How to Hire the Best People in the World

Summary

• I learned that employees who are top performers can be up to eight times as productive as average employees.
• Realizing that talent beats strategy was a game-changer; the right talent can effectively execute and improve strategies, which is crucial since two out of every three strategies fail due to lack of talent.
• Attracting top talent involves figuring out what talented individuals are looking for in an employer, similar to how companies seek product-market fit.
• A great example of product-market fit's importance is Instagram, which only succeeded after shifting focus to what users actually wanted.
• In the education sector, the lack of a company-talent match has led to issues like the great resignation, primarily due to inadequate pay, benefits, and work culture.
• When starting my company Gym Launch, I hired anyone who applied, not understanding the need for a talent strategy or what it entailed.
• Scaling rapidly exposed my inability to attract the right talent, leading to promoting unqualified individuals and forming an inefficient and burdensome team.
• The biggest realization was that working harder isn't the solution; I needed to attract better talent to work hard on the company's behalf.
• Developing a talent attraction strategy transformed my company's team from an overwhelming burden to a self-sufficient group, allowing me time off without worry.
• To attract top talent, craft a compelling employee value proposition (EVP), which is an offer to potential employees explaining why they should join your company.
• An EVP includes five key components: Compensation, Benefits, Career Opportunities, Work Environment, and Culture.
• To articulate an EVP, use the 'five T's' approach, which consists of Targeting talent, identifying Top qualities of ideal candidates, focusing on Touchpoints where talent interacts with your brand, and Tracking results of your talent acquisition efforts.
• Promoting your EVP is as important as promoting your company to customers, and should be highly visible where top talent searches for information about your organization.
• Determining the constraints in your hiring, whether in quantity or quality of applicants, is crucial in shaping your talent acquisition strategy.
• You don't have to be the largest or most profitable company to attract top talent; there are many strategies available for companies of all sizes to compete effectively in the talent marketplace.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest focusing on what top talent wants in an employer. Think about what you can offer that's special, like a great work culture or flexible hours. Start by crafting your Employee Value Proposition (EVP). Here's how to do it:

1. Compensation: Make sure you're clear about salary, raises, and fairness. You don't have to pay the most, but be open about what you can offer.

2. Benefits: Offer things like time off, education plans, or health insurance. If you can't give big benefits, maybe you can be flexible with work hours or where people work.

3. Career Opportunities: Help employees grow. Offer training or talk about how they can move up in your company.

4. Work Environment: Create a place where people feel good. Don't micromanage. Give clear goals and praise good work.

5. Culture: Share your company's mission and values. Make sure everyone knows why their work matters.

Now, use the 'five T's' for your plan:

1. Targeting Talent: Find out if you need more people or just better-skilled people. Understand your hiring needs.

2. Top Qualities: Think about what the best person for the job is like. What makes your current employees happy? Use that to find new people.

3. Touchpoints: Share your EVP where top talent looks. Make sure your company looks good online.

4. Tracking Results: Keep an eye on what's working. Are you getting more good candidates? More people interested?

Remember, you don't need to be the biggest company to get great people. Just be clear about what makes your place special, and show it off in the right places!

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

"Talent beats strategy, because talent executes on the strategy"

– Leila Hormozi

"You've got to get the right people in the right seats"

– Leila Hormozi

"Company Talent match is the degree to which the infrastructure of the company satisfies the demand the talent has"

– Leila Hormozi

"If you don't have a talent attraction strategy, you end up loading the organization, diluting the culture, decreasing the efficiency of the team"

– Leila Hormozi

"Culture of a company is really the internal branding"

