The success or failure of a business often hinges on whether or not you choose and hire good people. You need to have a process in place that lets you identify these people and get them hired. In this episode, Sam Reeve, Char Miller and Jules talk to the founder of A-List Interviews and creator of the Response Analysis System, Beth Smith. Beth talks about the process of identifying the right people and how to get these people on board. Learn more about HR and hiring secrets by tuning in.

—

How To Hire Good People: Discussing The Hiring Process With Beth Smith

I want to officially welcome you to the show. To give you an idea of what it is, it’s a mastermind of leaders. We’re dedicated to creating workplaces where people thrive, where employers reward and customers love. Nothing better than that. I’m going to be introducing everyone. What I do is I’m an on-camera and video coach. I hope people shot confidently on camera, which we’re all on camera whether we like it or not. I help with that.

To introduce you to our other amazing hosts, we have Char. She is a people strategist, an HR expert, runs her own company, has a wealth of experience in many different areas. We also have Sam who is the Founder and CEO of CompTeam. If you need help with talent strategies or compensation programs, Sam and his team are the go-to people for that. He’s the reason why we have this show as well. That’s our panel. I’m going to introduce you to our speaker. We’re excited to have Beth Smith here with us.

She’s radiating such good energy and good vibes. I love it. A little bit about Beth. She’s a business consultant. She helps businesses interview and hire people. She also teaches new, innovative and effective ways to interview and hire people. If you have ever interviewed someone or it’s for a team, it’s a big process. I love that you’re revolutionizing this because it’s about time that someone came in and changed all the way of doing things. Beth, you’re also on your third book. You’re writing another book.

I am. The first book was Why Can’t I Hire Good People?, which lays out my seven-step process, and we’ll get into a lot of that in the webinar. My second book is called Hire Power, and that is daily tips and insights for how to hire better. Why Can’t I Hire Good People? lays out the whole strategy and the seven steps and then Hire Power is a daily reminder, tips and insights. It can be read more like a daily journal than as a book that you read straight through.

The title of this presentation is Why Can’t I Hire Good People? We’re excited to have you here. I’m going to give you the floor. Welcome, Beth.

Thank you so much. I’m happy to be here. What I’m going to do is I’m going to tell you my story about how I got involved in this work that I do and then after that, I’m going to open up the floor to anybody who wants to ask any difficult hiring question. I am your girl. I owned a restaurant in Boulder, Colorado. I hired a guy to help me manage the place. He led into underage football players. They were accused of a felony. This was one of the incidents in the Colorado football recruiting scandal and it made national news.

When I go in to speak to groups of people like yours, I always say to them, “Did your bad hire make national news?” “No, I didn’t think so.” As far as I know, with all the speaking I have done to the thousands of people that I’ve spoken to, I’m the one that has made the single worst hiring decision of anyone else I have ever met.

The next day, the Boulder police officers walked into my restaurant and told me I was going to lose my license. I said, “Is there anything that I can do to change that?” I had a detective from the Boulder Police Department lean across the table, point his finger at me and say, “You have to learn how to hire better.” I said, “Okay.”

I read every book I could get my hands on. I looked at universities for classes. I did not find resources. What I did is I called every single business owner, C-level executive, VP and hiring manager in my network. I said to them, “I’m under direct orders from the Boulder Police Department to learn how to hire better. Can you help me?” Not a single person said yes. Every person I talked to said things like, “Good luck with that. When you figure it out, come back and teach me. I’m selling my business after 30 years because I can’t get the right people on the bus.”

In the back of my mind, I’m thinking to myself, “This is a much larger problem than my little bitty restaurant but I don’t have time to think about that.” I need to find a way to interview people quickly, efficiently and be able to put them on the floor because, in my restaurant, it was a 24 hours a day, 7-day a week operation. There were times that I would hire people and never see them again, meaning I worked days and they worked nights.

I went into this huge research project where I interviewed over 1,000 people over the course of four years. I went into this interview thinking one thing, “In fifteen minutes or less, what do I need to know about this person that would make me feel comfortable handing them my eighteen-month-old daughter, the passwords to my bank account, the keys to the liquor closet and be successful at it?”

