646 | The Real Hiring Problem and How to Stop It

Hiring mistakes don't start in the interview. They start long before that. Today we're diving into the real reason hiring keeps going wrong and how you can finally fix it. That is coming up next.

Welcome to the Chris LoCurto Show, where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.

Welcome to the show, folks. I hope you're having a fabulous day wherever you are.

Today we are talking about hiring problems. We all have them, we all experience them. We all know what it's like to struggle to get the right people on our team or even just get people on our team from time to time.

What I want to tell you, though, is that hiring problems don't all come from a broken job market.

Is there a broken job market? Yeah, you could definitely say that things have changed over the last handful of years, but not all of your hiring problems are coming from that.

They come from broken systems. Inside of your business. Yes, Inside of your business, your process, the way that you go about hiring.

Now, am I going to tell you something today that's only going to send the perfect people to your door? No. But I am definitely going to help you to put in better processes, better systems in hiring.

So if you're reacting to staffing shortages, cycling through people who don't last, or dreading another hiring process, it's time to take a hard look at how you're leading it.

How are you leading the hiring process? So this episode kicks off a step by step framework that shows you how to hire from strategy and not from stress.

Now, that is probably going to be a massive change for a lot of folks out there. I get it. I have had those times in my early years of hiring from stress. I know what that's like. But when you hire from stress, you make a lot of mistakes and then you have to come back and fix those.

The Parable of the Net (Matthew 13:47–50) (00:02:09)

So if you take a look at what Yeshua said in Matthew (Yeshua is a Hebrew name for Jesus) in Matthew 13:47, 50.

What he's talking about is he's talking about the Kingdom of Heaven is like a fishing net. When you cast catches all kinds of fish, right? So when you cast a wide net without clarity, you catch everything.

But when you design your hiring process with vision, with purpose, with your cultural alignment in mind, then the net becomes more of a filter, keeping what belongs and protecting what doesn't.

You see, Yeshua also talks about those that pull that net up onto the shore. They keep the good fish and they cast out the bad ones. What is our goal, our Goal is to get the right fish in the net, the right people in the door.

So it takes a lot of discernment. It takes clarity. It takes a job posting that actually posts the right information. All of those things are important.

So we're going to jump through a bunch of points today. We're also going to hit more of this next week.

Attachment to Filling the Role—Not Solving the Problem (00:03:18)

But point number one I want to talk about today is the attachment to filling the role itself and not actually solving the problem. We have all been there, right? You lose a key team member or you lose a team member who you felt was filling a key role.

And within 24 hours, you're posting a job description, trying to get a new person and see a warm body in the seat, right? Just so that you can stop what you believe is the bleeding. You reuse an old job description.

You don't stop to ask, does this role even still fit our strategy for today?

Folks, I'm going to tell you that is the wrong way to go when you are super attached to just filling the vacancy by bypassing clarity, by bypassing any thought on what does the role do, what does it feel, how does it fit all that.

Then that hire may solve today's urgency. You got a warm body in the seat. But it also absolutely might create tomorrow's dysfunction. So what am I talking about?

Instead of looking at a role that needs to be filled? You know, for us, we do a lot of training, a lot of strategic training with businesses all around the country and out of the country, as a matter of fact, in different countries.

And I will tell you this, a lot of folks have never been taught to. To focus on what your strategy is first. Now let me get into this a little bit. You may have heard me talk about this before, but if we use.

Let's use my definition of mission, vision and strategy. There are so many different definitions out there, but let's just go with this for today. I suggest you use it all the time, but so that we're on the same page.

Mission is your purpose for existence. Whether it is your business, your career, your marriage, your parenting, whatever it is, mission is your purpose for existing.

Why does this thing exist? That's its mission, right? What is your business's mission? Vision is where you are headed. You can have one mission.

You can have 700 different destinations, different visions, one after another after another after another, right? You can keep.

We-- We consistently teach people to cast a vision and then be working on the next one when. When we're getting close to this one being done right?

So that we're consistently moving the needle. We're constantly going to a different destination. That's not difficult for people to understand.

Strategy is the one that gets really messed up. I don't know why, but in its own, the definition of its word, it should make a lot of sense.

This is how we get to the destination. We're strategizing how to get to the vision, to the destination.

So if we focus on it like that, and then what we always say is, you know, if you're working your StratPlan or a strategy that you have, what does each role, how does each role align with that strategy or does it not?

What you may find over time is, is that you have people doing things that don't align with your strategy.

Now, I will tell you, as a business that does a ton of teaching, we have 10,000 money making options in front of us. There are so many things that we can do.

In the early days, people were always telling us, you should do this and you should do this and you should do this. And usually my response was, you should go do that. That's not my mission. That's not part of my vision.

