How to Hire Great People and Keep Them | Jay Henderson

Hiring is one of those things most law firm owners do just often enough to get burned.

You are growing, the phones are ringing, the cases are coming in, and suddenly you are thinking, “We need help. Like yesterday.” And that is usually the exact moment you start making decisions based on vibes, a decent resume, and one solid interview. Brian says it best. Most of us are not great at hiring because we do it so rarely. 

This episode is basically a reset button for the way lawyers hire.

Jay Henderson walks you through a simple lens that makes everything clearer: your firm is made of people, tasks, and systems. You can build great systems all day long, but the people are the ones doing the work. So if the people part is off, everything gets harder than it needs to be. 

From there, Jay gets practical. He breaks down how to create a “superstar profile” for each role so you know what good actually looks like before you post the job. Then he shows you how to write a job ad that attracts the right candidate instead of everyone with a pulse. He talks score sheets, structured interviews, and how to stop defaulting into selling the job because you ran out of questions. 

He also gives a gut check on gut checks. Pay attention when your instincts are warning you something is off, but do not let intuition be the whole strategy. Tools, testing, and a consistent process help you go in with your eyes open and avoid the bad hire tax. 

If you are building a firm you actually want to show up to on Mondays, this is the episode that helps you stop hiring problems from becoming your whole personality.

Connect with Jay:

• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jaysrealtalent
• Company: www.RealTalentHiring.com
• Email: Jay@RealTalentHiring.com

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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia.  He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field.  This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.

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Transcript

The Hiring Expectation Gap

SPEAKER_01 0:00

See, one of the biggest problems for owners is what I call the performance expectation gap. You know, you go through the whole hiring process, you make a decision, you bring them in, you're excited about them, and their performance is a flop, and you're wondering, how did that happen? Like everything went well, the resume, the background, the interview, the reference checks, it all went well, and this just is not working. How did that happen? So there's this massive frustration in the gap that happens between what we expected and what we're actually getting in terms of performance, right? And this is this is when we get into this will they do the job stuff. Because just because they can do it, does that mean they will?

Host Intro And Why Hiring Fails

Meet Jay Henderson And His Approach

SPEAKER_00 0:38

No, it doesn't. Hello, my friends, and welcome to Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design and build the kind of practices they actually like showing up to on Mondays. You know what creates a practice that you don't like showing up to on Mondays? People that you don't like working with. And uh, if we're being honest, like most of us suck at hiring. When we make a good hire, it's often because of luck. When we make a bad hire, it's often because of lack of skill. And the reason for that is that most of us, we just do it so rarely. Now, if you're operating a small law firm um like I am, and I've got 25 employees now, but you know, we're making two, three hires a year. It's just not a skill set that you build up. And if you're operating a smaller firm, if you have six or ten employees, you may be making one hire per year, right? And you're trying to pick the needle out of the haystack of applicants. And most of us are putting ads on Indeed, and the only people on Indeed are people that don't have jobs. And so there's all kinds of things in our hiring processes and solo and small law firms that really are ripe for screwing it up and winding up with a team that is subpar and a team that makes you not want to show up to your office on Mondays, frankly. So if you're ready to fix all of that, this episode is the episode for you. This is my friend Jay Henderson. Jay is a hiring expert, often described what Jay does as witchcraft because I don't understand it at all. Jay has uh personality tests and screening for your employees, and Jay will hop on a call with you and go over that screening and tell you what you should be looking for in interviews. Again, because most of us, I think most of us hire on vibes if we're being absolutely honest with ourselves. Like we hire on based on 45 minutes of talking to somebody in an interview. Do I think I could work with you or not? Right? And Jay is the cure for that. Jay's screening process and tools are the cure for that. Jay creates a superstar profile for every role in your office, talks about the power of structured interviews, and talks about how intuition plays a crucial role in our hiring decisions, which is what I just said. Um, but how often our intuition can be wrong. And so how we need to lean into using tools and using screening devices in our hiring process. I think you'll enjoy this episode. I think you'll get a lot out of it. I think you will look back on your hiring if you have done hiring and go, you know what, maybe I need to do a little bit differently in the future. So without further ado, my friend Jay Henderson. One of the problems with all the things that you've learned in the last day and a half and that you'll continue to learn through tomorrow is that if you implement even a third of it, you're gonna have more work than you can handle, and more work than the AI bots out in the hallway can handle for you. And that leads to a hiring problem. How many people have ever made a bad hire? I knew it wasn't oh, you haven't made a bad hire. Okay. I knew it wasn't just me. Last January, we hired two people in the same week, and they were both gone within two months. Both gone within two months. Because we departed from our usual hiring protocol, which is talking to Jay Henderson. So our next speaker is Jay Henderson at Real Talent Growth. I asked Jay before he came on stage, like, do you consider yourself a specialist at finding and hiring superstars, or are you a specialist at helping law firms avoid disaster? And he said it's much more the latter. Superstars are hard to find, and you really need to find somebody who's at a B plus level and raise them up. But avoiding disaster is the real peril in your law firm. And so please welcome Jay Henderson to the stage to talk about how to hire for growth.

