My Step-By-Step Process For Recruiting High-Level Talent | Ep 256
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What's up guys, welcome back to Build and today I want to talk about the one thing that separates companies that scale from companies that stall and that is how we recruit. I was thinking about this today because I was un-bottlenecking or de-bottlenecking whatever the word is, a couple roles that we have the company that were lagging and I was I stepped back and I was kind of reflecting it's like why are those roles lagging versus other roles moving really quickly?

And if you take a step back and you look at why you're able to find some people easily and why you're not able to find some people easily, it usually comes down to this one thing, which is that you don't understand the difference between hiring and recruiting high level talent versus easy to find talent. Okay, it's not the same game. It's not even the same sport. I can tell you this because in my first company, for example,

It was fully remote, super remote, flexible hours. There was really no like you come in, you do that. I didn't know what I was doing, to be honest. And so this was not good for my customers, to be clear. But I didn't have any guidelines around how anything was doing. It's just like, oh, it's a remote role that pays the same as an in-person role. Finding people is like the easiest thing in the world. And I didn't need highly skilled people. And so I didn't need highly skilled people. It was a remote, flexible role. And I'm paying the same as they paid it for an in-person job. I mean, I would get thousands of applicants, right?

Then fast forward, I'm starting a company where, okay, people are going to have set hours. Okay, they're going to have, sometimes they have to fly places. Okay, now they have to have more skill. Okay, it gets a little harder. Fast forward. I have a company where many roles, most roles are in person. There is less flexibility for a lot of those roles and there is more skill required for those roles.

When I take a step back and look at it, right, what you have to understand is you have to understand that recruiting and bringing on the right talent is not a one size fits all playbook. Okay, because then if you do that, you basically overhire for the wrong role or you underhire for the right one, or you don't even know what role you're looking for in the first place or why you can or can't find it.

And so I want to break down really the five principles that I think through when I'm thinking about roles, because I've been doing this a lot for myself lately. It's been something that I've been instilling and talking to my hiring managers about, which is that no role is the same. And a lot of people like to compare recruiting to marketing. But let me explain it like this. If you're marketing to get customers, you're typically marketing to one customer and you have one or maybe a couple products.

When you're recruiting, you are marketing to different customers, different products. So if you have 15 roles open, then you have 15 avatars and 15 products. Yeah, think about that, right? Because each job is different and the type of person you need for each job is different.

On marketing for your business, it's like you figure out who you're serving and then usually you add on different products. But to go outside and have a different type of avatar that you're trying to fill, that actually usually is one of the hardest things that business can do, right? They need to know who their customer is. They need to know who they serve. As long as they're very clear on that, it makes marketing easy. But recruiting, it's like people don't think about it the same way. And so they're like, oh, I'll just post on the same platform for the same people with the same interview cadence, with the same compensation philosophy, with the same...

That's why you can't find the roles, right? And the worst thing is that this is why a lot of companies don't scale. A lot of companies stall out because they don't level up the way that they find the right talent to level up. And the reality is that the bigger you want your business to be, the bigger the talent pool you need to have access to.

because hiring high level talent versus easy to find talent is not the same game. It's not even close. Okay, so let me break down kind of like the frames I used to think this through. And honestly, I was putting this in writing because I want to share it with my talent acquisition team. And I was like, this would be great for a podcast. So first,

different goals, different stakes. Okay, when you're hiring easy to find talent, you're essentially filling a seat. It's not that hard. It's almost like if you guys have ever done a sale where it's like, I was just the cashier, right? I'm just facilitating a transaction. That's an easy to fill role. It's like everybody wants it. It's really easy to find. You have a huge TAM. It's not going to be hard at all. It's like, it's a slam dunk, right?

You have a well-defined task, a well-defined role, a well-understood role, and you just need somebody competent with the skills to execute it, right? And so it's about execution. That is much easier to fill a role for than if you're hiring high-level talent, aka somebody who you might say is like a unicorn. You're trying to get somebody to change or speed up the trajectory of the business. And so you're betting on transformation, right? When you're doing that,

What you have to understand is that the role is harder to define, harder to understand, therefore harder to find a pool of. And so this is why what happens with a lot of people is that they post for roles like customer success and they get a lot of people, they find people, they're like, oh, that worked great. So I'm going to do the same thing for my VP of operations of a $50 million e-commerce company. And then you post on the same platform with the same strategy, with the same interview cadence. It's like, wait, what?

