How I Hire The Best People (Steal My Methods So You Can Too)

When it comes to hiring, I've made some of the worst decisions of my life. Like really bad. Like losing $500,000 bad. That one hurt me so much that I said to myself, I've had it. I'm going to do everything I can to be the best recruiter I can be. And since then, I've made some amazing hires. The best ones are still with me today. Cindy, Carl, Sunny, these people are rock stars on my team. People who've made my business better in ways I didn't even know were possible. So what's the difference between the great hires and the disasters? It was a solid hiring process. And in this episode, I'm going to give you mine, the exact methods I use to find, evaluate and hire people who build a great business for you. This is all the stuff I had to learn the hard way so you don't have to. Welcome back to the $100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zenholm, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday to help you start, grow and scale your business. I got a quick favorite to ask, if this show has helped you in any way, leave me a quick review. You could do so wherever you listen to podcasts. This helps me and my team reach even more people who need the same no fluff practical business advice that you're getting from the show. It only takes a few seconds, but it makes a huge difference. Thanks for being a part of our journey to help others on their journey. Now, before I get into how I want to say something that most people will never say to you, I wish I absolutely wish somebody explained this to me earlier. And here it is. Hiring is the highest leverage decision you can make as a business owner. It's not marketing, it's not product, it's not pricing. It's hiring. A great hire, a great team member will do things you never asked them to do, will solve problems you never knew even existed in your business. They will make the people around you better. A great hire will make you money. They'll save you time. They'll save you headaches. And guess what? A bad hire will do the exact opposite. They'll create problems everywhere they go. They drain everyone's energy. They stay longer than they should because letting somebody go is uncomfortable and very difficult to do. And most business owners just really avoid discomfort. Here's a number I want you to hear with both your ears. Okay, seriously. I found that a mediocre hire can cost you on average 30% of a person's annual salary. 30%. That's when you factor in lost productivity, the time spent managing the situation at hand, the toll it takes on the team, the cost of starting the hiring process all over again. And that's just the average. A really bad hire can cost you your business. Seriously, a bad hire can cost you everything. For small businesses that are listening to this episode right now, one bad hire doesn't just cost you money, costs you reputation, costs you time, costs you energy. This is why it's so high leverage. Get it right and it can do wonders. Get it wrong and it could be a nightmare. So let's talk about how to get it right. The first thing I want you to do is to avoid the most common mistake that I see. Business owners, when they want a hire, they are desperate. You know what I'm talking about. They wait until the pain is unbearable until they're so overwhelmed and so behind and so burnt out that they'll take anyone with a pulse just to get some relief. And desperation is the worst possible state to hire from. Why? Because when you're desperate, you overlook red flags. You are over forgiving. You convince yourself the small concerns, the small things that you're kind of noticing that are not right are not a big deal. You basically hire the person who's available rather than the right person for your business. And then after three months, you find out that, well my gosh, this person is actually the worst person I could have hired. And now you have a performance problem on top of everything else. So the rule I follow is start hiring before you need to. I'm going to give you a perfect example. Right now, I'm shooting this episode in my studio office. We're hiring a video producer, somebody to run all our cameras, do the editing, be our video person. I don't actually need to hire this person. I'm doing this fine. But I want to level up my game. I want to take the production to the next level. I want to produce some more content. Guess what? This week, this Thursday, we have seven interviews lined up for this position that we put out. I'm in a position right now where I can be picky. I don't need to just choose the first person that is willing to do the job. I have a pipeline of candidates that have applied for this position. I have their CVs, I have their resumes. I have them, they shot a video talking about themselves. I have a luxury to be selective now because being selective is the most powerful tool in hiring. Being able to say, Hey, who's the best person? Not who's the good enough person? So keep this in mind, hire before you need them because you don't want to hire from a position of desperation, bad position to begin. So let me give you my methods. Here we go. Method number one, hire for attitude first and skill second. I know this sounds counterintuitive, but in 20 years of building teams, I have never once regretted hiring someone with an exceptional attitude and teachable skills. But guess what? I've regretted plenty of times of hiring people that are highly skilled with a questionable attitude. Listen, skills can be taught. Anybody can be taught anything. Anybody who has a skill was taught it. That's just how it happens. Attitude, on the other hand, cannot be taught. It's a choice. Somebody's attitude is something that comes within work ethic can't be taught. The willingness to take ownership when things go wrong, that can't be taught. The integrity that they must have and tell you the truth when something is not going right, when it's inconvenient for them to kind of kind of fess