People, Tasks, Systems Framework

The Real Costs Of Bad Hires

Gut Feel Versus Useful Intuition

Reference Checks And Common Traps

Testing, Assessments, And Why They Matter

The Three Golden Questions

Four Steps To Hire With Clarity

Writing A Magnet Job Ad

Score Sheets And Panel Interviews

The Perfect Interview: Go Four Levels Deep

Reading Minds: Measuring Judgment

SPEAKER_01 4:18

He already asked you the question that I was going to ask you first, which is how many of you have ever made a wrong hiring decision? And a lot of hands went up. Did you guys look around the room? Put your hands up again if you have, and look around everybody. Don't look at me. Look at look around the room. It's amazing. Well, you're not alone, obviously, and it's really easy to do, unfortunately. And, you know, the hiring decision is a very, very difficult process. Very hard. One of the things I want to start with here is to think about this concept that your firm is made up of three things at its core. No matter what's happening, they all fall within these three things people, tasks, and systems. So we hear a lot about systems, don't we? Systems and processes. That is business. Okay. Systems and task, that's the focus of your business. The whole emyth thing is all about making sure that we're automated, we have maintenance of quality control. Everybody's clear, crystal clear on the steps of what they've got to do and why and what they're going to do and everything. But who does all those steps? It's the people, isn't it, right? And as you continue to grow using Ben and Brian's marketing materials and whatnot and strategies, as I do, you will need to be hiring people. Okay. You're going to have to scale because you're going to get more and more work to do and whatnot. And so this is a really, really big decision. But every time you look at your practice, if you would think of it through the filter of these three items, people, task, and systems, it'll really simplify your business for you because you'll be able to take a look at and notice and identify exactly what is the problem. Is it a systemic problem, a process or task problem, or is it a people problem? And like on page 44 in your booklet here is the page where you could take some notes with my speech. But it says there at the top, if you have a people problem, you have a everything problem. Systems are dormant, tasks are dormant, it's the people that makes it all live. So you don't, I don't have to tell you how critical it is to make sure you're getting the right people in the door and how painful it can be when you make the wrong hiring decision. It's expensive. Very, very expensive. You know that. There are six costs to consider when it comes to making a hiring decision. These are the things that, you know, usually we only think about that top right one, the recruiting cost and maybe the training cost, but there's other things too. Salary, we think about that typically as well. But management costs, your time, the squeaky wheel, the the more difficult the person is, the more of your time it's going to take. Right. So it's critical that we do our best, as I'm sure you're trying to do now, to make the best possible decisions that we can make. In fact, Harvard Business says that 80% of turnover is the result of bad hiring decisions. It's picking the wrong people. And picking the right people is very, very difficult. How many of you, this is a funny story. So I've given this speech a few times in my life. And uh I used to ask this question, which I was just about to do again. How many of you are behavioral psychologists by raise of hand? You're attorneys, I know better. But, you know, I would ask that question a lot because everyone believes that you can predict performance by noticing behavior. Past behavior equals future behavior. And that might be true in some level. One time I asked that question in Florida at a conference I was speaking at. How many of you are behavioral psychologists? I mean, really? And this lady raised her hand. I was shocked. Anyway, it turns out she she had been asking all of the questions in a small group of about 15 people. She asked more questions about hiring than anyone. And then I asked that question, she said, I'm a PhD in behavior. And I was blown away. Really? You've got a PhD in behavioral psych? Yes. And yet she had more questions, which isn't really surprising because she's interested in the brain and how people tick and all that kind of thing, right? But she still didn't know how to hire effectively. So it's a very, very difficult situation. And uh I want to fix that for you here. I want to start with these mistakes, right? There are 23 actually, hiring mistakes or things we do that can get in the way. Hiring too quickly. How many of you get stuck and you need someone immediately and you've got to get on it and go find somebody, yeah? And so that you get one or two or three or five resumes or whatever, and somebody comes in the door and they seem to look the part because we're very visual, TV generation, right? And they look like they might be the part. They're articulate, they can speak well, they have a little bit of a background, a good resume, and then we take a mirror and put it under the nose and they can breathe, so we'll hire them. Yeah? Bad, bad process, right? Hiring on gut feelings. I have a lot to say about this because your gut instincts are really actually important. It's been proven, we've known this. I say we, and I'll tell you why more later, but we've known that gut instincts or intuition is a literal form of intelligence. But they've literally scientifically proven that within the last five years. It became news. Intuition is a form of intelligence. It's important. But what happens is if you use your intuition that says to you, man, this person's amazing, they're fantastic, they're great, I gotta hire them. I will tell you, don't do that. That does not mean don't hire them. I'm just saying don't bite the baited hook because there are too many reasons why you might like a person that have nothing to do with their competency, their background, their abilities. Okay. And we tend to hire people that are a lot like ourselves. That doesn't mean don't hire them because they're like you, but we tend to do that, right? So there's all these things that can get in our way. But I will tell you that