Finding Diamonds in the Rough in Sales Hiring

Chuck Brotman: All right. Hello, everyone. And welcome to the latest talent GTM podcast. This is Chuck Brotman hosting today’s episode and really excited to have Kevin Gaither as my guest on the episode today. We’re going to talk about hiring diamonds in the rough. Kevin, thank you so much for giving us your time and joining the podcast.

Kevin Gaither: Yeah, no worries. Thanks Chuck. Looking forward to talking about this. It’s a, it’s a passionate topic for me, so let’s do it.

Chuck Brotman: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I, I think I first discovered you on LinkedIn, posting some really. Interesting, provocative, educational content hiring, most of which I agree with some of some things I didn’t always, but it was just so great to see you putting out your perspective and let’s start with your bio because I think it’s important audience knows how much your bio is informed by such an incredible Depth of experience and accomplishments.

Kevin resides in Los Angeles, where I, where I grew up. When he was growing up, no one ever told him he should be in sales, but he spent the last 30 years in sales and sales leadership, building sales teams at eight different startups, three of which has successful liquidity events. He now helps leaders at pre IPO tech companies avoid it.

Many of the mistakes that he made when building, fixing and growing their own sales teams. And when Kevin is not bugging his wife, walking his dog or playing poor golf, it can’t be worse than the golf that I play when I’m forced out there. He’s trying to come up with other projects and business ideas to occupy his time and limit bugging his wife.

Again, I really appreciate you joining, Kevin. Maybe my first question for you we talked about your experience in hiring. Can you talk about what you remember when you made your very first sales hire? Like what did that hiring process look like

Kevin Gaither: Process. What, what process, it was really just sort of like throwing, throwing you to the wolves. And I, most sales managers, experienced that, which is really unfortunate, it was back in 1997. The first opportunity I had to be, to be a manager. And, sure enough, the first four hires, first salesperson hires that I made, were they look just like me.

White people, young, male, like, what a disaster, and I’m not saying like everything needs to be DEI or whatever. I’m just saying that like there was no process. And as a result, I was just like, well, I’m just going to hire people that literally, look like me. but I still didn’t my and my leadership didn’t come to me expressing the import of trying to, make hiring better, which I have a very, very strong opinion that that’s the number one skill that sales leaders should have because everything else blows and everything else becomes far, far easier.

But I didn’t know that, And then so fast forward into my, second sales leadership, sales leadership job. And Chuck, this was amazing. Now I had a great opportunity. The VP of sales tapped me and said, Hey, we want you to take over team. And by the way, we want to hire up another 30 people in the, in the next 90 days.

Go and, and, and I didn’t, he hooked me up with a recruiter, who I still remain friends with to this day, which I have very strong opinions on recruiters, by the way. and I said, well, listen, I don’t know how to do this. His name is Todd. I don’t know how to do this, well, and I don’t want to screw it up for you.

I don’t want to let you down. How should I do this? And he goes, Oh, real simple. There’s three questions that you want to like evaluate each candidate against when they do the job. Are they a fit for the job and are they good for the team?

Chuck Brotman: Right.

Kevin Gaither: And, and I remember like thinking that everything that he said was sort of like, Moses etching the 10 commandments, it’s a stone, whatever.

And so I took it really seriously. That was a failure. That was a failure. And what resulted from that in like, another 180 days later is that I had to take this team that I’d built up to like 32 salespeople. And like fire half of them, like lay off half. Yeah. It was, it was, it was really bad.

Now, I’ve learned, I’ve come up with a new phrase recently and it’s burned and learned, burned and learned. It’s just, you make these mistakes, you hope they’re not fatal enough. And, and then you learn, you learn from them. 

Chuck Brotman: Can I ask when, at, I’m curious a bit. We’re gonna get into sort of some of the more recent experience we’ve all had in the markets up and down. But going back to that experience, you made these hires. I mean, having to let anybody go is hard, but that many so early in your management career, when did you when did you connect the dots and realize that there maybe maybe there was a problem in the way that you were like interviewing and making hiring decisions versus hiring managers?

things that had maybe nothing to do. When did you know the problem was actually how you were hiring? Was it an immediate sort of revelation to you, or did it come to you sort of more down the line as you learn better ways to, like, make great hiring decisions?

Kevin Gaither: so such a good question. Chuck, I wish I had this like, You know unbelievably logical, moment for you But the reality was is that this was I was at business. com and I had to lay off like I don’t know 16 20 people or whatever it was And i’ll tell you the reality is the sitting in front of somebody who’s crying That you just hired crying, Chuck crying, that, that makes, I don’t care who you are.

You could be a near psychopath, but you’ve still, still, it hurt. It hurt. I mean, obviously it hurt them. And so I don’t want to be unsensitive, like the crying CEO or something like that. Like, I don’t want to be that. What I’m trying to say is it. I knew that I screwed up because I’m sitting in front of somebody who’s crying because now because of my mistake, my mistake.

I, I have to let this, let this person go. And that’s an important thing, Chuck. I could view that event as a sales leader and go, wasn’t my fault. I didn’t get trained on this. And I could have pointed fingers elsewhere. But the reality is Chuck, that I took full responsibility, even though I logically, I, there was a, the problem was multivariate.

It wasn’t just me, but I took full responsible responsibility for it. And I went on a quest, and I went on a quest to learn how to interview, recruit, and hire sales people better. And it started with reading a whole slew of books that I became addicted to. My two favorite, actually three favorite would be Top Grading, Top Grading for Sales,

Chuck Brotman: Yeah.