up, Hey, there's something that's not so good with what I just did right now. That can't be taught. The humility to say, I don't know, but I'll find out or I need to help. That can't be taught. These things are either there or they're not. Guess what? I've hired people who didn't know how to do these things and I was foolish enough to think I can teach them how to raise their hand and talk to me when there's something wrong or to ask a question when they need to personally think it's impossible. I've never seen it done. Either they're able to do it and it comes within and they just show up that way or they don't have that gene. In the interview, I always ask this question, tell me about a time you made a serious mistake at work, what happened and what did you do? In the interview, one of two things happened. Either some people go quiet and give a very vague answer or they suddenly blame someone else for their mistake. And obviously that's a red flag. And others will look you in the eye, own it completely, describe exactly what they did to fix it. And they tell you what they learned in the process. That second person is the person we call back. That's the person that gets shortlisted. That's the person that we really are considering hiring. And nine times out of 10, we hire them every single time because the way someone handles their own failure is the most accurate preview you ever will get. Because listen, the resume, the CV, the way they're presenting themselves, you're seeing the best version of them. Okay, you've never worked with this person before. You don't know their flaws. You only know all their positive points. This is why I always say that if you're going to hire somebody for a position and there's somebody in your team that is qualified for that position, maybe for a promotion, I say the new person, the person that's coming from outside, has to be at least 30% better than the person that's in your team. Because you already know all the flaws of the person that's in your team. You already know them. You've worked with them. You know their ins and outs. You know how they operate. So remember, you're seeing the best version of them. So your job is to try to get as honest as possible to find out how they handle the situation and what their attitude is towards their work. At TUI, we give you more. More outfit choices with 20 kilograms of luggage allowance as standard. More hotels built around what you love, like that swim-up suite. More ratio to the bottom, water parks on site. More, oh, that looks good. Food options from pool side snacks to ala cart dining. Book on app, in-store or online. You book it, TUI sort it. At all and after protected, keys and Cs apply, selected hotels only see website for details. With LV, I can get my home insurance from just £133. They've made it easy for me to get a great price. And their 24-7 emergency helpline lets me look after what matters to me, because insurance is simple when it's me and LV. No wonder we're rated excellent on TrustPilot. Get your quote today at LV.com. 10% of new customers paid £133 or less July to December 2025. LV General Insurance is part of Allianz. Method number two, the job post is an advertisement, not just a form they fill out. I have to say that most job descriptions are terrible. How do I know this? Because my job descriptions used to be terrible, just like everybody else's. But we worked very hard on improving our job descriptions and making them more than just a list of requirements and bullet points and some corporate language that reads like a legal document. Nobody great is going to be excited by a job description that starts with like, you must have three to five years experience and strong communication skills. Your job post is not a form, it's an advertisement. And if you want to see an example, by the way, you can go to our job posts, just go to 1-0-0-NBA.net slash jobs, and you can see our available jobs right now. And you can see how we write our job posts. Why do I say this? Why do I say it should be an advertisement? Because it's the first impression a great candidate will have of your business. It's the first signal if they want to work there or not. And it needs to do two things simultaneously. First, it needs to attract the right people. And then second, it needs to repel the wrong ones to save you time and headaches because you don't want people applying that are just not right for you. The way you do both is to be specific and honest. Be specific about the role and what it requires the day to day. On top of our job description, we also include a video. And in the video, I say, hey, this is going to be hard work. If you don't like hard work, I'm sorry, this is not the job for you. And that's okay. There's plenty of fish in the sea. You want to attract the people that are like, yeah, I like hard work. I like to grow. I like to roll my sleeves and take responsibility. And be honest about what working with you is actually like. The pace, the expectations, the culture. We're very clear that we're not going to give you and spoon feed every answer. You're going to have to figure out some things on your own. And that's part of you having ownership of your role. And this is why it's so important to write your job post in a voice that sounds like a human being. And this is why it's really helpful to just describe the kind of person who will thrive in your company and the kind of person who won't. You can even include a small specific task or question that the candidate has to complete as a part of the application. So they get a taste of what it's like to do work in this position in your business. Something short, something specific. For example, we asked our candidates to shoot a video to answer a few questions. We give them some questions. They answer it on a video. Why do we do this? Well, because we are a media company and you will at some point be on video, whether on a video call or you'll be in one of our episodes, maybe by chance, or you'll be