The BEST interview FRAMEWORK for finding TOP TALENT…that you won’t need to fire later..

Summary

• As a CEO, one must be actively involved in multi-phase interview processes to understand the team dynamics and make informed hiring decisions.
• Being uninvolved in the interview process can lead to hiring mistakes and the subsequent need to let people go.
• To avoid stagnation and promote growth, it is crucial to be engaged in the hiring process, especially when the company is small (below 20-30 employees).
• I recommend a structured interview process with at least three phases to gain different perspectives and verify candidates' skills, values, and culture fit.
• Initially, have an admin conduct a phone screen to filter out unqualified or mismatched candidates quickly.
• The first interview with the hiring manager focuses on confirming candidates' history, experience, and alignment with company values.
• A peer interview or skill assessment interview as the second phase helps evaluate a candidate's practical skills and past performance.
• The gatekeeper interview, ideally done by the CEO or a high-level manager, ensures the protection of company culture and determines the mutual best interest for hiring.
• Skipping any phase in the interview process could result in skill gaps, poor culture fit, or hiring someone whose long-term goals do not align with the company.
• Getting the interview process right has a significant impact on company culture and the type of team built.
• Involving employees in the hiring process can contribute positively to team building and provide a rewarding experience for those participating in the selection.
• The thoroughness and seriousness of the interview process reflect on the company's culture and set expectations for new hires.
• Future videos planned to elaborate on specifics like interview conduct, question types, and managing discussions.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest starting with a simple phone screen by an admin to quickly find out if a candidate is not a good fit. Look for their excitement and confirm their resume details. This saves time and helps focus on applicants who really want the job.

Next, in the interview with the hiring manager, make sure candidates' values match the company's. Ask about their work history and experience. It is important to tell them exactly what the job involves so they know what to expect.

For the second interview, involve current team members. They can help test practical skills. Plus, they also want to work with good people, so they'll look for strong candidates. You could ask candidates to show previous work or do a task to see their skills.

Finally, as a leader, you should do a gatekeeper interview. This is to make sure the person fits the culture and that the job is right for them. Be honest about the hard parts of the job. You want someone who is really excited to work with you, even when it's tough.

If you skip any phase, you might end up hiring the wrong person. This can make you lose both time and money and hurt your team's growth.

Getting involved in hiring is key when your business is small. It builds a strong team that can grow with your company. Try this process and see how it changes your team for the better. Your team will appreciate being part of hiring and the new hires will understand your company culture from the start.

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

"If you want to get good at interviewing, you've got to do it over and over and over again"

– Leila Hormozi

"I interviewed the first thousand employees and you know until we got to 100 people I interviewed every single person"

– Leila Hormozi

"A lot of CEOs will not even take the time of day to give 30 minutes to see if that person is the right kind of person to have on their team"

– Leila Hormozi

"The last thing you want to do is that you didn't say it enough and so they come in and they think the role is completely different than it was"

– Leila Hormozi

"Whatever the person says however they act whatever work they give you that's the best you're ever going to get"