Kevin Gaither: And never hire a bad salesperson again.

Never hire a bad salesperson again is the most trite title of a book ever. And, and it happens to be one of my favorite books by Dr. Chris Kroener, who is also a friend of mine in Chicago. Great, great guy, organizational psychologist. And I read a whole slew of other books, including five lie detection books to, to improve.

Yeah, to improve my probabilities of making successful sales hires. And a lot of it was selfish. I wanted to avoid sitting in front of a salesperson saying, today’s your last day and have them crying. Like a lot of it was very selfish. It was self preservation to learn to do this better.

Chuck Brotman: And one more question as we get into this. We’ve all been or heard of situations where You know, great new hires can struggle and often fail because they weren’t set up for success, or there were other issues with the business or macroeconomic conditions that just made success almost impossible, if not impossible.

I’m assuming here in this situation, some of those hires you made, We’re great. I mean, you knew enough at that point, like this was about hiring above all else because some, some, some of those new people coming in, we’re doing really well than a lot of others were not. Is that, is that a fair way to put it?

I guess I’m trying to understand how would that at that early stage of your career when you went on that quest and started reading and committing to not being in that position where you had to let people go and see them crying, which is awful. You figured that in part because in fact, some of those hires must have worked out quite well.

Correct.

Kevin Gaither: Oh, yeah, some, some worked out well, but see, that’s the fallacy though, Chuck, that, in fact, I actually had to sit in a board meeting one time with the board member, like everybody, if you’ve never been in a board meeting before, like, you sort of think about the people that are on the board must be like unbelievably smart people.

They’re, they’re just humans. They’re just normal human. I’m not saying they’re stupid. I’m just saying they’re like, just normal humans, just like everybody else. And I literally had this board member say to me to my face. KG, I don’t know why you don’t just go like hire 20 salespeople and just, fire half of them and just let the, let, let the cards fall as they may.

And what I learned through my quest was that’s an unbelievably expensive process. Very expensive in real costs. And then of course, I said to him, and this was me being kind of a smart ass to the board, you don’t have to do that. I’m the one who will have to let those people off.

And that’s a painful experience, not something that I really want to do. I only lasted about a year at that company, but, but anyway, so the point is, is that, I certainly learned a lot from that, that experience. Yes, I could make excuses that there was a lot of other things that, that happened, but I took full responsibility myself.

Chuck Brotman: Got it. And the fallacy here that we’re talking about, this may be a good segue to talk about the growth at all costs world that we we’ve exited, but the fallacy from that, that VC is that this is how it always works. You hire in volumes, you get to your targets. Some of those hires work out great. Hopefully most of them. And then the rest you manage out.

Kevin Gaither: Yeah. Completely. It’s just sort of like this huge funnel like this, this huge funnel that like decreases, very, very quickly and it doesn’t have to be like that. Now I don’t know any, I don’t know any sales leader or hire, hiring manager that has a hundred percent success rate.

We’re talking about humans. We’re talking about improving your probabilities of hiring success. Chuck, let me say that again. Creating a thoughtful and intentional hiring process is not about perfection. It’s about improving your probabilities of hiring great salespeople in my, in my instance.

Chuck Brotman: Totally. Let’s talk about the, the, the Age of Zurb, right? So maybe 2020 sort of, in the early days of COVID, interest rates down to zero, tech companies, hiring in droves.

Kevin Gaither: Yeah.

Chuck Brotman: We’ve now kind of looked at this as the end of an era and, and, and there’s this notion that we’ve now been in a world of efficient growth, which in many argue is, is, is much healthier for business and will produce better businesses.

What are some of your observations about what happened during that time and particularly as it pertains to hiring?

Kevin Gaither: Yeah. So Chuck, I’m old enough to have gone through this a couple of times. And the last time that I experienced this was prior to the, the mortgage meltdown, prior to 2007 and, and could not, not coincidentally, that was around the same exact time where I went on this quest because it was sort of like, that was the thing, just hire, just put butts in the seat, and, and you get lucky because the economy is brisk.

 And it just sort of works out, because you’re, you’re just, as long as you have the heads. As long as you have the heads, the quality doesn’t matter. And you’re just going to get lucky because buyers have money. Interest rates are low. Everything is, is, is booming and everybody is growing.

Everybody is adding more heads. And so they need more seats for this, that, and my other observation most recently, and, and a given that I’d seen it before, it certainly made me laugh, especially during COVID. Many salespeople like the ones that like zoom and slack, they started like truly believing that they were good salespeople.

Chuck Brotman: Right. 

Kevin Gaither: And again, I I’m laughing because I’ve seen it before. I’m not laughing at these people in particular. And it’s a very natural process where, gosh, I’m doing really, really well. That, by the way, that’s called resulting. I look at the end result. And go, I must be good. That must be a good decision that, I made, but the reality was that everyone’s buying Zoom.

Everyone’s buying Slack. Everyone’s buying, micro Microsoft Teams during that point in time. And, and for salespeople, sorry for sales leaders that are making these hires. They’re like, wow, look at the results. Look at the revenue that I’m creating for Zoom or Slack or Microsoft Teams. Boy, I must be a good sales leader.

But when in reality, when in reality they had no process, or, or a solid process, let’s put it this way. I never worked at Zoom. I never worked at Slack. I never at Microsoft Teams. I’m just making this as an example. The fact is, is that there was the process for hiring salespeople was different.

