Hiring is easy—said no smart business owner ever. In this episode of Perpetual Traffic, Ralph and Lauren sit down with Josh Hill, Tier 11’s VP of Employee Success (or whatever his title is this week), to break down the real way to find and keep A+ players. Forget the “gut feel” hiring disasters—you’ll get the step-by-step playbook for building a team that actually scales your business. Whether you’re looking to offload the 80% that’s draining your soul or you just want to stop hiring people who “seemed great” but ended up ghosting you in three months, this episode is your new best friend. Oh, and there may or may not be some good-natured roasting of Josh’s Australian pronunciation of “HR.”

Chapters:

• 00:00:00 – Welcome to Perpetual Traffic
• 00:00:47 – Flashback Files: What You Missed
• 00:01:59 – Enter Josh Hill: The Hiring Architect
• 00:02:46 – Military Precision Meets HR Strategy
• 00:04:23 – Hiring Without Core Values? Good Luck
• 00:07:35 – The Blueprint for Hiring Excellence
• 00:12:19 – The Three Phases You Can’t Skip
• 00:16:12 – The Map That Prevents Hiring Chaos
• 00:18:35 – Emotion vs. Logic: The Ultimate Hiring Battle
• 00:21:14 – Employees as Subscribers, Not Just Hires
• 00:22:49 – The Clone Trap: Hiring Yourself Over & Over
• 00:25:33 – Gut Instincts vs. Process: The Hiring Gamble
• 00:28:17 – AI, Automation & The New Hiring Reality
• 00:29:48 – Hiring Regrets: Expensive, Inevitable, Avoidable
• 00:32:46 – Your Best Recruiters Are Already on Payroll
• 00:38:22 – The Job Board Mirage vs. The Headhunting Goldmine
• 00:40:02 – How to Win Over Passive Candidates
• 00:42:30 – Keep This Conversation Going

LINKS AND RESOURCES:

• Email Josh
• Tier 11 on YouTube
• Get Your Marketing Performance Indicators™ Checklist Now!
• 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:

Tier 11 Data Suite

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Read the Transcript Below:

Use This Foolproof Framework to NEVER Make a Bad Hire Ever Again!

Ralph: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns. I’m the founder and CEO of Tier 11 alongside my amazing co host.

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

Ralph: It never fails to get that smile every time I say amazing or unbelievable. Today is an amazing and an unbelievable show, by the way, because we’ve got an incredible guest, one that we’ve hinted at, I think for. at least two months, finally, we could get them. this is a continuation of our show right after the first of the year.

Ralph: If you haven’t listened to it back on January 17th. So episode six 63, we’ll leave links in the show notes, which was how to make your present better by making your future bigger, one of the big things and big takeaways of that, as well as multiple shows prior.

Ralph: To that one [00:01:00] where we talk about outsourcing, we talk about hiring, we talk about how to scale your business, build your team to ultimately operate the 20 percent that is your unique ability and then figure out. The 80 percent of the tasks that you’re doing today, hire someone who’s better than you at those other tasks to scale and grow the business.

Ralph: And this could also be very relevant to, let’s say you’re a marketing director, you’re a VP of marketing of a marketing team. How are you going to scale and grow the business? Is it something that you’re doing now that maybe you should be hiring another individual? To do, maybe it’s headlines, maybe it’s copy, maybe it’s Google ads, maybe it’s Facebook ads, maybe you should hire an agency, you know, hint, hint to share 11.

Ralph: The point is, is all of this is related back to that episode, episode 6 63. And then we did talk about this a little bit more, just a few weeks back on our four C’s episode. And that’s the reason why we have [00:02:00] today, our HR guy, although now he calls himself the VP of employee success, just when I got used to calling him the VP of people in culture, he now goes and changes his title today.

Ralph: We actually have Josh Hill from tier 11 all the way from Adelaide, Australia, by the way, on perpetual traffic. Welcome to the show.

Josh: Thanks, Mal. Thanks, Lauren. It has been too long. I’m start. And I do keep changing my title just to keep you on your toes, Ralph.

Ralph: true. You’re just going to be our HR guy. And of course you pronounce HR in a very distinct way, which we’re going to just make fun of you the entire show for. So

Josh: I’m used to it.

Ralph: he’s used to it.

Josh: Just keep it coming.

Ralph: just a little bit of bragging about Josh. First off Josh military background. He was a captain in the Australian military at 150 plus. Soldiers under his command. And, one of the things that he actually did is we actually recruited him from the Australian military to be a media buyer at tier 11, [00:03:00] and then somehow persuaded him to leave the military and come here. I don’t know how the hell that happened. now he is our HR guy.

Ralph: he’s ascended through the ranks and has taken what was always a really good hiring process. And we’ve talked about our hiring process here quite a bit today. We’re going to get into it a little bit. Deeper because it’s easy to say, go hire somebody. It’s easy to say, go find somebody, but how do you actually do it?

Ralph: That’s the hard part. And so today we’re going to give you a framework that Josh has perfected through the years based on an original way in which we hired way back when, which was sort of an eight step formula. When we first started 11 as a virtual company, now it’s even better than it ever was. And now we’re even recruiting in other countries.