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

eight times as productive as a normal average employee meaning there are also four to eight times as fast I want to share with you how I learned this lesson the hard way and how I've taken those lessons and turned them into a talent attraction machine so that you can figure out how to attract the top one percent of talent into your company how that works is let's say company a has mediocre talent and they set out a strategy and it's going to take them three years while Company B who happens to be their competitor sets out with the same strategy but because their workplace is 800 percent more productive it takes them one year obviously no matter the strategy no matter how smart you are with it if you have better Talent you will beat your competitors Talent beat strategy why because Talent executes on the strategy talent you have in the company dictates how the strategy gets executed how fast it gets executed how well it gets executed ultimately at the end of the day if you look at the statistics two out of every three strategies that are set to be completed by a company actually fail due to the talent but here's the thing people always say you've got to get the right people in the right seats the reason that you're struggling is you don't have the people okay go get good people cool how do I do that what does that look like what do I need to attract those people just like if you tell somebody who's overweight hey you need to go lose 20 pounds they're like wonderful I've been told that for the last five years but how do I lose the 20 pounds tell me what to do step by step it's not like people with mediocre Talent don't know that oftentimes people know that their team isn't competent for the task at hand they just don't know how to go get people who are more competent and the reason I know this is because I've worked with thousands and thousands of business owners and I can tell you they don't know how to attract that Talent OR to figure out how to attract top talent we need to stop thinking about what do we want as a business and we need to start thinking about what does top talent want out of an employer that's like when you're trying to build a product you're not thinking what would I like it's what would my customer like and in this sense your customer is the top talent you're trying to attract companies who are trying to achieve product Market fit often fail because it's very difficult and they can't figure out what the product Market fit is companies also fail because they don't have a company Talent match example of like failed product Market fit is in the beginning of Instagram it was called something to the extent of like bourbon b-u-r-b-n burb n it was like when you go meet up with people and you're at a meet-up place you post pictures of it it just wasn't what people wanted and so for a long time they struggled until eventually the Founder's wife suggested hey I think people just want pictures and they want to be able to post pictures and edit them and do all the stuff and on a whim this guy changed the app because it was going down and he thought that he was going to be out of business he changed it he achieved product Market fit and here we go billion dollar company how important product Market fit is to a company like Instagram is just how important it is when it comes to attracting talent you have to get the match Right company Talent match is the degree to which the infrastructure of the company satisfies the demand the talent has so an example where there's not a company Talent match is in the education industry I'm sure you've seen that there was the great resignation and one of the industries that was greatly affected was education now why is that let's look at why people fail to have a company Talent match teachers are not paid well they don't have good benefits they have to work very hard and they don't have a good workplace culture so if you look at it the benefits of working in a Traditional School System actually tend to be less than the cons so if you feel like you can kind of relate to this like you're like Layla I know I need more talent but I don't know how just keep listening when I started my first company gym launch I did not understand Talent match I didn't understand that you needed a talent strategy I knew that you needed talented people I didn't really know what they looked like I didn't know how to attract them I think I vaguely kind of understood conceptually but I didn't know enough to be able to execute it I hired literally anybody that had a pulse and applied for the job I was just so grateful that people wanted to work for us I continued to hire that way for the first year and a half a lot of times companies can afford to do that because in the first year and a half there's typically not some explosion in a company right two three years into it that you really need to level up your talent and who you're hiring for us it was actually the opposite we absolutely exploded six months into the new model that we had for Denmark we had been essentially flying people out to gyms and then we turned into a licensing model where we would teach people how to execute that on their own in their gym and when we did that the company exploded but my skill set to attract Talent did not explode and so what I ended up doing is hiring all these underqualified people promoting under qualified people and having a very large team that I felt the burden of the goal is that if you have a large team that the founder feels relief enough so that they can lead the business neither myself nor Alex felt that way at all it felt like it was this huge burden like we were carrying people I felt like things weren't getting done I didn't feel like it was efficient and I felt like I didn't know what to do one I was kind of scared I was like I'm inexperienced I'm young like how am I going to get these