One size doesn't fit everyone in my experience, there's really two determinants to kind of simplify things which tend to determine what type of best hiring processes might work for your company.

And those two determinants are one, the size of the company into the rate of growth of that company, welcome to the super managers podcast, where we interview leaders from all walks of life to tease out the habits, thought patterns, learnings and experiences that help them be extraordinary at the fine craft.

Of management.

Our goal is to bring you the lessons in the insights so that you don't have to learn through your own mistakes but so that you can shortcut your way to being a great leader.

This podcast is brought to you by fellow the software platform that helps managers in their teams.

Collaborate on meeting, agendas track action items and turn chaotic meetings into productive work sessions.

Check it out at www.elllo.org hey fellow Asian leaders, I'm Aiden and I'm the CEO of fellow dot app.

Today's guest is Nick dimitrov.

He's a former Amazon ba razor and co-founder of Amazon game studios today.

Nick teaches companies, how to hire best quality talent, that consistently raises the bar.

In today's episode, Nick talks about how leaders can acknowledge and eliminate hiring bias, he shares who should have the Final Call On hiring decisions.

Based on the Size of the company.

We also talked about how to define the bar or the standards of an organization.

What to do when you're on the fence.

About a candidate which I found was very interesting the way Nick answer that question.

And finally, she shares some tips on how smaller businesses can compete for talent with large corporations.

Hiring is always really important.

We're in very competitive, Talent, markets today.

And I found this interview with Nick highly used For anyone looking to hire or grow their organization, if you find this episode helpful as well.

Send me a note on Twitter, my handle is at Aidan at a wide Ein, and of course, we're creating a community of super managers.

So, if you want to talk about the content chat with other super managers, send us a note to Super managers at fellow dot app, and we'll let you know next steps on how to join the community.

And without further Ado, here's Nick dimitrov on episode 90.

One of the super managers podcast, Nick, welcome to the show and Gaiden.

Great to be here.

Yes, super excited to do this with you.

This is one of my favorite topics.

We're going to talk a lot about hiring, but before we jump in, you've had an extensive leadership career.

You worked at Amazon as a bar razor.

You've interviewed, many hundreds of candidates, you helped launch Amazon, game studios.

There's a lot that we're going to dive into, but what I wanted to do is maybe start from the very beginning.

This is one of the things.

You on the show which is like hi.

It's nice to meet you.

Tell us about your mistakes.

So we like to know when you first started managing or leading a team, do you remember, what were some early mistakes that you made back in the day?

I first started being a manager / leader in the early 2000s, that's gosh, almost 15 years plus ago.

And at the time, I started out as a business development person working for Xbox game studios in Microsoft's, and there was about seven of us on the team.

Team our manager at the time, decided to move on and job was open.

I threw my hat in together with a bunch of the former peers of mine and I was the person who won the role.

I was thrilled for a little bit but then clashed with the challenges of being a manager.

And in particular, I found it very hard to transition from being, a former peer with my team to being a new manager.

I've made to answer your question every single mistake in the book.

And more one of the biggest mistakes I made at the time was, I was trying to be liked by my former Pierce.

I was trying effectively even to mollify them.

If you will, that they were not the chosen ones for this role and I was and that's a, obviously, a very big mistake.

You don't need to be a best friend with someone who works for you in order to earn their respect.

Again, it was tough for me because I had pretty much transition from going to these folks has Vince on Friday night and drinking beers and playing Xbox games to becoming their manager and writing their performance reviews, and setting their goals, which is not a very intuitive transition, but it was a formative experience for sure.

So that's really interesting.

Do you remember what allowed you to make that transition?

Or where is there anything that you realize, hey, I've got to change this up, or do you remember what you did to help that transition?

Yeah, I think it's I think it's a crown, are I think when you are being apologetic, It can beating about the bush.

It's just not furthering the team at all and you can have an all-hands meeting with your team.

At the time, it was a team of seven, that was supporting all the studios, the internal games that Microsoft was launching.

And when you stand up in front of these folks, it's if you lose their respect, you know, and a much better approach is to go to the management and ask for ABC.

I can guarantee you that my team is going to deliver this, but Instead but in exchange, I would need, you know, for you folks to also meet your end of the bargain and it becomes much more of a productive exchange of value.