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

want to talk about is the interview process and the involvement of the ceo in that and just kind of creating a broad process for you to follow if you do not have a structured multi-phase interview process in your company this gets top of mind for me because i was actually at dinner with um a ceo the other day and i was asking him about his company and everything that was going on and had pretty slow growth it seemed like he had stagnated a little bit and then i started asking um a little bit of questions about the team because it seemed like he he felt like he had a lot of people he needed to fire it seemed like he was actually really unaware of that you know there were people in leadership that you know he was saying you know these people you know the rest of my team saying i need to fire these people now and i'm thinking to myself how do you not know if you need to fire these people and what i realized is he was very uh disconnected and uninvolved in not just the process of finding those people but the process of interviewing and onboarding and hiring those people and i think this is why you know people like howard schultz people like gary vaynerchuk people like uh jack welch you know a lot of them will say hey i interviewed the first thousand employees and you know until we got to 100 people i interviewed every single person then after that they still talk to the people when they come on and this is something that i practiced until i had you know a c-suite in place that could actually do those things on my behalf and so for the better part of you know four and a half years i was involving myself in most of those obviously there's exceptions like if you have for example we have a big sales team and they go through a lot of people on the front end and you know often filter out people in the first 30 days just based on you know the size of the team and how that works with funneling people besides that most positions ones that are not in that situation and aren't expected to be you know you want to involve yourself with i see this a lot which is really interesting to me because i think a lot of people who are you know below this is the irony of it that are below 20 or 30 um employees don't involve themselves in this process and they might be thinking well i don't need to involve myself in that you know we have 20 or 30 people the reality is i don't think that they can get above 20 or 30 people because they're not involving themselves in that and instead they're just spending all the time you know coaching and firing people because they haven't hired the right people because they were never involved in the process and so it's really interesting uh to observe and my camera keeps moving i think that it's something that people overlook because they don't like doing it right they feel like they're not good at it they feel like interviews are awkward etc etc so i kind of want to outline a broad interview process for you could use it really for any role and i obviously like tweak these and change them for the roles that we have based on as an executive a leader a manager is it a role that you know is turn and burn like what's it look like but it's a broad outline of what that could look like the reason i think this is really important is because a lot of people will spend all of this energy looking at marketing and looking at sales and diving into everything that produces revenue but it's up because on the back end there's all the people who are supporting the revenue they're the ones delivering the product they're the ones talking to the customer they're the ones holding up the promises and yet a lot of ceos will not even take the time of day to give 30 minutes to see if that person is the right kind of person to have on their team like do you want them to be the only impression of the company that that customer has okay so i think about this even with customer service right is if i'm hiring someone that customer is not seeing my company they're not seeing me and alex and all of our executive they're not they look at that one person and say this is the company they associate our entire company with that one person and so that is why you have to be really careful in terms of who you bring onto the team there's a lot of wasted money and time and a lot of slow growth because of people who don't do this and a lot of people abdicate their responsibility early because they feel like uh they're not good at it well no you don't get good at unless you do it like a hundred a thousand times you know people ask me like well how many people have you fired how many people have you hired i'm like countless i've probably fired a hundred people minimum you know like i think probably realistically 80. but you know you get good at something from repetition so if you want to get good at interviewing you've got to do it over and over and over again and so to give you a broad outline of what it can look like and then kind of the candle you want to come to an interview with i like to do interviews uh the process in three phases i don't think that when you interviewing somebody you should just do one interview and be done and hire them that's not how i do interviews okay the reason for that is because there's a lot of people in our company there's a lot of different perspectives and people see different things in people and they can analyze different things in people okay and so if you're looking at what kind of process to put together uh here's the steps that i would do and this is the minimum that i would have any company that we work with or that we take equity in this so i suggest them like minimum stakes this is what i want to have in place okay the first one is that you know your screen you're getting in applications you want to have somebody and i typically suggest it be like an admin do a phone screen okay and so usually it's just a quick i mean it can be it can be less than a couple minutes but if it's a good conversation might be a 15 minute phone screen uh and there's two things that you want to gain from this phone screen okay you want to get one are they a crazy person because i've caught a lot of people on phone screens like you look great on paper and i talk to you and you're nuts right um the second is does this person have the desire and the qualifications that were expressed on the resume okay so i'm listening for tonality of voice do they sound excited are they willing to make any time work for the interview um and then secondarily you know just double checking what is on their resume hey is this true and oftentimes you'll find that a lot of those things aren't there either they sound like they're very disinterested they don't remember even what your company is okay that's a huge red flag or they're not gonna make time for the interview they have you know 30 