Speaker 1: Hey there, Dan Martell here, serial entrepreneur, investor and creator of SaaS Academy. In this video, I'm gonna share with you how to build a pipeline of talented A players in your business. So if you've been frustrated with having duds show up, waste your time and having to fire them, I'm gonna teach you how to not only source better candidates but also have them hit the ground running. And be sure to stay at the end where I share with you my hiring scorecard framework on how to get that and also the talent pipeline process. I'm actually gonna give you the specific steps that I use for all of my recruiting to hire A players. ♪♪♪ So I don't know about you but people problems are legit. You've got, you know, freaking political issues, you've got infighting, you've got folks that are under performers, they don't have the skills, they're complaining all the time. It can be draining as an entrepreneur and honestly my first two companies were complete failures because I know for a fact now that I was just accepting anybody that showed up into my business. I was looking for a designer, I just hired the first person that got referred to me. I was looking for another programmer to help me out, I just hired the first person. Like I had no system for recording or recruiting. Essentially it was like, hmm, is there a pulse? Are they willing to work with me? You're hired. That is not what I'm talking about. What I want to share with you today is how I've been able to not only hire hundreds of people across all my companies but also make sure that those people show up, are enthusiastic, they want to work, they've got the capabilities and they're actually going to deliver value from day one. So I want to walk you through the steps for doing that in the right way. Number one, prep the position. I think that if you want to hire A players the first thing you need to do is actually define what you're looking for and this is the hiring scorecard I talked about at the beginning. To do that you need to understand where do you want to go in the next 16 months for that role. So if you're hiring a marketing person it's not about hiring somebody that can do the marketing that you need today. It's saying where are we going to be in 16 months and what would that person look like? What would they have had to accomplish? And if you want to make sure that you don't have duds, that you don't just have a warm body show up, you need to make sure that you set the criteria for their previous experience based on that 16 month into the future. I'm all a fan of training people on the job and hiring people and enthusiastic but at the same time there are certain roles where it makes no sense for you to just try to train these people that have no experience. They could be the most enthusiastic, positive, culture fit person but I'm a big fan for certain, especially executive leadership roles, they have to come with some level of experience doing the thing because the whole point of hiring them is to take things off your plate, not to add more coaching and mentorship and leadership conversations with them but to have them come in and go, oh yeah, in my previous company we did this, this and this and move it out. So that is prepping the position. That is being clear as to roles, responsibilities and expectations that person needs to have from an experience point of view before they show up on your team. Number two, build candidate pipeline. One of the biggest reasons that hiring fails is because there's not enough candidates in the top of the funnel, okay? This means you actually have to do some heavy lifting when it comes to sourcing. For me, first place you're going to want to look is amongst your existing team base. Actually promoting your team and asking them to go through LinkedIn, to go through Facebook, to ask them, hey, we're trying to hire this role, do you know anybody? I've even hired my recruiter to sit down with another engineer and go through their whole LinkedIn profile to say like, hey, this person you know, what do you know about them? Are they good? Is this somebody you'd want to work with? Does this person inspire you? Sourcing is a full-time thing. So you can either get leverage through hiring a contract recruiter to help you with this or you can block it in your calendar because to me, as the founder, your job is to make sure you have the right people on your team. So we want to source through existing employees. We want to source through job banks. People say, well, great candidates aren't looking for a job. That's not true. I've found incredible people that had jobs and were just kind of dissatisfied and kind of went online. So there's incredible technology today that allows you to publish to thousands of job banks online to build even more top of funnel. And then the third thing is sniper rifle. Like find companies that you admire that are further along that you know have great training programs, great recruiting practices and just go directly to those people and ask like, hey, who's the best product manager you've ever worked with at that company? Get some names, call them up, ask to speak with them. Go for the advice angle. Hey, I'd love to get your advice on our new product design. You're obviously very talented. Do you have five minutes to just quickly review and give us some thoughts and start the conversation and relationship? Great people are going to take a while to get over into your world, but to do that, we need to build top of pipeline for candidates. Number three, quick to qualify. I think too often people spend time with mediocre folks that just waste their time. And that's probably why at the end of the day when they're on a timeline to hire somebody and they need to make it happen, they pull the trigger with somebody that just isn't great. What I do instead is the first thing I ask my candidates to do is submit a video and follow the instructions. Why do I do that? Well, A, if they can't figure out how to shoot a video, feel comfortable communicating in this format and I'm talking like on a laptop with their phone, whatever they want to do. Answering some simple questions about who they are and following the instructions, I can't tell you, I'd say 80% of the people that submit a video. So a lot of people don't even get past the application process