Stop Hiring the Best Interviewer

Most hiring processes don't filter for performance. They filter for interview skill. In this episode, Josh Matthews breaks down the five silent killers that cause companies to reject their best candidates before an offer is ever made, joined by co-host Scott Stafford.

What you'll learn:
• Why unstructured interviews predict job performance only 20% of the time
• How interviewers form snap judgments in 10 seconds and spend the rest confirming them
• The real cost of giving veto power to untrained interviewers
• Why long-tenured candidates get hurt by interview anxiety while job-hoppers sail through
• How vague winner criteria and moving goalposts eliminate great people
• A specific script candidates can use to disarm interviewer bias mid-conversation
• What conscientiousness actually looks like before the interview even starts

Drawing on Google hiring research, University of Toledo studies, and years of frontline recruiting experience, this episode makes the case that most companies aren't just making bad hires. They're systematically rejecting their best ones.

The Hiring Edge is for hiring managers, talent leaders, and professionals who want to build better teams and advance their careers.

Hosted by Josh Matthews, President of Salesforce Staffing, LLC and ranked the #1 Salesforce Recruiter, globally.

Follow on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and leave a five-star review.

Transcript

Snap Judgments And Confirmation Bias

Josh Matthews 0:00

Found that interviewers form judgments about candidates in the first 10 seconds of an interview. 10 seconds. Then they spend the remaining 99.4% of the conversation in confirmation bias mode, looking for evidence to support the snap judgment they already made. Welcome to the Hiring Edge, the podcast helping leaders navigate the age of AI, create teams that thrive, and build a workplace people never want to leave. That's welcome everybody to the hiring edge. My name is Josh Matthews. I'm here with my friend Scott Stafford. Most companies don't lose their best talent over money. They lose them in the interview before the offer even goes out. They've already filtered out the very people they're trying to hire. This episode, we break down five silent killers in the hiring process. Untrained interviewers, unclear definitions of what great actually looks like. Valuing interview performance. This is a big one. Giving veto power to the wrong people. This is like my least favorite thing veto power to the wrong people. And filtering way too hard for technical skills that can be learned fast. But here's where it gets uncomfortable. Most hiring processes aren't just inconsistent, they're biased. In fact, I recall a stat where even recruiters said about 59% of recruiters admitted, yeah, they're they're kind of biased. And I'm sure that I am too. But the level of bias in actual organizations with hiring managers is so far off the chart, it's insane. So gut feel, culture fit, unstructured conversations, guys, these don't just lower your chances of finding great talent. They systematically push those chances away. And the data backs this up. Research from Google and decades of hiring science show that structured, evidence-based interviews are far better predictors of performance than ad hoc conversations. Even more, general mental ability or GMA, that's intellect, intelligence, EQ, all those things kind of combined, consistently shows up as one of the strongest predictors of long-term success, far outweighing how polished someone seems in a 45-minute interview. So if your hiring process is driven by instinct instead of signal, you're not just making slower decisions, you're making terrible, terrible, terrible decisions, worse ones. And you're losing people who would have actually built your business. I've been excited, Scott, to talk about this topic. We've kind of touched on aspects of this over the last handful of conversations, but we've never really boiled down like what are the actual metrics? Like, what are the actual metrics? And I'm going to hit everybody with something pretty hard right out of the gate. And that is that your ad hoc ad hoc vibe conversations, right? Like, oh, yeah, it's now time for the hiring manager to talk to you. It's now time for the, you know, talent acquisition person to kind of give you a little bit of screen. Unstructured, not scoring, asking different questions to different candidates, not verifying their past success, but trying to see how they perform under pressure, this kind of thing. It doesn't work. Okay. It doesn't work. In fact, you have roughly 20% chance of being able to effectively predict someone's success in a job from your typical average vibe chat interview, unstructured interview. 20% chance. Dude, that's not even a flip of a coin. It's so bad. So bad. So let's kind of dive in. Um there's five main things that I want to talk about today, Scott. And the reality is some of these kind of cross over, but a really big one is overvaluing interview performance over historical success. So this is like you're not always selecting the best performer. You may be just be selecting the best stage actor. That makes sense. So you know who gets hurt in these is introverts. Like, do you think I do well in an interview? Probably do pretty good. Pretty confident, can talk, can think on my feet, right? My brain fires up when I'm talking versus an introvert, right? But an introvert might actually be able to do my job better. It's possible. It's very possible. No, it's not. I'm kidding. But no, it's possible. And how would you ever know? One of the key things is this whole idea of like anxiety. Right. This is not a small thing to have an interview with the CEO or the hiring manager or whomever it is. So your anxiety is going to be up. Now, for you to get the job, this company wants you to learn how to manage your anxiety and keep it down. Right. And why? Well, I work with a lot of SIs. Right. And we all know that a lot of the people that work at SIs are client-facing. Right. So they're judging an interview. They're looking at an interview and going, okay, well, if this is an interview, this is going to be just like, it's going to be just like if they're talking to a client. Bullshit. No, it's not. That's dumb. That is the dumbest thing. One of the dumber things I've ever heard. Now, I kind of can see the path, the mental pathway of like A plus A to B to C to D, talking to someone that they don't know and answering questions and blah, blah, blah. And by the way, they're asking you questions about yourself. So shouldn't you have really good answers? And the reality is, I don't know, maybe, maybe not. But the fact is, is that some people are incredible with clients because you know what they do? They ask questions and they sit there and they listen. Isn't that a good consultant, anyway? Right. I mean, that's a consult. Do you sit around and just get drilled questions by your clients?

