Streamline the Hiring Process

Episode 941: Streamline the Hiring Process, with Michael Redbord

Streamline the hiring process and build the right team. Join Michael Redbord in this podcast to learn how to streamline the hiring process.

In this podcast, Michael Redbord teaches us how to streamline the hiring process and why it’s so important that you do. You’ll also learn how this mindset made HubSpot into what it is today. 

Michael Redbord is the General Manager of the Service Hub at HubSpot. Prior to that, Michael scaled the HubSpot Customer Support team from 20 people in a single office with single-language phone support to more than 200 people powering a global, multi-lingual, multi-channel support experience. In doing so, Michael turned HubSpot’s customer support team from a cost center to a profit center and one of HubSpots greatest engines of growth, with an unimaginable revenue retention rate of over 100%. Essentially, the revenue the sales and marketing teams generate is worth more because of the customer success team. Michael is a noted writer, speaker, and former competitive classical pianist.

What you will learn from this episode about how to streamline the hiring process:

• How Michael got started at HubSpot while it was still relatively small in 2010, and how the company rapidly scaled to the powerhouse it is today
• How many of the business leaders at HubSpot got started in the sales, support or customer service areas before advancing to leadership positions
• Why working directly with customers helps anchor the team at HubSpot, regardless of their role, and helps maintain focus on the customer experience
• How Michael navigated a difficult period in HubSpot’s life and managed the complexity of a situation that he refers to as an “acute crisis”
• How the need to rapidly hire new frontline employees helped HubSpot clarify and streamline the hiring process
• How the HubSpot team learned to scale their business and particularly to hire at scale, building out their team by hiring as many as 20 employees per month
• How doing hundreds of job interviews each week became a primary focus for HubSpot, and how Michael viewed interviewing as his primary job responsibility during that time
• How HubSpot transitioned from single-language phone support to offering global multilingual support, and what challenges they faced during the process
• What tips and recommendations Michael would offer to help you fill your open positions with people who have the right skills and passion for the role
• Why simplification and clarity are the keys to scaling, solving problems, and dealing with crisis situations
• Why you should streamline the hiring process ASAP and how it could evolve your business

Resources:

• Website: www.hubspot.com/service
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/mredbord/
• Twitter: @redbord
• Streamline the hiring process by using our FREE company profile templates

Additional Resources:

• Sell With Authority by Drew McLellan and Stephen Woessner: https://amzn.to/39y7x13
• Predictive ROI Free Resource Library: https://predictiveroi.com/resources/
• Stephen Woessner’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwoessner/
• Learn how to streamline the hiring process using the strategy of our guest, Sue MacArthur

 

 

Streamline the Hiring Process: Full Episode Transcript

 

Get ready to find your recipe for success on how to streamline the hiring process from America’s top business owners here at Onward Nation with your host, Stephen Woessner. 

 

Good morning. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI and your host for Onward Nation, where I interview today’s top business owners so we can learn their recipe for success, how they built, and how they scale their business.

 

In fact, my team at Predictive ROI. Maybe you’ve recently revisited our resources section, which is really turning into more of a resources library. We wanted to create more of a destination on our site, so you can always find those free resources, those practical and tactical guys. 

 

We’re building out that section continuously, so please visit us if you haven’t visited recently, please check us back now because we’ve added new things around search engine optimization, how to use LinkedIn to generate leads, and then the new resources around other success strategies that we’ve compiled from the brilliant insights shared by our very generous guest.

 

So just go to PredictiveROI.com/Resources. And then whatever you request we will send it right to your inbox. 

 

Check out these FREE company profile templates and use it to streamline the hiring process

 

Streamline the Hiring Process: Michael Redbord’s Introduction

 

So before we welcome today’s very special guest and I say special because I think the insights that Michael Redbord is going to share with you are all Onward Nation all revolve around building a scaling, because he and the team at HubSpot have done this very, very well.

 

So let me share some additional context as to why I was so excited when Michael said yes. So he’s going to walk us through clearly, HubSpot has had a lot of success. Absolutely. But he’s also going to take us behind the curtain and share some of those crisis moments to every company. HubSpot has not been immune to that because every company has those.

