Salesforce Hiring Edge

Why Vulnerability Is the #1 Hiring Superpower in Tech Teams

• Josh Matthews and Josh LeQuire • Season 3 • Episode 75

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In this raw and real episode of Salesforce Hiring Edge, we sit down with David Kestenberg — former CIO, startup founder, and transformation leader — to talk about something no one is saying out loud in tech hiring: vulnerability is a weapon.

From building authentic teams to calling BS on fake personas in interviews, David, Josh Matthews, and Josh LeQuire break down how to create a culture where people are safe to be real — and why that leads to better hires, better retention, and better outcomes.

You’ll learn:

  • Why saying "I don't know" might be your biggest strength
  • How to use vulnerability to create high-performance teams
  • The silent cost of inauthentic hires
  • How diversity, culture, and transparency create hiring edge in Salesforce orgs
  • How to screen for realness, not resumes

🎯 Whether you're hiring, getting hired, or leading a team — this episode is your blueprint for building something that lasts.

👉 Follow us on LinkedIn:
 Josh Matthews | David Kestenberg | Josh LeQuire

🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite app.
 📺 Watch full episodes on https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSmNMZJZbG-cywtt1nVYZWA

David Kestenberg:

The interviewer should say we are looking for this job because of that reason, because the guy quit, because we are scaling a new system. If I explain to the candidate why am I hiring, not to, what role am I hiring? Why am I hiring? When I explain to the candidate why I'm being vulnerable to the business decision and the psychology around the job. Now I've been vulnerable and I expect you to pay in the same currency and saying, okay, I understand.

Josh Matthews:

Welcome to Salesforce Hiring Edge, the show for leaders who want to hire smarter and scale faster with Salesforce.

Josh LeQuire:

Whether you're building a team or bringing in a consulting partner. We're breaking down what actually works in the real world.

Josh Matthews:

All right, let's get into it.

Josh LeQuire:

This episode is brought to you by C-Currents at the letter C currentscom.

Josh Matthews:

Welcome to Salesforce Hiring Edge. Today we're joined by David Kestenberg. David is a former CIO, tech strategist and startup founder who's led everything from M&A integrations to Salesforce transformations. He's also been a guest on our show in the past and welcome, david, it's so great to have you back on the show. Thank you, happy to be here.

Josh Matthews:

You know we started a conversation in our last episode with you and the topic came up around vulnerability. We were talking about ambiguity, vulnerability and accountability Lots of it-ities, right, and it got me thinking. I spent a little time thinking after that show about vulnerability. This is also something that I think about quite a bit, because I like to think that I'm psychologically minded or behaviorally minded, and it's served me quite well. I actually had a therapist years ago say you know, whoever's most vulnerable wins. That really stuck in my head and that it's an interesting thought.

Josh Matthews:

But there really is something about opening yourself up and kind of taking the like. It's basically like a cat pulling their claws back and being a fuzzy little kitten again. They're going to get a lot more out of the communication with people. But we had talked about it, david, you and Josh started to talk a little bit about it. So on this episode. I'd like to explore that a little bit more in terms of how vulnerability as a leader, or allowing vulnerability to exist within a team, actually improves outcomes for the projects, for the work at hand and for the culture and the overall vibe of a team. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Josh LeQuire:

I think the last time we talked, you were really keying very heavily into building culture, collaboration, everything from the recruiting process to screening for that and vibe checks, understanding what kinds of roles need to be shaped in a team, how people fit those roles, not just from a technical perspective but from a collaboration perspective. Your notes talk a lot about vulnerability as an asset, owning your mistakes publicly modeling, reflection and lessons learned, and you talked about your rituals on Fridays to celebrate achievements and having teammates recognize each other as well as others. So help me understand what vulnerability looks like for you.

David Kestenberg:

I think we need to have an opportunity to bring forward our authentic self in order to really achieve greatness. You know, we can do a job any day. To have a career, you have to be coming from inside you, and if the environment that you are working at as a job, as part of your career, is not nurturing your ability to be your authentic self, it's problematic and it's blocking your growth and it's blocking your ability to actually perform at your highest levels. Be the best version of yourself. I had one of our leaders in Heimbach was talking about best version of yourself and it's for me.

