We were working with an organization. I think they’re out of Michigan, and they were interviewing a developer. They were wanting a JavaScript developer, and they had never done a skills based assignment before. But they over and over and over were having poor fits to their organization. So I started talking with them and just said, keep it really simple. Create a one hour JavaScript project for this role. They did, and here’s what they told me. They got two applicants. One, the resume was great. The other resume was lacking. So they said at first they would have hired the individual with the great resume. You know, they had done all sorts of development work. They gave them the skills based the assignment and their their perspective immediately flipped the person with the amazing resume. You know, they were like, do you even know JavaScript? Do you even know programming? And then the person that didn’t have as beefy a resume came out on top, did a wonderful project, ended up getting the hire, and turned into an amazing employee.

This podcast is brought to you by Fast Slow Motion, a team of expert consultants that have helped hundreds of growing businesses build scalable systems on the HubSpot and Salesforce platforms. To learn more, visit fastslowmotion.com. Welcome to the Fast Slow Motion podcast, where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life. I’m your host, Sam Donaghey, and in today’s episode, we’re joined by two great guests. We’ve got Fast Slow Motion’s Director of People, Michael Smith and Chief Operating Officer Matt Dyar. So it’s absolutely fantastic to see you both today. Great to be here, Sam. Today, Matt and Michael will be doing a deep dive into what their roles are in the process and how they interview and assess candidates to make sure that we’re getting the right people on the bus at Fast Slow Motion. We’ve put a lot of thought and work into creating this process over the course of a decade, and we’ve had great success in using it to build an incredible team that really drives our business forward, and it’s our hope that learning about this system will be helpful to you as you build your own hiring processes. So let’s start by defining the interview process at Fast Slow Motion and why we put so much effort into interviewing candidates.

Well thanks Sam. We are very intentional about the hiring process. It’s well-defined but continues to evolve. Before we jump into that process, I think it’s important to explain why there’s a process. At Fast Slow Motion, we believe that before a company can grow, they must define those processes. And a key process is hiring and recruiting. Once an organization has a process, we believe it’s important to automate as many of those as possible to free people up to do things that automation can’t, and then always use the system to get visibility into the data. But that’s what we call a Scalable Business Framework – processes automation and visibility.

The hiring part of the process starts with you, Sam, and that values based recruiting. As you explained in episode one of this podcast on how to hire superstars, especially how you described the two middle values of curiosity and alignment. But once you put them into the candidate pipeline, you’ve done your interviews. There’s at least four more steps that every candidate goes through. There is a skills assessment. They have a skills assessment review, which is a scoring process. And then face to face. There’s a culture interview, there’s an interview with our CEO. And sometimes we also throw in some other conversation because we want to get to know that candidate as best as possible. And that only happens through conversations. 100% and it’s that holistic approach and it works really well.

Well, look, let’s start off with Matt, because when the candidates come through the interview process, they have to take a skills based assignment. And Matt, I’d love for you to talk to us about this. Let’s define what the skills base assignment is, and also why it’s important that we ask candidates to take this. Absolutely. Before I get into some of the details, I’m just going to point out if you’re a business leader out there, an HR manager or an executive team, the skills based assignment is one of the quickest, most impactful things that you can add to your recruitment process is something you can start simple and you can evolve it over time, but it’s something that you can put in play tomorrow, and it’s a great process for separating the A players from the B players. So let’s unpack a little bit what are some of the parameters of a good skills base assignment. And then what are some of the benefits of utilizing that skills base assignment? A couple of things that you want to do is make sure your skills base assignment is role based. So if you’re hiring for a sales rep, you’re going to want to have them give you a sales pitch. If you’re hiring an accountant, you’re going to want them to break down some financial statements. If you’re hiring a marketing person, have them do a marketing piece and present that to you. And so you want to align the skill base assignment requirements to the role that they’re going to be doing. And I’ll explain why that’s important here in just a minute. Another thing that you want to do is keep the work from the candidate to call it 2 to 3 hours worth of work. You don’t want to put a skills based assignment in place with requirements. It’s going to take them 100 hours worth of work. You want to make it reasonable, but if they’re able to do the assignment in just a couple of hours, that’s kind of the sweet spot. That’s what you’re looking for. You also want a time box, the assignment you don’t want to give a candidate months and months to build it out because that’s that’s not healthy. We found somewhere between 7 and 14 days is a good time frame to ask somebody to submit that skills based assignment back to you. And then we have grown to really, really love self-reported skills based assignments. You can do them live we used to do them live when we first started out, but honestly kind of do to scale. We actually ask our candidates to record themselves. And we do ask them to keep that under 30 minutes. If you’re a business leader, 30 minutes may be too long. It may be 15 minutes, it may be 20 minutes, but somewhere in that window of time. So it’s role based 2 to 3 hours. You want to time-box the delivery, ask the candidate to record it and deliver you the self recorded and keep it under 30 minutes. We have found those are great parameters for a skill based assignment. Now why why why do we do this? What is this? How does this benefit us and how can this benefit you?

