Summary

The episode discusses the importance of a successful hiring process, particularly for sales roles. The guests emphasize the need to reduce uncertainty in the hiring process and highlight the significance of the interview process in predicting success in sales roles. They also discuss the elements of an ideal candidate profile, including specific experience, skills, and competencies. The guests share their insights on building a successful hiring process, including the importance of scorecards, role plays, and reference checks. They also address the role of the sales leader in owning the hiring process and empowering managers to make hiring decisions. The episode concludes with a discussion on the importance of training interviewers and the role of the CEO in the interview process.

Take Aways

Reduce uncertainty in the hiring process by conducting thorough interviews, assessments, and reference checks.

Focus on traits such as grit, curiosity, and adaptability when hiring for sales roles.

Build an ideal candidate profile based on the specific requirements of the role and the company's ability to coach and train.

Empower managers to make hiring decisions within a structured framework set by the sales leader.

Use scorecards to evaluate candidates consistently and objectively.

Conduct role plays to assess candidates' skills in a simulated sales environment.

Prioritize reference checks to gain insights into a candidate's past performance and potential fit within the company.

Involve the CEO in the interview process to enhance the candidate's perception of the company and align on the ideal candidate profile.

Learn More: https://www.yardstick.team/

Connect with Lucas Price: linkedin.com/in/lucasprice1

Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Mentioned in this episode:

BEST Intro

BEST Outro

A lot of what we're going to be talking about is applicable to all types of roles. And we have some great guests with us. And I'm going to introduce myself and let the other guests. Introduce themselves as well, but you're going to learn today about lots of great ideas around successful hiring processes.

I'm Lucas Price. I'm the founder and CEO of Yardstick and Yardstick is a sales talent selection tool. We help you solve the waste and loss from failed sales hires with tools for bringing structure and governance to the interview process. And tracking the success of new hires against the hiring criteria.

Excited to be here.

Lucas Price: Waylon, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Waylon McGill: Yeah, perfect. So I spent five years at indeed. com helping companies hire great talent. I myself have been involved in hiring again, dozens, possibly a hundred plus hires as well, everything from BDRs to enterprise account executives and leaders of enterprise teams.

Lucas Price: My co host is Chuck from Blueprint Expansion. Chuck, tell us a little bit about yourself and Blueprint.

Chuck Brotman: Thanks, Lucas, and thrilled to be on with all these speakers here. So I'm Chuck Brotman. I'm the co founder of Blueprint Expansion. We are a go to market roles recruiting firm. We work with early, mid, and mature B2B tech and subscription software companies to help them make great sales, marketing, and customer success hires.

conversation.

Lucas Price: So we're going to start talking about the hiring process. Why is the interview process important or maybe even tell us is the interview process important?

How does it rank in your mind and is it something that can help us predict who's going to be successful in sales roles?

Chuck Brotman: I'm happy to jump in and then I'd love to hear from our other guests. I think it's super important. And what's interesting about this topic is, as we've seen this shift in the market over the last year from, a growth at all costs higher over higher your way to growth to 1, where, efficient growth is the North Star of so many.

B2B organizations to me, that just points to just the importance of getting every single higher, right? Because, you don't have the budget or capacity to overhire, which probably wasn't even a great strategy in the growth at all cost days. But if you want to make great hires, I think.

Lucas Price: think?

I think there are a lot of people who, who believe that. Hiring is a coin flip and that the interview process isn't really that helpful. It's just part of the process of recruiting and we don't really know until people are in the seat, whether they're going to be successful.

Is that true? Colin? Is that true? Wayland? What's your experience with that?

Colin Spector: You can only reduce so much uncertainty and interview process and and through references and assessments,. I would say as much as you can reduce the uncertainty up front, the better.

Every job can be a little nuance and a little different. And, whether it's, the work environment or the playbook and the persona they're selling to, right? It might be a different match. It doesn't always work out.

I don't think it's quite a coin flip. I think you can really reduce. Your risk through a combination of all the elements in the survey here. And, part of that is, doing even like mock exercises actually testing.

