Welcome to the System Sammy podcast.

I'm your usual host, Jordan Gill.

But this season, I am so pumped to share my feed with some absolute gems from my community.

So, Bridget Lyons is back from the Ops Whisperer, and she is speaking about a change that she made in her hiring to assemble a team that never missed a single deadline for an agency client in two years.

Okay, this one definitely made my ears perk up, all right, because again, I'm not a hiring expert by any means, and I don't even know how many people I've hired up until this point.

It's definitely in the tens of views, but this is such a treat to have someone talking about how it really can be done to have a true dream team.

So get excited to hear Bridget Lyons speaking again, this time about the hiring hack that finally led her to build her dream team.

If you've ever been burned by a bad hire, you know how demoralizing it is.

All that lost time that you've spent interviewing, screening people, onboarding, and then you have all this worry that if you sell it all over again and try to hire, you're just going to repeat whatever mistake you made before and bring on a second bad person you feel so much stress about.

All that money you spent to get very little return.

It's no wonder so many of my business owner friends decided that they were going to stay solo after a bad hire.

But before you give up on your dream of growing a company, I want to share with you the breakthrough that completely turned this dynamic around for me.

Something that changed not just the way that I hire, but my entire team.

If you know my story, you know that I built an absolute dream team over at my agency Podcast, Ally.

I'm talking zero missed deadlines in two years.

Team members who actually created new products and lines of businesses for me.

Folks that I came to depend on and who, even though I sold that business, I'm still in really frequent contact with now.

But I didn't start out here.

In my first few attempts at hiring, I put so much thought in the process.

I followed all of the systems and the steps you were supposed to do.

I asked standardized questions, I checked references, I gave a skills assessment.

And still, most of my hires were pretty good.

But something was always missing.

One woman I brought on was totally crushed anytime I gave feedback to her on her work.

And over time, the more feedback I gave her, the worse her performance became.

Until we both decided, mutually, that it just was not gonna work out.

Another person I hired got so frustrated when I couldn't give her exact step by step instructions for a task.

And it wasn't that I was trying to trick her or I had something in my mind, but we were trying to do something new and we were feeling our way through it.

And she just like hated working in that environment with kind of experimentation.

Here's what I've realized the problem was.

It's not enough to just hire people with the skills to do the job, because the skills that a person brings to your organization doesn't actually guarantee that they're a good match for the job that you're offering them.

And this is because, especially when we're small business owners and we have just one person, two people, maybe 10 people supporting us, you cannot afford to hire someone who could just do the job, but can't set a boundary with a client client or who is incredibly creative but can't stick to a timeline.

Like none of us can afford somebody who can come into our organization and only do one part of the job we need them to do.

Well.

The skills on their own just aren't going to cut it.

And as a small business owner, as much as we want to offer people training, there's just some things that you are not going to have the bandwidth and time to train on.

And if you're not figuring out sort of that raw material that people are coming to you with, you're at real risk of bringing in people who just are not going to thrive in your organization.

And it's going to end badly for both of you.

You know, if somebody is the strongest copywriter or best designer or fastest, most amazing coder you've ever met, but they're always saying yes to out of scope client work.

They're the wrong hire, they're not going to fit the job.

That's why the key is learning more about the way people think and how they'll behave when they're working for you before you make an offer.

At my agency, this was essential.

I came upon this sort of by accident because when I started hiring people to work at Podcast Ally and even a little bit before that, at my prior agency, the job that I was hiring for didn't really exist yet.

I got into the podcast market when it was still brand new.

So when I started reaching out to podcasts, I was booking clients to appear on podcasts, right?

And at the time, no one was really doing this yet.

It was like me and a couple of other people breaking into the space.

And I had to come up with, with my own methods for finding podcasts, getting their Contact information, coming up with, like, what do I put in the email?

Even things like, what does the subject line say?

So that the podcaster or the producer would even open it and read the email.

I had to come up with processes for all of this.

And this meant that I simply could not test whether my job candidates could do the job, because I had literally invented it.

I had created my own framework.

Instead of looking for, okay, does this person already know how to do the job?