And when you start going back to the team and delivering the bacon for them and delivering these promotions and delivering those raises, they value the tend to valued much more than then trying to placate them and being buddy-buddy with them.

Yeah.

Because at the end of the day I mean they're looking to deliver impact to.

So one of the things You do on a day-to-day basis, you know, outside of like, well, the experience that you've had today.

You focus on helping companies hire better.

So maybe we can start with the how did you end up getting into?

Like, how did you end up getting into this line of work of helping fast-growing companies?

Get better at hiring, and maybe let's just start with that.

Like, why are you so passionate about this area?

For sure.

I was, is you Mentioned, in my brief intro, I was a bar razor for Amazon for a number of years interviewed hundreds of candidates at Amazon.

And for those of you in the audience, who don't know, the bar razor is one of the very peculiar parts of the Amazon culture.

In those individuals.

Have the outsized decision-making authority to determine who to hire and who not to hire in in the, in that process.

I saw that it's a very effective decision mechanism for Amazon, but it also had a lot of Things in areas to improve.

I've seen a lot of candidates who are quite highly qualified who did not get offers an Amazon because of certain Miss firings and traits that they exhibited during the interviews that that caused them to fail.

So that was effectively a loss for both the company and the candidate.

So I started out, I've always wanted to have my own team in my own company and build something from scratch.

I'm an immigrant.

So I've always had this irrational desire to build things.

From scratch.

So I started out with, with a company called Amazon bound.

Amazon bound is still ongoing to, to the present day and the focus of the company was to help job candidates perform, effectively with Amazon and other companies, that perform behavioral interview methods and very naturally as we were working with individual consumers, companies started to approaches as well and ask us.

Hey help us out set up similar bar razor organizations, you Cultures in order to hire better and add.

The time I started Amazon bound, almost three years ago.

At the time, I pushed back these requests because I was focusing on our primary customer who was the consumer.

But in time as I was seeing these organic requests flood in it became more and more obvious that there's a there's a great need there.

And at first blush setting up a bar razor organization and helping companies hire.

Better seems like as somewhat of a straightforward task Hey, let's just set up a bar.

Razor team for free company and call it a day, but it's far less simplistic than that.

The bar razors are the keepers of the flame there, the holders of the key to, the city of that company.

And if you don't even claim to keep, and if you don't have a city to protect, there's no need for a sentinel culture, like a bar razor organization.

So I'd go back to these companies that had asked them.

What are your principles?

What are you cultural values?

What do you want to be in the top three percent in the world for the things you want to deliver to your customers?

And oftentimes, they didn't get good feedback because they haven't been thinking very clearly about those issues.

And the time, again, I decided to focus on the consumer aspect of the business.

But then three years, you fast forward to.

Today, we've collected a fair amount of wherewithal and we started a dedicated be to be part of the business to companies.

And as they say, the best way to start a B2B product is to First prove it out on a beach, sea level and scale it as a B2B Endeavor.

So so that's that's how we are.

Working with the number of scale of teams right now, mostly the tech space and we're helping them improve their growth prospects by putting together solid hiring practices that are built from the ground up in congruence with their particular culture.

One of the things that's a hot topic now is the concept of eliminating bias.

So one of the things that you recommend and you have a bunch of strategies around this, what do you recommend You hiring teams that want to really eliminate bias from the process.

Like, what are some things that people can do?

Yeah.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of biases that we commit in our professional lives and the, the troubling part is, were not aware of that.

There needs to be a very, in my opinion, a very deliberate process and method to eliminate those biases.

One, at a time, a lot of hiring biases.

Today, would include things like urgency bias.

We're hiring managers need to put a Warm body in the chair because they're facing number of deliverables and tight schedules.

And so on and so forth.

Another type of bias that people often commit is the confirmation bias.

That's the bias where interviewers taint, other interviewers about their opinion for the candidate before.

The other interviewers get, even had the chance to talk to the candidate.

Unconscious bias is another type of bias, that's that could be rather deadly.

The unconscious bias means you associate these Toll shortcuts and proxies in forming an opinion about the candidate instead of looking at behavioral data in illustrations, about their performance.

So for example, if a person has graduated from Harvard or worked for McKinsey, that doesn't make them automatically good at math or having strong analytical skills.

They might be a math whiz, but you need to establish that with very concrete data and behavioral illustrations.

So, to answer your question with specific examples.

