Podcast Ep 156 | 5 Expensive Hiring Mistakes to Avoid

Hir­ing can be expensive. 

It’s expen­sive in terms of time for lead­ers to com­mit to an effec­tive hir­ing process, it’s expen­sive in terms of recruit­ment fees or costs, and it’s expen­sive in terms of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. And that’s when you get it right!

Some­times we can make mis­takes when hir­ing, and this can be even more expen­sive. Per­haps busy exec­u­tives are skip­ping steps or they might not know what things to avoid.

This week we talk about five expen­sive hir­ing mis­takes you should avoid.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

00:13
Kevin Lawrence
Wel­come to the Growth Whis­pers pod­cast with Brad Giles in Perth, Aus­tralia, and Kevin Lawrence in Van­cou­ver, British Colum­bia, Cana­da. We’re here and we’re going to talk about bill build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies for the 156^th week in a row. Brad, we just hit three years. We’re just chat­ting about that a minute ago. Three years con­sis­tent­ly of doing a pod­cast. We know most peo­ple, most of us have a hard time doing any­thing for a year on a week­ly basis. Yeah, three years is a big mile­stone for us.

00:49
Brad Giles
Most peo­ple strug­gle to get to Feb­ru­ary when they set their New Year’s goals. We’ve got account­abil­i­ty part­ners in each oth­er, which is why every week we got to do it.

01:06
Kevin Lawrence
Exact­ly. As I said before, I would­n’t have done this with­out you because I’m account­able to you and you’re account­able to me. We’re not going to let each oth­er down. Obvi­ous­ly, in col­lab­o­rat­ing makes things work bet­ter as well.

01:18
Brad Giles
Yes, what I love is when I look back at all of the oth­er the old­er episode and it just feels like such an asset. What I mean by that is we’ve learned from each oth­er. We’ve put that out there. Peo­ple can go out there and they want to find out about, I don’t know, prof­it, PEREX or any one of the many things that we’ve looked at. We’ve got that out there and peo­ple can go through and look through to fig­ure out what are they inter­est­ed in it. It’s real­ly nice to have that asset out there.

01:49
Kevin Lawrence
Yeah, 100%. It’s good to feel like we’re always mak­ing progress and thou­sands of peo­ple a month are lis­ten­ing to this and get­ting val­ue out of it. So we’re glad that we’re able to. Again, thank you for your part­ner­ship on this, Brad. Some­thing that start­ed in COVID, right? We start­ed doing this in COVID, has con­tin­ued beyond it, which is pret­ty cool. All right, well, let’s dig in today. What’s your word, phrase, feel­ing, thought, phi­los­o­phy of the day?

02:18
Brad Giles
Cel­e­brate. I guess cel­e­brat­ing like, our anniver­sary today. I was refer­ring back to a book by Chip and Dan Heath, The Pow­er of Moments. Last week we did an episode about our top 912 16 books. Yeah, one of the ones that did­n’t make the cut was The Pow­er of Moments. We cel­e­brate birth­days, anniver­saries, there’s no rea­son that we can’t make our­selves cel­e­brate moments that are of impor­tance with­in our orga­ni­za­tions. What are the sig­nif­i­cant moments in your firm and how do you cel­e­brate them?

03:03
Kevin Lawrence
Yeah, awe­some. I love it. Mine is diver­si­ty, and it’s inter­est­ing. Had a con­ver­sa­tion last week with a bunch of CEOs and talk­ing about the val­ue of get­ting dif­fer­ent opin­ions in the room. Now, it’s chal­leng­ing because I heard about in one coun­try they were leg­is­lat­ing at senior lead­er­ship of large com­pa­nies that it need­ed to be 75% women on those teams. I did­n’t ful­ly get the full back­ground on sto­ry, and I got to dig in and get the facts. It’s like diver­si­ty helps to make bet­ter deci­sions, whether it’s diver­si­ty of race or back­ground or expe­ri­ence, and it’s proven many ways. It’s just peo­ple are stuck in old ways of doing things some­times. The val­ue of diver­si­ty and how do we cre­ate it in a way that is ben­e­fi­cial for all the peo­ple involved? Just dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives, dif­fer­ent opin­ions, dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences. Yeah. So diver­si­ty. Basi­cal­ly, ma’am, we got two in a row, sewing it togeth­er pret­ty easy, like cel­e­brat­ing diver­si­ty, right.

