Ralph Burns and Lauren Petrullo tackle the art of thinking big and hiring smart. From setting 10X goals that demand sharp decision-making to unexpected twists in virtual interviews (because you never know when someone’s hiding a cruise—or a pregnancy), they discuss building a dream team. Ralph and Lauren also talk about the importance of transparency, trust, and asking the right questions to avoid costly missteps. If you’re looking to 10X your business—or just want to hire someone who’s not secretly a foot model—this episode is for you.

Chapters:

• 00:00:00 – A Curious Start: Traffic, Goals, and Grievances
• 00:00:39 – Lofty Ideas: Why Bigger Dreams Are Easier
• 00:02:58 – Big Hurdles: The Struggles of Thinking Big
• 00:03:46 – The Ultimate Quest: Hiring the Perfect Fit
• 00:05:56 – Zoom Realities: When Interviews Get Surprising
• 00:08:48 – Radical Honesty: The Secret Sauce in Hiring
• 00:17:03 – Building Bridges: The Art of Trust at Work
• 00:21:04 – Looking Forward: What’s Next on the Horizon

LINKS AND RESOURCES:

• Virtual Boss by Ralph Burns
• Episode 591 Is Delegation Your Kryptonite? Conquer the 4 Levels and Free Up Your Time
• Episode 663 How to Make Your Present Better by Making Your Future Bigger
• Tier 11 on YouTube
• Marketing Performance Indicators
• Tier 11 Jobs
• Perpetual Traffic on YouTube
• Tiereleven.com
• Mongoose Media
• Perpetual Traffic Survey
• Perpetual Traffic Website
• Follow Perpetual Traffic on Twitter
• Connect with Lauren on Instagram and Connect with Ralph on LinkedIn

Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Perpetual Traffic? Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on iTunes and leave us a review!

Mentioned in this episode:

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Read the Transcript Below:

Avoid This 1 Common Hiring Mistake at Your Own Peril

Ralph: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the perpetual traffic podcast. This is your host, Ralph burns on the founder and CEO of tier 11 alongside my amazing co host.

Lauren: Lauren E. Petrillo, founder of Mongoose Media.

Ralph: Yeah. And today, thank you so much for joining us. It is a Friday. We’re just airing our grievances. About certain things that have happened this week. And what we’re finding is that, you, the perpetual traffic listener. Yeah. You want the tactical stuff. We will get to some of that, but, the theme that we decided on for this coming month and quarter is really, is about personal development.

Ralph: And I think last week’s show, the show that we aired last Friday, this is being aired today, on a Tuesday. go back and listen to that [00:01:00] because it was about a book that we discussed and sort of went into, not super deep, but just got the high level on, which is a book by Benjamin Hardy and Dan Kennedy, two really sharp dudes, that wrote a book called.

Ralph: 10 X is easier than two X. Not only is it a great title from a copywriter and a headline standpoint, because it’s very intriguing. Cause you know, it’s counterintuitive once again, counterintuitive, which I believe is actually in the title of that episode, actually, no, you negated that you took out the counterintuitive.

Ralph: the point is, is that. Tax is easier than two X is only easier if you find the right types of who’s within your organization or outside of your organization so you can focus on your 20%. You know what we talked about what Dan Sullivan talks about is your unique ability and that’s an ideal. It’s an ideal to get there.

Ralph: I’m not saying that you should have done it by now in, you know, four days. But the point is, is this is something that I would really like [00:02:00] you as a listener to think more and more about a double down on as much as possible. We’re certainly doing that here. And it’s about. Setting lofty goals. So big goals like 10 X goals instead of two X goals, because as soon as you set a 10 X goal, all of a sudden your choices for what chant, what path you need to take become very limited because if it’s a two X or it’s like, Hey, I want to grow my business by 10 percent this year, there’s literally Infinite numbers of things you can do, and they might not be the right things, but if you want to make a radical shift and go really big, like a B hag is Jim Collins from good to great would say, you need it all of a sudden, the choices you need to make are fundamentally different and chances are they’re probably not the things that you’re doing today.

Ralph: So that’s one of the things that we did inside tier 11 this past year, setting ourselves up for success, have lofty goals. I know you have lofty goals this year, personal income goals. Hopefully you’re doing the same as a professional traffic listener. So it leads [00:03:00] us to today’s show, which is some of the frustrations and the bumps in the road on the way to achieving that goal.