Over the next four years, I interviewed over 1,000 people. In the last year of business, I had 0% turnover. We sold the business. I sat on the couch for a year. I watched a lot of line orders. I played FreeCell on my phone. I’m very grateful that Facebook had not been invented because I’m not sure I would have ever started this business but then one day, I woke up and I thought, “I’ve learned some things about interviewing and hiring. I need to go out and teach it.”

For the past years, I’ve been doing this work where I go into a company and I teach them on how to conduct an effective interview process. I’ve interviewed almost 20,000 people in my career and I have a 91% retention rate for employees after a year. That is my powerful story about how I got into interviewing and hiring. Please keep in mind that I have made the worst hiring mistake you have ever heard so far. What questions do you guys have for me?

Having this retentive ability when you identify that person and they stay for long is great and exceptional. What I’m interested to hear is how has hiring changed in 2020 given all this craziness that’s happened in the marketplace?

Employers now are recognizing how hard it is to hire people and they want to do it right. They want to make good hiring decisions. Share on X

What’s funny is 2020 was the best year I’ve ever had in my business. What happened is employers were recognizing how hard it is to hire people and they want to do it right. My clients want to make good hiring decisions. They want to avoid layoffs and having to fire somebody. There’s a real big interest in how do we conduct effective interviews so we’re hiring the best people possible. What I have seen are a couple of things, remote possibilities for good employees is amazing. They are effective. They’re making their deadlines and getting the work done.

Remote for employees that are not good is increasing problems. It used to be one thing to have a bad employee but they were in the office next to you so you can keep an eye on them. It’s another thing when they’re remote. They’re not good and you can’t keep an eye on them. What ends up happening is people are firing faster, which means they’re hiring faster and not necessarily hiring better or more effectively. It takes longer to realize that a bad performer is on your team remotely than when we were all in the office together.

From a recruiting standpoint, we’re seeing a lot of issues with people that are applying to national jobs because they are remote. You have a lot of people that are out of state even. It’s not even just that they’re down the road from your office. They’re in completely different states. As I’m sure, Char can attest the HR nuances of having employees in different states raises the stakes too. It’s been an interesting year to recruit. It’s very different from 2008 when we had thousands of applicants for one job. I’m not seeing that anymore even with the high unemployment rate. I’m not seeing as many applicants per job as I was in the past. It’s been an intriguing year.

I would agree with you, Beth, also taking into consideration that there are significant employment law differences between the states. I have been an HR leader in over eleven states at one point. We had to hire an associate general counsel. You have to have an attorney. If your executive leadership are unable to invest in a good employment law attorney, your HR leader is going to be set up for failure. It’s very challenging and stressful.

One of the things that you mentioned, Beth, as far as the numbers of candidates applying to certain positions decreased in 2020. Is there an explanation for that or a theory of why that’s happening?

I don’t know that I would say that they’re decreasing but I would say that they are not as overwhelming as they were in 2008 and 2009. I still had one job as an HR director in a company in Baltimore. We had over 1,000 applicants. It depends on the state, industry whether you’re remote or not. It’s not necessarily that they’re decreasing. It’s just not as out of control as it was in 2008.

I know one of the past complaints that recruiters often have is that there’s so much noise in the marketplace that it’s hard to gain attention for your post and to attract people to your particular company. Is that a concern that is pervasive? Is there still a lot of noise out there?

Here’s the deal about recruiters. They like to say that there’s a shortage because that increases their value. That’s a misnomer. I wrote a paper called Is There a War on Talent? I hate that phrase. It came from a marketing firm in the ‘90s. That should tell you its origin that it’s an issue. There are one billion more people in the workforce since the ‘80s. The numbers of people that are in the workforce are way higher than they used to be in the ‘90s when there was a so-called war on talent.

I don’t like calling it a war. That sounds violent. I don’t like that term. I don’t like the fact that we are sword fighting over some candidate. That’s a bad perception for not only all hiring in general but for recruiters as an industry. That’s a mistake. I don’t believe there’s a shortage. You only have to hire one. I do believe you have to be strategic about it and your messaging has to be clear but I have no problem getting candidates to the table.

One thing I know is that there are more remote jobs ever in the market. The breadth of the people that your candidate pool is exploded. There are a lot more people. How do you narrow that down to identify the right people to interview?