It's what hiring managers can do is engage in first set up, these best hiring practices and then enforce them and those practices.

Again, they're built from the ground up and they're trying to tackle one of these biases at a time.

So for instance, the confirmation bias, a couple of specific steps companies can take is one disallow interviewers to see other people's feedback before they vote.

So, Have to submit a written feedback with a higher.

No, high recommendation before you even see how other people have voted another mechanism.

You can use is during the debrief during the interview debrief, you should push your most, junior level people to speak first and express their opinion first, and you should ask the senior most people the vp's and what not to speak last.

Those are specific steps.

You can take to tackle, the the confirmation bias in terms of the unconscious bias.

That's the yeah, it was going to Say like, before before we talk about unconscious bias, I think like this is really awesome, right?

Because let's contrast this to the way that I think a lot of debrief sessions happen.

So I think the and you know, certainly I've been in deep recessions like this where we just finished talking to a candidate.

Everybody gets on the phone debrief.

So what did everybody think, right?

And then someone might say something like I don't think this person is cut out for like This raw.

And then, one of the things that you say is like, that's where someone has to jump in and stop that in its tracks, right?

That's exactly where we start talking about, how to uproot unconscious bias, because somebody could say, hey, Mary is not cut out for this job in that can be such a pernicious thing to say because you you inject this doubt in people's minds without even knowing it and without even having specific behavioral data to lean on.

So you as a borrower, Razor or you as the is the culture keeper.

If you will, should interject pretty much like in a Hollywood film, you're the attorney and you yell objection your honor.

This evidence is non-relevant, you should have ejected.

You should say hey why is Meri not qualified for this role.

I need you to restate your objection using data and it's okay to have a doubt.

It's okay to express a hypothesis that you're not sure about but you need to be very very concrete to give you an example.

Maybe, you know, one of your interview questions to marry.

She described the case where she took three months to choose who to award a contract to.

Like she may be looked at for vendors and she took a number of months to decide who's the winning vendor and in this new job that you're interviewing for you, need this new hire to Express Rapid decision-making on a daily or weekly basis.

So, based on how you saw Mary handle, this vendor decision, you have strong balance, that should be a good fit, and that's totally fine.

But you should Express, you should.

Kick you late.

The behavioral underpinning that you saw take place and then present that to the group.

In terms of a question in the form of a question of hey, his has anybody else seen something like this so that it's perfectly acceptable to to express doubt and be Devil's Advocate, but you cannot do so on in the form of unconscious bias of using statements like well it feels like my gut is like I'm worried about these things are not cured overnight.

Yeah it's it's a best practice that Need to have the gumption in the wherewithal to put in place first and then to reinforce on a daily basis with every single interview that you go through.

Yeah, this is so important because you know, so people again like today you might get on a call do a debrief and then everybody starts talking and everybody's a little bit different.

So you know your opinions, you might have an opinion but then hear someone else's and then you're swayed by the more charismatic person or like maybe the more Senior person and all of a sudden all you've done, is you've just done group thing.

So, one of the things you recommend is everybody right feedback, send it to the hiring manager so that we have everyone's opinions untainted, and then you get together and then you can discuss after everybody has submitted, and do you get a chance to like, read each other's comments as well after they've been submitted yet?

Absolutely.

So so it really depends on what kind of technical Mechanism you stablish, but it's highly advisable that you read everybody else's feedback before the start of the meeting, or if you don't have the time to spend the first few minutes, a few minutes of the debrief meeting reading, everybody else's feedback in silence.

And then, the bar is, are one of the mechanisms that bar reserves engage in quarterbacking.

The decision is, you know, Socratic fashion going around the table and saying, hey, now that everybody else has read people's feedback.

I want you to go over a few things one, what's this?

His biggest strength to was this person's biggest weakness and three having read.

Everybody else's feedback.

Do you keep your vote with you, change your vote and then you push again in a surprise egg fashion.

You have the junior most people go first.

Everything is based on data as best as possible in your reach, an unbiased as best as you can decision.

Based on feedback in specific areas that other people have reviewed and not tainted each other and use the debrief to put together that behavioral countenance of the candidate as You can yeah I guess like the worst possible outcome is you don't get submit submit written feedback, you get on a debrief.

The most senior person says, I have a feeling that this person is isn't cut out to do this job, doesn't State a reason our data and the whole process is completely ruined.