04:11
Kevin Lawrence
Or cel­e­brat­ing and enhanc­ing things with diver­si­ty. Okay, awesome.

04:17
Brad Giles
Let’s talk about hir­ing mis­takes. They can be expen­sive, can’t they? Hir­ing mistakes?

04:24
Kevin Lawrence
Excru­ci­at­ing. Excruciating.

04:27
Brad Giles
There’s just so many sto­ries. What we’re try­ing to do today is to nar­row down and to kind of look through, out of all of the sto­ries that we’ve seen, what are five expen­sive hir­ing mis­takes to avoid? How can we dis­till all the sto­ries and put them into five buck­ets so that we can say, right, this is what you don’t do.

04:51
Kevin Lawrence
We all have had the expe­ri­ences, oh, my gosh, the tens of mil­lions of dol­lars that we’ve seen burnt in front I mean, per­son­al­ly, I’ve seen burnt in front of my own eyes by hav­ing the wrong peo­ple com­ing in. It’s not because peo­ple don’t intend to, and it’s not because we don’t want great peo­ple. It’s just real­ly hard and real­ly easy to make mis­takes on this. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, often we put the least amount of time into it. We put less amount of time into it than oth­er deci­sions that are big­ger, and they’re very hard to undo. Right. Hir­ing a per­son is some­times like start­ing con­struc­tion on a new tow­er, a new 50 sto­ry tow­er. Once you get going, it’s hard to redo it again. Let’s dig into these mis­takes and we’re going to share them. There’s more, but these are the ones that we see. And the num­ber one, for a lot.

05:46
Brad Giles
Of peo­ple, there’s just one thing kev, sor­ry, I want­ed to just men­tion in the prep you said some­thing, I think it was from Peter Druck­er. We spend the least amount of time on hir­ing deci­sions and they are the hard­est to undo. Just for framing.

06:01
Kevin Lawrence
Yes, it is. And I thought it was Druck­er. I could­n’t find the source, but it was some­one like Druck­er who said it could be. Yes, it’s very painful once we do it, and we don’t put enough time into it typ­i­cal­ly. So five points, num­ber one. The first is you’re not clear on great­ness and clear enough on what amaz­ing looks like in the role. Basi­cal­ly we set our sights too low. Not clear enough in terms of what it is, but real­ly, we don’t shoot high enough. One CEO said, look, if we could hire any­one in the world, the best per­son in the world, and we had infi­nite cash, who would we hire for our new head of mar­ket­ing, and some­one says, we’d prob­a­bly hire the CMO from Nike. Okay, well, that’s a good place to start. Right. They’re putting their sites up and get­ting clear. Then they got into why.

07:00
Kevin Lawrence
So one site is high enough. That’s crit­i­cal. The oth­er piece of it is get­ting spe­cif­ic on what does the per­son actu­al­ly need to thrive in that role with us. So, for exam­ple, we brought a sales leader into an orga­ni­za­tion. They were an A play­er sales leader, where they were amaz­ing, but they were in a busi­ness with an 18 month sales cycle and about a $5 mil­lion aver­age tick­et sale. They came into a busi­ness that was a dai­ly sales cycle, prob­a­bly a two hour sales cycle, and a $50,000 sales aver­age tick­et. They came into the Auto busi­ness. They came from heavy equip­ment into Auto. He was an amaz­ing guy, but he was­n’t the right type of sales leader because he’s used to a total­ly dif­fer­ent type of sales. We did­n’t get down to and when they recruit­ed the next per­son. Okay, great. It’s sales leader, mul­ti­lo­ca­tion two hour sales cycle, $50,000 aver­age trans­ac­tion val­ue conception.

08:08
Kevin Lawrence
They boiled down into the type of per­son who had done sim­i­lar trans­ac­tions. Just those kinds of details and get­ting clear on what real­ly we need from some­one to win.

