56. How to hire for excellence

Unknown Speaker 0:00

Music.

Brandon 0:06

Hello and welcome to another episode of the operations room. I am Brandon minsinga, joined by my amazing co host, Bethany Ayers. How are things going? Bethany, can

Bethany Ayers 0:13

we just say? Okay, bit tired, really tired of traveling back and forth to Manchester, even though it's only week three.

Brandon 0:22

Yeah, that's a lot of commuting. And by the way, this morning, being a Friday, we have a tremendous amount of rain happening, so you can feel the pitter patter as we as we speak right now, which is, it's not depressing, but it feels very moody, I would say, and like

Bethany Ayers 0:35

winter has come or is coming. I have my blanket on. I'm ready tucked in for the winter now

Brandon 0:42

going into hibernation. Pretty

Bethany Ayers 0:44

much. I had a partial disaster this week, commuting to Manchester, because people go to Manchester for things, I guess, like there's two football teams, there are concerts, there is just stuff, which meant this week, the only affordable hotel I could do was a Yotel without windows. A Yotel?

Brandon 1:05

Are those like the little pods? This

Bethany Ayers 1:07

wasn't a little pod, but I was like, I'm not in my room much. How bad can it be to not have a window? And the answer is really bad. I think it's the closest experience I will have to ever being in prison. Hopefully

Brandon 1:21

it's either a prison or it's Yotel. You can't tell the difference.

Bethany Ayers 1:24

It was horrible. They had sent me a note. It was more than 100 pounds a night. And then they sent me a little thing of like, do you want to upgrade? You can upgrade to a window? I was like, yeah, let me set up the upgrade. Have a window, 85 pounds a night for an upgrade, for a window, for a window, wow. So I was like, Nope, no, no, I'll just sit in my prison

Brandon 1:48

even as you're expensing it to the company. You deserve the 85 pound window, or I suspect your company should be affording you that luxury.

Bethany Ayers 1:55

re decent consistently around: 8590

Brandon 2:21

True, rates have gone up.

Bethany Ayers 2:23

They have So anyhow, you need a window in a hotel. That would be one of my learnings in general.

Brandon 2:30

Next time you head back to Manchester, then are you looking for a different not a Yotel next time, well,

Bethany Ayers 2:35

and actually, but Yotel have windows and no windows. So maybe I would give it a go. I don't know, because the whole room was weird, because when you walked in, the ceiling was one of those exposed concrete ceilings, which is part of why it felt like a prison. And the door was just like dark gray, and then this laminate flooring, and then the bathroom was a pre fab pod bathroom. So that's top was a couple feet lower than the ceiling. They really brought this thing in, and I don't understand the benefit of that. So it's like going in kind of a little barracks to go to the bathroom, and the whole thing squeaked. It was just weird. The whole thing was strange. And then I had a table, but no chair. So the first night, I was eating a falafel, and ended up first I had it on my bed, and it was making such a mess, and it made my trousers like and it got all over my jeans, and I only had one pair of trousers, and I tried to clean the falafel off the jeans. It was like, Okay, I'll eat over the table, or I'll eat at the table, but there's no chair, so I'm just standing over this little table, and I have one of the glasses underneath my falafel to catch the juice. And I was just like, this is a new low. Like, I have no window. My jeans are covered in falafel juice I'm dripping into a cup.

Brandon 3:51

This is potentially the worst promotion for Yotel the whole time, right there. We could, like, do an edit of what you've just described. Package that as, like, a video snippet. We go viral, I think, with the hotel bashing. So today we've got a great topic, which is how to hire for excellence. We have an amazing guest for this, which is James King. He's the number one international bestseller for accelerating excellence, the principles that drive elite performance. Before we get to James King, just wanted to ask you a couple of questions, when you make wrong hires, it is disastrous for the business, especially from a senior executive standpoint, both the time to get those people in, the acquisition cost and the impact on the company if they leave within six nine months, where they're just at the point by which they're actually viable to contribute to the business, and you're having to pull the plug and reset and hire a new person coming in, thereby losing whatever a year, type of thing. So with that thought in mind, what James talked about was putting in a lot more rigor into the process of acquiring talent and interviewing specifically to ensure that out of the gates you're getting the right person. And he talked about this idea of in the test day. Page being much more intense with simulation testing, which is to say that for this job, there are three to five tasks that you'll primarily be doing in this job that we need to stress test those three to five tasks over the course of a full day exercise with the candidate to really run them through like a real environment, I guess, to test those things. And I'm curious what you make of this, because I know that from an SDR standpoint, this is kind of, I wouldn't say, typical, but there definitely services out there for full day assessments, for this kind of thing, where you run through a series of tasks to filter out who are potentially the best possible candidates from an SDR position standpoint. But what he was suggesting was you should use this across the board for any role, including senior executives.