Waylon McGill: I agree with all that. I would just add that. There is always an element of uncertainty, of course, and the goal of a good hiring process is just to reduce the uncertainty as much as possible. And that's really going to come down to how rigorous your hiring process is. And I think there's certainly companies that are probably batting 500 where.

50 percent of the people that are hiring are working out of 50 percent or not. And the goal is obviously to get that, that to 80 or 90%. I think one of the things that I see a lot is just interview processes that are too easy. And Lucas, I think you, you had a great post on this about going deep, is that there's a lot of sort of surface level questioning.

Going on in interviews. And if that's the level of questioning, it's very easy to prepare for a surface level interview, right? It's really the devil is in the details. And when you dig in with those second and third level questions that's when you really separate the great candidates from the not so great.

And so you need to bake that into your process that it actually can be hard enough that, that only the great candidates make it through assuming that, you're in a position to be hiring great candidates.

Lucas Price: Great feedback. Some people seem to believe that there are ways to find successful sellers, but that the interview process is not the key part to it.

That, it might be assessments. It might be other pieces of that. All of which I believe are helpful, but the interview process itself. Great. Is that one of the key ways or are other things like more predictive and more helpful in terms of identifying who to hire as a seller?

Colin Spector: Happy to hit on this one.

And, we really put a big emphasis on grit and competitive spirit and curiosity and people that really just strive to be excellent in the top of the leaderboard and growth mindset. And. And so we started to look at other industries outside the norm that we had historically been hiring from.

And as an example of that, in our specifically, even in our SDR, team, we hired for Michelin stars sous chefs, right? Like people that obviously had gotten to the top of their game in the highest level, but we're looking to make a transition in their career. And they had the grid, they had the kind of skills internally inherent to them.

And then it's a matter of teaching them some of the. Product knowledge and closing knowledge and so I think a lot of it also just comes down to really getting clear on, what you're willing to coach on what you're not willing to coach on and that can make it a lot easier to and in terms of your hiring profile and.

as well,

Lucas Price: can you tell us a little bit about how to build an ideal candidate profile and how similar are those profiles across roles and companies or how different are they?

Are you starting over every time you build a profile? Within your company and what are you, what are the elements of an ideal candidate profile that helps you identify the best hires?

Waylon McGill: I think that there's going to be similarities and I think Colin touched on this in the sense of it takes the same things to be great at anything.

Like the process of becoming great at something is pretty consistent, right? Obviously, you've got natural talents, I'm five foot nine. I'm not going to be an NBA player, but the discipline it takes to become great to push through challenges when things aren't going your way, that's consistent.

Whether you're a sous chef. Or a sales rep. And so there's a lot of things that are going to be common, almost regardless of the role. And then there's going to be other things that are unique to you as a company and you have to, it's not necessarily just about the candidate. It's also about you as the company.

And so your ideal customer profile is going to be different. You're going to need someone who comes in with a bit of background because you don't have experience coaching people up in that area. And I think, so it's really an interaction between the candidate. You have to identify what our current top performers look like and what are we actually able to coach on versus.

Things that are, we just don't have experience doing. I think that's a big part of it.

Lucas Price: I tend to think of some of the elements that need to be in there are like, what's the specific experience or specific knowledge they need to have to succeed in this role? What are the skills that they need to have to succeed in this role?

And that usually helps me fill out those other elements. How do you think about

building this?

Colin Spector: You alluded to this Lucas, right? It's. You have specific attributes and elements that, make great salespeople or customer success. People are sales development people and what might vary, you have your core kind of framework that you can bring no matter where you go.

But what might vary is. The persona, or the segment, or the playbook and so on that a couple of quick examples might be if you're in a high velocity sales environment versus an enterprise sales environment and enterprise sales environment, you might need to add a couple other attributes, such as.

And and even though they're a great seller and they have all the grit and drive and competitive spirit and curiosity and coachability and everything else you look for normally. But just if they're lacking 1 other attribute that is necessary for an enterprise, we're talking 9 to 12 month sales cycle and they're used to the in quarter closes, then, you have sometimes a challenge there,

if they're not able to overcome or gather that competency.

Lucas Price: Are things like grit or history of achievement curiosity, are there traits like that you would say, put in every sales role or nearly every sales role?