Well, first and foremost, the skills based assignment is a sneak peek into the job that the candidate is actually going to be doing. So it’s a day in the life, if you will. They really get to see if you come work for us. This is the type of work that you’ll be doing. Meaning if they don’t like the skills based assignment, they’re not going to like the job, you know? And we found some of the best fits at Fast Slow Motion. Got a ton of energy from the assignment and really ended up loving the project. We we get a lot of praise for having them go through that process and have the feedback loop. The second thing that I would say is really beneficial is it allows the candidate to prove out their skills that they’re submitting via their resume. There’s a lot of fancy LinkedIn profiles and resumes out on the on the internet these days. And if we were just hiring people based upon their LinkedIn profile, we would be up a creek without a paddle right now. We’ve interviewed a lot of people that have amazing resumes, but then just can’t do the work or they’re not communicating well or they have no business acumen. And so this really allows the candidate to walk the walk. And then the third thing that I would say as a business, it allows you to really vet the qualities that you’re looking for out of that role and that candidate, for example, the three things that we’re really looking for is a team member with good business acumen, great technical skill set and a good communicator. And so by asking people to do a skills based assignment, you get some of those intangibles that you wouldn’t get just from reading a resume or looking at a LinkedIn profile. So for those reasons, we’re big advocates of the skills based assignment and think that this is something that every organization should implement as quickly as possible.

Okay, great. Matt, you know, once the candidate is actually completed the skills based assignment and then it’s passed on to and assessed by the team, what is the team then looking for when they review that? Again there’s this theme of where do you start? And then how do you evolve the process? We’ve been evolving this process for the better part of a decade, and so we’ve got a lot of systems and processes in place to handle scale. But a lot of businesses out there are only interviewing for a couple of roles a year. And in that case, you don’t need to over process this system. If you’re a CEO and you put a skills based assignment in place and you’re vetting for business acumen, technical skill and good communication, and when you watch that recording, when you meet with that candidate, instinctively you’re going to know whether or not they’re a good fit. You don’t need a one to 1 to 10 or 1 to 100 scoring system. You’re going to have a gut instinct. You’re going to have a feel for that candidate. You’re going to know whether or not they fit in with your principles and the culture of your organization. For us, we have implemented a little bit more process. The majority of our interview, our candidates are interviewing for the delivery side of the House. Okay. Implementation specialist, consultant, senior consultant, architect. And so we put them through a skills based assignment. And we actually look for 43 different key elements during the interview process. Like I said, we didn’t start with 43. It’s evolved to these 43 things that we’re looking for. But really, first and foremost, we’re making sure that they completed all the requirements that we gave them. Before. We give you just a few requirements and you miss a requirement that shows lack of attention to detail. So first and foremost, man, we’re looking to make sure that they actually did the assignment and did all the requirements. Next we want to see how they did those those requirements. So we’re diving into the solution and making sure that it’s a sound solution. And this is where we’re kind of bringing the business acumen and the technical skill sets. But we’re really making sure that they solution well. And then lastly we’re looking for wow factors, things that that team members have done, maybe gone above and beyond in the interview process and the assignment to to help them stand out from other candidates. Let me let me bookend that with something that we say during the assignment. And we say, don’t boil the ocean. So we don’t want people going off and doing hundreds of hours on this assignment. But we do want people to do enough in the skills based assignment to show their skill set. So it’s this balance between do enough to show your skills, but not so much that you’re boiling the ocean and spending too much time. And then finally, when we’re reviewing these assignments by people and preparing, say, for a follow up technical call, we are customizing each and every interview to the person who came through the process. There are no two applications that are the exact same. Everybody builds a little differently. Everybody communicates a little differently. Everybody has different backgrounds and experiences. And so we’re tailoring that process to the individual. So we get to know that individual. And we really are just curious during that process we want to understand why they made the decisions that they did. And so that’s kind of the heart of our review process Sam.

