Hire Higher: How To Hire A Dream Team With Andrea Hoffer

 

Finding great employees can be difficult and exhausting, especially when you have no idea how to find them. Here’s what’s store for you in this episode of Business Confidential Now. Andrea Hoffer, the CEO of AHA! Recruiting Experts and author of the book, Hire Higher, imparts her knowledge on building your dream team and the factors you need to consider. The key to building a great team is identifying the skills you need in your team and the core values. She also shares how you can attract the ideal candidates to help your business grow by leveraging your team. If you want to build your dream team or grow if you have one already, tune in to this episode and make your hiring process easier as Andrea shares the steps to build your dream team!

 

What you’ll discover about how to hire a dream team

• Where to begin when hiring your dream team
• The skills you need to look for when hiring your dream team
• The steps involved in attracting the ideal candidates for your dream team
• The first question you should ask when interviewing for your dream team
• The most important things to consider when you hire a dream team

 

Guest Bio

Hoffer is the founder and CEO of AHA! Recruiting Experts, a consulting and recruitment firm based out of Boca Raton, FL. Andrea has written two books, “The NEW Customer” and “Hire Higher.” Her first book, The NEW Customer, is a practical guide for creating outstanding customer experiences.

 

Hire Higher: How To Hire A Dream Team With Andrea Hoffer

Do you want to hire a dream team? Your very own dream team or grow one that you’ve already got. It might be easier than you think if you know the steps to take. My next guest is an expert in helping you find the right talent and is going to share some of her secrets on how to hire your dream team, so stay tuned.

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I have a terrific guest for you. She’s Andrea Hoffer, the Founder, and CEO of AHA! Recruiting Experts is a consulting and recruiting firm based out of Boca Raton, Florida, specializing in helping companies attract and retain top talent that can take your organization to the next level. She’s also published a book, Hire Higher. That title sounds a little misleading but when you see it, the first hire is as in hiring and bringing people onboard. The second higher is reaching the next level. I will be asking the questions from here and let Andrea do the talking so we all can find out how to hire a dream team that meets our business needs. Welcome to the show, Andrea.

Thank you. It’s great to be here.

It’s wonderful to have you. Startups and small business owners, in particular, wear many hats. As their business begins to take off and grow, they suddenly realize they need help but are strapped for time. Where would you recommend they begin if they are looking to hire a dream team?

They need to begin discovering who they need. What happens is they know they are overburdened and need help, they put an ad out there and are not sure who they need, what skills they are looking for, and what outcomes they are looking for. What happens is they might bring somebody on who is not the right fit for the position or even their culture.

I always say start with discovery. You want to figure out what you expect from this new person you are bringing on, what are the outcomes you are looking for, and what it is going to look like 90 days, 6 months or 1 year from now if this person is successful. What do you want them to accomplish? Also, what do you bring to the table as an employer? It’s a little bit of a give and takes, and you want to make sure that they are the right fit, happy, and successful as part of your team.

Let’s drill down a little bit because isn’t it a little hard for people to know what they don’t know? They know they need help but how do they go figuring out what skills are necessary?

We like to start with fixed discovery questions. The first one we often ask our clients to ask, and all of these questions are in my book as well, is, “Why does the position exist?” Putting a little bit of thought. No answer needs to be perfect. You want to put some thought into each of these questions. The first question is, “How does this contribute to the mission of the company? What the company is all about? How is this going to move the needle forward for you?” Everybody wants to feel needed. They want to know that they are contributing to something bigger. If you put some thought into that and know that before you start going out and hiring, it’s going to be easier to attract a good person because they are going to want to know how they fit in that puzzle.

The next thing is, “What are the results and outcomes needed from this position? What are some of the things you want to see happen in the next 90 days or so?” That’s going to help you in one, attracting the right person. If you put it out there what you are looking for this person to accomplish, people are going to be attracted to that because they may have done something similar in a past position or it will help them to figure out if their skills are transferable to what you are trying to sell.

You then start to think about, “What are the skills and experiences needed to do this job successfully?” This is the rabbit hole that most business owners fall down. They think, “I need someone, so here’s the laundry list of skills and experience I need them to have already to be successful.” Sometimes they don’t need those specific skills or even if they have those specific skills and experience, they might not be able to accomplish those outcomes that are necessary for them to be successful and for you as a company to be successful.