Bethany Ayers 5:41

I love the concept. I'm still struggling on the reality, although interestingly, as you're talking now, and I think James speaks about it in our episode, is like, what are the examples of the tests that you would do with an exec and I think I could actually come up with the exec test more than, say, I don't know, Product Marketing test or, you know, simulating product marketing. Because I would think like, what would you need for an exec? And there's certain areas that you need to test that they are good at their domain, and then leadership style. So whether or not they're good at leadership, does the leadership style fit? Because my experience, leadership style is so often why the senior leader doesn't make it. And also, like doing it around a values test doesn't work because values are quite amorphous. And like, what is your version of trust versus my version of trust? And nobody's going to say, oh, no, trust is not important to me. But then when you get into how it manifests itself. It could be very different. So I can see, like, write an email to the board, summarizing your product roadmap, trying to imagine, like, what would be the leader? Let's say we're hiring for a chief product officer, because it's such a hard one. So what would your presentation to the board be around your roadmap? How would you structure your team? Or send a weekly update about what's happened in your team, or you give them a simulation of like you've just had to fire somebody. It was a popular member of staff, and you now need to re gel your team. What would your communication plan be? Give us examples of what you would say in what you would write, and that could start to unpick it, but you'd have to really, you spend a few hours thinking about how to test. You know,

Brandon 7:29

it's interesting. I keep going back and forth in my mind, because the way that James described it on the one side of it seemed like entirely kind of impossible to do. The sheer number of candidates that you'd have to be able to run through this process to get that number of candidates and to get them all into a full day simulation, seems so difficult to make happen in reality. So there's that part of it. On the flip side, I also bought into his argument, which is, like, it's not impossible. You can totally do it. You just have to have enough candidates that are interested in the role itself and in your company to want to do it for a full day in this case, and do the assessment, the point of taking three to five core tasks from that role, as you know, senior executive in this case, identifying what those things are, identifying suitable simulated, rigorous tasks to go through. And we say rigorous simulations. We're talking, I'm assuming, for each task over the course of the day. And there's three to five of them. We're looking at a couple hours a couple hours a piece for each of them. So they're actually quite real and quite intensive. That seems very desirable to do, because, to his point, at the end of that day, you should have, like, a really rich understanding of that person in terms of applying tasks and stressors to them and how they respond. I suppose I think the leadership style thing, I think is way more difficult to figure out, like, what is a good two hour simulated exercise to understand that?

Bethany Ayers 8:47

So I took a aptitude test. I don't know. I took some sort of test around private equity, like, do I have the right skills to do be a private equity leader? Because it's like a recruiter that works on people moving from venture into PE it was interesting. It was almost like the inbox exercise that you hear about for the fast track civil service in the UK. For those of you who don't know about it, for graduates who are entering the civil service in the UK, it's a really tiny acceptance rate, like one or 2% is very prestigious, and one of the exercises in inbox. So you have a bunch of emails in effect, and how are you going to sort them? How do you prioritize? What are you going to do about all of them? And there's no obvious right answer, and you answer it, and then you either pass or you don't pass. I mean, there's other parts to it, but that's that element of it, and this test that I took was similar. So it was like, you are concerned about the financial viability or a financial decision. What do you do? Like, raise alarm bells, investigate yourself, blah, blah. And there's like, four different options. And some of the options, for me sounded ridiculous, and then others were like. Those both seem kind of okay, and you have to rank what you would do most to least likely. So I wonder if, like an extended inbox exercise, and then having the person explain their reasoning. And it's not just around the emails in your inbox, but also difficult situations that we deal with, and how would you approach it? And so hirings and firings are critical, aligning teams, disagreeing with colleagues, I

Brandon: 10:26

suspect, from an executive standpoint, shaking out the bag of alignment with the CEO and the founder and the other executives in terms of the fit for that company, that team, as well as just the competent side, you know, getting that done in a single day seems very useful to preempt any problems down the road, because I don't know what your hit rate Bethany has been for hiring senior executives and letting people go at that level.