Or do you think that there are, it's very specific to the sales role that there's not any of those competencies that kind of transcend all of them?

They learn more quickly. A lot of us work at startups, things are constantly changing. So that level of adaptability, I think applies at almost. At all these companies, . If you're in a huge company, maybe not as much but certainly at startups and the types of companies we, most of us work at that's super critical.

So a lot of this stuff is consistent across for sure.

Chuck Brotman: I think we've covered a lot of really vital things in terms of soft skills critical, maybe versus secondary competencies, whaling your kind of discussion about if you're like, maybe an early stage company with a highly technical sell, the importance of finding people that can be more self sufficient and learn the technicalities faster.

So how do you think about that in the market today? And how do you make sure that you're not. Looking for that, that, unicorn,?

Now you can afford some false negatives,. You can be more risk averse and say, we're going to stick a little bit more tightly to what we think is required to be successful here. If you're growing a business and you need to hire some bodies, you shouldn't just hire anyone.

You shouldn't just fill up there. They're generally not even going to contribute to revenue. They're going to take leads away from other sales reps who are probably better. But if you need to scale, you do need to do some hiring. You're probably going to have to loosen up that criteria. a little bit, .

But if you're only hiring one or two a month. You can afford to be a little bit more choosy. Obviously you have to stay away from looking for candidates that don't exist or looking for candidates that if they do exist, you really have no business hiring. There's no reason why they should want to work for you because either your comp package isn't good enough, but he's not doing well enough.

But it certainly should factor in.

Lucas Price: I tend to think that companies or a lot of people over index on the specific experience that they want and under index on the traits that really matter. Now, there are times when, you mentioned a scenario earlier around having certain technical knowledge with the database and I think it is important, enterprise sales.

You probably don't want to put someone who's. Great, but never had great traits, but never had a sales role into enterprise sales. There's a career progression to get there. I think it's helpful to think about it as like, where can we loosen up the specific experience that we need and where can we tighten up what we're looking for in terms of competencies and traits.

And so if you want to hire like real stars, the real stars always have really high aptitude. And characteristics, a hundred percent, I think are the most important.

Lucas Price: Colin, I'm taking us back a little bit here, but one of the things I wanted to hear from you on was, are there certain traits that you almost always look for in a sales role?

Colin Spector: We've hit on a number of them here and just to repeat, some of the top ones that consistently we look for at.

Attitude is key for us. We're always looking for really positive folks. Emotional intelligence. So we know that emotional intelligence is something that you can train on. But at the same time, it comes down to at that time point in time. Are you willing to coach on that? Or do you want somebody coming with great emotional intelligence?

And then within attitude, I also want to mention, as I said before, growth mindset is this someone that has a growth mindset? They view sales as a. Endless mastery of a profession, right? And they're always striving to sharpen their steel and have that growth mentality and mindset that they don't know at all.

And that relates to their coach ability. And so we're really looking for, as it comes down to hungry, smart, driven people that really want to learn and grow and are open minded to grow with us.

Talk to my recruiting team about that. What's your reaction to that type of response as a sales leader?

Colin Spector: Who should own it? The sales leader should own it, right? It's their playbook and, they should own it in partnership with their other, constituents on the team and that could be, if you have an in house talent management team or your other managers, your other hiring managers, but at the end of the day, it should be, it should come down to the revenue leader, the sales leader to really own it.

And then. Thank you. You should empower your managers to make their own team hiring decisions. You're going to go build your team, right? Here's our process of how we scale and product type sales here at the company. And now we're going to make this thing big and we know we're hiring people that are value aligned and have the similar, the same attributes, not just similar, the same attributes that we say, we know this is the recipe for success in a salesperson here.

That lends to, like, why having something like yardstick is so critical, right? It's 1 thing just to have a templated performance, interview or interview process and performance management process. But to actually ensure that folks are following a rigorous process it allows you to make experiments and changes and go back and do postmortem, whether good or bad as well.

Lucas Price: The sales leader owns making sure the process is right and consistent across the company and the front line manager owns the final decision with the inputs of someone who's gone through the full process is that do I have that right?