It’s better to first think about the results and outcomes you need from this position before you start thinking about, “What skills they need to accomplish those outcomes.” The more you can get from the candidate about what they have accomplished in the past, the more you can connect that to what you are looking to accomplish in the future.

The more you can get from the candidate about what they've accomplished in the past, the more you can connect that to what you're looking to accomplish in the future. Share on X

The next question that we typically take down is the success traits. The specific traits that you are looking for in somebody from day-to-day. “Are they great planners? Are they very good at building rapport with clients? What are those traits that are necessary to be successful?” We call them success traits and figure that out by asking about specific examples of stories.

If you don’t have a team in the past, you can even think of examples of how you’ve shown up when you’ve filled some part of this role in the past and think about those characteristics that are necessary to be successful. We ask them to think about their core values. What is their culture based on? These are the guiding posts that their entire company runs on. It’s how they make decisions day-to-day without the CEO or the president having to be in on every decision because they know that every person in their team follows their core values and lives them every day and uses them to make the day-to-day decisions.

Our last part of the discovery is thinking about what these team members that you are looking for, what they want in a job, and how you can give that to them. It’s not always money. It could be that they love to learn, and can you provide them with different learning opportunities. That’s a basic overview of the discovery process that we recommend, talk about, and do with our clients that is often overlooked, and I know everybody wants to get that breathing right away. We find that if you go through this discovery process, even if it’s for an hour to start to think about these things, then you can go to the next step to start attracting the right people for your position.

That’s a lot of food for thought, and I appreciate your discussion of those. Sometimes especially for the smaller startup business, they needed somebody. They are so eager to get some things off their plate. They are not necessarily thinking through these steps. A couple of weeks or months later, they discover, “This isn’t working out so well. Now, how do I get out of this mess? How do I fix it?”

It sounds like it’s worthwhile to go through that and give it a little bit more thought than shooting from the hip and hiring somebody with a pulse who’s interested. I am curious about your experience. How often do you find the client that you are working with? I’m talking about the individual decision-maker, not the business as a whole. The individual decision-maker is looking to find somebody like themselves.

Often, especially when it’s a small business. Sometimes that’s okay if they are going to be stepping outside that role but we try to open the eyes of the client and help them see that maybe somebody who brings something different to the company or the role could enhance it. That’s why we love telling stories in taking as many stories from the client as possible of what has been successful in the past and what hasn’t worked, whether it’s something they did or a past team member, and to pull different things from that story to learn.

That person showed up in such a way that is a little bit different than the way you showed up but yet you said they handled that situation very successfully. Maybe we are not looking for somebody exactly like you. It’s a little bit of give-and-take in that. When I talk about the discovery process, it doesn’t take months. Our discovery process is typically about 90 minutes. It’s to get them to start thinking so that we can drill down exactly what they are looking for, and it can be tweaked along the way as they remember other things as we are hiring.

If nothing priming the pump to get them thinking about these different things is awesome. You mentioned something before about one thing you have to criteria. Now, how do you attract the ideal candidates? What steps are involved with that?

We start with a job posting, and it’s funny for me to say that because one of the biggest mistakes I see business owners or hiring managers make is throwing a job posting out there. When we say we start with a job posting, after the discovery process, we take notes from that. We transcribe and record it and put it into our job posting formula.

It’s very easy to find, “What are the characteristics needed to be successful in this decision?” It says in the posting, “You are the ideal candidate if,” and then it very succinctly talks about how you show up. The same thing with why you will love it here. “You will love working here because,” and then it has those bullet points.

We take all that information and make it easy for people to find what’s most important to them. Most candidates are not going to read all the way through a posting. They are going to look for the information that’s most important to them. The other thing we do after we have created that we write about 4 or maybe 5 questions that start off the posting.

The whole point is to engage them right away, and we want the right candidates as they are reading these questions to be saying, “Yes, that’s me or no, that’s not me,” so they are eliminating themselves if they are not already identifying. If they identify with it, they continue to read and then usually will jump to the part of the posting that is most important to them. We then take that posting and make it very visual, and anybody can do this.