 

Every company experiences those. But the difference is, can you buckle down with your team? Can you hire correctly? Can you hire at scale in order to take a team from a few people up to hundreds of people in a short period of time, Michael is going to take us behind the curtain and talk about very transparently how they have done that well.

 

But then also a few of those moments along the way where things maybe weren’t so awesome and they had to make adjustments because that’s what growth companies do. That’s what successful companies do. So and then how to actually put into place a hiring profile when you’re hiring at scale, and you need to do that well at scale, how do you really dial that in to make sure that you’re not making mistakes?

 

So this is going to be one of those building and scaling conversations Onward Nation that I’m super excited for us to be able to have and be able to learn from. Michael. So without further ado, welcome to Onward Nation, Michael. 

 

Check out these FREE company profile templates and use it to streamline the hiring process

 

Streamline the Hiring Process: Michael’s Hubspot Journey

 

Thank you so much, Stephen. Thank you so much, Onward Nation. I’m really, really happy to be here and talk shop with you guys today.

 

Well, I am really excited to have you here. And so, you know, a few of these highlights and experience points that you’ve had at HubSpot. Those are certainly awesome. And we’re going to dive into those. And I can’t wait for us to have that conversation, but it is a small portion to your overall story. So actually take us behind the curtain and tell us more about you, your path, your journey.

 

And then we’ll dive in. Sure. So my story at HubSpot starts nine years ago when I joined the team. And I think at that point we were probably about, you know, 8100 people. So we were not a tiny company by any means. But we also were not the, you know, thousands of people in a public company like, like we are today.

 

And, you know, when I, when I took the job at HubSpot, I didn’t know if I knew what I was getting into. And I think a lot of folks who are in that kind of scaling mode and trying to hire quickly, they hired a lot of people who had that kind of experience I did where they’re ambitious, you know, they want to hit the ground running and join.

 

But did I really know what I was getting into when I joined this company? Absolutely not. Right. And all I knew is, man, this company seems to be doing well. And they have a lot of customers that are coming on and those customers need help. And here I am. I’m somebody who has a liberal arts degree. I’m somebody that’s worked in client service for a little bit.

 

I’m somebody that is kind of good with an Excel sheet. I can probably help these guys out. I can probably help them grow their businesses. And so I started at HubSpot on the phone working with our customers. And the year was 2010, and things have gone pretty well since then. But man, it was a shock to the system.

 

Actually, as a joiner at that point of a really fast scaling company. And then eventually, as we’ll get into kind of making the pivot from a joiner to a leader in that company and then bringing on other folks to have that same experience. So I didn’t realize that when you started, you actually started on the phone.

 

Check out these FREE company profile templates and use it to streamline the hiring process

 

Streamline the Hiring Process: How Hubspot Started

 

And so when you said that, I thought, well, that makes total sense, then. I mean, who better to lead the scaling effort than somebody who’s actually been in the trenches and, you know, working with customers on the phone? I mean, what great context then for later, right. That was the hypothesis at the time, I guess, you know, we were I was a lucky beneficiary of that.

 

But I actually think it was more than just a hypothesis. And me, as a kind of, you know, case of one, we actually had every single person that started at the company at that point in time. They started in either sales. Right? Selling the product, understanding the product, communicating the value of the product or selling the product.

 

It started in support helping people use the product, training folks walking it through or they started the service. Like I did, which was helping new customers typically get up and running and kind of teaching and more proactively educating those customers. So it was really an important kind of company value, even though it was a little bit unspoken that really everybody started in those externally facing roles.

 

It forces you to understand the product, communicate the value and really be in touch in a very, very kind of deep, you know, nine hours a day type way with the market. Right? I love that because you were forced to become a subject matter expert within a very short period of time, right? Absolutely. If I had joined in the job that, you know, I later took on which was running our support team or our service team, our whole customer base, I might have been able to do that work.

 

Like on paper, I think I would have, you know, done it well, but I would have lacked the empathy, I would have lacked kind of the last mile type knowledge. And I just don’t think I would have been as quick on my feet, because I wouldn’t have been able to predict and empathize with our customers in the same way.