if your gut instincts tell you do not hire this person, if you feel weird, if there's a something's just off, if you get that, follow that. Okay, 90% of the time you're gonna be right. You get a bad feeling. I believe that most of the inspiration we get in our lives, intuitive inspiration, if we could call it that, comes in the form of a warning. We're not told 24-7 in our gut instincts when to turn, when to go straight, how fast to go, but we are told when to be careful, when to watch out, aren't we? If that makes sense to anybody. So use your gut instincts, but effectively use them when it's telling you be careful or watch out or something is off. A lot of times people will call me and then I'll tell them, maybe not hire this person. And they will say, Okay, I just wanted to talk to you about confirmation because that's really how I felt. And I say, save your money. Okay, a friend's recommendation. How many of you have hired someone because a friend told you you should hire someone? Anyone? Raise the hands, a couple of people, okay. I hope it went well, but did it go, did it go poorly? Anyone? It went poorly every time. You know, you you've got to be careful because I don't know about you, but I'm a little bit different when I'm at home and uh than I am when I'm at work. When I'm at work, I'm pretty focused. I'm a little bit intense. Uh, when I go home, I want to chill. And so people who know me that are in a social situation, they're like, okay, Jay's super chill. And then I get to the office and I'm not as chill. But you got to be super, super careful about who you hire. And I would, I would, in this instance, I would say to you, also be careful about hiring family members. Sorry, be very careful about that. And uh be careful about hiring very close friends. Be careful about hiring people that are very close friends of or family members of your employees. Okay. I've seen some small firms get really destroyed by hiring their great paralegal daughter, and then there's problems. These things happen. You said, wow, did you just do that recently? Okay, cool. Good. Sounds familiar, yeah. References from a previous employer. How many of you check references? Should I raise a hand? Really a big deal. How many of you feel like checking references is a waste of time? Raise your hand. All right, right. There's a way to do it that's very, very effective, and it'll really help you. I'm going to show you that in a little bit. You've got to do it. I mean, it feels to people like a waste of time often, but I'll show you how to do it, then it's not a waste of time for you. Uh, you know, references, especially if you're pre if their previous employer is a competitor of yours, be careful. They might go, yeah, she was great. I wish I could hire her back. You should hire her. Wink wink. Number five. Number five, they aced the interview. Okay. We're like impressed because they're articulate or whatnot, as I said before, and they do very, very well for an hour in a job interview. And by the way, be careful how long you are interviews with people in the interview. All right. I like to say to my clients, you want to do a 10-minute phone interview. There's four or five things you want to check on that 10-minute phone interview. You want to have them in for a 20-minute interview, and then you want to have them back for a third interview. Okay. And that, if you need to spend more time with that person, you've had a couple of experiences with them, and you should do that. Another good strategy actually is to have your team interview people for 10 minutes or 15 or 20 minutes in person after you do a phone interview, and you just walk in the room and just meet the person. Have you ever been in a job interview where right when they walk in, you just knew right there it wasn't going to fly. You didn't want to hire them. Anybody, raise a hands. You've got there's a lot of hands on that one. Okay. So this is a really good thing to do to save your time and maximize yourself and your performance is to just meet them for a minute before you go there. Even if it's an attorney. I don't know how you feel about that, having your team interview attorneys, but of course you can have associates interview attorneys for you if time management is important to you, which I hope it is. So acing the interview, good. I'm glad they aced the interview. I'm glad they're sharp enough to, you know, get by you. You guys have really good BS meters. You're really good at being critical in your analysis about people, and that's very good. Testing well. How many of you run tests on people? Raise your hands real high, please. Not a lot. IQ tests, anybody? Okay, we got some over there. Background checks, anyone? Cool. Typing test, time is money, speed, writing samples, writing abilities. You get that? Okay. You either don't want to raise your hands or you're not doing this. Okay, whatever. That's cool. But it's a big deal to do these things. Testing is becoming more and more people are aware more than they've ever been that they're going to be tested, that there's going to be something that they're they're going to they're going to have to do. Like a personality test, a disc. Anyone heard of the disc? Yeah, you run that? Okay, good. You should. Colby, Myers Briggs, Predictive Index, Hogan, OneScore, there's a lot of them. Okay. And uh it's it's it's I think very good to do this. It's great to have the information so that even if you when you do hire them, you have data you can go back to when it comes to communication or management with people. Very important, very powerful to do. Okay. And it shows a powerful professional organization. I mean, the worst thing you can do for your great employees is hire a bad employee, okay? The best thing you can do for your great team is hire good people. They'll really appreciate it. How many of you have ever had to let someone go and then your team came to you and said, We've been waiting for you to do that? Anybody raise a hands? A lot of hands on that one. And it's so hard, it's so difficult. I mean, I don't have a lot of clients that like love firing people. It's a drag. So again, we're back to the hiring decision, the choice we make in the first place, that hopefully will be helpful. All right, impressive resume. You know, you can buy an impressive resume. Did you know that? All right, fiver, couple