Bethany Ayers: 10:51

I think I'm in the 5050, which is the industry standard, yeah,

Brandon: 10:55

which is what James seems to be trying to solve here. So the other thing that he'd spoken about was in the assessment part, testing the candidates on specific stressors, and being exacting about what you're looking for and scoring on and assigning that to different individuals to look at. So for example, if you're in the classic task example, where somebody is presenting, you have two people that are sitting there watching that person. Each person has a unique set of things and stressors to present back to that person in terms of the stressor. And then equally, they're also looking for things uniquely, as opposed to the other person that's looking for another set of characteristics. What's your take on that? I

Bethany Ayers: 11:30

mean, that's just pretty standard, isn't it? Even if it's not an assessment day, if you have a nice recruitment process, you have scorecards, you know what you're looking for in different rounds, and people have those questions to look for. That doesn't seem unusual to me. The only difference is that we're doing these big assessment days,

Brandon: 11:49

which brings me to the last question. So the standard approach that I seem to take all the time for every hire is your talent acquisition screen. The hiring manager comes second, and then if they pass that stage, they go into the task, whatever the task is. And then there's a broader set of individuals that will interview that person. And then the last step is usually the ways of working, slash culture interview, and then hiring the person off the back of that. What do you think of that? Because that seems to be the default go to. And with what James is suggesting, it's basically just taking that task component, I think, and just expanding that dramatically over a longer period of time with a lot more activity,

Bethany Ayers: 12:25

and also, so I think it would probably be the screening, and then you don't have that second interview, you have a day, and then presumably at the end of the day, it's done. So there's no final interview either. So I'm assuming there's a screening before just going straight into an assessment day. I think it depends on the role. Like we've had loads of roles where that process that you described, which is similar one to that I've used, works absolutely fine, and there's no need to change it. So I think I would use it where needed, but not across the board, because it is it, not only is it a lot of effort to think through an assessment day. It's a lot of pressure on the teams to have to, like, take a day out and simulate everything and be part of this massive process. James's argument is that if you hire the right people, they love being part of the assessment days, both sides, but it's still a lot, although if you add up all of the hours that the four stage process takes up, it's probably it's just one day of a hit, rather than lots of distraction hiring for multiple roles. The other point that James made, that I thought was really interesting, is around it's not just about aptitude, but it's about joy and love of those activities, and having people who really get energized, rather than enervated by the activity, and I thought that that was, again, even if we're not going to go for the whole simulation day, how I don't think we take a lot of time to look at like who's super excited and add the enthusiasm factor into our scorecard. So I'm just thinking this, if I reflect back to at peak, when we hired our first salespeople, one of the sales guys in his task interview got so excited, he jumped up and started rubbing his legs. He's like, Oh, I could go sell here and here. Like it was his physical reaction to the great excitement of being able to sell and where he was going to sell and how? And actually, that moment, I was like, Yeah, okay, we need him, and he is still at peak, and he is our top salesman. I

Brandon: 14:30

always ask questions around their interest level in the subject matter. So product marketing is a good example. Like, do they organically post about product marketing in interesting and useful ways with Novel Thoughts. You know, what kind of podcast did they listen to that really excite them around their work life? What was the last book that they read of consequence that they were really interested in, business wise? What was that? Why was that gonna mean? So what I'm trying to discern a little bit is, like from a technical skill domain point of view, do they have, like, a real vested interest? And the actual work itself inherently, as opposed to just being stuck into a role, because that's kind of where they've

Bethany Ayers: 15:05

ended up absolutely because that's when you find out where their passion is. And so ask that question. They're like, wine. Let me tell you about wine and on and on and on and on and on. You're like, okay, so this is just your job to facilitate your love of wine or cycling or investments, like a couple of people who were just massively into crypto and like, why don't you go do that? Why? Yeah, and so it's interesting. I have actually had people like, Look, you really seem way more excited about that than this. Why don't you pursue it? And in a way, it becomes quite easy feedback as to why there are no because I don't want them to have this job. I want them to go and pursue their passion.

Brandon: 15:48

So why don't we get onto our conversation with Mr. James King, how to hire for excellence.

James King: 15:59

I love most about performance sciences is that, traditionally, science studies the average. First things you're taught on any science degree is how to delete what we call measurement error, which is the outliers that risk messing up that data. But for people like us, there's a huge problem with that, and that is that you cannot learn about excellence through studying the average. So instead of deleting the outlier in the performance sciences, we study the outlier. We identify the individuals and organizations that have performed at the absolute upper limits of human potential, and then we break down and examine the causal mechanisms that drive their success. And the good news is, performance is never a coincidence. Everyone that excels does so through aligning with a specific set of principles, whether they realize it or not. We know the scientific forces that drive success at the absolute foundation, which is talent identification, whether that's in you as a COO or identifying talent to solve the challenges and problems you're going to expose them to in the role. For me, the fundamentals of leadership management is that your role is to clearly understand the technical, psychological, and of course, has done a lot of work in sport, in the military, and the physical then comes in, but the demands that are going to be imposed on the people you lead, because it's then your job to identify people who have the hardware to meet those demands, and then you need to technically prepare them to build that capacity so that they can not just meet those demands, but do so with a bit of a buffer. So James,

