Managing the Modern Hiring Process | TDSU Ep. 10

[00:00:42] Dillon: What's up Lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup where we're giving you fresh new ideas in the customer

success space. Every single

day. I've got my man Rob here with a fresh new haircut. Rob,

do you want to say hi?

[00:01:13] Rob: What's going on, Lifetime familia?

[00:01:17] Dillon: I've got JP with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

[00:01:22] JP: Hello

[00:01:25] Dillon: So for

anybody who's not watching the video,

JP just... uh, suggestively wiped the corners of his mouth with a napkin. And we've...

[00:01:33] JP: As suggestively as you can.

[00:01:38] Dillon: We've got Christine with us.

Christine, would you like to say hi?

[00:01:41] Christine: Hey, party people.

[00:01:43] JP: Yeah.

[00:01:45] Dillon: I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. Christine, thank

you so much for being here. Would you like to introduce yourself?

[00:01:51] Christine: Be happy to. I am a customer success enthusiast

who focuses mostly on helping

healthcare technology companies grow.

And in my spare time, I love to

ride horses, garden and eat anything low carb.

[00:02:06] Dillon: Heck yes. Heck yes.

[00:02:07] JP: I'll take your carbs.

[00:02:11] Dillon: Christine, you know what we're doing here. Every single day, we ask one person from the customer success or adjacent spaces to

tell us what is

on their mind when it comes to the space. So do you want to hit us with that?

[00:02:24] Christine: Would love to. For me, it's all about how to hire effectively in today's environment because I'm seeing a lot of material around how to get a job and how stressful the job market is, but I think an underestimated stressor happening right now in

customer success

for hiring managers

and for the folks who

are growing is: "How the heck do I make any sense of the thousands of applicants coming in the door?"

And: "How do I actually interview effectively and make sure i'm finding the right person for my company and my role?" Particularly for those high growth

companies, right where it's smaller, but you're looking at doubling

or tripling. I feel like that right now is a topic that we should dig into

[00:03:00] Dillon: So JP and I got in a fight about this less than

[00:03:03] JP: god, did not.

[00:03:04] Dillon: 48 hours ago.

[00:03:05] Christine: ...you

take your earrings out first?

Ooh! Ha

[00:03:09] Dillon: I used to have my ears

pierced. I don't know if you're

[00:03:11] JP: Where's my Vaseline?

[00:03:12] Christine: ...out.

Earpods coming out. Ha!

[00:03:15] Dillon: JP put the

baby powder on his hand. He was ready to slap

me up. So this is a question I,

I'm super interested to understand. My theory is that it's a little bit random right now because of just the sheer volume that we're dealing with,

but what suggestions are you bringing to the table or how do you think folks should think about it?

[00:03:34] Christine: Yeah for me I got three things and I'd love to get your thoughts if you want to go around

the horn.

The first thing that I think about when I think about how to hire effectively and

I learned this the hard way

by conducting thousands of interviews and hiring hundreds of people as a hiring manager and exec, not a recruiter. And that is to really understand what the heck you want from this person, to define the jobs to be done, and also the key characteristics that really are going to make this person successful.

So would love to start there in terms of, like, best practices or thoughts or hacks that you have for actually figuring out. "Oh, I have this problem. I'm just going to hire this person. They're going to solve it for me," to getting really crystal clear on exactly what it is you're looking for.

[00:04:17] Dillon: So again, I said this before we started recording, kudos for being the most professional guest we've ever had with your lapel mic. For anybody who's not watching the video, Christine has a straight up.

profesh

lapel mic, but secondly, for

pre facilitating by saying you want us to go

around the horn.

I love that. My job is super easy today. I want to start with Rob because I know

that Rob has had a lot of these same experiences, has hired a lot of people. And so I'd love to hear what he thinks about what you said.

[00:04:45] Rob: Yeah, yeah, Christine, you bring

up a really, really important topic and one that I care a lot about and one that I've made a lot of mistakes into. Cause similarly, I've been through more interviews than I can count and hired for hundreds of positions at this point,

not to toot my own horn, just

to make

enough mistakes to know the difference. So I think that for me, what I've been working on lately

has been a recruiting playbook that tries to handle these same questions.

First is around what you're hiring for. Not just like

the role description, and the KPIs, which could be ill defined,

but also, what would constitute

like a culture add is how I like to hear people phrase it.

And people often talk about a culture of fit,

but then they end up creating so much of an echo chamber at their own companies

that they don't think outside

the box.

So it's one thing to say culture add, but it's a whole other thing to

say, "These are the definitive pieces that we don't have in our current operation that we want to add."

Someone described it to me, I love this analogy. She said: "When you look in your kitchen cupboard, you don't look for the things you already have. You look for the things you don't have," you know, maybe you're a little low on

black pepper or cumin or whatever, right? You look for the spices that you lack.

And then from there, then you can build an educated process

around what are the stages?

What are the questions that you're

asking this person?

But I think one of the hardest things is, the third phase, which is then, something I care a lot about, is like removing the unconscious

company biases out of the process.

Which is really hard.