hundred bucks, get a great resume from somebody. So you just want to be checking and doing the testing and whatnot, right? Here are the three golden questions. These are the most important questions. You're everything you do in your hiring process is trying to answer these three questions. Can they do the job? Well, that's like a duh question, isn't it? Because that's we all know that already. We all know in our whole process of running an ad, get a resume, sort through the resumes, you know, go through that steps and those processes. Can they do the job? That's what we're trying to figure out. Will they do the job? How many of you ask yourself that question? How do you know? How will you know? See, we we're not going to ask this question because we don't know how to figure out if they will do the job or not. How many of you ever hired someone? See, one of the biggest problems for owners is what I call the performance expectation gap. You know, you go through the whole hiring process, you make a decision, you bring them in, you're excited about them, and their performance is a flop, and you're wondering, how did that happen? Like everything went well, the resume, the background, the interview, the reference checks, it all went well, and this just is not working. How did that happen? There's this massive frustration in the gap that happens between what we expected and what we're actually getting in terms of performance, right? And this is this is when we get into this will they do the job stuff. Because just because they can do it, does that mean they will? No, it doesn't. So I've measured about 60,000 people in the law world. You could consider it an interview where I've basically interviewed nearly 60,000 people in your industry. We're talking every role you can imagine, from COO to law firm administrator, paralegal attorneys, different kinds of attorneys, different level roles of attorneys, everything, right? So this is important to know. Will they do the job? Will they for you? We've proven that just because someone can do the job and they will do the job, and even that they've done it successfully before for someone else, doesn't at all mean that they're gonna do it well for you. Is there a match? What are you expecting? Will they work well with you or for you? Okay, just because they can doesn't mean they will do it the way you want them to. So those are the three golden questions, and that's what you're trying to discover in all of your interviewing process. And what I want to do is I want to give you what I believe are the four most important steps. Because I've been doing this in the legal industry for about 15 years, measured about 60,000 people, and I have learned that there are some really key steps. Now, Brian and Ben have a great hiring system that you can invest in. I don't know how much it costs or anything about that. I know the content's good, but and you should. This is a really critical skill as an owner. If you're gonna do marketing and grow, we're gonna be hiring people we want to get the best, don't we? The first step is to create what I call a superstar profile. Now, this means that you basically determine, you take every role in your firm, and you can have the people that are doing this role for you now sit down with you for 10 or 15 minutes and talk about what are the key performance criteria for this role? What are the steps? What's the process? What are the attitudes? What are the behaviors? What are the skills? Because we can build a resume or we can build a job description and we have duties and responsibilities, but there's way more beyond duties and responsibilities that we want to work with and understand and have them, and we want to know this. It's like, how does how do your gut instincts and your intuition and your whole hiring process, how does that work powerfully if you don't have this superstar profile for every role in your firm, right? The more clarity, oops, excuse clarity's power, right? So we want the total clarity that we can have in order to identify who we want and why. And when someone leaves your business, your firm, that's a great opportunity for you to stop and say, what was great about them? If I want to duplicate that person, what did we love about them? And what did we love about their performance? The opposite. So it's a very, very powerful thing to do. And I actually have a template that you can email me and get from me that I will give to you that walks you through the process of determining what is the best criteria for success in this role in my firm. You want to do that for every single role you have. Next is create what I call the superstar magnet. Now, Ben and Brian's system's really good with this because they understand marketing copywriting and sales copywriting. The secret key really is you want to write a job ad and job description that nails the person you're looking for. And step one helps you do that, doesn't it? The more clear you are about who you want from that superstar job profile, the easier it is for you to write the ad that talks directly to the person that you're trying to bring into the door. Door. It's just like marketing. I mean, everything Dan was up here talking about with Ben is all about who do we want. Remember, they were talking about that. Who are the key people that we're going after? We don't want to just write, do our marketing to anybody. We want to look specifically for the who that we really, really want. That's the first question in marketing. And it's really the same thing, you know, with hiring. You got to be crystal clear about who you want and what they're all about. And so then you can write this magnet, I call it, directly to the person so that when they read this job ad, they're thinking, you know, they're going, This is me. This is really for me. So that's the key there. Now, this is Michael McCready. He's a client of mine who he's in Chicago. And uh he came to my office and we did some work on his hiring processes and whatnot. That's not a typical thing that I do, but I did a couple of workshops in-house. And uh he took it very seriously. And on his plane ride home, he took the whole time to get crystal clear through the superstar job profile who exactly is it that I am looking for? Right. And then he said, I took like two hours to write this job ad. Copywriting isn't a normal thing