Bethany Ayers: 17:35

it sounds really easy the way you talk about it. So it's like, identify the outliers, the top performers, figure out why they're good, and then figure out how to test for them. I find people fall over me included on how do you know, what are the parts that matter for what's good? Let's take like an outstanding salesperson, because that's just a really easy one in a business context, because they sell well, you can see their numbers. Therefore they're outstanding. They're selling twice as much as everyone else. Then everybody looks at that outstanding sales performer, and then you come in with your own angle and bias. So the people who really care about activity will go, Look, they do more activity than everyone else. The person who really cares about emotional resilience will say, look, they take no more often than anyone else. The person who cares about emotional EQ will say they have great relationships better than everyone else. And it might be that it's all three, or it might be that it's none of those, but it's everybody's bias. So how do you identify you

James King: 18:33

have a sweet spot, just like a baseball bat has a location at which the ball will rebound at greater velocity than if struck at any other point, so do you, and so does everyone you lead and you bring into your organization and to excel, the goals that you pursue and the way that you pursue them must align with this sweet spot, and your sweet spot is combined in born from the qualities that make you unique. It's the intersection and convergence of three things, your strengths. So these are the things that come naturally to you, your interests, the things you're instinctually drawn to, and your values, the things that are most important to you. And when you pursue goals from the point at which these three things intersect, the magic happens. And we call this by the way, concordant goals. So this is called self concordance in the field of psychology. It's born out of what we call self determination theory. And the secret behind concordant goals is that they activate your dopaminergic incentive reward system. So this is the evolutionary mechanism that enables you to move forward confidently and assertively in the face of adversity and overwhelming odds. So it's designed to move you along your path of maximal development, and when you pursue goals from your sweet spot, your brain gives you all the good chemicals. What this does is it enables you to access your what I describe as psychological firepower. People. Talk about confidence, motivation, resilience, okay, yeah, we know these are all the top level behaviors that will ultimately drive success across time, but the root cause in terms of activating those traits, the psychological firepower that, by the way, exists in everyone. There are people that lack this part of their brain. There are people who are pursuing goals that fail to ignite these traits in the first place. There aren't people that aren't born without the ability to be confident, be resilient, be motivated, all the things we want as a leader or COO in our organization to see from the people we lead. This is where it really links to talent identification. I'm just going to very quickly go one level deeper in each of these areas, because this is where it gets really important when you're designing your talent identification process, your objective is then, obviously, to identify performers who are concordant with the role you want them to perform. The first component of the three is your strengths. And the reason your strengths are so important, by the way, to pursue goals that leverage your strengths is that they'll dictate two things, your baseline ability and your responsiveness to training. So the question from a talent ID perspective is, what strengths do you need to excel in this role technically? So that's gonna be different if you're an accountant or a salesperson, but there's gonna be a set of technical skills there, then there's gonna be a set of psychological skills there, in terms of introversion, extroversion, judging, perceiving all the Myers, Briggs, stuff. And then, of course, in sport, military, you have the physical aspect. But Beth, if we're pursuing the same goal, and I have six months experience, you have six months experience. If you have more strengths than me, you might experience 50 breakthrough moments or units of progress over that six month period. And if I experienced 30, then two years from now, you're going to be so far ahead of me. I'm never catching you up, no matter how hard I try. So the strengths are the key thing. The next part is the interests. So strengths will dictate the role you perform, but then your interests will dictate the area in which you perform it. So interests are the things we're instinctively drawn to. So for me, excellence, potential, talent. I didn't pick it. It picked me. I didn't get a say in this. I was just drawn to it. And they are so important because they dictate your ability to spend time and total immersion in a single, specific area. So if you're sincerely interested in financial account is not hard to spend three days on end, 16 hours a day churning through them. If you're not, then you got a big problem, and you got to work with discipline and willpower. And across time you're done, no one can win or Excel across time on discipline and willpower. It's a terrible strategy.