Ralph: One of those things is for you to reach your income goal, which I’m, if I’m not mistaken, is a million dollars cash this year. you’re not going to rob a bank or anything like that. That’s good. It’s going to come probably from your business or other businesses here. One of the things that you’re trying to hire for right now is someone who can help you get there. it is not easy. You may or may not need to kiss a few frogs as my old boss, Tom Davies, used to say, you got to kiss a few frogs before you find the princess, literally. That’s how he talks. I’m not kidding. And he was from Maine. Anyway, the point is, is. You’ve had some challenges here. So what I’d like to do is sort of introduce the idea of the hiring process, how to find those people.

Ralph: And then we’ll actually bring in some of our specialists. We have an HR specialist on staff at tier 11, does an extraordinary job of this figured out an [00:04:00] entire system. I’m not saying our way is the absolute way, but it is a good way. it does minimize some of the mistakes, but we still make some errors on the way.

Ralph: There is no getting around it. So tell us a little bit about the story that you were just telling me before you started to hit record today.

Lauren: so, I guess like to give some prefaces is there’s definitely different ways you can recruit. Referrals will always be the number one resource for me. If you have someone that’s willing to put their name on another individual’s character, and, Attitude because I’ll always hire for attitude over aptitude.

Lauren: That’s the best doing self recruitment can be exhausting. I’ve done indeed. I’ve done lots of other recruiting channels, but I have found the most success at least time wise has been using recruitment agencies. but what’s really interesting is when you use a recruitment agency, you have the opportunity to.

Lauren: Expand your borders and you’re doing all of these interviews virtually, you know, on my goals. I’m opening a physical [00:05:00] office in Orlando this year. So we’ll be recruiting more individual and talent from that drive in market so that they can work in our office, but not all positions need to be in person in the Orlando office.

Lauren: So something that I was. Telling you before the show, to be mindful of, I mean, let’s say this may happen, you know, hypothetically, this is a possibility. Okay.

Ralph: Not that it ever did or never would. Got

Lauren: All, all characters are based off of fictitious representations. Any relation to any real human people were on, what is the disclaim disclaimer language you see before every.

Ralph: I used to have to read those disclaimers in my first job at advertising, actually. But yes, yeah, it’s purely by chance. That’s hypothetical situations,

Lauren: you might want to be aware of. and that like you wouldn’t necessarily think about, but it’s fun situations. When you’re interviewing using [00:06:00] zoom, Google means some sort of video platform. What view do you look at Ralph? How much of the individual do you see?

Ralph: Pretty much it’s chest up or shoulders above.

Lauren: So if an individual has a physical disability and they’re in a chair, you can’t see it. Which most of the times is no problem. But if you have a role that is physical and requires additional accommodations, I’m not saying that like be an ableist in any capacity. It’s just, it’s something that you need to be aware of.

Lauren: If there are physical limitations, you can ask the proper questions of what can we do to accommodate going up and down this forklift, or if you don’t have an elevator, for example. That’s a hypothetical situation. My dad had one leg. Alright? Sitting down, he was like, five foot nothing. Standing up, he was six, eight and a half on one side, five, four on the other.

Lauren: Right? Because he was missing half a [00:07:00] leg. If you saw my stand up, you would know. My mom has a one foot fetish. Oh, yeah. There you go. Now you know why my dad had one foot. He lost it in the war. But, so, like, there were limitations when he was alive for certain jobs he could do. Like, his height, he was like, When you have someone that’s six, eight and a half, and you’re asking them to crawl under a seat, he doesn’t fit.

Ralph: He’s not going to be a fighter pilot either. Chances are.

Lauren: he was jumping out of

Ralph: he wouldn’t fit me with, yeah, I don’t even know if we’d be able to do that. But anyway, the point is, is there are physical limitations, like everyone now is nearly a hundred percent virtual, although some of the tech companies are going back to the office, making it a mandate, that’s a whole other thing that we can discuss, but the point is, is a lot of the hiring process now is done virtually and all you see is what you’re seeing right now on our YouTube channel over at perpetualtraffic.

Ralph: com forward slash YouTube.