for him. Yeah. And he said, I ran this ad. Now he said, now I'm in Chicago. And normally when I run an ad for an attorney, he said, I would get like 80 uh resumes. All right. How many of you would like to have 80 resumes next time you run an ad for an attorney? Yeah. Um, and he said, and I was like, he said, this time I only got two. And he said, I was really concerned. I was struggling. He goes, but as I read over the resumes and looked into these people, it occurred to me, excuse me, these are two perfect people for me. And he goes, and and then the problem became which one of these two do I hire? You know, because they both are so great. But this process, those simple steps, weeded out people, it seems, it appears, that maybe shouldn't be applying. Okay, and brought people that he thought were just really, really good. So he loved that, and uh powerful to be able to do that. I also have templates that'll help you do that. But again, Ben O'Brien have a great system for this, and they're very, very good. Ben's got some great, I've seen his job ads that are great. So take a look at that stuff, right? So that's two steps. Number three, create the job interview score sheet. So this is simple. You take the profile from step one, okay, and you create this score sheet so that you can have it in front of you when you interview people because you've spent so much time getting clear about who it is you want. Well, you convert it to the score sheet, you have it in front of you. Let's say you need to hire some people and you go out of town and you're gonna have a paralegal and a legal assistant or your accountant or an associate attorney or whatnot interview people for you. You hand them the score sheet, it's right there. They can score people as they go through the interview, they can compare, because you should have panel interviews. You ought to have two or three or four people interviewing at stuff at some step in your process, interviewing each candidate if they advance, right? And it's important to you. So the score sheet's very powerful because it allows people who haven't done the thinking that you've been doing about who you want in there to be serious about and to know what they're looking for, right? And again, your team will love this kind of clarity and helping their ability to help you make hiring decisions. You got to be careful about that part too, though, because you know you can you can get somebody in the door that comes and interviews with you and they're very powerful people and it scares your team. You ever had that one happen? That happens all the time. So, but it's really a simple process, it's very powerful, and it'll really pay dividends for you. This clarity is like goal setting. I mean, we know the more we when we set goals that are vague, it gives us no power. But the more clear we are, see, so the more clear you are about your hiring process and who it is you're looking for and exactly what they're gonna be doing. And you go past duties and responsibilities, which everybody talks about. Yeah, you don't write about duties and responsibilities in your job ad. It's like boring. Everybody's gonna tell you, yes, I do that stuff. That's me. I mean, you can put it in there, but there ought to be more. All right. Now, this is the score sheet. If you want one, you can write me an email and I will send it to you, no charge, and I will email you every day for the rest of your life until you tell me not to anymore. And I'm joking, I wish I was consistently writing people every day. I do not do that. Yeah, but I'd love to share that with you guys if it'll be helpful for you. Okay. So, step four. This is what I call the perfect job interview, right? So, interviewing is really a powerful skill to develop. And um you can have a really good BS meter and identify when people aren't gonna fit, but how do you interview in a powerful way whereby they will fit? And you come to clarity about that. All right. I have found over these years that most people don't know how to interview very powerfully. And if you don't have a strong interview process, you'll default to talking about your firm. Anybody ever have that experience? You don't know what to say next, so you start talking about here's what our firm is about, and here's what the job is, and here's how great our team is, and here's why you want to work here. And it doesn't matter to me that you can only fog a mirror, just please accept the position because I don't know what else to say. And I'm being facetious, right? But it's like that that happens a lot because interviewing people for jobs, right? It's not easy, it's difficult. Being great at interviewing is really powerful, and there's some important tips. Like you might have heard of Stephen R. Covey who wrote The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Anybody ever heard of that? Okay, so I worked for Stephen Covey for a long time, and uh he wrote this book, and Habit Five is awesome. Anybody know what Habit Five is? It's an old it's an old book. I'm finding Habit Five is seek first to understand and then to be understood, right? And it's like active listening. You learn about that stuff in communication classes in college, active listening and whatnot, right? And it teaches you how to listen powerfully. And I like this principle called four-level deep questioning. And what that means is so let's say somebody, I used to have a great example about this, I haven't thought about it in a long time, but let's say that you ask an interview question of someone and they answer it. How many of you would go on to the next question? Probably most of us. But the most powerful thing you could do is ask another question based on the answer that they gave you. So the language looks something like, okay, great, thank you for that. Tell me a little bit more about that. Tell me how you know that. Tell me how you came to that. Does that make sense? Then they answer you some more. So I guess an example might be, tell me why you applied for this position. How come you've come here? What's what's interesting to you about our firm? Oh, I love the hours that were posted in the ad, part-time hours. Okay, awesome. So here's level two. Tell me what it is about the hours that we posted that was interesting to you. Well, I want to go to school. I'm going to school at night, and uh, you know, it's