Brandon: 22:36

So those three parts make tremendous sense to me. And traditionally, in hiring processes, you tend to do that you look for the right strengths, you look for the right competencies, you look for the interest in the organization, the interest in what they do for a living, and you look for the values. Is there something from your background that you can tell us and tell our audience where? Here are some tricks of the trade in terms of how to think about strengths, how to think about interest, how to think about values. Stage

James King: 22:59

one is you need to model excellence. So you need to identify individuals that are performing and are delivering in the way that you want them to deliver. You must do some research and collect some data in terms of what is unique about them. And that could be the back of the envelope version, if that's all the time you've got. That could be some psychological profiling. That could be getting a professional organization to run that assessment for you, but in effect, it's that stepping back and literally examining so you take your outlier performers, you'd maybe do a cognitive test battery, and just like you know, you've got athletes on a pitch, it's quite clear that the physical strengths required to excel in basketball are very different from if you were a jockey, and it's exactly the same if you're an accountant, or if you're in sales or you're in HR, and you can stream the individuals in your organization through via cognitive test battery, the exact same way you can screen the physical anthropometry of a professional athlete, and you can test all that very easily. I would definitely suggest Myers Briggs, Ocean from psychological strengths. There's a myriad of cognitive test batteries. So that's one angle to come at it. They're clinical validated tools that will give you a picture of of what excellence looks like to you based on who you perceive to be good in your organization. The next aspect to be is to, quite simply, what do you want them to do? For instance, a COO there's, you know, I've worked with lots of coos, and some of them are very different. And this, for me, is where, if you're lost, this is the most simple thing to do. What are the four to five or even three to five things you want this individual to do? Well, simplified simulations and get them to do it as part of the assessment process.

Bethany Ayers: 24:38

I worked for a company called Codility, that is a testing software for engineers as part of the hiring process. And because that was their background, they had a philosophy that basically every hire should be tested. And I love that philosophy, and I took that away with me for subsequent jobs. And so I have tests for SDRs. Tests for salespeople. I have tests for Salesforce admins, etc. I don't have as great tests for execs, just because it's a real I like a lot of soft skills. But despite doing the tests, I assume it weeds out the obvious no's, but it has not, I can't say hand on heart, produced better performers, because

James King: 25:20

it's one dimensional. That's the point I'm trying to communicate. So I've talked to you about the lab based test, the cognitive test batteries. They're not the tests, so let me be clear, they are to understand what you are looking for. But

Bethany Ayers: 25:32

I've done like role plays of SDRs on the phone, or role plays with sales people through a discovery workshop, and when hiring execs, I absolutely require a presentation, and I do that just to see what their slide skills and their narrative building are like, like, I don't actually care what the results of their presentation is. I just want to know that they have those skills, rather than being able to talk if

James King: 25:56

you're doing that well and accurately, I guess what I'm saying is, you're not well, I know,

Bethany Ayers: 26:00

and I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong. Like, it's easy to get rid of the runs that are obvious no's, but they're people who perform well on that test, who do not then perform well in real life. And I'm trying to figure out, where is that? Where am I going wrong?

James King: 26:15

So a few things you can do. One is, when you're simulating, you have to simulate properly. You need role players, and you need to task those role players with, okay, this is the stress I want you to put on this individual. And here's why, and here's what I want to see from that the right candidate will do this. They won't do this. This is what excellence look like. This is what mediocre looks like. This is what Paul looks like. For me, it'd be looking at recreating the typical working day. So if the pipeline process is okay. You need to generate and come to a conclusion of which people to approach, to sell to. So that might be task one. Get them to do it. Here's our database. Who would you tag? Why? And probe them, penetrate them. That's the first skill. Get them to do that. And then why examine the decision making behind the outcomes. The next phase might be the right well, then what would you do? They'd be on the phone for two hours. Okay, get them on the phone, not for 15 minutes, for two hours to a broad spectrum of individuals. And this is where it's important to make the assessment process hard and to make it accurately reflect, even as much as you can, the time frames involved, at least over a working day. And the reasons are that smart, competent people, they can hack, and we're taught at good universities to memorize, prepare and recite, regurgitate, repeat. What you can't do if you're not truly concordant with the role, is do that for two hours and then move straight into the next thing and do it again. And that's why everything I do, or we do is with biometric feedback, so we can see the physiological response. So I can see the sales guy up there that's doing an incredible presentation, eight out of 10, maybe. But I can see his heart rates through the roof. Is is a HRV, which is a measure of sympathetic stress, is super high. I know that guy doesn't love this, because he's using willpower discipline to get it done. Then you'll see the individual that's maybe doing a seven or so technically, maybe not quite as good. Maybe they're doing an eight, maybe they're doing a nine. Then I look under the hood, I'm like, wow, this person loves this. But then I would move on to third stage of the sales process. Meet this person in person. Close them. Okay, close them. And all the extreme challenges, everything. When you're designing your assessment center as well, and you're designing these role plays, you must go extreme and work in. You don't get someone to look through a set of basic accounts. You get them to go if you look at say, we're screening for attention to detail, and a CIO with a financial background and strengths there. And you make it harder, and you see who breaks and the right candidates when you simulate these roles accurately, and you put people under pressure. If they're truly concordant, they will love it. At the end of the day, you'll go for dinner with them, or you'll have a chat, and they'll still be there being like, Oh, what about that? And why did you do this? The people who are just like, just want a job rather than want to pursue a calling, will sort of be there like, you know, they'll be hanging out. Their body language would be