Hire people who solve your problems for you, not vice versa. Share on X

There’s what I call The Myth of The Top Five. People will say, “Beth, send me your top five people.” The problem is my top five people are maybe not Sam’s top five people and they’re not Char’s top five people because we’re all looking for somewhat different things. What I recommend is not to spend time with only five people that you’re interviewing. When you interview someone, if they walk into the door, there are times where you take one look at them and you think to yourself, “I wouldn’t hire you to walk me across the street much less come in and do this job.” You know that within 2.5 seconds. You’ve allotted an hour interview and now you have 59 minutes and 57 seconds to do something with this candidate that you know you’re never going to hire.

Oftentimes, we have the person that does the pre-interview and then we have a panel interview. Are you talking about the pre-interview person?

It’s interesting because there’s what they call a screening interview. I don’t believe in those because the person who’s doing the screening is usually screening for different criteria than the panel. What I advocate for is a shorter interview with more people rather than a longer interview with fewer people in the beginning. My first interview was fifteen minutes long and I asked the same seven questions in the same order, every single candidate for every single position that the entire interview team is present for those interviews.

Is that in Zoom or an online type of thing?

The first interviews are over the phone, the second interviews are Zoom or some video conferencing tool and then the third interview, my process has to be in person. The reason I advocate for an in-person interview at some point is the amount of C-level executives that I’ve interviewed that have shown up drunk, on something, can’t form a sentence, can’t show up on time, can’t present well or whatever the case may be is alarming. I don’t ever hire somebody that I have not sat across the table from.

Would you say that the phone call would include all the panel people?

Yes, and here’s why. You cannot compare apples to apples unless all the apples are in the room. This is very normal, Char, for all the companies that I work with. Their interview process before I started with them was a pre-screened interview with typically an HR person or a recruiter. A hiring manager has a skills interview and then the C-level executive or the team has the final interview. The problem with that is everybody is evaluating different criteria in different ways. Everyone sees the same information. How would you compare apples to apples if not everyone is in the room and hears the same thing?

Do you use a form that everybody has like an actual document? All five people on the panel have the same consistent form. Is it like a rating process?

It is an analysis of their answer. It’s either pass or fails. They either answered it correctly or they didn’t. That was all based on the candidate’s responses.

The question was what your process is based on your learnings. That went through that but I was trying to figure out if they meant like in the interview itself but I guess that you’re going through like who’s seeing what. Who’s doing what? You have the same recipe as Daniel put it.

The recipe, Daniel, is seven steps, and the first step is creating an ideal list. “If you could have anybody in the world you wanted for this position, who would they be? What would they know?” My job is to create that ideal list and then we have a job description, which usually the company has that I’ll review. From those two documents, I write the job ad. The step number four is I post the ad. We screen the resumes on behalf of the clients and then we have a 1st interview, 2nd interview, 3rd interview. Those are the seven steps.

 

The 1st, 2nd and 3rd interviews are all varying links of time. Each interview has a separate question that you’re trying to answer. The first interview is all about conflict resolution. There are two types of conflict at work. There’s a conflict with your boss who can fire you. There’s a conflict with your peers who can not. If your candidate cannot manage their own conflicts at work then you have to do it for them. You’re not running a business. You’re running a daycare. It’s what I like to do.

So-and-so comes to you and says, “My peer is not doing her work. I’ve got more work than she does.” It’s a bunch of three-year-olds that you’re having to manage. The difference between managing and leading is managing means you have to solve problems for people. When you get to lead, you present problems and they solve them for you. That is the key difference between management leadership. The goal is to hire people who solve your problems for you, not vice versa. The first interview is all about conflict resolution.

The second interview is can they do the job we’re asking them to do? It’s all about skillsets. If you are hiring a lawyer, then are they good at legal work? If you’re hiring a CPA, are they good at CPA stuff? If you’re hiring an engineer, are they good at engineering? The third interview, which is the most telling in my opinion, do they love the work that you’re offering? If they don’t have a resounding yes on all three interviews, it’s never going to work out.

