Lessons - Résumés From Google and Facebook Are the Biggest Red Flag in Hiring | Andy Schoonover - CrowdHealth Founder & CEO

In this lessons episode, discover why grit and adaptability matter more than polished resumes when building an early team. Understand how practical hiring tests reveal stronger candidates, explore how finding the right early adopters drives new category growth, and uncover why doing unscalable work first creates deeper customer insight and better products. You mentioned the missionaries versus mercenaries. In one of the other interviews that you did, you actually had five, five key things that you wish somebody told you before starting a company. And that was actually one of them. You had a couple of really smart hiring lessons in this, in the, in these group of five, five lessons. Another one that you mentioned was beware of big company experience. And I completely agree with you, but walk me, walk me through why that's so important as a, as a founder trying to hire their first few employees. Yeah. I mean, when you see a big company on somebody's resume, you ultimately think that, you know, part of the success of that company has to do with the person that you're talking to. And forget oftentimes that these big companies are big. They are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. And they have tons of resources and they have everybody doing lots of stuff for them. So they don't have to do a whole lot. Right. You have executive assistants for executive assistants. Right. And so, you know, I have just I have learned throughout my, I guess, you know, 20 years now of being being entrepreneurial. Hiring somebody from a big company is a really hard thing. They have to overcome a lot of the big company bad habits. They are not as gritty oftentimes as, you know, people in startups. And I mean that by like, just get it done, right? Like forget about who gets it done, you get it done. And it may not be totally in your lane, but just get it done. And just big companies just don't oftentimes allow people to do that, whether it's because of bureaucracy or administrative or, whatever. And so I like the grittiness of people who are in startups and have been in startups or fresh out of college, right? Who are like, I don't know, just tell me what to do and I'll go get it done. I love that. I love those gritty, and I'll take gritty over super high horsepower any day. One of the other things I said, it might've been that interview or maybe it was somewhere else, but Give me somebody who will work their ass off over a straight A student any day. Right? The people who work their ass off know what it's like to fail. They get back up and they keep going after it. Right? The guys who get straight A's. They don't know what it's like to fail. And when they fail and they get a B, it's like the end of the world. And I'm like, dude, we're in a startup. We fail every single day. And if we're not failing, then we're doing something wrong. You know, we're not driving fast enough. How do you find that in somebody, though? How do you actually find that in somebody when you're interviewing them? I guess it's like a little bit of like a grit plus chip on the shoulder plus, you know, just figure it out, curious person. What's the interview question to get that person in? I think it's less interview questions. I'm terrible at interview questions. I'm just, I'm bad. And so I actually have them do stuff, right? I'm interviewing somebody right now and I said, okay, build me a corporate financial model. And he kind of looked at me like, I was like, hey, you're gonna get it wrong, right? But like, how do you even think about that, right? And so it makes, it requires them to ask really good questions, right? It asks them to really think about what drives the business. They have to dig into the business and really try to understand it. They have to be good at Excel, which I think is the most important tool of business from my perspective. And if you don't know how to do that, it's really hard to Excel. And so I'm actually having them do some work. The other thing I said is like, hey, here's CrowdHealth, here's what we're about, who should I go after? Write me a two-pager on who I would go after and how I would go after them. And it forces them to create some ideas, to get things on paper. And between those two activities, I can tell most of the time how they think right and can they think outside the box get creative or do they think really very much inside the box box and have um a really hard time with um with the gray right and that's where we are in startup land it's it's just gray like it's not black and white like you just have to figure out and operate in a land of gray and if they're not comfortable with that it's probably not a good fit And do you do that for all roles that you bring in? Most. That's smart. Most. Because I mean, look, I mean, part of this is like, you got to think analytically, right? Regardless of what role you're in. I don't care if it's a salesperson or a marketing person or an operation person or whatever. It's like, you need to think analytically and you need to have some kind of comprehension on how to do Excel. And if you don't know how to do a financial model, like a P and L, like you're going to go figure it out. Right. Which is a big part of, of, of a startup. Like, This is not, you know, in a 100-page user manual, right? Like, did you have to go? It's like, no, no, we just have to figure this stuff out. So go figure it out, right? Go figure out how to make a P&L. And you don't expect as much from some positions as other positions, but I think it is a good tool to get a really good sense of how people think and can operate. And let's flip that. When you're building a company in a new category, you're looking for certain people, certain mindsets that you're bringing in, but also walk me through how you market something that no one's ever heard of before or they've only had their first exposure to. What's the playbook for that? Yeah, you gotta be so different and so much better than the alternative that people are like, duh. Like, why didn't I think of that, right? Duh. You know, and that's hard oftentimes. Like, and it's hard now, right? Because I'm marketing and we spent, I don't know, a million boxes over the last three months, you know, marketing. And we've gotten some really, really good