Wie man wirklich gute Mitarbeiter findet

0:00So I live with the permanent assumption that I'm bad at hiring because I've got biases, there's things I don't know about certain things, etc. And when you start with that assumption that you are really, really bad at hiring, you try and decentralize the decision-m. So one thing I say a lot to startup founders is if you're hiring a salesperson, create an interview process where there's five people and one of them might be you and the other four are the best sales people you've ever encountered in your life.

0:25Like who sold you your house? and [laughter] ask them ask them to be part of the interview process. How does that sit with you? >> I think it sits great and I think that the amount of references that you go for is proportional to the importance of the role. >> Okay. So Sam the co-founder of school um when he so he was a nontechnical founder. >> Who's school? What is school? Sorry. >> Oh so school's uh school.com's a platform for building communities. Right now it's online but we have an inerson component so that people can meet online and meet in person. It's awesome. And so that's the only investment that I've publicly uh associated myself with outside of acquisition.com. So it was a very big deal. It's something that I believe in a lot because it's education.

1:02It's where education and media meet. Um it's funny. Sam is the is the is the founder of school and he is not technical. And so he knew that to build an exceptional software product you need world-class talent. And so he interviewed 600 developers to find Daniel who' become the CTO of school. [snorts] And he asked everybody to know who the best coders were. And then he talked to all those people. And they asked them who the best coder they knew was. And he talked to those people. And then he asked them who they thought the best coder they knew was. And eventually like Daniel's name came up as like god tier. He's like, "If you can ever get this guy, he'd be amazing." And so he ended up finding a way into find Daniel and then he ended up becoming uh co-founder of school as well. And what's interesting about that process is that it actually ladders into uh rapid learning. And so when I was a consultant, you I was 22 years old and I would go and have to give presentations to fourstar generals, right, about about weapon systems that I knew nothing about cuz I was, you know, chugging beers like 12 months earlier, right? Um and so how do you sound intelligent in front of somebody who has 30 years more experience than you do? And so this is the consulting process for rapid learning.

2:24First is you find five experts. So you ask the one person, you're like, "Hey, tell me the five people you know who are the best at this thing." And then you ask them, "Who are the five people you know who are who are who also know a ton about this thing?" And for each of the interviews, you take all of their their information down of like, "What do you think about this? What do you think about this? What do you think of this?" And what happens, you start mapping kind of like the e the information ecosystem. And the reason you talk to experts first is that there's no lack of information. Like you can Google whatever you want.

2:50The problem is there's too much. And so the filter becomes where the highest point of leverage is. And so experts have spent years filtering out for what's important. And so then you basically rapidly consume the most filtered information and then you reorganize the information. And so this is what a typical analyst will do as a consultant is like I would so for the space and cyber project that I did I with 600 pages of notes from all the interviews that we did. First step is you recategorize all all the news by category. So it goes from raw notes to categorized notes. Then from there you distill and consolidate notes into what are the what are the truths or the the most distilled beliefs that we have about these particular in this case weapon systems, but it could be whatever.

3:31>> And then from there, you're able to generate your inferences for what the what it looks like when it's right, what the problems are, what potential solutions might be, and then that's fundamentally how you say this is what we need to do next. That's if you're trying to learn something. But in talking to all those people, it actually works the same way because the interview process, the higher up the talent is, the more I would encourage entrepreneurs to use it as a learning process as a consultant. And so I present somebody who wants to come in for this role, the actual problems of the business for which they would have control over and say, "How would you solve these?" And so then they tell me all the things that they would be considering and what they're thinking about. And then I'll ask the next guy what he thinks and what he thinks and what he thinks or she thinks. And then all of a sudden, one, I get free consulting, which is amazing.

4:13But secondly, you can tell by how the quality and quantity of metrics that someone tracks how good they are at a particular skill. And so this is fundamentally what separates beginners from experts. And so beginners typically have binary thinking in terms of outcomes. Either it worked or it didn't work. An expert, for example, for a marketing campaign isn't going to say, "Oh, marketing doesn't work or ads don't work." They're going to say, "This particular campaign didn't work because our click-through rate was too low or because it was sending traffic that wasn't qualified and we weren't converting enough on the page or we didn't have enough people who were taking the second step in our four steps." And like they can break down any part of those any part of that continuum. If I'm interviewing a salesperson and the person says and I say, "Okay, how are you going to affect these metrics? What behaviors are are you going to do?" So to the same degree about vague versus specific, if they give me vague things back, I'm going to dial in and say, "No, but what are you going to do that's going to change that?" And by the way, this is a wonderful way to teach in the organization how what they do makes a business money. And so if you have like a customer support rep, for example, and you say, "Hey, how do you make our company money?" If they can't explain it to you, they probably aren't doing it.

5:22[laughter] And it sounds as simple as it is, but if someone says, "Well, you know, I answer customers questions." And it's like, how does that make us money? Now, if they're able to say, when I answer customers questions, I increase the likelihood that they refer us other customers, and I increase the likelihood that they stay and continue to pay for us. So, I help us get new customers by delivering an amazing experience, and I get the customers that we have to continue to pay us. And if it makes sense, I recommend other products and services that we have that I can introduce them to sales guys who can explain that so we generate even more revenue from them.

5:53I'd be like, one, if you can articulate that, you're probably not just a frontline customer service rep, [laughter] you're probably a director, right? And so that level of nuance, the specificity is what shows expertise. And so when I look for and I'm interviewing uh for candidates, I first I I want to gather as much information as I can. I want to drain as much knowledge as possible, but I'm also really looking for the quality and quantity of metrics they track and behaviors that they do to influence those metrics. So in the hypothetical problem that let's say we're trying to solve uh we have low clickthrough rates. I'd be like okay this is the problem we have how would you approach changing it right and then that actually gets me to understand what they would do in the organization because it's very easy to say uh you know I'm going to come in and let's say a sales director I'm going to come in and I'm going to I'm going to improve the the sales team. I'm like okay cool.

6:40What are you going to do? You know I'm going to coach the guys up. I'm like okay what does that mean? And so just continuing to ask what does that mean? How do you do that? until they're like, "Okay, well, I'm going to meet with the guys every single morning and we're going to do role play." All right. Well, how do you role play? Well, we're going to start with the script and we're like, the more detailed they get, the more I believe they can do it because they've actually explained what actions they will take. If someone can't dial it into actions, then it's very unlikely that they're going to take them. And so, what I just outlined is basically three core things. So, one is the quality and quantity of metrics that they track. The second is the behaviors that they're going to do to influence those metrics.

7:15and then lading up to third. How do those metrics and these behaviors influence the revenue in the business? If they can explain that clearly, you have a winner. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10-stage road map from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish I've now done multiple times. And so, I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business. what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, uh, service businesses, brickandmortar, all of this, and it works. And it's my gift to you.

7:55It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.comroadmap. Just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you. Offering.