Yeah. Thank you so much for breaking all that down. And there’s a lot of information there. And like you said, we we’ve really engineered this process for a long time. We know what we’re looking at. What kind of advice you have for anybody that might be listening, who might be fearful of putting in the skills based assignment, where they haven’t gone through this process yet and they’re not sure what to look for. And when candidates are taking the assessment, you know, it’s kind of a greenfield project, let’s say. Do you have any advice for a business that might just be starting out? I’ll give you the example. We were working with an organization. I think they’re out of Michigan, and they were interviewing a developer. They were wanting a JavaScript developer, and they had never done the skills based assignment before. But they over and over and over were having poor fits to their organization. So I started talking with them and just said, keep it really simple. Create a one hour JavaScript project for this role. They did, and here’s what they told me. They got two applicants. One, the resume was great. The other resume was lacking. So they said at first they would have hired the individual with the great resume. You know, they had done all sorts of development work. They gave them the skills based the assignment and their their perspective immediately flipped the person with the amazing resume. You know, they were like, do you even know JavaScript? Do you even know programming? And then the person that didn’t have as beefy a resume came out on top, did a wonderful project, ended up getting the hire, and turned into an amazing employee.

So all that to say is you can put these things in play really, really quickly and easily. You don’t need a robust scoring system, you just need to give people an opportunity to prove out their skill set. So going beyond the resume is really what what we need to think about here. So anybody can put this in place honestly very easily and very quickly. And I think it also kind of reveals the buy in of the candidate as well. To some extent. It kind of says, you know, are you invested in the process? Do you like the company? I get that, you know, it’s challenging for candidates to be out there in the market applying to tons of roles, and sometimes this can get a little bit overwhelming. But I think if you’re invested in a process and you’re invested in a company, I think you should be on board with this because it means that you go through a process. You you’re assessed thoroughly. You’re the right candidate if you get the job. And it’s a two way street. So thank you for for breaking that down. But yeah, one last thing, Sam, is this is a big difference between A players and B players. A players want the opportunity to prove themselves. Oftentimes B players don’t.

Right, very interesting. Okay, Michael, Candidates meet you at the culture interview stage. I’d love for you to tell us more about what happens here. Yeah, an automated part of the process happens just before they meet with me. When a candidate is moved in our system to culture interview and automation fires and an email sent to that candidate inviting them to take a behavior insights assessment when they complete that assessment, they’re prompted a schedule meeting with me through a provided calendar link. This behavior insights assessment is a tool we use to help people become more self-aware, and I truly believe that people can be more successful if they’re truly self-aware of the behaviors they bring, the gifts, skills, talents, and how those affect and support the team and the organization. To say that though, we do not use this assessment as a benchmark, once the team member is hired, this becomes just public knowledge inside of our organization so we can get to know you and you can get to know us. Just before they talk to me, I get that report, I review that, and that’s really the only research I do on a candidate, because I want to walk into this conversation with a candidate unbiased, and I want to come in fresh, and I listen as I ask questions, do their communication style, and when I meet and face to face match up with that behavioral assessment where we took and just kind of use it, and then I get to unpack it at the end with them just a little bit, and know this is a very small part of the culture interview. Just thought it is important for us to share that. The bulk of my conversation with the candidate revolves around understanding how much they’ve researched Fast Slow Motion, the position they’re applying for, and I ask them to communicate. Can they be a good fit for us? I’m looking for how much they’ve invested coming to Fast Slow Motion. And I also want to ask questions to reveal how much they know about themselves and are self-aware. Do they know or can they communicate what they’re going to bring to the team in the organization, and are they willing to be vulnerable around this topic? Man, I try to ask very open ended questions and get out of the way and let the candidate talk. I’m looking for signs of humility, transparency, and authenticity.

Do you think it benefits the candidate more than it benefits the company by doing this process. I get a lot of thank you’s at the end when we unpack this report with them and send it to them. This is not just a simple report. It’s really 49-50 pages of unpacking who they are. And there’s a lot of stuff to unpack, and there’s no way we can do it in the interview. But I get emails after our conversation just thanking me for sending that report to them. I always tell candidates, I say, you’re going to really enjoy the cultural interview. I always say that I’m like, it’s a really interesting one. Like, thanks for breaking that down.

