Trevor Longino Of CrowdTamers On How To Hire The Right Person

An Interview With Ken Babcock

Every person you hire should get a chance to work with you first. For a decade now I’ve done pilot projects as part of recruiting. A little paid 15 hour gigs. I’ve had people go through this and they say, ‘Oh man, this job is too intense for me. I don’t wanna work in a company where this is the expected tempo.’

When a company is looking to grow, the choice of who to hire can sometimes be an almost existential question. The right hire can dramatically grow a company, while the wrong hire can be very harmful to morale and growth. How can you know you are hiring the right person? What are the red flags that should warn you away from hiring someone? In this interview series, we are talking to business leaders who can share insights and stories from their experience about “How To Hire The Right Person”. As a part of this series I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Trevor Longino.

Trevor Longino launched 13 startups from $0 to $2MM+ in ARR over the last decade, including Unito.io, Gog.com, Kontakt.io, and ThePrizeFactory.com. He has launched 50 startups, mentored about 200 more, taught thousands, and taught marketing, branding, growth, and revenue to more than 1,000 startups at accelerators all over Europe and North America.

He is the founder of CrowdTamers, an agency that launches new startups and new products, and is a small-scale angel investor as well.

Thank you for joining us in this interview series. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’?

I’ve been doing startup marketing for 20 years. I’ve worked in a number of different companies as head of marketing, director of marketing, VP CMO, whatever you wanna call it. Over the years I’ve probably hired 200 plus people.

The very start of my career I worked in video games and hired a bunch of folks for EA — Electronic Art, one of the largest video game publishers in the world. And then from there, I went on to going into startup marketing and I’ve launched 13 different companies from zero to more than 2 million a year, as mentioned in your little bio.

I’m a father of three kids. I’ve traveled all over the world. I’ve lived in Florida where I’m from, in Poland — I lived there for a few years. Currently, I’m in Canada, Montreal and I’m interested as a founder, an entrepreneur, and as a business person in building companies where the teams are empowered to do phenomenal work because most companies are built on optimizing for everyone to do adequate work. I think with a little more intent, you can build a much smarter company.

And what finally got me to stop being a freelancer, which I had done for years after I left my last job and found CrowdTamers, my company, as an agency with employees was the decision to say, what happens if I try and build a company where I think we are empowering people to be extraordinary.

You’ve had a remarkable career journey. Can you highlight a key decision in your career that helped you get to where you are today?

There are a few things that looking backwards are tremendously informative, but in the moment you don’t understand the path that they are charting.

I’m not the kind of person who tends to say, “this is my five year plan for what my career is going to be. I’m going to stick with it. Be what may, and I must follow this path because it is the one I set down”.

The first real key decision, I think for me, was my very first job when I was 14 was website developer.

This is back in 1996. This is a long time ago. And I was hired to help write an ebook sales website for a dude who sold word documents and he wanted to be able to sell them on his own website. And so I spent maybe eight months writing this little e-commerce site. This is before PayPal was really a thing.

This was all done with SSL 1.0 and Ajax and everything ran server side. And it was terrible. It gave me an appreciation for technology. It gave me an analytical mind in tackling a lot of these marketing problems, but it also told me I don’t want to be a developer for a living. I was good with computers — that seemed like a sensible career to take. And I went, ‘oh no, don’t do that’. Then I moved into marketing for a while. Did design, did copywriting and did a number of things.

The next, really big key decision was moving to Poland. I’m not from Poland. I’m from Florida. And I went to join a video game startup in Warsaw called Good Old Games or gog.com. I moved there with no idea what was going to come from moving to a place like Poland into the year 2010.

Everyone still thought of it as that’s basically just little Russia, right? Everyone had visions as they were, as I told them I was moving you’re going to this grim gray, like just post world war II, awful dismal place. And it wasn’t. I loved the company I worked with. I loved being in Poland. I loved being in central Europe. It gave me both an understanding for how business is different. Different parts of the world, how cultures can be different and how bringing a uniquely American mindset into marketing is tremendously valuable in many markets.

What’s the most impactful initiative you’ve led that you’re particularly proud of?

Right now, what I’m working on, I think may be the most impactful thing of my career. I set myself a goal a year ago to help a thousand startups reach a million dollars a year in revenue by the end of 2027. They’re not all going to be clients. They’re not all going to be people who pay me. That’s not my goal.