Because you have to build a process that people can

fail out of basically like the inherent thing that makes an interview process

good is,

as harsh as this might sound, is

that people have to be able to fail out of it. Otherwise,

everyone would get the job

but you have to do that in such a way

that's not unfairly biased

against people who have certain ways of thinking,

certain backgrounds, certain whatever's.

I don't know that I've figured out an exact repeatable playbook

for that, or if I ever should.

But I'm curious to get the thoughts of

the other folks in the room

on that as well.

[00:06:43] JP: Is that supposed to be me?

[00:06:44] Dillon: Antagonist number one, JP Frost, why don't you go ahead?

[00:06:47] JP: Um,

there's a really silly, really silly . There's a really silly adage out

there: "People want to work with people they want to

work with." It's super like, you know, sort of okay.

but...

[00:07:03] Dillon: meta. Very meta.

[00:07:04] JP: I mean. People want to work with who they want to work with.

I think that that speaks a bit to what Rob mentioned as a culture add, right?

[00:07:15] Christine: Mm-Hmm.

[00:07:15] JP: I

know that

there's a certain , there's a Venn diagram, there's a certain circle I know that I want to take care of, right? That's going to be like, "Okay, you're going to be, in general, a desirable candidate,"

but

for this particular role, this particular company, you start adding on more filters, almost like when you go into the eye doctor and they're like, "Okay, can you see this? What is it?"

You're like, "Oh, it looks like a bologna sandwich." It's like, "Oh my God, that's a lobster."

You failed out of the process.

You know what I mean? Got to be able to sort of like, okay, are we seeing the same thing? And so I think this, uh, quote unquote fight that me and Dillon got into, uh, yeah,

that's definitely an air quote

fight.

Um, because

I agree that there is this, the idea of

randomness, I think, is as a candidate, there are things beyond what I can control and what I know. There's things like, I could have done my very best. But what Rob needs at his company, I failed out of. Does it mean that I'm a terrible person or that I may not be a good worker?

But that process

in particular, like I fail- I failed out of. That's a result of timing.

Maybe at a different point, I may not have failed out of that process. So I think that, on my end, when you talk about the messaging people see, is that it's not nuanced enough to really address what's happening. Certain things , they're more transferable no matter which jobs you go to, but some of those specifics

you don't know. And

I think to Rob's point, like you're not meant to know. Like you want to find someone who authentically is going to be the fit, you can't really gamify, things to a certain level.

So I feel like

in summation, I see you, Rob. sorry, not Rob, Dillon. I get them confused. Don't tell anyone.

Um,

[00:09:06] Dillon: Generic white dude.

[00:09:08] JP: Yeah, I didn't say, I didn't say anything. So

You're ruining my you're ruining my point. You're ruining my point. My point is

you, you, you

Just go on ahead, man. Go on and Say say what you're going to say, Rob. I mean Dillon.

I did it again.

[00:09:27] Dillon: Thank you, thank you. Thanks for committing to the bit.

I think, There's, I think we're using a

lot of tactics that were good and suitable in a different market. And we don't-- the word I got from Christine, where you started, Rob said it and then JP as well from all these different angles is intentionality and I think a lot of

times we're still just

slapping together a job description

and putting it out there and we're like, "Okay, well, how do we find the guy who has that 10

years or more of experience in this particular space and, we think he's got a decent personality?" He or she, right?

And nowadays, when you just have such a volume of candidates, you're going to find 20 of those people. You've got to find a

further way to whittle it down and find what makes the most sense for you. So Christine, with the little time we have left, I just want to understand what you took away from,

two robs and a JP,

what we had to say and what you've done to

combat this , and kind of work around it.

[00:10:31] Christine: Yeah. Well, love that. Thank you for the roundup. Number one,

be intentional 100 percent all day, every day, really get crisp about what you're wanting. Number two, to JP's point,

be specific about the filters in your interview process.

Build an ironclad one. Rob, I would love to see your hiring process guide. Would love to compare notes there.

And then for me, number three, if you want to hire great people, write great interview questions and ask the same questions for every candidate to avoid your biases creeping in.

We don't want that.

So within those questions, look at behavioral interview

questions or open ended questions that give you a better perception on how that person shows up, how they see themselves, and how they'll fit into your broader team.

And then if you really run the process, you're going to close the best candidates

because you know what you want, you know how to assess for what you want, and you're going to show up as a professional and run a

really tight process.

So those top candidates who have

lots of opportunities are going to choose you

because you never left them on read for seven days

while you were wondering what you wanted to do next, right?

You were really running it and that's, I think, how you're going to be successful as a hiring manager in this environment.

[00:11:30] Dillon: Amen.

Christine, that's our time. Thank you so much. This was.

a tight, tight episode and we got a lot

of information in there. You came prepared, so thank you so much. Would love to have you back.

Yes. Round of applause, round of applause Thanks

[00:11:45] JP: Have you on the show, man. I'm going to make another host.

[00:11:49] Dillon: It's getting, it's getting crowded in

here, guys, uh, but Christine seriously, thank you so much It was a pleasure to meet you We'd love to have you back.

But until then, ta ta for now.

[00:11:59] JP: Ta ta.

[00:12:00] Christine: J. P. Thanks

Rob. Or other Dillon

[00:12:02] JP: ta.

[00:12:02] Christine: Bye, guys.