation goes well, to really factor in on how we improve the best possible onboarding experience at any company in this country and in this world.

 


Adam Robinson:
Wow. All right. If listeners want to learn more, what’s the best way for them to do that?

 


Jeff Ellman:
By visiting UrbanBound.com.

 


Adam Robinson:
All right, so let’s jump right in. Jeff, you’ve done how many companies at this point?

 


Jeff Ellman:
Six companies.

 


Adam Robinson:
Six. You can I, along with Michael Krazman, partnered to launch Hireology going on eight years ago now, which is hard to believe, but let’s talk about UrbanBound and the origin of that business from a people standpoint. You guys have been, I know, working on that for a while under the name ThinkChicago before embarking on scaling that business. Take us to the moment you knew that you needed to staff it differently to add different people to the organization and grow it. Just take us through that thought process and how you approach that.

 


Jeff Ellman:
Yeah, let’s take you back to actually the ThinkChicago days which was, for any entrepreneur who was looking to start a business, really starting with the MVPs, so the Minimal Viable Product and, for us, it was how can we get in front of as many HR leaders as possible, see if there really is a problem out there that people are willing to pay money to solve. The idea of UrbanBound really went back to Think Chicago which was, we realized that most companies, when they were relocating employees, they really weren’t providing a great experience and there was very little support.

 


 
Yet, the City of Chicago was doing everything they can to attract companies to be headquartered here, but those companies that were in Chicago were doing nothing to really get employees to be excited to want to move here. We partnered with the city. This goes back seven and a half years ago with Mayor Daley, and we had CD-ROMS that went out to HR departments and sent to employees, really to focus on workforce attraction and work towards retention.

 


 
Then, we quickly learned there was a big problem that we were solving just in Chicago, and we had to scale this to other markets, so we got rid of the name, Think Chicago, and launched UrbanBound and then really learned that, if we can actually write policies and guidelines for companies and control the expenses on behalf of the employer, we can move those funds in the right direction, to the right suppliers, and report back on performance to ensure that relocations are going well.

 


 
As we were scaling the company, getting back to your question on hiring the right people, it was all early on. In the early days, it was about specialization of job functions. We knew we wanted to scale, and we wanted to scale quickly, and we felt the best way to that was, specifically, we had to get customers. Out of the gate, we wanted to bring on the Lighthouse accounts. If you think about the TWCs or the C.H. Robinsons, the PepsiCo’s, the Fortune 500 companies of the world, we wanted them as customers, so we targeted them.

 


 
We had different pricing, if you want to call it free or very low price, to get them in the door, knowing that we could have case studies to help us scale. Then, we hired people for specific roles so, whether it was a BDM which was a Business Development Manager who was responsible for having meetings or an AE who is responsible for closing those meetings and, of course, account managers who are responsible for their renew and upsell of those accounts at that point in time, so very specialized hiring.

 


Adam Robinson:
What did that early team look like?

 


Jeff Ellman:
It was a team of people who really had no experience in relocation because I, myself, had no experience in relocation, but it was a team of people that were all wanting to solve this problem, that everyone could relate to, which was moving is not a great experience, and there could be a better way and software should really be the way to do that, but these are people that were really eager to learn and excited to teach and wanted to offer something new to a market and had never seen relocation software before.

 


Adam Robinson:
You approach to finding those individuals comprised of what when you were getting started?

 


Jeff Ellman:
Luckily for me, and I told my investors when we first started the company is that my prior life, I was a recruiter. I started a recruiting company and had a very large database of talented salespeople in the Chicago area, so I was able to go through a list and identify the top 20 people who I call social kingpins who were very successful in their selling career, and I asked each one of them to make three introductions for me. I gave them the template and, from there, word really spread that there was a high-growth company in the relocation space in Chicago and HR tech that was looking to scale their sales team, and we had a plethora of candidates that were great.

 


Adam Robinson:
Let’s talk about that recruiting company, Humatal. You had the benefit, not only of having hired lots of people for your own businesses, but having done it on behalf of lots of other companies. What have you observed in your time doing this that is the number one or two reasons why companies aren’t very good at the hiring part?

 


Jeff Ellman:
I was always surprised when I sent over candidates who I felt were phenomenal for the job, and the employer would reject him or her for reasons that I would never have been able to predict, and it really went back to that they didn’t have a hiring process that was asking them to ask the right questions. Even when they asked the right questions, they didn’t even know what answers to look for that would predict success.

 


 
I found that most of my clients, the people who were making hiring decisions back in the day, weren’t even trained on how to run a hiring process, weren’t trained on the right questions to ask, and really were hiring with their gut almost 100% of the time, so it came down to heads or tails. It was a coin flip to see who they would hire and, the majority of the time, they were making bad hiring decisions, which was costing their company a tremendous amount of time and money and resources.

 


Adam Robinson:
What’s the first thing you would typically do with an organization that was going from no process to some kind of structured hiring process?

 


Jeff Ellman:
One of the things that I’ve done is, I’ve done exercise with the job function, so people who are in that role, really understanding who do you want to be in this role? What words would best describe a sales person at your company? We want them to be curious, we want them to be aggressive, we want them to be persistent and then, what are the things that we need to do to try to find those people and really identify what are the questions to ask that would [inaudible 00:07:50]?

 


 
Does that characteristic exist in this employee or candidate? If we’re not asking the right questions, really factoring in what are the top 10 or 15 things that we want to get out of an interview and, also, what are the things that we can look for in an interview that ties back to our core values as an employer because, at the end of the day, if they don’t align with your core values and they say all the right things to every single question, they’re still not going to be a fit.

 


Adam Robinson:
Is there a particular interview question you find most valuable as you try to figure this out?

 


Jeff Ellman:
There’s not one specific question, but one of my favorite questions that I typically ask is, “Adam, if you could share with me your previous place of employment, what was your boss’s name? How do you spell his or her name? When I call your boss and I ask about your performance on a scale of 1-10, what is he or she going to tell me? What are they going to say that you need to improve upon?”, etc., and you can really dive deep just in that one question, and I think that question is like truth serum because they really do start to visualize in their mind that, “You are going to call my boss. You are going to learn these things,” and they really tell you everything that you need to know in that one question.

 


Adam Robinson:
What’s the range of responses you typically get when you ask? That’s a pretty full frontal question in an interview.

 


Jeff Ellman:
Before the response ever comes out of the candidate’s mouth, you start to see the non-verbals. You see the wiggling in the chair, being uncomfortable, the red blotches on the neck because they’re going to have to give me some information they know I’m going to verify versus the rest of the interview. Some candidates can say things that you probably can’t fact-check, so it’s just a fantastic way, early on, to get to the root of the candidate.

 


Adam Robinson:
Let’s get back to UrbanBound. How many employees are in the business today, just to give our listeners some ideas to the scale?

 


Jeff Ellman:
We have 35 employees as of today.

 


Adam Robinson:
What is the leadership team that you have in place that are required to operate the business at that level?

 


Jeff Ellman:
Leadership team. I always say that a leadership team should never be able to, if you’re having a meeting, a large pizza should be able to service your entire leadership team. If a large pizza is not going to be enough, then there’s a problem. We’ve got six people on our team, potentially maybe a seventh as we grow, but you have a Director of Finance, you have your head of engineering, your head of your product, your COO, and then two co-founders and your head of sales, as well.

 


Adam Robinson:
As you evolve the business, what is the biggest challenge, or obstacle, you’re facing as it pertains to the leadership team communication in growing the business? What’s that one thing on your plate you’re working through?

 


Jeff Ellman:
It always come back to, as a software company, we win or we lose with our product, so any kind of conversation around the product direction and the roadmap would probably be the answer to that.

 


Adam Robinson:
Has your approach as a team to diagnosing product-related questions changed as you’ve gained experience?

 


Jeff Ellman:
It has because, the more and more customers we bring on, the more promise we can hear in the market and the more, call it advisors that we’re able to reach out to before we actually built something. Over time, our product market fit is just spot-on versus the early days of the company. We had a hypothesis, we built something, and test it, and we always said we were far off but, right now, we are absolutely in the right direction, which is why we’re going to be raising more money and adding more fuel to the fire so we can scale this company at a faster pace.

 


Adam Robinson:
Congratulations on that. As you look forward then, to be a leader in your organization, what do you think is the most important quality to have in the way you do business?

 


Jeff Ellman:
For me, personally, I feel like my passion for the business has to be contagious. I have to have empathy. I have to understand each employee’s challenges in their role and be the person who can help remove the roadblocks. I always prided myself on being approachable, and I also think a great leader has to be very curious to understand the ways that they can impact the business and help. Even by curious, I mean reading blogs, reading books, attending seminars and gaining that knowledge, then sharing that knowledge with your coworkers.

 


Adam Robinson:
How are you digging that stuff in interviews? What tips do you have for folks listening, based on your experience?

 


Jeff Ellman:
We have specific questions about that, so I do want to know in the interview process, tell me things that you’re passionate about because, if they don’t have a passion in their personal life, then they’re certainly not going to be excited and passionate about my business. Trying to figure out if someone’s curious or not, Adam, I’m going to ask them again at the end of the interview, what questions do you have for me?

 


 
A great candidate, 100 out of 100 times, is going to have 5, 10, 15, 20 questions. These are not questions about what’s your vacation policy like or what are the benefits like. These are questions like, “Tell me more about the biggest challenge you have in your business” and “How long is your sales [inaudible 00:12:50] goal?” and “What’s the average retention rate of your customers?” Really, it’s thoughtful questions that shows me this is a curious person, and they’re intelligent, as well.

 


Adam Robinson:
You mentioned some things that are important to you personally. How does that translate into the core value system of UrbanBound? Do you have core values and, if so, what are some things that you can share with us about the role of values in the interviewing process?

 


Jeff Ellman:
For any of the companies I started, if I think back to the very first days of starting a company and coming up with a blueprint for what would, hopefully, be a successful business, it went back to the core values. It seems that the businesses I started, the core values have been different at some of them. Some of them carried through but, here, we always talk about being eager to learn and excited to teach because there’s no blueprint out there for how to build relocation management software. No one’s ever done it before.

 


 
As a startup, we talk about doing more faster. That’s one of our core values is, can we do more faster in a short period of time? Can we accomplish goals that we set out for the whole year maybe interest first six months of the year? We always talk about [inaudible 00:13:52] as a core value so, once again, when I give someone a problem, I want them to come back to me with a potential solution and try to figure it out on their own before relying on me to give the answer.

 


 
Also, another important core value for us is being able to see the big picture and understanding the why behind what we do every single day because, at the end of the day, what really is exciting about our business is how many people we actually helped relocate. When you can see … We have a flat screen TV in our office where you can see, today, we moved Jennie Smith, and Jennie Smith is working for PepsiCo, and she’s moving to New York with her two kids and a dog. That’s really rewarding to see the impact we’re making on this employee who’s going through a difficult life transition and the fact that we made it easier, and a successful process is very rewarding to everyone.

 


Adam Robinson:
Jeff, let’s transition to more of the tactics of pay and rewards. What’s your philosophy around compensation at your company, and how do you approach what you pay employees?

 


Jeff Ellman:
When it comes to our compensation philosophy, first of all, we always want to make sure we’re offering a competitive base because we know that we need to attract and retain the best possible talent. With any position at any of my companies, there always has to be tremendous upside, whether that’s ownership in the company, whether that’s really aggressive bonuses or commissions. When the company wins, I want to make sure that all of our employees are winning at the same time.

 


Adam Robinson:
What do the [inaudible 00:15:21] look like there? I know, from our experience, Chicago is a give-me based salary, not necessarily a lot of equity town. If I’m on the West Coast, base is somewhat important, but equity’s the most important thing. How does that sit with UrbanBound’s model?

 


Jeff Ellman:
Very rarely, even when we make an offer to someone in Chicago when they’re negotiating salary, do they negotiate anything around options in the company. It’s typically around base pay, but we do feel strongly that, as the company grows, we know that the options are worth more, and we want our employees to be tied into the future success of the company. We train people. We do Options 101 right out of the gate to make sure everyone understands what it means to be an owner because we do find that, in many companies, the reason why employees don’t value options is they don’t know what it means, so having that as part of the hiring process has been helpful.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s great. What things do you do that’s non-comp, non-monetary comp-wise to help people feel like they’re getting more of a total reward for being with UrbanBound?

 


Jeff Ellman:
A lot of the things that we do are around career growth. Yes, it’s about measuring their paycheck, but there are so many opportunities here, whether it’s to be on different committees where we have our Culture Club, helping plan events. We’re constantly doing things with nonprofits or for charities or giving back to the community. These are all the things that really make people feel like it’s part of this family environment that makes us have a high retention rate of our employees.

 


 
Also, really challenging employees to even create some of their own career paths here because the career path at a company that goes from 10 employees to 30 employees to 100 employees is typically not well defined so, when people see the opportunity to be promoted and go into different roles, it really creates a lot of excitement and buzz in the company.

 


Adam Robinson:
Let’s take the flip side of the coin, then. How do you approach feedback? If things aren’t going as well as they should with an individual, or someone’s struggling for whatever reason, how do you approach that, individually and philosophically?

 


Jeff Ellman:
My approach to feedback … First of all, there’s two different ways that we approach it. Number one is, we do anonymous surveys, leveraging software called TINYpulse, where we can collect on a scale of 1-10 on how happy are you at work, for example. We can actually quantify the types of employees that are here and are they happy? Are they not? Are they being challenged, etc.? I, personally, want to give to someone straight between the eyes as to how they’re performing, so you always know where you stand with me.

 


 
If you’re not meeting your goals and if you’re [inaudible 00:17:58] effort-related goals, you’re very likely to be put on the performance improvement plan and given a timeframe or warning to turn things around. If that doesn’t happen, that person’s dismissed from the company. Either they fire themselves or we fire them because, at the end of the day, what I promise to every employee that works at any of my companies is that, when you look to your left and you look to your right, you’re only surrounded by A players and, if there’s not an A player next to you, there’s a good chance that person won’t be there for too long. That’s my promise to them.

 


Adam Robinson:
What does that conversation look like with someone? Just give our listeners a sense for how that sounds or is delivered. Let’s say you and I have had a verbal conversation about my particular, let’s say, sales numbers, and you need me to be at a higher level. We’ve operated for another couple of weeks. You just haven’t seen it. What does that conversation sound like?

 


Jeff Ellman:
Those fierce conversations always start off the same way. I will bring you to my room privately, and I let you know we’re about to have a difficult conversation. I would start off by asking you three or four questions. Before I ask you those questions, my philosophy, and my employees know this, is that I truly believe that success is a choice. Every day when you come to work, you have a choice to be successful or not be successful, so I will ask some open-ended questions. Do you feel like you’re putting your best foot forward when you come in to work every day? Can you give me examples of that? If you were in my shoes, how do you think I should feel about your performance and why?

 


 
Having the conversation by asking questions first and really going into what my expectations are to make sure that we’re aligned and giving that person an opportunity to quickly turn it around. The majority of the the time, you’ll see employees cannot turn it around, but those that do, they usually take off and really do great in their career here.

 


Adam Robinson:
How often would you say, in percentage terms, do people, in fact, turn it around?

 


Jeff Ellman:
When I think about people who I’ve put on performance plans, I’d probably say about 20-25% will actually turn it around and get the kick in the butt and get motivated, and the other 75% just don’t have the right skills. They could’ve been a mis-hire or they have the things that I can’t teach. I can’t teach someone to be driven to be curious, to be really well spoken, so that would be an example of a mis-hire that somehow kind of slipped through the cracks. To prevent that from happening in an early-stage company, I highly recommend, and I know, Adam, you do this at Hireology, that me, as the co-founder, I interview every single person that we hire to make sure that those mis-hires don’t happen consistently.

 


Adam Robinson:
Absolutely. That pays big dividends and, in fact, paid big dividends again today not an hour ago, I have to tell you. I absolutely concur with that. Is there a particular book or source of content that has been influential in your approach to hiring?

 


Jeff Ellman:
Specifically around hiring, I can’t say there’s been one book that really influenced me. I mean, there’s the book Who by Jeff Smart which, in the early days, really helped me understand what a scorecard was and how a scorecard should be in existence for every job function. I think that is a good book. As far as scaling a company, Aaron Ross has written some great books, Predictable Revenue, or Impossible to Inevitable is the one I’m reading right now. It really gives you the blueprint for how to scale a company at a rapid pace. I guess a final book would be Traction by Gino Wickman has had a big impact on my companies.

 


Adam Robinson:
Yeah, you and many of our guests have reported that book to be profoundly impactful to them, and I’m certainly counted among them. Let’s talk, as we close out here, a couple of big picture questions for you. What do you think is the greatest lesson you’ve learned about doing this in the people side of the business?

 


Jeff Ellman:
The greatest lesson I’ve learned, first of all, is that I don’t think there’s such thing as work-life balance. There’s work-life integration. Once I understood that, that was important for me personally as an entrepreneur because your success at home carries over to your success at work and vice versa. With my employees, on the people side, it is really understanding what makes them tick.

 


 
When I look out and they’re 65 years old and they’re retiring, what would success have looked like in their career and how can the job at my company been the best job for them to have success? I want them to really own the job and not rent the job. We have a lot of millennials who probably, most companies would rent the job, they’d work there for two or three years, then move on to the next opportunity. Here, I will encourage my employees to own the job and, hopefully, be here for as long as possible.

 


Adam Robinson:
As you sit in the seat today looking out, what do you think is something that you could or should improve upon as it pertains to talent management at UrbanBound?

 


Jeff Ellman:
Probably our performance reviews. I think we do a really good job getting people in the door, and we give constant feedback. That’s one of the processes I constantly look at because we do them manually, and I do think employees need feedback probably monthly or quarterly, and that’s something that I would like to change in the very near future.

 


Adam Robinson:
Closing question here, Mr. Ellman. If you were to come back on this show a year from now and report to us on whether or not you were able to successfully tackle the single biggest people-related issue or opportunity that you have in front of you, what will you be telling us happened?

 


Jeff Ellman:
The biggest opportunity for me on the people side is helping people be promoted, helping them stretch and try new things within the framework of our business, and that is something that we are constantly striving to do, and that’s something we can definitely measure success by.

 


Adam Robinson:
Ladies and gentlemen, that’s the final word. You’ve been learning from Jeff Ellman, Co-Founder of UrbanBound and many other companies, including Hireology. Jeff, thank you so much for being with us on the program today.

 


 
That’s a wrap for today’s episode of The Best Team Wins podcast, where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next week.

 

The post Serial Entrepreneur with a Background in Recruiting appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

When Referrals Go Wrong

Jeff Hyman is the CEO and Founder of Recruit Rockstars, the Amazon bestseller of the same name, the host of the Strong Suit Podcast, an esteemed speaker, and in his spare time, he teaches a course on recruiting at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Business. Jeff joins Adam this week to discuss what to do when a trusted associate sends you a referral that just isn’t a fit. Jeff also digs into Google and Facebook’s take-over of the job board market, what to do when you find the perfect person for your company but don’t have the right job for them, and more on this episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast.

