Find Out If You’ve Got A Winner Before Hiring

People often look at the cost of hiring as the hourly wage they pay that person.

The higher cost though is the time spent training that person to find out they’re not the right fit.

We’ve lost hundreds of thousands on the wrong hires.

Here is how we determine whether someone is the right fit before getting the role.

1. Once you’ve got your JD in hand, choose something inside of that role that you need help solving immediately
   

2. Turn this problem into a working task based on the job you are hiring for and pay them an hourly rate to complete it (here is an example of a task I used for a content marketing role for a company I’m a board observer on)
   

3. Once they’ve completed the task - ask them why they did it that way.
   Here are the questions we use:
   
   - What context did you take into account when completing this task?
   - Why did you choose to execute it like this?
   - How did you choose to spend the amount of time you took to complete this task?
   

4. Evaluate whether their answers align with the type of business you want to run and the role they need to fill

This isn’t 100% bulletproof in terms of finding the right candidate (we’ve still had a couple of bad hires slip through), but it’s a hell of a lot better than just a couple of interviews where someone can turn up well for 2 hours but be a nightmare when they get into your business.

Do Things That Don’t Scale

When Paul Graham wrote "do things that don't scale" he was leaning on 20 years of experience building and watching others build startups.

More than a decade on from that piece and via Y Combinator (the incubator he founded), he's now had a front-row seat to thousands of startups, and according to one source, at least sixty-seven unicorns. And still to this day, when people ask him what's the number one mistake founders make? his response is they don't do things that don't scale.

This is an excerpt from that article.

Wufoo was still sending handwritten notes to new customers when they were doing over $2 million NZD in revenue. Meanwhile, I'm just gonna automate it, bro - says the guy doing less than $10,000 automating his sales process.

It's not a conspiracy that automation is not part of Jeff Bezos, Melanie Perkins, or thousands of other super-successful founders' startup stories. It's the truth.

Even Mark Zuckerberg, a cult hero for many of the hackers, did things that don't scale.

Automation is a privilege you enjoy once you've found a repeatable process that works. It's what you do once you know how to win.

It's an outcome of winning. It's not how you win.

And you might think there are obvious counterexamples to this, like the paid ad quants who build large e-commerce brands. But even they have a dirty little secret.

"I brought in my friend to help me with my e-commerce business. He'd built large brands before, and I needed help with my marketing, so I offered him equity to help me scale.

After we'd signed the dotted line and set up our first session, I was so excited. I couldn't wait for him to come on and spill the beans on all the secrets he knew that would solve all our problems.

On our first session, he hops on and instead of spilling the beans, he starts by asking, 'What's your best product?' Okay, cool. 'And what's the best photo of that product you have?' And, 'Why do people buy it? Like, why do they say they want it?'

I answer his questions [that we'd learned from talking to our customers], he writes it all down in a Google Doc, and ends our call.

Then he goes and sets up an ad for that product, using that picture and that line that I shared with him about why people buy the product, and tells me to let it run for three months.

That ad becomes our top-performing ad, and it took him all of 5 seconds [to create]."

• The quotes/excerpts are from Paul Graham’s “do things that don’t scale” blog

• That story was shared by Shaan Puri on a recent MFM podcast