 

Well, so, you know, the reason why this is really sticking with me is, you know, I’ve talked with people within, let’s say, large healthcare organizations, right? And a person has a functional role that day. And then there’s obviously a supervisor of that kind of seven hierarchy above that. And then I’ve had conversations with the person who’s like on the front lines and I’ve said, so, you know, when you work with your supervisor, how does your supervisor, how did the manager or how did the director of whatever, you know, help you solve that problem?

 

Well, he or she can’t really help you solve the problem. All they care about is symmetric. And I’m like, well, what do you mean? Well, they’ve never done what it is that I do. Yeah. Like really. And so when you’re sharing what I’m like, that’s a really smart, operationalized strategy of making sure that Michael and all your peers and so forth started where you started, because that’s great context.

 

Then as you’re scaling, then the organization like you did, you have a greater appreciation for what people need, who are on the front lines as well as the customers. 100%. And I find that it actually anchors the entire team, right? No matter if your team has thousands of people or just a few folks, it anchors the entire team to some central point.

 

And that central point is the customer experience. And so, you know, even if you’ve just spent a week or a day right, on that support line or on site, having that conversation with the sort of emblematic customer, right, or going out on a prospect visit or whatever it is, you just you get a point of reference and you do so in kind of an instinctual, almost experiential kind of way.

 

And I think that really binds together the culture of a company as you scale, which is a really, really important aspect of scaling successfully, is having cultural points that people kind of tie back to and deeply understand. So you don’t need to read everything off a slide. People just know what they’re looking at. And I think that experience at the beginning of your kind of employee journey.

 

Check out these FREE company profile templates and use it to streamline the hiring process

 

Streamline the Hiring Process: Success in Marketing and Sales

 

Right. That’s actually really, really informative. Agreed. So we’ll go through, Onward Nation. We’ll go through the path of scaling and challenges and successes along the way. But Michael, give us some context as to where HubSpot is today. So 2010, about 80 to 100 people. Where’s HubSpot today as far as employee count and so forth.

 

Just so we can kind of get the context of where it has grown to. Yeah. So, I mean, Hubspot’s been a tremendous success story, one where we’re proud and humbled by it’s now, you know, over 3500 employees on every continent, with a number of offices in multiple countries. Where we are global, we speak, you know, dozens of languages.

 

We’re a public company with a $7 billion market cap or so, depending on the day. It’s, you know, it’s really been an absolute rocket ship. And when I look back on it and I say, oh, my goodness, how did we possibly succeed at that? And, you know, sometimes I think you, you get that joy of standing, and looking back on something you’ve accomplished and saying, well, that’s incredible.

 

And also and if we can keep that up, where might we be in another ten years? So you’ve certainly become a great success story in marketing and sales and service software over the years. It’s amazing to go from 80 to 100 people to now 3500 and like you said, in multiple countries and so forth, that is absolutely amazing.

 

Check out these FREE company profile templates and use it to streamline the hiring process

 

Streamline the Hiring Process: A Business Crisis

 

So, take us back then to 2010 and obviously, you’re getting experience in the trenches. And I think if I understand the timeline right, there’s about maybe 20 people or so in a single office. And then you were part of scaling those 20 people in that kind of functional role, up to about 200 people.

 

And then going from English speaking up to then multilingual. Am I understanding the path correctly? Yeah. Everything got bigger and more sophisticated all at the same time. And so yeah, when I joined HubSpot in 2010, a relatively small organization. But man, were we growing really, really quickly. You know, we’re doubling revenues, I believe, at the time on an annual basis that things are going well.

 

And, you know, then things at some point in that story of growth, there’s always bumps along the way, like you were saying at the outset of the episode. And one of those bumps is a bump that we, I think hit pretty hard and our customers felt as well. It kind of started at the end of 2012, and it’s the kind of thing that when we look back on the growth rate of our company or any kind of number that we have about our customers and their success, it’s still a big divot in that line nowadays.

 

Yes, the line generally goes up and to the right, but, you know, it’s got some modulation to it. And this was a big modulation down. What happened was that at the end of 2012, we had rewritten our entire software platform. So, you know, when you’re a software company, you have some really fundamental stuff that, from time to time, needs a little bit of maintenance cleaning out a basement, redoing the foundation.