Different than it is now because you didn’t have to have a tighter, lens on what great looked like for sales people because it was just sort of like fill the seats as long as they fit the culture, as long as they’re not toxic, as long as they can pass a drug test, put them in the seats and somebody is going to buy, buy the product, from them.

But that doesn’t mean that they had a great hiring process. 

Chuck Brotman: Actually let me let me come on this. I think this might be a good segue into you’re talking about process and let’s use the kind of not to pick on Zoom. The example is a good one, though, that in other words, so a couple things you talked about that happened during during this era.

One is that companies were hiring like crazy. You had a lot of demand, but but second, you had a lot of sellers at many kind of established SaaS companies that had a more downhill path to success that started to overestimate their skills and their ability to be successful in sales, in thick and thin times.

And what I want to share here, because I think it’ll get to your, your methodology, which I think is really compelling, is that I’m going to talk about what I think, and let me get your reaction. One of the positives That came out of 2020 to 22. And that is that because of this, this scarcity or perceived scarcity of talent, because there was so much competition to hire. We certainly saw a lot of our clients, particularly early stage, SaaS companies often with really compelling value props that needed to make early hires and were struggling to compete with more established companies for talent. And so we collectively. We’re forced to go out and try to attract people from different walks of life with different backgrounds.

I remember early in starting the business. I talked to a guy was having success as a literally as a used car salesperson, and I’ve seen him on linked. I mean, his career, I think, is flourishing, right? But he would have a harder time, I think, getting, I’m at bat today versus somebody that, had triple digit successes at a more established company during that time period.

We can talk about why that is, but do you agree that at a certain level, one of the positives that came out of this is that a lot of people from different backgrounds got. Got were recruited into into tech sales and that there is an argument that we shouldn’t, we should maintain that point of focus, right?

Like you really want to be open to you always want to be thinking actively about how to bring people in your business who might not be intuitive or obvious hires, right?

Kevin Gaither: Yeah, a hundred percent. . Let me speak to this, the, this other fallacy that I have learned. This is experience. This isn’t just an opinion. This is experience. I think it’s wholly lazy when, when hiring managers simply say, we just want to hire experienced people. You know what the reality is that the good ones are going to stay at the company that they’re at, unless they’re been abused or something like that, which is, there’s a non zero chance that that’s happening. But the reality of you being able to attract an A player who has experience from a competitor.

I just want to inspire. And that’s another one experience from competitors. And I’ve seen that fail time and time again. The other one, of course, Chuck is, I want to hire sales people that have the relationships already and have the Rolodex already, because there’s this perception that they’re going to like bring, business with them instead, instead it’s a true skillset and a, and a competitive advantage when you can look for salespeople.

In all walks of life, which means, which means the funnel opens up to, to you, much wider than those that are like, well, I just want to hire, I’m at zoom. I only want to hire people from Microsoft teams, like that’s, it’s an unbelievably, and I think it’s lazy, frankly, now there are some, very, very technical products, like, robotic surgery type of products where that, that death, I’ve seen that be relevant.

I’ve seen that very, be very relevant. But generally speaking, if you can hire people that have the right characteristics and underlying characteristics that can’t be taught, you can then teach them your thing. Assuming that you’ve got, your product, your service, assuming that you’ve got a good onboarding, program, which I think is a prerequisite regard, regardless, obviously.

But it was a true competitive advantage to me, because I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t look, I don’t feel there’s so much BS and banter on LinkedIn about like, why don’t hiring managers give more people a shot?

Chuck Brotman: Right.

Kevin Gaither: That’s not their responsibility. It’s not my job to give salespeople a shot. It’s like, well, you don’t look right. I’m going to give you a shot if you have the characteristics and I don’t care if you’re coming from God knows what location or, or industry or non industry, or if you have a degree or don’t have a degree or whatever, if you have these characteristics, I’m more interested in that than domain experience.

Chuck Brotman: I think, and I want to, give you an opportunity to talk about this. I know you’ve got thoughts on what those characteristics are in my next question, but what, but, To maybe recap a bit what you shared and add on to it, because I see this so much, as a recruiter today, what, what’s making it, I think, hard for some of the companies is the reality is there are some superb people out there who can execute, who maybe do have that experience that you’re looking for.

And so I think what’s happened now, is it common? Not often, right? It can, it can send you on a fool’s errand. But because there is more talent out there, I think companies now and companies are also recognizing there’s a lot of people who are out there for a reason because they’re not great. You have hiring managers just obsessing with running a process to validate.

Is the experience legit is a legit is a legit. They’re staying to hyper focus on a narrow set of experiences and validating that That A, they’re not looking at people who have, I think what you call it, your, your characteristics beyond that, who might be even more exceptional. And, and B, they’re not even looking for those characteristics at all in that set. It’s just about validating the narrative, about back channeling, about confirming this and that. Which still isn’t making sure they have, the kind of skills that are needed in your environment to be successful. Can you talk and maybe to segue from that, what are, like, the characteristics that you look for, for, as you mentioned, it’s not perfection in hiring, but to, like, to be more consistently successful.

What are those characteristics and why, and how does that apply across different types of companies, Kevin?

Kevin Gaither: Yeah, very good. Let me back up and remind your listeners like where this is coming from. This is coming from a place where I made hires. I screwed up. I had to lay them off and I, and I decided to go through a self teaching process to, to improve my probabilities of success in identifying, recruiting and in a hiring and hiring talent.