08:17
Brad Giles
Yeah. One team that comes to mind, they were, I guess, flatlin­ing their growth, and they said, we need a busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er to come in. They were pro­fes­sion­als at what they do in their field of exper­tise. Sales was­n’t the norm in their indus­try, and so they did­n’t real­ly know what they want­ed to know, what great­ness was, and they did­n’t real­ly know what the results would be. Sub­se­quent­ly, the results that they did­n’t know is what they achieved. Right. Yeah. Sec­ond one, a per­son hired a gen­er­al man­ag­er COO eight weeks into the jour­ney, this per­son had­n’t looked at Quick­Books, which was their account­ing pack­age for the pre­vi­ous six weeks. Part of their job that was, I guess, defined at the out­set is that they need­ed a report from Quick­Books every week.

09:22
Kevin Lawrence
Yes. Anoth­er side, on the pos­i­tive side of this, one of our clients is look­ing to hire a pres­i­dent for their orga­ni­za­tion. They did a lot of work build­ing a score­card of exact­ly what the role was because they nev­er had one. They were so clear on what they need­ed. They had three can­di­dates that they knew were pos­si­ble, and the guy said he went and had lunch with each of those dif­fer­ent peo­ple because he was net­work­ing him­self to build the to recruit. And, after lunch, he loved them all. Yeah. Came back and went through the score­card. Two of them instant­ly were elim­i­nat­ed because he was so clear on what he need­ed. All right, so mis­take num­ber one, not clar­i­ty on what great­ness looks like in that role.

10:03
Brad Giles
Sor­ry, the answer is a score­card you need a score­card, look top writ­ing or look to Onboard­ed for scorecards.

10:11
Kevin Lawrence
Right? It’s a score­card and think­ing big about an amaz­ing per­son, not just an okay per­son, awe­some. Num­ber two, just hir­ing some­body, that’s con­ve­nient, right? It’s some­one that it’s a neigh­bor, it’s a friend, it’s a col­league’s, neigh­bor, col­leagues, friend. And it’s real­ly calm. It hap­pens a lot, and it can be good, but gen­er­al­ly, because them, the bar is a lit­tle low­er. I’ve made these mis­takes myself a cou­ple of times, and it’s just you can’t low­er the bar. One com­pa­ny I was with and the CEO said, yeah, no, I just hired one of my col­lege bud­dies. He’s a great guy. He plays hock­ey, he’s got awe­some expe­ri­ence, and blah, blah. I said, did you run him through the process? No, I know. He’s awe­some. And they go, Great, here we go. We meet the guy. In the first meet­ing, I want­ed to tell the guy to not come back at lunch.

11:12
Kevin Lawrence
And he was­n’t rude. He was like, chill. He was almost like the stereo­typ­i­cal kid with the sil­ver spoon. He did­n’t real­ly want to work hard. He was more inter­est­ed in the base­ball scores and what was going on his phone than he was­n’t real­ly com­ing to make a con­tri­bu­tion. Now, he stayed like a year. Took a while to move him out, respect­ful­ly, but he was con­ve­nient. He just was­n’t amaz­ing for the role. It’s dou­bly hard because now you got to fire your bud­dy or your broth­er in law or what­ev­er it hap­pens to be.

11:44
Brad Giles
The prob­lem is that this is biol­o­gy. We are designed to oper­ate in tribes where we trust the peo­ple that we know, okay? If you’re in a tribe and this per­son says, this per­son is good, why? Because they did­n’t kill the oth­er tribe mem­bers, then you’re going to be think­ing, okay, I trust that per­son, too, but we’re not in tribes any­more. Now we’re in a soci­ety, and we’ve got to know that just because your instinct says, who do I know that is not fol­low­ing the process? There’s one CEO to that point who stopped their growth plans. They had pret­ty ambi­tious three year tar­gets, and they seemed to be going well, but they were like, look, we can’t con­tin­ue to grow because we don’t know any­body. We know every­body in the indus­try, and we’ve tapped out every­body that we know. There’s no one else that’s worth hiring.