What I do is I help startups figure out how to answer those big three questions of: Who is your audience? What is their problem? How do you offer to solve it? This is a systematic thing you can do, a repeatable thing that you can do. By teaching other people, this system, this process, I’m enabling other entrepreneurs who are product focused or technology focused to demystify the problem of go-to-market; systematize the creativity required to take different approaches to your product and prove with data that this is the way to build their business and make it work. And so the goal I made for myself, I think, is already quite impactful.

I’ve mentored and taught maybe 200 startups already and I’m about to publish one book right now, and I’m publishing another book by the end of the year, putting together courses being asked to speak at events and mentor startups. So there’s really a lot of impact for me as far as what’s changing for me as an entrepreneur and as a business owner, but also for all the companies I touch. And the rewarding part of it is, when I’m a mentor for very impressive accelerators like Founder Institute or Startup Montreal or Startup Hub Warsaw or whatever. I’m not, we’re not making money for this. I’m helping other entrepreneurs make their dreams successful.

How about a mistake you’ve made and the lesson you took away?

I ​​tell almost everybody I work with. I’ve been in the game for 20 something years.

In growth marketing, in startup marketing, in startup launching, and I am still wrong about 70% of the time.

The trick is to be wrong for a couple hundred bucks and to be right for a couple tens of thousands. With that mindset in how I approach marketing, it has been hard to take any mistake I’ve made as a complete one hundred percent loss. I can think of a couple examples of things I’ve screwed up that were enough of a setback where I spent a year getting things back where they should be.

I can think of when I was head of marketing at a company in Poland called Contact and doing quite well there; I helped the company reach number one position in the industry for its particular hardware device they made. I was asked to move over to become head of product because they were having a hard time shipping product and developing product quickly enough.

I had shown I was good at building and growing and scaling teams and systematizing stuff. I was effective at the job; the two years up to when I was made head of product, they had shipped no new product, nothing new had come out of the company. And over the seven months I was there as head of product, we shipped five pieces of hardware and two pieces of software: huge change in velocity, the focus, and what the company was trying to accomplish.

At the end of seven months, I had gone into this with the explicit understanding with the CEO. I said, ‘Look, you need a bad cop. You need someone to shake things up, someone to make this team understand that they can perform if they just move with more intent’. At the end of those seven months, I realized I hated being the bad cop, but I had set myself up that way and I was backed into a position where I’d hired my replacement in the marketing team and I hated the work I was doing in the product team.

So I left. Playing that role, being that person and realizing that all of my work previously, I could pretty honestly say I brought my authentic self. And then here was a case where I played real hard, like charging real pain in the butt guy and it worked, but I didn’t like who I was every morning when I woke up and no one in the team liked me.

So the next job I took, the CEO at that company — where I then became a CMO for a company called UTO at Montreal. He said, look I talked to some people at your previous company. They said you were a real a hole. And I explained to him like, yeah, I was playing a part. I don’t think I’m usually that way.

Definitely he had some concerns about me when I came on board, but then he found out when I was trying to be more me, unless that role was a very different person.

How has mentorship played a role in your career, whether receiving mentorship or offering it to others?

I mentor very extensively.

Right now I’m part of two or three mentoring marketplaces. I mentor for Founder Institute and for Startup Montreal. I’m involved in a couple other both European and North American accelerators and incubators as a mentor. It has two benefits. I think one is, I just like helping people and both my parents as I grew up with teachers.

So it’s in the blood, right. Explaining processes and helping people understand that it’s just what was in the air as I matured. Also, one of the best ways to understand something is to teach it to somebody else. Almost every blog post I write, every book chapter I write, every thread I create on social media where I talk about answering a complex problem, started with somebody I taught somewhere who was having a problem that I could answer. And forcing yourself to think, how do I explain this to a Neo fight effectively, then forces you to write more clearly. So I find that mentorship is immensely rewarding for me, not necessarily diminutively — I don’t make money off of it, but it forces discipline and thought and consciousness and intent into how I approach solving a problem, which then lets me systematize and change how I’m doing things in my company — mostly Interesting thing, gives me notoriety and in the space, there’s a bunch of benefits beyond just helping a founder out.

Developing your leadership style takes time and practice. Who do you model your leadership style after? What are some key character traits you try to emulate?