And then you get no applicants and you ask yourself, well, why haven't I? Well, because if this person has different goals, then they have different stakes, right? And so they're not looking in the same place as other people. They're not going to be found in the same place as other people. And the process to attract those people is completely different, right? Which brings me to this point.

It's essentially like sales. There's transactional sales and there's relational sales. So think about the recruiting process like a sales process. If you're hiring an easy to fill role, it's like selling a $49 product. You're going to build a funnel, you're going to automate it, and it's all about volume and conversion. You post the job, you get hundreds of applicants, and then you just filter for culture and skill fit. It's pretty simple like that. On the other end, if you're hiring for somebody who is highly skilled and it is a

highly technical role. You're essentially looking for a unicorn and that is like closing an enterprise deal. It's a long cycle. It's high touch. It's strategic and you've got to be flexible. And key point here, which is where a lot of people lose people, is you don't sell people with features. You sell people with vision and relationship. For a role that has a ton of flexibility, is easy to find, is easily definable, and there are a lot of people who can have the skill,

it is much more transactional because you essentially have a product, right, that a lot of people want. Whereas when you're looking and there's a, it's when you're looking for, say, a unicorn, it's much more like an enterprise deal. And when you're doing that, you are selling them on a lifestyle of working in your company. I want you guys to understand this, a lifestyle. You are selling them on a new life.

Because somebody who is a unicorn that is, say, the director of operations for a $50 million company that took them from, let's say, $10 million to $50 million, that person, this is their life. This is their career. This is what they do with most of the hours of their day. It's not about the features of like, oh, we've got this cool gym and we've got this awesome benefit and you get $100 a month for this or that. No, fuck that. That's not what matters.

They care about the vision and they care about the relationship. So you don't say to those people, hey, here's the job, take it or leave it. You instead show them that the future is bigger with you than without you, that they have more of a chance of winning with you and on your team than they do alone. Great talent doesn't just show up at your doorstep, right? You attract great talent. And so what that brings me to is my next point, which is being dynamic with your offers.

Okay, so for an easy to fill role, it's simple. You get to the final round, you give them an offer, and then you instill like, hey, we've got a deadline, let us know what you think, right? Here's the comp, here's the deadline, let us know. And that works because there's like 10 other people who are a culture fit and a skill fit who are qualified. But when you're talking to someone who's highly intelligent, highly skilled, and they're uniquely qualified for the role, that approach actually loses those people.

Instead, you have to engage it like a collaborative negotiation the entire way through. I always tell people, and I say it straight up front on the interview, I say, listen, this is the beginning of our relationship. Seriously, like I want you to work here for years, maybe a decade, maybe decades. And so I see this as the first part of our relationship. If we can't be honest and transparent right now, what's it going to look like in three months from now? Might as well just call it quits. It's kind of like dating somebody. It's like, if we're not going to be honest and upfront in the beginning, then what's it going to look like in a few months?

You can't take a transactional approach of like, it's all or nothing. We're not speaking, like instilling this like fake urgency. Like that stuff just completely turns those people off. Instead, you want to take a collaborative approach the entire way, constantly aligning on the vision of the company, the vision of the role, the working environment, how, what kind of autonomy they're going to have, what kind of incentives you're going to give them.

And you're listening to them and their concerns and their needs just as much as you're selling them and reassuring them of the things that you tell them the job is and the company is. And so what you essentially do is you don't give an offer to high-level talent. You co-create an opportunity with them.

Right. And that means that you're also willing to compromise, not on values, not on skills, but on structure. Right. Maybe that's more important to them that they get more cash and less bonus. Or maybe it's important that they get more bonus and less cash. Or maybe they need a longer ramp up time to wind down their role. Or maybe they need more help with their relocation. Maybe their wife needs to come out and see your building. If they're the right person, bottom line, you figure the fuck out.