Ralph: So there’s a lot going on here. so hopefully you’ll be able to have some takeaways from today’s show as you continue to operate in your 20 percent and figure out the 80 percent that you don’t want to be doing and get somebody else to do it. Cause there are people that are out there that want to do the stuff that [00:04:00] you don’t want to do.

Ralph: And that’s how you scale. anyway, Josh, maybe we can sort of take step back here. We talked a little bit about, the framework that we use, but we also discussed before we hit record. One of the core elements before even the framework itself. So maybe we can talk about that. I know it’s something that’s near and dear to your heart, which is core values.

Josh: Yeah, for sure. I think the tendency for a lot of companies, business owners, I mean, it doesn’t really matter what size of a, team you’re operating on, but the tendency to jump straight to a result and hire, I mean, to resist that urge is difficult. It’s a result that a lot of people chase.

Josh: they see a problem and then they go, okay, we need a body. Right. And it’s one of a myriad of different ways that you can enhance your capability as a company or add resource, drive, change, increase momentum, like whatever your goal is, the first thing that comes to mind is let’s throw a body at it. No worries.

Josh: However, guess that the system that we’ve built it to 11 and I think, the way we approach a lot of problems and I think is the [00:05:00] right method is always to start foundationally with fundamentals like truths. We do have a lengthy kind of foundational component of our recruitment process, which is looking first at why are we hiring? what do we need? Like what matters to tier 11? What matters to our team? What matters to our culture? If you believe that in the recruitment process, the cultural component, the cultural fit is one of the most important things. As well as skills and everything else, then it will naturally lead you to be thinking about.

Josh: Okay, what are our values as a company? What’s our vision? What’s our purpose? What’s the current status of how engaged our people are? And how do we get more people like them? Who are your best players? Who are your best people on the team? And how do you replicate those? But understanding why they’re your best players and starting with core values is One of the foundational components.

Josh: You need to have core values.

Ralph: it’s something that I think is. thrown around a lot. It’s like, Oh, you need core values, you know, you need to stand for something. But I think in a lot of corporate environments, which I was involved, [00:06:00] your experience is obviously in the military. My experience is primarily in the corporate world where there were core values, but they weren’t adhered to.

Ralph: They’re these dusty old Maxim’s that sat on a wall somewhere at the corporate office and nobody paid attention to them. And I think when you start your own organization or your own department, like you can have core values in your own department to a certain degree that roll up to the company.

Ralph: And I think that’s a very important place to start. And when I talk on this and I’ve talked about this quite a bit, is that nobody does that. They just go right to the result. Like, let me throw a body at it. And that’s exactly what you’re saying. And that just leads to a bad result. It’s like you fill the void.

Ralph: But you have not found the right person, the right seat, right role that also is in alignment with your vision as an organization or as a department. And when we started hiring, we were very, very intentional about that and. We just got lucky that we hired a bunch of people that sort of knew what they were doing or really good before we had a [00:07:00] real system and then all we did is we took the best person and then wrote down like, what are the core characteristics?

Ralph: What do they have specifically? And it was a long list and we boiled it down to like 3 or 4 things and those became our core values. And it was sort of this what I was referred to way back then. This is, you know, 7 or 8 years ago now as our character diamond, but. It’s really, in essence, it was four things, and I think that’s a good place to start.

Ralph: You haven’t done that yet as an organization. think none of the stuff that we say in the next part of the episode really matters all that much. Am I incorrect in saying that?

Josh: I agree. Completely. I think, When you’re looking to scale, you need the common thread in the company. You need the common DNA. And I think if you were to cross compare a lot of successful companies or startups, they would have. Similar attributes in their values, and they would drive their values in very specific ways to not only just have them on the wall, like you were [00:08:00] saying, that’s vanity, right?

Josh: Like, that’s again, like what we’re talking about here is not just about having values and all these are the values. That’s also a result. Being able to articulate a set of guiding principles, these values, they need to be linked to what you expect to observe through behavior. Right? So when we say me. our value is hunger. What does that behavior look like? How is that actually observable in the business? How do you set that expectation? How do you reward for it? How do you train for it? How do you hire for it again? It’s that’s foundational, right? So what we’re talking about here isn’t just Oh, these are our values tick done it’s a hard lengthy brain consuming process to come up with values that matter and execution.

Josh: Then connecting it to your operations and the journey that you have as a company, that’s even more difficult because now you need to live the values and you need to inculcate them. There you,

Ralph: Oh, That’s it. That’s the word.

Josh: you, Ralph.

Lauren: Wait a second, what 20 word are you [00:09:00] trying to drop right now?

Josh: That’s there. It’s an action line. You’ve now you’ve seen it deployed.

Lauren: You and your military language. Oh my goodness, you’ve now seen it deployed. I’m sure like, everyone else is like, Okay, Josh is too smart for me right now. Can you explain what that

Lauren: word means?

Ralph: have no idea what that word is.

Josh: the definition is to instill an idea, attitude or habit by persistent

Josh: instruction.

Ralph: He just Googled it. He didn’t know that off the head.

Josh: I’ve got it up because I knew one of you would ask me, right? I knew one of you. So I’ve got it up here in Colgate verb.

Ralph: Verb.

Josh: Similar to instill and ingrain.

Lauren: Inculcate.

Lauren: it’s infiltrating

Lauren: an idea.