So there are a few unforgivable traits in a leader. In my opinion, one is that they are dishonest. Another is that they demand things of the team, but the team won’t do. Another is they demand things of the team that they won’t do. So if the leader said, “Hey, I need you all to pull an all-nighter. Peace out. I’m gonna go home.” That’s not a leader that might be a boss.

Leadership style- I pulled from a couple people whom I’ve worked with, who I have tremendous respect for the managing director of GOG when I worked there — G Berg. He did a great job of taking the chaos of the very many senior people outside of GOG who had many different competing demands and filtering it into a coherent set of objectives to pass on to the team. He was a buffer between the chaos of the outside world and the internal tranquility that he created inside his department. When I saw the difference between the demands were placed on him and the way he structured them for us, that was illuminating to me.

And in my agency or whenever I’m managing teams, I try very much to be that buffer. There may be 30 things that people want out there, I organize it and put it into where ‘this is what we’re accomplishing’ and we move things in sequence rather than just running around with your head on fire.

One of the people managers, process managers, CEO, deep thinkers, who I’ve worked with, who I also have tremendous respect for, was the CEO of Unito, Mark Bocher. His ability to take an analytical mindset and apply it to working with people was something that was a missing skill for me. I’m not naturally a huge talent with people. I’m an introvert. I’m very idea oriented and finding ways and building habits, processes and systems that encourage people management, people connection, people nurturing is a skill I still always grapple with.

My leadership style is very much here’s idea, here’s process and explain things clearly. You go off and run on your own with as much freedom as you can possibly handle. And that’s a mix of some things from people like them, from people like Reed Hastings, right? No rules from Netflix.

I don’t know that there’s really a movement. There’s not a trench of people who talk about this, but part of how I’m building my company, part of what I want to do as I build Crowd Tamers, which is an agency that fundamentally is a quite commercially driven businesses is an idea that — too much of how capitalism runs is designed to extract the maximum value out of every worker.

And I don’t understand why that’s necessary. The idea to me is like junk food versus healthy food, right? The calories are more easily available in a potato chip than they are in a piece of spinach. No one’s going to argue that a potato chip is better for you than spinach, but it’s easier to get more calories out of a similar weight.

Likewise, in capitalism, if you’re constantly only driving the utmost, squeezing every single scent out of every worker’s productivity, you’re eating junk food as far as a business is concerned because you’re sacrificing long term benefit of an employee for the short term profit of ‘if I work you hard enough, I’ll get a little more out of you.’

If you don’t wear people quite as hard, if you have a little more respect for them as humans, as teammates, as coworkers, they’ll stick around longer. People really develop their skill, their mastery, their expertise in a job. It takes almost a year from when you start at a job to when you are really banging on all four cylinders for it and rife in the agency space is the fact that turnover is after 18 months, people leave.

You’ve overworked them. You’ve burned them out. You sucked them dry and they leave the industry. The number of people in agency space who are my age and are much less older is very rare because the work is so demanding. But if you build a company with the idea that we don’t have to work everybody to death; let’s figure out how to offer something unique enough that competing on price doesn’t mean we’re forced to watch every single penny as closely. Let’s train people to be very skilled. Let’s empower them to be makers of as big a decision as you can possibly push away from management so they move faster. What that means is that your team is a bunch of high powered experts aligned on a problem together. And when you do that, when you build that team, you’re creating a company where the org chart is as flat as I can make it.

There’s somebody who has to be in charge, because someone has to go find the client’s work and determine what we’re going to do for them and there’s everybody else in the company. When you have that flat org chart, you don’t have this distance, this feeling of, ‘oh, he’s the boss, he must know best.’ My employees who are working with me know I’m honest. I’m thinky. I’m prone to over talking about things. I try very hard to be consciously aware of the fact that I need to pay attention to people, leave space for them, and think about their wants and needs.

But I sometimes overlook it because I’m an idea person first and I’m constantly fighting that urge of ‘don’t reward the team, don’t celebrate this. It was your job to close this deal with the client. It was your job to make a good ad or a good piece of copy. Why celebrate it? That’s the wrong way to be. I know intellectually, so leaving space for that is important.