I started looking at the raw material that people were bringing me.

I had to think more creatively about what it was that people were bringing to the work, what judgments were they making, what kind of behaviors would they have, what raw skills did they have?

Because I could treat somebody with the raw material, how to book a podcast.

But there were certain things that were just outside of the scope of what I could do.

And so I needed to start looking at, like, if I had a candidate and I gave them a list of podcasts, could they kind of figure it on their own which ones were a good fit for a client or not?

So if I gave them a hypothetical client with some background, could they take five podcasts and say, these three are a good fit?

These two might be out of scope?

Or if I gave them some basic information about a client and some bullet points of information, could they pick out on their own what would be most interesting to a podcast host?

That was the sort of skills based raw material and judgment calls I needed candidate to make.

I also thought back to these past hiring experiences I told you about, the ones that were just off.

So these are the people that had the basic skills, but when they were on the job, they just weren't suited for it.

And I started to ask myself, what do I wish I had figured out before I made the offer?

What didn't I know that would have prevented a lot of pain for both of us?

And through this process, an overall picture of, like, the qualities that I was looking for started to emerge.

So I started to figure out that the people I hired to work for me needed to have an instinct for good storytelling.

They had to be able to connect with people and create a rapport really quickly over email.

It was important to me that people who work for me were able to accept and incorporate feedback, you know, that they could operate in an environment where they were getting a lot of feedback, because that's how I worked.

And I really, really wanted to have team members who could set and keep deadlines without me having to project.

I have never thought that it was my job as somebody's boss to manage their timelines and their projects for them.

Anyone I hire have to come to me knowing how to do this.

Once I figured this out, it led me to make some really important changes to the way I hired that ultimately changed everything for me and allowed me to build a business that I was able to run working remotely, traveling full time.

And that thrived to the extent that I was able to sell that business after a couple of years.

First, I looked for ways to give my candidates opportunities to show me how they behave once they actually had the job.

So this is behavioral based things.

I wanted to know things like, could my candidates set and meet deadlines?

Would they be able to push back on client requests?

What's their communication style?

I wanted to see kind of how they work, like what their working style was already like.

A lot of us do this by asking people behavioral questions, right?

So if a client ask you to do something out of scope, what do you do?

Or can you tell me about a time when.

And I had been doing these kinds of questions in my interviews, but I found that they weren't really giving me the full picture that I needed to get people on board who already had sort of the temperaments that I needed them to have to begin with.

Because this stuff is very hard to train.

You can't take a person who can't meet a deadline and get them to do that.

Like, I just really don't think that that's something that we can reasonably be expected to do while we're building and running business.

And so this was really important to me, right?

I said, I don't want to have to project manage my people.

I implemented a step in my hiring system where when I gave my folks their skills assessment, I sent them an email, I include the assessment.

I said, I expect this to take one to two hours.

And I know that you're very busy and you have other things going on.

You're probably working right now.

So could you just take a glance at it and let me know when you'll be able to give it back to me?

Do you see what I did there?

I gave my candidate an opportunity to set a deadline with me and then meet that deadline.

If they couldn't do that, they could not move on in my hiring process.

So if they didn't get back to me and tell me when they would have it back, they were out.

If they missed that deadline, unless they had emailed me ahead of time and said, you know what, something came up at work and I'm really Sorry, but I can't meet this deadline.

They were out, right?

Because I couldn't have somebody inside my small business who wasn't able to proactively communicate if they couldn't meet a deadline, or who wasn't able to stick to a deadline that they had set.

Like, I wasn't coming from the outside and saying, can you get this back to me in 48 hours?

I was saying, I know you're busy, take a look and let me know.

I was giving a lot of permission for them to give me a reasonable timeline and to stick to it.

And so this is what I mean when I'm talking about giving candidates an opportunity to show you how they behave.

A lot us do this already in terms of like, are people detail oriented, right?

A lot of people are out there advising you to put in these little tests inside of your process where you're able to see, like, okay, do people use the subject line or label files the way that they need to do?

They have that attention to detail.

And I think those things are great, but I think that they're not specific enough to the way that you want to work with people.