Ralph: Yeah.

Josh: Basically it’s like really intentionally nurturing something. And yeah, when it comes to hiring, it’s like, yeah, you need a foundation, you need a vision, you need, you need values. But that in and of itself is a whole podcast episode, right? Like just how to develop [00:10:00] and come to terms with what your values are.

Josh: But if you have. These mapped out, it sets you up really well for all sorts of other things, not just the hiring, but it sets you up to build a workforce that is aligned to exactly what you’re trying to achieve.

Ralph: So I guess, the core values are an undercurrent of everything by the time that the candidate gets to me, I’m really thinking, all right.

Ralph: Do they embrace those core values? And I have specific questions around those core values. Cause I’m sort of, I’m either the one that has the last interview or we’ve already made the hire cause you guys know exactly what to look for. And then my, my thing is just sort of either a tick in the box or it’s after they’ve already been hired just to sort of make sure, because I know the job has already been done.

Ralph: The point is, it’s like. Once you have core values, you need to, you need to be like layered upon, or like, I look at all the steps that we’re going to talk about here today. It’s like, it’s the oil that kind of makes the engine go and that you [00:11:00] have to constantly be thinking about it.

Ralph: It’s not just, I am hiring for the skill. I need a media buyer. I need somebody who is. Who knows how to do Facebook ads? Great. That’s one thing, but do they embrace our core values as well? Do they have hunger? Like the initial ones were humble, hungry, smart, and The last one. Is marketing IQ, like those were our four core values when we first started humble, hungry, smart marketing IQ, because everyone had to know something about marketing that’s now changed. So it’s much more simple. The point is, is we had something. And so we hired for all those things. We promoted for all those things. We trained for all those things. We fired for all those things too.

Ralph: at the end of the day, like that is. The essence of the inculcates that idea, inculcates all of your steps, not to use

Ralph: your term or anything, but I guess I just did so, so take us through the steps.

Ralph: you’ve got [00:12:00] your core values. Cool. Good. You do that as an organization. How do you go about hiring? Like, where does it sort of start? what’s step number one? And let’s sort of go all the way through it. And do you have numbered here in your mind or is it just like, how do you look at it?

Josh: Well, I mean, I guess if we take a step back, there’s, you can kind of divide it up into three phases, really. I mean, at least that’s how I look at it. You’ve got the preliminary, like phase one, which is all the stuff we’re talking about now. It’s like the foundational components that will feed into hiring and are super important, like the values and, you know, getting an understanding of exactly what.

Josh: Type of person common thread that you want throughout the company in terms of like their behavior and the way they show up, right? Like some companies are all about fast moving change. Some companies are about stability and then it matters intra team as well. So yes, I think it’s important to have a look at.

Josh: Agency wide or company wide kind of the values and the culture that you’re trying to [00:13:00] nurture, but teams have their certain dynamics as well, certain roles that you’re hiring for certain parts of the business, you want to nail it down even more, like depending on the project that they’re likely to take on if they’re a senior member or something, there’s nuance that you need to work out first on what is their experience going to look like and demand and mapping that out and that kind of feeds into, I guess more on that first phase, which is regarding, You know, having a clear idea of your accountability chart or your organizational structure, you don’t just want to be hiring people randomly and just throwing them into your organizational structure.

Josh: You want to have an idea of the seats that you have on the bus,

Lauren: But we always do that. Everyone listening has done that at least once. We throw people at problems. It seems like it’s the best solution. I paid you. You can fix this.

Lauren: I didn’t train you whatsoever, but I hired you. Therefore, I know you can do it.

Ralph: Yeah. Every company does

Josh: that’s right. So, that’s being a seat based organization, you know, and, and there’s always a push and pull between these [00:14:00] things. I’ve found, you know, there’s a lot of advocacy for if the person is right. And they’re a cultural fit and you have a need and you don’t just quite know where they fit yet.

Josh: Get them on the bus anyway, because they’ll figure it out. Even if the processes and systems are sloppy, they will rise to the challenge and they will get shit done. That’s a mantra. that’s a perspective. But it also needs to be balanced with the fact that you should not forego or forsake the need to have a clear idea on your accountability structure and why you’re hiring a seat and what that’s how to define that seat.

Josh: So that is really the first phase. It’s all that due diligence that needs to happen. Having a clear idea of your organizational structure and then developing the role itself, like the job map, which we call it at 2 11, which is really like the Bible of the seat. It has expectations, the vision for the role, core accountabilities, competency levels, like it’s a comprehensive document standalone that you should be able to give someone and they should be able to know exactly what they need to do, how they’re going to be measured.

Josh: What’s [00:15:00] expected of them just from a single document and creating that as an early exercise gets the juices flying with why we hire in the seat. What are the expectations? What are the measures of success? And that’s one of another kind of foundational component. I would wrap into this first prelim phase.

Josh: And then once you’re clear on all of those things, you’ve got a very good idea of what you need, why you need it, what value they’re going to drive. Then we start getting into meat of like actual sourcing. And recruitment and interviews and selection simulation tasks like cultural fit assessments.

Josh: Like, I mean,

Lauren: wait, you do simulation tasks before someone gets hired on all positions?

Josh: Yes, that’s right. Yeah.

