Test executive candidates by having them do the job

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 54:50

   Yeah, I think actually the bigger philosophy is that I don't believe in interviews. because I think some people interview well and they might not be good at all. And some people interview really poorly, but it might be excellent. So I actually just think it's a very noisy channel. You can't, there's not that much value in it. So then what can you do? One of the things, this is the one that you mentioned, but there are other ones that we use as well, is I try to actually have them do the job.

2. 55:16

   And I think we think, oh, you know, in programming, we can do that. Ask them to program this thing. And then if they do it well, but we can't do it for any other job. And I disagree with that. If you're hiring someone for head of marketing, work with them to fix something that's broken in marketing right now, whatever it is. If it's a personnel problem, or if it's the webpage, or if it's the product marketing positioning, work with them.

3. 55:35

   Call them in the evening, call them in the morning, ask them, go through it, work with them. Basically, make them do the job as if they were already an employee in the company. And you will have a very good sense of culturally how they are. Are you in the same wavelength? Can they actually do a good job at this? the kind of stuff especially pick the things that are not working right now in your company because those are the things you would give them to fix when they come in and if they could fix those things they're clearly a good hire uh So I'd rather do that than coming in in an interview and just asking them, you know, the, you know, the gotcha questions that they might have practiced, you know, tell me your own weakness.

4. 56:10

   What's your biggest weakness? And so on. So that's one of the big things that we do. The other is backdoors. And I believe you should do the backdoors up front. So don't go through a lot of firms, especially recruiting firms. They will do, run you through a cycle. They have you meet all these people. And then at the end, they want to just check the box. By the way, they'll even do the references for you, which is a big mistake.

5. 56:32

   I think you should do the references up front. I already know who you're hiring. So that the first time I meet the person, I already know a lot about them. I've already asked. And I've also found this thing that if you do five to 10 backdoors on people, their bosses, previous bosses, you actually kind of know the person better in some regards, not in their full entirety, better than they know themselves.

6. 56:52

   Because you know all the things they went through. And you know the perspective of three, four people that saw that happen to them in the previous job. They might not actually fully comprehend what everybody thought about that situation. Of course, they have a unique perspective. So I think the backdoors are extremely important. And then others just look at their trajectory of work. Where were they? Have they seen great? Have they done something stellar?

7. 57:11

   Are they hopping around a lot? Those are the three things that we kind of emphasize in hiring. What are your techniques on the backdoor references? Are there specific questions you like to ask or ways that no one likes to talk poorly about someone they know? So how do you sort of drill in to make sure you're getting the actual high quality information? Yeah, it really depends on who you're talking to and they're all different.

8. 57:31

   And you can tell immediately some people are not just going to tell you the truth. This is going to be, you know, they're going to just say good things or they don't want to say anything. So, you know, that's that. So you just move on and end the call. But, and I guess I'm revealing my, you know, recipe here, so it will never work again. But I think that if you can find the form of person that, you know, opens up, I think one thing that I like to grill them on is really, really ranking of how good the person is.

9. 57:56

   And don't ask, you know, score from one to 10 and they say 10. Really ask them, like, does it rank number one, number two, how many have you? And then let's go really deep. Who did you, who's number one, who's number two in your list? By the way, you go after those as well, of course. And then I really ask them, you know, go through scenarios. Like, it's just the follow-up questions. Like, what did they do well?

10. 58:13

    Tell me something that went wrong. Give me a scenario. What was that scenario? Really push the boundary. You got to kind of almost to the point that they become uncomfortable. So many times I've done it so far that, you know, they call back and say, like, you know, know, this is, you know, what's going on here. But yeah, you want to, but you'll find when you're doing the back doors that, okay, that guy and that gal, they're like super forthcoming.

11. 58:33

    That's a straight shooter. They're going to tell you the whole thing. And others are not. Front door references, the references that the candidate gives you are similar, but kind of inverted. They're, you know, the vast majority are actually people that the person is going to hire next. If it's a manager, they're just literally giving you there. And that's useful too, because you can interview those people, you know, who they're going to hire next.

12. 58:52

    so you can gauge the quality of the people that they're going to hire. But occasionally you find the front door that also tells you the real truth and tells you like really what's going on. And you learn a lot there too. And when I do these references, I'm not looking for, hey, what's your one fault that I'm going to cancel, you know, I'm not going to hire you for. It's just to get a complete picture.

13. 59:10

    You're going to have faults. You're going to have strengths. We want to understand that full picture before we go ahead and hire you. So that's kind of what we're going for. But yeah, for some execs, I've done 15 of these backdoors before I hired them. As a leader, you've had to ramp up in different functional areas, one of which was enterprise sales.