And so this is one where, if you have ever made a hire and they haven't quite worked out because maybe somebody couldn't manage projects the way you needed them to, couldn't manage clients the way you needed them to, couldn't push back on you if you were being unreasonable, right?

Like, wherever that breakdown was, or like, I have a friend who really cares about people's communication, like how quickly they do, how they manage people through communication.

That's just something you can test through, through the process you want to think about how do you give folks this opportun to show up in the process so that you can see how they behave once they're in the job.

The second thing I'm going to tell you is the one that had an even bigger impact on my hires.

Together these two are very powerful.

But the second one really changed everything for me.

If you've ever hired before or if you've ever looked for advice or bought somebody's hiring system, I'm sure you've seen that you should do some sort of skills task.

Maybe you ask somebody to do a small editing assignment, a design challenge, a coding exercise, whatever, right?

You give them a test that should take them like an hour, maybe two to complete, and then you get that back and you use that test to decide, okay, I'm going to move these candidates forward.

But once you move the candidates forward and you kind of grade the task, whatever that means to you, do you do anything with it?

Most people I've talked to about this do not.

They never go back over that assessment or that test with the candidate.

And this is your big, big missed opportunity to find out how somebody will operate once they get the job.

Digging into the assessment with your candidate does so many things for you.

First of all, especially now that people can go and plug in any sort of assignment into an AI tool like ChatGPT, if you talk through the assessment with your candidate, it helps you figure out if they actually did the work themselves.

Because if I plug an assignment into AI and it generates an answer and I send that back in for a job, you know, it's very hard for me then if I don't know what I'm doing to actually speak to it, if I'm ask questions about it.

Like, if you go to me and say, hey, can you tell me about the decision you made here to use this coding language or something, I don't know how to code, you would immediately figure out that I am lying or exaggerating about my abilities.

So you'd be able to right away figure out, like, did this candidate actually do the work?

And I think that's so important now.

The next thing it does is it gives you more insight into someone's level of mastery with the content.

So let's say that I did the work myself, but maybe I really struggled.

Maybe I had to consult some outside resources.

If you start interviewing me on something that I'm struggling with and asking me why I made the decisions I did or how I approached it, you're going to figure out very quickly if I have remedial skills.

When I'm talking about the work, expertise just shines through.

Like, to this day, even though I'm not working in the podcast outreach space anymore, if somebody asks me a question, they're always like, oh, like, they always get something out of that because I have an expert level of knowledge that they hadn't heard before.

And so immediately you're going to figure out, like, where the skill level of your candidate is.

And if you have a couple of candidates and they both turn in great assignments and you're not sure which one is better, this is going to help you so much.

The other thing, and this was so important to me, is that you're gonna start to see how they will respond to feedback and to conversations about their work when they're working for you.

So if you're talking through them, their assessment, and you're saying, Like I said, like, oh, how did you make this decision here?

And then you can just say something like, oh, I might have done it differently.

Here's what I would have done.

And you can see how they respond.

Do they get defensive immediately and start explaining and pushing back?

Do they roll over and like, oh, you're so right.

I can't believe in like self flagellating?

Or do they respond thoughtfully and in a way that you would want to see them respond if they were in a similar experience in front of a client?

So you can see how they start to respond and manage feedback and you can see how they will fit inside the kind of culture you want and how they, you want them to show up in the job.

And then the last thing I'll say that this does for you, and I think it's truly the most important of all of them, is it gives you a chance to learn more about how your candidates think about problems.

So to me, it's not enough to just see like, can somebody do the job well?

Do they turn in good work.

But ultimately, if you want to have a strong team, the thing that you're going to need to have is an understanding that when they have to make decisions without your input, that those decisions are going to align with the decision making you want to have at your company.

Right.

You want them to have good judgment.

Judgment is ultimately the difference between a team that is okay, but that you have to spend a lot of time giving management guidance to and one who is able to step up and up level your organization.

As your organization grows, you want candidates that can grow with it.

You want their judgment to align with not yours.

Exactly, but like the judgments that you would make for the company.