Lauren: so like, if you can’t, if you can’t see more than chest up, and you’re hiring for a foot model, well, you can’t see the feet. Right? other situations that you might, [00:08:00] Not hypothetically not be aware of is that if, someone’s water is going to break an hour after your interview,

Ralph: The hiring process, we’re not hiring

Lauren: their, right. The thing is like, if you have someone like this is true, no matter what, if someone has a planned vacation and you’re in the hiring process and you know, like, Hey, look, I booked this cruise with my family. It’s two weeks after your intended start date. I just need to signal to you that I will be unavailable.

Lauren: Cause this was previously booked. Right. Those type of situations and conversations happen normally. And when you know about someone’s, anticipated days that they’ll have off, you can make a decision on if that’s going to work for your company or not. but if you’re not able to see

Ralph: a right to know,

Lauren: Yeah, because if you’re in the first 90 days and depending on what your human resources team or your hiring documents or your employee handbooks say, usually the first 90 days is a [00:09:00] trial period and you’re not taking off

Ralph: let’s just make sure we’re clear on this. We are not saying that if someone is eight months pregnant, you shouldn’t hire them, but

Lauren: 100%. That’s not what

Ralph: have to have a practice. This is like you’re in business to make a profit. Okay. Change the world influence mankind in a positive way. Yes. But at the end of the day,

Ralph: no profit, no people. So you are in business to turn a profit and you have to have full discourse when it comes to making that hiring decision. We did the same thing. We didn’t realize it either. And somebody recently that was hired, we didn’t realize they were.

Ralph: Six months pregnant, they should have told us now we gave them, you know, full maternity leave did as many right things as we possibly could do. But that put us in a huge competitive disadvantage. Not only that, but it cost us a lot of money, which, you know, we checked with all the state [00:10:00] regulations.

Ralph: Obviously, we’re a virtual company, but it’s like the applicant has. The obligation, in my opinion, from an ethical standpoint to divulge those details, which could affect their work effectiveness. Did I say that in a legalese way? Yeah, a hundred percent

Lauren: If you have a vacation you’ve already planned and you don’t disclose it, because this has happened before, hypothetically, right? Someone, We’ll take off two weeks after they started and like request time off. You’re like, whoa, whoa, what, what? This isn’t your first 90 day period.

Lauren: Oh, I’ve had this book before. It’s like, this just was poor communication up front. Most of the time, like the individual, like if you’re hiring someone and that person’s a right fit. I can’t speak for all employers, but I would assume 90 percent are like, heck yeah, I’m willing to wait. You communicated effectively, but if you’re not aware of those types of limitations, you might find yourself in a situation where they’re [00:11:00] not being honest with you, they’re underperforming because they’re hiding their stress, potentially, hypothetically, if they are, if they’ve delivered a baby two days before they started working with you, may cause them.

Lauren: Challenges in producing milk stress make like they’re not sleeping. There’s just, there’s a lot that goes to it and

Ralph: at work,

Lauren: a hundred percent.

Ralph: all of those things, those need to be divulged. I think one of the, like a takeaway on this is a simple question that can be asked. And, You know, before the world of virtual interviews, this was sort of more apparent, I think, because you could see the physical potential limitations.

Ralph: Like, we’re just using this as an example is that you might want to consider asking the question, is there anything that we haven’t discussed so far that would hinder your ability to do work within the next 90 to 120 days at mongoose media? And if they say no, what? They are [00:12:00] lying.

Lauren: Well, they may not think they’re lying. Like, to be fair, like you don’t know your own physical limitations. Like you can’t foresee if someone were to get a medical diagnosis, someone we’ve worked with, someone got. Shortly after hiring a unknown, very like small limited medical diagnosis that would, so you can’t know what you don’t know, but you have to disclose stuff that, you know, like if you have a vacation that is booked in your first 90 to 120 days that, you know, you’re going to be out of the office for, if there’s political turmoil in your current environment, where you may not have access.

Lauren: To electricity, power, or internet, and you know this to be true. That’s something you should disclose things of that nature. I think that question you pose is, is there anything in the next 90 to 120 days that we have not discussed that could limit you from fulfilling your duties to your full potential?

Lauren: Like, are there any restraints that we need to be aware of? Cause I [00:13:00] will tell you again. Most of the time when you find that good candidate that, that prince or princess, if you will, because you’ve kissed a lot of frogs before, I believe most business owners are like, heck yes, we will work. Let’s accommodate together because when you have a business owner that is willing and able to understand, yeah, you’ve got this 10 year career.