 And, so, and that began in, 2005, for, for example. So what does that make it 19 years? That I’ve been honing, honing these, this, this process and, and I’ve hired all kinds of salespeople from SDRs to account managers, to channel salespeople, to enterprise salespeople, and mostly, high velocity SMB transactional type of type of salespeople, as well across that entire spectrum.

There are six characteristics that I think are non negotiables. Six that are non negotiables. If you’re going to work for me now, again, your mileage might, might vary, but I think that every sales leader on this call should consider these six and we can double click on any one of them. As you see fit, I’m going to run through them fast. Need for achievement, competitiveness, optimism, coachability, Continual learning, which is not the same thing, by the way. Coachability, continual learning, and organizational skills. So, need for achievement, competitiveness, optimism, continual learning. Coachability and organizational skills. Those are for me, I wouldn’t make any kind of higher SDR, higher enterprise sales, higher, and anywhere and everywhere in between without those six.

Let me know where you want to go with that.

Chuck Brotman: Well, I love it. first question for you. Do you believe that all six characteristics sort of apply equally across different stages and sales context? If you also, for example, there’s company a that, in a greenfield market where they’re solving problems in ways that people haven’t.

Previously conceived, right? and it’s not the cell is not really competitive, but they’re competing against inaction or lack of awareness of the problem. And they need sellers who can really help educate the market and drive opportunity. There’s product market fit. I don’t want to say they haven’t figured that out.

I know definitions can vary, but it’s a very greenfield cell. It’s early stage. No known competitors versus company be where they’re in a highly competitive market. Every deal typically requires, some form of rip and replace and understanding the timing of contracts and et cetera. I mean, do these, I guess what I’m asking, do these characteristics in your opinion kind of apply equally and we shouldn’t overcomplicate it?

Kevin Gaither: yes, but for me, A, an appropriate benchmark hiring benchmark, which we can discuss what the heck that means if you want to, should have 10 to 12 total characteristics on it. So what that means to me is, okay, I’ll go to company a as a sales leader and I start developing this hiring process to replace salespeople or hire new sales people or what have you.

And the core of the benchmark is going to have these six characteristics. The core is going to have these six characteristics. And then I’ll flesh the rest of the, of the benchmark out with other characteristics that are far more customized and specific to the job, the organ, the job and the industry, that I’m at for sure.

But yes, I would say that, to use a big multi syllable word, ubiquitous. I would use them across any company. You could be at GoDaddy. Selling six transactions, 10 transactions a day. And I would still be looking for those six characteristics, or you could be selling jet airliners and I would still, one a year and you make your number.

And I’m, I’m looking for that. I’m looking for those six characteristics.

Chuck Brotman: Second question for you. So let’s say I’m a, I’m a well networked but B player at best seller looking for work. I know Kevin Gaither. I see you on LinkedIn all the time. I know who your clients are. I see that you’ve shared, questions to assess for these characteristics. How does a company avoid being gamed by somebody who maybe doesn’t have?

Coach ability and competitiveness, or that need for achievement, but knows they’ll be assessed for that knows the kind of questions you recommend asking and is coming prepared to, to kind of game their way through it,

Kevin Gaither: I I’m laughing because I literally had a salesperson. Tell me after I hired him KG. I saw that you published all of your questions online and I took them down, put them all into index cards, rented and, rented a space in a library and put all the cards around me so that when you ask the question, I take the card and turn it over on a, and I have the answer.

By the way, he turned out to be one of the best salespeople that I’ve ever hired in my, in my entire life. And people have said to me, “KG, geez, don’t you think like people are going to like game it just like, just like you said,” the reality is, is if you’re a crappy interviewer, you’re going to get duped by this.

 But The devil is in the details and this sounds so trite to say, but if you’re a skilled interviewer and especially in behavioral interviewing and know how to peel back the onion to understand the details of the story that the sales person is going to tell you, you can figure out whether or not they’re,full of it or not.

And I’ll give you an example.

Chuck Brotman: Can you also define as you go through that? Some of our audience may not know what behavioral interviewing is. Can you explain that to as you go through your example or

Kevin Gaither: Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s not, it’s not complicated. It’s difficult to execute sometimes for salespeople. The, the root of behavioral interviewing, it has a maximum that sounds something like this past performance is going to guarantee future results. Now that’s in the stock market that doesn’t apply. And that’s a cover your butt type of move.

But with interviewing, Past performance guarantees future results. So when you can get a candidate to tell you real stories about situations where they did the thing that you’re trying to assess and can do it with detail, now you’re assessing their, their real behaviors because they’re telling you stories.

And, and, everybody knows, or everybody who knows behavioral interviewing, the basis Of every behavioral interview question starts with, tell me about a time when you,

Chuck Brotman: Right.

Kevin Gaither: you start filling it and it’s not difficult to shape every question. And why would you want to do that?

You’d want to do that because if you ask a salesperson, are you competitive? Which. Sales leaders ask that stupid question, or how competitive do you think you are? I mean, just make me throw up in my mouth. Why don’t you? But you know, tell me about the, the, the last deal that you won, or tell me about the, tell me about the most competitive situation that you faced at work, or tell me about the last time you felt you were competitive.

Now tell me about another time, by the way, that’s one of my favorite, competitive questions. Tell me about the last time you were competitive. Why, why is that important to me? Why do I think that’s my favorite question? Because competitive people. Are always competitive in their personal lives and their business lives.

