Barry Shamis - Selecting Winners (E0318)

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Welcome to the Exit Coach Radio show, the show for baby boomer business owners who are looking for cutting edge information as they plan their 3 to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week we interview top professional advisors for their best tips, strategies, and precautions so you can be well planned. And don't miss our one minute exit coach tip of the day on Exitcoachradio.com. And now here's your host, the exit coach, Bill. Black, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm very happy to have you on joining us and listening to our, our great speakers today. We really have a fantastic lineup, and our next speaker is our next guest, I should say is Barry Shamus, and he's joining us from selecting winners and selecting Winners is a training and consulting firm that teaches business owners, executives, and managers how to hire better employees. We all need to know about that, so I'm fascinated to hear from Barry. Barry, thanks very much for joining us today. How are you? I'm doing great. It's great to be with you, Bill. And Barry, you're joining us from Las Vegas, I understand. That is correct, beautiful sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. Everybody's a winner there, huh? Absolutely, Barry, did I get your last name right? How do you pronounce your last name? It is Seamus. You got it perfect, Bill. OK, Barry. All right, great. Well, Barry, tell us a little bit about the the concept of selecting winners and how did you come up with the idea for the company and tell us a little bit about what you do. Yeah, happy to do that, Bill. I started selecting winners in 1984 for the 10 years leading up to that. I was working in the corporate arena doing exactly the same thing, doing teaching managers how to hire good people, and I just got to the point where I was frustrated because what I was teaching them wasn't taking. They weren't putting it into practice. Nothing was changing. So I decided to create a, create a better mousetrap and spent a couple of years doing some primary research and ended up with the selecting winners program and since 1984 we've had about 100,000 people in 64 different countries come through the program and we're, it's a little counterculture. It goes away from the mainstream, but we've had just tremendous results. Our clients are very, very happy with it and At the end of the day they're hiring better people, which is the only measure of a good training program. Now Barry, we often say that your best assets go home every night, your your employees. They're not on the balance sheet, but they make the balance sheet, and yet so many people give so little thought to how they're going to select a winner. What's the most important thing a business owner or manager can do to improve their odds of selecting a winner? Well, you know, your point is so well taken, Bill. It's amazing. I've always said people give way more thought and time into deciding what phone system they're going to use than who they're going to hire. And so the idea that our people are our most important asset, which every business owner, CEO survey I've ever seen, always says it's number one, it's our people, but they don't just, they just don't behave that way. They may believe it but they don't do anything about it. So you asked me a great question. You know, what's the one thing that they can do? And there's two actually. Number one, I like to say education. You've just got to understand this process. Hiring people is like any other business process like finance, sales, manufacturing. Customer acquisition, whatever it is, um, hiring people is another business process, and yet people don't study it. I promise you if sales is an issue in your company, you go out and study sales and and find out what we need to do to fix our sales. If manufacturing's a problem, you go out and study it to find out how to fix the problems. But forever people just struggle with hiring people and just accept it as a problem without going out. So number one, I really think anything you listeners can do to increase your knowledge base as it relates to the subject, read a book, read some articles, take a seminar, a webinar, get more data, more information about how you go about hiring. That's going to be great. And then the second thing I think it's the single really the biggest mistake people make is they don't define success in advance. You know, we say, OK, I need to hire somebody and maybe you put a job description together, maybe you don't, and, and then you run around and you hire someone and then you're really surprised when, you know, a couple of weeks later you got to let them go because they weren't satisfying your business needs. Defining success in advance is a two part process. It's #1, knowing the results the person needs to bring to the table to satisfy your business needs. And number 2, you know what knowledge, skills, abilities, and behaviors do they have to apply to that? How do they have to behave while delivering those results? So that they, they become a winner, what we call a winner, a good employee, and people don't spend enough time doing that. I've always said the hardest part of hiring is knowing what you're looking for. It's, it's not finding and choosing people, it's knowing what to look for. So I call that defining success in advance and, and most business owners, small business owners specifically really struggle with that. Well, yeah, it is, it's difficult obviously because at face value, everybody comes in with a good story and a good resume and all that kind of stuff, and then, you know, there's a reason why they're out on the marketplace in the first place is the best time is the best place to find a winner of somebody who's already working. Well, that's, that's one of those myths. People have so many pre-beliefs and myths about, about hiring that it's really a shame. Um, the most important thing I'll tell your listeners today, Bill, is try and make your decisions on as many data points as possible. The more, the more data, the more information you have, the better decisions you're going to make, so. Um, well, this person isn't working, so I'm not even going to look at them. You've made a decision on a single data point. You're probably not making a great decision. So I don't think, you know, whether they're working, not working, uh, a great client story. One of my clients just recently happened to be in the technology arena, but they heard through the grapevine that a startup company was losing its funding. And they went before anybody knew about this and went and pitched very difficult to find engineers. There were 40 of them at the company and they hired 37 of them in one shot. Because these people were about to lose their jobs, so I get asked all the time, where is the best place to find people. First and foremost, I'll share a term. I call it sphere of influence. You