Lauren: Family reunion. How amazing. Okay. We recognize it. Let’s either push your hiring date back to after it starts, or let’s just make sure we all know that there’s this two week period and let’s accommodate your training schedule. Most of the time. It’s like when you find the person you want, business owners are, Willing to make accommodations and to find ways that could work.

Lauren: physical limitations. Like if you, you don’t have feet, but you have, you’re doing a foot model. Okay. Do you have like prosthetic feet or do you have access to someone else’s feet there? It’s a conversation. It’s not like a deal breaker. I think most, most, most of the time, but what is a deal breaker for me is that.

Lauren: [00:14:00] Subterfuge that intentional hiding of. imperative information that can affect your performance because then you’re like, why isn’t this individual performing as well? I don’t understand what happened.

Ralph: Yeah. And, it seems like you hire a lot of foot models at Mongo’s media. That’s interesting. But the point is, is like, this is a, this is a question that is a good question to ask at the end. We’re almost, we’re, we’re talking about sort of the tail end of the interviewing process. the question that I always ask prior to, actually making an offer is if I offered you the job today, would you say yes? And because that way I know I have somebody who’s interested and I don’t necessarily listen to the, the response, whether it’s yes or no, I listen to how they respond if they hesitate. I know I have a problem. And then if they hesitate, if they say, yeah, [00:15:00] or if they, if they immediately say yes, absolutely. Like you’ve already talked about money. All right. You, they know what the salary range is. You haven’t given them the offer yet. Let’s say the salary range. I never tell them, this is what you’re going to make. This is the range. Usually go a little bit. Lower because they end up wanting a higher end of the range.

Ralph: That’s just a little tactic that I’ve used for years and years. the point is, is like everybody thinks, well, if the range is five to 7, 000 a month, well, I’m worth 7, 000, of course, however. What I might say is that when we’re talking about money, I’m like, all right, the range is five to 7, 000. You don’t quite have the expertise and the level of seniority for the 7, 000 range.

Ralph: I will do everything I can in order to fight for you. Like I’m the CEO now. So it’s a little bit different. It was a hiring manager. I was like, I can go to the CEO, I can go to HR and fight on your behalf. However, I wouldn’t expect that. But something in that middle part of the range. How does that sound?

Ralph: And then if they say, that’s great, [00:16:00] then you say, all right, well, based on everything that we’ve talked about so far, this is sales one on one really. Is there anything that would prevent you from starting with us? Or if we offered you the job today. You know, would you take it and if they say yes, immediately, then, you know, you’ve got your higher chances are it’s not a hundred percent foolproof.

Ralph: The corollary to that question is the one that we asked before is like, you want to sort of know that through the process. You might want to drop that in during your interview somewhere so that you at least know. So the, the one that we hired that was six months pregnant, like she didn’t tell us. And I had a real problem with that.

Ralph: And, you know, everything worked out fine. Like we paid, we probably overpaid her in the end point is she was in the U S we complied with all the regulatory laws and all the other sorts of stuff that you have to go through. The point is like, You should tell your employer and it doesn’t necessarily if she told me, I would have been like, fine, because she was a great candidate.

Ralph: So we thought. So the point is [00:17:00] that like that immediately dropped down a level of trust. And I look at trust is the foundational concept. Everyone who’s going to work with you. If you do not have that, you have got nothing. And I wrote a book on this called virtual boss. We’ll leave a link in the show notes.

Ralph: There’s not a huge section on hiring. There’s a whole other book on hiring, which I haven’t written yet. The point was is that the, you’ve got to place deposits in the trust account as a manager, as a hiring manager, as much as possible, because you’re eventually going to start to withdraw them, but you, as the employee.

Ralph: Should be doing the same because it’s a two way street. It’s not what can I get out of the company? It’s like, what can I give to the company and what can I get in return so that they get what they want and that when you have those two things together, like that’s all based on trust. And it sounds like in your interviewing process here, that trust was immediately broken.

Ralph: Thankfully, you had a recruitment agency. Hypothetically,

Lauren: It would have been broken.