And, and one of my, when I know I’ve got something potentially, when I asked that question to somebody, I say, Chuck, tell me about the last time you were competitive and you look up and you look at me and then you go, well, do you mean like personal or business? 

Chuck Brotman: Right. 

Kevin Gaither: Now I’m interested because this person is like, well, shoot, like yesterday I was doing this and it was competitive and dah, dah, dah, dah.

That’s a great start. I will. Great. I don’t, it doesn’t matter to me. I’m just asking, tell me about the last time. And then they start telling me, specific stories, real stories. And when you ask for the details of a story, this is the lie detection coming into play, by the

way, when you start to ask for details, when, where, why, who was there?

What was the situation? How did it end? real people that have this real experience. They were able to tell the story very well and it’s compelling and believable. So back to your, the root of your question. I’m not afraid of anybody gaming me because I can give them the questions. I’m going to figure out by grilling them.

And I hate to say it because people,

Chuck Brotman: Right.

Kevin Gaither: it’s like an interview process is, is I’m, I’m interrogating you and I’m sorry for saying that, but it is, I’m, I’m asking you questions to get answers and I’m going to dig deeper and deeper and deeper to figure out, to get to the truth, to get to the truth, 

Chuck Brotman: Where do you see people who, who are, who are hiring sort of executing poorly on behavioral interviewing? Is it, is it just a failure to go deep through to ask? They’re asking the questions too routinely. Like where in general are companies that are building your questions into their process falling short and failing?

Executing on it.

Kevin Gaither: Yeah, it’s, it’s, there, there’s so many different layers to this and I’m sure you’ve seen it as well. First. I consulted with a client last year, as a matter of fact, where I built out their entire, hiring process for a VP of sales and, and they had had failed hires in the past VP of sales hires in the past.

How did you go about doing it? Well, I have everybody from my executive team go in and meet with them and ask them questions. What do they ask him? I don’t know. I just let them ask their own questions.

Chuck Brotman: Right,

Kevin Gaither: So it’s this sort of like round Robin, like you, you just tell me if you like them or not. And this, this goes back to like what I learned from my first VP, way back when, can they do the job?

Do they want to do the job? Are they a good fit for the team? You end up with these like ridiculous hires cause no one’s on the same page of what good looks like. 

Chuck Brotman: You can’t have one weak link in that process, right? Even if you’re running superb interviews, if you have somebody that has influence in your organization who comes in and wings it, that can undermine everything, right?

Kevin Gaither: For sure. For sure. And especially if they’ve got like a C in their title, they can make it, they can influence one way or the other the wrong way. so, so not having any sort of process, is a consistent failure, which surprises me, but it just helps me realize that most people don’t quite understand the import of having a very well structured hiring, process.

 So that, that’s, that’s failure. Number one. failure number two is, maybe you define what good looks like, but you don’t define the questions that, that people should be asking and you don’t teach them how to ask these questions. And so what that results in. Okay, competitive is important to us.

Okay, great. And then you just, you tell somebody to go in there and assess competitiveness and you get these galactically ridiculous questions like, do you hate to lose or love to win? And the, and the person that you candidate is like, well, what’s the right answer? Like they’re looking for the right answer. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s ridiculous. And I get into lots of arguments about how stupid that type of question is. And, how competitive do you think you are? And, and then some of the other ones, like, how many ping pong balls can fit into a bus or something like that? It’s like, look, man, it’s salespeople.

We’re not the sharpest tools in the shed. Like, why are we going through that kind of BS? and then like this post interview process, it’s like this haphazard, like you’re not scoring, like you’re not using a scoring system, against which you’re like, okay, this is a candidate that I’m trying to assess for competitiveness.

How do I rate them? One to 10 has it or doesn’t have it. Personally, I like the binary they don’t, or they do, it’s just because you can get caught in this and this is from experience, remember learned and burned, burned and learned. You can get caught in this, like, let’s say you are doing scoring and you score it, out of 10 for, for example, it’s like, well.

Seven is passing. And whether the binary is a forcing function, do they have it or do they not? Or do they not have it? Or I’m not sure. Or I’m not sure. But, but having, not having a scoring system to then be able to go in post interview with all these people and go, okay, these were the three characteristics you were supposed to assess.

These are the three you were supposed to, and these are the four that you were supposed to. How do they score? Let’s go one by one. And how do you know that? And like, grilling the interviewers, like, how do you know that? there’s so many other failures, and to me, the biggest failure, continually, I don’t see investment in, in recruiting, interviewing, hiring training.

And those are three things that they’re completely different by the way, recruiting, interviewing, and hiring. Those are three different things in my mind. And there is virtually no training that goes into that. And number two, I’m only seeing a little bit of technology going, going along the way now to start support interviewers.

When the cost, okay, most people don’t know. I should say that. I know it, it, the cost of a mishire is like three to five times base salary, three to five times base salary. Most interviewers have a coin flip 50 50 success rates. Okay, so think about making 10 hires that with a base salary of a hundred grand.

And, and the mistake that you make adds up per real, really quick. 10 hires, five of ’em are no good. Five of ’em. At a base salary of $500,000, of five, a hundred thousand is $500,000. Times three to five is $1.5 million mistake at the very least. And yet there’s very little software. Especially with the advent of AI, there’s very little software that goes along with the interview process to help the people make better hires.