a it's three nights a week, and I've got to leave at a certain time in order to be there on time. Oh, that's awesome. Good. Here's level three in my silly example. All right. Tell me what you're going to school for, which is natural. You all probably would ask that. Well, I've always wanted to be a clown. So I'm going to clown school. And here we are in the legal industry. So it's like, well, I've always wanted to be to do clean teeth. What do they call that position? I forgot. Dental assistant. I've always wanted to clean teeth, you know? And you're like a little disconnect, and you might go, that's no problem as long as they're here and they stay for a couple of years, and I don't expect them to anyway. So you just want to go deeper and deeper and deeper. And if you don't do that, you know, research shows that people take the first answer they're given and then they move on. All right. And you don't want to do that. You want to go deeper and deeper, and you'll go, and if you keep doing that, and you know, without obviously interrogating them, making them feel awkward, then it will really be powerful for you. Perhaps the biggest problem that you have in hiring is that you do not know how to read minds like I do. So in the laughter's admission of guilt, he knows I can read minds. Can I can I read minds? But the quotes there, right, being a little bit facetious, but it's real. This is why the PhD in behavioral psychology had so many questions for me when she has a PhD about people and I do not. You know, she's trying to figure it out. How do you really know what is going on inside of people and and who they really are? You know, if you can go into a hiring relationship with your eyes wide open because you know exactly what you're getting in somebody, you know, and you understand that, then your chances of success are dramatically improved. An example comes to mind of uh Hilton Corporation. Now, again, I've been working in the legal industry for 15 years, and I've again done about 60,000 interviews in the legal world assessments, really. But we were working with Hilton, the vice president of Hilton worldwide, and we were helping them hire people in five, five key places New York, London, Miami, Japan, Tokyo, and Vegas. And uh they would they would sign a one-year contract, and they signed that every year for 11 years. And uh what they said after we did our research to help them hire the best people is we're hiring people we never would have hired before. We are not hiring people we would have hired before. They get through our training, they get through our training in 30% of the time as usual, okay, than normal. And they are succeeding, I forgot the number, some number by some percentage better than they were ever were before. I don't remember what that was. Really good stuff, right? Just because we measured exactly who needed to be there and then could help them identify that when people were right in front of them. And it's, I guess, a form of reading minds, you know. I mean, I've been studying the science for like 25 years, but that's how you do the perfect job interview. It's it's the secret interview. You know, um, a little bit more about that is to understand how they think and make decisions. So the human mind works in a very specific way. Okay, what the brain does is it perceives the world around it, it analyzes what it perceives. The first thing it actually does is it associates. We perceive and associate. Our brain goes, seen that before, I know what that means. Analyze it, and then we make a decision. How many of you agree you do not make a decision until you've analyzed something? Makes sense, right? Okay. Sometimes we make a decision only because the boss told us to. But typically we have to use our filtering process, what I call our perception, to analyze what we see. And then we take action. So there's no action till there's a decision, no decision until we've thought about it, and we are using ourselves. Like, you know, it's it's us. Success is a function of making faster, more accurate decisions. Faster. In a golf tournament, the person who wins is the one who makes the fastest, most accurate swing of the golf club more often than everyone else for four days. In business, it's the organizations that make the fastest, most accurate decisions. That's where success comes from. And everywhere you go, there you are. And you have your own bias, a natural bias, not the artificial bias we learn about in law school. But we all have a natural bias through which we filter the world around us. And when people complete the exercise that I use for hiring, there's six four quadrillion ways to take it. Mind-bending. Six point four quadrillion different ways to take this exercise that I give to people. But we don't get results until we go through these steps. And understanding how your candidate goes through these steps, it's like a superpower. It's unbelievable. They take a 15-minute exercise and you get a report that is, well, I have a client who says, what, shockingly, or no, eerily, eerily accurate. And it is. That's why I do it. So I was at the Covey Leadership Center, as I mentioned before, working with Stephen Covey. I left his organization and I went down the road to a company. I had a goal in my life to become a sports psychologist. I'm a foot. Russell's back there. We were talking earlier. He's into sports psych. We were talking about that. I love sports psychology. I'm kind of a geek and a nerd about how the mind works. So I was totally into sports psych because I was into sports. And how do people perform at their highest and best, especially under pressure? How do you get the best performance out of yourself or others under pressure? Okay. That's the stuff. And they've been studying this in that industry for 50 years, right? So I leave Covey Leadership Center because I found out that right down the road, five miles from me, the whole time, was a company called Inside Out Development. And they were teaching sports psych principles to the Fortune 500 people, like we were doing at Covey. We were teaching Covey's material to the Fortune 500. They were teaching leaders and managers how to coach other people to higher performance using sports psych principles. I found out about that, man. I made a beeline over there. Best suit, all this experience at Covey. You know, I was