Brandon: 28:58

awful. This would be amazing to do, but in reality, it's literally almost impossible. There's no possible way you can ask candidates in 2024 to go through the battery of tests that you just kind of talked about. The one thing that I am thinking about a way of doing it that you're suggesting, I think, is what I've also done in the past, and probably you have Bethany as well, which is sometimes you bring people in on contractor as a consultant for a time period, two months, three months, four months, the discussion with that candidate is that, look, come in, do the consulting bit, and let's see how things evolve over the course of three, four month period, actually doing the job. There is nothing more

James King: 29:34

important than the talent you bring into your organization. And this is why so many people struggle with this, because they spend 2% of the time recruiting and taking the time to design simulate these tests, and they spend 98% of their time fixing all the problems from getting it wrong. You need to, and you can, if the individual wants that job, they will come in for a day and they will do an assessment day. We normally do them on a Saturday, so no excuses. And quite frankly, if you're not. Ahead, to put in the time. You're probably not the right person for the job, and certainly for anyone that's working in a company I'm working with, I'm not interested in you, if you're not prepared to do that, and it's important as you. And there's a real, honest narrative here is that we're going to ask a lot of you, but we're also going to give you a lot. We're going to give you everything. Therefore we need to check that this fits. We're going to cut our losers very quickly, which is why we do try and thin people out the process as quickly as possible. But for the two or three candidates that are looking to commit perhaps the next 510, 15 years of their life, then if you can't spend 16 hours in total, or 12 hours in total, then for me, you're in the wrong company. And I would encourage people listening to set your standards higher. And if you can't get people to do that, where your recruitment process is probably breaking down is what I would call the gene pool. You probably haven't got enough high quality candidates coming to apply for your role. Because, of course, if you've got no supply, then, yeah, it's tough, and that's why one of the first things we have to optimize in talent identification is the demand is, how do we bang our drum? What's unique about our company? What can we offer that other people can't How do we tell the world about that? I am

Bethany Ayers: 31:06

somewhere in between the two of you. I have had the experience we used. I can't remember their name anymore, and it wasn't Pareto law, but it was another one that does SDR recruitment about 15 years ago, and what they do for SDRs was very similar to what you're talking about. So they have a huge talent pool. Because they base their gene pool as you say, any graduate who's interested in joining tech or going into sales applies, I do. They get 1000s of people applying all the time. They narrow it down to the people who come to the assessment day. And then the assessment day is an incredibly tough day, where most people quit halfway through or just cry, and then at the end of the assessment day, the ones who get through it are then the ones that they place as SDRs. And I know that this works. I had moral qualms about like the stories that I heard, because there's a lot of tears on the day, but the ones that did survive and get through the other end. I'm in touch with quite a few of them still, and they are now global leaders. They have done incredibly well, and they had the right stuff. So I'm agreeing with you that that worked. But we had two conditions. We had somebody else doing the assessment for us, and we had a big gene pool. My concern is the requirement on the rest of the organization who is needed for the assessment day. So let's say you do it on a Saturday. That's a big ask of everybody else in the team, because it's not just you and the hiring managers and the leaders like you need a lot of people involved. So presumably you do it in batches. How does that work? If you've got