12:40
Brad Giles
Okay. That’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly the right rea­son to stop your growth plans.

12:48
Kevin Lawrence
No, I’d say not. The root of it is that just mak­ing the mis­take of just hir­ing what’s easy and con­ve­nient and as you said, Brett, over trust­ing. Over trust­ing refer­rals from oth­er peo­ple. When peo­ple say, oh, yeah, I know we got so and so, we’re going to inter­view them, but anoth­er exec­u­tive had referred them or some­thing else, and I’m like, that does­n’t mean any­thing. Anoth­er CEO referred them, it does­n’t mean any­thing. You still have to dou­ble scru­ti­nize even more scru­ti­nize them because there’s an addi­tion­al rela­tion­ship risk in that hire. All right, so that was num­ber two, hir­ing some­one that or is con­ve­nient or is rec­om­mend­ed. Three, under invest­ing time. Basi­cal­ly it’s a big invest­ment and we’re so busy, and most senior lead­ers and CEOs don’t put enough time into this. Whether it’s on new recruit­ment piece or even the inter­view­ing piece, it’s easy. And it’s easy to del­e­gate this.

13:47
Kevin Lawrence
For senior hires, we have to be involved. A num­ber of the CEOs I work with are amaz­ing mas­ter recruiters. They are amaz­ing. One, we some­times jok­ing­ly call him the Chief Employ­ment Offi­cer because he is the best recruiter in the com­pa­ny and he recruits all over the place and he works with recruiters him­self. It’s almost 1000 employ­ees, but he’s on it and he’s dri­ving all the time and he’s always got a list. He’s prospect­ing like a good sales guy would, or sales­per­son would. Par­don me, but a lot of peo­ple just try to leave it to HR, and that’s not the way to do it for these senior roles. He was telling me recent­ly, one per­son that he’s hir­ing anoth­er exec­u­tive, when were look­ing for a cer­tain role, said, I think I know some­one I heard about in the indus­try. I met this guy once, he goes, well, what’s his name?

14:49
Kevin Lawrence
He calls, speaks to the guy, ends up work­ing with him. That guy referred anoth­er guy, which is that’s how it works in his world. He was talk­ing about being at a con­fer­ence and in the line­up at lunch and at line­up at lunch. The guy in front behind him, when they said, what’s your name for the reser­va­tion? There was some­thing they were going in, and the guy goes, oh, are you from that com­pa­ny? I heard about you guys. He starts talk­ing about them dig­ging in, and now he’s prob­a­bly hir­ing that guy, too.

15:21
Brad Giles
Awe­some.

15:22
Kevin Lawrence
Yeah. He’s just con­stant­ly recruit­ing and he puts a lot of time into it.

15:28
Brad Giles
The thing that you kind of glossed over there was this is a big invest­ment, you said it, but Brad Smart in Top Grad­ing says that it’s 15 times the annu­al salary if you get it wrong for a senior executive.

15:44
Kevin Lawrence
Right.

15:45
Brad Giles
Even if it’s a bit less than that, or even if you’re a small­er com­pa­ny, it’s a mas­sive invest­ment. How much time, let’s say that your exec­u­tive is on $200,000 and a mis­take could cost you 600 or $2 mil­lion or what­ev­er it might be. It’s a huge amount of mon­ey. When you add every­thing up, how much time should you spend to make sure that invest­ment is the right investment?

16:15
Kevin Lawrence
Yes, it’s at least a few mil­lion bucks. When you’re hir­ing an exec­u­tive, the impact on a busi­ness, plus or minus. That’s worth, you would do oth­er things that you would put time on oth­er things that are worth less than a cou­ple of mil­lion bucks.

16:27
Brad Giles
Often, yeah. So think about it like this. You could be buy­ing a machine worth a cou­ple of mil­lion bucks if that machine has a chance of not work­ing in 90 days. You’d want to do some more due dili­gence on that machine. And that’s what we’re saying.