 

Connect with Jeff on Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Transcripts:

Adam Robinson:
Welcome to the Best Team Wins podcast where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes, I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the program, Jeff Hyman is the CEO and founder of Strong Suit, based in Chicago, founded in 2007. Strong Suit has three employees. Jeff has started four company’s total, raised over $50 million in venture funding, and hired or placed over 3,000 people for his own companies and others.

 


 
He teaches the first-ever MBA course on recruiting at the esteemed Northwestern Kellogg School of Business, and he hosts the Strong Suit podcast, and is the author of Recruit Rockstars, an Amazon bestseller. Wow. I am so excited to have you on the program today, Jeff. Thank you for being here.

 


Jeff Hyman:
Adam, it’s great to be here, and it’s great to talk with someone who shares the same passion. I am a huge fan of your podcast and your book as well.

 


Adam Robinson:
Yeah, I appreciate that. Well, so we have the opportunity Jeff, today, to talk about your experience in the founder CEO seat building a venture-backed hyper growth business, and we have the opportunity to talk about your expertise as an executive search professional and just someone who’s been at this awhile and has seen a lot. And so, for our listeners today, it’s really going to be a real treat to hear you share what you’ve learned right or wrong about how to do this the right way.

 


Jeff Hyman:
So plenty of wrong. I’ve made every mistake in the book.

 


Adam Robinson:
Before we focus on that, let’s talk about Recruit Rockstars and what you’re up to now. Give our listeners 30 seconds on what you’re doing.

 


Jeff Hyman:
Yeah, so I do two things. I do executive search for venture capital and private equity portfolio companies, so that’s my day job. My night job, if you would, is, as you said, I teach a course on recruiting at Kellogg, up in Evanston, and so I take these relatively new minds who are going out into the business world and try to impart on them some of what I’ve learned about recruiting and retaining talent.

 


Adam Robinson:
Excellent, and if the listeners want to learn more about what you’re doing, what’s the best way for them to do that?

 


Jeff Hyman:
They can just go to recruitrockstars.com.

 


Adam Robinson:
The book, the podcast, all linked up there?

 


Jeff Hyman:
Yep. Everything is at Recruit Rockstars.

 


Adam Robinson:
Fantastic. Okay, let’s jump in. I want to go back to when you started Retrofit, which eventually raised a good sum of money, and now, you’ve transitioned that into very capable hands. That first employee-

 


Jeff Hyman:
Yes.

 


Adam Robinson:
… when you scaled beyond yourself and it was time to go for it, talk about the process you used, if there was one in fact at that time, to go about building that early team, when you were getting out of the gate there.

 


Jeff Hyman:
So, it would have been 2011 as I was starting to build the team for Retrofit, which is now a relatively sizable online healthcare and wellness company based in Chicago. The very first few hires, to be honest, Adam, were about selling the concept, selling the idea to get someone to join a nascent startup … you know this because you’ve done it … is as much about selling and convincing and cajoling and a little bit of begging as it is about assessing the individual. In my case, the first hire was a young lady named Whitney who I had the good fortune of knowing previously, and I remember her very clear.

 


 
I met her at a Starbucks and took her through the business concept. It wasn’t even a business model yet. It was just this idea of online weight loss, and she was very intrigued, very compelled. It probably was a mating ritual of a couple of months before she finally agreed to do it full-time and leave what she was doing. So that was the first hire.

 


Adam Robinson:
Would you say you followed a defined hiring process at that time, or is that more of a gut feel and pattern recognition type of hire?

 


Jeff Hyman:
I do my best to avoid gut feel, just because it’s so misleading. I think I’ve learned a lot even in the past few years about recruiting, which has helped, but I knew that she had the DNA that I was looking for at the time. I was really looking for, as I think a lot of startups need, a sense of optimism. When there’s a 95% chance you’re going to fail, and every day is harder than the one before, an optimist is a really good thing. Flexibility, versatility, which Whitney certainly had and just a Jane of all trades that could help on marketing, help on sales, help on operations. She just did it all. And so, that was really the DNA I was looking for.

 


 
I had a lot of room for the particular competencies and experience, but DNA was something I couldn’t compromise on, and she was the one during that process, and I must have talked to three, four dozen people who just epitomized those things.

 


Adam Robinson:
So, jump forward then to when Retrofit is scaling, it’s growing quickly, you’ve got VC fuel behind you, and you’re having to bring people on 10 at a time. How did you do that? So for our listeners who either are experiencing that or are contemplating what it’s like to go through something like that, where your success is literally tied to your ability to hire 10 people a week, you know, that kind of a growth rate.

 


Jeff Hyman:
Yeah, sure.

 


Adam Robinson:
How’d you do it?

 


Jeff Hyman:
Well one of the first things I did was said, “This is going to be a full-time job.” You know, hiring, interviewing, assessing, vetting. It’s so vital, but it’s so time consuming. We hired a head of talent in our first 10 hires. I think number eight, seven or eight, an incredible young lady named Vicky who served us well, in that, she hand-picked an amazing team of wellness experts, registered dietitians, sports psychologists, software developers and just was such a guardian of our DNA, much like a head of marketing is a guardian of the brand. That was incredibly helpful.

 


 
We also involved our board of directors and our investors in some of the hiring to get their buy-in, to get their perspective especially on the senior team, the executive team. We just never compromised it. It was painful sometimes. We would leave a seat open for six months until we found the right person, which of course means everyone else has to chip in, but I’ve always found that’s far preferable to settling for a B player.

 


Adam Robinson:
Absolutely. Can you think of examples where you might’ve rushed it?

 


Jeff Hyman:
Oh sure.

 


Adam Robinson:
Even as the pro, right? Who knows what they’re doing here?

 


Jeff Hyman:
I am far from a pro because this hiring thing is very experiential, right? I don’t know about you, but I think it’s as much art as science, and so, hopefully, with each hire, I get a little bit better, a little bit smarter. But yeah, we made plenty of hiring mistakes. Warm bodies that came along and we just had to get someone on board or someone we didn’t fully vet because they were referred by one of our investors, and so, we just took that as this person is amazing, and within weeks, we knew we had made a mistake. It’s a distributed company, so Retrofit has people across the country, and we consult with clients via video.

 


 
So, having people who had never done that before I think was very difficult. We had quite a few people who thought they could work from home, stay focused and work on their own independently, and after a month or two, they realized they just either weren’t structured enough to be able to do that, because it does take a certain discipline, or they were so extroverted that they found they were getting depressed and getting lonely. And so, I think that was something that we changed, which was not hiring anyone who had not worked remotely before. So, yeah, we made every mistake in the book.

 


Adam Robinson:
So, you know what? I want to stay on this notion of a board member or trusted advisor telling you, “This guy’s awesome.” That happens all the time. I’ve had that experience a number of times where someone says, “Oh he or she was the head of XYZ at my last company. They’re amazing. You should hire them.”

 


Jeff Hyman:
Exactly.

 


Adam Robinson:
And of course, as the CEO, and you’re sitting there going, “All right. Well I trust this board member. They’re telling me they’re awesome. They must be awesome.” I think maybe 0% of the time, that’s turned out to be the case. That’s been my experience. Why do you think … Now put yourself in the provider seat. Now, you work with venture firms all the time who need to take their money and turn it into talent that’s going to produce growth for their portfolio company. Why doesn’t that work? Why doesn’t that this guy’s awesome hiring process work for companies?

 


Jeff Hyman:
I think there’s a number of reasons. There’s no shortcuts in recruiting no matter how someone was referred to you, whether it was from an investor or a board member, even from an employee through your own employee referral program. I think there’s a bunch of reasons. One is a rock star in one company is not a rock star in another company. Every company has its own values, and DNA, and work processes, and limitations, constraints, and so, just as when I lived out in Silicon Valley, during the dot-com boom, the first one, so many big-company people came from McKinsey, and P&G, and world-class companies, where they were rock stars, and they bombed miserably at small start-up companies just because it was a total misalignment. So not everything is transferable.

 


 
And then the second is investors have a very different perspective. They don’t hire people every day for a living, and so, many of them will understandably rely on what school the person went to or what companies they worked at. They’re from Google, from Apple, GrubHub, therefore, they must be amazing, but science will tell you that those things are not necessarily predictive of success. And so, taking those shortcuts can be very dangerous. So, I feel your pain, because I’ve made those same mistakes.

 


Adam Robinson:
What is the conversation then … Now we’re getting into a little bit of-

 


Jeff Hyman:
Inside baseball.

 


Adam Robinson:
… business coaching here, but what’s the conversation you have when your largest single investor, that’s got tens of millions invested in you, says, “Hire this person. He or she’s awesome,” and you’re thinking, “I talked to them. They’re not awesome”? How do you stand up for your own culture in the face of that type of pressure?

 


Jeff Hyman:
Well it’s not easy. It takes some fortitude, but I try to rely on data. So subjectivity is what drives people crazy in the recruiting process. People say, “I like him,” or, “I like her.” That’s crap. It’s meaningless. It needs to be based on specific objective measures. So in developing a scorecard, which is where I always start whether it’s for clients or for myself of getting agreement from the investor on what the scorecard is, what are the competencies, and what is the DNA we’re looking for. So now, we know what we’re looking for. Now, we have something we can actually compare that individual against, right? Versus it just being warm and soft and fuzzy.

 


 
I think the second thing is having another candidate, right? To compare to, to look at. In the absence of anyone else, it’s pretty tough to say, “No, we need a director of sales, we need a Java developer,” or whatever. Even an independent board member. I’ve had this debate. So you hustle and you find other candidates so that you can compare and contrast and run a process and agree with the board and the investor that we are running a process and happy to engage your candidate and include them in the process. They’ll have every opportunity, obviously. We’d love to go with someone who’s pre-approved, pre-vetted, but it’s not reason by itself to skip the process.

 


Adam Robinson:
So armed with data then, armed with data, you can have those conversations. What do you say to the six-employee startup, founder-led, you know, he or she is facing that pressure to just get to that next milestone. They’ve got three unfilled sales spots. They’ve got to hit a revenue number. Every day is an opportunity cost. They’ve got the money. They just don’t have the talent. What do you do?

 


Jeff Hyman:
I say, “Don’t settle.” I know that is painful. I’ve been there so many times, and every time I’ve settled, no matter who the person was referred by, it didn’t take a week or two or a month before I said, “What was I thinking?” You then start diverting your focus and spending more of your time babysitting and micromanaging and coaching that B or C player, which takes your eye off the ball further. So, you’re asking everyone else to pinch-hit, to fill in the gap, to bridge it until you find the right person, and I know that’s painful, but that’s what I’d tell a six-person company or a 600-person company.

 


Adam Robinson:
I’ve enjoyed your writing on the topic of employment brand, and so if we could shift to talk about, now, how do we address this issue? How can companies take control of this? And so important the concept of branding, and you’ve got some really good advice for entrepreneurs looking to take charge of this. What are some things that that leaders can do to make sure they’re putting their best foot forward in the market?

 


Jeff Hyman:
Well it goes back to your previous question. When you don’t have an employer brand and you’re not always recruiting, and you don’t have a pipeline, a flow of candidates, just like a great salesperson or business development person should have a great flow or a pipeline of business opportunities, you tend to fall into just-in-time hiring, right? And that’s when the problem begins. Oh my god. Sally quit. We don’t have a back-up plan in place internally. We don’t have a pipeline of people externally. So, you tend to hire the first person that comes along.

 


 
When you have a pipeline mentality, which is derived from having built an employer brand, which doesn’t take much time or money, you have choices. You have people coming through that say, hey, I’m interested. I’d like to have a conversation. Now, sometimes, you want to hire them before you even have the perfect position. I’m sure you’ve done that at your shop because top performers are so hard to find, right?

 


Adam Robinson:
Yeah, hire the person, find them the job, that is-

 


Jeff Hyman:
Correct.

 


Adam Robinson:
… certainly a necessary time to do [crosstalk 00:15:42]-

 


Jeff Hyman:
Hard to do for a six-person company, but it doesn’t take long — 30, 40, 50, 100 people — before you say, “You know what? Rock stars come across my desk so infrequently that when I find one that’s actually interested in what we’re doing, in our mission, it’s worth grabbing them,” and like you said, finding the position later. But building an employer brand, to answer your question, is all about just like building a consumer brand. What is your differentiated point of view and unique employer value proposition? Why should someone come work for you in your city? I think it’s very relevant to your city or your town and who your competing employers are.

 


 
So if you’re in the valley, you’re competing with Google and Apple, but if you’re in New York, you’re competing with someone else. But who is our target candidate? Much like marketing. How do we build a pipeline, a funnel to attract them? How do we engage them? And it’s not going to be by paying the most money, because no matter how much you can afford to pay, there’s always someone that can afford to pay more, right? So it can’t be based on dollars. It has to be based on the value proposition that you can provide to that individual.

 


Adam Robinson:
In your methodology, you lay out some best practices or steps that that people can follow in order to drive a predictable result. Take us through what some of those major steps are, so our listeners have some guideposts as to how you recommend doing it.

 


Jeff Hyman:
There’s 10, so we don’t to go through all of them. But as I talk to people, I usually find they’re like, “Yeah,” three or five of them, I get rung, and then they wonder why they have 50% batting average, meaning half of the people work out and half don’t, which is, you know, what other part of your business would you be okay with that? So none of these by themselves will solve the problem, but little by little by little, they build. So an example is focusing on things that are predictive, right?

 


 
If you ask a lot of people, a lot of executives, “What do you focus on? What school did the guy go to? What was his GPA? What companies did she work at? What was her title? How many years experience? Does she have industry experience?” All those things are nice, nice to have, but they’re not in and of themselves highly predictive of success, especially compared to DNA, which is how someone is wired even before they turn 10, and that is a primary determinant of someone’s behavior, someone’s performance over the long term. So focusing on just what’s predictive, right?

 


 
Doesn’t sound like rocket science, but a lot of people don’t do it. Relying on expensive recruiters like me or job postings or things like that. When you’re not tapping out your own employee referral program, at least 50% of your hires should be coming from your employees, and if they’re not, then they’re either not happy, in which case you got one problem, or they don’t even know you have an employee referral program, which half of companies don’t. So that’s another big issue. Probably the biggest one, one that I’d like to focus on with clients is the test drive, which I’m guessing you do, because you’re pretty sophisticated about this, but 90% of companies don’t.

 


 
They do the interviews and then they stop. They say, “Hey, we found our director of marketing. She interviewed unbelievably, and she’s great,” and they hire her. It turns out what she talked about, what she said in the interview, she can’t do, and so, the test drive is just a couple hours or a couple days where you have a job audition or an opportunity to see the person in action. You do it for every role, every time, CEO down to office manager, and you see the person in action. And many times, you’ll be shocked that someone who did great in the interviews just can’t do the job for many reasons.

 


 
So that’s probably the biggest one. It’s not so much a mistake as much as a failsafe to avoid bad hires.

 


Adam Robinson:
Yeah, I got to tell you, Jeff, that test drive, as you term it, is something that I have learned. And from experience, every time I’ve made a poor hiring decision, it’s been because I haven’t put them in the environment. Not the theoretical verbal description of the environment, but the actual job environment, where I can watch them do what we need them to do. So we have sales candidates get on the phone and make calls with us.

 


Jeff Hyman:
Yeah, you see them in action.

 


Adam Robinson:
Yeah, we have customer success folks work through data and then look at save information and just try to be in the position. We’re hiring for a vice president to handle some of our most important larger accounts, and we’re going to ask them to put a presentation together, a business review, as if we were their large customer and come give it to us. So, let me just concur. It’s a must do, it’s a must do.

 


Jeff Hyman:
Yeah. I don’t understand companies that don’t do it. It does take a little bit of time. Sometimes I even pay the candidate for their time, so it costs a little bit of money, but compared to some of the bad hires that I’ve avoided, because they bombed the test drive. I mean, they couldn’t even follow instructions. They couldn’t even make decisions. They weren’t on time. I mean, basic stuff that you never would have known, coming out of the interview where they did exceptionally well.

 


Adam Robinson:
I suppose the question is, would you rather find out before or after they’re on your payroll that this person can’t do what you need them to do?

 


Jeff Hyman:
You know the answer to that, right?

 


Adam Robinson:
It’s self-evident.

 


Jeff Hyman:
It’s really painful. It’s the same reason people don’t like checking references, because by that point, you’re so emotionally invested. You’ve spent so much time. You don’t want to hear it. You don’t want to know. But as soon as they start, you’re going to find out, and then you’re going to be like, “What was I thinking?”

 


Adam Robinson:
I had a conversation today with the management group. They were asking me this, and I’m going to throw a little bit of the jump all at you here, because you’re well-versed in the tools available to recruiters. Google and Facebook are about to eat the technology world as it pertains to jobs now and-

 


Jeff Hyman:
It’s already starting, yeah.

 


Adam Robinson:
… in candidate search. How can smaller operators or those without sophisticated talent, acquisition teams, take advantage of this changing landscape? Because most of them now are still the post-and-pray model. “I’ll buy some ads. I hope they work. I’ll buy some ads. I hope they work,” that world’s going to change now. What would you say to them?

 


Jeff Hyman:
Well, I think it’s great, right? Because it’s going to level the playing field for small companies. A lot of it is automatic, right? So when you, for example, post your jobs on your company’s website, which, if you’re not doing by now, I don’t know what to tell you, Google will scrape those and format them and make them readily available to job seekers who go to Google and, say, type, “director of marketing in Chicago,” it will make it much easier for candidates to find those. And, Facebook is similar. The problem, as you know, is when you’re at 4% unemployment on your way to 3%, not as many people are looking for jobs.

 


 
There’s a good number of people looking, but not nowhere near as many as when we were at 6% or 10%. So waiting and posting and praying, exactly as you said, is a very dangerous strategy, because you’re going to see a relatively small pool of the available market. Most of your recruiting needs to be networking, personal referrals, introductions employee referrals, investor referrals. If you sit and wait for people to read your job posting no matter where, Google or otherwise, you’re going to be waiting a long time.

 


Adam Robinson:
Undoubtedly. Undoubtedly.

 


Jeff Hyman:
Every time I do a search for a client, I post it on LinkedIn, just to make sure I’m covering the basis. I’ll get three, four, five hundred resumes. I can’t tell you the last time I ever hired one from that source, not that there aren’t great people on LinkedIn, but statistically the odds of the right person seeing the job at the right time and applying is just very small.

 


Adam Robinson:
Very good point. And thematically, what I’m hearing from you today, Jeff, is that recruitment is a core business process. Let me put those words in your mouth. You can’t be done reactively. You will always be chasing to catch up, and it leads to poor decisions.

