Lessons - How To Hire Well | Seth Godin, Author & Speaker

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upskill your personal and professional life. I'm just thinking about another point that you brought up was balancing the needs of the business versus the needs of the individual. So let's talk because I think to if we look back at your body of work, a lot of the work that you've done on marketing is to shift the focus from focusing on the organization to focusing on the customer. And a point you bring up in this book is as an organization, you're focusing on not the needs of the organization anymore, the needs of the employee, and you sort of mentioned this a few times. So I think this all comes down to how do we how do we champion the needs of the individual or the employee and again look at them like not just a piece of a company, but an actual human being. So what are the needs of the individual once they have their pay and they have their food and they have their shelter and we've satisfied Maslow's hierarchy of needs. What does a person need in an organization? Well, I need to highlight one thing, which is I am not saying companies need to give some sort of economic value to their employees because it's the right thing to do. What I am saying is creating the conditions for growth and significance actually helps the company achieve what it sought to accomplish in the first place. So if we can use Google as an example and then I'll try to be more specific in your question. Early on when I was at Yahoo, Google was doing some really interesting things. It was a pretty small company and then they were going to have to shut down. And the reason they were going to have to shut down is not because they weren't making any money. They had plenty of money in the bank. It's because the amount of data they were trying to store was so large that it was crashing their search engine. It was taking forever to get results. And the laws of physics were involved here. You can't just say let's everybody work harder because the fact is the speed of light is the speed of light. And two engineers put in emotional labor and effort and figured out that if they just stored certain kinds of data on the outside of the hard drive instead of on the inside ring of the hard drive. It spins faster on the outside and they could get the data fast enough to keep Google from going out of business. Now that sort of change doesn't happen because some manager is offering people a bonus. Nor does it happen because you're yelling at them. It happens because a human being is enrolled in the journey of trying to make a change happen. And what human beings want, and I surveyed 10,000 people in 90 countries, they want to be treated with respect. They want to exceed their own expectations for what they thought was possible. And they want to work with people that they like in respect. They want those three things way more than they want a promotion or title or salary. They don't want to travel or get paid a lot compared to being able to shop as a human to do work that matters with people who care. And I don't care if you run a sandwich shop that's still going to pay off. One example that you brought up, I thought was interesting to that point. And I think this is the right context, correct me if I'm wrong, but the Harry Brighthouse example, where it's basically based on the movie, the paper chase, and the professors pulled calling on students. But everybody wants to be in this class. And it's interesting because cold calling on students, it's uncomfortable. It's not something that you'd think people would want to subject themselves to. But this is the most wanted class that everybody wants to be in. So it shows that people, when given the opportunity to excel and be in a group of peers that are also excelling, they're going to take that opportunity. Well, it's important to note that not everybody wants to be in the class. In fact, almost nobody wants to be in the class, but that's enough. But if you've been indoctrinated from first grade to ask, will this be on the test? To do the minimum amount of work and to get by. Why would you want to be in a class where you get called by? The goal is to take an easy class. But if you are thinking smart about this, college is costing you 50, 60, 70, 80, thousand dollars a year that you're going to be in debt for for decades or more. Why wouldn't you want to go to a classroom where everybody else wants to be there too? And that's the magic of the Brighthouse Pro, which is some people want to be in a room with people who want to be in the room. Now is this, so this speaks about, I don't know if this speaks about the soft skills that you should be looking for because then this is an education for a leader saying, how do I find the people that want to be in that room? And traditionally, I would only hire people that have the hard skills and you address this as well. But then at the end of the book, you have an encyclopedia of real skills, things that are soft skills. But as a lead, I've hired a lot of people. You've hired a lot of people, a lot of people listening to this have hired a lot of people. You can gauge some of this. But ultimately, it's stressful when you're hiring somebody to hire based on soft skills. So how do you hire properly? What is your advice for the manager, the leader, the director, the VP that wants to incorporate this? So just to catch people up, what I'm saying is if it's easy to measure, it might not be important. If they went to a famous college, if they have the same skin colors, if they're tall, if they're charismatic, if they interview well, if they can type a lot of words per minute, if they commit a lot of lines of code to get up fine. But that's not really what's going to transform your organization. It's loyalty, honesty, empathy, connection, possibility, the willingness to sit in the liminal state between here and there. Lots of things that don't show up on resumes. And what I have found, because I don't know what better shortcut is the only way to know that is to work with somebody. And the good news is you can now work with somebody before you hire them. And so my ironclad policy is I only work with people I've worked with before. So if I'm going to work with somebody I haven't worked with before, I give them a project that I pay them for. And in the act of them working with you, you can see what it's like to work with them. What do they do when something is difficult? Do they always need instructions? Do they give people the benefit of the doubt? If they're not acting like the kind of person you want to work with, don't work with them. I love that. It's so simple. It's actually not that complicated when you break it down. Why did you feel it was important to highlight the difference between tension and stress? When I talk about tension, it makes people really uncomfortable, which is ironic, of course. If I want to shoot a rubber band across the room, it's only going to happen if I pull it backwards. Otherwise, it doesn't go. No joke is funny without tension. That's what it's called, a punch line comes at the end, right? When I say knock, knock, and you say who's there, there's tension as we wait for the next part. Tension is the essence of growth and learning and all the sorts of things we try to create as marketers and leaders. Stress, on the other hand, is wanting to be doing two things at the same time, here and there. Away from here, toward here, that I need to be at work, but I need to be at home. That I have no choice but to be in the spot because I'm bolted down and I want to leave. Two different things at the same time, it causes our brain to be too out of chemicals that don't make us happy. So I'm in favor of reducing stress by the stories we tell ourselves, by the choices we get to make by creating a fair culture. But I'm also in favor of creating tension to produce outputs that we seek.