Lauren: Dang, that takes so much time and

Lauren: patience.

Ralph: does. I just want to be clear before we go on to this, because I do think the simulator task. when I explain it, when I talk about it, like, especially when we went from 6 figures to 7 figures plus, it was an application to a simulator to a bunch of other steps before they even [00:16:00] got to an interview, which was fascinating.

Ralph: And it works so well. It’s a longer process, but let’s just take a step back here. The accountability chart is super important. And now that is, if you have not, we’ve talked about this so many times on the show, nearly 700 episodes, I think we talk about traction and EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system, like obviously many, many times.

Ralph: And it’s great to see, like when I go to some conferences for agencies, there’s a lot of adoption on this system now, which is great. It’s great to see. Cause it wasn’t that 10 years ago, when you talk about the accountability chart, we’re really talking about an org chart. Right, and I think when we first started to Lauren’s point, he said, Oh, you’re great, you fit the company culture.

Ralph: Just come on board. Great people will find you a seat that works to a certain degree. And 1 of the best business books that I reread probably every single year. Not probably because I know that I reread it or listen to it is good to great. It’s like. Find the right people, get them on the bus and then figure out the seat on the [00:17:00] bus.

Ralph: So there’s two schools of thought here. So I don’t think one is wrong and the other is correct because it depends on where you are in your growth and in your business, because the first way just find the right people and then we’ll figure out the seat worked for us at a later point in time, though, we needed to have more structure and accountability chart is basically, okay, we have, let’s say, CEO, then we have leadership team.

Ralph: And then inside the leadership team, that’s going to be managers. And under those managers is going to be all these individual people that are going to be the ones that are doing the skill or doing the thing. That is an accountability chart. That is like you have a. You literally every quarter what we used to do for EOS is we would truly fire everyone in our brains and restructure the organization and create a new accountability chart.

Ralph: It’s like, what do we really need from a structure standpoint? And do we have the right people in the right seats? Do we even have the right [00:18:00] seats? So I don’t think like you talked about that, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily something that. People think about quite as much, because as you become a million multi million dollar organization, this part becomes absolutely essential.

Josh: exactly. term that we use quite a bit. And I’m not sure if it’s Jim Collins. Maybe it is, but it’s putting people in the parking lot. So to speak when you are designing or reimagining or going through this due diligence of like, do I need to hire this person? Or even when we, when you’re doing reviews of the company structure, it’s like the ability to emotionally remove yourself from a situation, because a lot of the people that you work with, you, you’re connected to them.

Josh: you’ve built relationships, with your immediate team, especially if you’re a business owner, like it’s difficult to emotionally detach

Josh: yourself,

Ralph: If personal relationships with these people,

Lauren: You’re spending more time with them than your partners and family.

Josh: yeah,

Ralph: a hundred percent, I spend more time with Lauren than I do my wife. So [00:19:00] that’s true

Lauren: Actually, I think that is true. I think you and I’ve had more conversations than you and Jen, which I’m not complaining about, but it is funny, but the fact of matter is that like, like you’re saying, these are people that you personally invested in, you financially invested, especially if you’re the business owner.

Lauren: But then the other thing is like, you assume expectations because they’re coming in to what could be a well oiled machine that could be a culture. That is working really, really well. And I know this is like a sidebar to it, but there’s also been times where self included and I’m certain other people listening have hired someone that’s come in with a wrecking ball and Miley Cyrus, the team’s groove.

Lauren: So eliminating that wrecking ball before it comes in, has to be. accounted for and what you’re talking about helps vibe check and groove check.

Josh: Yeah. I mean, hiring has the ability to destroy your business and also has the ability to take your business from good to [00:20:00] great. it’s one of the things you just can’t forsake. You know, when it gets to like the 20 to 80 and removing yourself from this as a business owner, or, you know, just if you need to offload some of the work that’s done to get to this level of hiring quality, because it does take a lot of work, it’s just important to remember that, like.

Josh: I mean, in your case, Ralph, for example, you built a hiring process that worked right and it got us to a certain position as a company, but the amount of sheer time it took for you to maintain that and for you to drive it and for you to continue iterating and improving upon it, like you have the ability to do that as a business owner, like you proved it out, you built it, but you get to a point where it’s just like you grow to the business to a certain point and you need to focus your efforts on other parts of the business or even elevate as a visionary and you can’t let the hiring process Degrade or diminish from that point.

Josh: In fact, what you need to do is invest in it and increase its capacity and its ability, or at least maintain it where you left it. And to do that, you need to invest. Yeah, and I think a big component as well as this is this emotional side [00:21:00] that’s not really talked about. I don’t think too much because hiring is a process.

Josh: It’s a system. It’s a logical flow to get people into the organization. But fundamentally, we’re talking about humans, right? We’re talking about it. When we hire people, it’s not just about a job or a seat, you know, they’re fundamentally changing their lives. They’re upheaving, you know, a lot of the time that they spend with their previous workforce and they’re subscribing to a new product tier 11.

Josh: And that’s kind of the way we look at a tier 11. The mentality that we’re starting to approach is looking at employment or even just the employee experience. As a subscription product, why do our employees or contractors want to subscribe to Tier 11? What’s stopping them from getting up and saying, you know what?