 


Jeff Hyman:
I’ll go one step further. Not only is it a core business process, in my opinion, and this is a little controversial probably, it is the only sustainable source of competitive advantage and differentiation. Technology is no longer a source of differentiation like it used to be. You can’t patent anything. And if you do, you can’t protect it, because you don’t have a war chest. You launch an app and there’s five others just like it a week later. Marketing and building a brand takes forever, extremely hard to do, with fragmentation of media.

 


 
I haven’t found a competitive advantage source other than building an amazing team who can out-execute your competition. And so, it’s not only a business process, it’s like the most important business process.

 


Adam Robinson:
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Jeff Hyman, thank you so much for being with us on the podcast today.

 


Jeff Hyman:
It was a pleasure, and like I said, I’m a big fan, so thank you for all the work that you do.

 


Adam Robinson:
Ladies and gentlemen, that is a wrap for this week’s episode of the Best Team Wins podcast, where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book, The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thank you for tuning in, and we will see you next week.

 

The post When Referrals Go Wrong appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

Working Together to Solve Challenging Problems

Jared Schrieber, CEO and Co-Founder of InfoScout, looks for candidates that love to solve challenging problems in a collaborative environment by giving them problems to solve during the interview process. This became part of the InfoScount hiring process only after their team learned from hiring mistakes made early in the company’s history. Learn from Jared on this topic and much more on this episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast.

 

 

Follow InfoScout on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.

Connect with Jared on Twitter and Linkedin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Transcripts:

Adam Robinson:
Welcome to The Best Team Wins Podcast, where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the show, Jared Schrieber is the Co-founder and CEO of InfoScout, a high growth, venture-backed company based in San Francisco. InfoScout was founded in 2011 and currently has 125 employees. Jared, we are so excited to have you on the program today.

 


Jared Schrieber:
Great to be here, Adam.

 


Adam Robinson:
We’re here to focus on the people side of InfoScout, but before we do that, let’s set the stage. Give us 30 seconds on InfoScout and what you guys are up to.

 


Jared Schrieber:
Got it. Well, a lot of people have heard of Nielsen, which is typically known for tracking what people watch on TV with the Nielsen TV ratings. What most people don’t know is most of their business is tracking what people buy. One of the ways they historically did that was by sending barcode scanners into people’s homes and asking people to scan every product that they bought, and then kind of thumb in the prices paid and a whole bunch of other information about their shopping trip into this clunky device that had to be linked up to their home router.

 


Adam Robinson:
That sounds awful.

 


Jared Schrieber:
Yeah. Well, it’s even more awful when you realize that if you do that for about 15 minutes after a large grocery shopping trip, you’ll get a 20 cent reward. Brands are obviously going, “Man, who does this, and isn’t there a better way?” Back in 2011, as smartphone adoption started picking up, my co-founder and I thought that we could get people to take pictures of their shopping receipts for gamified rewards, for school donations, to track and organize their spend, for any number of different reasons why somebody might be incentivized to take a picture of their everyday shopping receipt, and then we could do the hard work of figuring out what items they bought and prices they paid, and track it over time to help brands understand loyalty, response to promotion and advertising, switching to competitors, trial of new items, et cetera. So, that’s what we’ve done.

 


Adam Robinson:
I read a write-up in the San Francisco Biz Journal, or something that, that told the story of Red Bull knowing almost instantaneously who was buying their product as soon as they launched it. Tell us a little bit more about that experience. I mean, that’s pretty powerful stuff. There’s a reason you’re growing so quickly.

 


Jared Schrieber:
You could imagine, with the Nielsen model of those in-home barcode scanners and the low rewards, it’s hard to get many people to do it, so the insights are a little bit limited or slower to come by. With our smartphone app-based approach, we’ve got hundreds of thousands of Americans taking pictures of their everyday shopping receipts. So, if Red Bull launches the new summer edition flavor, we can pick up hundreds if not thousands of people trying that product for the first time, and trigger surveys to them in the moment to understand why they bought it, what their consideration factors were, what they would have bought instead, how they found out about it, et cetera.

 


 
As a result, one of our best services is helping brands track the launch of new items, and helping figure out how did the consumer find out about the product, source of awareness, TV, referral from a friend, some kind of display in the store, how they liked it, whether they’re going to buy it again or recommend it. All those kind of things are insights that we can deliver way faster than any of the incumbents.

 


Adam Robinson:
If listeners want to know more about the company or the open opportunities you guys have, what’s the best way for them to do that?

 


Jared Schrieber:
Ah, just google InfoScout. We’re all over the place. You’ll see in on our website, we’ve got a blog, we’ve got a careers page, you name it. You’ll find us at InfoScout.

 


Adam Robinson:
Fantastic. All right, let’s talk about the people side of your business. I want to go all the way back to 2011. You and the founding team had the genesis of the idea, you start doing what you’re doing, and you get to the point where you want to scale beyond the founders. Tell us about that first hire. What was the job, how did you know you needed it, and take us through, from what you can remember, the process for picking that first person.

 


Jared Schrieber:
Wow. Well, I wish I could say we got off to the right start on that front. We needed an Android engineer desperately to bring our first app to market. Between my co-founder and a quasi-third co-founder who worked nights and weekends with us, we could build the iOS app, but we needed somebody to help on the Android side. In desperation, we just kind of made a rush hire, a rash decision, and we ended up regretting that for quite a long time afterwards, to be frank.

 


 
I think that was one of those experiences that helped us realize, you know what? There’s no substitute for making the right hire. You just can’t rush it. Even if you’re desperate and feel like the deadlines are looming, and you just have to get a body in the seat and get it done, it’s something that you’ll regret later if you don’t make the right hire.

 


Adam Robinson:
Without getting anyone in trouble, if you were to categorize the reason it was a mis-hire, would you say that was a skill mismatch or a culture mismatch?

 


Jared Schrieber:
Culture, without a doubt. I think the person was capable of doing the work within a box or a set of confines given enough direction, but how they went about it, ability to collaborate, ability to think outside that box in a broader perspective as we were trying to scale a relatively complex business from zero, none of those things were there.

 


Adam Robinson:
Okay. I imagine the process has changed over the last seven years. You’ve got now well over a hundred headcount working for you. That takes systems and process, and you’re known for the culture. It’s clear, anyone doing research on your company can see that it’s a people-first environment. Talk about the evolution of your selection process, how you moved from, “I hope this works” to where you are today.

 


Jared Schrieber:
Wow. Well, it’s interesting. You wrote about the best team wins. From our perspective, the best team is a team that loves working together to solve challenging problems, so what we need to figure out in the interview process is, one, does the candidate love to solve challenging problems? Are they excited and enticed by solving challenging problems? And two, would you love to work with that person to solve those problems? A lot of our screening now goes into creating real, practical cases and challenges for them to problem-solve.

 


 
An engineer might have to create a game of chess from scratch with code. And then, separate from that, we might work with them to architect some solution on the fly on a white board, collaborating with them to solve a problem, often a real problem that we’re actually facing. We just want to collaboratively work with them to see how they would go about it, and can we banter back and forth, and brainstorm, and come to conclusions together as somebody that we would want to solve problems with in the future together.

 


Adam Robinson:
Does this extend … I mean, certainly engineering is a great use case for collaboration, but do you shadow all jobs? Are you having sales people make cold calls in the office, that kind of thing?

 


Jared Schrieber:
We’ve created cases for every role. Sales, we’ve got two different cases that we use. They have everything to do with the upfront discovery, leading to a meeting, and the prep, all the way through the actual targeted kind of pitch and execution, where the interview committee acts as a prospect as if they were being pitched to and plays the roles in the room.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s awesome. All right, so I heard interview committee. I heard outcomes-based selection process. These are all things our listeners know, and readers know, are must-dos. What set of values underlines that whole process?

 


Jared Schrieber:
Oh, that’s interesting. I think some are explicit, and some may be a little bit more implicit. Let me start with the explicit in terms of how we work and operate as a company. I think if anybody were to do a little research on us, they’d very quickly see that we’re known for our transparency. We have a value that’s be transparent to a fault. We pride ourselves on sharing as much information as possible, from board-level decks and financials down to everybody in the organization, so everybody has full context of what’s going on in the business so they can make the best decisions possible, not only for their role but for the whole company.

 


 
One of the things that we’re trying to evaluate is how comfortable someone is with this idea that there’s full transparency and visibility in the organization. Is that something that they see and value? We tend to share a lot of information with candidates in the process, and they’re always surprised how much they learn about the inner workings of our company, or our strategy, or our approach to things during the interview process before they’ve ever been hired and signed an NDA, for example. Seeing, reading people’s comfort with that along the way is helpful to us.

 


 
Another value is we’re all entrepreneurs. We want people who are interested in taking risk, and managing an enterprise through risk, and taking ownership along the way in the process, or the end outcomes, that they truly act as owners. They take full responsibility. They’re willing to step outside their own role to help others to get something done. I think those are some of the things that are explicit.

 


 
I think the implicit as it relates to our culture and hiring is … you kind of mentioned it … people first, which is when in a great team, you treat people as people, as individuals first and roles second. If you’re on a sports team, you wouldn’t just think of the forward as the forward. You probably know that person. You know them well outside of the team dynamic, and have hung out with them, and know their likes and interests in other things outside of work, and you treat them as a person, not just as a role. I think that’s something that implicitly we value a lot at InfoScout.

 


Adam Robinson:
Was there an event, or an individual on the team, or some other external influencing factor that provided a kick in the pants for you to get more structured on the hiring side?

 


Jared Schrieber:
I think the kick in the pants was, I would say, three of our earliest hires were just, quite frankly, people we probably should not have hired. We took a step back after that and really evaluated, for any give role, how is it that we could ferret out some of these things that we ended up finding out later, after working with the person for a few months, that we probably should have and could have identified during the interview process, and to design an interview process to screen for these things that would be red flags of what are the things that somebody would do or exhibit that would make them not successful in this particular role, and make sure that somebody who might exhibit those, we flag before we hire them not after we hire them. You’re going to end up screening out some good candidates as a result, but only really good people make it through at the end of the day, and that’s the key.

 


Adam Robinson:
Let’s talk tactics now. We’ve heard about, just philosophically, the approach, some of the values and the reasons, how that all came together. Now, at the street level, day-to-day, I want to talk about rewards, and then the flip side of that, coaching and challenging discussions with folks. What’s the philosophy for the compensation, either tangible or intangible, for InfoScout?

 


Jared Schrieber:
One thing I’d say is whether or not there’s a variable component to the compensation really depends on the level of seniority of the role, or tied to some direct outcome, a la sales with sales commissions. With more senior individuals whose contribution is larger, then we’re certainly tying some kind of variable or bonus component tied to what they’re working on to their total compensation. Otherwise, we try to keep the vast majority of all bonuses and incentives an upside tied to overall company performance. We might set a set of MBOs, or it might be based on overall stock price of the company, but we’re really trying to align people towards a common set of goals as opposed to having it be based on individual performance.

 


Adam Robinson:
If I’m someone not getting it done, either I’m not ramping fast enough, or I am outright struggling or failing in the role, what systems or conversation structures do you use as tools to help me get where I need to be, whether that’s with you or somewhere else?

 


Jared Schrieber:
Ah, that’s key, by the way, and I’ll come back to that in a second. For one, I had the good fortune of becoming a manager for the first time at Intel early in my career, and they had a great management training program. One of the things I learned there was a process called the two-minute coach, which is, one, that whenever you see something that is good or not good in your employees, you need to call it out, and do so quickly.

 


 
Now, if it’s not good, you’re not necessarily going to call it out in front of the team, but as soon as you get the person off to the side, or shoot a private email, you let them know. Typically, that involves having a conversation with them, is a more productive way, and it starts by just simply saying, state what you observed. “I noticed X.” Don’t place a value judgment. Don’t say it was bad. Don’t need to say anything about it other than exactly what you observed, and let the person comment themselves. Are they even aware that that was an issue or a problem? Did they notice that they’d done it or not? And are they free to kind of converse about it?

 


 
From there, you can enter just, typically, a pretty honest conversation about the implications of it, and what is the goal. It’s kind of a reminder of what are we trying to achieve here, how did that help you or not help you towards that goal or objective, and then working together and, particularly, getting them to propose a solution in terms of how they’d handle that circumstance in the future or what they would do differently. I’ve just found that … It’s called like the two-minute coach or two-minute drill … to be super effective at having performance-related conversations with employees.

 


 
I tell all of our managers and leaders assume that everybody that reports to you wants to get better. You have to assume that anybody on your team just wants to get better. If you make that assumption, then it makes it a lot more comfortable to have a coaching conversation with a member of your team when you see them doing something that might be holding them back and not getting the best of their performance. If the team member knows that that’s expected, that, “Hey, we assume you want to get better, so we’re going to tell you when we see you doing something that we think is holding you back,” it makes these conversations happen a lot more naturally, and a lot more positively and constructively.

 


Adam Robinson:
Oh, that’s great. That sounds like, I feel like I read that before in Andy Grove’s book. Was that a Grove-ism at Intel?

 


Jared Schrieber:
I think he got it from an external consultant, as I recall. They made every manager go through that same training, so it was definitely driven by Andy Grove through the organization, but I actually think they pulled it in from an outside kind of HR organizational development firm.

 


Adam Robinson:
I’m so glad you shared that story. I think, in my experience, this notion of assume positive intent, assume everybody wants to do a good job and get better. That’s so important. Without the structure to have or navigate that conversation, the number of unnecessarily awkward conversations in business would go down. I think that framework is-

 


Jared Schrieber:
A ton. It’s critical to assume the positive intent. Assume that everybody wants to be better, wants to get better, wants to improve. And, by the way, if they don’t, they probably don’t belong on your team, and by having these conversations, you realize the people who really don’t care to be better and don’t care to improve.

 


 
One of the things I’m proud of in our culture is we actively encourage people to leave, and it’s not just a part of review cycles. If we’re finding that it’s just not heading in the right direction and they’re not going to be successful in the role, we have that conversation with them. It’s amazing how often the person agrees as opposed to fights it and go, “Oh, give me another chance, I want to figure it out,” they’re like, “You know, I’m just not seeing this either.”

 


 
We work with them with, say, a six-week timeline or something like that to go find something else. We treat them with dignity and respect as people. As opposed to an employee who gets a two-week notice and a check and says goodbye, we treat them as people so they have a job while they’re looking for a job. So often it just ends up in a great experience for both parties, for that individual who goes and finds something that is a better fit, and we as a company have an opportunity to find somebody who’s going to be a better fit. I think, in doing so, it raises the bar for all of our team members. They know that they can count on anybody that they’re working with to perform in their role.

 


Adam Robinson:
One of the things that I like to do is share, from our guest, the book that most influenced their thinking on the people side of their business, or their approach to management, or leadership. People want to dig in and further their own learning. What book for you, either business book, autobiography, and anything you can think of on your bookshelf that you remember, you took something from and it stuck with you?

 


Jared Schrieber:
I would say far, far and away, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, just bar none. By the way, not just on the people and HR side. I would say of all business-related books, that is far, far and away my kind of top read, top reference. I tell my managers, I give it to my managers for them to read, and say, “This is what I’m going to hold you accountable to. I will hold you accountable to uphold the principles that are outlined in this book.”

 


Adam Robinson:
Give our readers a glimpse into what one or two of those might be, or list [crosstalk 00:19:04].

 


Jared Schrieber:
In the book, it can be … We already touched on one of the topics. It can be as very simple as when you praise people, do it openly and publicly, but when you’re correcting someone or pointing out faults, do so privately, and with respect, and without necessarily some of the extra value judgment that goes on top of just kind of pointing it out with a positive intent to coach. That’s really drilled home through a number of examples in that book.

 


Adam Robinson:
Pretty amazing for a book that is now, it has to be approaching 100 years old.

 


Jared Schrieber:
It’s incredible. I mean, it’s a terrible title for the book. It’s such a turnoff in today’s age to say, “How to win friends and influence people.” Really, I wish it would just be renamed, it would do much better. But if you really get into what it’s about, there are so many truisms that hold true as well today as they must have 80, 100 years ago.

 


Adam Robinson:
We have a few minutes left here. I want to talk about your own lessons learned in this process. What is one thing you think, right now, you or the organization could be better at as it pertains to human capital or the people side?

 


Jared Schrieber:
I think we could be better at formal training programs for continued development of our team. I think we’ve done a nice job in a number of circumstances of helping junior employees pick up a number of new skills and grow themselves, but it’s been for really self-starters who have communicated that interest or motivation and we support them as opposed to making it a standard part of how we bring in talent and grow them through the organization. I think we do a nice job of onboarding people, but once they’re onboarded and how they continue to develop, I think we could be a little bit more formal and structured in terms of what we offer people as a means for them to continue to grow their skills and career.

 


Adam Robinson:
As a follow up to that, do you have full-time learning and development on staff now? Or is that an aspirational hire for you down the road?

 


Jared Schrieber:
Well, it wouldn’t be an aspirational hire for us. At 125, 150 people now, not quite there, but I think we are rapidly approaching to where that kind of hire would make sense for our organization.

 


Adam Robinson:
What’s the line you’ve drawn in the sand at the headcount where that starts to make sense?

 


Jared Schrieber:
I’m not sure I have a line in the sand. I think it’s just as we continue to grow and we identify additional resource needs of the organization, it’s carefully listening, not necessarily to exactly what gets said, but sometimes reading between the lines of where are we leaving opportunities on the table? Where are we struggling? Where are we not getting full leverage out of our team and talent? As we see that it has to do with, “Boy, I wish somebody could have stepped up, or knew about this, or had these skills.” As those conversations happen more and more, I think that’s going to be the trigger for us.

 


Adam Robinson:
Final question here. If you were back on the show in a year, and telling us about whether or not you successfully tackled the single biggest people or culture-related issue or opportunity that you have in front of InfoScout today, what would you be telling us happened?

 


Jared Schrieber:
Oh boy. I think this would be a story where we’re having to build out a middle layer of management as we grow, quite frankly. I mean, we’re just hitting a new scale now where I think the story would be that we successfully identified a number of team members who were ready to step up and build and manage their own teams, and that they were successfully armed with the tools to not only kind of recruit and hire the right kind of talent, but to build high performing teams themselves, the kind that they had been a part of when they started at InfoScout.

 


Adam Robinson:
Ladies and gentlemen, that’s the final word. You’ve been learning from Jared Schrieber, Co-founder and CEO of InfoScout. Jared, thank you so much for being with us today.

 


Jared Schrieber:
My pleasure. Thanks a lot, Adam.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast, where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next week.