So, yeah, and use the bar a sir, you have to step in and then even Council even Mentor the senior most person who committed this after the If and say, hey, even though there might be multiple layers.

Your senior say, hey, this is not a substantive feedback and going forward.

You should engage in practice, ABC and abandoned practice, d, e, and f.

So, everything is based on should be as best as we can based on enforcing.

Behavioral, standards and data and best practices.

Yeah.

This makes a lot of sense and it was it very interesting.

So that's what the role of the bar razor would be seized Socratic method, ask questions and make sure people are at Arriving at those answers.

I think they have the right to veto a decision, but ultimately like that doesn't happen very often, but the hiring manager is the decision maker, right?

Like other people can put their opinions in, but the hiring manager makes the final call.

Well, it really depends on what type of pirate culture.

The organization wants to instill.

Some hiring cultures that I've seen work.

Well, point to the fact that the Baris are should have the out.

Outsized, the kind of unmitigated authority to make or break.

The the hiring decision because usually the bar razor would not come from the same team, who interviews the candidates.

Oh, so this person by the virtue of coming from a different team, they have eliminated a number of these biases that other people in the team would have.

So the bar razor is effectively.

They have the, you shall not pass kind of veto.

And of course, the hiring manager needs to agree as well, but the Baris are, is the one who can veto it.

One button to answer your question.

If you are an effective, ba razor, you should convince others of your opinion, right?

It's not about you being, right?

It's about you, reaching through to the other people on the loop and using data and behavioral examples to change your mind.

If you have to write the point is for you to push for these best practices.

Whatever the hiring culture is that you've instilled in your company and get to that data, driven, illustration driven.

In and be the guardian of the process and improve the process of time.

Do you find that in practice?

There are a lot of cases where the hiring manager will make a decision that is like counter to most people's recommendations like have.

It does that happen a lot or not?

Really?

Absolutely.

I mean, people come to these interviews with that, as you said, with their Personal Agenda, and World different, and personal opinions, and there's a number of different permutations that can have than the hiring manager.

Be a post to the higher and if you're a Baris are and if you're inclined to hire this person but the hiring manager is in, there's no point to Ram this person down the team's throat because effectively are setting the candidate failure going forward.

If you cannot convince the team that they should be higher, you could take that person.

And then here mark them for potentially another role for another team with the company conversely, when the hiring manager really wants to hire somebody and use the Baris to disagree, it's up to you to again, to hold that.

Line in disallow, the the bar to be lower the hiring bar.

However, you company defines it to be lowered.

So, it's challenging that again, you cannot just bully people around.

With the decision, you have to convince them that whatever decision we make is a team is based on data and is based on a culture fit and then you have to look at the candidate.

Help everybody understand if this candidate raises the ball or not.

And then if they don't raise the bar, then it's a somewhat of a more straightforward decision.

If you And of having backbone and not yielding to the urgency bias to the confirmation bias so on and so forth.

If the team on the other hand doesn't want to hire the person you have to be there their Ambassador, if you will, and help them, you know, live to fight another day and maybe have other teams at the company and look at them for different roles, right?

So you mentioned that, you have to make sure that the person raises the bar.

So how do you determine what the bar is?

This is again, but there's no one size.

Size fit all four companies.

I think it's very, very important to build something that is aligned with the culture of the company.

Having a bar is one of those good mental mechanisms when you hire that, that helps you almost irrespective of what the situation is or what your line of business is the area where having the bar helps is because you said clear standards, whatever those are for the company.

Whether the, for example, at Amazon, you need to be better than half of the other people who are working.

At this level and other companies, you might have to meet a certain level of criteria if you don't want to pit people against each other, so on and so forth.

But setting the bar clearly helps you eliminate some of these hiring biases again.

Where, for example, you can have a cohort of candidates in lots of companies, they tend to compare the candidates against each other.

And that's a, that's truly, a faulty practice because you might have a cohort of people who are all substandard and then you are making a poor decision.

And if they're All below the bar you should hire, none of them, or you might have a team, you might have a cohort of candidates that are all exceptional, and if they're above the bar, you should hire all of them.

How do you stack rank, The Beatles, for example, right there, all exceptional.

So you should instead of trying to compare candidates to each other, you should said this bar, that is reasonably efficient yet challenging to me.