That's not where I'm headed. Could we, as teachers, educators, do all kinds of stuff? Yeah, absolutely. Do we sell, you know, swag and stuff like that? Yep.

Should we go after a huge store selling tchotchkes? No, that's not part of our mission. Do we want people to have our brand and stuff like that? Sure. Are we going to dedicate a ton of energy and resource to, you know, selling popcorn poppers with our logo on it?

No, we are not. We have no desire to do that. Our goal is to change lives. Our goal is to worship God and change lives. Help people change their lives, getting them to great perspective.

Those are our two most important goals. Right. Our third is being profitable. Profit's not our number one goal. 99.9% of businesses around the world it is. But for us, God's first, your second, and then profit is third.

We won't run a business that's not profitable. Right. But if it's not focused on God first, I just don't want to do it. And if it's not helping people change their lives, I just don't want to do it. Right.

It's, it's important to us. In this business, I have other businesses that are focused on different things, but in this business, that's what our focus is.

So if anything is thrown at us, you guys should go and, and, I don't know, create lessons built around YouTube, branding or.

Wow. I'm just coming up with the lamest stuff right now. That's not our part of our mission. That's not for us.

That's for somebody else to do. Why am I telling you all this? You have to realize what your mission is, what your vision is, and what is your strategy to get there. What are the steps that you're going to take to get to the next. Just the next destination?

I'm not talking about the next three, five, ten. Not talking five years out. Ten years out. I'm not talking about that. What is the next destination you're heading to?

Do you even have one? Are you focused on that? If not, get with us. If you don't understand your mission, get with us. And I'm not just talking about something that you put on a plaque on a wall for clients to see.

That's. That's not a great mission. What I'm talking about is if you have these things in place and you have a strategy of where you're going, then that is where you start.

You start by evaluating the role that you're trying to fill by asking the question, does it actually fit into our strategy? We have got also a fantastic farm.

We've got the Ridge that is putting out the healthiest milk and the healthiest vegetables and the healthiest, you know, yogurts and stuff, and all these things that we produce.

It is the highest quality standard. Why? Because it was for. We started it for our health. And then people started asking, hey, can I get in on that? Absolutely. We can.

We can sell what we can sell, right? This is all we have the capacity for. But if you want it, great, fantastic. There are so many things we could do with that. There's so many different products and things that we can throw into it, but that's not our.

That's not our. Our vision. Our vision is one, take care of us. Two, take care of the clients that come to any of our events. And then three, we sell it to the public, we open it up to the public.

After that, our goal is to take care of us first, then our clients, then the people. What we're not looking to do is to go after 17 different homesteading things that other people are covering really well and we're not needed for.

So when we look at what's needed to take care of our business, whether it be The Poimen Group or it's the farm, The Ridge, either one of those.

We aren't looking to hire people to blow this thing up in ways that we have no desire to go after. Instead, we carefully evaluate who should be working where and what should they be doing. That's what you should be doing.

When you look at the filling of a role and you do not start with the question and, hey, listen, this might scare some of your team members...

But you should actually be evaluating the roles that are currently in place and even with team members in them and asking yourself, does it fit? Does it align? Is this something that is moving us in the direction that we want to go in?

Or did we put somebody in this role five years ago and we've never taken a second look at it? We've just continued to do the same thing over and over and over again.

So that is the first place you've got to start. Don't just fill a role. Don't just create, you know, put a warm body in a seat so that you are taking care of today's urgency. Start by asking yourself the question, do we need this?

You know, leaders think that they're solving the problem by filling the seat fast, but you're not solving the right problem if you don't pause to clarify what the role actually needs to be.

And if it doesn't fit your mission, if it doesn't fit your vision, it's definitely not going to fit your strategy.

Attachment to the Resume—Not the Results (00:12:20)

Point number two, attachment to the resume, not the results. Folks, we've all made this mistake.

I made this mistake many times in my early days. You're wowed by a polished resume, a LinkedIn profile, a confident pitch in the interview, but you never ask for past results.

You never ask for, you know, case examples or proof that they can deliver what you need.

We have all fallen into this trap where somebody walks in the door and we like their smile and their energy and, and they laugh at our jokes and yada, yada, yada, and then we end up hiring them.

And they literally said 20 words in the entire interview, but we liked them. And then find out 90 days later they have no clue how to do this role. And then the stress compounds dramatically.

You cannot fall in love with somebody's resume without asking quality questions, especially built around the, the experiences that you've had in the role to find out whether or not they can accomplish it.

Now, big mistake people make all the time is asking yes or no questions.

Hey, can you do this? Of course I can. What else are they going to say? No, I can't do that? That would end the interview. You have to stop asking questions of like, hey, are you able to do this?

Hey, I see this on your resume. Are you good at that? Quit asking those types of questions and put situations in place.

So one of the things I'm always trying to guide leaders and business owners too, when it comes to this hiring topic is you've had somebody leave a role.