 

 

 

 

The post Working Together to Solve Challenging Problems appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

Winning Over a Passive Candidate

Matt Schwartz, CEO and Founder of the executive search firm MJS Search, discusses how you can win over passive candidates, why your employer brand is important and more on this episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast.

 

Follow MJS Search on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google Plus, and Youtube.

Connect with Matt on Twitter and Linkedin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Transcripts:

 

Adam Robinson:
Welcome to The Best Team Wins Podcast where we feature entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes, I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the program, we’re taking a little bit of a different tack here. We’ve got Matt Schwartz, the founder and CEO of MJS Executive Search based in Scarsdale, New York. Matt is an expert on helping companies find and hire the right people. He is taking a macro level view of this with us here today. Listen up. He sees the market at the top of the food chain here, and I am so excited to have him here with us on the program. Matt, welcome.

 


Matt Schwartz:
Hi Adam. Thanks for having me on.

 


Adam Robinson:
Yeah, this is going to be fun. Before we jump into your approach, give us 30 seconds on what your firm does, for those that may not understand how executive or retained search functions.

 


Matt Schwartz:
Absolutely. We are a 15-year-old retained search firm. Retained means that companies actually hire us on exclusive and actually pay us upfront for our services. The reason why they do that is because we have specific functional expertise in areas that they need help with or don’t have that domain knowledge internally. I started this firm at the beginning of 2003 right after the first dot-com boom and bust. Companies had just spent millions of dollars building brands that disappeared overnight, and we realized that we needed to create a positioning that was going to be attractive if they were going to be hiring people.

 



For us, that started out as what we called measurable marketing. People were willing to spend if they could see an ROI on their investment. Over the last 15 years, you can imagine that has evolved dramatically into a lot more digital channels. We moved from measurable marketing to digital marketing transformation, and then one of our clients said, “Wow, you’re really involved in business re-imagination.” We focus on what we call transformational talent, which is often roles that have never existed before within our client’s business, skill sets that are not organic to the company or the industry, or roles that need a significant upgrade due to an infusion of digital marketing or technology.

 


Adam Robinson:
If listeners want to learn more about what you’re doing, what’s a good way for them to do that?

 


Matt Schwartz:
Yes. Our website is mjsearch.com.

 


Adam Robinson:
Great. All right. Let’s dive in here. Typically, what I’m doing is asking CEOs to take us all the way back to that first hire. I understand you’ve got somebody that or a couple of individuals that are helping you on these projects. Talk about how your team functions to help your customers find the right people, as that’ll give us some good context for the next 20 minutes.

 


Matt Schwartz:
Absolutely. For us, like I said, a lot of times the roles that we’re working on have never existed before within our client’s business. Once we win the opportunity and they feel comfortable that we’re the right firm to jump off the cliff with, to go down this very unique road to find these individuals, we spend a lot of time with that client doing a deep dive to make sure that we could be a true extension of their organization, not only understanding the company and their culture, but also asking a lot of questions around the job in terms of what this person’s going to be responsible for, what the organizational structure looks like, what resources do they have access to, budgets, not only reporting relationships but how involved will other senior leadership be and who are the stakeholders across the organization.

 



With that, during that time, it’s up to us as a retained search firm to be able to really manage the client’s expectation, because those are the times where the clients often want everything and the kitchen sink, but they hire us not only for our ability to bring people to the table, but to have insights on the market and help adjust their expectations to figure out what is going to be realistic for them to find a person that can do the job that they think they want this person to do, or what the realistic job is based on the market and the skill sets available.

 


Adam Robinson:
Having the benefit of seeing the market at the macro level, I know you guys are nationwide in your search.

 


Matt Schwartz:
Yes.

 


Adam Robinson:
Give us your take. As we record this January of 2018, it is the tightest labor market we’ve seen in decades. What are you seeing, and how are you coaching your clients to approach these critical hires in a labor market that is just so tough to navigate?

 


Matt Schwartz:
I think the best way to start is to think about, what are top-level candidates looking for in today’s market? When I talk about top-level candidates or some of these people in the most high demand, I’m talking about chief digital officers, artificial intelligence, machine learning folks, people who understand the nuances of today’s media world, general innovation. These areas are … or cybersecurity. These are just hot, hot, hot. If you think about what the candidates are looking for, believe it or not the number one thing our candidates tell us is that they are looking for a challenge. They’re looking for an opportunity to really transform and make a difference in a business. That’s actually the number one thing that attracts them. Obviously, right after the challenge comes competitive pay.

 



A lot of the world-leading tech companies, like the Facebooks, the Googles, the Amazons of the world, they are in a massive land grab, and they cannot hire people fast enough. Even though their cash compensation may not be as competitive as a lot of other companies, their ability to offer up significant golden handcuffs with restricted stock or options over a three to five-year period makes it super difficult for corporate America to pull these people away, because it often doesn’t mean they’re giving them a 10 to 20% increase. It means that they may have to increase their comp by 50% based on the amount of money they need to make up over a three to five-year period if that candidate stayed where they were.

 


Adam Robinson:
All right. We’re hearing certainly a challenge, fair pay, ability to make an impact. How are these passive job seekers … They may be open to work, but they’re not out there with their resume posted. How can companies today who want to do some of this themselves access this kind of talent?

 


Matt Schwartz:
The candidates that these clients want are the ones that are not actively looking. They’re the ones that are just rock stars, just crushing it at their current companies, but are open … Everybody’s open to listening. How do you get people’s attention, and how do you get them to say, “Huh, if that is as great as it sounds, maybe I should throw my hat in the ring”? That’s where an outstanding internal recruiting staff, which most of our clients have, or a third-party search firm like mine can really make a difference. What that comes down to is being able to communicate, what is that employer brand? What do they stand for? What is the story of the company and the job that’s going to give people a deeper understanding of the impact they could make? A lot of times, people have a perception of an organization, but they don’t know what the real reality is.

 



That’s one thing that I think we do exceptionally well is being able to tell that story of that transformation, that change, a company’s investment and how important technology is, but also how supportive the senior leadership is. These are the kinds of things that get people’s attention to say, “Huh, I really can potentially consider this and take the leap.” Then lastly, who that person will be working with is also a key issue. People go to work for great companies and great company brands, but if they don’t like their boss, it’s not going to work out. Hopefully that boss is a visionary, is a great leader, has the ability to help that person navigate and be successful in the organization. The more information we have on that, or the internal recruiting staff has on that and can tell that story, the more excited and interested a potential candidate’s going to get.

 


Adam Robinson:
Let me take this from the other side of the ledger. As listeners can sit there, think about their best people, and ask the question, “Am I doing everything I can do to make sure I’m delivering on my promise to them so they’re not poached,” what can companies do, what can leaders do, listening now, to check to see if they’re doing their best to keep the team that they’ve built? Why do people leave?

 


Matt Schwartz:
Yeah. People are looking for bigger and better opportunity. What that typically means, and again outside of comp, they’re looking for upward mobility. They’re looking for growth. It could be larger P&L management. It could be larger people management. It could be broader responsibilities from what they have. At least with our best clients, and we work with a number of Global Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 organizations, they spend a lot of time developing their people during their review period. They talk about, “Okay, you’re going to be in this role for X number of years, but let’s plan on … Let’s talk about where you would like to go within the organization. What skill sets are you looking to develop over time?” and figure out what skill sets that person may be deficient in so they can get them the right training, coaching, mentoring, so when it comes time to apply or get recommended for that next leadership opportunity, they’re ready to go. Again, the best companies are very much on top of that, because if they’re not continually asking that question and understanding the employee’s mindset, often that’s the trigger point when someone can put that thought in that candidate’s head and get them attracted to potentially make a move.

 


Adam Robinson:
If there is one mistake that companies make as they go about engaging the search process, either a misconception, a misperception, or a mistake they make when they’re in a search, what would you counsel listeners against doing, or what trap can they avoid?

 


Matt Schwartz:
I would say a company needs to have a very clear vision of the role. One of the things that we guide our clients to do is to develop what we call an asset test, which are the three to six key criteria that a candidate must have in order to be right for the role. Then they actually build a competency-based assessment, I do a competency-based assessment, against each candidate to figure out, do they match up against that asset test? Then the other thing is there’s often another short list of soft skills and personality traits that the person needs to represent in order to be a good fit for the company. Being laser-focused on that, having your interview committee not have someone re-hash their background over a course of four, five, six interviews in the course of a day, but having people focus much more on specific skill sets and examples can really help people get a clear understanding of the candidate, give the candidate a better interview experience, but also a broader perspective on the company, how they work, and the different roles that people have as far as the interviewers go in the process.

 


Adam Robinson:
What’s the best way that I, as a company engaging a professional firm such as yours, how do I get the most value out of the relationship? I’m going to be investing a substantial fee, but the value is there if I do it right. What does an ideal client do that really delivers value to them?

 


Matt Schwartz:
Yes. First, there are sometimes clients who view a search firm-client relationship as fetch and not search. It’s understanding that they need to invest the time upfront during that discovery process, as we talked about earlier. Two, make themselves available to answer any questions that come up during the search process, so we can move quickly, have a deeper understanding of something that maybe we didn’t get answered upfront.

 



Then from there, be a very active participant in terms of giving timely feedback on resume submissions and interviews, and making sure that they’re available for … We offer weekly update calls. They don’t have to be long. We don’t go through every single person we’ve contacted. Sometimes our searches take up four, five, six, seven hundred people to get a winning candidate in the boat. We don’t have to go through everyone, but we need to go through the most relevant candidates so they understand, “Okay, the search firm has done their job. They’ve come back, given us insights on what’s happening in the market, and these are the most qualified and interested people that have surfaced through their effort.” Again, making themselves available.

 



Then lastly, during the close of the search and actually making an offer and closing the deal, being able to be present and show the love to the candidate to express how excited they are to get them on their team and bring them into the organization. Very often, clients will look at this as a little bit more transactional, and the more senior you go, the less transactional these searches are.

 


Adam Robinson:
You mentioned something early in our discussion about employment brand being important. It’s something we talk about all the time here on this show. What role does brand play in the process, and how can listeners harness their own employment brand to increase the inbound interest in their open roles?

 


Matt Schwartz:
Yeah. When I think about some of our best, well-known clients, whether it’s an American Express or a PepsiCo or a Fidelity Investments, these companies have done a phenomenal job at getting on the lists of the best companies to work for and having it known out there that that’s something that is important to them, and really taking care of their employees. That’s one. Two, when I look at a company like General Electric, although they’re going through some rough times at this moment, over the last five to 10 years, it was amazing. They’re one of the few companies that went out and put out television ads showcasing that, “Hey, a tech engineer can go work on software for trains at GE and have a dynamic opportunity.” I don’t know if you remember that ad, but it was great.

 


Adam Robinson:
I do, the college dorm room where he walks in and says, “I’m going to work for GE,” and people look at him like he’s crazy. I thought that was super effective.

 


Matt Schwartz:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Companies that will take that shot and spend the money to do that are potentially going to get the attention of the market and say, “Huh, maybe this is a great option for me.” Yeah, I think that’s … Those are two things that I think are really phenomenal. Also, there are a lot of companies that … I think of Pepsi. We worked with them for many, many years. They’re always looking for great people, but just because you have a great background doesn’t mean there’s a job for you at Pepsi right now. They actually went ahead and put together pepsijobs.com, which lists jobs like a lot of other companies do, but you could also submit yourself to their database and say, “Hey, I do have an interest in working for your company if something else comes up in the future.” I know their internal recruiting teams would go there first to say, “Hey, who’s raised their hand and said they want to work here, opposed to us going and hiring a search firm or a contingency firm to go and do this for us with a big fee?” They’ve saved millions and millions of dollars in search fees just relying on people raising their hand and saying they wanted to work for their company.

 


Adam Robinson:
Now with the three or four minutes we have remaining here, I want to gaze into the crystal ball and just harness your power of future sight and look out. What does the rest of 2018 look like from a recruiting and hiring standpoint, and what trends do you see emerging now that, over the next two to three years, will impact employers in a meaningful way?

 


Matt Schwartz:
I just wrote a blog post that talked about, if your CEO is not the leader of the company’s digital transformation, you’re going to fail, basically, that we’re seeing companies just at war with so many startups that if they don’t change the way they do things, it’s going to get even more challenging for them in the future. One statistic is, since the year 2000, over 50% of the Fortune 500 have either been acquired, merged, or declared bankruptcy. If they don’t continue to grow and change, this is going to be a problem. What we’re seeing is companies completely reorganizing themselves, realizing that the siloed organizational structures of the past have created huge bottlenecks to innovate in the areas of digital and technology. They’re moving to a much more agile environment in order to be competitive, and are scrambling to acquire the talent in areas like artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud computing, smart grid technology. These are all trends that are coming and coming fast. Again, the CEO has to take the leadership position on this vision to really drive this forward.

 


Adam Robinson:
Now, does that mean that large companies are looking for early-stage talent? I know the examples. Small-to-big and big-to-small transitions are fraught with peril. When a large-cap company comes to you and says, “Hey, listen, Matt, we’re looking for somebody with a startup mindset. Let’s go into an early-stage company and pull an executive,” the things that make people successful at a startup are generally blank slate, lack of systems and rules. You can fill the vacuum with your own capability. That infrastructure is fairly rigid at larger companies and vice versa. If I come to you and said, “Pull me an executive out of a startup, and let’s go for it,” or if I was a startup saying, “We really need that big company thinking,” what are you telling me?

 


Matt Schwartz:
Yeah. It typically is massive organ rejection on both sides. I’m not saying that they want to go and hire people from startups. A lot of our large clients want people from the companies that are well-established today, the Googles, the Amazons, the Microsofts, where perhaps they’ve spent a few years building that foundation and building a lot of credibility, and then could bring it into their more traditional environments. Too many companies have hired the same MBA types for years, and they all have great analytic skills, but often they tend to be a little bit more risk-averse.

 



Some of these companies that have been pioneers in their industry, bringing someone in from one of those organizations could be tremendously beneficial. But when you look at someone from a startup, people usually feel if they like that startup culture, it’s going to be very, very hard for them to go into a larger company, especially if there’s too many layers, hard to get things done, hard to get decisions pushed through, and they can’t be as nimble as what they’re used to. Again, completely agree with you and definitely see a lot of organ rejection unless a candidate is highly motivated to make that happen and for some good reasons.

 


Adam Robinson:
I understand you’ve got some free tools and content that listeners can take advantage of to do some further digging on some of the things we’ve talked about today. Where can we find that?

 


Matt Schwartz:
Absolutely. Again, for more information on our firm, it’s mjsearch.com. We’re also offering a free e-book on transformational talent. You can text mjsearch to 44222. That’s mjsearch to 44222. We’ll ask for your email address, and we’ll shoot that e-book right over to you.

 


Adam Robinson:
Excellent. Ladies and gentlemen, that’s the final word. You have been learning from Matt Schwartz, CEO and founder of MJS Executive Search. Matt, thank you so much for being on the show today.

 


Matt Schwartz:
Thank you, Adam.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast, where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of the business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next week.

 

The post Winning Over a Passive Candidate appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

In 6 Years, Only 7 Employees Have Ever Left This 150-Person Company

 

David Blake, CEO and Co-Founder of Degreed, discusses his unique interview style, their mission-driven organization, their amazing retention rates, and more on this episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast.

 

 

Follow Degreed on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Youtube, and Linkedin.

Connect with David on Degreed, Linkedin, and Twitter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Transcripts: 

 

Adam Robinson:
Welcome to The Best Team Wins Podcast, where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes, I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the program, David Blake is the CEO of Degreed, based in San Francisco. Degreed is a venture-backed firm founded in 2012 with 150 employees and doing some pretty amazing things. David, welcome to the program.

 


David Blake:
Thank you.

 


Adam Robinson:
We are here today to focus on the people side of Degreed, but before we dive in, let’s set the stage. Give us 30 seconds on Degreed and what you do.

 


David Blake:
Yeah. The company was born out of the question, “Tell me about your education,” and when you ask that of people, they inevitably tell you where they went to university and what degree they have. It’s just this reflection of the fact that we have no universal way to speak to our lifelong learning, and so that was really the ambition and mission of the company was to make all lifelong learning count and matter and be transparent in our lives and in the market so we can connect, and grow, and develop, and transact on that learning.

 


Adam Robinson:
Yeah. I read a piece written about you in Fast Company where you talk about that fact and equate it to asking an exercise question and someone telling you about the time they ran a marathon 23 years ago.

 


David Blake:
That’s akin to if I said, “Tell me about your health,” and you said, “I ran a marathon in 1999.” That really is an absurd answer to that question, but we answer our education in the exact same way. “Tell me about your education,” and you say, “Well, I went to SMU in 1999. I graduated in economics.” It’s not because marathons are bad, and it’s not because college is bad. It’s just a reflection of it really is an absurdity. We’re conditioned to it, but it’s an absurdity that when I say, “Tell me about your education,” you tell me what you did 25 years ago.

 


Adam Robinson:
If listeners want to learn more or check out the courses, what’s the best way for them to do that?

 


David Blake:
Yeah. Degreed.com, it’s free for anyone to use. While we, ourselves, aren’t a provider of education or content, really, our platform is about helping you find and discover the best resources online, offline, to learn anything. We’ve integrated with nearly the entirety of the world of training and learning providers and so that you can have the best resources discoverable to you, and you can structure that and create a pathway for yourself to learn whatever you need from the best content out there.

 


Adam Robinson:
All right. Let’s talk about the people side of the business, and start going back to 2012 when things got started. Talk about how that first team came together and that moment you knew it was time to go beyond founders and put that first person on the payroll.

 


David Blake:
For me, it was a fairly, I don’t know what the right word is, audacious, scary start. We live in San Francisco. We had been a part of startups previously. By their very nature, startups don’t always pay the best, sort of the risk-reward. We had been able to save a little bit, but not a lot, and it was an expensive city, and I was a father of two, and at the time, my wife didn’t work. When we started the company, we were spending … We had very little personal runway, and so hiring people was a big step for us, but also knew that this was something I wouldn’t be able to do alone and so had to balance that and set out to find a co-founder.

 



Eric Sharp, my co-founder, was the first person to join. It would be a few months before I was able to be connected with and recruit him and pull him into the company, and just a phenomenal talent. We’ve been at it ever since together, but it was a big step. For the first couple of months, I was paying his salary on my credit cards, and so it was important that it was a good match and a strong fit because there was a lot of risk involved.

 


Adam Robinson:
What about him did you believe, at the time, made him the right person to make this investment with?

 


David Blake:
Yeah. The decision criteria and process is a lot different in the early days than it is later on where it becomes much more structured, and you’re talking to a lot of people, and there’s some recognition to the company in the space and in the industry. It changes a lot. I mean, in those early days, some of it’s who out there is hair-brained enough to go on this crazy ride with you? People who are in a position to go on a crazy adventure like that, it filters a lot of people out, I mean just for the risk profile, for the financial ability, and luckily … and then you have the talents and the fit.