David Kestenberg:

Vulnerability is the ability to lower the walls, even if on the outside life, outside of work, outside of this environment that we create for ourselves, there are things that are more complex, that are more difficult to handle in our group. It should be very comfortable. I'll give you a simple example. I don't know how, like I'm Jewish, I'm very comfortable about talking about my faith, very comfortable talking about my dual citizenship. I'm Israeli, but I also have a citizenship, american citizenship, citizenship. I'm very comfortable talking about that. That normalize talking about immigration status. You know, when you have a lot of you know, post-grad students that are on h1b and dealing with that constant fear of like. If they're gonna get fired, they're gonna get deported and they can talk about that, because I'm not even talking about like trump. I'm talking about, like five years ago, covid Okay, no one wants to talk about their immigration status or personal fate.

David Kestenberg:

You know, if it's the Ramadan now and you didn't eat all day and it's four o'clock and you're pissed off not because everybody's stupid around you, because you didn't eat all day and if people don't know because you didn't want to say that you're Muslim, then you have a problem as a teen. You know, if you're a single mother and you need to leave at 3 pm because you need to pick up your kid, but you're not comfortable saying that because you don't want to be judged by your race, by your ethnic background, by your whatever, then you have a very, very problematic ecosystem. Now you can't go and say, hey, what exactly are you to people. That doesn't work that way. You need to start with. Let's talk about cricket, and then let's talk about your holidays. Okay, what kind of food? Let's talk food. Let's talk food. Okay, so it was Passover. Jews have horrible food. Share with us that horrible food that you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about. It is the best freaking food.

Josh Matthews:

You know, I'm just going to say that, my bubby, I would finish my gefilte fish at PESA and I wasn't a fan. I'm still not a huge fan, but I'd finish it. And you couldn't finish it. You had to leave a tiny little bit on your plate because if you blinked there'd be a whole other piece right on your plate.

David Kestenberg:

I would always eat my gefilte fish because my dad used to, and we're Polish Jews. That's it. You're going to eat that. My kids know that they need to eat that.

Josh Matthews:

It is what it is it is what it is If you bring it to a Friday call and you say hey, guys, I have this horrible food.

David Kestenberg:

And then, all of a sudden, the Indian guy is talking about this amazing drum that they have and the music that he sings, and then the other guy is talking about that. Then, when it matters, when it's Friday at 3 pm and the Muslim guy needs to go pray or there's a dentist appointment for the single mother baby, single mother baby, they will come and say hey, I'm owning the vibe that we created here and sharing something that in some entities can be weaponized against me. But because I modeled it, I started with it. I'm talking about myself, not because I'm an egomaniac that loves to talk about myself, because I want you to talk about you myself, because I want you to talk about you, because I want you to talk about you with your colleagues, not with me.

Josh LeQuire:

Well, it's like you're celebrating diversity. You're creating an environment of open communication and trust, right, because the people feel closed off. I don't know if I can share everything.

Josh Matthews:

And it's compassion. You know it's compassion and understanding. You know when we think as individuals decide look, we've got our three faces right. We've got our public life, our private life and then we have our secret life. No one's asking to break into anybody's secret life here. Right the thoughts that you don't share with anybody.

David Kestenberg:

Yeah, but let's touch on that diversity thing. Okay. So I understand diversity, I get it. I am the diverse, I am the immigrant with the accent, with all that. I understand diversity. I think that in the big picture, because we are building a high-performing teams, it's really not about saving the seats for that type of you know minority or that type of minority. It's really not about saving the seats for that type of you know minority or that type of minority. It's really not about that. It's like I need, as we said before, I need the best snipers and I need the best swimmers and I need the best basketball players. I am biased toward one group. You know, that's very, very clear.

David Kestenberg:

I would always prefer to hire a veteran, always, and I will tell you why. Veterans has a unique skill that is different than other people. You know, everybody carry trauma, everybody. You just need to be alive to carry trauma. So it's not just about the blood and whatever.