There’s many software out there, or you could even do it on your website where you are putting pictures, videos, and icons to make that information jump off the page and bring that candidate in. We find starting with that helps a great deal in attracting quality candidates. Over and over, we hear from candidates, “This jumped off the page for me. It resonated with me when I saw that or I read your core values.” That’s the biggest thing we hear is what resonated with your core values.

You have to think about, “Where do these people hang out?” A lot of it would be online. It depends on the position but what type of Facebook groups are they in? Are they on TikTok or in different LinkedIn groups? Spend some time or have somebody on your team spending some time there and talk about the opportunity that you have available.

Job boards are great, but now, that is not the only way and not the best way to find candidates. It’s an easy entry point, and I would still recommend using the job boards but I would also go a step further and think of places where the people you are trying to attract would be and reach them. One of the ways, if you currently have a team, would be to ask your current team members. “Where do you spend your time online or even offline?” Especially if it’s an in-office or in-store type position so that they can help you to reach the appropriate people.

That’s fascinating about how you are talking about. Adding images, video, and all these different forms of engagement, especially the questions that you start with. Can you give me an example, even if it’s a hypothetical job posting, of a question that you would start with?

I’m a big believer in that first question getting to the point. For example, years ago, we were hiring a business development professional for a salmon farm. It was a land-based salmon farm, agricultural. I don’t remember the exact question but it was something to the effect of, “Are you a business professional in the food industry or the agriculture industry?”

The first question was, “This is what we are looking for.” Very direct. The next one can sometimes be something basic like, “Do you love customers? Is working with customers your favorite thing?” That’s important to the job. I should pull up a couple of postings to give you some other ideas. We have a copywriter on our team, so she’s a lot better at coming up with some of these questions but you can even use a tool called Jasper, that sometimes will run pieces of our posting through to tweak it, so it sounds better. That’s one of the tools that we use.

We have a business development job at our company. I can read you those questions. It says, “Are you a go-getter,” is our first question. We need somebody who’s going to be a go-getter and cultivate business for us. We don’t want someone who is used to doing business development where they get all the leads. We want somebody who’s going to be out there hitting the pavement for the leads. That question alone is starting to get at that.

We then say, “Are you someone who is high energy, extremely organized, and can manage your work without a lot of direction or handholding?” That second question it’s giving you a good overview of who we are looking for because we are making the assumption that most people are only going to read these questions. Some of them we are hoping that they will continue to read but we want to at least get some of the most important information to them clearly and succinctly with these first couple of questions.

It is always helpful to have an example. You know what you are looking for. You are scouring the different locations where your ideal candidate might be so that you can assemble this dream team and hire your dream team. Now, the interview process. You’ve narrowed it down to a group of people that look like they have got the stuff you are looking for. Tell me about the interview process because, especially when you want to hire a dream team, I would think that that’s pretty intense. You don’t want to be making mistakes. What are the most important things to zero in on?

I’m going to walk you through our formula for interviewing because that is probably the most powerful tool. This formula is built on some of the best gurus when it comes to interviewing, and the first thing is that we start most interview questions with could you. “Could you share? Could you tell me?” The reason we start with that is that it’s very conversational, and it makes the candidate feel like they have an element of control.

It’s very different from the traditional questioning, which will tell you very directional. It’s almost like you hear old stories of making the candidate feel uncomfortable because you want to grill them. That’s not the way you are going to get to know them. You want them to feel as comfortable as possible and make it feel more like a conversation. The more comfortable they feel, the more of themselves they are going to share with you.

You would be amazed by some of the things that have been shared with me over the years. The next part of the question is a specific example. “Could you share a specific example of?” A specific example is your power phrase, and you always want to say either a specific example or story, any specific something. We usually say specific examples.

You want to take some situation that is typical for this position you are hiring for, and you want to put that in. For example, if you are looking for someone who tends to take ownership of things. You might ask, “Could you share a specific example of a time at work when it wasn’t clear who was responsible for a certain task?”

The thing that you will notice that’s not in that is, “How did you resolve that? How did you figure it out?” You don’t want to add that in because that’s giving away the answer. You want to present the situation and ask them to tell you of a specific example when they have been faced with a similar situation. If you continue to ask questions like this, and each one is very much tied to the job, you will start to see a pattern in how they respond.