 



Eric and I were really aligned. His own education, he came from, really, the back woods of Wyoming and grew up … Education was really the point of leverage that enabled him to elevate his position in life, and to be able to unlock opportunities, and to meet and reach his ambitions. He had a deep passion for education and the power that it could have in others’ lives, and so we were deeply aligned with that. His spouse, Sarah, was also really interested and deeply committed. I think, in those early days, it’s especially important that the couple and the family are also committed to it because it takes so much from in those early days, and a lot is demanded, and a lot, ultimately, is sacrificed by spouses and families. Then, his life, luckily, was enabled to make that jump, where he was part of a company that had just recently been acquired, and it gave him a, well, sort of the financial opportunity as well as the window in his career to be able to take something like this on.

 


Adam Robinson:
You alluded to the fact that hiring later in the stage of the business, perhaps where you guys are now with 150 people, much different, a little more systematic than, perhaps, looking for utility players early on. How did you, organizationally, learn how to go through that journey? Take us through the maturation of the selection process, and when was, “We like this person. We think they could do lots of things,” not good enough anymore?

 


David Blake:
Yeah. I mean we have two principles as a company when it comes to who we let on the bus. One is we aspire to hire well, and the second is we aspire to fire well. I think all companies probably aspire to hire well. Not all will openly talk about or explicitly make it a goal to fire well. We believe both are important. The principle that guides who we hire is really the discipline of it has to be an easy yes. When the candidate isn’t right, it’s actually pretty easy. Once there’s, “We like this person, but,” that one’s usually fairly easy to dismiss that candidate and keep looking.

 



Often, that principle has been tested most when we love the candidate but timing isn’t right, or but the price isn’t right, or but the role isn’t right, or but the … It’s a principle that extends beyond just the individual themselves. We use it to encompass a discipline, holistically, on dimensions of budget, and timing, and role, and phase, and all of those things. We’ve lived by that principle.

 



Then, as I have had to recruit and then interview, and vet, and hire, and sell, and close, and onboard a lot of people over the course of this journey, there was a … It’s a process I developed early in my career that I use for interviewing people, and it’s served me really well. I’m happy to talk a little bit more about that should it prove interesting.

 


Adam Robinson:
Yeah, let’s go there. This is a system that you developed through experience and earlier on. Take us through that. What does that look like?

 


David Blake:
Yeah, so this came, really, as I became an early manager in my career. There’s nothing about the process in the book, but really, what I look back to and what catalyzed the thinking that would go into this process I developed, I was reading Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness at the time. He does talk a little bit about how and who they hire and what questions are asked, but this process isn’t immediately a reflection of that. It really just sort of stirred the pot for me.

 



One of the challenges of being an entrepreneur, and a founder, and CEO, and growing a team of diverse talents and job functions and roles is that you’re often having to recruit people in a area of expertise where you’re not a subject matter expert or, in many cases, where you have no subject matter domain. This process is one that I found serves, adapts to that very well, is able to get a lot of information out of people, and even puts people in a position where it puts a little bit of pressure into the interview itself to where you’re able to get a reflection of how people are able to deal with a challenge.

 



What the process is, it’s really quite simple. I bring a pad of sticky notes into every interview I do, and I do two things with those sticky notes. It’s a similar exercise. I do it twice. The first is I give the sticky notes to the candidate and ask them, “What are all the skills and attributes and traits that are going to be required for you to be successful in this role?” Then the candidate is then required to, one trait or attribute or skill per sticky note, and it usually ends up being 12, 14, maybe 15, 16 things, and one per sticky note, and just ask that they put them down in front of them as they come up with these.

 



That first step is really a reflection of does this person know what is required to be successful, and how well is this person acclimated and self-aware of the requirements of the job and the role and what it requires to be successful? I will sometimes fill in a couple of holes if I see something that I believe is important to the job or the role that they missed.

 



Then, the next step of it all is that I then ask the candidate to rank order all of those things. On the table now are only positive attributes and skills, by the very definition of the task, are required and necessary to be successful. You have only good, positive things in front of you. Then I ask the candidate to rank order those things in the order in which a reflection of themselves, which are they strongest at to what is, ultimately, their weakest of those attributes. This is, by the very nature of the task, a bit of a difficult challenge because it is forcing people to force rank what is entirely positive things.

 



There’s no right or wrong answer here, necessarily. People are ultimately, I believe, under that pressure. It’s hard to think about what might be the right answer or how to game it. Really, you get a pretty good reflection of people’s truth and people’s reality, which is just which of these things are they best and strongest at? Good things are at the top of the list, and good things fall to the bottom of the list, and how the candidate can react to that pressure of that task of having to self-identify things that fall to the bottom of that list.

 



Then, the last step of it all is I ask … Then I come back over it, and I ask people about it, “Why did this end up at the top? What about this one in the middle? Why are these at the bottom?” Seeing people be able to articulate their strengths and … Ultimately, it doesn’t even mean anything at the bottom of the list is necessarily a weakness. It’s just the weakest. Seeing how confidently they are able to stand behind their attributes and their skills and their abilities, even those things that fell to the bottom, and it actually does end up revealing quite a bit, both how people handle that moment and that articulation, as well as what things are at the top of the list and the bottom, as well as that full spectrum.

 



You come away with a lot of information in a short amount of time. You see the shape of people’s skills. You see how they react in that moment, and you’re able to get, really, pretty good exposure of who they are, what they’re going to bring to the table, where you might have to complement and/or augment their attributes or skills as you bring them onto the team. That’s the first.

 



The second, just quickly, what I do is the same thing, but then it’s, “What are you optimizing for as you think about the next role that you’re gonna to take?” Similarly, on each sticky note, it’s things like geography, and industry, and company size, and culture, and mission, and team, and growth opportunities, and challenge, and comp, and title, all of those things that affect our roles and that people value and are important in how we shape our careers. We get all those things out on the table, and then they are asked to force rank which of these things are most important to you and are you optimizing for, and which of these things, ultimately, are the least important to you?

 



Then you come away with a really good sense of what people value and what’s important to them. That helps, one, in seeing a reflection of who they are, but also, ultimately, where you have a candidate who you do want to bring onto the team and hire and close, it helps bring that alignment of what’s important to them so that you know how you can meet those things that are important to them.

 



We’ve often found, over the course of Degreed as we’ve recruited and hired people, companies often think fairly narrowly in a job offer: cash, maybe equity. We have two levers to play with and, otherwise, every offer is a template, and those are the two knobs that we’ll turn up or turn down. Really, people often care about a lot of really very different things. If you know what they care about, you can often meet those things, ultimately, to both parties, ultimate satisfaction much easier than you can just paying people a lot. It’s served us really well. It’s been a bit of a real secret weapon in my career. It’s served me and, I think, Degreed exceptionally well.

 


Adam Robinson:
Yeah, I can see why. That’s pretty incredible. This is for all roles in the organization.

 


David Blake:
Yeah. Anymore, I don’t interview every candidate who joins, but especially early on where I did, I mean I would have to interview engineers, QA engineers, designers, I mean just people whose … I’m not a domain expert, and I found it was an especially helpful way to bring a meaningful conversation to the table even where there is an assymetry of expertise between me and them. I’m able to tease out of them what’s important and still engage with them around those points not necessarily being an expert. I used it for all types of roles.

 


Adam Robinson:
Is there a common set of core values that have been developed in the business that help guide your decisions in addition to the individual interests, likes, hot buttons, or other ways they’ve self-ranked things, as you discussed?

 


David Blake:
Sure. Absolutely. I’m a first-time CEO and founder. I’ve now been in the role for six years, so I’ve earned one or two stripes along the way. Really, as I started the company, it was the first time being CEO, the first time being a founder, and so it was the first time that it fell to me to give that articulation of the mission and the vision, the culture, and the brand, and the strategy. I sat down to that task, really, very early on. I mean I think it was, likely, still probably only Eric and I as I sat down to it. We did come up with, very early on, an articulation of all those things.

 



When we talk about our company’s culture, we define it as the principles by which we will make decisions and how we treat each other. We have 12 company principles. They’ve really held very true over the six years. They’ve evolved ever so slightly, but have served us very well. They range from some being about who we hire, how we structure the organization, our strategy around financing, to diversity and inclusion, to flexibility and family, to what we aim to achieve in the organization and the outcome we hope to achieve. It’s a diverse set principles.

 


Adam Robinson:
As you look at the people side of your business, David, is there a single philosophy that sums up your approach to that if we were to define it as find and keep the right people in the right seats? How would you describe your approach to that at a macro level?

 


David Blake:
Yeah. I mean I think, definitely, our mission is our guiding star. We want people who are behind that and who self-select in to that. That’s sort of the apex. If they’re behind the mission, then we want people. We use our cultural principles to create alignment inside the organization. As far as people, I think, it has to be an easy yes. That really has been the guiding principle. There really is not other philosophy. We don’t talk about A players. We don’t talk about anything else. It’s the guiding principle has always been that it has to be an easy yes.

 



I don’t believe in hiring for fit. I believe in the power of diversity, and I think those things are contrary to each other. I think hiring for fit is code speak for hiring people that look, think, act like yourselves. There’s no consideration given for that “fit” as we both recruit and interview and hire people. We like bringing in people that really are different from ourselves. When we talk about our company culture, it’s not how we act. It’s not the office culture. It’s not what it feels like to live a day in the life at Degreed. Our principles are how we make decisions and how we treat each other, not what vibe you get when you walk through our office.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s been consistent, then, over the life cycle of building the employee base, then.

 


David Blake:
It has, yeah. Yeah.

 


Adam Robinson:
Translating that, then, to rewards and recognition, how is that philosophy reinforced in the way you pay, reward, and promote the people that are on your team?

 


David Blake:
Yeah. The most, on the nose, is really actual compensation. How does it translate into compensation? Then I think there are other ways that rewards extend beyond just compensation or equity, as I mentioned. One of our principles is equality, and to that principle, we really … Compensation is one of the things that we speak to in that principle. There’s a whole range of philosophies, and there’s a whole science and industry of practice behind compensation, and there’s a lot of ways, yet, you can come out on this question.

 



For us, we saw it as a spectrum where, at one end of the extreme is that flexible approach of you get who you want, the best people. You pay what you have to. Don’t ever let compensation keep you from hiring the best person. The other end of the spectrum is, for a given role, pay everyone the exact same. There’s pros and cons to both. That flexible approach means you’re more advantaged and have more flexibility and degrees of latitude in who you hire and what it takes to get them through your door, but one of the downsides of that approach is, over time, ultimately, people are going to be joining your organization from a diversity of contexts and companies. They’re going to be being paid different things as they enter the door. Some people are better at negotiating than others, which doesn’t necessarily always immediately translate into any reflection of how competent they are in achieving their role inside the organization.

 



You can draw people into the company and through the door, but often are paying very … have a high variance in what you’re paying people for the same role, or for the same job, or for the same work. Over time, that can lead to a inequality in pay, and that is something that we were sensitive to as we seek to be an inclusive and diverse and aspire to have a quality is one of the principles that guide our organization.

 



The other end of the extreme is pay everyone the exact same. It’s a rigid approach. It’s one where it often is hard if you’re looking for the best people. They’re in companies where they’re well paid or situations where they’re … and it can be a challenge. That was a question that we confronted very early on and had to decide how we were going to come out. We sort of split. We take two approaches inside the organization, and both are a bit of down the middle. There’s a bit of a compromise in this.

 



For some roles inside the organization, everyone has the exact same compensation structure. Those are often the roles where there is a variable compensation piece to it, so everyone has the same base, and they have the same rates on the variable comp. That’s our sales organization, our sales development organization, a couple of other roles, and they all have the exact same structure. Now, at the end of the year, they’re going to make varying amounts because of that variable compensation, but they have the same structure on it. Just because one sales rep was being paid more as we brought them through the door, we don’t give them a sweeter deal on the rates on their variable compensation. Everyone has the exact same structure.

 



Then, the other approach that we’ve taken is a matrix where, for roles like engineering, for our designers, there’s a matrix that corresponds with skill level. At each skill level, there is a small range that allows us some flexibility but also balances that need for consistency, and so there’s a small range at each step of the matrix. That’s how we’ve tackled it.

 


Adam Robinson:
If you think about the last six years in the CEO seat, what is the greatest lesson or learning that you’ve taken away from building the team that you’ve built?

 


David Blake:
That is a really tough one. I mean I think I’ll come back to I think Degreed has operated, really, quite gracefully, as we’ve grown. Our retention has been phenomenal. We have had, over the course of six years and 150 people, we’ve now had maybe six or seven people ever leave the organization.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s amazing.

 


David Blake:
Our retention is exceptionally high. We’re an organization where people have complete autonomy and discretion as to whether they’re in the office or not and when and what hours they work. For me, it’s actually the principle I talked about how we aspire to hire well and aspire to fire well and the principle that guides who we fire. This is a principle we talk about openly, publicly. This one takes a little bit longer to explain.

 



It’s, perhaps, less punchy, but is really just we’ve got this mission to make all lifelong learning matter. We say to jailbreak the degree, and it’s a big, audacious mission, and it’s taken a lot of work, and we believe deeply in it, and we believe 100% of our energies need to be focused on that mission. If, at any point, people are doing things that require us to turn our attention inwards and to be expending energy on ourselves, sorting through our own issues or challenges, that is energy that’s been stolen from pursuing the mission, and that is the day that we will move to terminate someone from the organization.

 



What that principle has done is further reinforce this alignment towards the mission and just that really is what we are here to do, and we have very little tolerance for … People problems mean you’re stealing from the mission. We’ve hired well. We give people a lot of autonomy and trust. We really seek to reinforce people in their … keep them well leveraged in their personal missions, but then we also have this really high bar of what we expect and demand of our people, and it’s kept the organization operationally efficient and mission-driven and a great place to work, and I think it’s served us well.

 



I suppose all of that is to say if you give your people a North Star and a pathway to pursue it and work hard to enable them, keep high expectations of them, I’ve really seen people rise to meet it again and again. It’s amazing how well the organization is able to operate even with this extreme and high amount of autonomy that we give every individual inside the organization.

 


Adam Robinson:
Final question here to wrap things up, David, if you were to come back a year from now and report to the community here whether or not you were able to successfully tackle the single-largest people-related challenge or opportunity that you have in front of you in the business today, what would you be telling us happened in 2018?

 


David Blake:
I mean I think people, even good people, the best people, we look for patterns and routines and processes. Those make us more efficient. That is, generally, a positive attribute. One of the things I’ve found, even of the best people, is when … Our strategy is one where we talk about our strategy in chapters. Our mission is sort of this guiding North Star and has been consistent, but our strategy, it’s, “All right. Step one, we’re gonna go do this, and then, step two, we’re gonna do this.” Shifting people in an organization through a strategy that evolves every 18 to 24 months … Our organization, right now, is sort of at another one of these fairly material inflection points in our strategy. I think, a year from now, what does success look like? It’s where we’ve been able to take our organization, and they have been able to efficiently and quickly adapt to the new strategy and not lost any time to it looking backwards.

 


Adam Robinson:
Ladies and gentlemen, that’s the final word. You’ve been learning from David Blake, CEO of Degreed. David, thank you for being with us on the program today.

 


David Blake:
It was fun. I appreciate it. Thanks so much.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast, where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book The Best Team Wins, which you could find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we’ll see you next week.

 

The post In 6 Years, Only 7 Employees Have Ever Left This 150-Person Company appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

3 Changes I’m Making in 2018 as CEO

In my role as CEO, I began working with my team to lay the groundwork for a killer 2018 many months ago.  We strategized, identified our biggest opportunities and crafted an operating plan that we all feel great about.

In short, we’re pumped.

Over the holidays, I found myself thinking about what I can do to maximize my contribution to the organization. I’ve discussed here before that success as CEO requires relentless focus on three things–people, strategy, and cash–and as I reflected on the prior twelve months it was clear that I have plenty room for improvement. More specifically, I need to give myself the room to execute against these three priorities.

With 2018 now in full swing, I have resolved to make these three simple (but not easy!) changes to how I do my job:

1. Guard my calendar like Fort Knox.

During the last three months of 2017, my calendar was completely filled with appointments nearly three weeks in advance.  Most of these meetings were external; prospective financial partners, industry intelligence, prospective customers, and prospective vendors. These meetings enabled me to stay close to the market and to our company’s operating needs, but they came with a high opportunity cost.

I had zero time to think.  I was absorbing hundreds of data points, but I wasn’t giving myself enough space to let my brain do what it does. The only downtime I had was on airplanes or at the extremes of the day–before 7am or after 9pm.

This year, I am going to guard my time like the precious commodity that it is. Doing so will require me to fight my natural tendency to say “sure, I’ll spend a few minutes with you” and to say no to anything that’s not related to our people, our strategy or our balance sheet.

I’m also going back to what worked for me when we were in our startup phase: blocking off a few hours every day of untouchable “GSD” time, and scheduling one four-hour block each month to sit quietly and think strategically.

2. Cut travel days by 30 percent.

One of my biggest responsibilities as CEO is spending time in front of large customers, top prospects and important strategic partners.  However, when I analyzed my travel log from last year, I realized that nearly 30 percent of my of my travel days were related to what, upon reflection, were trips that I could have delegated.

In total, I spent over 100 days on the road in 2017.

I’ve spent the last two years transitioning most operational responsibility to a hand-picked and highly capable management team, with the goal of spending more time on big relationships.” Now I’m seeing that the definition of a big relationship has changed considerably; I don’t need to go to every meeting anymore.

It’s time to give others in this organization an opportunity to make the big pitches and log that podium time.  It’s great for my team’s development, and it frees me up to work on the few but truly game-changing opportunities sitting in front of us.

Another outcome from cutting travel by 30 percent is that I can be a much more present and engaged husband and father.  (The biggest benefit of all.)

3. Discipline through simplicity.

For years, I’ve kept my professional objectives on track with a very simple strategy that I learned from Verne Harnish, author of Scaling Up.  It goes like this: every day, your first activity is to take five minutes and make a list of the five most important things that you need to get done, in order of priority. Then, focus relentlessly on the first item on that list, and don’t do anything else until that first thing is done. At the end of the year, assuming 260 working days, you’ll get 260 really important things done.

Last year, I let this previously formed habit slip.  Some days, I wouldn’t create my list first thing in the morning. Some days, I wouldn’t make my list at all; I’d have 7:30am meetings on the calendar and it was just go-go-go from the jump.

Getting out of this high-impact daily habit resulted in an increase in stress and also introduced anxiety; when I didn’t write the important things down, it was hard to know if I was focusing on the important versus the urgent.