16:39
Kevin Lawrence
Yes. Awe­some. That was num­ber three under invest­ing the time. Under invest­ing time com­pared to the size of invest­ment it is, and it deserves a lot of atten­tion or leav­ing it up to oth­er peo­ple. The next is that we’ve talked about this in a lot of oth­er episode, but it’s not dig­ging deep enough and basi­cal­ly judg­ing the book by its cov­er. I call it being brand blind in some cas­es. Like, it’s dan­ger­ous. Oh, yeah, they worked at Apple or they worked at, what­ev­er so many times, because then we drop our defens­es. It’s almost like your point about the tribe, Brad. We think they’re pre val­i­dat­ed. I had one of my CEOs, they hired this per­son, and he had an MBA from one of the most pres­ti­gious busi­ness schools, and he had expe­ri­ence at anoth­er very pres­ti­gious com­pa­ny, and he was so excit­ed. Yeah, I got this guy, he’s an MBA from this com­pa­ny, and he went to work from that school par­don me?

17:35
Kevin Lawrence
From this com­pa­ny, and he got excit­ed. No, I hired him. He’s fine. I don’t need to do a deep dri­ve. Look at where he came from. There’s always a bell curve in every indus­try. There’s good doc­tors and bad doc­tors and mediocre doc­tors. There’s good sci­en­tists and bad sci­en­tists and mediocre sci­en­tists. There’s good teach­ers and bad teach­ers and good accoun­tants and bad accoun­tants and good exec­u­tives and bad exec­u­tives. Just because they came from some­where, it does­n’t mean any­thing. Peo­ple just not dig in deep enough. Whether it’s assess­ments or prop­er deep, three, four hour inter­views to real­ly under­stand them, check­ing ref­er­ences, all that good stuff. I know, Brad, you got lots of exam­ples on this, too, because we spent a lot of time on this.

18:25
Brad Giles
Yeah, obvi­ous­ly, ref­er­ences are a func­tion in the hir­ing process for a rea­son. If you’re not ring­ing the ref­er­ences, you’re doing your­self a mas­sive dis­ser­vice. Part of upgrad­ing is under­stand­ing who did you report to and what will they say when we talk to them? Going back, like, ten years. It’s quite detailed for the right role, it’s got to be appro­pri­ate to the role. There’s one case where CEO had two can­di­dates for a senior exec­u­tive role, and the recruiter said, we got to pick one quick­ly or they’ll go they’ll be gone. You need to jump on it. I’m say­ing, look, we need to slow down and make sure that we’re con­fi­dent in the deci­sion. Sure, you could carve out some time in your cal­en­dar or what­ev­er, but we need to be sure. We want them to be sure as well.

19:23
Kevin Lawrence
Go straight ahead, but go over. I finish.

19:25
Brad Giles
Two months lat­er, were back hir­ing again because they picked quick­ly, they picked the wrong per­son, they did­n’t dig deep enough.

19:38
Kevin Lawrence
If you’re spend­ing two or three or $5 mil­lion, are you going to make a deci­sion under duress? I hope not. With this some­times scarce, it kicks in and with the ref­er­ences, it should be the hir­ing man­ag­er, the per­son talk­ing to, because you’re under­stand­ing the per­son, val­i­dat­ing what came out of the inter­views and think­ing it through and are they going to be a good fit for you. So yeah, that’s key. The oth­er one in the dig­ging deep is see­ing their skills in action. If they’re an accoun­tant, give them a messed up PnL or cash flow and get them to fix it. Pay them for their time, but bring them in, don’t let them go home and have some­one help them with it. Right? It’s like stu­dents in uni­ver­si­ty do exams in the room with super­vi­sion so they can’t get exter­nal help. Give them a project they can do and see them in action.

20:29
Kevin Lawrence
If they’re a writer, get them to write. If they’re a sales­per­son, get them to do a role play, what­ev­er it hap­pens to be, even if their inter­views are good. Basi­cal­ly do as much dig­ging in as you can based on your mul­ti­mil­lion dol­lar investment.

20:45
Brad Giles
Again, I guess there’s one oth­er quick sto­ry. There one leader got an exter­nal recruiter. They looked at exter­nal recruiters as being their HR depart­ment and they had an inter­nal HR depart­ment as well. They would get exter­nal recruiters to do all the inter­views and then have their HR depart­ment do the final with only a very short meet­ing with them at the end. That’s all fine and well, right?