Colin Spector: Yeah, you nailed it.

Waylon McGill: So I agree with most of that at the end of the day. Who's on your team is likely to have the biggest impact on your success in the role as a revenue leader, . You're not gonna you're not gonna hire a bunch of C players and all of a sudden have a dream team because you're a great Coach doesn't work that way if you hire a bunch of A players and you mostly just stay out of the way you'll probably be fine actually So I think it's super important who's on the team so you certainly don't want to be outsourcing that to your talent development team and If you're getting the vast majority of your candidates through your talent partners, that's probably not a good thing,.

Where I disagree a little bit is where I've seen things go sideways for some organizations is junior managers doing hiring. And making their own decisions, even within a framework. And if you just think about it, like when you're selling deals, you can afford to like, especially if you're in like SMB or mid market, you can afford to not close some winnable deals.

You just go find the next deal. If you miss on a higher. The cost to get out of that bad decision is a lot bigger and it has material impact for the person who was hired. It could be a great sales rep. Let's use the database example. Amazing sales rep. They come in. They don't have the required knowledge.

You can't teach them fast enough for them to hit the ramp effectively. And now you've really crushed someone's confidence. Who's actually a great seller and now they've got to go get a new job. They've got to explain a hole in their resume. There's so much more at stake than there is with just like selling deals and that it's important for the person who ultimately runs the organization to have final say.

And it's not something that I would do often, but it's certainly something that I think is important because when the senior leaders take themselves out of the equation, I think that you just tend to have more misses because hiring is not selling deals where you might close 20 a year, 30 a year.

You might only make four hires a year. You're not learning as quickly as you are with like a selling motion, for example.

Lucas Price: I wonder if this next topic is the way to find agreement on this issue where there's some overlap, but it's not exactly the same because. The 4 of us are for 4 people who have.

Thought a lot about how to interview the right way we've practiced it, or, we've been in there doing a lot of interviews. Is that good enough that on your team, you're really good at interviewing, or is it important that. It's an individual skill that you're really skilled at.

Colin Spector: You nailed it. It's not that when I say, empowering my managers to go and make their decisions that they're doing it in a vacuum, right? They are getting inputs.

I can make recommendations. I maybe I can ultimately veto right on the VP day, but I want to empower them to put their name on that person and say, that's the 1 I want on my team. Now, they should absolutely be getting inputs. They don't interview people in the vacuum. So going back to what I'm saying, they're part of a process is there.

They have to have met with at least 2 other managers and myself, sometimes our CEO, right? Depending how big the company is in our stage, the CEO is still mostly meeting with many of our candidates. anD so based upon the scores and the inputs from each party, the managers empowered to make the final decision of this is my person, right?

Lucas Price: Waylon, how do you think about up leveling the interviewing skill of the rest of the team?

Waylon McGill: You should have a process and you should be training people on the process and you got to teach it just the same way you teach selling skills, right? We talked a little bit earlier about deep diving and stuff.

And what I see, for example, a lot of first time hiring managers is asking people questions like, what do you what do you think is important to being a successful account executive? And then someone will say something like, preparation. Preparation is, number one and you say, okay, great.

This and the entry level hiring manager, the early hiring manager might think, okay, this person's great at preparation. And they don't ask that second or third level question. It might be something as simple as just, okay, great. Tell me what you did to prepare for this interview. And so teaching them to dig deeper, to separate, that sort of surface level answer.

You don't want them to be sending you 10 candidates when they could be sending you two or three, and that is educating them on what the process looks like, what good looks like, what it takes to be successful here.

Chuck Brotman: In a way, discussions around who owns the process and, who has veto rights and when these are all important things to work through and you do need to have a process.

I think to your question more important or just fundamentally important to getting all this right is making sure that you've orchestrated this whole process and what anybody involved in assessing talent. Is actually doing and that's where I see so many and actually a lot of this. I see as a recruiter,.