Josh: I’m going to change my Netflix subscription to Amazon. I’m going to change my Tier 11 subscription from this agency to another agency. If we approach it that way, then it forces the HR team or leaders to think about the employee experience first. And if you’re thinking about the employee experience first, then [00:22:00] you’re going to develop a better hiring experience for them and also for the managers.

Josh: it’s a good way to frame it as well.

Ralph: I mean, hiring is, I always sort of think back to, a hiring manager that I worked with in the corporate world, where every hiring decision for him was an emotional decision because. He just hired on a motion. He’s like, my gut tells me this gut tells me this guy is going to be a great salesperson, Michael, based upon what criteria.

Ralph: And I think you have to have very, very specific criteria. You need a job map. So it is a totally, in his case, he was looking for just a gut feel. It did not have a specific checklist. And he also looked at, and that this is one of the things.

Ralph: When I talk about this is don’t look for people that are exactly like you. So we once had a joke. This kid was like a tall, Southern sort of athletic, talked and had a funny sense of humor, like actually hysterically funny. [00:23:00] All the guys on his team were exactly like him. He had ten, all dudes, all like him, southern, funny, six foot three.

Ralph: You know where they ranked in the company, out of twenty districts? Dead last

Ralph: and he was a great sales guy and I’ll never forget this. It was like, that is a cardinal sin of hiring, always trying to look for the same person as you do not look for the same person that you are look. complimentary to your skills, not complimentary, like suck up kind of thing.

Ralph: you are the boss. the things that you don’t do well, you, they should have that, especially if you’re hiring them for a task in your 80 percent that you don’t want to do anymore. They should not be like you. I always hear a joke with our COO.

Ralph: He’s like programs on the weekends and when he has free time, he watches anime, he’s so completely different than me. And I’m like, that’s exactly why I love this guy. [00:24:00] Cause he’s like my opposite. I don’t want to hire me. And I think that’s. That’s a hard thing for a lot of people to get, like, wrap their heads around or sort of understand is, and Brian Bircher was his name, and everyone in his district was the exact same way. I’ve never forgotten that lesson. And I did the opposite, and we were number one every single year. The point is, that’s not, it wasn’t just that. But I think there is something to this is that you have to take that emotion out of it.

Ralph: You have to be once or twice removed to a certain degree. And also very most importantly, look for people who are complimentary to your skills.

Lauren: I think it’s hard though, because when you meet someone that’s just like you, you connect so well. And then because you two connect, you assume everyone else on your team will connect the same way. But then all it does is amplify all the things that they don’t like about you, that they now have to get it from two fronts.

Lauren: But it’s, it’s hard. Like you meet somebody like, Oh my gosh, You watch K dramas, you speak Italian, [00:25:00] you eat cookies as its own nutritious food group. When I meet someone that has those three criteria, and I’m like, Show me your Goodreads, because you are my soulmate. I’m like, you’re on the bus. But, it’s hard, because when you’re interviewing them, you’re like, Oh my god, you’re perfect!

Lauren: Because our egos see ourselves in the other person. It’s like, I’m looking in a mirror, and I tell myself every day, I’m perfect, I’m kind, kidding. But. In the reality like when you see those it’s it’s hard. So anyone that’s listening It’s like oh i’ve totally hired someone that’s just like me it gets frustrating because You, as the business owner, aren’t hireable.

Ralph: So true.

Lauren: know that. You’re not hireable. That’s why you started a business. And so then you hire someone else that’s like you. Either they’re also not hireable, or they’re actually not like you. You have shared common interests. And the reason that they’re applying for a job is why they’re not like you. Because you didn’t apply for your job, you created your job.

Josh: that can extend as well to just simply having the same kind of interview styles or being the [00:26:00] same level of extrovert, you know, or just jiving on the call about similar hobbies or interests. It could have nothing to do with necessarily that suitability for the role that you’ve developed. I think it’s a very good point to raise because it’s very dangerous to go into hiring and recruitment and being 100 percent emotionally led.

Josh: Like it’s an important component, but it’s important to be able to insert that like a scalpel. Once you’ve done all the due diligence that we were talking about in that first phase, like you need to go through and build the building blocks and the foundation so that when you get to a conversation.

Josh: your intuition in your emotions play an important part, and you want to have that connection and that spark, but it should not be the driving force in your decision making, and you need to cross reference and cross check that with the logical side of your brain, and you can’t do that you haven’t done the logical work up front.

Josh: Otherwise, you’re just asking for pain and you will end up building a team of people that you simply can be friends with and that you enjoy being around but can’t make the hard decisions, can’t execute according to the job maps that you’ve developed or the seats that you’ve [00:27:00] developed or the vision or the values that you have.

Josh: that’s probably one of the hardest things about that I found about recruitment because naturally I’m quite an emotional individual that likes to connect with people. I make friends with everyone. I love people. That’s why I’m in HR. That’s why I’m in this role. This job is because I’m biased, but you know, without people, you do not have a business period, right?

Josh: you need good people. I look at everyone and I’m like, opportunity, potential. Yes. Go you. And that, if you have too much of that in hiring process, it’s like, let’s hire everyone because everyone’s amazing. And then you get to a point where you’re like, that person’s actually really shit, So,

Lauren: But if they were like you, you can’t admit that because then you feel that you are shit because then you’re looking in the mirror And you’re like, well, wait, they were perfect. Why aren’t they better because either you

Lauren: have a identity crisis

Josh: wow. Yeah. a

Lauren: Or you take it personally.