ready. Went in there, did an interview with the CEO. He said, Great, thanks. Here's a two-page thing. It was on paper then, 100 years ago. He said, You fill this thing out and fax it to me. So I did after I called my dad and said, Hey, there's this weird thing. This guy wants me to fill this thing out. He's like, Yeah, just do it. You're fine. Fill out this exercise, fax it to them, get a second interview, walk in, sit down, and uh the CEO starts asking me questions. And he asked me questions that were so poignantly in my world that blew me away. I honestly nearly cried at one point. I had to look away. And I'm thinking, how does he, you know, to ask these questions for me? Right? It's crazy, blew me away. Well, I got the job, shockingly. I got the position, and I was them with them for years. But three or four months later, after I was hired, the guru of the science that measures this stuff in people came out to our company, and we were up at Sundance, Utah for a three-day conference. Has anybody ever been to Sundance, by the way? Phenomenal. You got to go there. That's like one of my favorite places in the world. Anyway, and we were there for three days and we were in this cabin when the water, you know, from the river was rushing under it. Really cool. And the guru of the science, who's from Nashville, Tennessee, came out and he trained us in this science about how to measure people. And then I knew, oh, that's how the CEO knew to ask me these questions. And the CEO had called this man Wayne and asked him about me. Should I hire him? Why? What's the problem gonna be? Where are the risks? How do we know, et cetera? Who is this guy really? And Wayne, who who has been doing this stuff, I mean, this science has been validated for over 80 years. Five types of validity studies, face, correlational validity, statistical validity. Um, I don't remember the other ones right now, but they have to do validity every five year studies. So this guy has basically, the scientist has basically like written thousands upon thousands of paragraphs. And the algorithm is set so that when people complete it, it gives you a report on their performance capacity. So this is the beauty of what we're talking about. You've got to go through these steps to have the interview, you know, the profile. Who do I want? What's the ad that's going to get them in the door? You know, how do I interview this person based on this? We'll use the score sheet. And then at whatever point you decide, you run an assessment on the person that reveals more to you about them than their mother knows. And it's astounding. And the reason I do this work is because of my interview experience with Inside Out, where the CEO just knew me like the back of his hand. Then I went to the training. And then that guy, Wayne, and I are partners, and we've been working together for many, many, many years. And he's trained me in the science, which has really been a blast. You ought to use AI, all this talk about AI. By the way, I have a new book. I'll show you that here. Yeah, The Lawyer's Guide to Hiring Superstars. Just launching it. I've got a few with me, but here are the steps we talked about in this interviewing all these different types of roles. But I don't have anything in AI in this book on AI and using for hiring. I wrote it a while ago. And uh I am now writing a bonus chapter, which is going to be all about using AI for hiring. There's some very powerful steps you could take that are really amazing, actually. Imagine you take transcripts from job interviews, the results of any kind of a profile, like a disc or Colby or Myers Briggs or what I do, okay, the criteria of the job, the job ad, and you upload all that into AI for three or four or five people, and you tell it, please collate this and organize it as to who do you think would be the best fit for this role. And it's going to come back and it's going to give you a report that you won't believe, like in minutes. And it's going to help you identify who are the people I should focus on the most. So powerful. And you need to do it. All right. The downsides or the things that are not there, AI cannot identify the risk of the individual that you are that they that it is identifying. It doesn't know their intrinsic world. It doesn't know how they think and make decisions. Okay? It doesn't understand these things about the person. It cannot identify the risk. It doesn't know the quality of the judgment capacity. You know, you can have brilliant professors. How many of you had a great professor in law school that couldn't teach well? Anyone? We got some hands, right? There's brilliant people who can't change a tire. Okay. There are three parts of your business people, task, and systems. The task and systems, as we talked about before, are finite until we change them. All right. And the people and the quality of their judgment is really, really the key. When you're trying to find can they, will they, will they for me, what are you looking for to identify those answers? What's the quality of their judgment? How well do they see the world? This is different than IQ. Be brilliant, can't change a tire. Okay. We want people who can function in the business. IQ is awesome. It helps, it's important. I don't think we should hire people without good smarts, but you need to hire people who can function. I've had clients come to me with employees that they hired, and the employee said to me, I want to thank you for what you do. Why is that? Well, I don't have a high school degree, no college degree, obviously. I never had an opportunity to get an education. And for some reason, this law firm decided to take a chance on me, and you told them they should hire me. She was there three years. They loved her. She had the right stuff, you know? She had quality of judgment. She could think and make decisions well. She fit the role. It was all just worked. Okay. And AI can't tell you that. It can't identify, okay, it can criteria, it can criterize for you, here are the best five in this order. But then you still have to find out, are they are they toxic? There are 10 toxic thinking patterns. Are they going to be a problem? Are they going to get along with the team? Am I the boss going to want to work with them? You can hire a C E a COO that you're growing and you're the CEO, attorney, owner of the firm, and you