Right. And so this is the place where I see a lot of people go wrong, which is like it's hard to switch between different roles, especially as a hiring manager. You're hiring for different roles. It's like just running through a process. You've got your day to day. You've got fires. But I just want to instill upon everyone here. This is why so many companies lose good talent.

because they treat easy-to-fill roles in well-defined positions the same as hard-to-fill roles in undefined positions with people who need to have a unique skill set to fill them. And so what that means is that we need to have a different interview strategy. Okay, when you have a role that's easy to fill, typically you can use a repeatable cookie-cutter process. All right, we've got an application, we've got a quick screen, we've got a test task, and we've got a decision. It's predictable, it's scalable.

But here's the thing, with hard to fill roles, I would say like the quote unicorn roles, that doesn't work.

You actually want to customize the whole process based on them, their background, their ambitions, their goals, where they're at in their life, their decision-making style. Maybe one of them, you need to do like a strategic case study. Maybe another one, you're like, okay, we need to have like a deep conversation about the culture. Maybe another one wants to meet all the people they're going to work with. So you have to put together like a peer panel. You're not just assessing fit. You're building conviction, both for you and for them.

So that by the time they join, you both feel like this just makes sense. We're already super excited. We already like, we're kind of working together right now and we would like to continue doing that. And so you're not evaluating task execution. You're evaluating the impact they're going to have on the organization, how well they're going to interact with the team. Can they really take on this initiative and take it to the next level? Which brings me to my last point, okay?

Talent is the only multiplier you have in your business. The truth is the best way to increase the output of your business is to increase your talent density. If you have high talent density, you have high output because when you bring in people that are very talented A players, they're going to build better systems, they're going to attract other A players, and they're going to continue to raise the standard as you scale. And if you don't raise the standard while you scale, you degrade the standard when you scale.

Okay. And here's the thing about those people. They don't just do the job. They change and innovate the job. They don't just ask for direction. They set the direction and recommend the direction. And they don't create work. They remove work from your plate. And so you can fill hundreds of seats in your business, hundreds of spots on your team and still struggle. Or you can really focus on filling your team with the right people.

Okay, easy to find talent will get a job done. High level talent is going to help you build the future of your company. And so if you want a company that can scale without you and survive beyond you, then you have to recruit differently. Because again, like I said, great talent isn't just going to show up at your door, you have to attract it. And I always remember this line, which is like your company is the sum of the people you recruit, not the sum of the ideas you have.

Right. And so the best thing that we can do is get amazing people on our team so that we can continue to scale our companies.

So for those of you who have been listening to this podcast, you're like, man, I actually resonate with this. Like, I just realized that I've been treating, you know, recruiting an executive the same way as I did to recruit a, you know, customer support rep or a staff accountant or whatever. And you're like, holy crap, I don't know why I've been doing this. I think the visualizing it as marketing funnels, and you have a bunch of different ones, and then seeing it as an enterprise sale versus like a ticket sale is one of the best ways that you can train this for yourself going forward and for your teams going forward.

Because here's the thing, your teams want to follow a process, but this is an art. And I always say like recruiting is an art and a science. And when the more you go on to the quote enterprise sale side of things, the more it is an art. And by the way, it doesn't stop just once you get the person in, like then we go all the way into talent retention strategy and performance development. However, if you don't get the right people in, you don't have to worry about any of those things. And so we're just starting here. The last thing I will say is this, like I'm making this podcast because I'm

Recruiting is one of the most important things that you can do as a CEO of your business, as the founder of your business. What I have learned in time, and I think I've had to learn the lesson many times, is just, you know, the one thing that I do that is really difficult for a lot of people to do is I can see so much further into the future. And I can ask myself, does this person increase or decrease the likelihood that I get there? And if I'm like, dude, they're going to increase it by tenfold, I'm going to figure out a way to make it work. I'm going to color outside the lines. And there are no rules. It's your company. You can do whatever you want.

So with that, I hope this was helpful for you. If you have somebody on your team who's in the process of hiring people for their teams, please send this to them. If you have a team of recruiters, please send this to them. And I hope it helps you. Have a great rest of your day, week, month, and I will catch you on the next one.