How To Build A Hiring Powerhouse (and how you can replicate ours).

When Taylor wrote The End of Jobs, he spoke about why apprenticeships are one of the best ways to learn entrepreneurship and thrive in the new economy.

After receiving dozens of emails from readers asking where to find apprenticeships, Taylor put together a simple landing page to collect emails of those interested in finding opportunities. He would occasionally stumble upon apprenticeships on Twitter and Facebook, and many of those readers looking for them simply didn’t have the network or connections to know they were available.

Around the time I started working with Taylor in 2016, and with the list steadily growing, we saw GetApprenticeship as something that could potentially stand on its own two feet as a recruiting service. I built a website and notified the budding apprentices, and we both figured out a pricing model for our matchmaking service so that it would be a no-brainer for employers.

GetApprenticeship has been running for just over a year now, and we’re delighted to have helped dozens of clients and apprentices access amazing opportunities through the site.

During this time, Taylor and I have built a small, agile business that delivers results while being extremely time and cost-effective for our clients. We’ve figured out how to build a niche recruiting service that is low-cost, has a ~70% placement success rate, provides a quick turnaround time, and offers virtually no risk to employers if they don’t end up hiring someone (via our money-back guarantee).

As far as I know, there isn’t another service in the recruitment space that can claim these same stats. We’re super proud of what we’ve achieved, so in this post I’m going to share exactly what we did to get there. I’m going to break down what our processes are, all the steps you should take, and how our thought process on hiring has led us to where we are.

Interested in improving your own internal hiring process? If you’re an online business owner interested in hiring new talent for your company, this detailed guide will break down everything we’ve learned hiring apprentices for our clients, so you can take what we’ve learned and apply it as you see fit.

What Makes GetApprenticeship Different.

In the recruitment space, there’s a big focus on an applicant’s skills, experience, and references. Recruiters work with companies who specify certain traits and criteria for a new employee, and the recruiter gets to work manually sourcing people who meet the description.

There isn’t anything wrong with the way that the traditional recruitment model works, but we could see the formula of “Find an amazing employee for y company in position x meeting z criteria” didn’t necessarily have to be constrained to the metrics above.

We saw that this model of recruiting might actually be suffering from a bad case of illegibility, and the wisdom of CEOs such as Warren Buffett and Elon Musk led us to believe there may be other metrics we could focus on to provide a higher rate of placement success for our clients.

One of the benefits of helping companies hire apprentice applicants instead of employees further along in their careers, is that it gave us the ability to bypass those traditional metrics. While sourcing applicants for the clients we worked with, we decided to try and shoot for more qualitative, non-binary markers of someone’s future success.

Instead of looking at experience, we focused on openness to growth and learning. Instead of looking at credentials, we looked for demonstration of self-taught skills. Instead of looking at bare stats, we focused on culture fit and personality.

We were able to do this largely because we were running a small recruitment operation, often only trying to hire applicants for one or two clients at a given time. This gave us ample opportunity to perfect our process and our criteria, custom tailor our applicant selections, and think hard about which applicants would be best for our client’s companies.

Hiring the Personal Way: Why You Shouldn’t Always Trust The Bare Stats

Essentially, what we wanted to do while sourcing apprentice applicants for our clients through GetApprenticeship was what any founder or CEO would do when hiring for their own company. We did take some of the traditional metrics into account of course, such as an applicant’s previous work experience, but we weighted them much lower than some of our metrics. Here are some of the principles we used as a foundation for our hiring process:

Heuristics over Rules: We use very few hard and fast rules for excluding an applicant, and apart from initial disqualifications we’ll discuss below, everyone who applies gets a fair look.

Strengths over Weaknesses: We look for the one to three essential characteristics an applicant must have as specified by our client, and evaluate them with those in mind. If you think like a venture capitalist, you wouldn’t disqualify someone for a weakness; you’d only focus on relevant strengths.