However, this bar, whatever this bar means for your company and then evaluate each candidate against that bar and find them a home.

If A exceed the bar and the right time with the right team, you know, with the right roles so on and so forth.

Hey, there before moving to the next part of the interview, quick interjection to tell you about one of the internet's Best Kept Secrets, the manager, tldr newsletter.

So, every two weeks we read the best, content out there, the greatest articles, the advice, the case, studies, whatever, the latest and greatest is we summarize it and we send it to your inbox.

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Nothing but because we're doing the work will summarize it and send it to your inbox once every two weeks and the best news, it's completely free.

So go on over to fellow dot app, / newsletter, and sign up today.

And with that said, let's go back to the interview.

So one of the things that you mentioned is the different companies sizes and stages have different ways of hiring.

So I think, you know, for example, if you're like a three-person company, Just started, this might be Overkill so maybe you can elaborate like, what kind of a hiring process?

Do you think works at different sized companies?

Absolutely.

I've been very fortunate in my career to have very diverse set of experiences.

I started the first 20, some years of my professional life working for big tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon.

And the last few years of my professional life.

I've been working with at bars or I've been working with much smaller companies that are growing much more rapidly.

So it is you stated.

That one size doesn't fit everyone in my experience.

There's really two determinants to kind of simplify things which tend to determine what type of best hiring processes might work for your company and those two determinants are one, the size of the company into the rate of growth of that company.

And if we look at these two vectors company is roughly fall into three cohorts starting with cohort, Guan, those are startups.

As you mentioned, people companies, with, with smaller staff.

Usually, those are Please fewer than 23, hundred people.

Those startups, that grow very rapidly.

And then for those, folks, the best hiring practice tends to be give the untrammeled decision hiring decisions, decision-making, authority to the founders because the founders, they have the magic for the company.

They know who fits and who doesn't fit with their culture and they also have the decision-making authority to let someone go.

Should they make the wrong hiring choice?

And they care to do so, because the He's there baby.

So the best hiring process, for example, for a small start-up, that's growing rapidly is to effectively.

Let the founders or the founding team have one-on-one engagement with every candidate who's being hired and that's going to help ensure that your hiring process screens for people who are aligned with you culture and doesn't let the ones who are not aligned to get it on the other side of the Continuum in cohort, 3, and go.

Three.

You have companies that are growing at a much lower rate of growth, those companies can be large, they can be companies like oil and gas companies or telecom companies or they can be small.

It can be lifestyle type of companies.

For example, it could be a video game studios of 200, people that's been doing business for 25 plus years.

This is what there's nothing wrong with that.

So those companies they don't have the need for rapid growth, and they can afford to take their sweet time in evaluating for that.

Culture fit for that, for that culture alignment.

Some of the best hiring practices that these folks tend to engage in our trial employment.

For example, those companies, they love to start someone new as a contingent staff employee or an intern and after a few months, once they've proved their mettle convert them to a full timer or some of the larger tech companies, they would, they tend to interview you extensively, for instance, Google and Microsoft.

They would interview someone for 23 months upon end before they make their decision.

So, Those folks, they tend to be very thoughtful and planful and that's a good hiring mechanism about who fits and who doesn't.

And then the last category of companies are the ones in between those are companies who have grown past that critical point of maybe four or five hundred people in the company where the founding team can no longer interview.

Everyone one on one and yet their growth rates are still quite spectacular.

Especially Really?

If they're hyper scaling companies, they if anything their growth rate is accelerating because they have money coming in from angels and VCS mandating them to keep going.

So these companies are kind of caught between a rock and a hard place because the founders can no longer do the one-on-one interview that has been.

So magical and helpful for the company.

Yet, on the other hand, the growth, expectations, have accelerated, and these companies they don't have a good hiring process in place and that's where things start to tend to start to feel.

Apart and they have a lot of attrition, they have people who don't accept the offers, they make the wrong hiring decision, which is good, which could be very deadly for the company and effectively, these are primarily the type of companies who we tend to work with and ba razor and we help those folks to establish these best practices in the context of their specific culture.

Yes.

So this makes a lot of sense.

So it's interesting that you know at smaller companies getting the founders who understand the culture who are going be there for the long term to be very involved and over the course of time I can see how you would want to create like other people who can almost be like where the Founder Hat and kind of like be trained and be representative of the same sort of cultural alignment and get them involved in the process.