David Kestenberg:

The under fire situation, it's not that it's a definition of a bad day. The under fire situation, it's not that it's a definition of a bad day, the magnitude of bad days, that a veteran experience is very, very different. And then, when I needed in my team, my immediate team, to have, you know, my number two to deal with a lot of different problems, including firing people, including having difficult decisions when he's been already in difficult situations in his life. That puts me in a situation that I'm saying, okay, you know, we're talking about how to build a hive and when you build your hive, there's a seed that is saved for veteran. Now, yeah, it's possible that it will be for someone that grew up in another privileged community. It's possible that it will be safe for other people. But my sweet spot that's why I love that the Salesforce ecosystem is invested so much in Salesforce Military and all the beautiful things that they're doing there Merivest Vets in Tech there's a lot of David Nava's military office hours.

David Kestenberg:

I've been on a stage with him seven years ago.

Josh Matthews:

Vanessa and I were just on this winter. It's really really wonderful to get to participate.

David Kestenberg:

So when we're talking diversity, now measuring a lot of different things, like when you look at applying for jobs and if I need to apply for a job, I'm an Israeli veteran. So if I'm applying today, I cannot say that I'm a protected veteran. But will you take? I'm a freaking major, but I need to say that I'm not a veteran. So are you ripping me off for my identity? Should I? And then how does that work? So when I interview people I don't care about you know what they had to say on the questionnaire. I need to hear who they are and if they will tell me that they are a soccer player or an artist or that that's create that level of vulnerability and intimacy. You know when the team is 300 people. You will not know everybody's cats and kids name. You will not know they can't.

Josh Matthews:

You will know top five, loudest and top five quietest nuts and bolts of this, because the idea is to create, to allow for vulnerability to exist on a team or, for example, to allow for vulnerability to exist in the interview and hiring process, which I think is absolutely critical. It's so difficult, it's so difficult to get to know someone if they won't open up to you or to someone in the interview process. You might have three or four or five people involved in the interview process. They've got to open up to at least one of them and it's got to be the person that is trusted by the others to be really good at being able to pull that information out. For my clients, it's me and, by the way, I'm so lucky because so many of my clients, or many of my clients, they're really good at it too, right, so they're just verifying what some of the things that I think about an individual. So, to get someone to open up, there's a real craft to it, right, and I think you've already said it, david.

Josh Matthews:

I mean, the first thing is to open up about yourself, right, when you can demonstrate. Look, not only am I not perfect, I'm also aware that I'm not perfect, right? Let me tell you why I suck. When you can do that, then people can start to share where they might be challenged right, or where they might be soft right, that kind of thing. And, josh, I mean let me just ask you directly on this. I mean, you've hired people, you know, and I imagine that you've gotten people to open up. You and I we have very open conversations about what's going on, not just in a public life, but private life as well. You know, is there something that you've done, or either of you or like an opening lead that you use to hopefully kind of gently announce this is okay, it's okay to talk about these things.

Josh LeQuire:

Yeah, and I think, david, I'm going to steal some of your notes on this, leading by example. You know, I think if I myself am willing to show by example what I feel comfortable talking about, other people will follow suit In the process of interviewing, onboarding and, certainly, retaining employees. I make a point, david you mentioned this in some of your comments earlier of opening conversations, just catching up with people. How are you doing? What's going on? And it's okay to talk about tough things as much as it's okay to celebrate the good things. Life is life. Life is going to life on us, whether it's good or bad. The good things, life is life you know life it's.

Josh Matthews:

Life is gonna life on us, whether it's good or bad yeah yeah, you know, uh, there's, there's a lot of bad, a lot of good so, yeah, the universe doesn't give a shit about your timeline like what you want, yeah, but it's also like you know some people.

David Kestenberg:

You go to a meeting and you see someone that is usually happy and now it's a little bit sad and quiet and you can't put them really on the spot in front of 15 other people and it's like hey, josh, you look sad today, what happened? And you're like, listen, my grandma is in the hospital. Like it's not. Sometimes it's really really difficult to do that, but if you send a text message, you know whatever Teams or Slack on the side and say, hey, bro, we're good, what's going on? You need the day off Like what's Just acknowledging that you've seen it can be changing, you know, to the positive.