 

However you want to look at it. And we did that. And the way that we rolled it out to our customers, I don’t think was the best in retrospect, man, if we learned a lot, and I think a lot of the ways that we hopefully treat our customers better today are because of that. But at the time, we’re rolling out a whole new platform.

 

We had a few thousand customers maybe, I don’t know what it was, maybe 5000. And I was responsible for a customer support team, which yes, was about 20 people monolingual. We all sat in the same room. The Hvac was really bad in the room, so it was always super hot or super. And you know, that time period was one of acute crises for the business.

 

And here I was. I had just taken over a support team. I was about 60 days in, and I was trying to figure out what the heck to do. 

 

Check out these FREE company profile templates and use it to streamline the hiring process

 

Streamline the Hiring Process: An Acute Crisis

 

So you call it an acute crisis? Why? Why was it in an acute crisis? You had like, so let’s talk about why it was a crisis first and then we’ll get into the solution, but those are really pointed words like why acute crisis?

 

Yeah, I like to take that question from the customer’s point of view, because that’s where I think, you know, you kind of create those challenges at the edge of your reach as an organization. So what we had done is we had basically changed the entire user interface. So every screen that our customers logged into on a given day to do their job right, to grow their businesses, to do their marketing, whatever it was, we changed the way those things looked.

 

Right? We put a new coat of paint on it, but we also moved all the buttons around a whole new user interface. Additionally, we had changed a lot of the underpinnings of some of the foundational pieces. So the actual mechanics of what we expected people to do in our system was really different. And that just rocked our customer’s ability to get value from us to its very core.

 

We essentially had to retrain everybody all at once as a toddler. Holy bananas. And not just retraining your team, but like retraining 5000 customers. Oh yeah, when I said everybody, I’m at the customers. I guess we also had to retrain our team at the same time as we were retraining our customers. And so we’ve learned a lot since then, put it that way.

 

Check out these FREE company profile templates and use it to streamline the hiring process

 

Streamline the Hiring Process: The Only Way Out Is Through

 

Wow. That seems unfathomable. So okay, break that down. How did you guys do that? That seems like such a like I’m giving you the heebie jeebies. Even thinking about having to retrain 5000 customers. How in the world did you guys do that? Yeah, I’m starting to get the sweats too. It was, you know, sometimes when you’re in a real crisis situation like that, you know, you don’t realize some of the moves that you make until you have the benefit of time and, you know, you can sort of have a retrospective.

 

And I think at the time, we felt the only way out was through. And we knew that our customers needed help. And I knew I didn’t have enough people to help them. And it was a very simple calculus. It was like, okay, if we had more people, we could help more customers, right? With the horse out of the barn with regard to the changes we had made, it was kind of too far to pull them back and just too technically challenging.

 

So the only way out was through. And so, you know, I, I went and, I was sort of a new leader, I guess, a sort of mid-level manager director level at the company at the time when in front of our executive team, I explained how absolutely, screwed we were to use technical terminology. And we said, look, okay, I mean, you don’t, we don’t know who else is going to get us out of this.

 

Mike and I said, okay, like, fair point, I guess, or so why don’t you do it? And I said, okay, well, I’m gonna need to hire a lot of people. I said, okay, I want to go do that. Right. And sort of this steady hand against my, probably relatively high data sort of emotional state. And I said, oh, okay.

 

Cool. So I’m just going to hire this team. And over the course of about the next six months, I think I tripled the size of our, of our service team. And also over the course of that time, we were able to do a much more proactive start treating our customers, I think, in the right way.

 

And we really turned it around. We had one extremely rough quarter, but it didn’t kill the company. And obviously things have been pretty good since then. Okay. So when you went and had that conversation, with additional leaders. Yes. Hire people. So that took you from 20 people on your team to about 60 people on your team.

 

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Streamline the Hiring Process: Hiring Frontline People

 

Do I have that right? Yeah. Somewhere in that neighborhood. Yeah. Okay. So then, so then kind of getting through that acute crisis, then what was it that you saw as far as a need to okay. Now we’re at 60. We got through the thing. We had a bad quarter. We survived. And then to go from 60 then to 200 were where they’re different sort of.