If one, they are talking in generalities even though you are continuously asking them for details and specific examples, they keep giving you very general statements and saying things like, “You should do this,” then that’s a red flag. That’s not telling me that they have done anything I’m looking for in the past. If they walk you through specific examples of them being the person of how they were in these situations and how they acted, then you get a much better feel for how they typically show up in these types of situations and how they would probably show up if they were part of your team.

It’s something you have to get used to in interviewing but once you start to use this tool, it’s amazing the information you get from your interview. When you are keyed into, “Am I getting specific details about what they have done in the past, or am I hearing all the flowery keywords that the internet tells them to say?”

You can tell the difference because there’s so much information out there on how to interview effectively where they are giving you all the words that they think the employers are looking for. If you have good interview questions, no interview response should be the same if you get the same interview response from the candidates. With the same question over and over again, it’s not a good question because everybody should have very different backgrounds and experiences.

If you have good interview questions, no interview response should be the same because everybody should have different backgrounds and experiences. Share on X

Let me try this out. Could you share some specific examples of the job offer process? This is great information about how to craft interview questions to get at the real meat, not just form but substance, of the person that you are interviewing and their capabilities. Your evaluation of how they fit into your organization culturally is great. I appreciate that. What about the offer? That seems to be a linchpin sometimes. What advice do you have for that stage of the process when hiring a dream team?

First of all, don’t wait to think about the offer until you are making an offer. With the first interview or the first couple of interviews, you want to be asking the candidate about why they are looking for a change. What are the things that are frustrating them about their current position? If they could change anything about their current organization or position, what are those things? Take detailed notes because you may need them when it comes to the offer.

At the same time, I’m a huge believer in being transparent about pay. Don’t leave the pay blank on the postings. Be upfront or else you are going to waste so much time. Have a range that you are comfortable with for your budget. That doesn’t mean every candidate would get the top of the range. You just put it in there. It depends on the experience, and then you can negotiate that later but at least they know.

 

Don’t make the range huge. I would keep it within $20,000 or maybe $30,000 at most but depending upon how much it is. That way that, they know if somebody is used to making $100,000 and they apply for a job that they assume is paying over $100,000 but it’s paying $40,000, then you are wasting time upfront. That’s why I’m a big believer in transparency.

As you get to know them and get to understand why they would be interested in leaving their current position and what they are looking for in their next position, when you get to the offer part, keep that, that’s your fodder. That’s the information that you can use. What’s happening is that sometimes people will be made an offer and their current employer when they tell them. They say, “We will pay you $30,000 more.”

It does sometimes become a bit of a price war. Not always but sometimes. That’s the opportunity for you to go back to the candidate and say, “This is all I have in my budget. Here are the reasons we want you and the development opportunities we see for you.” That’s big with candidates, and it always has been, “What growth opportunities do I have here?”

Let me also remind you here are some of the reasons you shared with me early on why you were looking to leave. I understand they might be offering you more money but are these things going to change, and how important is this to you? You might not always win the offer that way but you are more likely to so that it doesn’t become about the money and it’s more about what they are looking for in a job and is your opportunity a better fit for them.

That brings the whole conversation full circle to where they started with you. That can be incredibly powerful because there are so many studies that say people leave their boss, and it’s rarely about money. I can understand at the entry level, certainly. Some of these are not living wages, and they need to move on to make more money and have more responsibility.

There comes a point where how you are treated and fit into the culture is as important if not more important than the money. Andrea, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate these excellent tips for how to hire a dream team. They are terrific, and I appreciate how you’ve enumerated them and elaborated on why they are important, how they fit in, and how they are worth the time doing.

If you are reading and would like more information about Andrea Hoffer and her recruiting team, AHA! Recruiting Experts or her book Hire Higher: How to Attract, Interview, & Grow Your Dream Team, that information can be found on the website of the show. If you know someone who’s looking to hire a dream team and you know the right people for the job, please tell them about this show episode. Share the link and leave a positive review so that others can learn about it too. You can do it on your podcast app or at LoveThePodcast.com/businessconfidential. I thank you for your time reading the show. Have a great day and an even better tomorrow.

 

 

Related Resources:

• AHA! Recruiting Experts
• Hire Higher
• Jasper
• https://Linkedin.com/in/andreahoffer
• LoveThePodcast.com/businessconfidential
• If you liked this interview you might also like these Entrepreneurship episodes

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