The thing I wanted to ask you about is this concept that you talk about which is a mental mechanism for hiring.

With the free to elaborate, what is a mental mechanism for hiring?

Excites a fancy 20 dollar word?

Isn't it effectively?

What it means is a best practice that tends to be effective and Evergreen and work.

Well, regardless of the situation and regardless of the line of business that you companies in.

So to give you specific pragmatic, responses to the question you posed as a number of various hiring mechanisms, mental mechanisms, One of them is to prefer the false positive decision, Falls - mistake versus a pole, a false positive mistake.

What does that mean a false?

Negative mistake means that you don't hire somebody.

Who would be a fit with your culture versus a false positive mistake?

That means you hire somebody who's not a fit, the reason why that's relevant is because making the wrong hiring decisions and bringing somebody in, who's not a fit, can be very, very expensive.

I'm going to share a number of data points which are not confidential at all.

These are these are widely known in the industry.

But on average, if you hire the wrong, engineering Talent, engineering individual, that's going to cost you over 6 to 12 months, to let that person go close to a quarter million dollars or more or if you hire the wrong salesperson with their sales, quotas in a B2B company that can cost you anywhere from 1 million dollars plus 2 to tens of millions of dollars per year.

So, these types of false positive mistakes are very very deadly.

And as a Result, a lot of companies, they establish the mental mechanism of, if we are on the fence about a candidate, we will vote.

No.

And that's what we all agree with as a culture.

And that's what we move forward with.

As they say, when there is doubt, there's no doubt another mental mechanism, which is more tactical in nature is to put together.

As you mentioned earlier, a, best plan of best process of putting down notes in writing as you interview the candidate.

So you can eliminate them.

Murray recollection and the he said, she said type of environment.

So that after you finish the interview, you have to convert those written notes, into a written higher or no high recommendation with specific justification behind it and submit that high, right?

Hire or no high recommendation, either to a central repository, or to an independent person.

Who's going to collect everybody's feedback within 24 hours.

That's the best practice another.

I mean, this countless other examples but I'll give you maybe one more.

Another example, for a good hiring mechanism is to make sure that you have a shadow program for new interviewers who arrived at your company and put together a relatively stringent plan of having a newbie Shadow.

An X number of interviews and participate as a fly on the wall in X number of interview debriefs, before they're allowed to express a firm written opinion.

Lie about a new hire and this this has nothing to do about that.

This is nothing to do with the person having higher experience an interview experience or not.

They could have ample hiring experienced and every experience outside of your company.

That is irrelevant, right?

Because they might come from very different culture.

So you need to Institute this kind of onboarding mechanisms you realize, as much as you can irrespective of the of the level of experience of the new hires and make sure again, that they understand their culture culture, clearly They're prevented as best as possible for making false positive mistakes yet.

This is super interesting from a you know we've all been in hiring committees where you're just kind of on the fence with a candidate.

So in situations like that if you're on the fence you know like like you said if there is doubt there is no doubt and I think that makes a lot of sense.

Another way that I've heard that is that there's got to be at least one person that has very strong conviction.

If there's nobody that has Very strong conviction.

It's probably not worth the risk because of, you know what?

It can cost companies by making the raw, it's a lot worse to hire the wrong person.

Then rather like wait, another even month or two months to hire the right person because you're actually going to lose more than that in time and dollars.

If you make the wrong call, a hundred percent agree.

As you said, somebody needs to be so vocal in and convicted about the decision that they need to slap their badge on the table and say, unless S.

We hire this individual I'm walking out of here, right?

I'm willing to stake effectively my career and my judgment call on this person.

Joining the company and you need to you need to build that balance and again you need to base it as much as possible on how well this personalized would you culture?

So Nick you know there's different opinions about this but because you've worked at you know, a lot of different companies who do this.

Well but also you've worked with a lot of companies.

What is the the success rate?

Tires going through this method, like how good can it be?

Is is good 50/50?

Can it be like 70%?

Good?

And how do you, how do you determine success rate?

The no prescriptive percentages here.

But I'll share with you a few different examples where it's somewhat wasteful to over-index on false-negative decisions but it protects you culture, right?

And if you put together a strong culture in place that is that you advertise as you best go to market with new Talent, go-to-market strategy, you You will tend to attract new candidates over and over again.