Look for Culture Fit: We go by the dictums of “hire someone who, if the situation were different, you would want to work for them.”, or “hire someone who you would be happy to see if you were walking down the beach on vacation.” Making sure someone fits into your company is far more important than how their credentials sound on paper.

Look for Results Orientation: Results orientation means the applicants talk in terms of “I hosted a conference and we generated 200 sales leads, of which 40 turned into customers for a 5K MRR increase.” Non-results orientation means they say “We hosted a conference and it was good. I’m not sure how many leads we got.” Having a results-oriented individual in your company can change it in positive ways you may not expect.

Look for Self-Organization: Does the applicant acknowledge their work environment and how that makes them productive or unproductive? Has this person actively thought about how they work and how it influences the results they create?

When helping our clients hire entry level talent such as apprentices, it was important to look at qualitative metrics such as these in order to determine who looked most likely to have future success. With these principles in mind, it was easy to then build our hiring process around them.

How to Hire Quickly, Cheaply, and Effectively.

Getting Started and Writing Your Job Description

The first step to bringing someone new onto your team is to define the basics. What role are you hiring for? What experience level do they need to be effective in the role? How much will they be paid? These are the questions that will serve as the foundation for all the steps going forward.

Figure out exactly who you’re hiring, who your ideal candidate is, how long you want them to stick around, and what you can offer them in terms of compensation and bonuses. More explicitly, why would someone want to come and work for you or your company? Now is the time to explore some of the foundational questions of your business and how you are making impact.

Once you have all the key pieces of information together for who you want to hire, it’s time to put together a job description. I’ve already written a detailed guide for how to write a killer job description here.

Some key takeaways to remember from the job description writing process:

1. Sell, sell, sell. Remember to sell your position to your ideal applicant as though you were writing a sales letter for a new product. Target your job description to your ideal new employee, and it will be sure to attract that type of applicant.

2. Use clear structure while giving plenty of detail. I’ve given our outline that we use in the killer job description guide, but in reality you can use any one you want. Just make sure you are super clear about the benefits of the position, and what the requirements, outcomes, and terms are for the position.

Publishing and Promoting the Position

After you’ve got your job description written, it’s time to publish it so you can promote it and have people apply. Publish the job description as a new post on your website’s blog as you would normally do, and apply all necessary formatting. Next, you’ll need to set up a mechanism that will allow people to apply.

Setting Up the Application Mechanism

Add an ‘Easter Egg’ somewhere in the Job Description.

One useful trick we use, and that we talk about in a bit more detail in the job description guide, is including some sort of instant disqualifier embedded in the post that will carry over into the application. It serves the function of eliminating applicants who don’t read the job description properly. This group includes those who aren’t fully serious about the position.

The Easter Egg will usually be a single word you prompt the applicant to use in response to a question in the application form, which we’ll show you how to implement now.

Add an application form at the end of the Job Description.

To collect applications, you’ll need to set up some type of submission form. The easiest and best method is through using Google Forms, or by using the great service Paperform (paid).

To use Google Forms to collect responses, simply create a new form and add the following questions:

1. Name
2. Email
3. Link to Youtube Video — We recommend asking your applicants to submit a short (2-minute) Youtube video as part of their application. Especially important if you are hiring remotely, a short video will allow you to get a much better feel for someone than reading a stale application. Ask yourself, is this someone I’d like to go to lunch or get a drink with? If the answer is no, it’s probably not the right person for your company.
4. Links to Personal Sites — If the applicant has social media, LinkedIn, or a personal blog, ask them to link it here.
5. Links to Previous Work — Ask your applicant to share some of their previous work relevant to the position.
6. Anything Else You’d Like to Add? — This section will be where you encourage your applicant to place the ‘Easter Egg’ mentioned in the previous section.
7. Skype ID
8. Earliest Possible Start Date

Applications Open Period: Promoting the Position

Once you’ve published the position on your site and set up a mechanism for receiving applications, it’s time to promote the position through as many avenues as you have available to you. Below is a list of viable promotion channels to give you an idea:

Your own email list — Often, the best applicants for your company come from within your own audience. If you have a decent sized email list, it’s always a good idea to send out a notification and let them know you’re hiring.