Well, look, once the interview was complete what does the decision making process look like at that point? You know, what are some of the things that we’re looking for in a candidate at this stage that would sort of qualify them moving forward to the final stage? Sam, I’d say there’s kind of two themes, two frameworks that we we work with or lenses, if you will, that we look through when when analyzing a candidate. And the first one, we’ve talked about it on some previous podcasts and Michael was kind of alluding to it. There is a phenomenal book by Patrick Lencioni called “The Ideal Team Player” just a wonderful book. And in this book he breaks down three characteristics. He calls it humble, hungry and smart. I’ll also give a plug for that book if you’re H.R. manager or business leader out there and you’re like, that sounds great. That sounds exactly like what we want to look for humble, hungry and smart employees and go Google the ideal team player interview questions. If you just Google that, there’s all sorts of content out there that gives you the questions to ask for these three different characteristics, and then how to interpret the answers that candidates give you. And so Michael uses a few of those concepts in his cultural interview. But we really, really look for humble team members. Another way of saying that is are they coachable. So we really look for coachability, hungry, are they going to work really hard? Are they going to go above and beyond in their role and then smart. Do they have both the IQ and the EQ to be successful in the difficult world of consulting. So that’s kind of that first framework that we look look to use. The second one I had, I had mentioned it earlier, three things that we want our team members to exude are, business acumen, technical skills and great communication. So we’re really looking for those things as well. And some of those 43 key elements that I talked about earlier are scoring these different concepts and characteristics that we’re looking for. So business acumen and technical skills, you know, can they solution and can they consult. Or are you just walking through a solution or are you actually consulting through the solution. We really look for that. And then even if you get the solution right, but your communication is really, really poor. We’re in a very client facing organization. Very client facing role. And so it doesn’t matter how good you are if you can’t communicate that message, you’re no, you’re no good in that role. So it’s one of those things that second framework can you consult, can you solution, can you communicate. We’re looking for those things as well.

Yeah. Interject a little bit in how I actually score the interviews. I actually score people on the humble hungry smart and the communication. No, so Matt’s looking for that. And I’m also looking for that. Let me ask you guys a question, right. It sounds so comprehensive. What about candidates that are listening to this right now? And they’re thinking, this is a lot to go through a process like, what kind of a message would you like to to say to those people? Well, all right, let me share a story with you, Sam. I’ll share a story with you. I love this story. And so I’ll use this story and this may this may give you a little bit of my mindset. I know this story as well. Okay. Okay. So, so a bunch of kids went to a career fair, right. And the military was there. The army. The Navy, you know, they they started talking about how good, the Army was, all the, all the benefits, all the perks. The Navy guy stood up. He started talking about why you should join the Navy, why he’s better than the Army, why he’s better than everything else. And then, the the marine recruiter stood up and said, I don’t think anybody in this entire auditorium is bad enough. Tough enough to join the Marines. If you think I’m wrong, I’ll be in the back of the room. Come prove me wrong. So what I would say to candidates, and I hate to say this, but A players top tier talent, people are going to want that challenge. If you don’t want that challenge, don’t go. Don’t don’t come through it. Don’t go through the process. It is hard. It is a tough process. But at the end of that is a team of A players that will be beside you, supporting you, growing you. So if you want to go through that gauntlet, come on. But if you don’t want to go through the gauntlet, nobody’s forcing your hand to do it. But are you bad enough? Or are you tough enough to go through the process? If yes, come on and join and apply. And if somebody does apply and they go through the process, they were, they’re a good fit, right? You know, the culturally their mindset was there. They were brought in to FSM and they had, they had it in them to go through the gauntlet.

So, yeah, thanks for sharing that story, Matt. Well, look, let me ask another question as well, because I think this is a really important thing these days to talk about, like providing feedback to candidates. Now, I do want to preface this by saying in our interview process, sometimes you don’t get feedback. It’s at a particular stage. But then once you get past that stage, we do give feedback. So Matt, how do we provide feedback to candidates who weren’t selected, and why is this an important part of the process? Yeah, I would say both people that might not be a good fit at the end of the day, and people who end up getting an offer, both of them get a lot of coaching and teaching throughout the entire process. Michael and I are both natural teachers. We just we love coaching, we love mentoring. And so it’s in our nature. And so really there’s an engagement and feedback loop throughout the entire process. Whenever somebody is, say, doing that technical skills based assignment, if they can be communicating a little bit better, we’re going to challenge them on that. If they incorrectly solution something, we’re going to challenge them on that we’re going to ask why we’re going to unpack that. And maybe at the end of that we explain why, you know, if they had maybe built it this way, it would be a little bit more scalable or, hey, here was a deficiency in your skill set. Hey, go, go take this certification or these courses. Really the the coaching and mentoring is throughout the entire skill space assignment and throughout the entire culture based assignment. It’s not this ten page PDF you get at the end of the process. It’s something that you that we engage with you throughout the entire time. So it’s kind of built into the process.