Josh Matthews:

When Now, you talked in the prior episode, when you were on before, you talked a little bit about how you build that immediate team around you. You surround yourself with the people that you already know. You can look at your network and you can pull them in. Not everybody is our age and has an extra 20 years. Some people have five years, some people have 10 years. They still need to hire a team. Their network's this big and even if they knew how to build a network or knew how to identify who's good, who's not, they might still have some challenges simply because of time in the seat. They just don't have it yet. So they're going to hire their first team. For instance, they need to find out how real someone is. What is your record Like? What are you looking for? Do you consider yourself to be pretty good in general at, for instance I don't even want to say it, but like lie detection or like telling when someone's hiding something, I can do bullshit detector.

David Kestenberg:

I can do bullshit detector, which is great, but I'll give you, I'll give you a short story. I ran my first startup wasn't really good, interviewing a lot of interns. There was a it's's it's 10 years. There's definitely and and like it's old, old, old and not relevant story. But from a people perspective, but from a daily perspective, there is, there was an intern that came in and I'm like nice to meet you, sit down, I read his resume or whatever.

David Kestenberg:

I'm like what's your name? And he's like my name is chris and I'm like what's your name? And he's like my name is Chris. And I'm like I'm looking at him and he's Chinese, maybe 22, maybe 21. And I'm like you're Chris. He's like yes, I'm Chris. And I'm like how's your mother calling you? And he's like Yupeng. And I'm like would you like me to call you Yupeng? He's like yeah, that would be nice. I'm like would you like me to call you Yupeng? He's like yeah, that would be nice. I'm like so why did you tell me that your name is Chris? He's like because they told us to Americanize ourselves. And I'm like you don't need to. You can be whoever you want to be. That's the whole point. You're in an interview you want to be. You're coming to a job. You have the opportunity to be whoever you want to, yeah right.

David Kestenberg:

You know I am. You know, don't lie, don't own things that you've never done. But like here's an opportunity to be outgoing, here's an opportunity to be more laid back, here's an opportunity to focus on my technical skills. Like, if you're coming and introducing yourself by the illusion and the assumption of what the end viewer wants to see, you're not going to get the job because it's going to get the original. If I was looking for a Chris from Harvard, I wouldn't hire a Eupeng from CMU. So be you and you are way more high likely to get the job just by being yourself.

David Kestenberg:

Like we have this ideal Zuckerberg mask. Like I need to behave, I need to have a certain accent, I need to go to a certain school, I need to leave a certain school. I need to have a no On your journey. Be very comfortable with who you are and what is the next step. Don't go with it for 10 years. Just where's north? Where's north? Keep going to your personal North and if you're moving and growing and learning, everybody's going to want to hire you because you're adapting to the future and not just creating some persona that does not exist. Like I would never be able to come across as a you know, as a Princeton MBA with like on the rowing team, I'm not, I'm just not, you know.

Josh Matthews:

Just it's very apropos. I was watching this video by Chris Hughes. I'm not sure if you guys know who Chris Hughes is. He's a former uh uh psyops guy. I think he did about 20 years in the CIA and he's a big behavioralist and got a PhD in neurology. He's one of my favorite YouTube guys to follow and he was talking in this recent episode about how there's so much crap on YouTube and on the internet around, like how to appear confident, how to look like you're confident, how to speak like an authority figure, and it's just like slapping a bunch of band-aids on stuff. He said confidence is a byproduct. It's a byproduct of what you are, of your knowledge, your ability. It's a quality. It's a byproduct To pretend that you're confident when you're not. He said that's no different than taking some duct tape and an orange and taping it to an oak tree and calling it an orange tree.

Josh Matthews:

I just love that I thought, oh my God, yeah, that's good, it's solid. Isn't that perfect, right? I mean, anybody in Salesforce recruiting and hiring is going to talk to a lot of people who are some citizens, some foreign nationals, some people who are on H-1B or working through third-party firms and so on, and there is this sort of cultural emphasis to de-emphasize their own culture and that can be painful and just sort of having them live. It's like dressing up in clothes that aren't comfortable. You're not going to be at your best.