Those key character traits, right? Freedom, power, independence, clarity. If you do all that, you’re building a company that I think is designed around rewarding expertise and rewarding skill. Trying to build that environment where you have the room to be extraordinary is the role of the CEO. And if you allow mediocrity and grit to come into the gears of this machine and drag everything down, then your business doesn’t run as well. Then you do start to have to worry about how do I extract every last penny from my work? How do I make these people as productive as possible, because you haven’t brought people on board who want to accomplish the goals that your business should do.

Thank you for sharing that with us. Let’s change paths a little bit. The pandemic forced many companies to adapt. Implementing remote onboarding and professional development — in addition to maintaining culture — challenged organizations. Can you share with us the challenges you have faced, with remote onboarding and hiring? How have your internal processes evolved as a result?

All right. I have run remote teams for 15 years. Not only remote teams, I have run both remote teams and in-person teams. My current company is fully remote.

I was running remote teams where I had a team of 45 marketers in India when I lived in Florida back in 2006. Back in those days, there wasn’t task management software, or video calls. We built our own VOIP system for phone calls and every Sunday morning, I would upload an Excel spreadsheet to an FTP drive.

They would download the Excel spreadsheet and I would have a call with them at 9:30 PM on Sunday night, which is the beginning of their day. We’d walk through all the deliverables with what was going on. I’ll tell them ‘here’s all what you have to do, and then every night as they finish their work, they would upload what they’d accomplished to the FTP drive. In the morning I checked the drive, I’d see what it accomplished. So since back then I’ve been doing this kind of work. I’m familiar with remote work. Remote onboarding does have some challenges.

What I have found in remote cultures, one of the most successful traits you can adopt is being extremely prolific in your online documentation of things and your asynchronous documentation of things.

Before I hired my first employee in CrowdTamers, I believe I had written a 22 page company guide. The company guide includes things like: what’s our mission? What’s our goal? What are our commandments? What do we accomplish? How do we do it? Where do you go to look for resources, who owns what part of the work in this company?What are our policies? How do we collaborate? All these sorts of things. I had all this put down before I had one employee.

All the routine processes we do, the whole company contributes to. One of our key commandments is overcommunicate, asynchronously. And as part of that, document processes as you create them. If you do it twice, write it down because if you do it twice odds are, you’re going to have to do it again, and it’d be really handy if somebody else could do it in the future.

So that idea of if you do it twice, right down means even silly things like how to validate someone’s email address on hunter IO before you send an email out to a contact that you just discovered, right? We have a process for that. It’s got a little loom video and eight bullet points.

Is that overdoing the documentation? Maybe you hire somebody junior. They’ve never done it before. It could be very empowering to not feel like a fool when you ask the question, but to be able to surf to the answer instead.

So that onboarding then comes with one documentation of all the processes. Two clear areas of ownership. We have an area of responsibility document for company, where everybody is assigned what they do in the company. As we hire more and more people, you add more and more resolution, right?

Originally the AORs doc is literally just with everything and my name. Then I hired my first employee and I had her areas of responsibility and then everything else with my name. Now I’ve got my eighth employee coming on board at the crowd teamers, right? This is quite a higher resolution. That’s good for the employee to know what they own. That’s good for the other team members to understand what this person now inherits.

As part of any recruiting process, I generate a work document that says here’s what this person’s job will be. Here’s the goals we want them to achieve. Here are the tasks that will make that goal happen. And in some cases we do OKRs for like, proper metrics and everything old enough for all team members because when you just started on board, it’s hard to have all that properly scope down and measure. That takes care of onboarding, right? You push tremendously online tremendously. Async.

In my case, everything sits in Notion and everyone just knows to go there. To find information, you go to Notion. To have a discussion, you go to slack and that’s all the tools, the power of the whole company.

Okay. Hiring, being fully remote, surprisingly hasn’t changed much for me. The interviews have switched from the second interview being in person back when I would hire in person to the second interview being remote. But my cadence has for at least a decade been phone screen, just pay if you’ve been to the website, do you know who we are? Get an application, right? Or go find an applicant, which you’ll talk about in a little bit, then take a phone call at the interested people, that’s like very short, say 10 minutes.

If that passes the immediate sniff test. Cool. Schedule a follow up, a little more in depth. I really look more at your resume. I’m more aware of who you are like. And in the numbers bucket is Hey, applicants are a couple of hundred, right? You go find a couple dozen good potential people when you’re hunting for them.