Michael, do you have any thoughts on, on on any feedback and when we can go back to that behavior assessment and, you know, we all have different communication styles. And I’m listening to that in the interview. And I’ve had people come in and are either very quiet. And we know people are introverts or extroverts and quiet or more outgoing. And I’ve challenged some of that. I’ve had people come in the interview process who are more outgoing and not given me a chance to ask a question, and I’ll challenge them on that right now, because to be a good consultant, you need to pause and let someone else ask a question sometimes. So it’s throughout that process we’re just trying to give real time feedback.

Yeah. And it’s so important when somebody comes on board that they match these standards. Or at least they’ve got the potential to get there. Could you both or one of you share a success story where the interview process led to hiring a standout superstar at Fast Slow Motion? Sam, I am going to challenge you on that. You know, it’s a trick question because every hire at Fast Slow Motion turns into a stand out superstar, okay. But I’m not one. No, I’ll, I’ll say this. What I love about our process is that we don’t really look for, say, the status quo consultant with 5 to 10 years of experience. Right. A lot of organizations kind of have that hurdle right out of the gate that you’ve got to get over. And we’re really looking more for qualities and less about what exactly you’re your career path up until this point has been. Probably something that I’m really proud about is as I look out over our team, we’ve got we’ve got teachers, we’ve got people from health care, manufacturing, we’ve got a lot of musicians that had successful musical careers before they came here. A lot of people from the military, a lot of people had family businesses that they that they left and came here. So I really like the diversity that we have as an organization of where people came from and what their career path was that led them to Fast Slow Motion.

There is is one that I could, I could say has kind of blown my hair back a little bit. And I’ve I’ve been excited to watch this individual grow inside of Fast Slow Motion. Had a candidate a few years ago, it was just really interesting. He had worked in warehouses and distribution centers basically for years, never had a tech job in his entire life, was actually unemployed when he first came to us, but had just this unbreakable determination and grit and had really taken advantage of his time off and had already started getting certifications and learning the platform and the skill set, and was so impressive, so diligent through that entire process, we we decided we needed him on the team. And ever since that point, he is he has grown to have 20 plus industry certifications and has really become one not just at Fast Slow Motion, but one of the most prolific solution architects in the Salesforce ecosystem. And he’s learning HubSpot right now, and I think he’ll probably be one of the most prolific architects in the HubSpot ecosystem here pretty soon. So, yeah, there’s a lot of stories of team members inside of our organization that have worked hard. It is a meritocracy, so nothing’s handed to you. People have to work hard wherever they land. But this team member, as well as many, many others have really taken advantage of the opportunity.

And Matt, let me jump in that with this particular person you’re talking about. I just think back that he came in with this coachable spirit that he was willing to learn from day one and came in with humility, saying, I don’t know everything, but I’m willing to ask questions. I’m willing to say when I’m wrong. And I think that’s a key to his success here. He still lives out that way, that he’s coachable and he comes in with humility. And on top of that as well, just to kind of close the loop. He’s also got a passion for coaching himself right. And in passing information along with charity, is a dead set way of learning what you’re learning. Apparently just going back to just coaching it, learning.

Well, we always like to wrap up each episode with a quote that encapsulates our thoughts on the subject that we’ve just covered. So Matt and Michael do both have a quote that you’d like to share with our listeners, please? Hey, I’ll go first. There’s this. We use this a lot inside of our organization, and it says our successes and failures happen gradually. Then suddenly one conversation at a time seems kind of odd when you’re thinking about failures, but I’m talking about the successes here in the hiring process and interviewing. It’s about gradual conversations and getting to know that person all the way through the process and a conversation between two people. So we want to hear from the candidate, too. And the suddenly part as we make the job offer. So we want to build start from beginning having relationships with our team members and through conversations.

There’s a quote that I, I really like and that’s, if you hire hard, you manage easy. And I really like that. And too many business owners get that, out of order, you know, they, they might hire the first or second person who comes through the process. And so the hiring is really easy. And quite often when that’s the case, the management of that individual or that that interaction can be quite difficult. So hire hard manage easy.

Guys, thank you so much for being here today. Well that’s it for today’s episode. Thanks again to Matt and Michael for joining us. For our listeners, we hope that you enjoyed hearing Matt and Michael’s insights into the interviewing process and how we find and hire superstars at Fast Slow Motion, and we hope that these insights will be helpful to you as you build your own teams and businesses. If you want to connect with Matt and Michael or learn more about our hiring process, then their profiles will be linked in the notes section of this episode. Remember to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform, or you can find archived episodes at fastslowmotion.com/podcast.