I’ll give you an example. We interviewed a senior level electrical engineer and he was such an Eeyore, “Yeah, I’ve done that. Yeah, I’ve solved that problem. Yeah, I’ve run into that kind of client.” He had been an electrical engineer for twenty years. I kept waiting for some enthusiasm to come about and finally, I said to him, “If you can have any job in the world you wanted, what would it be?” All of a sudden, he went, “I would be a ballroom dance instructor on a cruise ship.”

We did not hire him. He does not love engineering. He is not going to solve problems. He’s going to create more problems even though he’s done this work for twenty years. If they don’t love the job they’re offering then you, let them go. I’m hoping that he is somewhere on a cruise ship before the pandemic teaching ballroom dancing.

Have you noticed that Eeyore always has lots of friends?

They’re doing his job for him. That’s why.

They always invite him to the little parties.

There' are two types of conflict at work. There's conflict with your boss who can fire you, and there's conflict with your peers, who cannot. Share on X

It takes a whole team to keep his tail on, that’s Eeyore.

My group and I managed teams of 159,000. There were probably 30% that could be considered Eeyores or Debbie Downers. Once they’re in your company and particularly if you’re in a union company, that’s even more problematic, no offense but that’s a problem. If you’re hiring the wrong people, it’s hard to handle those Eeyores.

I know we have an international audience. If anybody doesn’t know who Eeyore is, it’s the character out of the Winnie the Pooh series. It was written a long time ago. One thing I want to bring out is your seven-step process and then the three interviews. I know that Laszlo Bock was once an HR leader at Google. He wrote the book Work Rules!. In his book, he was mentioning that Google started off this huge detailed process. In my experience, Google over-does everything at least at the beginning until they figured out the right mix.

They had this onerous process where they took people through 7 or 8 interviews, panel interviews and so forth. Being the data geeks they are, they did the statistics around it. They found that after the third interview, the probability of hiring the right person doesn’t increase all that much. They were wasting people’s time. I’m happy that you’ve got that three interview processes. Having the appropriate candidate experience is important in this and being dragged along through all this time seems to generate a negative experience. What would you think?

It does. You have candidates A, B, C and D. This is their performance on interviews 1, 2 and 3. Who do you hire? Why?

I’m guessing it would probably be C because they’re performing pretty well on all the interviews.

That’s an excellent choice. I think D is showing that that person learned something from the interview process. It appears to me that D is progressing. Unfortunately, that first interview was probably disappointing. By the time they learned the process, they did very well. That’s one of my points.

To your point, Char, they are improving but at some point, they’re going to fall off of improving. Consistency across the board and what Jules said C is for consistent. What you’re looking for is consistency across the board. Remember, there are three interviews for three different questions. It has to be a resounding yes on all three or you’re going to end up with someone like this.

 

To your point, after three interviews and I see this all the time in the third interview, they do let down and relax. The reason that they do that is that they know that they are high up. It’s close. They know that an answer is close. They relax some and when they do that, it’s amazing to me how often they let down where they don’t perform well.

There’s a quote in my book, “Thank God for the third interview.” There’s something so magical about that third interview. They either want it and it’s very clear they’re the right fit or they fall off. What I encourage my clients to do and part of it is why I keep getting hires over and over is because I tell them, “We are not hiring somebody who went down on the third interview.” We’re not doing it because you don’t have a consistent pattern across the board of the interview process so you don’t know how they’re going to perform.

Oftentimes, you’ll see a lot of arrogance and a lot of times, you don’t. If they think they’re doing well in the first two and then by the time they hit their third, I’ve seen a lot of that in some of my interview experiences. To me, that’s a red flag. It’s hard to judge if you’re going to do three interviews.

There are some people I noticed that interview well but then when they’re out of the interview, you get a different experience or vice versa. They interview poorly and then they’re great. How do you flush that out?

Eventually, they let down. People who interview well, there are holes that start to come up and people who interview well are gaming the system. I had this woman one time that was like, “I can pass any interview that you put in front of me.” I’m sure she’s probably right because she’s not going into this in an authentic way. She’s going into this to knock the socks off the people in the interview team and they get excited. If you listen closely to her words, you will start to hear things that unnerve you. You’re trying to pull the wool over someone’s eyes, which is what a good interviewer wants to do. Their goal to go in is to land the job. They say, “I’m good at interviewing.” Fine, do that but the problem is they’re not going to last.