And also, if you know, hire somebody that doesn't mean that you can prevent them from interviewing and being hired with your company, a few months down the line because we all change, right?

We all accumulate new experiences, you need to keep a permanent file of every candidate you talk to and then you and you did, you monitor their evolution in time but you absolutely have to stay firm and defined that bar, whatever that bar is.

You know, if it's if it's 50/50 it's unlikely that this is going to be the right decision.

If it's somewhat higher than that, you need.

You know, that very firm commitment from the team or the bar racer on.

What are you going to do to ensure that this person is a fit with the culture?

And you set them up for success.

And if God forbid, there's this people agree to disagree and you're willing to maybe squint your eyes and and And take a flyer on someone.

Then you need to have a very clear plan of what is your unwind decision?

How are you going to let the person go?

If they don't meet your criteria and you standards, but you have to have some sort of a bar that you have agreed.

You've agreed to ahead of time, then you make that bar as objective as possible.

And if you do this correctly, like how often do the candidates that you hire end up working out and being successful hires, do you think if you do this Effectively and you change it in the context of your own culture.

The likelihood that this works out is, is better than 50/50?

Obviously there's no guarantees, but you know, let's take Amazon is an example of people can disagree with their with their culture and the way they do business, but it's undeniable that whatever.

The latest number is, they hire 1.2 million people now and they've scaled quite spectacularly from from being a small company to the company, they are today.

And that is to a large extent due to this bar.

Raising process and these unambiguous rules that they've set up.

And, of course, obviously, you would, you would change the hiring process.

You mentioned earlier, where we talked about hiring processes tend to evolve, you always need to incrementally improve your hiring process.

Nothing is set in stone, but once you once you set that Northern Light of here's my culture.

Here's what I'm not willing to compromise with.

Here's some mental mechanisms that I believe work.

And then Course, I'm going to monitor the performance of The Hires that I bring on board via this method.

And as you as you evolve the company, the likelihood that you're going to succeed in finding good people is, is quite High.

I mean a good a good litmus test.

Is are you willing to walk away from someone and it hurts and you willing to walk away from them?

Because they haven't quite met your bar frequently for senior roles.

For key roles, it's not in customary to wait for the right person for 69, 912 months upon n ee.

You don't need to rush into these hiring decisions because again, you haven't build this.

This company, this culture for the short haul, you building it for the long haul and as Evernote used to say, you've built a hundred year company in waiting, another nine, or twelve months for the right person is is nothing in comparison to the benefit that they going to bring to the table.

Once you convince them to join your team, if identified them in you and you turn them into a higher.

So once you finish the hiring.

So the person is hired and now there, Board.

What are the processes afterwards just to like verify that this was the right hire?

Like are there things that you do 30 days 90 days afterwards?

Yeah, for sure this again goes into a number of steps you would you would put in place to to ensure that this person is a good fit and they're set up for success.

But usually a good practice is to set up what some companies call a launch plan, where you clearly identify is he said the 30-60-90, they plan for the for the person, you pair them up with with a launch buddy with somebody who's effectively a mentor and unofficial Mentor or peer to peer mentor.

You also communicate with them very, very frequently.

The culture and the values that we've, that would have been talking about.

They manifest itself in hiring, but they also have to manifest themselves in everything.

The company does in terms of what type of projects that company invests in who they promote how they pursue their Their next best strategy so on and so forth.

So, if you said these very clear numeric goals and they're very specific and you put them in different buckets of, you know, here's some maybe Rhythm of the business goals.

Here's some long-term strategic goals.

Here's some all of these goals are quite measurable.

You put the the right support structure for this employee and you you surround them with support you tend to or on on processes where time is of the essence and communication is a The essence over communication is of the essence, you put in place that the structure, where should somebody underperform that should become obvious relatively quickly and then you have another tough decision to make.

If everything is hunky-dory, then you high-five each other and and and you move on to the next candidate in terms of looking for the right next candidate, if things don't work out.

Well though, you have to put structure in place to let the person go either correct.

Their performance as rapidly as possible or let them go because Is it's so vital for you as a as a text Caleb or a fast growing company to have everybody over deliver or otherwise you're not going to achieve you find a little bit.

Yeah that makes a lot of sense and so one thing that, you know, maybe a question for folks is if you are working and we have a lot of folks in the audience that maybe don't work at companies with 10,000 people but might work at companies with you know in the hundreds or maybe there's smaller than that and their startups.