Why? Because these feel like soft costs. They feel like soft costs to the, to the employer, whereas all the sales enablement stuff, AI coaching pipeline management, like that, that feels far more, far more tangible to, to buyers, to the companies. So they’re going to invest there. And I’ll tell you what, Chuck, I don’t care if you’ve got a great product, a great culture, great compensation.

I don’t care about any of that stuff. If you put the wrong butts in the seat, it’s all for naught. If you put the wrong butts in the seat, it’s all for naught,

Chuck Brotman: And you may well be even understating the cost because I think for many companies, bad hires, the cost is existential, right? If you make too many bad hires, like you’re, you’re shutting your doors right in this, in this economy. So,

Kevin Gaither: Well, certainly an early stage, certainly an early stage. it’s in fact, I get criticized for this by the way, where, we’re such early stage. We don’t need a process like that. We don’t need a structured process like that. All right. Buyer beware. You do you.

Chuck Brotman: Right. It’s me. It’s so interesting that into your point in, in, in sales, like there’s more recognition that. once you have product market fit and even arguably to get there, you need to have some process for repeatability and for learning and fine tuning and yet in hiring, right? That there’s just, there’s so little recognition of that.

I want to, I think really powerful. You should morning. I think my takeaways from you even you haven’t framed it this way cagey, but it’s just keeping it simple, not overcomplicating it right and then putting it through doing that. What I’m hearing you share is You’re actually enabling more rigor and better decision making, but simplicity, right?

The six key characters you’ve described, rigorous training, not over architecting complex questions is great. I want to come back to a point you made at the beginning when you were doing your very first hires before business dot com. You talk about hiring people that look like yourself, and I want to Yeah.

Yeah. Something you shared. I want to come back to that. But and I’ll do that through sharing something that you furnished to me in our intake notes. You talked about how we were telling this episode diamonds in the rough, right? That it’s not easy to find these great sellers. But if you have a process, they’re there to be hired.

And you commented to me that they’re everywhere. They’re Uber drivers, bartenders, waiters, waitresses, mobile phone, retail reps. I love this because one of the things that I’ve been critical of is how Sometimes people in hiring, they sort of grab on to like proxy attributes, right? We hire, athletes because athletes have competitiveness without deploying the kind of methodology that you’ve described, which would enable me to Be much more broader.

But also, I think what you’re promoting here, you haven’t shared it this way, but is a great way to actually build more diversity into your hiring because you’re not sort of looking for certain proxy categories that are more comfortable with, right? If I’m a former, D1 lacrosse player and I’m interviewing a D1 lacrosse player, it’s going to be easier for me, perhaps to like, to understand their behavioral responses, talking about competitiveness and optimism in those scenarios because of that background.

So my question, I’d curious, I’d love to get your reactions to that. But my question is, how do you ensure that interviewers can really come in and understand examples that may come from talent? That’s that were where they were in a completely different walk of life, right? Like, maybe it’s somebody who was, a construction welder.

And I, I know nothing about that, right? Like, How do you ensure that bias or my slow to understand what they’re discussing doesn’t get in the way of that assessment?

Kevin Gaither: Admittedly, I mean, anybody can agree with this, but like there’s, everyone has bias. And an unconscious bias is like insidious. Like, it’s like, how do you, you don’t even know what’s happening and you’re doing it anyway. Let’s talk about, again, I’m not about certainties, black and white and ones and zeros.

I’m about improving my probability of success. And, and honestly, I’m not, maybe I get blasted for this. I don’t know, but I’m not specifically saying going into an interview and going, okay, I’m going to make sure that I’m going to make X amount of diverse, diverse hires. I’m, I’m engineering the process.

Re engineering the process, I suppose, by focusing on these characteristics, okay? Such that when this person comes in and sits in front of me, virtually or otherwise, it doesn’t matter what they look like or where they came from, I’m assessing these characteristics. The reason why I was laughing, with you about the D1 lacrosse thing is, is actually a diversity story in and of itself.

There’s two prongs to this, Chuck. First, when I was at business. com, I wanted to hire sales athletes. That was one of my, I was like, well, they’re good fit for the job and they do the job. Okay, great. Well, I’m going to hire all sales. People have to be competitive. So I’m going to hire sales athletes.

And I had the sales rep candidate sitting in front of me who was a D one water polo player at Berkeley, UC Berkeley. I mean, this is like division one, like, right. And here’s what I did in my mind. And by the way, he was white, he was male. Okay? Good looking, tall, blonde, okay? And I, and I, and in my mind, I said, He played D1 Water Polo.

He must be competitive. He must be competitive. And, he couldn’t close his way out of a paper bag. And what, and what turned out from that, Chuck, was that he, what his parents are the ones that pushed him and pushed him and pushed him and pushed him. And so he was the one that was like, I don’t want to practice.

I don’t want to play, but my parents are pushing me and he gets a full ride, but he still doesn’t enjoy what he’s doing. So what ends up happening after college, he reverts to the mean, he reverts to his normal state, which was, I don’t really want to be doing this. I’m not really that competitive. I just happen to be pushed to do it.

Now, the diversity story is the opposite. Now, because I learned all these dang lessons, I found that there’s competitive people all over the place that never played competitive sports. And one of the best salespeople that I, interviewed or, or hired, Was a woman who when I asked the question, tell me about the last time you were competitive and she said, do you mean personal business?

And I said, aha. well, anyone just with the most recent, she goes, well, yesterday I was in yoga class, yoga class yesterday. I was, Come on, we’re talking to Namaste and peace and own and all this kind of stuff. And she’s going to tell me a competitive story about this. And she goes, yeah, so we were doing this really, really difficult pose.