minutes uh on tuesday at six o'clock or lastly you know you ask them about their qualifications and it's almost like they don't remember because you know some people fudge it on the resume um so that's the first piece you wanna put a phone screen in place now the next three pieces are the interview process itself so this is what you would call the multi-phase interview okay so the first one is the first interview in that interview you typically would have the hiring manager do that the hiring manager is whoever is responsible for the entire process of interviewing the person okay oftentimes this would be like if you're hiring for sales it's a sales manager if you're hiring for marketing it's a marketing manager if you're a bigger company um you know you'll have an hr manager who might be that person but typically they delegate that to the leads anyways because it's usually better to have the person that's going to be their superior doing the process so the first interview is conducted by that hiring manager what is this the purpose of this interview okay it is to validate and confirm history experience qualifications and values that is what you want to basically confer on that call so on your end you want to double check all that with the candidate on the candidate's end you want to make sure that you set the expectations with them yes they've read them yes the phone screen probably included them but you want to verbalize it again what do you need from this role what kind of person you're looking for and what kind of company is this that we have you cannot repeat things too often especially when you're hiring someone the last thing you want to do is that you didn't say it enough and so they come in and they think the role is completely different than it was because you can have the same title for a role it can mean something different completely different in multiple companies so that's the first interview that you want to conduct the second interview is typically conducted by the hiring manager and or current employees and the reason for this is that this is going to be a skill assessment interview and so sometimes the hiring manager is not the best person to assess the skill based on what kind of team they have underneath of them the second reason for that is oftentimes peers right when they're when you include them in the interview process okay here's why they're incentivized they don't want to work with somebody who's going to underperform so if you bring in an a player they're gonna want to find a players to bring to work with them because they want that people want the community they want people that they like to work with and that are going to be productive on the team if that's the kind of culture you have which i would assume it is if you're watching this video so that's who conducts the interview now what are you doing in the interview you're asking them questions about real life scenarios you're doing strength skill matches okay so you're making sure that the skills they have and the strengths they have match with what you need the role to do right everyone has weaknesses the point is are their weaknesses going to be detrimental to the role if not ignore focus on the strengths you're checking past performance so a lot of times asking about how they solve problems in past jobs and past uh careers that they've held and then oftentimes there's one of two other things that you want to do which is one you want to request a portfolio uh if it's a certain kind of if it's a you want to say a product manager if it's a software engineer if it's a marketing designer a graphic designer right you want to say i would like your portfolio and i'd like to go over that together with you on this next call the second one is that if it's not a role that they would have a portfolio of work from then you want to conduct some sort of assignment and then review that with them on that call okay so there's lots of different ways you could do this for higher level roles it's typically situational uh interviewing or questions so you might have them right short essays on how they would solve certain problems that have already occurred or you anticipate occurring in your business the second piece of that is you could have them actually perform activity so often for the marketing roles for example i'm going to ask them to build a funnel make an ad write some copy i'm going to ask for that ahead of time and say i would like your best three pieces based on this criteria and that's what you want to have done in the second interview is the assumption is that this person has experienced the qualifications and the uh candor to match this role now what you want to test is how do they actually do under pressure right like in the moment because they're gonna be nervous on the interview with you what's gonna come out of their mouth only the truth for the most part unless they're very well rehearsed which that does happen but that's what's gonna come out same with the assignments that's their best work that they're gonna put forward and that's what you have to remember about interviewing is that whatever the person says however they act whatever work they give you that's the best you're ever going to get like when they come in if they haven't blown your socks off in the interview they're not bringing anything better to the table now they've got the job it's like now she's got the ring you know she's not going to be better than she was before right i'm joking but um seriously that's how people act they often want to put their best foot forward and then once you get in there and you're all comfortable then it's like then she's wearing sweatpants and not doing her hair not doing her makeup anymore okay and so that's what you should have seen with interviewing now the third interview is what i call the gatekeeper interview and so this is basically the the quality assurance this is the gatekeeper this is if you the ceo are not the direct hiring manager this is where you come in and what you are intending to do in this interview is put the best interests of that person and your culture in mind and so at this point you want to assume that skill is there you want to assume that all qualification experience etc are there but who is the most important potent source of culture in your company it's you and you are the one who's been able to spot it the best and so you want to protect your culture by making sure that when you talk to this person you believe that they are they have the same values they have that aligned values and then they can share the mission that you all have and then on the second side of that you want to make sure that this role is best for them so you want to make sure it wasn't oversold you want to make sure they have proper expectations and i like to tell people all the they're going to encounter you know i think a lot of