Josh LeQuire:

The problem is when people feel like they have to play a role, or play to the interviewer or play to the company, the reality is they're not going to last right. Like I've hired people who, you know, taught the talk, look good on paper, interviewed well, I thought we're going to be fantastic in a given role, came in and had to let go two or three weeks later because the act, you know, eventually the gig was up, you know, you figured out what was going on and that's the worst. You know. The false positive hire, I think, is the most painful. You know I try and screen as best as I can, but they get through sometimes, you know.

Josh Matthews:

I'll tell you there's a trick here. It's when you fall in love with a candidate really fast, you have to then try really hard to prove why you're wrong. This is how we get rid of confirmation bias, right, like? I'll give a short story. I had a gal come in. Now I had a massive need. I had to make this hire. I had four or five days where I was going to lose the requisition. This was when I was in corporate America, so I had to make the hire.

Josh Matthews:

Gal came in. She was super friendly, super casual. We got along great. She said all the right things. I wanted her to be the one. I wanted to like her. I had two other people came in. They met with her and at the time I was a fairly new manager, so I wasn't as good as I am right now. This was a hard lesson learned.

Josh Matthews:

She came in a couple of weeks later for her first day and by lunch not only did I know it wasn't going to work out, everyone on my team knew it wasn't going to work out, Like everybody knew it's like oh my God, I wanted this hire to work out so badly. I just dropped all of this talent and skill set that I developed over years to screen people because I needed it to work. I wanted it to work. And so when you fall in love with that candidate, you're like, oh, we got along great, because they're asking questions about you and they're doing all those Like anyone who's ever gone to a party. And you meet someone and you walk away and you're like, oh my God, I just met the most incredible person. They were fantastic. And then, you know, someone says, well, what's up with them? What are they all about? You're like, oh, I don't know, because the reason you like them is all they did was ask about you. Right, you just got played.

David Kestenberg:

Yeah, you just got played. The military equivalent to that is with navigating, when you look at the map and then you go through the desert and you go up the hill and down the hill and up the hill and down the hill, and then you look at the map and you see the mountains in front of you and you look at the map and you force the map to match the mountains and they're not there. You're looking the wrong direction. This is north and and. But you're looking at the map and you're like, yeah, it makes sense. It's like you see this peak, this peak, is this peak? You see, but it's not. Yeah, and sometimes you can't force the map to reflect on on reality and you know, and if you came to your team and said, brothers and sisters, I was wrong and I will correct it as fast as I can and I will earn your trust again, or whatever needs to happen, because sometimes it's not. Everything is like a global colossal chaos. Sometimes it's like, hey, I screwed up.

Josh LeQuire:

Let me fix it, David, you're kind of pointing to. We're talking a little bit about immigrant culture, American culture, corporate culture. I've worked big companies, small companies, clients, all over the place. I would say the majority of companies and the majority of American corporate culture have leadership that don't necessarily come out and say I was wrong or own their mistakes.

Josh LeQuire:

You know there's a lot of pride. I think what you're touting is more probably the minority or the exception and not the rule in this country, right? I mean, feel free to disagree but I don't know.

David Kestenberg:

I think that, yes, it's true, in organizations they're going to die. That's as simple as that. If you're looking on fast-growing organization technology that evolve rapidly, you will see people that say, well, we push to testings, 80 fail, let's do it again, whatever. And and they're very, very clear about the cycle of decision making and asking the questions and the lesson learned and the five l's of uhoitte. You know, what did we learn? What do we need? What do we need from leadership? What do we lack of All those? You know there's frames into that cycle of feedback and that big picture lesson learned, but those that don't own their shortcomings will fall behind. As simple as it happened to me, happened to better than me and the more capabilities here. Now here's the thing you can't come every day to the office and say I screwed up yesterday. Eventually it's your last day.

David Kestenberg:

More wins than losses right. You do More strategic wins and more minor losses. Show growth, show that you learn, show that you improve. Do not hide anything. That's the most important thing, because if someone in the chain of our building the fruit basket is not putting the right banana in the right place, it's going to explode in production. It's going to explode in production. And if they will not have the culture of saying, hey guys, I didn't finish testing, or I tested, but something doesn't feel right on the integration layer, or something like that, if they're not going to feel comfortable to say it, it will bite them and then we will need to deal with discipline. You don't want to deal with discipline, you want to deal with training. You want to deal with, you know, adoption and onboarding to new ways of doing things. But in a lot of the corporate life you have to deal with discipline because it's a jobby job.

