A Deep Dive on Hiring

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Questions Asked

Randy Street (3:30)

• Where do you stand on CEOs interviewing every single new hire within their organization? Is this a sign of admirable dedication to people and culture, or a sign of ineffective delegation and a lack of trust in other members of the leadership group?
• Is there a company size threshold that would dictate which of the above approaches is more appropriate?
• Where do you stand on the use of personality profiles/tests as part of the hiring process? How reliable or predictive have you found them to be?
• Should a CEO include members of her management team in the interview process when hiring new members of that team? What if she disagrees with the team’s consensus recommendation?
• Many hiring mistakes seem to manifest when small companies hire executives from much larger companies. Why? Does this challenge or support conventional hiring wisdom?
• What’s the more common hiring mistake: Right-person-wrong-seat, or wrong-person-right-seat?
  
  

Verne Harnish (22:39)

• It seems to be particularly hard for CEOs to hire a “#2” or “right hand” to take some of the day-to-day responsibilities off their plate. What advice would you give to a CEO currently contemplating (but struggling) to make such a hire? Why does this seem to be such a difficult hire for CEOs and entrepreneurs to make?
• When filling these types of roles, why do internal hires tend to work out more frequently than external hires do?
• Many CEOs want to make a key executive hire, but are worried that they don’t have the budget to do it. However, in some cases, the value that these new hires would generate could create the budget bandwidth that these CEOs are seeking. How would you counsel a CEO who currently finds herself stuck in this type of circular logic?
• How do you recommend that CEOs structure “trial periods” when making key executive hires?

AJ Wasserstein (37:43)

• What are some of the generalizable lessons that you can tease out from the hiring mistakes that you made over two decades as a CEO?

Mike Zani (43:40)

• Explain your “head, heart, and briefcase” framework for evaluating talent, and tell us where within that framework do most hiring mistakes tend to take place?
• What are some of the hiring mistakes that you’ve made recently, and what generalizable lessons did you extract from those mistakes?

Steve Divitkos (52:27)

• Audio Blog: Hiring Your Senior Leadership Team

Anthemos Georgiades: Hiring in High Growth Environments (1:12:50)

• Did your company “outgrow” some of its early hires? If so, how did you deal with the reality of having to move on from people who helped you grow so rapidly?
• Was there something in particular that you looked for in your early hires to see whether or not these people had the ability to rapidly scale alongside the company?
• You recently hired a very experienced executive to be your President and COO, a very difficult hire for a lot of Entrepreneurs to make. When considering this hire, what worried you the most? What did you consider as some of the possible pros or cons of making it?

Nicholas Andrews: Hiring for the Finance & Accounting Function (1:27:09)

• What is the difference between a CFO and, say, a VP or Director of Finance & Accounting?
• How does a CEO know whether or not she needs a CFO versus, say, a Controller or a Director of Finance?
• What should CEOs look for in the resumes and interviews? And are there any red flags to be aware of that might be suggestive of a potential bad hire?
• How do you know that a newly hired Finance/Accounting leader is doing a good job? Are there any metrics that might better inform this question?

Rich Mironov: Hiring in Product Management (1:42:40)

• What should CEOs look for when hiring their Product Management leader, and what should they ask in the interview?
• How do you weigh industry experience vs. general Product Management experience, assuming that it’s hard/rare to find somebody who has both?
• How involved should a Head of Product be in the day-to-day of Product Management (gathering requirements, writing user stories, etc.)?

Dave Prusinski: Hiring in Sales (1:55:20)

• What are the most common mistakes that CEOs make when hiring a Head of Sales?
• How do you hire a Head of Sales who can scale while also avoiding “over-hiring” risk?
• How important is industry experience when hiring individual sales reps?
• When should a CEO expect a new sales hire to pay for themselves?
• How do you evaluate new sales hires if your company has very long sales cycles?
• How do you translate a revenue goal into a quantifiable activity goal for each rep?    
• If building a sales team from scratch, who should you hire the first? Leader or individual contributors?
• How do you most effectively ramp/onboard newly hired sales reps?
• Should CEOs utilize their existing reps to help onboard newly hired reps?  

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