This year, I’m getting back to this highly effective habit of planning my day around the most important things that need to get done, versus reacting to things that happen in the business. Of course, stuff happens and the day can get derailed, but I’m going to do my best to get that one thing done each and every day, no matter what unplanned craziness transpires.

What are you going to do differently in 2018 to set yourself up for success?

 

Note: This post originally appeared on Inc.com.

The post 3 Changes I’m Making in 2018 as CEO appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

Great Sales Team Culture

This week our featured guests are Jeff Brandwein, Sales Manager at Hireology and Chief Motivator at wakeupitsdayone.com, and Joe Arko, a Hireology Sales team member. Jeff Brandwein is known in the office for having a distinct team culture within Hireology, Joe and Jeff discuss what makes a great sales team culture and what interests top-performing sales candidates during the interview process.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Transcripts:

Adam Robinson:
Welcome to the Best Team Wins podcast where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson. For the next 25 minutes, I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring.

 



Today, on the program, we have a special episode featuring two of our superstars here from Hireology, Jeff Brandwein, one of our sales leaders and Joe Arko, who is a sales professional extraordinaire on the floor. Pulled them off the sales floor today, don’t tell anyone on my board and into the studio to talk about culture and growth, so I’m so excited to have you guys here. Welcome to the program.

 


Joe Arko:
Thanks for having us.

 


Jeff Brandwein:
Thank you.

 


Adam Robinson:
All right. Guys, so we are a couple of weeks away from the end of the year, and as you know, we’ve got plans to grow and do some big things next year. I know what our listeners care a lot about is navigating that growth in terms of the right people and preserving the culture, and so I want to get it both from you: leader’s perspective and from the team member perspective. Jeff, how do you … You’ve been here since employee six or seven.

 


Jeff Brandwein:
Yeah, five and a half years.

 


Adam Robinson:
You’ve been here a long time; the whole time. Let’s call it the whole time, been here the whole time.

 


Jeff Brandwein:
Yeah, pretty much.

 


Adam Robinson:
We’re 140 people now; we’re adding 25 heads next year. Right out of the gate we have 25 rows we got to fill. What is your approach to making sure you’re able to do what you do with all of these new faces?

 


Jeff Brandwein:
I think it’s a lot of what … I think I’ve actually learned from you in terms of the culture that we have and I think it’s getting everyone focused in on that end goal, which is, obviously, being a sales leader is that quota: that number that you have to hit but then, importantly, what is the team vision. As a team, what do we believe and what do we value in and getting everyone to buy into that.

 



Those are the things that do with the new people that I’m adding to my team is trying to get them bought into those specific core values for a team, beliefs, visions and where we want to go as a team. We center around that along with the quota, and if we can get everyone on the same page there, that’s the most important thing for me.

 


Adam Robinson:
When I come in the morning and I see your team sitting in Indians, I say, crisscross apple sauce now on the floor having a team meeting in a circle; it makes me wonder, what’s actually going on over there? Will you tell me what that’s all about please?

 


Jeff Brandwein:
We have a team trophy that … Actually, this started about two, three years ago where we give out a trophy to the reps who previous got it the month before, gives it to their coworker as the one who showed the team’s core values over that month.

 


Adam Robinson:
Core values like what?

 


Jeff Brandwein:
One of our core values would be day-one attitude.

 


Adam Robinson:
This is team core value. You’ve implemented different from company core value, which, by the way, I think is awesome. Go …

 


Jeff Brandwein:
What we do is we have … We don’t believe in first place, so there is no such thing as a team member finishing in first place for the month. Basically, we have a second place medal that we give out and we have a third place cap that says, “Superhero in training.” The idea of it is that, if you’re showing those core values and the beliefs that we live in throughout the month, then you’ll get awarded that from somebody on the team.

 



The trophy itself is basically … It’s actually funny, one of the reps on the team had a trophy that he stole from high school that is a dance trophy for the Indiana State High School Association of Dancing or something, and he actually brought it into office and so now that’s our trophy, which is actually configured with our old trophy that somebody broke down.

 



What’s actually cool about that story is that the old trophy got taken down by somebody else we don’t know who, but instead of just getting rid of the trophy; we actually just built a better and bigger trophy.

 


Adam Robinson:
Our stolen trophy was replaced by a bigger, better stolen trophy.

 


Jeff Brandwein:
Exactly.

 


Adam Robinson:
I like that. Joe, what’s it like to work for this guy?

 


Joe Arko:
To work for Jeff Brandwein? Well, it’s a bit culty. Sometimes you feel a little like you’re in a cult but one that’s really good for you. If there was a cult, then it was all focused on performing at your best, eating well, coming in fire up and selling a lot of product. That’s the cult that Jeff Brandwein is.

 


Adam Robinson:
Sign me up for that cult.

 


Joe Arko:
It’s pretty great.

 


Adam Robinson:
Eat right, sell more.

 


Joe Arko:
That’s about it. At certain times, you do detach from a situation and laugh at yourself; a little bit, you are sitting crisscross apple sauce on the floor with a bunch of other grown human beings listening to Enya. By the way, that’s something you may not have caught is it’s Enya on repeat throughout the entire ceremony.

 


Adam Robinson:
You’re all in on this.

 


Joe Arko:
For sure. It’s well put together. I think, if Jeff does anything better than anything else he does, it’s to build these rituals in, and so everything is circled around the core values. I mean, that’s the same that you run the company is the way that Jeff runs his department. Again, you have the trophy that gets given, then you add the medal, the cap in there and you add in these other daily and weekly things. I find that Jeff is really good at building rituals in whether it’s on a daily cadence or on a monthly cadence or on a quarterly cadence that make people feel  they’re part of a bigger unit than themselves that they’re accountable to the other people in that unit to do their best and to get their job done day in and day out.

 



There is some tongue-and-cheek to it. We know that we’re sitting on the floor listening to Enya talking about how much we like one another’s characteristics as human beings. It is a little silly at times but, dogging it on, it gets us in, fired up and ready to work most days.

 


Adam Robinson:
Remember back when you were new, what was going through your mind the first time you sat through one of Jeff’s, it’s called a meeting experience.

 


Joe Arko:
Trophy ceremony.

 


Adam Robinson:
Trophy ceremony. For listeners, what I want them to understand is this is completely by design and we’re joking about this now, but this has worked for a long time for us. You came from a challenged sales environment the last time.

 


Joe Arko:
Yeah.

 


Adam Robinson:
I think you were selling medical waste disposal or something.

 


Joe Arko:
Yep. Under the gun, all day, every day.

 


Adam Robinson:
We’re glad to have you here.

 


Joe Arko:
Glad to be here.

 


Adam Robinson:
What was it like walking into a trophy ceremony type selling environment and what were you thinking? What did I do?

 


Joe Arko:
Well, it couldn’t have been any further removed from the world that I was coming to. We’ve got another guy on the floor with me who was selling copiers before this, and I think he was in a similar environment: very tight control of everything that every salesperson is doing.

 



I can’t even call-to-mind the first trophy ceremony, particularly. It’s just the way that the whole team is run. It’s relaxed and it’s fun, but because you have a number that you have to hit and you’re constantly reminded of that number, we get emails about it. Jeff’s doing his managerial job to make sure everybody knows where they’re at: to their quota and whether or not they’re performing on it.

 



Because it’s so ubiquitous; because everybody knows what that is, we can almost forget about it. We, almost, on a daily basis can then drop back down and have fun with one another. We can sit and have these funny moments or these jovial things. We’re not talking about numbers at the trophy ceremony. First, the guy who hits his number; the guy who’s 160% of his number, doesn’t even get rewarded at that ceremony. That’s not what it’s about. It’s, “Hey, we have these things that we really value as an organization and we trust you to perform to the things against which we’re measuring you.” From there, if you don’t like coming into work every day, then I’m not doing my job right as a manager, and I hate to speak for you Jeff but that’s what it feel like and to be in that environment is fantastic. You can enjoy it, you know what you’ve got to do and you know that you don’t have somebody breathing out of the back of your neck to get you to make phone calls all day.

 


Adam Robinson:
Jeff, I want to talk to about what you say to potential new hires in your interview with them. That’s what we talk a lot about on this podcast are tactics or techniques shared by other business owners or leaders on how to get the right person in the door. You’re out there doing it every day. You’re talking to people every week. What expectation do you try to set with them so that they don’t walk in the door and go, “Oh my God, what did I do?”

 


Jeff Brandwein:
I think one of the things that I definitely do when I’m interviewing or talking to a candidate, I actually try to … I’m really honest with them about what the job is going to be, so I’m very upfront. In a way, it’s almost like I’m trying to not sell or trying to tell them, “Hey, be careful because this is what you’re getting into.”

 


Adam Robinson:
Give me the pitch. Let’s hear it.

 


Jeff Brandwein:
I tell them how many phone calls you’re going to make. I mean, you’re going to have to be making 30 to 50 phone calls. We’re very metrics driven, so you’re going to have to set 12 meetings around 8; we have an accountability meeting, you’re going to be putting your numbers up in front of the team.

 



If you don’t want to be making cold calls every single day because your job is not going to change; your job day-to-day doesn’t really change and Joe can attest to this. It is coming in, you’re hitting the phones, you’re calling the same people in and out every single day, so if you don’t want to do that, this is not going to be the job for you. I will say that authentically to a candidate when they’re asking me questions about the job itself.

 


Adam Robinson:
I’m the candidate here. I hear that, I say, “I’m willing to put the time in. Jeff, what happens next?” Let’s say I do a good job, what’s my opportunity? How do you message that in a way that is not a potential false promise?

 


Jeff Brandwein:
I think, what I will tell people is that I always focus around the four things. I always tell them, “Look, the number one thing that sets apart all the great people here is their mindset.” If you have a great mindset, you come in with your beginner’s mindset, growth mindset and really try to work hard, that’s the most important thing. Then, second, we talk about attitude and grit is an important trade. Then, talk about business acumen. Business acumen is really important to talking to owners every single day, and then, four is just having a high EQ. You’re talking to different types of people every single day.

 



What I’ll tell them is, “The job’s really hard but here’s the thing, you don’t have to be a great salesperson.” I don’t really believe that’s what it’s about. It’s doing those four things really well, you’re going to wildly successful here. That’s what the best reps, in our company since I’ve been here for so long, I’ve seen. If took any out of our top reps, I would say those are the four traits they have.

 



I tell them, it’s like, “The thing is that I can help you and guide you to those four things, but you got to come in and want to do those four things. If you think you can do those four things, you’re going to be supersuccessful here.”

 


Adam Robinson:
Joe, from the candidate perspective, we don’t have to talk about Hireology specifically, but what I want you to help give our listeners is the mindset of the jobseeker or the person consuming this information as you evaluated this organization and heard those kind of messages. How does that lineup with what you and even extrapolate that out to what you think others, like you, want or look for and how can our listeners leverage that to be better at building trust and winning hearts and minds of people that might want to work for them?

 


Joe Arko:
It’s interesting to think about … Granted, I’ve been here for a year and a half, so it’s been a while since I went through that process and then, in the interim, I’m talking to business owners all day about what candidates want to see, so that may influence my …

 


Adam Robinson:
Some would call you an expert.

 


Joe Arko:
Yeah, some. I don’t know, if all would quite yet. It might be a few months away from totally understanding everything that goes into the hiring process. But, I mean, putting myself back into those shoes coming in here, it’s really the things that you wouldn’t consider or what struck me the most.

 



It was the way that the sales floor looked; the way that I saw people interacting with their coworkers. I mean, most of what comes to mind from two Augusts ago are the things that did not transpire in a conversation with the person that was interviewing me. It was, does this seem like a place that I want to work? Did I get along with guy that was interviewing me? It was much less about the logistics of my conversation with Jeff and much more about how I felt about him being my boss. I met him; we talked for quite a while about what the job entails: is this guy a smart guy? Do I think that he’s going to be able to lead me to do more than I could, if I were on my own?

 



Then, from there, all of the questions that I was asking myself were around, am I going to fit in here? Does this place mesh with my personality or am I going to land in another position where I’m struggling to fit in and I feel uncomfortable when I come into work in the morning, I sit down at my desk and I put my blinders on because I’ve got 10,000 things to do and at the end of the day maybe I talked to somebody about golf for five minutes. Is this somewhere that I can come in and be happy 45, 50 hour a week every single week indefinitely and am I going to enjoy for this guy?

 



I sat down with Jeff; I sat down with Max, our Vice President of Sales, and I couldn’t have enjoyed the conversations that we had more. Those were two guys that I knew I wanted to work for. I loved the way that the sales floor looked and I said, “Sign me up.”

 


Adam Robinson:
What about the look of the sales floor. Could you describe to us in a way that would help our audience understand what that was for you? What can entrepreneurs do to set the floor so that it’s a desirable place for someone whose pretty good at selling wants to actually give them their time?

 


Joe Arko:
Sure. It was a delicate balance between people shooting the breeze. I saw people up from their desks sitting at somebody else’s desk having a conversation, it may have been work related maybe not. At the same time, I saw a ton of people on the phone. What that told me is nobody is going to crack a whip, if you have an anecdote that you want to tell to the guy sitting next to you, but at the same time, this is a culture where everybody is got numbers to hit, everybody knows exactly where they’re at on the month and they know what their activity needs to be in order to get there.

 



Again, maybe I’ve got some glasses on from having been here for as long as I have, but that’s what I value about the sales floor. Speaking with hindsight is there’s some autonomy to have a good time at work and everybody knows where they have to be at the end of the month. You have everything that you need to get your job done and there’s nobody beating you over the head with a 2 by 4 to try to get you there.

 


Adam Robinson:
Jeff, as a leader of people, philosophically, how are you approaching that job? What do you believe that you think is a mutable truth as it relates to hiring and managing sales professionals or revenue generators?

 


Jeff Brandwein:
I think the biggest thing, like I went back to, I mean, you hear about and I read about them all the time like the greatest coaches to ever coach, teachers and everything. They all have a vision, the values that they wanted the team to work towards but it’s all about the amount of the effort, working really hard and whether you win or lose.

 



I think, to me, what that means to different and how you portray that to the team, you can do that in many different ways. For me, though, like I said, the biggest thing is the core values and the vision statement. During the interview process, I have some questions around some of the core values that I have because I want to see, if it’s something that’s within line with what this person’s like.

 



For example, with my team, and Joe knows this, you got to have a ton of energy because you got to make a lot of phone calls, you got to come in here excited. One of the best questions I love to ask people is, what are you most passionate about? I really try to dive deeper into once they tell me what that is, like, “Tell me more about that? Tell me why. How long have you been passionate about it?” Things like that because I want to know, if somebody is truly a passionate person or they’re passionate about something and personally or professionally. I want to know that because that can tell me that that person has a ton of energy. They’re optimistic; you can see how optimistic they are about something. That, all, relates to the core values.

 



If I was going to interview people and bringing people on, you just want them to see, if they’re already bought into those core values that you’re already thinking. Are they just going to come in and just work hard? Because at the end of the day whether they win or lose it really doesn’t matter, it’s all about how hard you work and that’s the kind of message that I try to get out of them and see, if that’s what they’re looking for.

 


Adam Robinson:
What, then, is one thing you want to do differently or improve upon to take your management game to the next level in 2018?

 


Jeff Brandwein:
I think, for me, I think it’s … Though, I do a good job from a team perspective of getting everyone on the same page, one of the things that I’m trying to work on is trying to guide more the individual reps to things that motivate them because I think everyone can buy-in. I mean, it’s been three years. Everyone seems to buy-in to these core values that we have, which is amazing, but I also understand that they buy into that but to take them to the next level, and then also me to help them in our team. Each person, though, is driven by something else, and so I need to do, or I want to do a better job of trying to guide them to the little specific things that motivate them the most to try to get the best out of them because just because we have these core values and people buy into them doesn’t mean that that’s the only thing that motivates them every single day, and so I want to help to try to position them to be better salespeople and in turn I believe that that will come back to me as a leader and help our team grow.

 


Adam Robinson:
I’m going to do this to you, Joe, right now. What’s one thing Jeff can do differently that would make him a better leader?

 


Joe Arko:
Well, he’s not my manager anymore, so I have absolute autonomy to say whatever I think is appropriate. Well, if Jeff does anything well, it’s his energy. It’s the passion that he brings into work every day. If I would give Jeff, looking him in the face right now, one piece of advice on how he could manage his reps more effectively, I think it would be to be a Pied Piper for that energy. He comes in and he’s fired up, he’s ready to go. He’s usually screaming at the top of his lungs and its Wednesday morning meeting with his team. Everybody in the company knows what’s going on with his team and what they’re doing.

 



I would say, having left Jeff’s team, I wish that I had taken more of that energy with me. I don’t mean that it had rubbed off on me and I left and I had this. I think, if Jeff could do anything better, it would be to better explain why he has that much energy, to get to the reps that are working with him, the ideas that make him excited as he is. Not just the energy itself but the generation of that and why it makes him as excited as he is to get to work so that, then, when they do go to a different team or they do go to a different company, it isn’t just, “Hey, remember how fired up Jeff was? Let’s try to be like that.” It’s more of an idea of, “Man, Jeff had all these fantastic ideas that went through his head every day and if I can just have a couple of those at the beginning of my day here, then I can be a little bit as fired up as Jeff was coming into work.”

 


Adam Robinson:
Let’s take it home, then, with more of that type of topic. What is the most impactful book you’ve read recently and would you recommend it to our audience, Jeff?

 


Jeff Brandwein:
A great book that I just read about leadership is Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull. He is the co-founder of Pixar. To me, I read a lot of books, and Jocko Willink’s book, Extreme Ownership, is probably number one in leadership books for me, and number two, I put Creativity Inc.

 


Adam Robinson:
Joe?

 


Joe Arko:
I’ve got two answers but it’s the same title, so Mastery is the title of the book. Robert Greene wrote a compilation on it and he talks about the lives of all these famous individuals and how they attained mastery in these different areas: it’s Da Vinci, Tiger Woods and Mozart, and how they became what they became. That’s an absolutely fantastic read.

 



Then, there’s also another book entitled Mastery written by George Leonard, who was a practitioner of Aikido, I believe. The whole point of his book is how to master something over the long term. Robert Greene’s is how to go from not knowing anything to mastering something and talking about the lifecycles of those individuals. But Mastery by George Leonard, the theme is to love the Plato. He talks about having, instead of practicing; it talks about having a practice. When you have a practice and you’re in a Plato, you’re just going to work. I’m going in today, I’m going to concentrate on this thing and, if I don’t get any better by the end of the day that’s okay because I’m doing this to do it.

 



It’s the process of working on things that is the rewarding part and, if you do that, then you’re going to continually improve but you’re also not going to … These peaks and troughs where you’re really excited about your progress, and then you’re feeling bad because you’re not on a hockey stick anymore. He just talks about love what you do every day, do it because you love it, and if you’re constantly working towards getting better you’re going to hit Platos, then you realize that that’s just another phase in your development. I think there are some really good messages in there.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you have been learning from Jeff Brandwein and Joe Arko, Hireology each, extraordinary individuals. Thank you both for participating in this extra special episode of the Best Team Wins podcast. Thanks guys.