 

I don’t know if the right word is inflection points or like what were the steps to go from 60 to then 200 people on your team? Yeah, it’s a great question because it does change over time. I think that one thing that we learned in that crisis period was we were able to, you know, iterate on our hiring profile very, very quickly.

 

So we learned quickly what we wanted in that frontline employee, the face we wanted to present to our customers. And we made some mistakes. Certainly the first couple groups of folks that I hired, I don’t think, you know, worked out as well as the ones afterwards. We refined the profile, we wrote it down. We were very, very rigorous about the way that we interviewed, almost like running a scientific process where, you know, the interview was the same every time we’d ask the same questions.

 

Right. And we just got really, really tight on that. So the benefit of that time period was we figured out how to hire frontline people super well. But then when we hit that scale, the need started to change. We needed types. We need certain specialists. Right? We still needed those frontliners. We need a certain specialist, the specialists for things like managers.

 

The specialists were technical experts or subject matter experts in certain ways of doing marketing or something like that. And so we had to repeat that process. But what we had was a framework that we knew would work and allow us to pretty quickly iterate on those hiring profiles for, say, managers as we kind of built out our management tier.

 

And then we came out of, you know, the next six months saying, okay, we now feel really good about that. And so we were able to make progress through the, you know, I guess, problems that come with scale, figure out how to hire, figure out how to quickly figure to hire managers, figure out how to hire them quickly, all that and feel good that as we progressed on each step of that way, we had repeatable process that we could always lean back on.

 

So we were ready for the next problem. We didn’t accrue those problems over time. We solved them in a, you know, a relatively short time period and were able to move on to the next thing. 

 

Check out these FREE company profile templates and use it to streamline the hiring process

 

Streamline the Hiring Process: Straight Line Type of Growth

 

Okay. I love that. Okay. So let’s go back through some of that because there’s some really, really good things there for us to slice and dice.

 

So when you say hiring at scale, just kind of put that in like numbers for us. Like, how many people are we talking about when you were thinking about that piece, like here’s, here’s, here’s what I mean by that. So to go from 62 to 200, does that mean that you are actively looking to fill 140 positions, or did that go in chunks?

 

It went in chunks. So it’s probably a pretty straight line type of growth right where we were hiring. And maybe, you know, we’re hiring at 20 folks a month. Yeah, that’s one every working day if you want. Wow. Right. But you know something like that. Right. And we are also a feeder organization for the rest of the company.

 

So we’re moving lots of people out. But, gross. You’re probably hiring 20, but to get 20 hires that meet that bar, meet that profile that we established. Right. The number of interviews is kind of the funnel, if you will, of how you hire these folks. It gets really, really big. So you need to do, you know, if each one of them takes 3 or 4 interviews to hire, that’s 80 interviews, 80, you know, 20 minute or half hour chunks.

 

And then not everybody you interview, you actually hire. Right? So you end up doing, I remember we were doing probably, you know, hundreds of interviews, like in a given week, just in order to produce those 20 hires at the end of the month. And so it became a real organizational focus for us. How to think about types of people that succeed in our company, how to think about the kind of experience we want to provide to our customers.

 

Right. Because we did it all the time and it consumed so much of our calendar space, it consumed a lot of our head space, and we were able to solve a lot of those problems and refine those profiles and stick to them pretty quickly. So my assumption here is, and please correct me if I am off track, my assumption here is because you were leading that effort.

 

You probably helped guide the profile. This is who we want. These are the expectations. These are the metrics. This is like culturally this is the fit. Or were you also involved in it? And then you’re able to maybe delegate that away to like a recruiting team in H.R. Team whatever. Or were you actually in a majority of the interviews.

 

Check out these FREE company profile templates and use it to streamline the hiring process

 

Streamline the Hiring Process: The Leadership Role

 

So help us understand your role as a leader in that? This was my primary job in my view, right? If I could find great people, I could hire great people, I could continually raise the bar. I just everything else would work out. And that turned out in my particular situation to be right. So yeah, I would have the final interview for every one of those hires.