Forums / Reddit — If your company is in a specific niche, it’s worth spending a few minutes finding forums or subreddits that are related, and letting people there know you have a position available. This has varying levels of success, but you can sometimes find good applicants this way.

Job Boards — For most small businesses, posting paid positions on job boards becomes prohibitively expensive after the first two or three (usually coming in at around $200–350 for each post). There are some free options out there (such as Indeed), but typically you will have to pay to post on most large job boards.

Social Media — If your company has a good social media presence, let the position be known that way. It’s also a good idea to post it on your own personal profiles (especially Twitter and LinkedIn if you have them), as there are likely people within your own professional circle who may be a good fit for the role. Facebook Groups are another great option here.

Applications Closing Period

After a few weeks to a month of leaving the applications open (or once you’re satisfied with the numbers), you can then close the submissions by removing the link to the Google Form from your job description page. Make sure your Google Form is set to “Not Accepting Responses” by navigating to the “Responses” tab and clicking the swiper. Replace the link on the job post with some text saying something along the lines of, “Sorry, applications have closed for this position.”

A week before you close the applications, it may also be a good idea to send out a reminder to your email list or do a final round of promotion on social media and the forums you posted on.

Sorting the Applicants

Once you’ve closed your applications, you’ll be left with a Google Form full of submissions to sort through. If you’ve received a lot of applications, this may seem daunting at first, but I’m going to walk through a quick and easy way to put all the information into a central place so it’ll be easier to decipher.

Exporting the data.

In Google Forms, navigate to the “Responses” tab, and select the green button you can see in the image below. Select “Create New Spreadsheet.”

Now you should have an exported spreadsheet with all the responses. Make a copy of our Applicant Filtering Spreadsheet, then copy and paste the data into the first tab, “1. Disqualifier.”

Disqualification Round.

Navigate to the “1. Disqualifier” tab, and only copy across the responses that included the “Easter Egg” word in response to the question “Anything Else You’d Like to Add?”. Make sure you organize all the responses into the correct headings for the next sections.

This round is important, as it allows you to immediately skip over all those who didn’t read your job description properly. 80–90% of applicants won’t include the instant disqualifier in their application. Inability to follow basic instructions is a great way to weed out people fast and includes a surprisingly large amount of the general population.

Gut Check Round.

After copying all the applicants who followed instructions into the “1. Disqualifier” tab, it’s time to go through and read all the responses and watch all the supplied videos. While watching the videos, make sure to note how you feel the applicant will fit the role in regards to company culture. This is a purely personal choice, so keep in mind not to be too harsh and try to be as objective as possible. Once you’ve decided on who will make it through, copy the applicants and their data across to the next tab — “2. Gut Check.”

Evaluation Criteria.

By this point, you’ll have a list of applicants who you are relatively happy with, so the next thing you’ll need is some type of mechanism to sort through and decide who is going to make it to the interview stage. This is what the evaluation tab will help you accomplish.

Start by copying the applicants from the “2. Gut Check” tab into the “3. Evaluation” tab. From here, you’ll be faced with five evaluation criteria, where you’ll rank each criteria from one to five. What you’re going to do is review each applicant’s videos and written responses again, and then give a rating for each criteria using the scale.

Focused on Long Term Growth: Do they have a long term mindset? Do any of their statements indicate a long time frame of thinking about their goals or aspirations?

Evidence of Past Projects: One of the biggest determinants of future success is evidence of past success. Put simply, look for people who do things.

“Heck Yes” or no?: Go with the gut-level reaction from viewing the applicant’s video or written responses. As Derek Sivers might ask, Is it a “heck yes,” or no? Does this person seem like they could be among the best in the industry for this type of role within five years?

Do They Match Up With Company Culture / Values: How would this person fit with your current team, your standards of behavior, or the general “culture” of the company? Does this seem like someone who’ll be a great fit?