 


Joe Arko:
Thanks for having us.

 


Jeff Brandwein:
Thank you.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s a wrap for this week show. This is the Best Team Wins podcast where we’re featuring entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people’s side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book, The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Make sure to share this podcast with someone you love. We will talk to you next week.

 

The post Great Sales Team Culture appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

Ready for Remote?

In a world that’s rapidly evolving to make remote work easier and a new workforce demographic that wants to work anywhere (look at the success of the Remote Year program), you should be asking yourself: Can we offer remote jobs at our company? When you open a job and list the city as “Anywhere, USA,” it can be a differentiator in your ability to attract and retain top talent.

Hireology, the company I co-founded in 2010, began with a remote engineering team. We were managing for speed and cost and it was impossible to find local engineering talent on our startup budget. Now that we’ve been doing this for a few years, it’s become clear that our remote policy is a differentiator for our employment brand. 30 percent of our 130-person workforce is remote, and remote workers exist across all departments.

There are three components of a successful remote work policy that you need to get a handle on before you take this path.

1.Team

It’s easy for remote employees to feel like they’re on an island. Teams and meeting cadence keep people accountable and offer camaraderie and purpose: utilize daily syncs, weekly huddles, quarterly conversations, and/or any other opportunities where your remote team is able to check-in on measurables, ask questions, get coaching and feedback from their manager. It’s critical that your remote employees feel like they are part of your team, working together towards a common goal.

At Hireology, we have monthly Town Halls where we align on our mission as a company and answer the team’s questions. We use instant messenger technology to facilitate a “water cooler” environment for our remote team (more on this below). We fly everyone into Chicago for an “onsite week” twice each year to drive maximum team bonding. You can figure out what works best for your company, but make sure that your remote employees feel like part of the team.

2. Technology

You need the technology and systems in place to make remote work at your company successful before you ever hire a remote employee.

Wifi — A strong internet connection at HQ is critical. Everyone thinks, “I can get wifi anywhere,” but when you’re trying to run an all-company huddle and 30 percent of your team can’t hear what’s being said because you can’t get enough upload speed to make it work–not cool.

We give our remote employees an internet stipend to help remove the burden of pricey plans at home and we offer wifi hotspots to folks that are constantly traveling. We upgraded the office to fiber optic internet with the express goal of improving the team’s experience in our weekly all-company huddle.

Video Conferencing — Any video conference technology that gives you the ability to record the meeting, share your screen, and conference in many people from many different locations will get the job done. You need to be able to communicate and collaborate effectively and easily and nothing works better than the face-time enabled by video conferencing.

Cloud Storage and Applications — Google for Business offers the ability to collaborate and share documents seamlessly through their cloud storage drive and business applications. We love that we’re not renaming files with “version_2” “version_3” etcetera and emailing them back and forth every time someone needs to change a document and you never have to worry about running out of server or hard-drive space.

The Water Cooler — We all know that missing Game of Thrones or Insecure on Sunday means we’ll miss the water cooler chat at the office. Providing the proverbial water cooler for your remote team allows for freeform interaction and the critical space that helps employees get to know each other as people.

At Hireology we use Hipchat and many other companies use Slack for this function, but these platforms aren’t just a water cooler. They’re messaging and collaboration tools necessary for effective remote team communication.

3. Trust

Trust is the most important part of being a remote employer and can also be the most difficult for some managers. You’ll wonder, “How do I know that my employees are working?” You don’t, but you have to trust that they will–but this is true in any business, with or without remote employees.

The best way to set yourself up for success is to set clear expectations and define success with measurable goals that get reported on regularly for all to see.  In my experience, providing people with clear expectations, the tools to succeed and the leeway to work on their terms are a recipe for creating strong trust between managers and their team members.

Once you’ve got a handle on these three areas of your business, you’re ready to reap the benefits of offering remote employment. Go ahead, open that job in “Anywhere, USA.”

Note: This post originally appeared on Inc.com.

The post Ready for Remote? appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

The Social Promise: an Interview with David Klein, CEO and Co-Founder of CommonBond

 

David Klein, CEO and Co-Founder of CommonBond, knows that his people are the most important predictor of his company’s long-term success. On this episode of  The Best Team Wins Podcast, we dive into how CommonBond’s social promise impacts their culture and their recruiting efforts, what it takes to build a long-lasting company, why non-monetary compensation is more important than anything else you can give employees and much more. This episode is not to be missed!

Follow CommonBond on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, and Youtube.

Connect with David on Twitter and Linkedin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Transcripts:

Adam Robinson:
Welcome to The Best Team Wins Podcast, where we feature entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson and for the next 25 minutes, I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring.

 



Today on the program, David Klein is the CEO and co-founder of CommonBond based in New York City. CommonBond was founded in 2012, currently has 85 employees and is backed by a who’s who of venture funds, including Social Capital, Tribeca Venture Partners, August Capital and others. We are so excited to have you on the program today. David, welcome to the show.

 


David Klein:
Thanks Adam. Great to be here.

 


Adam Robinson:
We are going to focus on the people side of CommonBond. To set the stage for our listeners give us 30 seconds on who you are and what you do.

 


David Klein:
Sure. CommonBond is an education finance company. We lower the cost of student debt for those who graduated from college and university. We lower the cost of student debt for those currently in school. And we lower the cost of student debt for employees through a suite of student loan benefits that we provide through employers. Our mission really is to make finance more affordable, more transparent and much easier to manage.

 


Adam Robinson:
What are a few of the ways, just to give our listeners some context, ways or products that you’re doing then?

 


David Klein:
Sure. I’ll mention two things. The first is what we became well-known, and that’s our refinance product. That is to say, if you went to college university and you needed to pay your way with student loans, just like I did when I went back to business school. Then you are eligible to refinance your student debt upon graduation. The reason people tend to like to refinance their student debt on the CommonBond platform is that we save people on average about $24,000 when they refinance with us. In large part because of how we use data and technology to better underwrite folks and give them a fair shake on their interest rate. That’s the refinance side of the house.

 



We also do the same thing for students in school. But the second piece that I wanted to mention up top here, that might be interesting for your audience, is something that we call our employer platform. We’ve built an enterprise technology platform that has a suite of student loan benefits that employers like to offer their employees as a way to attract and retain top talent. For example, one of those student loan benefits that we offer is something we call student loan contribution, or student loan repayment.

 



We’ve built technology that enables an employer to contribute say $100 a month towards employees’ student loans. We call this the 401k of student loans. It’s relatively nascent. A lot of people are clamoring for it on the employer side, certainly on the employee side. It’s something that we’re very excited to be providing to the broader market through employers.

 


Adam Robinson:
Pretty awesome. I can imagine that the interest is pretty high, particularly from employers, on how to add that benefit. If folks want to learn more, where would they best do that?

 


David Klein:
Sure. Go to our website at commonbond.co, that’s commonbond, one word, dot CO.

 


Adam Robinson:
Fantastic. Thank you for that. Let’s dive right in. I want to start off talking about the mission of your organization. I of course had student loan debt with my MBA. It sounds like the founders of the business, from what I’ve read and researched online, you guys started the business having debt yourselves.

 



I think everybody understands that it’s pretty intense to try to pay, certainly a graduate student loan off, if not undergraduate student loans. The mission’s pretty noble. How does that mission, to make life a little easier for people, play into your ability to market your company as a great place to work?

 


David Klein:
Yeah, I think it has a lot to do with it. Actually in our case I think we’re uniquely positioned in that we have what I would call a dual social mission. The first has to do with the very core of what we do. We exist for no other reason than to save people money and make their lives easier. That is why we exist. When I had to take out student loans to pay for my graduate education, and I realized that rates were too high and the process was too complex and the service was really poor, I knew I wanted to change that. That’s why we exist.

 



In fact, we’re the only company in the space. I like to say that’s a FUBU company, For Us, By Us. We’re the only company in education finance that refinances, that provides student loans, that had the personal pain ourselves and through that pain as well as our backgrounds in finance and our entrepreneurial ambitions, did we start CommonBond. That’s number one, we exist to save people money and make their lives easier.

 



Number two is something that internally we call our social promise. This is something that’s pretty unique in all of finance and all of education. We’re the first and still only company to have a one for one social mission, whereby for every degree funded on our platform, we fund the education of a student in need. We do that through a partnership we have with a group called Pencils of Promise based here in New York, with a chain of over 400 schools globally.

 



That in concert in what it is that we do every day I think has been refreshing for a lot of folks in the workforce who are looking to work for companies whose values they share.

 


Adam Robinson:
It’s incredible, that social promise, which is very prominent on your website. How has that impacted the kind of talent you have opting in, saying, “Hey, I think I’d like to learn more about what you guys are doing.”

 


David Klein:
Yeah. You know, I would say that if I looked at the floor today, probably 80% of the people who work here, either heard about us and wanted to work here because of our social promise, or rather heard about us because of the social promise, or accepted our offer because of our social promise.

 


Adam Robinson:
Pretty incredible.

 


David Klein:
It’s a pretty high number. It is remarkable. When you meet the people who work here, they are equally remarkable people. These are people who are committed and caring and smart and hungry. The kinds of folks that you want around you, especially at this stage of business building, where you’re looking to build out a company, a great company, for the long term. I feel very fortunate with the types of folks that the team is able to attract to work here over time. I do think that is at least in part driven by our social mission.

 


Adam Robinson:
One of the things our listeners tell us they really love to hear is that inflection point moment in the business, where you went from co-founders and an idea, to, “Wow, this is actually working,” and it’s time to bring some outside people in. Wind the clock back for us and take us back to that moment, that it was time to [inaudible 00:08:08] people in from outside that founding group. Talk to us about the thought process there, and to what degree did you know what you needed and what you were building, versus just trying to put some good utility players on the team and figure it out?

 


David Klein:
Yeah, there are a lot of questions in there. Let me start with what it was like to bring on the first couple people outside the founding team, and then we can go from there. When I think about our first employee, our first employee is a guy by the name of Nate. Nate I had originally met about a year before we ever launched the pilot for our company.

 



The reason I met him is because I was going to business school at the time in Philadelphia and there was something called the Drexel University Entrepreneurial Legal Clinic. I was going to Penn at the time, I was going toward a business school. I had applied to the Penn Entrepreneurial Legal Clinic and had been roundly rejected. So I applied to the Drexel Entrepreneurial Legal Clinic and was roundly rejected again. But because I kept pursuing both and Drexel was the one that ultimately responded to my continued push for feedback, I was able to work with a group of second and third year lawyers at the time, to put the very first formation documents of our company together.

 



The student, the third year law student at the time, who was lead in that clinic was Nate. As it would turn out several months later after our first summer as a business, and between first and second year of business school, we had done a number of things. We had posted on social media, hosted community events that we had put on. Nate saw those and he just reached out cold, after several months of those formation documents, and said, “Hey, I’m around. I noticed a lot of the activity on social media. Are you interested in some help?” Of course as an early stage founder, when somebody is offering you help, you take it.

 


Adam Robinson:
Heck yes.

 


David Klein:
It just so happened that Nate’s timing was impeccable because the day after he reached out and I said yes, we had secured our very first outside investor term sheet. We were able to-

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s good timing.

 


David Klein:
It was fantastic timing. He came to us, not necessarily looking to get paid immediately, he was looking truly to help. I feel grateful that we were able to pay him after he was on board helping us for about a month or so after we had closed our first round of outside capital.

 


Adam Robinson:
Nice work Nate, good timing there. You know, that first employee hire is so fascinating to me, because they have such an out-sized impact on the early trajectory, and really frankly whether or not it’s going to work. It sounds like Nate was the right person for that job.

 



So, the term sheet happened and of course the funding close. How did that change your mindset as an operator now that you’ve got this talent machine you needed to crank up so that you deployed capital wisely, but also quickly enough to meet the growth gates that you know you needed to meet?

 


David Klein:
Yeah, the mindset goes from a couple folks who are working together every day, either directly or virtually through technology. To now, you have some capital, you all get it together in one room so to speak, or our very first office. By the way, our very first office was also the same place that I and my other operating co-founder Mike and Nate our first employee, lived for over a year together, but also worked out of.

 



It was at that point that we said, “Okay,” with a little bit of money, not a ton, but with a little bit of money and with some runway, “it’s time to,” as you mentioned, “scale up with people and the right amount of people.” And so we went out about hiring folks. We hired a product manager. We hired folks to focus on marketing and operations and customer service and credit risk, in our case it’s very important to the business.

 



I’ll be honest, it’s not an easy thing to do. Especially if you’re a first time founder of particular scale. Why is it that somebody would work inside of a very small startup with just a handful of people, when they have other options and opportunities in front of them? Add to that the fact that as an early, early stage company, you’re not going to be able to pay a whole heck of a lot of money from a cash perspective, relative to what somebody could find at a traditional place of employment.

 



There has to be a very, I think there has to be a very strong shared belief in what you’re doing. From an altruistic perspective, kind of from a day in, day out source of motivation perspective. As well as to believe that the stock that you have and the equity that you get in the company as an early stage employee will one day turn into something that is meaningful. Again, not easy to do. It really requires really strong shared belief in what it is that you’re doing. The rest I guess as they say is history.

 


Adam Robinson:
Currently then what informs your decision when it comes to whether or not someone sitting in front of you might be right person for the job or not?

 


David Klein:
What’s interesting is now it’s a very different calculus. We’ll get a few hundred resumes for each role that we have open. We’ve been able to develop a little bit of a name for ourselves, certainly in our space. I think increasingly so in the talent market, in part because the social mission that we have as mentioned before.

 



The way we think about bringing new talent on board, because culture is important to us, because culture is ever-changing, because culture is the result of human interaction, which is really complex and impossible to nail down at any given point in time, we’re looking for certain qualities or themes of qualities that people have.

 



When I think about what a top performer looks like at CommonBond, it comes down to three things. One, they have a great attitude. Two, they demonstrate real ownership. That is to say they exert great initiative. They’re stepping up and into gaps and they’re filling those gaps either themselves or by bringing others together. Three, they deliver meaningful results. That is to say, if attitude and ownership was how someone went about doing their job, meaningful results was all about what someone was able to accomplish in their job.

 



If someone can accomplish meaningful results consistently over time on the what, and deliver that with a great attitude, and having demonstrated real ownership on the how, that’s a top performer. So when we go through our recruiting process, we are looking for those qualities who comes on board to help us to get to where we’re going.

 


Adam Robinson:
David, you have mentioned earlier in our discussion this belief driven, or mission driven, or share understanding or belief of what you’re doing as an organization is important. Do core values play a role? Is there a documented belief system that you use to manage the business?

 


David Klein:
There is. We have 10 specific company values. We probably should reduce that. It’s a lot to remember. But it runs the gamut between putting our customer first, to being kind, to working hard, playing hard, to having really high standard, holding people to it and constantly getting better, to solidarity, in that we’re all in this together, the rollercoaster ride of building a company from scratch.

 



I’d say those are the documented values, or the themes of values that we have documented. I also think there are unspoken values that I think any company has, and certainly we do too. I think the unspoken values have to do with why we exist as a company, what it is we do to positively affect the community around us, inside the office, outside the office, at home and outside the office abroad. I think those are the kinds of things that signal to whether it’s prospective hires or current team members, signals the kind of company we are, to give them a sense of, “Is this a place that I want to go into work every day?”

 



For example, I talked to you about a one for one social mission. That’s one thing. But we also have something every year called the CommonBond Social Impact Award. That is to say that every year we go on a search for the country’s top social entrepreneur. We believe our goal and our mission in part on the social side is to encourage, empower and inspire other social entrepreneurs. That is to say, people who use for-profit principles and motives to drive social good. It’s a $10,000 award that we give out every year. We’ve done it for four straight years. We’ll continue to do it.

 



This last year the team came to me and said, “Hey David, you know there’s a lot in the press about women in technology.” Really, from the Trump election on there’s been a lot written in the headlines, and much of it is negative. My team had come to me and said, “Hey, we’re women in tech. We really like it here. We think this is a great opportunity. We think that with some more data and a productive storyline and narrative we can make tech and finance a much more welcomed place for women.”

 



So the team put together the first Women in Tech Week, endorsed by Mayor de Blasio. We had many different corporate partners, including the VMBA, ClassPass, The Muse, Betterment. A whole host of companies came to join us to really encourage, empower and inspire women in technology and in finance. We’ll likely continue, we’ll certainly continue to do these things over time. We’ll likely continue to add to our suite of, what I’ll consider social impact driven activity.

 



I do think that speaks volumes and signals to folks externally to come aboard. By the way, we don’t it to recruit great talent. We do it because that’s who we are. It just so happens that it speaks to a large broad swath of folks who are in the job market.

 


Adam Robinson:
Well, I can think of no better way to make those values truly authentic, than to live them in that kind of a way. Hats off for putting values into practice and demonstrating what that looks like in the real world. I think it has a big impact when it’s not just words on a page.

 


David Klein:
Absolutely.

 


Adam Robinson:
Let’s shift sides of the brain here and talk more operationally about how you actually manage this stuff. Let’s start with your compensation philosophy. Think of the different components, it’s either base salary, upside, equity, you’re going to learn more than you would somewhere else. Talk about your general approach to what the value you deliver as an employer to people work for your organization, and perhaps how that fits into your recruiting strategy.

 


David Klein:
Sure. I think from a pure monetary comp perspective, our approach is relatively simple and straight forward. That is, we want to be fair relative to market, and we want to be consistent relative to other folks internally. While that seems kind of simple, if we were able to, if the company was able to deliver on that 100%, 100% of the time, then we’d be in good shape.

 



So, fair to what’s market for a particular role and experience set, consistent internally amongst employees. That’s from a monetary comp perspective. Then I there’s non-monetary comp. Part of non-monetary comp is what we talked about already. Which is, how does one feel about the company they’re working for? Are they looking forward to coming in to work every day? Do they feel as though they’re effecting positive change in the world? Do they feel as though they have responsibility to deliver real impact?

 



We’ve talked about that already, and I think that’s incredibly important. There’s another piece of non-monetary comp, and that has to do with learning and development and recognition. It’s very important to, again a broad swath of folks, to learn and develop. What I tell my company is, “Hey look, CommonBond was built to be a professional playground for top performers,” and I really mean that. What that means is want to ensure that this place continues to be a place where people feel like they are learning, they are developing, by doing their everyday job. That’s really important to me and I think it’s really important to the folks that we bring on board.