You do screens of maybe 30, 10 minute screens. You do first interviews of maybe 15. Of those 15 for first screening, you bring it down to maybe five. For the second in person interview. Of those five, you have all the ones who you think could legit maybe do the job, come for an interview with the team where they talk to the team and the hiring manager isn’t there.

So my case right now at CrowdTamers is I’m the CEO and hiring manager. I talked to the whole rest of the company. Back when I was CMO or VP of marketing, whatever I’d say, ‘Hey, come meet the rest of the team’. I’ll step out of the room. That’s done online now, right? It used to be face-to-face. Then there’s a pilot project and the pilot project has always been remote pretty much.

Because frequently people have daytime jobs while they’re looking for work and it’ll be, ‘Hey, here’s a 15 and 20 hour little consultation I’m going to pay you for. I’m going to give you a distinct product. If you can do the job that tells me you might be able to do your actual job at the company. If you can’t do the job or you don’t like the job, and maybe we aren’t a good fit.

So that process has survived intact. Despite some of these elements moving fully online. I know many people put a great stock in meeting people face to face, getting all those subtle body cues and everything. I have found video calls take care of all that. And honestly a personality assessment, like a Clifton strengths test I have found also is tremendously illuminating into how someone’s brain works.

When you’re down to your last five candidates, it’s tremendously worth it to invest in that, to see who you have in your candidate who fits the way you think the mind should work of the person you wish to hire.

With the Great Resignation/Reconsideration in full swing, many job seekers are reevaluating their priorities in selecting a role and an employer. How do you think this will influence companies’ approaches to hiring, talent management, and continuous learning?

So that’s three questions because those are all different stages of the employee life cycle of the company. I think it’s really handy to think about employees much the same way I think about clients in a SaaS product or an agency. You think of the lifetime value of your client, right? You spend $10,000 for a client on board. If they generated a hundred thousand dollars in revenue for you. Cool. This is worth it, right? When you’ve got your employees, it is actually handy from the manager’s point for you to think of them in a similar type of fashion where you say, okay, I’m gonna spend $7,000 worth of both labor and just money to recruit this person.

How long do they have to be an employee before they’ve paid off that investment? And then can I double or triple or 10 X what it costs to bring them onboard the company. So the first thing is hiring.

With the great resignation now top of mind for everybody, I feel more comfortable than I ever have before in going hunting for good candidates. It always used to be a little bit awkward. You see somebody, they’ve been in a company six months a year. But they really fit the profile of who you think might be good for your role. Do you reach out? Maybe not. Because they just started a new gig. How much interest are they going to have in jumping to another opportunity? Nowadays, anybody who I see if they started last month at some place. No worries. Let me reach out to them. If my pitch is more appealing to them than their current gig, they’ll hop. And my pitch has to be about more than just, ‘am I hiring opportunity? The offer I make to everybody who I’ve recruited over the last decade, isn’t just about a salary because the salary is rarely phenomenal when you’re in a small startup or in a bootstrap company. You’re not paying top of the market, but you are offering other opportunities. — Professional growth. Choose to learn from somebody who’s been doing marketing for a long time. Opportunities to take a bigger chunk of the pie. All of these things are enabled and so you lean heavily on those. to bring people from maybe a gig at a place like Shopify or Facebook or Google and say, look, you’ve got really good skills but they’re going to waste. Come somewhere where they matter. Having a mission driven company, like my current company, where I take a thousand startups to a million dollars a year in revenue.

Also, it’s a big draw. People wanna be part of something ambitious. This is not just an agency where what do I wanna do? I wanna make a million dollars and you go, yeah. What do you wanna do for your clients? And you go, I wanna make a million dollars, right? No one really wants to work for that guy.I wanna help a thousand entrepreneurs make their dreams come true. Sign me up. Better offer.

Talent management then, as you start to recruit, you have to understand as you recruit and onboard them. One of the things I ask everybody who I am recruiting even before they’re hired is, ‘what do you wanna learn most in the next year?’ That’s tremendously informative for a number of reasons. One is there some people go, oh, not much. I probably don’t wanna hire you. You should always be learning. But two, if what they wanna learn is within the realm of what their job will touch, a hundred percent. It’s my role then as their boss, to equip them to learn these things. For all of my employees, I say, look, any Udemy, self-directed course, you wanna buy?

