Key Leadership Lesson: Spend Triple the Time Hiring – See the Real Person Behind the Interview
Spend Triple the Time Hiring – See the Real Person Behind the Interview
When I first started out in leadership, I hadn’t been trained in effective hiring practices. I fell into the common trap of hiring people that I simply liked or those who seemed similar to me. Since I was leading a sales team, I quickly ran into issues when new hires weren’t performing. This was frustrating not just for me, but also for the candidates. Because of my lack of preparation, I was putting people in roles they weren’t suited for, which meant they missed out on other potential opportunities that might have been a better fit. Initially, I thought this was just the reality of hiring—you win some, you lose some. Candidly, I would look around and realize that that was sort of par for the course at the majority of our competitors, particularly in real estate sales. There's high turnover in real estate where the average agent only stays with their brokerage for approximately 18 months. So once again, I thought it was just normal. The thing is, I don't like to be normal. In a sense, I always want to be abnormal—in other words better than average.
As the turnover became increasingly frustrating, I didn’t want to settle for “normal” turnover rates. Learning from leaders like Gary Keller who preached getting a few key hires will change the trajectory of your business, I sought out a consultant to help refine our/my hiring process and build a system that aligned the right person with the right role.
Have a Plan
The first step is to get real clear on what it is and who it is your organization needs. Start with building out a robust job profile. At Faris Capital Partners we include the following in our job profiles: the role mission, the expected results, the required skills, the personality and behavorial attributes of the right candidate, the job responsibilities, the roles SMART goals, the vital fucntions and metrics of the role, and the first 90-day priorities of the role. Once the team is aligned on all of this, we craft the job posting and/or engage a recruiter.
A Four-Step Hiring Process
The main shift was moving from a one-step process to a minimum four-step process. First, we conduct a screening interview to discuss culture and, in a sense, try to scare candidates away if they’re not aligned. We set the standard and explain our expectations clearly. For example, at Faris Capital Partners, I’ll let people know that we operate like a startup—we may not have every process spelled out, and they need to be comfortable building the train track after the train has already left the station, so to speak. By setting these expectations upfront, candidates who thrive in more corporate environments often self-select out. They're used to those more corporate roles where everything's spelled out and they come in, put their head down, and do the same things every day.
Next is the comprehensive interview, focused specifically on role-related questions. I take time to develop these questions in advance and ensure that they stay consistent across interviews. I will often spend a few hours just working and refining these questions. A great resource can be the TopGrading interview questions–I found them online with a simple Google search. They are a great starting point for interviewing as their questions are open-ended and specifically ask for examples to back up the candidate's answers. By building out a question set in advance it allows for a more direct comparison of responses across candidates.
If a candidate does well, we then conduct a behavioral assessment and review it together. This helps validate the impressions we’ve gathered from the initial interviews, revealing whether the candidate’s behavior aligns with the role’s needs. This is often a point where I will pump the breaks. If I find misalignment in the answers given in prior interviews with the behavioral assessment I dig in deep but I often find, in this case, I may have been dupped by someone who is just good at interviewing (side note, sometimes those that are most nervous in the interview process turn out to be my best hires as their nerves are a sign of genuine interest in working with us.)
Finally, the commitment interview is where we go back to core values and discuss how we like to work together, how to build trust, and how we prefer to give and receive feedback. If this goes well, we extend the offer. That said, if something comes up in this conversation that we don’t like, I can still pump the breaks on that offer if need be.
The Impact of a Deliberate Process
Hiring will never be perfect, but since implementing this process across both my previous organization and Faris Capital Partners, our turnover—especially among key hires and leadership—has significantly declined. When you hire someone, you owe them the responsibility to deliver on what you’ve promised. Hiring is a two-way street: the candidate will work hard to deliver on their role, and as the leader, you have to make sure the job, the culture, and the support are exactly as described. Taking this time upfront ensures we’re hiring someone into a role where they have a genuine opportunity to shine and be the best version of themselves.
Some Interview Questions I Love:
Describe your reading habits.
What is the last great book you read?
Please describe your decision making process…are you more decisive and quick, but sometimes too quick, or are you more thorough but sometimes too slow?
Please describe a situation where you had to learn a lot quickly. How did you go about learning, and how successful was the outcome?
What have you specifically done in the past to remain more knowledgeable about your industry and the competitive landscape?
What are some of the biggest risks you have taken in the past few years and what were the outcomes?
What actions would you take in the first few weeks, should you join our organization?
What are some examples of when you have gone above and beyond the call of duty in a role? What happened?
Are you better at initiating a lot of things or hammering our results on fewer things?