 



I also mentioned recognition. I think that can come in many different forms. I think that can come in peer to peer shout outs. I think that can come at the team level, calling individuals in teams. I think that can come out at the company level, whether I give a shout out to an individual or a team at our Friday lunch and learn, where I’ll spend 30 minutes to an hour in Q&A with the company, or over email after the product team releases notes after a big release to call out certain individuals and certain teams that were really influential into getting something out that’s going to move the business in a meaningful way. I think there’s the learning, development and recognition piece of non-monetary comp as well.

 


Adam Robinson:
Weight that for me David, how important is the non-monetary recognition or the peer to peer uplift, relative to overall satisfaction? On the left hand of the scale let’s say a fair trade of time for money gets it done, versus we really have to lift each other up through daily acts of recognition. Where does it fall in terms of your focus philosophically?

 


David Klein:
I actually think the non-monetary comp is just as important if not more important than the monetary comp. In fact, many times monetary comp is nothing more than a proxy to somebody about how appreciated they feel, or how recognized they feel. Sometimes if people feel less recognized and less appreciated than they should then, I’ve seen this before, what can tend to happen is that they want even more money to compensate for that.

 



I think our comp philosophy, as mentioned before we want to be fair relative to what somebody could get in market for a similar job. We’re able to kind of pay market for various roles, certainly now than we were when we were just starting out. I think as long as we do our job and meet that fairness threshold, fairness to market threshold, it really does come down to, how well can we as a company, how well can we as leaders across the company show appreciation and give recognition to our people?

 


Adam Robinson:
As we wrap up here our time, look back over the last four years and connect the dots for us. What would you sum as perhaps the biggest lesson learned or thing you know now to be true that perhaps you didn’t know before you started this incredible hyper growth journey?

 


David Klein:
I don’t if this is something new that I learned, but it’s certainly been validated and affirmed 100 times over. That is, in my opinion, the most important thing to a company at any stage vis-a-vis its long term success, is its people. I know that might sound trite to say, and I remember when I was an employee at large companies in corporate America before business school and before I started CommonBond, where I heard leaders say something similar. But having been in those shoes now, having started something from scratch, realizing what it takes to build a great company that lasts a long time.

 



I have zero doubt in my mind that the quality of people we can bring on board, and the quality of our culture to make great people even greater and retain those people over time, is in my opinion the single most important predictor of long term success at a company. This is something I think a lot about. This is something that keeps me up at night. This is something that is always at the forefront of my mind. It’s effectively, people and capital, people and capital, people and capital. The things that in my opinion happen to be the existential cornerstones of what it means to build a great and lasting business. That’s what I would say to your question, and how important I view people and the culture that they operate in.

 


Adam Robinson:
There it is, ladies and gentlemen, in black and white out there walking the walk. Final couple of questions here, is there a particular book that you’re reading now that you would recommend to the audience, that could help inform their thinking on this topic, or management in general? Something that you really liked or really has stuck with you.

 


David Klein:
Yeah. You know, I’d say one of the books I’ve read in the last year that I’m glad I read was, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. I’d say that was a good one. I’d say that in terms of a management book, or a people and culture oriented book, I don’t know if it’s couth to say and if not you can edit this piece right out, but there’s actually a podcast that Reid Hoffman does, Masters of Scale. He has one podcast where he interviews Reed Hastings, CEO, co-founder of Netflix. Netflix is known to have a pretty incredible culture.

 



In fact they created what’s called the Netflix Culture Document, 127 PowerPoint page document that Sheryl Sandberg called, “one of the most important documents to come out of Silicon Valley.” In any event, that podcast I think anyone who’s serious about people, and building culture as a way to build a sustainable company long term, should listen to that podcast, if not also read all 127 PowerPoint pages of the Netflix Culture Document. Big fan.

 


Adam Robinson:
Excellent. Excellent recommendation. If you were to come back on this show a year from now, and share with us whether or not you were able to successfully tackle the single biggest talent or people related issue, or opportunity, that you have in the business, what would you be telling us happened?

 


David Klein:
I would tell you that we were able to grow our employee count substantially, and come out the other side a stronger organization because we had the right people process and governance in place to absorb that people growth in a way that turned growth very positive and productive. I think one of the things that goes maybe a little more underappreciated than it should is, we think a lot about growth and it stops there.

 



We think that growth on its face is a good thing. “Oh, you’re growing your company by 50%,” or, “100% employee count over the next six months,” or, “12 months. That’s fantastic.” It is fantastic, if you’re able to pull it off well. I think that’s where the conversation ends, but frankly that’s where the really rich conversation comes. How do you pull off that kind of growth in that short period of time, in such a way that allows you to maintain your culture, allows you to maintain the self-governing values that help people operate in a day to day basis.

 



How do you think about the quality of people management throughout your organization? How do you think about people management skills improving over time because as a company and organization grows, so too does the complexity of what you need to do as a manager and leader of people. That to me is where the real conversation starts. That to me is the sign of a great company, a company that can absorb 50% to 100% headcount growth over to six to 12 months increments, consistently over time. If we’re here a year from now, then I’d be happy as a clam to be able to tell you, “We grew substantially over a relatively short period of time, in a way that our organization was able to absorb and productively use as a platform to going to the next level of scale.”

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you have been learning from David Klein, CEO and co-founder of CommonBond. David, thank you. Super, super thoughtful and really deep experience share there for our listeners. I know they’re going to get a lot out of having listened to you tell that story. Really appreciate you being with us today. Thank you.

 


David Klein:
Great. Thanks Adam.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s a wrap for today’s episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast. We’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book, The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for tuning in and we will see you next week.

 

The post The Social Promise: an Interview with David Klein, CEO and Co-Founder of CommonBond appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

Align Values with Outcomes: Interview with Christian Smith, President and Co-Founder of TrackR

Have you ever lost your keys? TrackR solves that problem for you by keeping track of the items that are important to you– and it’s one of the fastest growing companies in America. Christian Smith, President and Co-Founder of TrackR, joins The Best Team Wins Podcast to discuss hiring, management, and more.

 

Follow TrackR on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Pinterest.

Connect with Christian on Twitter and Linkedin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Transcripts:

Adam Robinson:
Welcome to The Best Team Wins podcast where we’re featuring entrepreneurs and business leaders who’s exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson and for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring.

 



Today, on the program, Christian Smith is the president and co-founder of TrackR. TrackR was founded in 2009 as a hyper [inaudible 00:00:40] venture back business based out of Santa Barbara, California. It currently has 110 employees. TrackR recently closed a 50 million dollar series B, led by Revolution Growth and if that were not enough, they were also number 45 on last year’s Ink 500 list of safest run private companies in the US.

 



Christian, welcome to the program.

 


Christian Smith:
Adam, thanks so much for having me.

 


Adam Robinson:
We are here today to focus on the people side of your business but before we dive in, set the stage for us. Give us 30 seconds on TrackR and what you do.

 


Christian Smith:
Sure. That concept behind TrackR came out of a personal experience that my co-founder and I had. We were both engineers in college together and we loved surfing so we’d often go on surf trips during the weekend. On weekend, we went up to a place called Pismo Beach and we parked his car in the sand, went out and had a surf and when we came back, we were mortified to realize the car was parked below the high tide line.

 


Adam Robinson:
Oh no.

 


Christian Smith:
If we didn’t get moved soon, it was going to get washed away into the Pacific Ocean. We frantically ripped the car apart, searching for the keys, couldn’t find it anywhere. Fortunately we were thinking heads up and we ran down the beach looking for help.

 



A man with a metal detector happened to be on the beach and my co-founder was able to convince him to come over and help us find the key. We ended up finding the key that had fallen in the sand right as the water was lapping the front tires. We were able to get the car moved off the beach but that was this kind of “Ah ha,” moment that we realized, why. Why did that happen. People lose things because they memorize where all of these little things are and because we just didn’t have a memory of that, where the key was, we had a tremendous panic.

 



We experienced a really extreme manifestation of a common problem that on average, people have about 16 minutes a day of searching for keys, wallets, backpacks and so we thought, how can we change that reality? We created small coin sized devices you can attach to anything and a smartphone application helps you find them so you can quickly find your keys, your wallet, whatever else you’re searching for and then if you happen to leave it behind, the app remembers where and when on a Google map you left it so that you can go back to that point and find it.

 


Adam Robinson:
If people want to learn more about your products or your company, what’s the best place for them to do that?

 


Christian Smith:
You can go to thetrackr.com, that’s T, H, E, Track and the letter R.com.

 


Adam Robinson:
They’re really beautifully designed products and congratulations on all the success. I want to dig into the early days. You and your co-founder have this experience of nearly losing the car in the beach, you decide to build this product to solve this problem, maybe more accurately. You start doing stuff, at some point that leads to meeting more people. Take us to that earliest stage when you realized it’s got to be bigger than the two of you. Talk about how you went about finding that first hire. What did that look like?

 


Christian Smith:
Yeah, that’s a really good question. When we were two engineers in a garage, we were basically kind of building everything, doing all aspects of the business. Then when we … we saw that … when we’re starting to sell product on Amazon, after we launched, we saw that it would be helpful to get an employee that was gonna be focused on sales so that we can do the engineering and operational side.

 



We ended up connecting with someone who … actually, our first employee reached out to us. They were a local sales person and we were able to bring them into … kind of help us close different deals. That was a little bit non-traditional. Then we saw that, as we were kind of building things, we saw that we needed help building things.

 



We started … some of the first people that we brought on were iOS and Android engineers that really helped us kind of accelerate the development side of the application and the hardware. This was back when we were making the jump from writing Blackberry applications to some of the first connected iOS apps.

 


Adam Robinson:
Oh yeah. Wow. Amazing how things change in just a few short years. I want to talk about that first sales hire. One of the things that I often say and has been my experience is, your best people aren’t found, they find you. They opt in because they believe so strongly in what you’re doing, they feel compelled to reach out and say I’d like to work for you.

 



Part of that’s brand, as an employer and part of that’s just how what you do or make resonates with them. Did this individual truly, was out of your network and just found what you were doing and said I need to work here?

 


Christian Smith:
The context around that was, we launched at a conference called Demo in 2010 and we ended up winning the consumer category. We just had a really great demonstration of the product working and were able to kind of tell this bigger story. We won that award and this … our first sales guys ended up seeing what we were doing and had been kind of interested in doing something similar.

 



There was this shared interest and he had been kind of talking to some other partners about these types of solutions that we were creating. It was a very, a really great match and it ended up that he was about 15 minutes away from our office. Proximity was big factor that really helped us out.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s excellent. From there, fast forward to today, you got 110 employees. How has the process of selecting people for your business change from the days of finding folks that could write Blackberry apps to today. Is this more rigorous, less rigorous, more of a network things, less of a network thing. What’s the current state? How do you find the people?

 


Christian Smith:
Yeah, I think hiring along the path, it’s kind of changed pretty dramatically. From really manual processes early on where there’s a heavy time investment to interviewing everyone and making sure that they’re a culture match to a good in between hiring platform for us was AngelList, when we were growing from 10 to 30, finding people that were really interested and excited about entrepreneurship and startups was really perfect for that audience that was on AngelList.

 



Now, we’ve kind of evolved into a little bit … added more structure and starting to work with different outsource agencies to kind of help do some hiring. There’s some different recruiters that we’ve worked with to make sure that we find the exact right person to fill a seat. Really, that’s kind of based on the concept that comes out of a book called Traction, by Gino Wickman.

 



Traction introduces this paradigm that you have two different buckets that you’re evaluating every single person in an organization. The first bucket, is it the right person? This person … it’s a personality culture match and the second is, is that person sitting in the right seat? The seat is defined by their role, their desire to fill that role. Do they get it? Do they want to do that role and are they … do they get it, do they want it, are they capable.

 



Starting to kind of separate out, first the culture match side, personality and fit versus the looking at the how that human fills a certain role. Sometimes you’ll have the right person but then the wrong seat. Where that person, it wouldn’t be able to grow enough in that position for it would be … they would be … they might have difficulty with certain aspects of the role. Then it kind of breeds the question, do we shift the role around to fit that person and then shift some of the other responsibilities out. It’s just been a really useful paradigm for processing how to design the roles and responsibility structure that everyone’s performing at the company.

 


Adam Robinson:
Yeah, that’s great. Our regular listeners will be smiling at that comment because they know that hireology is itself an EOS attraction business and we launched the business using that tool, using the VTO from day one. It’s been an amazing way to run the business it certainly governs the people side of the business pretty well.

 



Excited to hear that. That’s great to hear. It’s always fun to meet a fellow Traction tech company. There aren’t that many at scale out there so pretty cool. Maybe offline we’ll talk more about it. That kind of result is not uncommon.

 



When you talk about right person, right seat in this notion of get it, want it, capacity to do it, how is that govern your decisions about existing team members. You mentioned, right person, wrong seat. What happens when you have someone who’s in the right seat and they’ve got the technical skill but they just don’t fit the overall team? What’s been your approach to handling that and has that changed over time?

 


Christian Smith:
Yeah, I think that the kind of high level way that I process this is, I’m imaging that we find ourself today at time zero. We have this moment in time and as an enterprise, we’re trying to get to point B, which is … we’ve kind of have used EOS to … the entrepreneur operating system to define what’s that end goal, what’s that big vision that we want to get to.

 



Then, we kind of filled in different metrics of success. One metric for of success for me was, when we were starting the company, it was the two of us in a garage. I was moved to tears when I realized we’re gonna hire about 100 people to … when this operation scales up and what is the impact that … what is the momentum that we want to create that we impact that number 100. The number 100 was significant because it was at a point where it would be someone who would be non-technical. Their job was to coordinate facilities and to create an atmosphere. Like an office manager or kind of person.

 



I don’t know if you heard the story about JFK, who, when he was walking through, I think it was Lockheed Martin, he asked the janitor who was rolling his cart through the hall, what do you do? He said, “I put men on the moon.” It was one of those stories where, wow, yes he does. He keeps everyone focused on their job by keeping eh environment clean so that they can do their best work.

 



When I realized, okay we got this big point B that we want to get to and what’s the impact that we want to make on our office managers life. Well, it’s pretty clear you can … you have your whole stock table, what’s your share price worth and what’s that point B, that exit event that you want to get to and how do we have a life changing impact on that, on the janitor or the office manager.

 



That’s this trajectory that we find ourselves on and a long that pathway, I see that we’re connecting people with their highest potential and that’s kind of the journey that we all find ourselves on and there are some people that will be able to come with us from today, where we’re at, all the way to point B. There are some people that, their paths might be different and it might be better for them to be somewhere else or to go somewhere else, learn and then come back.

 



I think of that type of onboarding and off boarding that’s relatively fluid and as a corporation, we have a very clear trajectory and then when someone else’s values or role changes within that, then I just want to make sure that, as a manager, that I’m connecting them to their highest potential. Whether that’s in the organization or out of it.

 



By sticking to our values and I think it’s … that creates a really healthy context to have that conversation.

 


Adam Robinson:
You just mentioned values. Let’s talk about the value system in TrackR. Could you walk us through one or more of the core values that you use to define the business and the culture there?

 


Christian Smith:
Yeah, I think that the first value that we have is really being, making data driven decisions. Taking in all of the information before forming a hypothesis, I think is so important. That allows us to approach complex situations and solve them with information and rather than jumping to an emotional decision, just get really curious about the data.

 



That’s something I think that helps drive a really healthy decision making process. Another thing, we believe in having people that are really passionate about the company. This is something that we kind of look for, people who are really passionate about their life and their work and … We want people who … I guess the value that we have around the office is we want people to give a damn. If you don’t, if you tend to be more apathetic then probably not the culture fit.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s great. Does that … I guess walk us through how that translates into daily practice. Either on the hiring front, the promotion and training front or even potentially how you work with your customers.

 


Christian Smith:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah so I think that for each area of the business, each different department from customer support to engineering is … you can apply those different values in different ways. A customer support rep who’s data driven and is different than an engineer who’s data driven. Very technical analysis versus qualitative analysis.

 



The department leaders are really good at exposing that information through questions and really understanding how people are using … how people are taking in information and using that as a hiring filter has been really powerful to fill the culture around that value.

 



For the passion side of things, that’s … that means we’re hiring people that are going to express their opinions. They’re going to have beliefs. That means it’s not really … decision making processes tend not to be really passive. That’s something that culturally, I think is really important to understand when choosing values is there’s going to be things that are really positive about that value but then there’s also going to be a flip side. If everybody in the room is really passionate about a decision, then there’s gonna be some push back and arguing and expression and emotion, which we see as really positive.

 



Then its also important to then look at the data. Coupling those two value for us was very, very critical in order to make those conversations work. Values can’t function independently and if they do, it tends to kind of … I think it would tend to create a skewed culture where the other values aren’t balancing them out.

 


Adam Robinson:
Over the last eight years of your experience in building that team at TrackR, is there one overall governing philosophy as it pertains to your approach to talent and the people side of the business that you subscribe to?

 


Christian Smith:
Personally, when I wake up in the morning, I’m excited to connect. My goal is to see 1,000 people connect with their dreams. For me, it’s really clear. Does that person’s desire for the future and their ambition, is that something that we can align on and harness toward a certain direction that we need in order to run this organization. It has been a really good filter to understand, does this person fit or are they really excited actually about something else.

 



That philosophy has been one that stuck with me through the years.

 


Adam Robinson:
Final couple of questions here as we round out our time together. What book are you reading right now and would you recommend it our listeners?

 


Christian Smith:
Lets see, the last book that I just finished is called Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin and I think it’s really … it’s been fantastic to just learn more about how do Navy Seals approach planning to ensure success on missions. There are a lot of applications that are, I think, really great tactics to apply to what we’re doing as a team. Also, it’s really helpful framework for me to approach leadership while leading a team and just understanding that I’m going to, at the end of the day, I’m gonna take responsibility for whatever happens and if there are failures then they’re failures of leadership.

 



That approach really creates a structure where everybody else can do their best work.

 


Adam Robinson:
If you were able to come back on this show a year from now and report on whether or not you successfully tackled the single biggest people related opportunity that you have in front of you in the business today, what would you be telling us happened?

 


Christian Smith:
That focus is key and so keeping my role at the company is really to set and focus on the vision. Make sure that point out in space that we’re all driving and working so hard to is one really clear, and two, we have a … we’re executing on a plan to get there.

 



Yeah, I would say that the most important part is just making sure that that’s happening. There a bunch of tactical things that we’ll be experimenting with over the next year to make sure that that’s happening. I would like to say that we were very successful with those things.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning form Christian Smith, president and co-founder of TrackR. Christian, thank you for being with us on the program.

 


Christian Smith:
Thanks Adam. Take care.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s a wrap. Thanks for listening to this weeks episode of The Best Team Wins podcast, where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exception approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson and I am looking forward to seeing everybody next week. Check out the book, www.thebestteamwins.com for more tips and tricks and stories like the experiences that Christian just shared with us. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll see you next week.

 

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