Success Insights

(Video Transcript - lightly edited for clarity)

Let's start out with the basics of what it means to hire the right team member. My four tenants of a great business and a great team member follow these four principles:

1. You only hire people who agree to embrace your mission statement so hopefully you have a mission statement.
    
2. Only hire people that agree to embody your core values.
    
3. There's a book out by Patrick Lencioni; it's called the Five Dysfunctions of A Team, that should be mandatory reading for every team member within their first thirty days of starting.
    
4. Only hire self-managed and self-disciplined people.

There are your four tenets of a great business. Write them down because your entire interview process is based upon those tenets.

It's not about just hiring people because you've had people that were a bad culture fit which means you've had cancers on your team. By following the four tenets of a great business, you are going to start eliminating that cancer from your team. As a result, you'll have a much happier team, a happier team produces more.

Now, let's talk about the actual interview process. You've posted your ad, you get inundated with resumes. The first thing you do is have someone on your team scan those resumes after communicating with them what it is you're looking for. If you want real estate experience, let them scan for only people with real estate experience. Once they review the resumes, they will then give only those people that they believe would be worth interviewing. Then send these people a personality profile link to complete and return. I prefer the DISC profile.

Secondly, you should never interview somebody unless they filled out an application, here's why. When someone submits a resumé, it’s what they want you to know. If people were only half as good as their resumé, God we'd be in heaven. The application is important because that tells us what we need to know.

Once you have their DISK profile, application and resumé, have somebody else do the initial interviews. Every candidate you hire should have a minimum of two interviews preferably three. How does that work if you're hiring an Operations person? My recommendation would be have one of your operations people do a cursory scan and call the candidate. If they have to leave a voicemail, how long did it take them to return your call because all of the clock starts ticking as soon as we make that first phone call. They should invite them to complete a phone interview which should last maybe five to ten minutes max. If they like what they hear, then invite them in for a face-to-face with you. A face-to-face should take no more than 30 minutes.

Before you interview though, you better know what position you're hiring for, what the compensation is because I want to know about compensation upfront. If the comp plan that I'm proposing to this candidate doesn't work, I'd rather know sooner rather than later. Let's not go through the whole interview process before we state what the compensation is. I want to know upfront that the income fits within what their budgetary means.

If that is in alignment and you are sitting in front of them, you need to have a list of interview questions. Be prepared to have different interview questions for salespeople vs. support staff. Once you've done an interview, have your coach involved in the interview process as well.

Take the three interviews, compile the information and decide. From the time the first interview starts, your decision should be made within 72 to 96 hours because these candidates are looking for a job, a place to go, so we need to be very quick in this process. Otherwise, somebody else may come along and find that talent and take it from you.

Salespeople and operational people have different profiles so please make sure you're hiring the person with the correct DISC profile to fit the position. Ideally, for a salesperson I'm looking for an AI or ID. For an operations person, I'm looking for an S an SC or an SI.

Those are the basic tenants of great hiring principles and when you apply them consistently, your life will be happier.