Let’s talk about hiring…

Hiring is one of the most important things you ever do. It is one of the most high value activities in your business. Most of the big breakthroughs I’ve had in my business had something to do with bringing on the right person and happened shortly after they came on board.

Conversely, most of the quagmires in my business have had to do with hiring the wrong person for the job. We put them in the wrong place, it just wasn’t a good fit with our team, or whatever. It just didn’t work out.

When you look to hire new talent, there’s something very very important that you need to remember that almost nobody does.

It needs to be an audition, not an interview.

If you’re casting for a Shakespeare play, and you needed an actor, you would not sit and talk to them for an hour about Shakespeare. You would have them act Shakespeare on stage. If you want a bass player for your band, you don’t sit around and talk about Geddy Lee or bass players or Fender basses or anything like that.  You have them play in the band. And you hear what they sound like.

Now if this is how performance businesses work, how come companies don’t do the same thing?

You don’t sit and talk to somebody for an hour about marketing and all the things they’ve done, all the stuff that’s on their resume. You put them to work.

You give them a project!

That is the fastest way to weed people out. When you do that here’s what you’re going to find; you’re going to find out that eighty percent of the people can’t do it. It’s astounding how many people can’t do basic things!

In fact when we hire people, before there’s even a conversation we might say something like:

“To apply for this position send a Microsoft Word document with a simple letter explaining to us why we should hire you. Do not send a PDF, do not send a resume, and send it to XYZ @ gmail.com.”

You will be amazed at how many people send a resume even though you told them not to, how many people don’t write you the letter you asked even though you said exactly what to do.

You know what? If they can’t follow simple instructions, out they go.

The next step might be:

“Call me at ten-fifteen on Tuesday morning here’s the phone number”.

If they call at 10:20 instead of 10:15, they’re out.

A lot of times in our desperation to find the right person we overlook these little things, and these little things are actually huge tells that there’s gonna be problems later when you actually give them something to do.

Solution?

We give people stuff to do before we ever even talk to them, and that’s what you should do.

This tip is just a little slice of one chapter in my book 80/20 Sales and Marketing, which you can buy on Amazon, but first I want you to get the super quick cheat sheet version of the book by clicking right here.