Pick it up? Tell me you bought it. I’ll reimburse you. No questions asked. If you wanna learn how to play guitar on Udemy, I’ll reimburse you. It’s fine. I haven’t set a cap on that for anybody. To be fair, I don’t think I’ve seen anybody spend more than about 200 bucks a quarter. At that point, if you were getting an opportunity to learn something and we have it all in one, one company Udemy account, right? So anybody can now access these videos.

This sort of thing makes it a great opportunity to tell these people when you want to learn this thing, I’m going to equip you to learn this thing. And of course, if it’s something I know about come to me, let’s workshop problems together. Continuous learning to me is a big part of talent management, right? Beyond just regularly touching base once a month with every team member and saying, ‘Hey, how’s life right outside of your nine to five job?’. What’s going on? Is something going very well or is something going very poorly? What can I help you with? One of my employees was in Ukraine and moved to Ukraine November of last year and moved out after I very strongly demanded he do so about seven days before the invasion.

During that whole process of one moving to Ukraine and seeing how to help make this go as well for you and then moving back from Ukraine, in an all fired hurry — being able to be there for them, the sounding board offer help take care of some of the silly logistics issue that crept up, that is a tremendously valuable bond you form with somebody that doesn’t cost all that much in time and money but just showing you care makes a big difference.

Super, thank you for sharing all of that. Next, let’s turn to the main focus of our discussion about hiring the right person. As you know, hiring can be very time consuming and difficult. Can you share 5 techniques that you use to identify the talent that would be best suited for the job you want to fill? Please share an example for each idea.

There are a few key things that you want to do when writing your job description and writing the work document of the tasks these people will be doing that are very important.

Your preparation before you hire is the first of these five techniques. The first thing you wanna make sure you’re doing is preparing adequately for what this role is going to be. It’s easy to say, I want a designer to join my company. Okay. What work will they tackle? And you go, oh we’re thinking about launching a YouTube Channel and we wanna have somebody who can make all the graphics, then upload the videos, edit the videos and share ’em on social media and produce them.

Also we need somebody to come up with ideas for the videos and film them and do all the sound mixing too. So you’ve worked your way backwards from wanting a designer to actually needing a video caster, somebody who’s got a full suite of skills. If you say, oh, we know we want a designer that they won’t be taking care of all this video stuff.

Okay. What are their OKRs? What are their objectives? What’s the work they’re supposed to accomplish in the first 90 days? Then you work out what that work is supposed to be. This accomplishes two things. One is it lets you build a very good job description. And when you talk to somebody as an applicant and they ask, can you tell me what this role will look like? Being able to open up a document and saying, Hey, here’s the tasks, the goals and the KPIs we’re measuring. For an achievement type of personality, which is who you will for many roles, want to be hiring, that’s tremendously empowering, right? Oh yes, I can do that. I want to do that. Let me do it. That’s one.

Two, once you’ve got this scoped out when you post to Indeed or Angelist or monster.com or wherever; the overwhelming majority of what you get sent your way is going to be garage. There’s a reason why almost everybody in the HR space uses NLP resume scanners to discard 95% of what lands in their inbox. Actually I’ve hired a couple hundred jobs. I’ve probably had 50,000 resumes come in for those couple hundred jobs. And it is not because the job was so demanding. I didn’t hire more people because most resumes are just like people who will apply to literally every single job on LinkedIn. And you’re like, “dude, your last job experience was a line order cook. Why in the world are you applying for my paid performance marketing management role?”

Because you figure anybody can do marketing. Marketers aren’t that smart so I’ll apply for this. No, come on dude. You might find some good people in the applicant pool. I don’t think I have hired, in the last three or four years, anybody who I didn’t go hunting for.

And going hunting means I know what my job description looks like and I go look, people who currently hold this job. LinkedIn’s a great place to go looking for them. You can pay for the recruiter package. It’s very expensive. You can also just pay for the Linkedin premium, which I think is 60 bucks a month and write nicely worded connection requests to people and try reaching out to them that way. I found that works very well and is way less than recruiter. In this case, what you wanna do is when you’re using LinkedIn premium to connect people and say, Hey, do you want to come work for me? That’s a little bold.