Our clients don't always know what executives or panelists are assessing for what's actually taking place in it. That values fit conversation. And if you don't know that. And then you've got people there who are vetoing or raising concerns and you haven't tied that back to overall like your ideal candidate profile and your needs and the outcomes you need this person to drive,

Waylon McGill: One last thing that I would add is just it's becoming more common to record interviews, . And I think it's really valuable to watch the interviews,. So even if I'm going to do a final round for somebody I'll watch typically the interviews and use it the same way you'd use call recording for coaching on sales calls and watch it and do feedback in terms of sometimes maybe we're just having a nice conversation and we end up just hiring, wanting to hire someone who we like and we, we have a good rapport with and so if you're not watching any of the interviews, it becomes very difficult to know if we are sticking to the plan and if we are executing the interviews in the right way.

But something like. I take the discipline [00:25:00] so seriously, how I go. I'm prepared for every single screen I run. It's, it's not because I'm like, just protecting my employer's brand. That's part of it. But Hey, if I'm going to do a good assessment, like I have to be on my a game, I have to be prepared.

I have to have a purpose agenda outcome. And I think that applies all the way through the process.

Lucas Price: What are the important aspects to the hiring process? And I wrote a few down here to get us kicked off.

And we've talked about some of these things already, but it's organized and efficient. It's structured where every interviewer knows what they're supposed to be covering in the interview. It includes the generic name is work samples, but a lot of in sales. A lot of times that could be. A mock discovery call or a mock cold call or something like that.

Waylon McGill: I'll just give like a brief story. So I was at a dinner with a very senior sales leader and actually he's been CEO of several companies as well. His name is Butch Langlois. And I was talking to him about hiring and he told me that in the previous year, he'd probably seen something like 100 people who'd worked for him.

Post new job alerts on LinkedIn. And he's guess how many reference calls I got? It's I don't know, 10, 15. The answer was zero. I Think reference checks are something that's generally not happening. Sometimes it's happening. And even when it's happening, it's not happening. Right? I think.

You could get the lowest performer who's difficult to deal with, and they can probably find you three people they've worked with who are willing to say nice things about them. And so if our reference, so when I hear people say something like, reference checks are, they're meaningless it's just because people aren't doing them correctly.

And then I'm going to tell people at the end of that interview, look. I think it's super important to do reference checks. I think you should do reference checks on me. You should talk to people on my existing team. You should reach out to places where I worked previously to understand if I'm the right fit for you.

I'm going to want to do the same. If you don't want me to contact, a 3rd, 50 percent of the people you've worked for, then there's probably a 30 to 50 percent chance that I'm not going to feel good about it this higher in the future. And that's too much of a risk for me. Now, understanding that some people will have, people grow, they adapt. So the fact that somebody has a bad reference, by no means is that a killer of an opportunity for me. But when you do those calls, people who consistently been great, they'll follow up from that conversation with an email with contact details of everyone they've ever worked for and

And one of the beauties of that approach is when you say what would they say you need to work on? You can raise that in the reference check, right? So I've had an experience or I've had experience where I say things like, John told me, you might say that he needed to be more organized.

And the person says, wow, that was a really honest answer from John. And they'll be like, but here's why I don't think that's entirely fair. And you really get the good and the bad, and you get a more holistic picture. And when you do it that way in my experience, it's been highly predictive.

And when I see hires that have not worked out and not worked out spectacularly, it's almost always the case that either reference checks weren't done at all or were done very poorly.

Lucas Price: That's a lot of great information on reference checks. Colin. I've heard some great things from you in our previous conversations around how you do like sales role plays. Can you share a little bit about how you make those role plays successful at Aurum?

Colin Spector: We share a a sample discovery call, like an actual live discovery call that, that we've gotten permission to share from the customer.

And, for us. We don't expect you to be a product expert on our solution, right? It's not the goal of the exercise isn't hey you need to come here and be an expert. We want to just see how you ask questions, how you guide and lead. A discovery call and ideally, you've armed yourself with enough insight about based upon what we've shared.

We have a free trial. And so some of the best candidates have actually gone and they'll sign up for the trial and actually do a mock demonstration within the discovery. And so we really, but again, we rank it not on product expertise and stuff we can teach you. It's much more around how do you think about discovery?