Josh: hundred percent. Yeah. And then, yeah. And then you get to a point where you get into this, this cycle of like protecting your decision, and not considering it as a sunk [00:28:00] cost that you’ve hired the wrong person. And that, that’s a whole nother. Kind of situation when you, you put the time and effort into hiring and it was a misfire and that will happen especially with, the way that recruitment’s heading with, with AI.

Josh: And I mean, that, that’s a separate conversation, but like the amount of applications you can get now for jobs where people look amazing and the tendency for people to,

Lauren: Yeah,

Lauren: people lie and they can manipulate it and like even like on socials they can there’s so many AI tools available there to make you sound and look better than you actually are that if you’re not leveraging those you’re at a disadvantage and when you are leveraging those you have to be Like inspector gadget and make sure you ask.

Lauren: I mean, there’s tons of videos on the Internet where you’ll see even at coders. So I’m not a developer. I don’t do software engineering at all, but I’ve seen interviews where people are recording themselves being interviewed. And then they have a I open on the screen right to the right of them, telling them all the answers that they need.

Lauren: Like, even at like a recent conversation I had with a bunch of CTOs, they were talking about how they have to [00:29:00] do like live coding prompts, where they have to share their script and they have to hire specific software to make sure that they’re the ones doing the coding because I have found this too.

Lauren: I’ve hired someone that didn’t do the work. I hired someone who did really well interview style, and then they had their partner or someone living with them that did the work. And I got caught. Like, that was That’s what happens when you hire remotely, like, those things are, like, so true, and, ugh. I know someone else listening has a horror story.

Lauren: Tell me yours so I feel better. Ralph, please tell me you’ve had this experience too.

Ralph: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, less so now, but yes, absolutely. it’s a natural thing. It’s almost like you have to go through that. And the only way. For you to understand the value of what we’re talking about here. I know we’re talking a lot on sort of step, really step one here in a lot of ways.

Ralph: And then we

Ralph: talked about we’re like at step zero almost to a certain degree is to experience the pain of having the wrong hire. So I think it’s actually, it’s a blessing in a lot of ways to [00:30:00] do it the wrong way, because then you experience the pain of. Getting somebody on board and you never want to repeat that mistake ever again.

Lauren: I didn’t need those blessings. I would have been

Ralph: Yeah. I mean, if you keep repeating the same mistake, then you’re just an idiot and you should be listening to this show, I suppose. reading some book on how to hire, the point is, is that everyone’s going to make those mistakes and you can make them once, twice, three times, but after like the third time you’ve made a bad hiring decision,

Lauren: It’s not them, it’s you.

Ralph: it is you.

Ralph: 100%. It definitely is. And I think that the old Maxim is true here. You know, when you do follow a process, you do higher, slow and fire fast you immediately figure out what your mistakes are and let those people go quickly. But it’s almost like you have to hire bad people in order to realize I really do need a system and maybe I need a better way, which is hopefully what we’re explaining here.

Lauren: Well, would you agree to be true? Like, for me, it’s, every person I hire is an expense for me for six months. So when they join my team, I have to know that [00:31:00] six months of their salary, Is pure investment

Ralph: Totally

Lauren: because if they leave or they’re fired within six months, they became an expense, not an investment.

Ralph: 100%.

Josh: Yeah. all of these components that will eventually go into, they’re all foundational, like they’re all important. They’re all interlinked they all contribute to a successful hire. Phase zero is foundational, but also at the tail end of this whole process, the onboarding, the process in which you onboard someone, you welcome them in, you give them the tools, the, the structure, the processes, the support, the nurturing to succeed.

Josh: That is one of the strongest indicators of success. You can do everything right. You could even hire the right person objectively, right? If they come in and they’ve got a really poor onboarding experience. You’re severely undermining and diminishing everything that you’ve done, and there’s, principles of onboarding, and there’s so many different ways to do it.

Josh: But ultimately, it’s like they’re in the [00:32:00] company. Now, everything is geared towards mobilizing them and getting them up to speed as quickly as possible and getting them living their job map.

Ralph: So let’s get into we’re on step zero a bit. We talked about the accountability chart, we talked about job maps. We talked about the importance of core values. Let’s get into sourcing candidates. Like you’ve got all that stuff laid out. Most of that is pretext here. So how do you start?

Ralph: this is the biggest question I always get. Where do you guys find the best people? Always the biggest question. How would you answer that? How do you do it? I know you’ve got sort of a very specific way in which you do it, which has led to some incredible hires. Let’s talk about that.

Josh: Well, I’m a big advocate of, your employees and foremost, being ultimately your best hiring managers, right? So I think me. They have the best understanding. I mean, okay, it’s taking a step back sourcing and ultimately selling the company that you’re offering as that subscription product to a candidate is the essence of how to attract the [00:33:00] best talent.

Josh: Like, you need to sell your company to someone. It’s not a case of you’re in a position of power and I can have anyone I want. You need to come at it from an inverted perspective. What is it going to take for you to steal the attention to convince someone that you are the defining career change, the defining career move?