What are the things that you know, you can do?

Do you think as smaller companies or someone who's a hiring manager or leader at a smaller company to convince that very unique and talented person to join your company versus say that larger Mega cap company?

The labor market is so tight, right?

And small companies are they usually tend to be at a disadvantage when they compete with large companies in terms of monetary compensation?

Station.

And that's where you need to focus.

I would suggest as a smaller employer.

That's where I need to focus on culture and that's where you need to focus on things that don't scale is pull.

Graham says of Y, combinator large companies cannot afford to work on things that don't scale and what to give you specific example to your question a few examples.

What this means is focus on very customer, obsessed process of interviewing the candidate.

And then onboarding, the candidate this potentially could Mean finding out what are the candidates pod buttons, that are non monetary and completely customize an offer that a large company cannot afford to make.

So for example, if this person is a go-getter who wants to work on critical path projects, I mean give her as much Roba she can handle on, right?

Out of the gate and allow her to spread her wings and perform whereas in a larger company should be expected to maybe earn her kind of keep, and quote, unquote and not And that opportunity to rise write and perform a different example could be now in a work from home remote work type of model.

Allow this person to be as flexible as he or she would desire.

A third example, could be be very open about the type of monetary upside that this person might forego accepting an offer by a Fan Company by meta or someone else.

And when you invert these problems and turn them into a benefit for you.

And if somebody's willing to Mortgage their future for 85,000 dollars.

In extra salary annually, then you actually might be better off to let them go.

And that might have prevented may be a false positive decision from taking place.

And when I keep harping on cultural advantages over monitor Advantage is, I don't mean to imply that but small companies should not pay their employees.

Well, I mean, obviously sit down with these employees and paint them, a very would be employees and paid to them a very clear picture of what would happen if you.

But he continues to accelerate and scale and hid that product Market fit and get to a hyperscale stage in that case.

The monetary benefit of that, your company would provide to this person would like to exceed the monetary benefit, you know, for from a fan company.

But again, appeal to the right cultural fit for these employees and if in a worst-case scenario, maybe tell them that.

Hey, if you join my team in the next year, you're gonna Grow as much as the the stuff that you'll do for meta or Google or Amazon for the next 12 years.

So come, join the team, learn grow.

And then, if you want to go work for a large team, a large company a year or two later, you know, knock yourself out and after working for us for, you know a year or two, you going to get a much better offer there and you going to further your own, you know, position with that.

So so try to focus on on the right, cultural fit and always invert and be and be flexible as much.

You can.

Yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense, is so Nick were just coming up on time here and we talked about a lot of different things.

We talked about how to eliminate bias.

We've talked about different hiring processes at different stages of companies, we've talked about mental mechanism, my favorite one from today is like, when there is doubt, there is no doubt.

I really like that in the context of hiring, and of course, how small companies can compete with with larger ones.

So, So one question that we like to ask as a final question for all the guests on this show is for all the managers and leaders constantly looking to get better at their craft of managing and leading teams.

Are there any final tips?

Tricks, or words of wisdom that you would leave them with if I were to start with just one summary advice for everyone is hiring is likely the top competency that you're going to develop a new company that's going to enable you to succeed in the long run.

Do not.

Compromise with it.

Do not rush into anything, take your time, builds a hiring best process that is aligned with your culture.

Do it in time, iterate on it and you're going to be amply rewarded.

And then in terms of specific maybe areas and resources, you can go look to find ideas to inspire you to do.

So we're continually learning as we've been discussing so far.

So some good sources in areas of information could be go talk to To your employees.

You'd be surprised about the wealth of ideas that they have to improve your company, too willing to listen, go talk to other colleagues that you have from from different businesses.

Listen to podcasts, like like super managers, books are always a great resource.

I recently finished then a great book by Frank flukeman, the CEO of snowflake, it's called a up.

And in the book he gives a number of really good cultural points of how you can among The things you can bet on other people's conviction, even if it runs counter to your conviction, and then you should again Embrace, those different viewpoints and gamble with people given the benefit of the doubt that on them iterates and hopefully, good things are going to follow.

That's great advice and a great place to end it.

Nick.

Thanks so much for doing this.

Thank you.

Yeah I was happy to do it and that's it for today.

Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of the super managers podcast.

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