James King: 32:39

concordant people in your industry that want to compete and want to compete and want to win, they want to what do so with the best people. And also, if you design these assessment centers, that it's one of the most fun things, like, people love it. People love coming in. It's almost the most exciting thing to do, because you're it's a responsibility. If people don't want that responsibility, then again, maybe they're the wrong people. But if you haven't got at least a handful of cultural architects in your organization that do want to do that, then I think you've got big problems, to be honest. I think as well, like Brandon, you talked about effectively what was a probation period, I couldn't agree more. I still think, though, you have to do a robust screening, assessment and demand a lot. One of the other reasons for that, people who do hard things and get through them, appreciate them more, and people who are in organizations who know that it's bloody hard to get into them. But one of the military selection processes I went through, the privilege of going through such a brutal selection process, is the second you're in. People look to the left and right, and they trust you, and they give you responsibility, and they give you your their time, and they give you their effort, and they do the extra they'll go the extra mile to support you, because they believe in you, because you've passed the robust test. But then absolutely probation shouldn't be a foregone conclusion. We've got avatar. Stage one. What are we trying to hire here? What the strengths, interest, values, stage two, the gene pool. How are we going to find them? Because we got 100 applicants, we need to hire 20 people. The probability of getting great performance is very low at Mandara capital, the example case study in the book, my first assessment center, we had 150 applicants. I knew that was the biggest problem, so that's where I focused my effort. It wasn't talent that was a problem. It was our our talent identification process problem. You have to take ownership and remove excuses. If you haven't got a talent, you don't just be like, Okay, we haven't got the gene pool. We'll just have to compromise. Never compromise. Never drop your standards. You have to go and solve the root cause problem, which is go and beat the drum about why you should get there. And if you don't know what that is, then that's your problem.

Brandon: 34:37

Couple things occur in my head, one of which is, when you're hiring SDRs, you can do this batch process over the course of a day period, and it kind of makes more sense in some ways, because these are young people coming out of university, and they have all sorts of variances of skills and abilities and resilience. When you come into other role types, you're not going to have the pool number one, and you're also going to have a much more complex competency. Framework set up. So for example, revenue operations, or you start moving up the ranks to executives, like a CEO, as an example, what kind of full day competency you would run for a CEO.

James King: 35:10

The game has changed, and the players have changed. And with the generations you're talking about, even the new generation coming into coo roles, you need to be doing that. And even with the people, we reject that we push and yes, this is a different generation, and some of them might cry. As long as you're not ethical, then we're there to support them. This is a safe, controlled environment, and we give them feedback and we support them. What did you enjoy? What didn't you enjoy? How do you pivot forward? You're not doing anyone favors by not challenging or not pushing them, or dropping your standards to make them feel better or not cry, you're actually doing a disservice, in my opinion.

Bethany Ayers: 35:44

Well, I think it's the support part. Like, what my feedback was from that company was people cried and they're like, Okay, you're weak, you're out. There was no feedback, there was no support. So that's different. So it's not just the tears, it was how they were treated afterwards. That was a concern.

James King: 35:57

So here's our message for every Assessment Center we run. It's quite simply, this. We know we've spent time examining the problems we're going to ask you to solve, and we have very high standards now, because we understand the problem so well, we know very specifically the sort of individual we're looking for in terms of the strengths, interests and values. So today in this assessment process, it's not about are you good enough? It's are you the right type of good anyone that gets through a CV screening process to get to these assessment centers is already probably a pretty high performance human being. It's no longer about, Are you smart? Are you competent? It's are you the right type of smart for the problems we're going to ask you to solve? And it completely depersonalizes the assessment day. And then we'd also caveat with like, Look, you are looking at us today. You're going to go through these tests and these processes that accurately simulate the reality you exposed to in this role. And if you're not excited, you're not enjoying it, even if you do well, we want you to be very honest with us and think very hard about whether you'd really want to accept this role, because it it might not be for you. So as the day progresses, let's talk. Let's exchange information. Let us know how you feel. It's genuinely just a look. Here's who we are, show us who you are, and we're going to put you under the conditions that show us who you are under the conditions you're going to be in in this role.

Bethany Ayers: 37:08

I'm going back to the practicalities again and the structure for the rest of the organization, so I get it for also what you're talking about, which is hiring lots of people, you know, so you're hiring a lot of traders at the same time, or SDRs, and I get the exec side, because it's a critical hire. And you invest so much on that exec hire, and 50% of the time they fail. And so if we can get it to not be 50% of the time all for it, where I struggle is fast moving. Company has a lot of hires, and it's like 20 different roles. So it's not that you can send everybody to the same assessment day, and it seems like that would be a lot to hire your one product marketing person and your one front end developer and your one rev ops person. So that's where I would see it really falling down, is how do you do 20 different roles? So