Josh Matthews:

I think too, it's one thing to come out like. The best thing that someone could do when they screw up is just come out and say, hey, I screwed up and this is on me and you got to do it so that it doesn't land on your boss or on your coworker and they had nothing to do with it. If the shit's going to land somewhere, it should land on you. If you're the cause of it, you should own it. Ideally you're owning it before anybody else is either uncovering it or after they've uncovered it but hasn't like kind of tried to find out. But the number one thing that you absolutely have to do is, if you are asked, did you screw up? You have to own that. You can't lie On the ethical scale of behavior as a society.

David Kestenberg:

we have the common law. You break the law, you go to jail. But we expect everybody to be at the volunteering level, at the ethical level. But everybody lives around that you know, close to the law, just not breaking the law. So if you break the law, if you lied, you can't, you're done, pack your stuff, we'll see you, you know somewhere else. But you can't expect everybody always to be volunteering, always raising their hands to who want to do deployment on Friday at midnight. It's not. They're going to behave a little bit above what asked to be able to have a cushion to survive. But if there's bad intent and someone lies, they deserve the full hammer. This is not where we are. This is not where we are.

David Kestenberg:

And when we're talking back into the value of me as an interviewer to be able to identify someone into 20 minutes conversation because he's wearing a Manchester United shirt or has an album on his wall behind him, no, we can't predict the future. We get more experience with the vibe check and when the candidate is authentic to himself, then he's making our life easier, because then I don't need to swim through the bullshit. I just like okay, I understand, you have an accent, I have an accent. It's great, awesome. All right, let's move on above that. Can we actually do the work you know?

Josh Matthews:

so this has been this has been a very good conversation. Guys, we're gonna wrap it. I want to just do a quick round robin, if I can. Yeah, so I'm going to go with you first, josh. Again, the main topic has been around vulnerability Ideally, vulnerability in the process of hiring Also to David's credit, of course like keeping a team, building the right team, making sure that the culture of that team is solid. What's your number one piece of advice, or one of your top pieces of advice, for people who are working either as a Salesforce customer or a Salesforce partner? What's something they can do to demonstrate vulnerability and also get or allow candidates to be more vulnerable with them more open?

Josh LeQuire:

I think while David was talking earlier, the first thing that came to my mind not just the folks making mistakes and not fessing, but I think one of the biggest mistakes in our business is not saying I don't know. I think a lot of people are afraid to say I don't know, I don't understand, and make assumptions and move forward and work on bad assumptions or try and hide it or try and mask it in certain ways. That's dangerous, you know, that's another variation. I think I wouldn't call that lying. But I mean you're not really volunteering that. I'm taking on a task.

Josh LeQuire:

I don't know that's a prevalent problem. I'm taking on a task. I don't know. That's a prevalent problem. When you look at failed implementations in our world, man, I can't begin to tell you how many firefights I've been in to rescue failed implementations. I think 80%, 90% of the projects I pick up these days I'm having to refactor a ton of work. You know there's a lot of bad stuff and that comes 10 times out of 10 saying I don't understand the business requirements, I don't understand how to implement the solution you're asking me to implement.

Josh LeQuire:

I'm not talking about the documentation.

Josh Matthews:

So what you're talking about is not imposter syndrome, we're talking just imposter well, that and like come on man, I'm just being cute well, no, no, I.

Josh LeQuire:

I don't agree with that fully, because I think some people are just afraid to say I don't know, uh, and look stupid. Or perhaps you know, I'm gonna figure this out, I'm gonna go on my own, and a lot of times it's just better to say I don't know, maybe I can get some help, and so yeah know, one of the things that I wrote in the notes that you didn't talk about is the I know a guy policy.

David Kestenberg:

Yes, so the I know a guy policy is one of my favorite ones. I like that People are experts in their domain. If you don't know, don't tell me you don't know, ask for the. I know a guy who is the expert on Capado. Push to Prod that versus that. Talk with that guy. So once you leverage that I know a guy all of a sudden you don't need to say I don't know on a forum of 50 people on a call. You can just talk with the dude.