Josh: That is right for them and it may not be right and you don’t want to oversell. It’s about discovery, but initially to attract and to source, you need to develop that level of that, that mindset that this is a game of attraction and selling the opportunity and the best salesman in that position, of course, you’re hiring team and yourself, your employees, they get the business and if they’re advocates of your culture and what you stand for, your vision and everything, they can articulate, especially the people that are in the teams.

Josh: Where this role would be employed. They are the best articulators of what people can expect, why it’s worth their time, what value that this company can provide them. So whether it’s the fact that you [00:34:00] mobilize your people to hire through their own, sources or networks, or even if you do some discovery first to talk to your employees, to understand why you here, what do you get from this subscription?

Josh: What do you get from tier 11? You why is this your career choice? If you do that level of discovery, that sets you up well for sourcing and those subsequent conversations that need to happen. But that would be my first number one tip is like, put your focus internally on the company before running to Indeed and job boards and LinkedIn recruiter and take a step back.

Josh: Again, it’s the foundational stuff that makes hiring great. It’s the phase zero and it’s before we jump into anything, you take a step back, you think, you be intentional. Why am I going to go to a job board? When I’ve got my employees here. They could advocate for this company and help us hire really good people.

Josh: So that’s the first step and usually, from there, it’s, it’s a combination of headhunting and outreach and job boards. We can dive into both of those if you

Josh: want. Yeah.

Lauren: from the people that are working for you that [00:35:00] are like, I enjoy working for this company. I know someone who’s talented they’re willing to bet their name and reputation because we’ve done it some of the Best pack members have come from referrals like a thousand percent like we had one girl who gave us five referrals It was like her whole friend group had started working for us and her mom joked and said are you hr?

Lauren: Or are you a copywriter for this company?

Ralph: just hang out with your

Ralph: friends all day.

Lauren: Yeah, like it was amazing. It was like, wow. I was like, how else do we infect your friends? Anyone else, you know, because it was just Brilliant talent after brilliant talent, but the challenge comes in is like for us, it works. We had a referral incentive program.

Lauren: So when they had someone that was a good fit, provided that they and the other person were in good standing, they got paid out. And then we set up a process where they could take the payment at 30 days, six months or one year, depending on when they wanted to take the payout, it got bigger. So if you were willing to be like, yeah, I know this person will still be here in a year.

Lauren: It was like three or four X, the payout of six months. So it’s like, do you want to wait? Or if you know, like, maybe it’s [00:36:00] not good fit that always signaled to us if it was a good one, but then the other times where it’s happened, where a referral gave us a bad recommendation, the person on our team who referred it, if the other person didn’t do well, they felt an obligation to compensate.

Lauren: And they were the first ones to say, I referred the wrong person, please don’t let this damage my relationship with you guys. So in that referral capacity, it’s like, it’s amazing. But it also comes with that. small risk. I don’t know if you’ve experienced that too.

Josh: right. And I think what’s important if you stand up a referral program like that, it’s very important to make sure that that’s just, that’s just a pipeline to go into your already established. Very comprehensive recruitment process, right? This person isn’t cutting the queue. They’re not going to the front of the line.

Josh: It’s just an in, to getting pushed front and center, especially if it’s a referral from one of your best people. And that’s what I would encourage. It’s like referrals are gonna vary in terms of their quality. Of course, I mean, typically you could [00:37:00] correlate better referrals. From your top tier performance, right?

Josh: If I’ve got someone at the agency or in my company that I believe to be one of them, you know, alignment to core values goes above and beyond hungry, smart and says, Hey, I’ve got someone that I know that could do this job instantly. I’m going to be like, okay, if there anything like you, then I’m very excited.

Josh: And typically someone of that caliber is not going to be referring someone that could potentially jeopardize their reputation or their performance or anything like that. So you’re usually going to find the best referrals from your best people and developing incentives for that to proactively happen is good.

Josh: In absence of that, you don’t need to overcomplicate it. You can just reach out to your best performers and say, look, or even post it publicly to your company. It’s also a good assessment and a good indicator of do people really like working at your company, you know, because if, you’re getting nothing back and you’re hearing crickets, that’s probably an indicator that maybe you need to do a bit more discovery with your people.

Josh: To [00:38:00] ascertain why they’re not hungry to, to hire people like them or similar bring them to your company,

Ralph: People always ask me like, how do you guys recruit? I know you’ve got sort of a secret sauce recruiting, but also let’s talk about the paid services and where you stand there as well as job boards.

Josh: it’s a tough one because it does depend on the role. It depends on exactly who you’re hiring and what market. And I think. Our approach typically is to do both simultaneously. It’s always to go with the job boards. We mean, we always do job boards because there’s just a big market of people that are looking at job boards, and we also do headhunting on the side.

Josh: So I’ve had mixed success with both. we’ve hired great people from both avenues. I think one thing to remember is the circumstance in which the engagement is happening, right? When you reach out to someone, they’re not looking. You’re disrupting them. You’re disrupting their life, their workflow, their attention.

Josh: And you are actively putting an opportunity out in front of [00:39:00] them. And that goes back to the selling component, right? I mean, that’s why it’s even more important. To really firmly understand what is your company vision, your values, your purpose, why are you a better subscription product than the company that they’re currently subscribed to.