times what we do is we sell sell sell people on this job because we're really desperate to get people in but that's not going to be good and that's not going to set them up for success so i like to tell them all the stuff that they should anticipate to be shitty and i actually like to overemphasize that often because i think that a lot of times it's uninformed optimism right they're like this is gonna be the best job ever it's gonna solve all my problems i'm never gonna feel anxious anymore my boss is never gonna yell at me like oh my god it's gonna be amazing it's like no here's all the that you're gonna deal with and so i just want you know from here on out this is what it's gonna look like and so i like to paint a realistic picture because i come into that and my intention on that call is if this is not truly the role for them i do not want them to get offered this job i want to say hey i think you're awesome i don't think this is the role for you based on what you want your future to be what your skill set is and how i think you're going to match up with this culture and so you're protecting the businesses culture and you're protecting their best interests and that is in my opinion the most important interview it's where many people fall short because they're so focused on getting or out of the short-term pain of not having someone in the role or having the wrong person in the role and they just want to get someone in that they're like really do i have to be this picky yes you have to be this picky and so those are the three interviews now we've got the first one which is with the hiring manager that's where we're going to go over the history experience values qualifications got the second one which is with usually the hiring manager and or a peer interview where you're going to go over skills you know strengths past performance assessments sharing a portfolio real life scenarios and then we've got the third interview where we're going to go over um are they right the right person for this company am i protecting the culture and i am am i protecting them by making this decision is it in the best interest of both the company and this person that they take this job and so those are the three interviews that you want to do now if you skip one of the three here's the scenarios that can happen on the back end you might skip uh the skill interview and so you hire someone who's a great culture fit everyone likes them but they come in they have no skill at all and they can't perform right so you've got to fire them the second is that you hire for skill and you kind of ignore perform or culture because maybe the skill is so high then you have someone that comes in they're very skilled but they're not a culture fit and that in itself is inherently going to block them from doing well because they cannot express their skills in its totality if they are not a culture fit and people do not not accept them into the company they don't work well with them they don't jive with them so it's not in the best interest of either them or the company do that and then the last one is that you could hire people with skill and with a culture fit but it's not in their best interest and so they won't be here for the long haul anyway you can do that in a couple of ways which i'll kind of elaborate on which is um if you know that somebody actually wants to have a different career and they're just taking this job because you know they're really excited over the company or something but it doesn't fit with really any vision they have for their lives you need to step in and be responsible and say like hey that's you know this is not in your best interest so i don't think this is a fit the second piece is if the salary doesn't match right if they're willing to take a really harsh pay cut but you know and you can dig and say are you really going to be able to live off this for that long or are they going to have to take a second job they're going to be really stressed and that just never is good if there's financial stress on somebody they're not going to perform well on their job so it's your responsibility to ask those hard questions to make sure that person's truly going to be a fit for the company um in the long haul and so those are the three interviews that i conduct and the themes of each one right it's like qualifications skill culture fit uh slash best interest and that's the broad outline that i'll give that i think that could work for any company of any size i think if you're just starting out you've only got you know 10 15 people on the team putting something like this in place isn't too difficult okay and it's very important it makes a huge difference to the culture of the entire company um i think a lot of times what happens is we kind of overlook it and we say well i don't want to involve too many people in that well i don't want to take up everyone's time like they're so busy they love okay i will say this employees and people on your team will love being involved in this process they love feeling like they are helping contribute to building the team and they are more than happy to say if they think that person is going to be an a player alongside of them or not and so utilize the resources that you have put this structure into place try it you know if you hate it let me know if you love it let me know or no you know as well um but i promise you'll make a huge difference into the kind of team you build and the kind of impression that people have when they enter your company so if you think of an employee who comes in and they've had one interview with one person and they haven't had the clears of expectations and they haven't really tried that hard for the role versus somebody who's gone through three or four interviews they've talked to multiple people in the company they've done multiple assignments they're working their ass off to get this role what kind of impression do they have of the company and the seriousness that you take of the kind of people on this team when they come in these are the seeds that you sell and when you bring people in one way and then it's different on the inside um they're going to notice the discrepancy if you bring people in like this and then on the inside it is the way that you show it right and is exactly how you've interpreted it to them then they're going to say okay now they're going to help you repeat this with everyone else that you're bringing in so it's a perpetual cycle and so i hope this video is useful for you i'm going to do a few more videos on interviewing because this was extremely broad and i would really like to get into the nitty-gritty of the tonality of interviewing how to conduct the interview the questions you want to ask and the conversations you want to have so look out for that it will come out soon and hopefully have a great rest of your day week night morning etc