James King: 38:02

quite simply, you just do it okay? And there's, there's levels of this, right? You can do the back of the envelope version. People think it's hard. It's actually way cheaper than the money people spend on recruiter fees, on HR issues with mediocre, low performing employees, all the challenges you have mopping up the mess they create and make, but effectively, you just find a way. Of course, I'd prioritize it. Where am I going to get leverage first? You're not going to hire 20 people at once. We're going to what we're going to do is aim to hire three people every month over the next six months. And for me, if it's the startup, if that's how long it takes, you take six months because you want the business to work, and you've got a responsibility for the investors, capital, for your own time, and the people you lead and managing that organization. So you'd go three at a time, maybe starting with where you get leverage. You bring people through a world class process, then they get it. Okay, wow, I see, yeah, what we did for me, we go, we need to recreate that for this person. Okay, cool. I've got contacts here. Hustle. That's what you want in people in that organization. So that's gonna be a big trait of what we're looking for in those core people, the core people, they're going to be so important you can't afford to cut corners with that. The game really has changed with this generation. My generation probably being the end of that. I'm 39 now, and you could almost beat people into high performance. You can't do that anymore. You have to intrinsically motivate these people, and that means that you have to take time to step back and be honest about what you can and can't offer in terms of your culture, compensation, the pattern of work, the problems they're going to solve. And you have to create a really compelling why. Why should I work here versus there? And if you don't do that properly, in terms of advertising, again, to try and generate and create that gene pool. Then, then you're going to struggle. You've

Bethany Ayers: 39:47

convinced me more than I thought you would. Your book covers it a little bit, but it doesn't really get into the nitty gritty of what we're talking about here, of like, examples of what the days look like, other than the one for the the trader you. Do you have a blog? Do you have resources that people could get to know you with

James King: 40:05

there is a one hour lecture on tele identification, how to do this, so we can provide the links for that.

Brandon: 40:11

Can you walk me through a template day from your perspective for a senior executive, from 9am to 5am how do you break it down? What do you do?

James King: 40:18

So first off, 9am to 5am I don't care about 9am to 5am I care about what's the toughest day they're going to have that year working for your organization. If you took all the worst bits of every day, the most demanding bits of every day, and you're in your organization, in that role, over the last 18 months, two years, I would identify what are they. I would want them to proportionately reflect reality. It depends on what the role is. There isn't a, this is the COO test, right? So I would look at just like in tennis, there's 86% of points, one a one through the first serve, return serve, second serve. In that role. I would first have to understand what the first serve, return serve and second is, serve is for that role. And then I would recreate scenarios as specifically as possible, and I would expose them to them for the time frames, and those scenarios would be drawn from the worst case examples. So the day that the company had a serious issue with investor relations, and there was an emergency meeting with the board, and you're leading it as CFO or CEO, that's the conversation. And I'm playing this Chairman there, and I'm playing the chairman on the worst day he's woke up. He's at it from his partner, the dog's shot on the carpet. Everything's gone wrong. He's in a mood, and he's going to push you and challenge you. We're going extreme. It might be a disciplinary issue, an ethical one. Okay, these three people have breached the target. The head of tech wants to get rid of them. Your coo. What are you going to do? CEOs are busy doing this. Deal with it. If that's something that happens, and that's the reality of who you're working with. Working with, and if the CEO is loose all over the place, ADHD type symptoms, then guess what? You've got to simulate that in because we need to check he can work with that CEO. Because the skills required to work with that CEO is very different from the skills required working with this one. If you want to see how they discipline people, have them discipline someone. Have him sit there and say, No, I disagree. Push back, see how he deals with that, or she deals with that. Well, they deal with it. It really does depend on the role itself. If it's a sales role I'm going to have, who are the clients? How do they behave? Are they really introverted guys who are technical? Then guess what? I want them to pitch to people like that, and I want them to ask the most awkward questions that those people have asked the sales team over the last 12 months. Not just go and do a comfy comfort zone presentation, and again, you put people in these scenarios, and the right people will love it, and the people that don't want it are like, halfway through, literally, like, look, I don't think this role is for me. I'm going to withdraw from the process. And that's

Bethany Ayers: 42:34

great. Thank you, James. So if our listeners can only take one thing away from our conversation today. What is it?

James King: 42:41

Never drop your standards. And talent isn't the problem. You're the problem. You need to fix your talent identification problem, because there are people out there now that are entirely concordant with a role that would chop arms off to do the role in a company like yours, and it's your job to find them. It's not their job to find you and you're, it's breaking down, because either your gene pool's terrible and they don't know about the opportunity, or you're, they're hearing about it, but you're not communicating it clearly enough, or, you know, in a way that evokes them and gets them to actually apply, or your screening process is just turning them off, or it's not good enough. It's not highlighting who they are and where they're optimized. So you're the problem and take ownership of it and deal with it, because the rewards for doing so are enormous.

Brandon: 43:24

So thank you, James for joining us on the operations room. If you like what you hear, please leave us a comment or subscribe, and we will see you next week.