What are you coming to us foundationally with what foundation of skills you already have from a discovery perspective? And then we can see, okay. What do we need to build on? What do we need to teach them? Ideal, like the ideal candidates, it's simply we're just teaching you our market, our personas, our product and technology, and you're coming in with great foundational question, asking skills and communication skills and driving urgency and next steps and uncovering pain and everything that's associated with great discovery.

Chuck Brotman: What I'm hearing that I love is like rigor and transparency,.

Then you ask for those references, . So many companies where they get hiring wrong is they think it's about they have to play games. They have to throw people off kilter. There have to be surprises. They can't share what's being assessed. And I think what you're both in different ways showing here is how you can have a rigorous process to find the best and mitigate risk and also be transparent, which also I think as a byproduct.

Improves your employer brand leaves a great impression, even on those that you ultimately decide to pass on.

Lucas Price: Yeah, that's a great job tying it together. One of the default behaviors for someone who's interviewing, who hasn't been trained on it or giving given instructions. Is that they're going to end up with, I liked that person.

History of achievement, their grit, their emotional intelligence. anD break down individual scores on each of that to go one layer deeper beyond. I just like them or to go many layers deeper beyond. I just like them. And I think that's why scorecards are really important is to begin the process of removing that cognitive bias and getting into the traits.

That's just scratching the surface on scorecards. With that, I'll throw it out to anyone else who has additional comments about how, how to build scorecards and why scorecards are important.

Colin Spector: I just agree with that. Lucas totally. And yeah, you could have. Recency bias or just some sort of bias of like ability. Some people are just good interviewers and, on the surface gosh I really like that person, but you need to be able to go back and look at how they answered the specific questions that you've aligned with the rest of your team on as the objective criteria with what you're going to make these decisions.

Lucas Price: I think Waylon has a point of view on this that I'm going to tee up a little bit as well. 1 of the things I tell people who are asking me about this is like that final decision.

The scores that come out of the scorecard are not the decision, right? They're a data point that helps you make the decision because sometimes there is something in your gut around hey, these scores look good, but. But and sometimes your gut is right and you're not quite sure why. And so the best hiring decisions ultimately are human decisions.

But you don't want that to be just the decision, just the scores that kick out of it. That those are inputs into the decision. I know Waylon, you've made some comments along these lines.

Waylon McGill: I think that's totally accurate. And I think it's probably the reason that less people use scorecards that should is because sometimes you're definitely not going to just hire who got the best score. And part of that is that, people can be outsized. They could be, two, three X better than other people at a couple of particular areas that are relevant and not super high in other areas and be really successful.

And that might be the person you want to hire. And if you just balanced scorecard approach and feel like your decision is going to be dictated by that, there's a good chance you just stopped using scorecards. I think those are solid points.

They can't continue to be a part of the process, . It's much if you've got a rep who's top performing and just refuses to put basic details in CRM,. Good leaders. No, ultimately, if they're not following process, they're like, the results don't matter. They're not helping a scale and they're not being solid citizens.

And Territories get constrained or change where they get managed out of the business, like hiring has to be similar. There has to be whatever your process is like, you have to make sure that people are following it. They have issues with it. They feel like, hey, these scorecards wrong when this is constraining or my guess is otherwise, open up that dialogue.

Do post mortems. But like too many times I see companies that just tolerate renegades because they're really busy, . I want them to talk to this person like one week link like that can like, crater your whole process.

Lucas Price: What happens if I'm thrown into an interview process without any guidance?

What should I be focused on? If they're not giving you that guidance or stop putting in a position to be successful, I would definitely ask the follow up. If I didn't get that, I would probably test for some of those things that, Colin talked about is what are those traits that are going to be required regardless of the role, grit, determination, coachability curiosity.

I would test for the things that I know are likely to be applicable

Colin Spector: regardless. If

you're the hiring manager, you should be onboarded and trained on, exactly what Waylon is alluding to just double clicking there. If you're unsure on how you should focus the hiring process, then, the expectation setting there seems to misalign like, was it your responsibility to go build the process or were you going to throw it in middle of, they had a pipeline of candidates were those candidates chosen based upon like the VPs criteria and you're just, providing input on, I think yeah, they need to ask to, ask them to pull back with you.