Why I tend to say is, Hey. Your resume looks phenomenal. I’m looking for somebody with your set of skills. Do you know somebody who would be interested? The answer could be me. The answer could also be, I don’t know anybody. Okay, cool. No worries. People who are looking understand what’s being asked, so that technique then lets me find people who currently have a job doing exactly what I want, tell them, ‘You can come work for me’, and that kind of person who’s in great reconsideration. They’ll frequently check out my company. They’ll discover what I do before they answer. And if they go, “Oh, you guys sound cooler than what I’m doing” , you have a talk, right?

So first one, do the prep work. Second one, go hunt for people. Don’t just trust that the right one will land on your door.

Lead by example, during the interviews. If somebody would say, “Hey I’m a super funny guy.” I have never known anybody who was actually funny, who said, oh yeah, I’m hilarious all the time, man. I’m a laugh a minute. If you are funny, it is evident. If you are talking about how your company is building a diverse team of employees in the LGBT space and all races and nationalities and ethnicities, your interviewer for that job better or not be a straight white guy. If you are talking about how your company’s open and honest and rewards deep discussions or you’d rather have somebody be wrong and honest than right in line. Okay. Then you better be able to show that in how you interview.

A tactical example of this- one of the worst questions you can ask in an interview is, ‘what’s your weakness, right?’. Because the answer, if you just ask it that way, he’s gonna be one of two things. I am too organized. I get too lost in being perfect to deliver on time sometimes, or I work too hard. Those are the two complete garbage answers.

Before I ask that question in one of my interviews, I preface this with, ‘Listen, here’s what I’m bad at. As a manager, I’m very good at ideas. I’m very good at explaining things. I’m good at being patient with people and letting their skills develop. But I am so idea driven, I sometimes trample over people’s feelings. I don’t think about their needs as people all the time. I try very hard to intellectually make myself do it, but I forget I tend to over commit on what I can deliver and then I forget about stuff. My team has to be quite patient being like ‘Trevor, you’ve got 50 things to do, you forgot these two that you said you would do’. Oops. And I tend to get my team members, I assume if they aren’t telling me something is wrong that everything’s fine. Those are weaknesses on my part right. Now, if I say to you, ‘Hey, if you were to work with me, what would I find out about you? What would your strengths and weaknesses be?’

I’ve now been open and honest with you and shared some weaknesses that are true human weaknesses. You’re much more likely to be honest with me. And if you’re not, that tells me something too. If after that discussion, somebody still says, oh, I try too hard.’ Given how much I prize honesty in my company, you’re probably not gonna be a good fit for me.

So model the values that matter to your company from the very first moment of an employee’s interaction with you. You’re having 50 phone calls over the course of a month to find that one employee. 49 of those people you talk to won’t matter, one of them will. You don’t know which one so you have to model your company’s key values to every single one of them to make sure the actual employee understands from the first day what matters to you.

That’s three. Four, I really do use personality assessments to tell me about things about people that I wouldn’t get from a conversation. If I know I need somebody who’s going to be diligent and follow up well and keep track of many small details, a personality assessment can give me some insight into the kind of people who are good at that. If I have many candidates and there’s one who’s particularly skilled at that, according to their personality assessment, they may stand out above.

On the flip side, if I need somebody who’s very strategic, somebody who’s big picture, able to set a story, be phenomenal on the phone with people, relate, communicate, be charismatic, some of that shows up in the interview, but some of it being able to validate with an assessment is really handy.

So almost every hire unless your company is huge, has the potential to be a big inflection point for you either way up or down. Investing some money in an assessment of somebody that stands outside of your read of them, whether in person or through video call is very important. I like it a lot.

Lastly, that’s four. Fifth one is — every person you hire should get a chance to work with you first. For a decade now I’ve done pilot projects as part of recruiting. A little paid 15 hour gigs. I’ve had people go through this and they say, ‘Oh man, this job is too intense for me. I don’t wanna work in a company where this is the expected tempo.’

Cool. It’s good that we knew this before you came on board because you haven’t left your old job and I haven’t rejected other candidates who might be a good fit. Tremendous savings in terms of time & heartache to give your top two or three candidates for a role, a pilot project.

Those five are what I do that’s different from other people out there. I think I’ve had tremendous luck hiring high performing teams in three different countries over the world, over the last decade. Pulling together disparate groups of people with different sets of skills and different minds and different ways of behaving and thinking and being into teams that generate 1, 5, 10, 20 million of revenue.