And there's probably four or five, maybe 10 things that are have left a bad taste in your mouth about that person or that role or somebody you've had to let go, things that you know, you didn't like.

But then we go and interview for the same exact role instead of taking a look and consistently, I mean, even do this over years. Let's say you have a great team member, but mistakes happen throughout the years.

Keep a log of those things. Right. Just, you know, this person was struggling with communicating with other team members in this area, which caused this big problem and you know, snowballed into three other areas.

Having to fix problems. Yeah, whatever it is, Whenever you see something come up that's just not fitting that role, that's not working well, that's a problem. Log it, solve the problem. Get in there and solve the problem.

But what you want to do is if you didn't think about these things ahead of time when you hired the first time or the last time, I should say, then when you go into the next hiring process, take these problems into consideration by before you interview and create scenarios and then ask, how would they handle the scenario?

So they're saying they can do this job well. They've got a resume that says that they can do this job well.

Throw out specific scenarios. Hey, if this situation happened with a client and you know, it was affecting this team member over here or whatever, how, what would you do there?

How would you handle that? You know, hey, if a client came and was telling you how horrible of a job you know you're doing or whatever, how would you handle that situation?

Put the situations that you've seen that you didn't interview probably the first time or the last time, I should say, and create scenarios in that hiring process.

Don't just go by a resume. Find out can they get to the results that you need.

If you can do this and you can, they can give you quality answers and solutions that you're like, wow, that's exactly what I had to do to fix that problem, or wow, that would have fixed that problem really well.

Now you're starting to see how they think. Now you're starting to see how they're going to work in that role.

Super important for you to do. I know it seems crazy. So you want me to write this down and keep a log of that and I might not even hire for that role for a couple of years? Yep.

We're not talking about a huge log. Unless you've had, unless you're having problems every day in that role, then maybe it is, and you probably need to do something else a heck of a lot quicker, which is heavy loads of accountability.

What I'm telling you to do is don't just bring somebody in. Read a resume like their smile, and put them in the seat. Create the, the scenarios that force them to come up with an answer, even if it's not the greatest answer on the planet.

But you can see that they think.

Well, you can see that they're going to take action on it and whatever is left out of the scenario or their answer is something that you could teach or train, then you're 1,000 miles further down the road than with the person that you don't ask that question with.

So you gotta make sure that you are getting to the results that you want, even through scenarios. Right.

So don't confuse polish with performance. Right. Just because they have a polished resume or a great, you know, LinkedIn profile, that doesn't mean that they're gonna do a great job.

Your job is to find the person who's done the work, not just the one who talks about it the best.

Attachment to Past Roles—Not Current Strategy (00:17:49)

Number three, attachment to past roles, not current goals.

Now, this kind of goes with number one of focusing on your strategy. But now what we're talking about is what happens when goals have changed inside of your business.

What happens when strategy has changed, direction has changed, vision has changed? Right. It could even possibly be mission. Let's say you bought a new business and you keep filling the roles that have been there forever.

But maybe you have added a new mission to this. Whatever it is, when things have changed, changed. Just recycling the same job description for the last hire from however many years ago you know is not going to.

Well, it could work for you. But not sitting down and asking the question, how have our goals changed? What's new? What are things that we're doing differently? Right.

So it doesn't mean, you know, with the strategy piece, you might find that the role doesn't even fit your strategy.

But with the goal focus, you know, we've got these things that we're trying to hit here, here, here, and here. What you may discover is that the role is outdated.

You still need a version of that role, but instead what you do is you hire for the same exact role that you had before and now your expectations of their delivery, their key results, are now different.

But unfortunately, you put together the same exact package.

So it keeps you stuck in yesterday's structure. Every single hire must be rooted in today's business needs. They have to be focused on what you're trying to accomplish now.

So, for example, let's say five years ago you had a KRA that was speaking about delivering sales in this vein over here. This is how we're doing the sales. These are the things we're trying to sell. These are the most important things we're selling.

But now things have shifted. Goals have shifted. You're trying to accomplish something else. And you know, maybe it's in an administrative role.

You know, there's a function that you're trying to accomplish with project management or something to that effect. And now everything has shift.

Not everything, but enough goals have shifted that if you hire the same person, you're going to end up with the same problems. They're not going to get to the expectation that you have.

They're not going to get to the expected results that you have. So before you go, after just posting the same past role, ask yourself the question, what do we want the outcomes of this role to look like?

What are the expected results, the key deliverables that we want to come from this role? Plus, you might just reevaluate that role and ask the question, do we want to change?

Maybe everything seems right. Let's just hire the same role. And without taking any time. Sure, you put a good person in a role and they keep doing what the last person did.

But what if you want more? What if you want it to be better, stronger, leaner, whatever it is, accomplishing a different result.