Lucas Price: I totally agree with both your answers. I think if I put myself in their shoes and I really had no information. About I'm assuming I at least know the role and I'm going to be interviewing candidates for the role and I'd be and I was told just go interview. What I would do is I would think about what are 1 or 1 or 2 traits that are going to be really important for this role and then I would try to develop probably behavioral based questions about those traits.

And I couldn't, for whatever reason, go and talk to the manager about it. This is a little bit. Far fetch that I couldn't, but if I couldn't, that's what I would do is I would say, all right, what's 1 or 2 traits that I think are going to be really important. Come up with a set of questions, behavioral based questions, not a lot of questions.

Each question. I want to go very deep on so only 3 or 4 questions during the interview, but be prepared to ask lots of follow up questions about each 1. And ask every candidate the same questions and then come up with a score on those trades afterwards. That's how I would handle the situation. As a hiring manager, how CEO who's involved in the interview process and his yes or no is the final say?

Waylon McGill: It can be tough. I've certainly been in that situation, whether or not it's the CEO or just whoever you're reporting to you need to figure out what it is that they want to see. And you might have a difference of opinion in terms of what's important. And so what I would do is try to get really clear on what they want.

So they might think that a few things are valuable that you don't really think so. You got a test for those and don't put people forward unless they meet that criteria. It's probably going to make your life a little bit more difficult. You're going to have to interview more candidates, right?

Because you're not just looking for people who meet your criteria, but they also they're in that Venn diagram where they overlap with what you're looking for and what the CEO is looking for. Find those people, be restrictive in terms of who you put through and earn the trust potentially or hopefully to start making those decisions on your own because you've proven that you can.

You put forward great candidates. At some point, the CEO is likely going to be like, if everybody sent through is yes for me, then I'm just going to get to take my time back. I don't need to be doing this

anymore.

You should be empowering and trusting your revenue leaders. Yes. But, each person makes an impact on the culture. You're not yet at scale to where, that doesn't have a big impact, right? And so for that reason, I think at minimum for the cultural alignment and value alignment and kind of vision to write to hear the CEO vision is exciting.

Yeah, to Waylon's point, put your kind of top finalists in front of the CEO. If they really want to be a part of the process, they don't always right. But when they do, I think it's actually great because if you're putting a top finalist that you're trying to help sell the role on what better way to do that than through the CEO, who's going to get them more excited about the vision and gosh, like the CEO is willing to invest.

Their generous time with me on this call and they're sharing their philosophy. I'm even more excited about this opportunity.

Chuck Brotman: So another thing to think that's important whether it's, an earlier mid stage company or larger that matter.

In other words, position them to add value on top of what you've already done. And also to make them aware of the thoughtfulness and structure you put in place. And then the last thing I was going to say on top of that too is. Yeah. Make sure that you're communicating with your candidates, like the why behind this too, .

That this is an opportunity for you, particularly if it's late stage, this is a finalist. You feel like this is your candidate. Don't just throw them to the executive. Make sure they understand. Hey, here's where this fits in our process. And here's your opportunity to ask final questions too, because in many cases, you can make this a selling point to that candidate, particularly if it's, Okay.

A competitive situation like, Hey, here's your chance to talk to their executive leadership. Come prepared with good questions, right? And the best candidates should like, embrace that opportunity versus being off put by it.

And then it can, like Chuck said, really helping the recruiting as well. But you have to think about okay, how do I make the CEO value add to this? And I think the way I would do it is I would hang back to the beginning of our meeting is I would take the ideal candidate profile and perhaps the scorecard to the CEO at the beginning of the process before candidates are coming in and say, this is what I think we're looking for.

Do you agree or disagree? And I saw Chris Voss speak yesterday. So to the extent that the CEO disagreed, I would try to dig in and understand, I would ask mirroring questions and I would label the things that he said to get the CEO to tell me more to figure out how we can come to an agreement on what the right characteristics are that we should be looking for.

And there's a good chance that the CEO will really enhance the profile by having that conversation with them. So that's how I'd handle it. And we're at time here. And I really want to thank everyone for participating today. I think it was a great conversation and thanks again. And look forward to to chat with you guys more in the future.