There’s this delicate balance that my clients have when they are dying to hire someone. Nobody likes interviewing the way that I do. I’m a geek. My clients don’t want to sit around and interview people all week. No one else loves that work. I’m weird. They want to hire somebody. They’re like, “Please, they need the help.” At the end of the day, when you have someone who is trying to pull the wool over your eyes and they know it, my clients are not stupid. They recognize it.

What they have to do is talk themselves out of hiring somebody because they want to hire somebody, they need the help and they hate interviewing people. It’s not about someone who pulls the wool over there. Somehow you’re going to know. It’s about talking yourself out of that person so that you can continue the search. That’s where people run into problems.

Being an owner of a company and working closely with my CEO, he’s very impatient, which typical CEOs are. How much time would you set this process would take?

Money flows from the impatient to the patient. So do candidates and job opportunities. Share on X

It’s probably the biggest disadvantage of working with me. My favorite quote from Warren Buffett is, “Money falls from the impatient to the patient,” so to candidates, job opportunities, cars or houses. When you are patient, you will hire the right fit. When you’re impatient, you will not. It’s very clear. I tell people that when I’m working with them for the first time because they’re having to do the double duty, learn my process then hire somebody. That typically takes anywhere between 4 and 6 months is what I tell people.

Are there exceptions to that? In 2016, it took me a full year to hire a senior-level architect because they didn’t exist at that time and we had to work hard to find that. I hired a CFO in eight days over Christmas one time because my client knew exactly what he wanted and we put that out. We did the first interview on Monday, the second interview on Wednesday, Christmas was on Thursday, the third interview on Friday. We did reference checks on Monday then we made a job offer. He knew exactly what he was looking for. It depends on how quickly someone will learn this process as to how fast they get filled and then after the first time they utilize me, it never takes as long.

Are you sourcing candidates that are currently working?

Absolutely. Am I doing passive recruiting? Hell no.

You’re sourcing candidates. It might take a year before they decide to leave their current situation.

If it takes them a year, we probably aren’t waiting for them.

Is it 6 months, 3 months?

We’re not waiting on anybody. What we do is we post an ad and we’re interviewing seven days after we post the ad. Not seven business days, seven days. We move as fast as we possibly can. My retention rate is probably the single best reason to hire me but the second one is we move fast. We have an advantage over some of the larger companies that take six months to a year to hire somebody. We’re not doing that.

 

What about the notification period? Typically companies require at least two weeks notification period. Do you give their current employer notice that they’re leaving?

That’s after they’re hired. That’s okay. I always support someone wanting to give two weeks’ notice because if we support it, we’ll get it. If I say to a candidate, “You want to get three weeks’ notice?” Thumbs up. I want them to leave their job well. I want them to leave in an honorable way because if they do that with their previous employer, they’re going to do it to us. It’s important to have a clean break.

I always recommend that after they give their notice, that they have at least a week between ending that relationship and starting a new one. I prefer two weeks because then they come and they’ve reorganized their closet, took their clothes to the cleaners, bought food for the pantry, got the kids in the daycare, whatever the situation. They’ve had a little bit of downtime. They got to read a book, have slept, come to your job and they are happy. They can’t wait to get started. They’ve had a break. That’s the ideal way to do this, in my opinion.

I did that with one of my jobs. I got to take that vacation. We went to Cancun. It was refreshing. We got to relax and get a little sun. I’ll never forget because when I started my new job, I was like, “It’s going to take me a while to earn some PTO.” At least I got my little vacation before I started my new job.

You brought up one thing, Beth, about that hard-to-find skillset. What do you do in situations where you got either a real hot skill that is hot in the marketplace or a unicorn that is very difficult to find? What is the process you typically follow there?

There’s a couple of ways around that. One is by creating your ideal list. The reason that I started creating an ideal list is that my clients are suffering from what I call the hiring hangover. They have a headache, slightly nauseous, tired, not interested in starting this process with me, can’t think of anything worse than to start an interview processed and barf. This is the Law of Attraction, and we’ve been talking about the Law of Attraction for years since Napoleon Hill wrote The Law of Success in 1921. When you approach a process like an Eeyore, like you’re hangover, you are going to attract people that are Eeyores and are the hangover. It’s not any fun. If you want to attract the absolute best person that you possibly can, you have to get your mindset in a place where that person can show up.