I was in the front of the class, by the way, front of the class, yoga person, front of the class. She’s doing this pose. And she closed eyes and she opens her eyes to look left, look right, to see who fell down. And she saw that others fell down. And she was like, yep, I win.

And she was one of the best. But if you looked at that on paper and you were only looking to hire sales athletes, one, she never would have yoga.

On her resume, you know what I mean? But yet she was fiercely competitive. So to back to your question, I’m there’s, I don’t believe that an unbiased process, a purely unbiased process can be, can be run. Everyone brings their own biases, unconscious or otherwise into the, into the process. but if you start with an intentional set of objective characteristics, you’re going to improve your probability of, of making.

the right hire, which could be a diverse hire, the right hire could be a diverse

Chuck Brotman: But the thing that you tell me if you disagree that you haven’t used this word, but which seems vital to me to execute what you did with that, with that yoga participant, you have to be relentlessly curious as well. If you are not as an interviewer, you talked about, sort of grilling and that may be the outcome, but.

I feel like if you go into that intent without like curiosity by your side, right? Somebody not as adept is not going to get to the point where they get that example out of this person, right?

Kevin Gaither: Oh yeah. I think of Ted Lasso. Be curious, not judgmental, be curious, not judgmental. and, and that is a very tactical, interview mistake. don’t fall in love with the candidate that is, don’t fall in love with the candidate.

Chuck Brotman: Don’t get happy years, right? Like we 

Kevin Gaither: No, exactly. And again, that was, I faced that with this D1 water polo player.

I looked at him on paper. He sat in front of me, big, strong, broad shoulders, blonde hair. And I was like, Oh, this is one competitive dude. And I fell in love with him right out of the gate. Never. Remember, you have to score the candidate. And if you have an, post interview process, that other people in the room are going to grill you about how you came up with that score.

Why you say that they’re competitive. Why, what did they tell you? And so if you, if you go yoga, next question, you’re going to miss out on those diamonds in the rough. You’re going to miss out on those diamonds in the, in the, in the rough. And by the way, There’s so many people that are going to hear this and go, ah, he’s cracked.

I’m going to hire experienced sales, but go right ahead because that’s my competitive advantage and anybody that can look and find those diamonds in the rough, wherever they are, Uber drivers and, and, working at T Mobile or Verizon, that’s a competitive advantage relative to then saying, I only want to hire people from, experienced people from competitors.

Now your world has gone down to like minuscule levels.

Chuck Brotman: Right. Well, and also this isn’t a DEI focused Program here. But this is this is the piece that I think D. I. Has been so sorely missing, right? And the irony here is I think you’re outlining an approach that is the most resilient and best and only way to ensure organization has more diverse talent. It’s not about like checking boxes or looking for X or Y in your demographics.

It is about having a A process, whether it’s your six characteristics or something comparable, but where you’re really committed to assessing for that and finding it where it resides. And, we, we’ve seen, with our clients, we, we preach similar things and try to run our screens that way.

And we know from the data we’ve seen, like our clients do make it. More diverse hires. That’s never something we’re setting out as our end goal. We want them to hire the best talent that will execute long term. And you’ve articulated a way to do that. And I’m hopeful those people you described who are going to go back to old habits who do care about promoting opportunity.

across the landscape, right? This is the way you do it, right? So I 

Kevin Gaither: Yeah. That’s, that’s exactly right. And there, and there’s, there’s multiple components to it. And one of the most important is not only creating that benchmark with like objective characteristics, here are the eight, 10, 12 things that, that characteristics that were, that we’re looking for, the things that you really can’t teach in a lot, in a lot of ways, but post interview being in a group with a group of people that have the mindset of.

Yeah. I want to make, it’s my responsibility to the company to make sure that we’re making the best hires that are possible. And when that interviewer over there says they don’t have, they’re not competitive. It’s my responsibility to say, how do you know that? Convince me of, of that. And you have to be in a safe space.

I hate using that word cause it’s so snowflakey, but you have to be in a, in a safe space with your interviewing team so that you’re comfortable enough to call out other interviewers and go, how do you know that? And when you can, when you can get them to stand and deliver, well, I asked this question and they told me this story.

It’s like, okay, well then you know what? Good. You’re you’re, they’re not that competitive. You can improve your probabilities of making a great Transcribed And diverse hire and run a, not biased, an unbiased process or a process with the least amount of bias. When you can combine those two things on the front end and the back end.

Chuck Brotman: Love it. One last question for you. And then I want to get some more of some of your reading and listening recommendations.

Kevin Gaither: Sure.

Chuck Brotman: We have our points of view here. Others, share differently on LinkedIn. Many are very accomplished. And so I think it’s interesting to see, when things about hiring differently and their and their secret sauce.

 how do we get to a point where we’re Or how do you with with the process you recommend? How do we use actual data to confirm this is working or not? Obviously, performance tells all. But as you mentioned, you’re gonna have some subset of your hires who are or not working. And, and some companies may, may not have numbers that are great, maybe managing more people out than they wanted to, who are trying to execute the process you described.

Like, how do you improve this over time? How do you learn from actual data?

Kevin Gaither: Yeah. prior to applicant tracking systems, I had an, very complicated way of measuring this. Here it is. After six months of making a hire, You put it in a Google spreadsheet and, and you ask yourself one simple question, knowing what you know now, would you hire that person again? Period. End of story.