shooting a video if you're a video person. And we want to know how you are as a communicator. Can you communicate efficiently? Can you express yourself? Can you also show your personality? That one additional cut, that one thing they have to do, submit a video for us, it cuts our applicant pool by 70%. Make sure it filters out the people that are lazy or don't want to do that, or maybe they just think I don't want to be on video. What is this? If you don't like video, then you're in the wrong place. Okay. This is what we do for a living. Even if you've never been on video, if you're not willing to stretch yourself a little bit and put yourself out of the comfort zone and, you know, do a selfie video, do a quick, you know, face the camera and answer some questions. If you're not willing to do that, then you're definitely not going to do well in our company. The people who complete it thoughtfully and well, and don't look like they're reading when they're shooting the video, these are the people they get filtered in and get an interview. Those are worth our time. And those are the type of people are going to be worth your time. Method number three, the pre-interview filter. I don't start with a full interview. I start with a short task. This is a good way to do this, especially with highly technical roles. Like when we were hiring engineers and developers and designers at Webinar Ninja, our software company, a brief task or a simple problem to solve is a good way to find out how they think, how they problem solve. And we used to do this, like for example, for developers where we would get them to code a part of a software, like a login or something, like, you know, like, you're signing in with your username and password. And we really didn't care the way they decoded it or what the language they use. We just wanted to understand how they actually work. And it would be a live call, like a live Zoom call. And we'd go through the interview and they would have like an hour to do this. And this whole thing was recorded. And go ahead and work. And it could be like an open book test. We just wanted to understand how they actually function. Listen, the resume will never reveal this. So you need to actually trust but verify, verify they can actually do what you want them to do. And how they do it is just as important. We do this with customer support for customer support agents. We get them to answer customer support tickets. And by the way, they're not real customers tickets or customer chats or messages. It's somebody from our team pretending that they are a customer and they're asking them questions. And they have, it's like an open book test, they can go to the knowledge base, they can they look it up, they go to our website. Again, the actual answer doesn't matter. It's how they actually approach the problem and the way they communicate to the customer that really matters. We also look to see, is there any extra thought or any extra effort they're making in their task in completing the task? Because that's exactly what they need to bring to the job, their own personality, their own approach. The ones who do the minimum on the task and don't really try to go above and beyond or add their own flair, we're not really interested in them. We're looking for somebody who's exceptional. Hey, if you're finding today's episode useful, I highly recommend you subscribe to the show if you're not subscribed already, because we have an upcoming episode I'm working on right now that I think you're going to absolutely love. And it's about the truth of running two businesses at once. I did this for a decade. And I'm going to talk about what are the tradeoffs, what are the difficult things you're going to face? And what are some of the joys of running two businesses successfully at the same time? And would I advise it? You know, I did it for 10 years. I don't do it anymore. I just focus on this business now since we sold Whip and our Ninja. But I want to share with you what I learned along the way, so that if you're thinking about jumping into a new business, or maybe you want to do two at the same time, you have some data points, you have some information that you can use as you navigate that journey. So hit subscribe so you don't miss it. Method number four, the interview is a conversation, not an interrogation. You're not some sort of KGB agent trying to like squeeze information out of them. The candidate is going to be nervous naturally, because their livelihood is on the line here. They want this job. So you don't want to make this a rigid conversation. You want to make this a fluid conversation. You want to make it a conversation just like you would have a conversation with them when they're in the job. Because if you don't make it a conversation and you just do rapid fire questions, you're not going to really learn anything about them. You're going to learn about how they interview. Okay, you don't want that. How somebody interviews some people are really good at interviewing. That's a completely different skill. You want to try and set to have a genuine conversation, just like you're meeting somebody at a party, and you want to get to know them. Be curious about the person, where they came from, what drives them. Why are they doing this career? Why are they applying for this job? What's going on right now? Why are you unhappy in your current job? Where did you fail in life and where are you at right now in your life? Like, are you on the rebound? Are you in a different season now? Did you just have a child and now you're trying to get back into the workforce? What's the situation? By understanding who they are, you really get a full picture to understand what their motivations are. What drives them? What motivates them? What lights them up? So I like to ask open-ended questions, and then I shut my mouth. Most interviewers, they talk too much. They want to fill in the silence. They want to make them feel comfortable by just talking. No, you need to