 

I was involved in interview training. I mean, we certainly had partners and recruiters because you can’t fill the top of the funnel, you know, less you less you scale outside of yourself. But, you know, I was the definitional hand, I suppose, in a lot of that stuff. And, you know, it was it became a real kind of point of pride personally, because I felt like I became like the best and in the company and maybe the best, you know, in the country for at least a period of time and really doing the super fast scaling, refining, hiring profiles, nailing hit the nail on the head.

 

With these folks, we got really, really good at it, I believe, because I did not take my hands out of the pot. I kept them there. And I believe that was the number one thing that was critical to our success. So I kept my eye on it. So very involved. Well, so Onward Nation is a really critical lesson for all of us to learn where the service business scale is.

 

Service business takes a lot of time, takes a lot of time from both the leadership perspective as well as management and so forth. And in the lesson that Michael just gave us, is there anything more important? Could there be anything more critical if we’re going to solve this acute problem, this crisis, then the people that are going to be needed to solve that problem.

 

Check out these FREE company profile templates and use it to streamline the hiring process

 

Streamline the Hiring Process: Hiring Employees for the European Market

 

And so he made it his most vital priority, like nothing else mattered. Would that be too bold of a statement or is that accurate, Mike? That’s pretty accurate. Yeah. If you hire smart people, they should go make good decisions about other things. So my job was to hire smart people. Love it. So let’s think about the multilingual piece because that’s an element to this that I find really intriguing to go from single language phone support then to global multilingual.

 

What were some of the, either challenges or maybe some of the success stories along the way in doing that? Yeah, the first challenge is one of timing, and I think timing is tricky for any business, any, any juncture. I probably made one of the worst timing decisions of my career regarding this. So I just spoke about, you know, this kind of crisis period.

 

Right about in the middle of that, I thought it’d be a good idea to take a business trip over to Ireland and start another team over there, because I didn’t have enough problems on my hands. So I figured I’ll double. Actually, what my rationale actually was we had recently opened up, like kind of a sales outpost in Ireland.

 

It was a new office for us that would turn into a really amazing office for us over time. But it didn’t have a support department. I thought, man, okay, there’s more people in Europe that I could go hire, right? And there’s all these people in the States and the only people in Europe. And if I could hire some of those people in Europe, I could hire faster and get out of this crisis faster.

 

So there was some rationale to it, looking back on it, it was totally bonkers. So I went over there and we basically set up a very similar operation to what we had in the States. I would do the phone screens. I had to learn to pronounce all sorts of Irish names that, challenges with. I spent a lot of time on YouTube.

 

We set up the recruiters with the same hiring profile. We gave them the same traits. It was all very kind of, you know, structured. Right. And that was successful. We basically were able to launch without too many kinds of bumps in the road. We were able to launch a new support team in Ireland at the same time as we were having that crisis in the states.

 

Expand our hiring geographies and fix the problem twice as fast. I believe it’s because we were able to have a very, very tight playbook on what worked, and we were basically able to ship that to the Irish team. I was personally involved. I went over there week out of the month to interview folks to make those hires. So we kind of took everything we’ve been talking about so far, Stephen, and we really stamped it out again, over in the Irish office for the European Market.

 

Check out these FREE company profile templates and use it to streamline the hiring process

 

Streamline the Hiring Process: Finding a Person with The Right Skills

 

Okay. So all of that sounds awesome. So why did you call it bonkers? Just because of the amount of workload that you threw onto already an acute crisis? It was bonkers. From a personal standpoint. It was just that I was under so much stress. It was like daily conversations with our CEO, who I love his amazing mentor, but, like, things weren’t going well, and he was, you know, he was right to push me at that time.

 

And I just think from a way, I was spending time like, I’m really lucky it worked out because if it hadn’t, it would have been a thing. I looked back on it, and I really probably shouldn’t have spent those seven hours on a plane. Maybe I should have done, you know, some work in the office. So that’s why it was crazy, because it really stretched me as a leader, probably past the realm of Reasonability.

 

Fair point, fair point. So let’s think about this from a skills perspective as it relates to Onward Nation business owners. So I wonder, based on your experience of doing the scaling as you have done it and shared with us your transparent way that, you know, it’s not all running through the meadow with unicorns 100% of the time, right?