because they don't even submit a video. The people that do submit a video don't listen to the instructions. They don't answer the questions or they go over time. And to me, if you can't follow that as an applicant, then I don't want you on my team because you're just going to frustrate me as a team member. I mean that's just the reality. So I think you should be quick to qualify using videos. Everybody's now adding this as a feature into their applicant tracking system. So by all means, you can keep it simple. Ask them to figure, I don't even tell them how to do it. I'm just like, send us a link to your video. You can figure out how to upload it to the internet. It's almost a bit of a test. And then review the videos because man, I'll tell you, I can learn so much by watching somebody communicate over a video that I could probably get in person but I just don't have the time to do that, right? And then that way as the applicant goes through the different departments, they use the video to get a really good sense of the candidate. Number four, simulate the work. I still find it crazy that people go work at a company, essentially get married before even going on a date. How are you possibly gonna know if this company is everything they say it to be? Or if you're hiring, how do you know if this candidate is everything he says or she says that they are? So one of my rules and I got this from Seth Godin is I can't work with you till I work with you. It's just a belief. It's a practice. It's a principle. And to do that, I always offer up a test project. So in the pipeline process, there's a test project, okay? And I've got a bunch of others. I'll tell you how to get that resource. The test project is simulating the real work. So whatever it is, if it's writing code, if it's designing, if it's an assistant, if it's a marketing person, it's actually doing the real work. Okay? It's not like, hey, go to this website and kind of tell us what you think. It's like, I want to see the work product. I want to know that you're capable. I want to see what you can produce and evaluate that. And here's the trick for test projects. All candidates have to do the exact same test project. Why? How are you supposed to compare people? If you're hiring a new VP of marketing and you get each one of those candidates to do a different project, how are you supposed to compare the quality of their work or the quality of their thinking? So I highly recommend to find one test project per role and have everybody do the same one so that when they submit them, you can actually have your review team analyze them and compare them to each other, not have separate test projects. Number five, sell the future. Now, look, at the beginning, you're building a top of funnel, you know, candidates and people are applying and you're trying to qualify and see if they're a fit and checking for values and doing all this stuff but at a certain point when you get into kind of first level interviews and eventually with the CEO myself, there's this trade-off of where you want to assess them but you also need to sell them on the future. So one of my favorite questions, I even heard recently that the, I think, what is their title? Gary Vaynerchuk hired a people culture person at VaynerMedia and they have this same question that they asked in their, they did a quick write-up is, in five years what do you see your day looking like or your job, you know, in a five-year period? And to me that's, I need to understand what their future and what they have a vision for their life, A, that they have one, B, that they can articulate it and three is that their vision for where they want to be and what I need them to eventually grow into are ideally aligned. And if they're not, then we need to figure out how to kind of, you know, massage that. It might be a different role, it might be whatever but you need to sell the future. You need to talk about what they want, talk about the compensation, talk about the fit, the fun, you know, the opportunity for equity, all that fun stuff. The team, I think that's a big thing. People want to work with other incredible people that inspire them but then also talk about what they want to accomplish in their life and how you're going to support them to get it because I truly believe that people will go and push and fight for you if they know that you've got their back and you want to see them succeed in life outside of your own goal. So that to me is a big part of, you know, getting the right A players is selling the future. So the five steps to build a talent pipeline of A players. Number one, you have to prep the position and know the roles and responsibilities you're hiring for in 16 months. Two, build the candidate pipeline. Have a ton of people applying. Number three, quick to qualify them. I like to use videos but don't spend time with unqualified candidates. Four, simulate the work. Again, I can't work with you until I work with you. And five, sell the future because you need to make sure that their vision aligns with yours for what you need them to do into the future. So as I mentioned at the beginning of this video I want to share an incredible resource called the hiring scorecard. So essentially it's the four different criterias that I define before I hire somebody and use that to help the hiring manager and the different team members that are going to be involved in that process. Grade the candidates against those criterias and I'm also going to give you the talent pipeline process so that you can understand the different steps in the pipeline that I use. For example, test projects, assessments. I use profile assessments, et cetera. So you could potentially implement those into your process. The link is below in the description so you can click that and get a copy of the scorecard and the talent pipeline process. I'd love for you to implement that and let me know how that worked out for you in your business. Again, the link below. Click that, get your copy. If you like this video be sure to smash the like button. Subscribe to my channel. If there's somebody you think this video could serve that you care about feel free to share it with them directly. And as per usual I want to challenge you to live a bigger life and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday. So I'm at...