Maybe you keep, you know, two of the same KRAs from before.

But you add two other ones without sitting down and asking the question, what is the expected result we have for this role now, today, with our current goals, with our current strategy, with our current vision?

Without doing that, then what you're probably going to do is hire the same exact role and then you'll get down the road and you're going to try and make the person who's in that role now, who fit the role that you hired, you're going to try and make them change and you're going to try and get them to fit what you want them to fit.

I'm not saying that you can't do that. We have done that a thousand times.

We have had roles grow and morph and change. We've had that happen a thousand times. What I'm saying is, is don't allow that to be something you do down the road after a hire.

Sit down, put together the new KRAs, the new expected key deliverables, the things that you want to see happen, and then hire to that.

If your business has grown but your job descriptions haven't, you're not hiring for the future. You're recreating the past. And that's not leadership.

So make sure you sit down and go over, what do we want this to look like?

Attachment to Charisma—Not Culture Fit (00:22:20)

Point number four, attachment to charisma, not cultural fit. Folks. I just said it a few minutes ago. Boy, have we all made the mistake. And you know, it's not always a mistake.

But if you don't have enough information from somebody, we can all make the mistake of hiring the friendly, funny type of person that shares the same interests that you have.

You know, you connect easily with them, but you forget to test the value, values, alignment that you forget to test accountability, or you forget to test communication under stress.

So as you're looking at a new hire and you experience this person coming out, and I want to say it's not just the charisma piece, it also could be the person who is very quiet.

If you don't understand the personality styles of the people coming through the door and sitting down in your chair and going through this interview process, you might end up hiring somebody who's super charismatic that can't get anything done.

You might not hire the person who seems really quiet but is the absolute best fit for the role.

I can't tell you how many times I've said it myself, and I've heard other leaders say this that I've tried to help them with after I've learned from my own mistakes of saying, wow, I just didn't connect with that person.

My early days of not connecting with somebody and then finding out how phenomenal of a hire they were.

You know, that I should have hired them, that somebody else hired them and you know, or somebody I know, or you know, it just showed me the mistake I was making by not understanding the personality style of the person.

So do not get attached to charm. The person who is charming is intentionally being charming.

Their goal is to be charming. Their goal is to get you to like them. So it's them you want to hire, not their expertise, not their values, not their communication, not their ability to be accountable to themselves. Right.

So that becomes a very expensive hiring habit when you hire according to charm. Once again, some of my greatest hires had a what I would call a not so good first interview with me because they were so clammed up.

But I learned early on to read people, and I learned early on to read responses and things that I'm seeing and. And, you know, body language and, you know, how much are they blushing around their neck and where's the nerves?

And so on and so forth. That changed my interviewing for decades. It is easy for me to sit down and within 30 seconds go, hey, listen, you don't have to be nervous about this interview right here.

There's nothing to be nervous about. Our goal is to make sure that, you know, we hire the right person. But our goal is also to make sure that you don't come to work for us and you think we're crazy people.

So we want this to work out for both of us and just have a good, you know, conversation about getting rid of the nerves that they're currently having and allow them to settle in.

But you do that by understanding that just because you're seeing somebody who's clammed up does not mean that they're not the perfect fit. They may be terrible at interviewing, right?

They might be phenomenal at doing the job and communicating afterwards, but they might be terrible at the interview process. So the question is not do I like how they respond or their attitude. The question is, are they a cultural fit?

Culture fit isn't about who you like. It's about who lives out your values when it matters. Chemistry can't fix character. Let me say that again. Chemistry.

You liking somebody, them liking you cannot fix a character flaw that they may have a problem that you're going to experience down the road.

Smart Hiring Framework (00:26:27)

So you can't hire well when your focus is misplaced, when you're attached to speed or polish or the power past or personality, you'll miss the deeper truths that protect your team and propel your business.

This month, we're replacing guesswork with clarity. This episode kicks off a powerful series on how to hire with clarity, confidence, and culture fit.

So next week, we dive into “Before You Hire: 5 Questions Every Smart Leader Must Answer”.

Now, this October, we're handing you the full smart hiring framework. One powerful resource at a time. You'll listen, apply, and by the end of the month, you'll have a complete system to hire better, lead, smarter, and protect your culture.

You have to sign up by filling out the form at chrislocurto.com/hiringframework one word hiring framework.

Once you're in, you'll automatically receive all all the resources throughout the month. Remember chrislocurto.com/hiringframework. You won't want to miss what's coming.

This framework could save you months of stress and thousands in costly miss-hires.

Well, folks, that's all the time that we have for today. I hope this has helped you. Well, I hope this has blessed you.

If it has, please share this with somebody else. Help us to reach others. Help us to to get this word out and help people to make better decisions.

As always, take this information. Change your leadership. Change your business. Change your life. And join us on the next episode.