 

I mean, there are some real crises that need to be solved and need to be solved quickly. So let’s think about this from a skills perspective. So if you’re an Onward Nation business owner, is there a skill? Is there something that you would recommend that they have to master in order to be good at the scaling piece of this?

 

Check out these FREE company profile templates and use it to streamline the hiring process

 

Streamline the Hiring Process: Understand the Job You’re Hiring Someone For

 

Totally. So the very first part, before you even start the process of looking for somebody new to hire, is understanding and really precise and simple terms what job you’re hiring them for. So if you’re an owner of a marketing agency and you deliver client work, you know, around content or something like that, right? I think you need to know very, very clearly what the function of that role is and what are the skills, what are the traits right now?

 

What’s the experience? So what are the skills, traits and characteristics of the person you’re looking for that will fill that job. So this involves doing a couple of things. You have to know what the function is. I suggest writing it down. You have to look at that function. I think about 3 or 4 things. And I recommend four.

 

That would be the exact right person to fill this job, right? One of them might be the ability to, you know, have a really good culture fit. One of them might be, you know, empathy, right? One of them might be the ability to be a storyteller. Right. Those are traits that enable somebody to be really successful at the job. So you have a job description, then you have your traits.

 

And now you can begin to actually look for people that have those traits. This is where it gets interesting. So if you’re looking for somebody that has, you know, really good empathy and maybe can talk to your clients, you can go on LinkedIn, you can try to find people with a customer service background or a customer success background or client delivery background.

 

Cool. But you could also look for somebody that really cares about philanthropy or is really active in their community, or demonstrates those characteristics in other ways. Right. And so for us, I think we were able to get really tight on the traits, we’re able to look broad into what those were. And I’d recommend folks listening do the same thing.

 

If you can really narrow in those traits and you can get creative at ways to identify people with those traits, you can find some amazing, amazing talent, right, that you can plug into those jobs and you can do so at scale as opposed to where are they might not have those traits, but but we’ll teach them. That’s fine.

 

We’ll mold them into the person because that doesn’t work, does it? It’s hard to change traits. I mean, you can teach anybody anything. You teach knowledge, you can teach how to use software. You can even teach how to write and communicate in some ways. But if you don’t have those basal instincts, those basal traits, you have a poor foundation to build on.

 

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Streamline the Hiring Process: The Atomic Unit of Culture Is the Person

 

Yeah. So I was spending some time with Darren Hardy, former publisher of a successful magazine. He was telling me the story about how he was going to interview the CEO of Marriott. At the time, this was years ago. And, you know, he went to the Marriott where the office was. He was going to be the CEO.

 

And just everybody was so friendly. Everybody was saying hello. And anytime you needed something, it was my pleasure. You know, like the Marriott is known for, just everybody was so friendly. And so anyway, he’s waiting in the lobby, the CEO comes down and meets, you know, shakes hands. And so he says, look, I gotta say, like, how is it like, what kind of training program do you have?

 

Like, how is it that everybody here is so friendly? And the CEO looks at Darren and says, well, Darren, we just hire friendly people. Hit the nail on the head right there. Right. I think a lot of people spend a lot of time obsessing about their culture, right? Small businesses, medium businesses, large businesses. Everybody spends time obsessing about it.

 

But the atomic unit of culture is the person. Right? And so if you can find people that you feel like from a characteristic perspective, the way they’re hardwired really fit with it, a lot of this stuff takes care of itself and it’s amazing when it actually works. But I love how you just said that the atomic unit of culture is the person.

 

Oh, that’s really, really smart. Thanks. You can train them. You can train them all you want. But, you know, at some point it’s just people who are really, really good. 

 

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Streamline the Hiring Process: Influential Lesson From a Mentor

 

Let’s go back to that. Those mentorship moments that you were mentioning with your CEO and when you were telling us the Ireland story. So, tell us, like take us back to that moment, like out of that experience of the daily phone calls or in the rhythm of checkpoints and all of that, like what was the most influential lesson that came out of that experience of working one on one with the CEO of HubSpot, that really is still benefiting you today? 