21:11
Kevin Lawrence
You may think that you’re not fine and well, that’s crazy.

21:15
Brad Giles
That’s all fine and well if that’s what you want to do, but it comes with a con­se­quence, right? If you think that your time is more valu­able than that, the con­se­quence for this per­son is they were stacked full of C play­ers and tox­ic A’s, peo­ple who did­n’t align with the values.

21:31
Kevin Lawrence
Like, we use recruiters because we need peo­ple to do the labor of recruit­ment on our behalf. But their busi­ness mod­el con­flicts with yours. Right. They get paid by plac­ing and you accept­ing where we’re the one that has to deal with them and we need recruiters and they’re not bad peo­ple, but their busi­ness mod­el is dif­fer­ent. It’s like trust­ing the com­mis­sion sales­per­son. Some­times it can be, can work out, and it can­not. Depends a lot on the per­son. Recruit­ment is hard and you doing more dili­gence is hard. Yeah, it’s almost like get­ting your real­tor to be your home inspec­tor. It kind of does­n’t make sense. How’s it going? Not dig­ging deep enough and there’s always more and we have lots of tools. I know Brad and I, we talk about this a lot on the show. I put a lot of ener­gy into this because it saves a lot of headaches.

22:26
Brad Giles
Num­ber five is scarci­ty. Num­ber five is scarci­ty. You touched on this before. What does that mean, choos­ing between one can­di­date and none at all?

22:38
Kevin Lawrence
Yes.

22:39
Brad Giles
Well, look, this is the can­di­date who’s there. They seem like they’re good enough. We need some­one to fill the role. Why is this a problem?

22:54
Kevin Lawrence
Kev well, the thing is that gen­er­al­ly many of the hir­ing mis­takes that we see hap­pen is that when peo­ple were down choos­ing between one and none, and so then you got to go back to the well and start again, and it’s anoth­er one, two, three months to get the right per­son. So peo­ple gen­er­al­ly com­pro­mise and just set­tle. Ide­al­ly, you’re down at the end with two awe­some can­di­dates try­ing to choose between the two. That makes the best deci­sion. When there’s only one and you end up still hav­ing all that respon­si­bil­i­ty with­out any help, you’re more like­ly to set­tle. And set­tling leads to pain.

23:34
Brad Giles
About 15 years ago, I need­ed a ware­house man­ag­er, some­one who could man­age our stock and inven­to­ry incom­ing out­go­ing goods. Look, it’s a com­pe­tent posi­tion, but it’s not an exec­u­tive position.

23:46
Kevin Lawrence
Right.

23:47
Brad Giles
Went to mar­ket, and we had and I said to them, I like to upgrad­ing. We need about 50 appli­cants. Like, you’ve got to go cast a wide net, and we need a lot of peo­ple apply. Went through and went through a series of inter­views, and we got to the end, and I said, it’s not good enough. We haven’t got the right can­di­date. We need to start again. And so the HR man­ag­er agreed. Went and we start­ed again, and went through the whole process again and got an even wider net and more can­di­dates. Even­tu­al­ly we end­ed up with some­one who was quite good and com­pe­tent, and they did the job real­ly well. If we would have picked some­one our last scarci­ty, even though went to 50 can­di­dates the first time around, we just would­n’t have had that con­fi­dence and high lev­el at the end.

24:41
Kevin Lawrence
Yeah, were doing a recruit­ment for a sales leader for a com­pa­ny that I work with an excel­lent recruiter, like one of the best we’ve ever worked with. And were down. We had one can­di­date that was real­ly good and could have done the job, but the CEO was like, I don’t think this is our guy. So he went and pushed back. The recruiter is like, this guy could do it and would be good CEOs. I know. So the CEO pushed back. They went and did a whole oth­er batch and came back. In the end, were able to choose between the two. We chose a dif­fer­ent guy who turned out amaz­ing, but it takes courage some­times to push back and ask for more. It’s send­ing a meal back in a restau­rant. There’s a social ten­sion that some peo­ple have a hard time with and then they end up hav­ing to settle.