should always be some people call it a network. I call it a sphere of influence. You should always be working your network. You should know what's going on in your industry with your competitors. You should know what's going on in the local market or the regional market, wherever it is that you. You operate by being aware of your surroundings and what's going on. You'll get first shot at the best candidates, including your, your existing employees and picking their brain and saying, Who do you know? Who do you, who have you worked with, who will be good here? An employee referral program has to be an absolute must for every business in my opinion. That's a great point. I mean, you know, you're hitting on some really valuable points here, Barry. Obviously that we talked about how important employees are to an organization, and yet so many employers don't take the time to study what, what makes a good selection process, and then they're unaware about what's going on out there and they just take whatever comes their way. Those are two strikes. Um, how do you know if you're getting good information that's going to make, that's gonna help you make these great hiring decisions? OK, so, so now we're at the point, Bill, where an individual is sitting across the table from you, and how do I know? First, and you, you alluded to this earlier. I like to use the analogy an interview is like prom night. It never quite gets any better. Everybody scrubbed and polished it on their best behavior and so forth. So try not to get swayed by what's going on in the actual interview. The key to making sure you get good information, Bill, is to ask good questions. And most people just don't have a real good feel for what a good question is. So if you're getting information about what the person has done, lots of how questions, how did you do this? How did you put this together? How did you create that? How did you deal with this customer? Lots of how questions so that you're seeing how they behave and how they've handled situations that may be the same or similar, you know, to those that they're going to face on your job. The thing to stay away from is quit putting yourself in a position you're not qualified to be in. Don't try to figure people out. Because neither you or I, Bill, are trained behavioral psychologists, as most of your listeners are not either. So why would we want to put ourselves in a position where we need to figure people out? Instead, let's find out what they've done, how they've behaved, how they've handled situations once again that are the same or similar to those they're going to face in our job. So if you're asking good factual questions, if you're asking good action questions. You usually get information that helps you make a better decision. And one more thing, ask lots of them. The more data you have, the better chance you're going to make a good decision. You know, I hear people saying, you know, in a typical, you know, 30 or 60 minute interview, they ask, you know, 5 to 8 questions. I ask literally hundreds of questions in 60 minutes. More data you get, better decisions you make. So if they can keep that in mind, try to get factual information, try to get behavioral information and don't try to figure other people out. Don't, you know, don't get into other people's heads. It's a terrible place to go. Yeah, yeah, good point. Now, um, I would imagine, Barry, that a lot of people are looking at technology and what's available as far as some of these, um, you know, these litmus tests that are out there that'll help you identify people's strengths and weaknesses and things like that. Are those a good idea or a bad idea? Well, I, I, I hate to be vague with you, Bill, but it depends. Um, I am in favor. My philosophy is incredibly simple. I am in favor of anything that helps you get better data to help you make better hiring decisions. So when we come back to these assessments and tests and so forth, there's just hundreds of them on the marketplace, and that that industry has really exploded and it's exploded, I believe. You know, in response to the fact that people are so frustrated they don't hire good people, so they're looking for the silver bullet, and unfortunately none of the assessments out there are the silver bullet. So if you find a tool, a test, an assessment that actually gives you good information, if you add that to all the other information you're getting, it can be very valuable. So, um, what I would. Caution people is, uh, don't make decisions based upon the result of the test. Oh, Bill fits into the wrong quadrant. I'm not gonna talk to him anymore. I mean that you're making a decision really in a vacuum when you do that. Um, I, I, I kind of go back to my, my premise, and I really beat on this. The more data you have, the better decisions you're going to make. And so if you just, if you have a test that's validated for your industry and the job type and it's reliable, meaning it does a good job of testing what it says it tests for, that's just additional data to help you make the decision and that's what I advise my clients if it It is valid and reliable. It's another good data point, so add it to the pot and we have one more good data point. OK, good point. So and that's what a lot of people are looking for obviously is the shortcut to uh what's a very difficult process sometimes sorting through a pile of resumes or a large number of applicants to get to that to get to that finalist, you know, that that person is a jewel and then like you say at that point you really need to be ready with your questions. So you're you say 100+ questions that you have available to do, uh, does that bewilder people? Well, I, I didn't want, I don't want to shock your audience. I mean, the true number is a typical 60 minute interview. I ask between 150 and 300 questions, but I don't want people to get turned off by a scary number. It's really not that many, um, when you think about it, because if I, if I was interviewing you, Bill, and, and, and you're going to be in my customer support department. And I said to you, Bill, who was the last irate customer that you had to deal with because you're probably going to deal with irate customers in a customer support position. And then I could say how long ago was this and what was your history and what was the initial question? How did you respond? What research did you do? How long did it take you? What were you able to do to solve the problem? How did you follow up with them? And now I just asked you 10 questions. I see OK so mhm. So it's the main heading and then the sub questions that that leads to more information. I call it probing. We teach something called the pyramid technique, you know, the first question is, is, is really just the tip of the pyramid and then you just build down and and the foundation is in the volume of questions that you ask. So people get, you know, real put off sometimes when they hear the number. It's not the case. I just showed you how literally in in 30 seconds I could ask you 10 questions. And they're real pretty simple questions, but go ahead. Yeah I see what you're saying yeah exactly it it can go pretty quickly once you have the the main question and the subheadings to really get to the the baseline information you're looking for makes a lot of sense. Uh, Barry, one question I had for you was a lot of owners are trying to figure out within their management team who might be a good successor, owner, or, or, you know, potential manager. Do these techniques apply there as well as taking it to the next level with with current, um, managers to figure out their ownership material? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, Bill. I mean, when you're trying to decide who's going to succeed you or do I promote this person, you're facing the exact identical situation. You have a business need that's not being satisfied. You have to clearly define that business need and identify the number one, the results, the person's going to need to deliver and the behaviors, the knowledge, skills, abilities and behaviors they're going to need to bring to the table. To do that on its simplest level, when you're promoting a person for the first time from individual contributor to a supervisor, we all know that person's not qualified. They have no, they have no experience level being a supervisor, but we were all promoted our first time, and it's actually easier than you think to predict who will be successful, just like taking the second in command and making them the first in command. Um, Will they deliver the results you need to make the business a success, and will they apply the right knowledge, skills, abilities and behaviors to the problems that they're going to face? And when you interview for that, so yes, my selecting winners model works for internal people, external people, entry level people, the most senior people in every discipline under the sun. At the end of the day, it's a data gathering data evaluation methodology, and we're applying it to hiring. So that's one of the beauties of selecting winners. And when I created it, I wanted it to not just be for salespeople and not just for Administrative people are not just for finance people. It's got to work for everybody because at the end of the day the process of choosing people is the same. At any level and in and in every discipline. That makes a lot of sense. And of course with your your years of experience doing this, I wanted to ask you, are you finding it that a different set of questions are necessary for uh younger people like millennials in that in that age group today? uh have the questions changed much from that group to, for instance, the baby boomer group? You know, it, I probably get asked that question more than any other bill. It's such a fantastic question. There is no doubt that the baby boomers, the Gen X's, the millennials, and so forth do have different characteristics. But at the end of the day, the decision you are, the question you are trying to answer as a business owner, as a manager, is will this person satisfy my business needs. At the end of the day, that's the laser focus when you're hiring. Will this person satisfy my business needs, and the way we go about that doesn't change because I'm, I'm not going to say there aren't different behavioral characteristics between these major groups of people, but you still have to only answer the question, will this person behave in a way consistent with success in my environment? And guess what, you know, if you're a baby boomer and you're looking to hire millennials and you have certain standards and So forth for your organization, you may have a harder time because maybe some of those people don't behave in a way consistent with success, but the process you go through to determine whether or not they do is the same. So those, those types of questions, I told you lots of factual questions and how and getting examples of what that all stays the same whether it's millennials, Gen Xers, baby boomers, it makes no difference. Great information, great tips, Barry, and you have a uh a book out called Hiring 3.0, New Rules for the New Economy, that's available on Amazon, correct? Yes, that is correct. All right, great. And you're also a Visage speaker, and so what that means for our listeners who aren't aware is Visage International is a CEO peer group. There's a lot of CEOs that get together to work on their problems with each other and hear great speakers like Barry Seamus. So if you're a Visage chair out there and hiring and looking for speakers, or if you're with another business group, Barry's available for that. And Barry, tell them how to get in touch with you best. The simplest way is to go to my website. There's a wealth of resources and ways to contact me personally and find out about the other solutions we have available for people, and it's very simply one word selectingwinners.com, selectingwinners.com, and they can get all the information they need. It's great information. It's it's very clear that Selecting winners is a winner in everybody's book and that you, you know what you're talking about. You gave us some great tips and information, and Barry, I hope you'll come back at some other time in the future and we can go deeper on some of these topics because we just really scratched the surface today. So thank you so much for a great interview and providing these great tips, ideas and precautions for our listeners. I look forward to the next time. Alright, me, me as well, Bill, it was great being with you and we'll talk with your audience again soon. Take care. Alright, we're gonna take a short break we'll be right back after this, so please stay with us. You're listening to Exit Coachradio.com, the information station for age 50 plus business owners, where we're interviewing top advisors for their best tips, ideas, and precautions so you can be well planned. We upload new one minute tips every day. Exitcoachradio.com. Come listen for a minute. Business owners, if you came back from lunch and there was a resignation letter on your desk, which employee would you really, really not want it to be from? What are you doing to prevent this from happening? At Exit and Retirement Strategies, we design plans that attract, motivate, and retain key employees. For a free consultation, called Bill Black, the exit coach at 866-370-3774. Call today. Thank you for listening to Exit Coach Radio. Want to keep your personal number private but still stay connected? With line 2, you can get a second phone line right on your device with a super simple app and no need for another phone. Whether it's for online shopping, dating, or shielding your main number from spam, Line 2 is an easy way to manage. It all. Ready for peace of mind without breaking the bank? Call, text, block, and more for only 999. Get started with line 2.com/auudio or download line 2 in any app store today. Line 2, your second line simplified.