That systematized approach applies broadly to almost any type of recruiting you can do there, whether it’s marketing or not.

In contrast, what are a few red flags that should warn you away from hiring someone?

Chronic dishonesty is going to be a hard, no, for me. There are times you have to be careful with the truth. Why did you leave your last job? You’re not gonna say cause my boss was a philandering a-hole or whatever. You’re going to go, ‘Oh, it was time for me to move on to a new thing. I was just stagnating looking for a new opportunity.’

Some of that is acceptable as a social veil right over what actually happened. But there should be some questions you can push on and look for an honest answer. If you can’t get it, that tells me something about you. Almost every role, if you’ve done your work and you know what the actual deliverables are, you can tie a very direct concrete work to it.

And when you ask that person, give me a concrete example of this concrete work. If they cannot give you precise examples of something, or unless they say I would love to but I can’t because of NDAs, that indicates that they may be either glowing off their expertise a bit, or they weren’t as hands on as they were saying, or even that their memory is not that great. Any of these three things is a tough tough call when you’re hiring somebody. It’s very hard to read attitude in an interview. Some people get very nervous and I personally find I am prone to discount a lot of quirky behavior in an interview, particularly in the beginning when I have an interview, because I know many people have a tremendous grip with fright. If you don’t make allowance for that, you might turn away a good candidate just because their first 10 minutes they were out of their mind with stress.

I try to bring down the emotional temperature, in essence, try to make them relatively less stressed to get a more honest reading of a person.

Because of your role, you are a person of significant influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most people, what would that be? You never know what your ideas can trigger.

So the founding idea of why I gave myself this goal of getting a thousand startups to a million dollars a year in revenue was that I know from personal experience, I am not particularly good at founding technical companies. I’ve founded a couple and I’ve found that working on the dev side of things ends up not being what I want to do. Leading the developers and interfacing in this space between what they want to build and what I think the market requires and the differences in vision between maybe the co-founders: all of those, I just don’t negotiate terribly. I might do better about it now that I’m older than I did the last couple times I tried, but it’s not for me. But I do know how to launch things, I know how to make them successful, more successful than 99% of companies are. Like most companies don’t make a million dollars ever, much less than a million dollars a year.

The best I can think of for me would be to launch a company that fundamentally improves some part of life for the big part of people. But if I’m launching these companies myself, there’s CMO or a fractional CMO, I can only maybe launch five more companies before I’m just too old. But if I create an agency, a knowledge base, a movement of people who understand how to launch their business successfully and their incredible idea can succeed, that’s the movement that I think uses my skill set to better the world, because we don’t really need billionaires as a class of people.

When you reach that kind of wealth, I don’t think you contribute much to the world. We do need millionaires. Millionaires are really upper middle class engines that drive tremendous opportunity. They are the real job creators. They are trying new ideas, disrupting more abundant industries. Those are the people I can get behind people with 1 10 50, a hundred million dollars. They’re the really exciting engine of business. Capitalism is a terrible system, but it is the best one we’ve ever come up with and being able to use the pieces of capitalism to make more millionaires who are building good businesses and socially uplifting their families, their communities with investment and opportunity and capital and all of these things is a tremendous net force for good.

Never mind the fact that of some of those thousand companies I wish to help reach a million dollars a year in revenue, some of them will be building, I don’t know, incredibly dense vertical farms in drought stricken areas of the world to produce 300 X to crop productivity for 95% less water use and just change huge problems that I don’t even begin to know how to address. But if I teach a founder the right way to do it, they can finally make that dream come true. That’s the movement that I care about, that’s the movement I am setting out to make happen. It is the best good I could think of what I could do with myself.

And it is why I set out to build CrowdTamers as an agency. It is why I set out to write these books. It is why I set out to make this approach for go-to-market. Something that I want to spread as wide as I possibly can.

This was truly meaningful! Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise!

Thanks so much for The interview. I hope it has been instructional for you and bye.

About the interviewer. Ken Babcock is the CEO and Co-Founder of Tango. Prior to his mission of celebrating how work is executed, Ken spent over 4 years at Uber riding the rollercoaster of a generational company. After gaining hands-on experience with entrepreneurship at Atomic VC, Ken went on to HBS. It was at HBS that Ken met his Co-Founders, Dan Giovacchini and Brian Shultz and they founded Tango.