Positive Outlook: What sort of emotional affect is expressed through the applicant’s video and written responses? Do they seem enthusiastic about the opportunity, or do they dwell in negativity? Be conscious of what energy you choose to bring into your company or expose to your team.

Other considerations:

• If this is your first hire, don’t hire someone exactly like yourself in terms of strength/weaknesses. Look for someone with complementary domain experience. For example, if you are a great developer, look for someone with a design or marketing edge.
• After watching the video, you want to be excited about the possibility of working with this person. You want to have the feeling that you have found the one. If you have any hesitation, or if you find yourself thinking you want to bring candidates in just to test them a little more, then screen them out. Only interview those whose profile appears to be a strong match.

Once you’ve graded each applicant using a one to five scale for each question, you will have a summary showing each applicant’s total score on the right hand side of the spreadsheet. Consider this number a helpful tool that shows what conclusions you have come to semi-objectively about key traits for each applicant. Let it inform your decision, not decide it for you. You may be surprised what the numbers reveal, sometimes contrary to your initial gut reactions from watching applicant videos.

You aren’t constrained by these questions or criteria we’ve used here. If there is something specific you’re looking for in your application such as required experience or technical ability, be sure to add them to your criteria.

Try to get down to the top three or top six (maximum) final applicants, then move them across into the final tab of the spreadsheet, “Top 6.”

Interviewing

Once you’ve decided on your top three to six candidates, it’s time to start scheduling interviews so you can really get a good feel for who these applicants are and if they’ll be a good fit or not.

Luckily, I’ve already written a detailed interviewing guide you can read here.

Some key takeaways from the above guide:

Schedule Aggressively: It’s important to try and schedule all of your interviews close together in order to avoid recency bias, and to reduce the amount of time for the hiring process. Ideally, you want to get all of the interviews wrapped up so you can return to more revenue-driving opportunities.

Make sure you prepare properly: Watch all of the videos and read all of the written responses once again before the interview. Make sure you note down any concerns or big questions you have for each applicant. When the interview is occuring, make sure you ask all of the questions you’ve prepared earlier.

Use video if interviewing online: Body language and nonverbal cues are important. If you’re interviewing online, make sure you have video enabled. Ease into the interview questions, and use our suggested questions list as a starting point to supplement any more specific questions you prepared earlier.

Post-interview: Make sure you write down notes and impressions while they are still fresh. Grade each candidate on value match, past work, trajectory, and domain experience, in that order of importance.

Final Selection

At the end of the day, hiring is a complex decision and research suggests that complex decisions are best

made at an intuitive, gut level.

If you’re having trouble choosing between candidates, get a good night’s sleep, think about it some more from a rational/objective point of view, and if you still can’t decide, then the best decision is to go with your gut.

Action Steps and Resources

1. Keep in mind our hiring philosophy — Heuristics over Rules, Strengths Over Weaknesses, Look for Culture Fit and Look for Results Orientation.
2. Put Together Your Job Description — [How to Write a Killer Job Description] Sell the position hard, make sure it’s detailed, and include an easter egg somewhere in the text. Add a way to collect applications.
3. Promote the Position — Notify your email list if you have one, post to social media, and post on relevant forums and subreddits. Do this multiple times for the length of the application period, especially towards the end before you close.
4. Sort the Applicants — Use our Applicant Sorting Spreadsheet to sort through the data given in the applications, and whittle the applicants down to those you actually want to spend time interviewing.
5. Conduct Interviews — [The Risk-Free Method for Interviewing Job Candidates] Review your applicants, prepare a list of relevant questions, and take plenty of notes.
6. Final Decision — Keep in mind the hiring philosophy, don’t stress too much, and go with your intuition. If you follow these steps, you’ll have greatly reduced the risk of hiring the wrong person. You’ll hire someone you don’t mind being around, is growth oriented, matches your essential criteria, and is just as keen as you are to make a huge impact on your organization. Best of luck!

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