people right like why would they come and work for me I also thought to myself like I'm afraid what if I make these investments in these people and then they leave they don't like it they think the companies this big pile of burning and so they don't want to be here anyways on the other hand is you know I felt really guilty that I had all these people I put in these roles and I kept thinking maybe it's me maybe it's my fault and obviously to a degree it is but I kept thinking I just need to train these people more I need to make sure they have better skills I need to pour more of myself into them and it really all came to a head in 2019 when I had a moment where we had had our biggest month ever we've done like 4.5 million I was just so anxious and stressed and overwhelmed I looked at Alex in a moment of just desperation I was like I don't want to do this anymore it feels awful you know I quickly was like listen I don't actually want to end the business but I need to do something about this I remember I contacted this woman who was a coach I was hoping that she could help me figure out how to get out of this hole like I felt like I built myself into which was essentially a company that was just full of underqualified people and I remember I met with her and she said well what do you think the problem is I feel like everyone's underqualified you know I feel like I've been pouring myself into it I've gotten really good at training skill transfer and a lot of these things but it's just not it's just not cutting it it's just not going fast enough for the rate that we're growing what if your job is not to work harder but to get better talent to work harder on your behalf I was like oh and at first it felt weird because I was like I so pride myself or did on working hard and it was really hard for me to accept that in that moment I realized that working hard wasn't going to get this company to where it needed to be I needed to get other people to work hard as well at least work as hard as me I've been trying so hard to bring this team along but at the same time like in my gut I knew it I'd read enough times in enough books that eventually when the company has matured to a certain point you need to make sure that you start up leveling the talent you need to make sure you're getting high performers in there so from that point on I really dedicated myself to understanding what makes great talent how do companies attract great talent how do you keep great talent how do you get it when you're new in experienced and have no idea what you're doing over the next year and a half I went from having a team that I felt overwhelmed by I didn't want to be on the meetings I didn't want to talk to people because I felt so resentful that I was doing so much work on others behalfs to going to have a team where I was not involved in the day today I didn't have to be there all the time I could take a vacation and things wouldn't fall apart and it all came down to understanding a company Talent match and then a talent attraction strategy if you don't have a talent attraction strategy what you end up doing is you end uploading the organization diluting the culture decreasing the efficiency of the team and not ultimately being able to carry out any strategy that you set for the business so how do you attract top talent you attract top talent with an employee value proposition just like you put an offer into the marketplace to get people to buy something you put an offer into the talent Marketplace to get people to come and work for you so just like you put together an offer stack in terms of what somebody's going to get if they sign up with your company if they buy your product Etc you put together an employee value stack that shows them everything they're going to get while joining your organization and so what an employee value proposition should do is it should answer the question why should I work here and not somewhere else there are five pieces to an employee value proposition I want you to follow along and understand these five pieces so I can explain to you how to put these into action the first piece should be fairly common which is compensation but compensation doesn't come down to just salary and what you're paying in person compensation comes down to a few things there's salary there's how do you raise and promote people within the organization there's fairness in terms of evaluating people for raises and promotions there's paid transparency which is are you being transparent with the people in the organization about how and when they're paid all that together is compensation the second piece that follows compensation is benefits benefits is time off flexible work schedule remote work versus in-person work education retirement plans and things like insurance now on the other end of the spectrum the other three pieces of an employee value proposition are career work environment and culture so career is does this person in their role have the ability to progress top talent wants opportunity do you provide training do you provide Career Development do you talk about Career Development you talk about their career path do you ask them questions of what they want in the organization do you evaluate them and give them feedback those all go into Career Development work environment what kind of environment are they working are they autonomous or are they micromanaged are they recognized or are they punished do they have clear expectations or do they have no idea what's going on and are they challenged or are they just clocking in clocking out every day and then lastly there's culture culture really comes down to understanding the mission and the goals of the company why are we here why do we do the work we do and then how do we do the work we do which is the value piece culture of a company is really the internal branding so just like externally there's a brand of company