Ralph: And [00:18:00] if you go through an agency, the agency is actually the one that does the dirty work for you and finds it, which is helpful.

Lauren: for sure. So that’s where it’s like leaning on the agencies I’ve found to be super helpful. Like in the past, I have a real example I’m happy to share is like, I had an individual who told me like she’s engaged and she’s going to have a wedding in the next four months. So she told me right out the gate.

Lauren: So I was like, cool. That means there’s a wedding, there’s a honeymoon and there’s going to be the, like two weeks before the wedding, she’s going to be useless. And she’s going to be off. So we had that discussion of like, okay, you told me this totally fine. That’s amazing. I can’t wait to celebrate with you.

Lauren: Let’s make sure that does this make sense of the time off you would need for the wedding? Cause I’m not asking you to push it. You’re a great candidate. I want to move forward. and you’ve established clear communication and trust, which speaks volumes to me. And so it’s like, yeah, okay, great. , how long is the honeymoon?

Lauren: What are the plans? I think you should take three days off before the wedding. So you can handle it. And get ready. So we had said that she [00:19:00] had said she wanted the day of the wedding. And I was like, I think you should do three. She said, maybe one days. I was like, this is not negotiable. You’re taking three days off because you never know what’s going to come up last minute.

Lauren: And I can tell you that the individual worked with me for two years.

Ralph: It’s great.

Lauren: And

Ralph: started on the

Lauren: we built with each other was, Hey, thank you so much because I didn’t know I needed those three days because there was stuff with in law and long story short is, I think the way you phrase that question is amazing. And if anyone listening has encountered hypothetical situations.

Lauren: Like we’ve discussed or other scenarios i’d love if you’re listening on spotify to leave a comment or if you’re on youtube to tell us about your experience because There are new challenges that aren’t like super discussed ralph. I’ve talked about like a remote Like dress code that you have to do because we’re all showing up online again.

Lauren: I don’t care you’re chest up So you might be wearing a skirt underwear pants. This isn’t like a no pants. No shoes No service [00:20:00] situation, but there’s lots of those

Ralph: you know I was wearing a

Lauren: help with I thought it was a scort.

Lauren: Scorch it. Well, actually, yeah, it is a squirt. But I’m sure those listeners here that have encountered similar experiences and

Ralph: Oh, absolutely.

Lauren: I’d love to know what, situations you’ve done or if there’s anything that you have found helpful in ensuring that you’ve got good culture, fit, good potential and, and prospecting because asking for a friend,

Ralph: Asking for a friend. Absolutely. Well, This is just, I think one small subset of the whole process of the who, not how theme that we want to sort of talk about here, setting bigger goals, going 10 X instead of two X, you know, 10 percent isn’t very exciting, but 10 X is exciting.

Ralph: The only way to make your present better is to make your future bigger. And we’re big believers in that, even though I forget that phrase every now and then Lauren, but anyway, just going to stamp that like right on my.

Ralph: Desk

Lauren: on your finger,

Ralph: it on my finger, [00:21:00] like this finger right here, right there. Nice, nice place for it. and this is all a part of that. So what we’re going to do is we’re gonna actually do more episodes here and let us know in the comments, wherever you listen to podcasts, if you find this helpful and useful, this is just sort of a day in the life of hiring as an entrepreneur, whether you’re a director of a department, you know, or Europe.

Ralph: A one man band hiring your first person, like your first VA. Like this is the kind of stuff that you really need to look at in order to 10 X yourself in the coming year. we will bring on our HR specialists, onto the show. We’ve been asking, I’ve actually asked him last year, our head of people and culture, Josh Hill.

Ralph: And we’ll go through that whole process as well as we’ll get into a lot of the hiring techniques that I’ve used through the years. I’ve literally interviewed and hired hundreds and probably thousands of interviews. So there is all that, that we can tap into here. So anyway, [00:22:00] as you move forward in your journey, best of luck in hiring.

Ralph: This is sort of the tail end of it. We’re going to talk a lot more about this in the coming weeks and months.

Ralph: So wherever you listen to podcasts, make sure that you comment and leave a rating.

Ralph: And of course you can get all the show notes and everything that we talked about here today over at perpetualtraffic. com. So on behalf of my awesome cohost, Lauren E. Petrullo, MBA,

Lauren: Okay.

Ralph: until next show, see ya.