can hire a COO who could be a great COO, but a catastrophe to work with. Would you like that? No, we obviously don't, right? So those are some of the beautiful things that AI can do for you, but there's some things that it's still short on. I don't know when it's going to be able to do it. They're working on, what do they call that? Super AI now? Or something like that? Like the next level of intelligence, super intelligence, AI. We'll see what happens. I'm working on a pod that take a private AI pod that takes my science and can upload it, and it'll be able to use AI. We got to be very careful with that, though. A man that I know put a prompt into AI and said, How do we keep AI from being a problem in the world? And AI said, it needs a motherly instinct. How will this computer science robot gather and gain motherly instinct? Our science can actually do that. But we're not sure it's a big deal to go messing around with that. We don't know what will come of it. But because there's this intrinsic dimension of thinking, that's where your intuition stuff comes from. That's where your empathy comes from. Some people value empathy and some people don't. Some people value their intuition, some people don't. Some people are highly empathetic and have poor judgment about their empathy. So what happens is they're syrupy, they're too nice, they're too trusting, they're chumps, if you will, easily taken advantage of. The other end of the scale is a total lack of empathy, but an extraordinary clarity in their thinking when they use that dimension of thought, their intuitive ability. Some people are total lack of empathy and have. Poor judgment. So they believe their wrong judgment about how bad people are. It's all fascinating science. It's really cool stuff to understand, you know, what's going on inside of people. And then when people are looking for work, they're in a transition state in their life, right? That's why they're looking for work. Every time we were looking for work, we were in a transitory state, you know, coming out of college, or you just don't like the job you're in now, so you go get a different job. So there's something going on inside. It's not always bad. Sometimes it's just awareness that, hey, I shouldn't be here and I don't want to be here, so I got to go find something else. But sometimes people are in such a transition state that they really do not know what they want to do and they can't figure it out. And when you go trying to sell them into your firm, because your default interview process, right, is hey, we're a great firm. You should work here. In fact, let me take you to lunch. We do catering every Friday. You really want to be here. So we now start selling people into coming to work for us. And they're in this situation where they don't know what they want to do and where they want to be. So they're like, sounds like you want me. Okay, great. That's what I did in college. I think she wants to go out with me. I'll do it. So, you know, it's it's a lot going on in people when they're looking for work and they're trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives. And you really want to, you know, again, people can interview well, and I'm glad. I mean, I want people to work. I want people to be happy. I want them to find the jobs they want. I don't want my life to be, my mission is not Jay Henderson kept people from working for a living. Not what I want to do. But I do have a mission to make sure that my clients who put their trust in me know exactly who they are getting and what that person is about. So that you go in with your eyes wide open and you've made a good hiring decision. You've got somebody that fits the role, they've got good quality judgment, you can rely upon them effectively. And this is the only objective science that measures, objectively measures how people think and make decisions. The others that I mentioned, which I like them all, Colby, Disc, Myers, Briggs, once good, name them. I like them. You know, I'm again a nerd about how people think and make decisions. If they're validated, awesome. I love it. But they're subjective. The whole process in which they were created is a subjective process. When they complete it and take it themselves, it's a subjective process because it's usually a self-questionnaire, isn't it? If I was chased by a bear, I would A, climb a tree, B, jump a fence, you know, three. I realize I just did A, B, three. But, you know, it's like, it's like the subjective thing where I'm going to tell you what I think you want to know about me. Like I like the disc very much. It's laughable to me how easy it is to take it and understand what it wants from you. Although that's what I do for a living. So maybe it's just easy for me. I think it's easy for everybody. It pretty much telegraphs. But these are the steps. Create the profile, create the magnet, get the score sheet, help other, get other people to help you, get your interview process down pat. You know, a number four is get the real talent law performance profile. That's what I do. I can literally predict performance. I predict performance. Nothing else will predict performance. Nothing else will show you emotional control, quality of judgment. They'll show you fit. Like a disc can say, hey, these are good salespeople. These are your good administrators. They can do that. The Hilton Corporation said when we started using you, we were using disc and we blocked two and a half out of every 10 bad hires. When we started using yours, we immediately began to block eight out of ten. They said, uh, when we use them both together, we're blocking nine out of ten bad hires. You know, and uh that tells you that people still slip through. Nothing's perfect. There's no tooth ferry, right? It's not perfect. But, you know, your ability to make a great hiring decision is a big deal, and there's these tools that'll help you. And uh I have a couple books up here. I'll walk. Where will I go, Brian? I'll go over there. We're done after this, right?

SPEAKER_00 44:37

We are almost done after this. Okay. We're done in this room after this. You can go to either side of the room.

SPEAKER_01 44:41

Okay, cool. So if anybody wants a book, I'll be right over there. Okay. Happy to happy to give you a book or take a card and send you one. And uh thank you so much for your time. I've enjoyed it.