 

Yeah, it’s a great question. When I reflect on it. And in fact, a lot of the success and benefit that I’ve had since then, it’s really in just simplicity of, of thought. And so this, this is going to sound a little bit funny, maybe, but you know, the simpler you can communicate, the simpler your actual thought process can be, or the convolution that you can remove from your own thinking.

 

Right. And the straighter a line, you can draw between where you are today and where you need to be, the easier it is to execute on that plan, but also the easier it is to get other people onboard. So I think, you know, my ability to kind of get myself out of that jam. I remember a certain number of sleepless nights in Ireland, maybe due to the jetlag, maybe due to the stress, I don’t know.

 

But you know, you get these moments of clarity that sometimes you happen upon and it was just like, why does it have to be so hard? This is a simple problem. You can boil it down to its constituent parts. And that was the answer. Right? And I’ve always found the sense that any problem that you can have, any solution that is just at its most reductive, its simplest form, that’s probably the right one.

 

And even if it’s not exactly right, it’s the thing that’s going to get you moving forward the fastest, which in the end will end up looking like the right thing. So here again, this is another great lesson Onward Nation that Mike is just giving us here. And that is that it is a simple answer. But you also had to do some real critical thinking to to really boil it down to that, to that kernel.

 

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Streamline the Hiring Process: Communicate With a Clear Vision

 

What was that simple kernel? Right. It just wasn’t by happenstance. You thought about it a lot to get there. Absolutely. And when you’re in a crisis situation, things feel like they swirl right? And you’re like, oh, this and that, and you get pulled in different directions. And I think kind of being one with the swirl, if you will, is important so that you can see all the pieces.

 

But when you actually then stand up to communicate what’s going to happen to your team, to your peers, to your board, whomever, right that swirl cannot show up. It needs to be extremely clear, right? It needs to be really kind of straightforward. Right. And the better you can do that, understand all the problems, but communicate a clear vision.

 

That’s how you went. I think it was Mark Twain who gets credit for this quote. I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time. Exactly. It’s really hard. It takes a lot of effort to experience all the different pieces and pick up the important ones. Exactly. Well, in, in, you obviously did that expertly.

 

Well, and and when you’re in a crisis, you got to be right. Totally. Otherwise you don’t get to join you and Onward Nation to tell the story. Very kind of you to say, it’s been great, great conversation. And I was so excited, like I said at the onset when you said yes. And thank you for walking us through all of the building and scaling, the insider’s story.

 

That was just awesome. So I know we covered a lot, but before we go, before we close out and say goodbye, any final advice you’d like to share, Mike? Anything you think we might have missed? And then please tell Onward Nation business owners the best way to connect with you. 

 

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Streamline the Hiring Process: Final Advice and How to Connect with Michael

 

Of course. So I’d like to highlight a point that we made a little earlier on, in our discussion today before we got into some of the planning details and how to think about things, I mentioned that when we first got into this crisis, you know, we needed to hire.

 

We needed to scale all that. Where did we work? We looked at our team, but most of all, we looked at our customers and looked at what they needed. And so I think any opportunity that you guys have to look outwards to get that point of reference, that’s external, that will ground you, it will anchor you and will give you a source of truth, a North Star in any kind of situation.

 

If you keep your eye on that and keep that in your mind, you’re so much more likely to be successful. Everything else that you do loves it. Best way to connect with you, Mike. Yeah. So I’m a marketer at heart. Anyway, you can find me on Twitter. It’s @Redbord. It’s just my last name.

 

You can find me on LinkedIn. Michael Redbord. I’ll be more than happy to continue the conversation with any of you guys out there. Okay. Onward nation, no matter how many notes you took or how often you go back and re-listen to Mike’s words of wisdom, which I sure hope that you do. The key is you have to take these insights.

 

The lessons. You have to take the knowledge from that and apply it, take action and apply it and accelerate your results. And Mike, we all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day. And I am grateful that you said yes, and came onto the show. You were our mentor and our guide to help us build and scale onward to that next level.

 

Thank you so much, sir. Thank you so much, Stephen. Thanks Onward Nation for listening and appreciating it. This episode is complete, so head over to OnwardNation.com for show notes and more food to fuel your ambition. Continue to find your recipe for success here at Onward Nation.

 

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