feedback. But a lot of people just look at you like, what the heck are you talking about? Right. And so, you know, one of the things you have to realize is that you have to pick a group of people that you think will really resonate with your brand. Right. And what I'll tell you right now is the people who are resonating with our brand are the people who are typically very high on kind of personal responsibility. They're like, I want to take care of my own health care bills and not have a health insurance plan get in the middle of this. And so we've been all in on those types of people. They are the Bitcoin people. They are libertarian. They are those types of people, and they're entrepreneurs, right? Like entrepreneurs tend to be like, hey, let me control my own destiny as opposed to just relying on a health insurance plan, and you never know what they're going to do, right? We've been all in on those types of folks, and it really has resonated with them. So it's really like find your customer, who does it resonate with, and go from there. I will say that we've spent a million dollars on marketing, but we tried about 20 different distribution channels to get our message out. And we tried... From digital to traditional to print to, you know, all kinds of different things. And even within those, we've segmented, you know, a lot of different ideologies and political spectrum and thought, you know, all of those just to see if, is there a group here that this tends to resonate with? And, um, and I think we've, we've found, you know, who those early adopters are going to be. And so that was, that was our approach. Very interesting. I just know how difficult it is. So I can only imagine, um, building, you know, building a marketing strategy for, uh, an industry that doesn't exist yet. I can't imagine it's easy. I'm just looking at you. This is gonna be some kind of emotional getting fired up, right? I mean, because if it's not an emotional sell or purchase, it's gonna be really hard to get people. get people to actually buy, especially like something like health insurance, which is, you know, typically like, oh my God, like I don't, the last day of the month, every month has been our biggest day because people wait until the very last moment to, to figure out what they're going to do with paying their healthcare bills for the following month. And they find us and they're like, oh, wow, this is really, really cool. But it is the last thing you want to deal with. And a part of that is because health insurance sucks. I mean, it really does. And so we really want to make something where it's like, no, no, this way to pay for your health bills is actually pretty cool. And you're just going to save a ton of money and you're going to help other people. That's great. That's a great alternative to what we've been forced into. One other thing that you mentioned, and I've heard this said different ways before, but I'm curious to understand how it applied to crowd health. Do things that are unscalable and then learn how best to scale them. What does that mean in a broader context, and how did you actually apply that to crowd health when you quite literally need... you need a certain mass of people to make the entire business model function. I mean, it's hard. And it's, I mean, we're almost like threading a needle, right? I mean, you really are. Um, and I think I've said that in that interview too, is doing things that are unscalable. I mean, there is a, um, there is a desire from the beginning to automate as much as you can, right? Yeah. Um, and you know, for me, it's like, man, I, everything that has to do with the customer, I want to own and manually do so that I understand what that customer is like and what they're thinking and how they're reacting and things like that. And so there was this idea internally at the company of, you know, there's these little chat bots down in the lower right-hand corner of your website. And so... They're like, okay, well, let's just come up with all the questions that we think people have and what the answers are to all those questions. And we'll chatbot it because that's the best way to scale all the interest that we'll get. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. Let's not do that. Let's all get on the chat. And I'll answer these questions, you know, all 10 of us, including the CEO. I think I've spent more time on that chat bot than anybody else answering questions from prospective customers because now I know what they're asking. Now I know what their objections are. Now I understand our customer a lot better. And that's an unscaled way of doing something. that I think will help us scale because now we understand the customer a lot better that you just don't get from a chat bot. Right. And plus, those chat bots are so annoying. If you type in one letter wrong, it drives you bonkers. Right. And so one of the things that we are on scaling to is. We have your personal care advocate. Like you will have somebody that you can talk to every single time that you call into crowd health, right? The same person. So you're not going around, you know, big call center and you have to explain your daughter has tubes and her ears and they're costing $8,000. You don't have to do that 20 times to get an answer. You're talking to the same person every single time. Right. And that's an unscalable way of doing things. But we think in the long run, If you have a health condition, you will call that person and we can help you and guide you to a really good doctor who, at the end of the day, is going to be way less expensive than if we did it in a way that, you know, is call center oriented. And you may not have gone to that great doctor. And so we think in the long run, it's going to save us a bunch of money. And it's just a way better customer experience. Some of these things that these big companies do to scale is a terrible, terrible customer experience. I mean, call into your cable company, right? I'm trying to cancel my security system right now, and I can't freaking get somebody on the line, right? That's a terrible customer experience. We want to have an awesome customer experience, and we think in the long run, that's going to allow us to scale a lot faster than if we had lots of automation or lots of outsourced call centers and all that kind of stuff. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.