When we write ideal lists, I have my clients print them off manually and hang them in their office to where they see them every day. What I like for them to do is print it out and put it on their bedside table so it’s the last thing they see at night. I call it going to night school. You read this list and generate. In other words, it’s up to the client to create the vision for this role and stay focused on the vision, meaning a unicorn. If they stay focused on the vision and they do their mindset work, that person’s going to show up.

I’m having to hire a regulatory utility analyst. You talk about a unicorn. We need someone with a Law degree, someone that’s an expert in Excel and someone who can talk to people. We’ve been at it for about four and a half months. I’m calling references on a guy. Hopefully, we get to make a job offer but he showed up. I couldn’t believe it.

If you want to attract the best person that you possibly can, you have to get your mindset in a place where that person will show up. Share on X

What I like is the more specific the unicorn is, the more fun it is for me to go out and see what I can do. It’s a vision from the client. It’s my interview process. I have a whole team of people behind me at Indeed.com that have been with me for years. They do the back-end work on Indeed to get me the people that I’m looking for. It’s a team effort. I meet with my Indeed team every Tuesday morning at 9:00. We go over all of my searches and go, “What are we seeing from the search engine? What are people putting in for a title? Do we have enough keywords so that people are seen?”

This goes back to you’re staying visible in front of people. Making sure that your ad is written the way it needs to be written. That we have a quick interview process so they apply. We’re calling them in a couple of days. We’re getting them in for an interview the following week and we are moving through the process. It’s the way that we find unicorns. I have to tell you that part of my success in the pandemic is people are looking for unicorns and I have a process to find unicorns.

Beth, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your books? Let’s dive in a little bit in your new book. Let’s go through the series of books that you have. What brought you to write them? What is the result we get from reading each of these?

It took me eight years to write my first book. The reason it took so long is that I kept thinking to myself, “It’s not surely somebody has already written this book. Surely someone has already put together the seven-step process. Surely someone before me.” We work with smart people so surely, someone has already written this book before. Every time there was a new hiring book that was written, I would probably go out and buy it. I’ll read it cover-to-cover, frenetically going, “Did they have my process in this book?”

It took me 5 or 6 years to realize, “No one has written this book because I have to write this book.” It took forever for me to figure that out. I would have these panic moments at Barnes & Noble. The people knew me there by name. It was scary. I would go into the business section, look at the hiring section, stand there and flip through books. I’m like, “My book is not even here. It’s not here because I haven’t written it.”

I hate to sit down and write. I’m much more of a people person. What I did was I recorded my answers and two different questions. We had somebody transcribe it. We moved pieces and parts of it to where it would fit. The seven-step process has an introduction. Chapter number one is your ideal list chapter. Chapter number two talks about job descriptions. Chapter number three is job ads. Chapter number four is how to review resumes.

If I had my way, no hiring manager would ever look at a resume before you interviewed somebody. Don’t do it. You have preconceived notions when you read someone’s resume before you walk into an interview and that will mess you up every single time. Have someone else review resumes and then you walk into the interview. That’s a side note. Chapter number five is the first interview and the questions that I asked are in the book. This is why you asked them. This is what you’re looking for. This is why it’s important. Step number six is chapter six. Step number seven is chapter number seven, and then chapter number eight talks about reference checks afterward because I do reference checks after that. It talks also about the importance of training.

As companies, we have quit training people. It makes sense because if you hire somebody and you’re not sure if they’re going to make it or not, why would you spend all this time, money, energy and resources to train someone who’s not going to work out? There’s a very successful marketing firm called Crispin Porter Bogusky. They’re out of business but they had contracts with Toyota. They did high-end marketing work.

 

I heard the VP of Technology speak one time and he said his hiring process was he picked 10 resumes out of 100. He called them all in. He handed the keys and laptops and said, “If you’re still here in 90 days, you have the job.” If you think about that hiring process, what happens is that these people killed themselves with no training and direction on how to make it. They stay for two years and slug it out. They leave and take their intellectual property and usually their clients with them.