Josh LeQuire:

I think it's okay, like I slightly disagree with you, david, because I don't have a problem if somebody comes to me saying I don't know, because then I can say, well, I know a guy, you know, or maybe you know a guy right.

David Kestenberg:

Yeah, yeah, no, I'm saying like achieve that ability to, without saying I don't know, saying I need help on that. I need help and then you connect them to the guy. I love it.

Josh LeQuire:

That's so important and I think that you identify that early, you could save people three, four weeks of major headaches and catastrophes. Right, little things snowball into bigger things all the time and it always, I found in my experience. Sometimes 10 times out of 10, it's from somebody just not raising their hand.

Josh Matthews:

Yeah, Well, again, keeping it about the hiring process right, I happen to think that it's very good to say I don't know. When they don't know, they can say, I don't know, but I do know a guy and I'm close to them and they've already offered to help me ramp up on that. It sounds like this, maybe, is a critical piece of the role. Would that be accurate? Okay, because if it's really critical, then that's something I can spend time getting better at and ramping up on off hours. I still think I'm a great candidate for this job, so there's an opportunity there to leverage both of them, but have a solution that includes some sort of off hours effort. All right, same question for you, david.

David Kestenberg:

So my answer is a little bit different. It's from the perspective of the interviewer, not from the candidate. The interviewer should say we are looking for this job because of that reason, because the guy quit, because we are scaling a new system. If I explain to the candidate why am I hiring, not to what role am I hiring, why am I hiring, the guy quit.

David Kestenberg:

You're going new system, you are thinking about new products you need to support now whatever business from other unit, whatever it is, when I explain to the candidate why I'm being vulnerable to the business decision and the business psychology around the job which will be the ecosystem of that individual, and he's the finish. He's here's the finish of success. Now I've been vulnerable and I expect you to pay in the same currency and saying, okay, I understand, I understand that they quit after three months because it was stressful. I'm good with stress or I uh, this is, I'm a little bit early in my career. I don't know if I have that, that type of longevity stuff like that. So opening with an uh, uh, a vulnerable statement by explaining why we're hiring and not what we're hiring, creates the right tone and vibe to the continuation of the conversation.

Josh Matthews:

I love both of your responses. I think it's terrific. I'm going to throw in the third one here in the hat, which is simply to give them a way that they can't back out, and the way I like to do that is position them with what I call the three-month question. And, by the way, you can do it as a candidate. You can ask this as a candidate. You can also ask it as an interviewer. As an interviewer, it would sound like this David, you seem really good for this job. I can't offer you the job just yet because we're not through the process, but I want you to imagine that you're offered the position and you're really excited about it and you start I'd like to know what we're going to know about you three months from now, that we'll have wanted to know about you today. And just so you know this is really important. Okay, because we will know. So tell us what that is right now.

David Kestenberg:

You will get emails from me at 2 am. Yeah, there you go.

Josh Matthews:

I've gotten texts from you at midnight, so close enough Maybe not.

David Kestenberg:

I could be confusing you with another question.

Josh Matthews:

You're probably right. Wonderful session, guys. Thank you both of you, David especially for being a terrific guest here now twice on the show. You're always welcome back. We really appreciate you here.

David Kestenberg:

I would love to Thank you so much.

Josh Matthews:

You bet Great insights, david, absolutely, thank you. Make sure that you're following Josh LaQuire and David Kestenberg and myself, josh Matthews, on LinkedIn. Check out Josh Force on YouTube. If you're listening to this on a podcast, you might enjoy the video of this program. And if you're watching the video and you'd like to just have some audio on your drive home or what have you, or during your workout, you can follow us on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or any of your favorite platforms. Thanks so much for joining us. We'll be back next week. Bye for now. This episode is brought to you by our amazing partners. First up, ccurrentscom, laquire's powerhouse for its Salesforce implementations and services. And, of course, the salesforcerecruitercom, your go-to hub. If you're hiring, job hunting or just trying to get ahead in the Salesforce ecosystem, go ahead and reach out to us. Let's all win together.

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Josh Matthews

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