and that's what the customers see internally there's the brand of the company that is what the talent sees that's a lot of how do we put that together to figure out employee value proposition I call it the five T's and this is the strategy that I follow to put together a talent strategy so that I know I'm going to have a strategy it doesn't need to be all of those things but I should be very clear on what things it is and what it is not so the first of the five T's is targeting talent that means what are your target Talent goals do you need more applicants do you need more qualified applicants that are applicants do you need a different kind of applicant what is the current constraint in terms of getting people in so for example we had a portfolio company they had a very hard time getting coaches in and coaching was a department that they need to attract people that had a certain skill set and they needed a lot of them and so we looked at their strategy and they were getting qualified people but they weren't getting enough of them they didn't have enough Nets cast to get enough of them so just like a lot of people post on indeed or LinkedIn and then they say I'm not getting enough talent coming in it's like well why aren't we posting on indeed LinkedIn Glassdoor Craigslist I mean like posting everywhere as well as doing Outreach on our behalfs to get Talent so you have to look at where the bottleneck is in getting the talent and that's your first piece that you need to identify is do I need more or do I need better and so for them they needed more and so on their website we actually added a second funnel that was kind of parallel to their customer funnel that said do you want to be a coach essentially like a sales page selling people on why they could become a coach why it was so great to become a coach and why it's so great to work as our company and then we actually ran paid ads asking would you like to become a coach here's the opportunity here's what it looks like and so now they're able to get unlimited coaches because they they have a talent acquisition funnel that gets them more qualified applicants the second piece in determining your talent strategy is top qualities what this means is you want to identify what is your candidate Persona that you're looking for who's the perfect person to work at your company I have had three companies prior to acquisition.com I've had gym launch I've had Prestige labs and I've had Alan and my talent Persona has looked different for each one of them the person I'm going to get to work at gym launch they might be a great director of customer success at gym launch but they're not a great director of customer success at Allen in gym launch when I'm looking for a director of customer success I'm looking for somebody that can talk to customers all day they can take escalation calls and they really understand a customer experience on the other side with Alan when I'm looking for a director of customer success that person doesn't necessarily need to understand and talk to people as much as they did on the server side you want to identify what do current employees love about working at your company and what if done more would cause them to love working there more so typically what people value in a smaller company tends to be more of the soft stuff it's the culture it's the workplace it's the autonomy whereas if you ask somebody at that bigger company they're probably going to say compensation benefits because bigger companies know that as they get bigger the soft side is actually what decreases and so they make up for that in compensation and benefits the fourth key to this is touch points where does Talent interact with your company so that you can promote your employee value proposition so just like you promote your business to get customers you have to promote your company to get talent and so the question you have to ask yourself is when I put our company out there into the internet where are people looking at it and what are they looking for well typically if somebody sees your company they're going to Google it that's the first thing I've recruited thousands of people for not only my own companies but our portfolio companies and the first reason that people won't work at a company is what they get when they Google it the best talent they're not going to not do diligence they're going to Google your company they're going to look you up they're going to look at your customer ratings they're going to look at anything they can find those places that they're looking to do due diligence on your company are exactly where you put your employee value proposition and then the fifth T is tracking results this ties back to number one are you trying to get more candidates are you trying to get more qualified candidates are you trying to get more brand awareness you have to find the metric that goes along with it and then you want to measure it to see the question is how do you measure to make sure it's effective when I'm trying to get more qualified candidates I've tried different strategies some of it has been through the content that I make and talking about interviewing tips and things like that and then I look at okay I launched a video for example on top five interview questions did we get more qualified candidates during that time and if we did then I would say it's an effective strategy I should do more of that and if we didn't then I would say it's not effective and we should go back to what we're doing or try something else what I want you to understand you don't need to be the most established the biggest or the most profitable company to attract top talent there are so many other things that you can do to attract top talent I tell you this as somebody who has been there no matter how small you are no matter how inexperienced you are no matter where your company is at you can have a competitive Talent match strategy