They’re like, “F you. Where were you when I needed support, training and somebody to answer these questions for me? You set people up for failure.” Even if they become successful, they’re not going to stay. They don’t have any loyalty to you because you didn’t for them. It’s imperative that you hire correctly and you train them correctly. At that point, that’s how you end up with good people.

Do you have this book in Audible?

Yes. My college roommate and her husband are the readers of it. They are producers. He reads the actual book part and then she reads the blogs that I’ve put in there. It’s probably my favorite version of the book in Audible. That’s the Why Can’t I Hire Good People? book. Hire Power has not been published yet. We haven’t released it but I don’t have an audible version of that one yet. Just the first one.

I’ll get the Why Can’t I Hire Good People? and maybe I’ll get that to my leaders because I have six people leaders and a director. That would be a good one.

The book should be in every new packet. They give you the packet with the employee handbooks and slip it right on in there.

There’s a book called Hiring The Best by a guy named Martin Yate. He wrote it in 1994. In his prologue, he talks about interviewing being a dirty secret. If you think about that, we hiring managers expect them to put a team of people together. We hold them accountable for that team. We do not train them on what to look for in an interview and why it’s important. Every hiring manager out there is needing this skillset and they don’t get it. It’s falling in a lot of ways because we’re setting them up for failure. Jules, did you have a question for me?

There are many great takeaways here. I love talking about the energy that if you want to attract something good and a great candidate, you have to step up to that too. You can’t expect you’re going to get the best if you’re a miserable person with bad vibes. No one’s going to want to work for that. With remote, people can work anywhere for companies in other countries or states. It’s opened up a whole different world for employees as well. You have to bring the best as well. It’s like a dream team that way.

I’m impressed because I have a lot of experience and I learned a lot of things from you. It’s very innovative.

You have preconceived notions when you read someone's resume before you walk into an interview, and that will mess you up every single time. Share on X

I wanted to point out and recognize our sponsor here, TMA. They do talent assessments and help managers understand their people more and so forth. Beth, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much. I’m glad that we were able to fit this in and have you on because I know you’re a powerful presence in this area. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

Thanks for having me, Sam. I appreciated the opportunity and you know how much I adore you. I appreciate being here.

I’ll get your audio.

Thank you, Char. I appreciate the support

I joined a business mastermind in 2020. My love language isn’t gifts but everyone likes to have a box sent to their home full of goodies. There was a good book, Building a StoryBrand, by Donald Miller. It talks about how to build a brand. Getting that book showed that they cared enough, that they wanted us to succeed and this is the extra homework we could do before we even got started. Slipping in a book works. Sam, you’ll be next because you’re on the book path as well.

I’ve got to get my book out.

He reads the real ones, the hardcovers. I just listened to them.

I listened to books too. It’s good. I love Audible. Thank you so much. I look forward to seeing everyone next time. Thank you, Beth.

Thank you.

Important Links:

• CompTeam
• Why Can’t I Hire Good People?
• Work Rules!
• The Law of Success
• Indeed.com
• Crispin Porter Bogusky
• Audible – Why Can’t I Hire Good People?
• Hiring The Best
• TMA
• Building a StoryBrand

About Beth Smith

Beth Smith has been empowering business owners, hiring managers and human resource directors for over a decade to interview and hire the right person the first time. She discovered the importance of the interviewing process when she made poor hiring decisions, which almost lead to the demise of her first company.

After launching an enormous research project so that she could learn how to conduct more effective interviews, she concluded that there is a science to interviewing. She also discovered that many managers are thrown into the interview room, scrambling to figure out what to ask and what to listen for, instead of actually being taught how to conduct an effective interview.

Beth graduated from the University of Texas in 1995 with degrees in History and Social Work with a minor in English. She also studied Psychology, Philosophy and Child Development. She has won several awards within her community and industry, such as Women Who Make A Difference in Boulder, Business Owner of the Year, Certificates of Service for the Hill Alliance and The Responsible Hospitality Group.

Beth lives in Boulder with her family. In her free time, she is the Orientation Coordinator for PawsCo, a Colorado animal rescue organization. She is also an avid swimmer, loves to lift weights and is a die-hard football fan.