lead by allowing them the space to talk. Don't lead the witness like in a court case, right? A lot of people, they tell the candidate in front of them what they want to hear, and then they ask whether they agree. Just ask the question and wait, the silence is uncomfortable, but in that discomfort is useful information, because guess what? The job, it's going to be uncomfortable sometimes. And how they handle silence in the interview is how they'll handle pressure in the role. Some of my favorite questions are, what are you genuinely not good at? I want to really answer here, not a strength dressed up as a weakness. Like, I work too hard and, you know, I'm an overachiever. Another question I like to ask is, what did you think of this role when you first read the description? I want their honest, first impression. Here's another question. What would your last employer say your biggest area for growth is? This allows me to understand if they're self-aware, if they're honest, or if they're just going to be vague and kind of protect themselves. I'm trying to understand who they are. I'm listening to how they relate to their own gaps or failures and their own reality. I'm also looking for how they answer. I love it when a candidate hears one of my questions and says to me, huh, let me think of that for that moment. Never thought about that or haven't thought about that in a while. But off the top of my head, here it is. That's somebody being honest. That's not somebody who's like rushing to give me the answer I want to hear. Method number five, check references like you mean it. Okay. Most reference checks, people treat them like a formality, a five minute call where they ask a soft question just to make sure that, Hey, did this person actually work here? That tells you almost nothing. It just tells you that the person's not a liar. Here's how we like to check references. We call, we never email. And I don't lead with, can you tell me about working with this person? This person is in a job. They're working. They're busy. I got to be a little bit more specific if I want to pull out the answer I'm looking for. So I lead with something like, I love your honest opinion. We're thinking seriously about bringing this person on. What should I know going in to this relationship? How do I set an up for success? That question is completely different. It assumes that the higher is happening and it gives the reference permission to really share information rather than just a sales pitch. Oh yeah, this guy is great. Wonderful. Because now they're helping their former colleagues succeed and not protecting themselves by saying, Hey, the best way to kind of ramp them up is one, two, three, four. They're good listener. If you give them, you know, exact instructions, they'll follow nine times out of 10. The reference will tell you something real. They'll give you like a working style, no, a growth area, a situation where things were difficult and how to avoid them. The information is gold. And if a reference gives you three minutes of nothing but glowing superlatives and zero texture or zero specificity, that's a signal to real relationships have nuances. Even when you talk about your best friends, you know, they're not perfect. If there's no nuance in the reference, it means the relationship was either not real or they're choosing not to tell you something. I'm not saying they need to badmouth but they got to be honest. A good example of this is like, Oh, so, so she's fantastic. And I really loved working with her. She's really hardworking. I got to say though, sometimes her internet was kind of shoddy. So if there's a way that you can help her get better interconnection, I think that she'll be more reliable because that's the only thing I can really think of that, you know, stopped us from communicating constantly. Now I know that she's a super hard worker, that she has a lot of potential, but she's got this one problem where her interconnection is just horrible. So if I solve that problem for this person, there's a good chance they're going to be an amazing hire. Method number six, higher slow, fire fast. This is the hardest one to actually do. I'm going to be honest with you, but it's probably the most important one. Higher slow means resist the urge, resist to move quickly when you find someone you like. Sometimes we just like people. We're excited. They're a good candidate. They feel like the right fit. They're fun to hang out with and it feels like momentum. It's not. It's just dopamine. Okay. Take an extra few days. Have a second conversation with them. Do the reference check like we talked about. Get them to do the task. I love the phrase trust, but verify that extra time you're putting in is going to verify you're making the right decision. Now what does fire fast mean? Well, it means when things are not working, don't wait. I got to say 95% of the time when I have a hire that just is not working out, even when I put them on a plan, even when I try to train them up, months go by and 95% of the time they don't get better. It's just a bad hiring mistake. That's on me. It's my failure. This is why in my experience, as soon as we see that this hire is not working out and is not able to be salvaged, we fire immediately. We usually give them another month to see if there's any way they can get to where they need to be. We have a conversation so they know that this is what's going to happen if things don't change. But in my experience, it almost never does happen once, but it's pretty rare. The moment your gut tells you that someone is not right for the role or the team, trust that feeling. That feeling is powerful. Have an honest conversation with them. Give them clarity. Let them know that they're not winning right now. Let them know that because when they know that, they know that their backs against the wall, they need to change. Things that have to happen. By the way, nothing destroys Team Rale faster than them watching the leader keep someone