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We’ve talked about my hiring practices before on the show, but truth be told, I haven’t had to formally hire anyone or seek out a new employee in the last 4 years – which is wild when you think about it.
People ask all of the time if we’re hiring and 99% of the time the answer is no. But we recently WERE hiring and we were able to hire two incredible new team members in under a week using our method of hiring – with a twist. Excited to share exactly how we did that and landed on two people we are SO pumped to have on our team.
I was recently with a ton of other leaders in our industry and the topic of building a team came up a lot and I was shocked at how complicated some of the processes were around hiring. I’m not knocking them but they just aren’t for me. From getting agents to help find candidates to having 5 part interviews or massive requirements, it just isn’t how I do things. I don’t have the time, energy, budget, or bandwidth to complicate the process.
So in this episode, I’ll share my super speedy, super effective hiring strategy so you can get the right people in your business at the exact time you need them!
My Team Structure
First, Let me break down our team structure for you just so you kind of have a visual of how our team works over here and why we were hiring in the first place!
So right now we have 5 people on salary including me, those roles are:
- Integrator or my right hand gal, Marisa
- Podcast producer, Kylie, who manages all things Goal Digger
- All things support through Stephanie who’s been with me for like 7 years
- Copy, copy, copy with Brooklyn who writes a LOT of words every week
- And then me!
For contractors, we have a handful of people who are in the brand weekly:
- We have Kerry who does all of our paid traffic strategy
- Shannon who does all of our tech connections and email strategy
- Kaeli who rocks Pinterest for us
- Audrey who helps with content
- Natasha who does all of our automation and chat strategy
- Jess who’s our fractional CMO and leads marketing
- And Madie who is our queen of the graphics
So all in all, our team is about ten or eleven people in total! Some contractors are working on the business daily and some are more on a weekly or monthly retainer but this makes up the majority of our team! So why were we hiring two new people? Well, that’s a question even Drew was asking.
One of our team members, Marisa, wanted to transition into a new role that was better suited for her time and for the business needs. When she stepped into motherhood and the reality around that transition, she no longer felt the Integrator role was a fit for her, especially with a deep desire to be more present offline, thus wanting to go part-time.
The other piece to this puzzle is that after hiring Jess, my vision for the brand also shifted. Before her, I had talked a lot about pivoting the brand, sunsetting your online programs, shifting more into the speaker/author space. In deciding to now keep your courses running this also impacted the need to craft a role.
The Two Roles We Filled
We landed on needing two positions, I love how we broke these out for a few reasons. Ownership is-imperative for a successful role and one thing that has been a struggle is that in Marisa’s current role, she essentially owns like… everything! One of many facets of the Integrator role is to fill gaps across the organization. In tandem with my desire to keep the team small, Marisa’s role has expanded over the last four years, wildly expanding her skill set in a beautiful way, while simultaneously resulting in her taking on more ownership in different areas across the brand.
Because she can do it all, that’s usually what happens and so in splitting up the role we were able to give more defined roles where the team members will have total ownership of an area of the business.
We wanted to find A-players who knew a lot about the scope of work they were hired to do. In the past, I’ve hired people with adjacent experience but then we’ve worked together on training and creating a process and it’s been great but this time around, we really wanted to hire people who already had experience and could hit the ground running.
There’s something to be said about looking at someone’s experience and skill set and although they may not tick every box, knowing what skills are transferable and teachable. A lot of talented people are skimmed over by employers staying strict in their vision of a fit. You don’t do that and it’s produced the cultivation of a truly talent rich team! I think a lot of talented people are skimmed over by employers staying strict in their vision of a fit. I don’t do that and it’s produced the cultivation of a truly talent rich team!
I wanted to have more part-time positions but have room to expand to full time and the best way to do that was to create two separate positions -. It would allow us to see what the true scope of their work is and leave a little flexibility in what the positions could turn into. Instead of stretching one person to fit all of the parts, finding people who specialize in one facet of the business felt like a better fit!
My Exact Process
1. Created the roles and the job descriptions. I encouraged Marisa to craft her dream role! In doing that exercise, it helped us break down what she’s currently doing and evaluate the needs we had to fill in order to help make the transition. We first made an internal bulleted list of what we wanted in the candidates and what we were looking for! Then we got a few examples of job descriptions for similar positions that we pulled a few extra pieces from and lastly, I used ChatGPT to help me create the perfect job descriptions that we could use.
2. We listed ONE position on LinkedIn! I’ve sworn by LinkedIn as the means of hiring FOREVER! That’s the only way I’ve hired in the last few years, the last five team members I’ve hired have come from LinkedIn. I swear by it. Here’s why:
- It’s super easy to create a job listing on there and get it up and published
- It’s super cost effective, we spent $98 total for the job listing
- People can’t fudge their experience, they literally submit their LinkedIn profile and resume via LinkedIn and that’s what you see as the person hiring, if you really want people who have experience, this is incredible because no one can sway what their work experience was.
- It’s easy to sort/rank/highlight profiles you want to remember. It honestly used to be easier – I will say that. You used to be able to type in a keyword and it would pull anyone’s profiles to the top that had those words in their job experience or history and this time it was slightly more clunky, but you are able to add in pre-screening questions which do aid in the sorting process which helped us see who stood out quickly. it was still REALLY easy for us to see who stood out quickly.
3. Organizing Candidates: We made a spreadsheet and I dropped my faves and Marisa dropped her faves. In the past, hiring has been 100% on me, but since Marisa is essentially hiring her replacements, she wanted to be a part of this process and it was SO invaluable to have another set of eyes on things. We made a Google sheet where we dropped their name, which role we thought they might be a fit for (reminder, we posted ONE posting with the goal to source TWO hires) what stood out about them, and a link to their profile.
4. Narrowing the field: We had 298 applicants in 36 hours so we decided to shut off our listing and just work with the applicants we got which we felt there were some really strong applicants in there! We ended up getting it down to 6 candidates that we wanted to interview.
5. Two rounds: Now this is different than the past, Marisa did round one of the interviews. One thing Marisa and I have in common is that we both worked for Target in HR at one point in our lives, so we know how to interview and do the hiring process, only this time it wasn’t through the corporate controlled way! I LOVED that she wanted to do the first round of interviews because I value and wanted her perspective.
6. Narrowing the field again: Then she narrowed the six candidates down to the final 3. We were in theory only hiring for ONE role but we had kept in the back of our mind that we had 2 positions we were hiring for and IF someone could be a fit for the second role, we’d want to hire them too and save our selves time of having to do this process again.
Here are the tools I used to hire in 7 days
- LinkedIn profile + a company page for your business
- Free Calendly account
- Google Sheet
- ChatGPT (this tool could also help generate suggested interview questions + help craft emails to candidates too!)
- Zoom
More from This Episode
Press play to hear more about my hiring process, including how I interview, what traits beyond the talents and skill set are important to me, and how I’m feeling about bringing new people into the fold after not hiring for so long. Tune into this episode wherever you get your podcasts and then hop over to Instagram and let me know if you’re hiring anyone this year!