It’s everything you need to know because after six months, you’re kind of like, eh, or, oh my God. Yes. They’re great. Like it’s just, there’s just no yes or no.

Chuck Brotman: Why six months versus three or versus a year? How do you get to six?

Kevin Gaither: Oh, well, because 90 days everybody can act on their best behavior for the first, 90 days. One year is too long in my, in my opinion. and by the way, I may have picked that up off of, one of the books that I read top grading, top grading for sales, or, I may have picked that, that up from one of those books there.

but 90 days, it’s like everyone’s acting on their best behavior. They’re putting in all their, effort, right at the beginning, but then, they’re going to revert, people revert to the mean one year is just way too long. One year is way too long. And I want to optimize my process now.

and, and then you look at your own hiring success rate and what you can, what I recommend is that, Whoever the sales leader is or the head of talent acquisition, they’re going to measure that globally. So they’re going to measure that across the board, and capture that information, but then capture it on an interviewer by interviewer basis.

Interviewer by interviewer basis. Now, when I was at, so you can learn who are good interviewers who are not good interviewers and create the better interviewer interviewing teams. Okay? and you have to optimize that because everyone thinks they’re good interviewers. By the way, I’ve never met anybody that goes, boy, I really suck at interviewing.

Like, everyone thinks that they’ve got it for some reason. I’m really good at assessing talent in the first two minutes of a call. Give me a freaking break. However, with the advent of applicant tracking systems, just like a CRM process, we should be able to measure stage by stage conversion rates, stage by stage, conversion rates and being able to assess You know, how we’re moving these candidates and how fast we’re moving these, these candidates through.

And by the way, Chuck, let me just say, I believe in a thorough process, but also a fast process. I believe you can get up and down with, with candidates in two weeks or less, two weeks, two weeks. These processes that go a month, two months, three months with like 20 different people. It’s like, Oh my God, no good salesperson is going to go through, through that.

Unless the compensation is like off the roof, too quick. You don’t have enough data points, two weeks. If you have a candidate, that’s good. Why aren’t you saying great. How about tomorrow for the next interview? And then, and then if they continue to pass, you’re compressing it for the good ones and you’re kicking the, so you can have a good process, a thorough process.

That is also, very speedy.

Chuck Brotman: In hindsight, I wish we set aside two hours for this podcast. Maybe we have a topic for part two. But since we’re almost at time here to close things out, you we haven’t had time to go into the depth and substance of your career. And I would encourage my listeners to check out KG’s background here more fully on LinkedIn.

What, tell us more. You’ve given us a couple of book recommendations that helped you Build your process that you learn from a top grading and I think never hiring a bad salesperson again. I’m going to check both of them out. What else do you recommend? What are you reading? What are you listening to?

what else can you share with our, our listeners who, whether, whether they’re, whether we’re talking to talent or, or hiring leaders here that can help them get better at hiring and sales in general.

Kevin Gaither: Yeah, so, very good. So the, the books that I’m reading nowadays are, business books, self-help books and things like that. But some of my favorite books that, that I recommend, first of all, Thinking in Bets, this book didn’t exist until, gosh, probably, I don’t know, six years ago, is by Annie Duke, who’s a former professional poker player. And, it was game changing for me because what I said to you was improving probabilities of success. There are no, it’s not, not black and white. this book is a game changer for any leader, not only sales leaders that are looking to hire better or make better, better decisions.

When you can think about the decisions that you’re making with respect to probably improving your probabilities of, of success. So I would for sure recommend thinking in bets. no, no doubt about it. I feel like not, I feel like, the other book that I really like is 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, which is, by John Maxwell. that, that one is absolutely fantastic. The other one that I really like that is so, like, academic that most people are going to potentially be bored by this, which is the E Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. Michael, it’s about why businesses fail and how to do it. It’s all about process.

 And then the next one after that that I’ll leave you with is the Checklist Manifesto. Not dissimilar, but it’s, when you’re flying a plane, you better hope that those pilots are going check, check, check, check, check. Why aren’t we doing the same thing with a hiring process? So those are, those are some of the books that I would certainly recommend that people, pick up and read.

They’re not difficult reads, but, but you know, yeah. If you’re passionate about improving your probabilities of making great hires, these are books that can certainly help you out.

Chuck Brotman: And then you’ve got a site, I think it’s insidesalesexpert.com where you make some kind of templates available for, for interviewing and cover some of the concepts you’ve shared here too, correct?

Kevin Gaither: Yeah, absolutely. My most popular download on InsideSalesExpert. com. That’s singular, not plural. InsideSalesExpert. com is a 77 Salesperson Interview Questions literally is broken out into like, several dozen characteristics and three to four or five, sample questions for each that you can then take and modify for your own, it just sort of jumpstarts any sort of, benchmark creation and interview process.

Hey, I need to interview somebody. I have no process, download this. You’ve got characteristics and questions that you can ask plug and play with a little template. but I also have a course, called Diamonds in the Rough that documents exactly how you can transform your hiring process to find these diamonds in the, in the rough, wherever they are and put them through a, a great process there. So you’ll, you’ll find that on my site, insidesalesexpert. com.

Chuck Brotman: Awesome. Thank you for the time. This was so much fun to go through all this with you. I really feel like we could, we could go another hour, but we are at a bad time here and, maybe we can look for a part two. Thank you.

Kevin Gaither: I would absolutely love it. Thanks for having me on the show, Chuck. That was great.

Chuck Brotman: Take care. Bye.