Josh: That’s a selling process, that’s a negotiation process, and you need to do that right, and that’s where the EQ comes in. You cannot be a robot, you need to be a salesman. And you need to go in there and you need to fight for that candidate.

Lauren: this is so mind boggling by the way, because if anyone’s listening and that you’ve like poached or like you approach someone that wasn’t ready,

Lauren: like you’re saying this, I’m like, Oh my God, this is so obvious. And it’s never how I positioned it because I have the assumption, of course they want to work with us, duh, because they know everything about us.

Lauren: But I’m coming into a conversation halfway in

Lauren: the conversation when they’re like,

Josh: right. Exactly. they’re like, why are you talking to me? Right, like, I’m happy right now. What can you offer me? I can offer you this, this, this, and this. And that’s really where it starts. [00:40:00] That’s where you start to do your discovery with the candidate and understand what matters to them. And a lot of the people that we hire, it’s a lot of the same thing.

Josh: It’s, I’m frustrated, I can’t make decisions, I can’t get promoted, I can’t you know, you’re contacting people that have potentially reached the ceiling of their company or they’re looking for growth. They’re looking for the next career defining move, and you’re in a position to offer that you’re in a position to sell that to them and to resubscribe them to culture or an environment that is more attractive and can give them what they need as a professional, and it’s a mutually beneficial relationship.

Josh: You know, you’ve done, you’ve done the job map, you’ve done the accountability chart, you know very clearly what they need to do and you know what to expect from them. And you can sell them that clarity. You can sell them that opportunity that you’ve already articulated and candidates love it when you’re confident and you understand exactly what they’re walking into and you can speak to that and you can speak to the challenges.

Josh: I’m incredibly candid and transparent. Will me higher. That’s kind of how we approach it, like I don’t sugarcoat anything, there is a lot of change, this is [00:41:00] happening, you’re going to run into these problems, this is going to be a source of frustration, if you pitch it as a challenge, high performers love that, they lap it up

Josh: because high performers want growth, they want

Josh: challenge, they’re competitive, 100 percent if you come at it like that, the people that are not inclined to be motivated by that will fall to the wayside.

Josh: So you’re already doing your initial screening in the initial conversations you’re having when you’re outreaching by how you communicate with conviction, and transparency around the opportunity. So you can see like when you headhunt, there’s just a lot more propensity to get higher quality because it’s more intentional and top top performers are not looking well.

Josh: Majority of the time, they’re not looking for jobs because they’ve locked in probably to a well paying job. And they’re providing value. They’re loyal. They’re loyal to their company. They’re high performing. They’re working hard. And you’re coming along and saying, I want your loyalty, your hard work, your talent over here.

Josh: Whereas [00:42:00] with a job board, I’m not saying that you don’t find any amazing talent on job boards. All of us have been on job boards. It’s more so that you just have a higher chance. of coming across candidates that, you just got a wider spectrum, right, of different people. So there’s more to sift through to get to the needle to get to the gold and your systems need to be set up so you can do that sifting.

Lauren: there’s so much more to cover on this topic. Like, I don’t think we should stop the conversation here.

Lauren: Like, I think we should come back and keep the conversation going. But for those that are listening and that’s identifying with a lot of this or like finding confusion, like how do you spell incalculate, for example.

Lauren: And anyone that’s listening that has questions specifically that you want. our head of whatever his title will be in two weeks because it’s likely going to change, send us an email to josh at tier11.

Lauren: com and we’ll, we’ll continue the conversation. And if someone’s got some additional questions, we can bring that into the conversation. So we bring you, the perpetual traffic [00:43:00] listener to the discussion.

Josh: So we have covered an awful lot here on today’s show and for you, the perpetual traffic listener, I think this is one of the most important episodes that we’ve done in quite some time. So in that vein, what we’d like to do is do a part two with Josh, myself and Lauren going through the hiring process, and then also.

Josh: Get your feedback prior to doing show two. We want to know what your issues are with hiring and how we can troubleshoot them live and on the air. So the best way to do that is to email Josh directly. It’s Josh Hill and it is josh at tier 11. com. That’s T I E R spell out 11. com. Email him your questions

Josh: It makes sure so that Josh doesn’t miss any of these in the subject line of the email at josh at tier 11. com put in the subject line of perpetual traffic, and he will correlate all of those questions.

And then we will continue [00:44:00] to go through the 11 step process on how to hire superstars. So really appreciate y’all listening here today.

Josh: Once again, his email is Josh at tier 11. Send him your questions, subject line, perpetual traffic, and we’ll answer them on the air. As we record part two in a week or so. So make sure that where you’re listening, you do leave a rating or a review, especially over on Spotify. Spotify is growing like a weed for us right now, which is great to see.

Josh: A lot of downloads over there. So I really appreciate all your listening on Spotify. Leave us a rating and review. It really does help us to get a wider audience here, help entrepreneurs, directors of marketing marketers, like you get better at their craft and ultimately scale and grow their businesses.

Josh: So I really do appreciate that. And of course. Check us out over on our YouTube channel over at perpetual traffic. com forward slash YouTube. So on behalf of my awesome, amazing cohost, Lauren E. Petrillo, until next show, see ya.

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