around that clearly isn't performing well. They're picking up the slack and they're doing their work for them and they're just not picking up their weight. It's just not good for the team. It also signals that your standards don't matter anymore, that you don't really care about the standards of the company. One more thing, whoever hired the person is responsible for firing them. If that's you, you must do the firing. If that's your manager, they must do the firing. Why do I say this? Because when you have to fire somebody, it's never comfortable and never gets easy. You need to experience that pain so that when you go to hire again, you're reminded, hey, I don't want to experience that again. I don't want to have to do that firing again. I better take my time and make the right hire. Method number seven, my final one, the 90-day test. Every hire I make comes with a clear 90-day framework, not a formal probation, a genuine onboarding plan that makes sure that we're a good fit for each other. It's a chance for us to find out, hey, are you good for our team? And if you are happy to work for us, by the end of the 90 days, we have a clear answer. You have a clear answer as the candidate. There's no feeling. There's no hoping. You know exactly what the job is like. And within those 90 days, as the team member to say, hey, this is not a good fit for me, I got to go. And that's okay, but we have that right too. So we basically have like a contracted role for 90 days. And the reason why we do this, and I say this point blank in the interview, hey, you look great on paper and you're interviewing great. And I love the conversation we're having, but that doesn't tell me how you're going to work in the team. That doesn't tell me how you're going to perform with the actual customers we have and the actual work that we're going to embark on. I need to see you in action to know for sure you're the right person. So this is what we're going to do. We're going to do a 90 day plan. And then after the 90 days, we can have a honest conversation with each other. If you are like, yep, I love working here. And we're like, yep, we love having you. Then it's long term. Now, before I wrap up today's episode, I want to push back on myself just for a moment. Got to be honest, because everything I just shared is a framework and frameworks are useful, but they're not the whole story. Some of the best hires I've made broke most of my rules. Okay, the resume wasn't polished. The interview was a little bit awkward. The reference check was, you know, thin just because the people they work with were just as awkward as them. And it was really hard to get the answers I was looking for. But something was there. There was a hunger in them, a clarity about who they are and what they wanted to build. In the interview, I felt like I was having a conversation with somebody that was going somewhere with their life. Hiring is as much as an art as it is a science. Okay. So trust your gut, trust your intuition. The frameworks are there to protect you from the obvious mistakes. But I found the best hires require trusting something you can't fully articulate. I can't put my finger on it, but this person's got something. The key is this, when your gut overrides the process, know that it's happening. Be conscious of it and make the call. Be conscious about it. Not because you're rushed, not because you're desperate. It's because you found the person. This is the person. I know it. That distinction between conscious judgment and lazy shortcutting, like just trying to rush this situation, is the difference between a great instinct hire and a disaster. When your gut can be proven by the evidence you see in the interview and in the whole process, then you know for sure you got the right person. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Hiring is not a task you do when a seat is empty or you're desperate for a position. It's a system that you build before you actually need it. A great team doesn't just happen because you got lucky. It happens because you took hiring seriously. You saw it as a priority as the founder, as the leader of your business. You were deliberate about finding somebody with a great attitude. You were honest with the job post. You were clear about who you're looking for and who you're not looking for. You filtered out early the people that you're not looking for. You asked the questions in the interview that really revealed the real person that's in front of you. You took reference seriously and you checked what actually mattered about this person so that you can make sure that you win with this new candidate. You take your time and you make a deliberate decision. Every new person that you hire has a 90-day plan so you make sure you verify that this person is perfect for you and the team. If you do these things consistently and you build that system, you will build that dream team you've always imagined. It starts with one hire. If this episode has been helpful for you, if it's given you some clarity, I think it'll pair well with an episode that I published recently called Why I've Always Hired More Women. I don't want to share too much. I want you to listen to the episode to hear why I say this and why this has been my experience. I believe that these two episodes together will give you a very complete picture of how I think about building a great team. Go check it out. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start grow and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify or ever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode. With LV, I can get my home insurance from just £133. They've made it easy for me to get a great price and their 24-7 emergency helpline lets me look after what matters to me because insurance is simple when it's me and LV. No wonder we're rated excellent on TrustPilot. Get your quote today at LV.com. 10% of new customers paid £133 or less July to December 2025. LV General Insurance is part of Alliance.