25:27
Kevin Lawrence
Scarci­ty is dan­ger­ous on a wider net. It goes back up to recruit­ing your­self and putting time up at the top of the fun­nel, get­ting good can­di­dates to start with. We got a cou­ple of bonus­es here. Num­ber one, not clear on great­ness and what it looks like. Set­ting your sites high enough and know­ing what they real­ly need to thrive. Two, hir­ing some­one or that’s con­ve­nient or that was referred. Three, under invest­ing time with you and your team to real­ly make this hap­pen don’t dig deep enough and you judge the book too much by its cov­er and don’t real­ly under­stand them deeply. Five, Scarci­ty kicks in and you just grab some­one ver­sus hold­ing out for and ensur­ing that you get great­ness. So we got a cou­ple of bonus­es. You want to do yours first. I got one I was think­ing about as were doing the show there.

26:17
Kevin Lawrence
Brad sure.

26:19
Brad Giles
After those hir­ing mis­takes, one oth­er is Onboard­ing. Clear­ly we’ve spo­ken about the onboard­ed book today, and we spoke about it last week in the nine Books every CEO must Read episode. If you do a great job of hir­ing and you do a ter­ri­ble job of onboard­ing, like most com­pa­nies do, this is a very expen­sive mis­take. Onboard­ing should val­i­date whether this per­son is a suc­cess­ful fit in the com­pa­ny, because spend­ing 90 days with some­one is going to give you a much greater sense than spend­ing a few hours with some­one inter­views where they’re real­ly try­ing to sell them­selves. So bonus one is onboarding.

27:00
Kevin Lawrence
Yes. The idea with that too, to make sure brand I mean, it’s your book, but I think the key piece is peo­ple also don’t put enough ener­gy into those onboard­ing and invest enough time and ener­gy with them along­side them to help them to be suc­cess­ful. That’s why I was so excit­ed you wrote that book. Bonus two is over­pay­ing. You’ve got pay bands and to match what you need to. And there’s two prob­lems with over­pay­ing. First of all, recruiters might want you to because it’s eas­i­er to recruit for more mon­ey. I’ve seen some CEOs get talked in some com­pen­sa­tion pack­ages don’t make sense. Note to self, if some­one’s com­ing to work for you and they’re over­ly con­cerned with com­pen­sa­tion, that tells you some­thing. I was talk­ing to the CEO actu­al­ly, recent­ly, and he was say­ing that when he recruits, he says he will nev­er pay a dol­lar more than they are cur­rent­ly making.

27:57
Kevin Lawrence
He goes, we have a great pur­pose led com­pa­ny with a spec­tac­u­lar oppor­tu­ni­ty. I want them to come because they buy into our vision and what we’re doing and what we’re about and who we are. I’m not going to bribe them in. I’m going to get them to buy in, was his view. That’s a hard thing to stick to. Basi­cal­ly, over­pay­ing or brib­ing peo­ple to work for you is a dan­ger­ous thing, because if they’re that coin oper­at­ed, there’s a rea­son­able chance they might con­tin­ue to be coin oper­at­ed down the road.

28:30
Brad Giles
Very good. So a few inter­est­ing mis­takes to avoid. There hope that you have enjoyed today’s episode of The Growth Whis­per­ers. Hir­ing mis­takes to avoid. My name is Brad Giles. You can find me@​evolutionpartners.​com Au, where I’ve got a week­ly newslet­ter you may poten­tial­ly be inter­est­ed in. Look, it’s a range of thoughts and ideas every week that you can sup­ply prac­ti­cal­ly to your busi­ness. That’s at Evo​lu​tion​part​ners​.com Au, you can find that. Kevin also has an inter­est­ing newslet­ter every week. You can find him@​lawrenceandcode.​com with his newslet­ter. You can find us as well on The Growth Whis­per­ers on YouTube, just by search­ing if you’d pre­fer to see our smil­ing faces. No mat­ter where you catch us, we’d love it if you could rate our episodes. The rat­ings mat­ter a lot to us. Hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s episode and look for­ward to chat­ting to you again next week. Take care.