Right.

So another way I would think about this are like the values that align your company.

So if you have certain company values and you have somebody doing an assignment, well, is your value that they follow procedures exactly?

Well, you can talk to them about how they did the assignment and maybe they say things like, well, you know, you gave me these directions and the steps and so I had a little qualms about the step, but ultimately I knew that it was important to follow directions.

So that's the choice I made.

Right.

Or if you want them to be really creative and really strategic and come up with like innovative new ways to do things, maybe they say like, well, you know, I was looking at the pieces of information you provide and I know that most people would do it this way, but I thought it would be really interesting to take this other angle.

Right.

You're just kind of looking for the way they talk about their work to see if that aligns for the way that you want people showing up once they're inside your organization.

I also want to add that it really matters to me that in our small businesses we are creating good working environments for the people we're hiring.

I think that that is like a radical change that we can be making inside our companies that will dramatically improve people's lives.

If you can create a great working environment for people and a great alternative to traditional ways of working, like, wow, that is to me very, very important.

And I'll say that when you add in this conversational step into the process, it's good for not just you, but it's also good for your candidates because it lets them get to know you on another level, just like it lets you get to know them.

They're going to experience what it's like having a conversation with you about the work they're going to, how you give feedback, and through that they're going to have more information when they're deciding if they're going to take the role that you offer to them.

And you don't want people taking your job if temperamentally they're not a match.

Like, think back to what I told you about my bad hires, where I had somebody inside my organization who was such a strong contributor.

She was so smart and she was so creative, but she just could not handle being in the kind of environment I had where there was a lot of feedback and where we had a value for continual improvement.

And so it meant that we are always looking at our market and looking at new ways to doing things and doing experimentation.

And sometimes, you know, you were going to try something or be pushed to do something outside your comfort zone and it wasn't going to work out.

And not everyone wants to work in an environment like that.

Like, I'll be honest, when I was in my 20s, I would have hated the job that I offered.

I just like emotionally could not have handled the kind of transparency that we have around the work, the kind of collaboration we did within our company.

Like, I was just too afraid of engaging in that way with my peers at that age.

If I had hired myself, my 20 year old self, 22 year old self into my organization, she would have failed.

She would not have grown in that role.

It's so important too that your candidates get to experience what it's going to be like to actually work with you, what these conversations are like.

They're going to hear your tone of voice in a more natural kind of conversational way.

They're going to hear the way that you phrase things and they're going to be able to make judgments about you, too.

And that is great.

That is more than okay.

Like, that is exactly what you want because you want it to be more than a match of just like, can this person on a baseline do the job description?

The job description is a start.

It is obviously critically important that you hire people who have the skills to do the job.

So in my case, I had to look for skills, right?

But it was also like, I had to look for do they have the right frame of mind?

Do they approach problems in the right kind of way?

And making that switch and digging into how people are thinking, that's how I built my dream team.

I want you to be able to start incorporating this practice into your hiring system right now.

So what I've done for you is pull together some scripts that you can use to start holding these conversations when you're next hiring, even if you're hiring someone tomorrow.

Like, you could start using this right away.

The scripts I pulled together for you take you from setting up the context for these conversations with candidates so they know what to expect from you, to some language you can use to create enough safety for them so that they can actually have a conversation with you during an interview to how you can gently give someone some feedback.

You can see how they'll respond.

Like, it's just prompts on how to hold these conversations.

You can go grab these scripts right now.

I have them for you at my website.

It's theopswhisperer.com forward/interviewscripts it's a mouthful.

I'll say it again.

It's theopswhiSperer.com forward slash interviewscripts and if you'd like some help either auditing your hiring process and looking at some other things, things that you might want to do to improve and make sure you avoid hiring mistakes, I'm going to give you an option to get some support from me there too.

I believe in you and I know.

That you've got this so good.

Right?

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the System Save Me Podcast.

If you loved this episode, I would so appreciate a review on whatever platform you're listening on.

But also go up on the guest host, connect with them on Instagram, LinkedIn or wherever they suggested to reach out.

I hope you're having a great day and I will see you on the next episode.