Scott Stafford 6:02

No, listening is far more important, right? Actually, that's communication, right? It's communications. It's communication.

Josh Matthews 6:10

You know, the other thing is too, this whole idea of like interview performance. I'm always a little bit wary when someone can interview really well, but then I look at their job history and they've been a kangaroo. They've been hopping, hopping, hopping from job to job to job, or contract to contract to contract. Now, do you think they've had some practice? Yep, they've had a lot of practice. Yeah, man. What about the person who's been somewhere for five years and somewhere for seven years? You think they've had a lot of practice interviewing?

Scott Stafford 6:41

And they're probably really nervous, right? Because they haven't done it so much, they're not they're gonna have that performance anxiety and you're gonna make a poor hiring decision on that.

Josh Matthews 6:51

That's well, yeah, and they're they're they're loyal people too. They're loyal, like they're letting go of five years, six years, seven years of relationship. So it's not a small thing, this, right? And so, you know, if if someone's delivered for five years, why would you sort of kick that to the side and instead put more weight on a shaky 45-minute conversation more than their body of work?

Scott Stafford 7:19

That makes sense. I mean, I think what you're actually saying is, you know, make sure that you look at the whole history of what they're doing. Try to remove your bias and then really try to understand, right, how you're looking at them in just 45 minutes, right? You can't judge everything when somebody's nervous. Perfect.

Untrained Interviewers Create Bad Signals

Josh Matthews 7:38

Yeah, and bias is a huge topic, and we'll get into that in a little bit, right? In fact, we might just get into that here in about one minute. We're talking about a really interesting topic, and that is the five main things that companies and organizations and hiring managers are doing that is foolish, that's keeping them from their top candidates. You've got the pipeline, you've got the best dad ever, you've got the best recruiter ever. All these top people have been filtered down to you, and then you're getting through them, and then you're saying no, and you're saying no to people that actually would do really well, and you're doing that. You're doing that because that's how you've been trained. Now, when I say that's how you've been trained, what do I mean by that? The reality is something like 67% of people, hiring managers who conduct interviews, 67% have had. Do you want to guess how much training they've had? 67%, Scott. I don't know. Zero. Okay. Zero training. Zero training. That's crazy. Yeah. Two-thirds of people who conduct interviews as hiring managers have a total goose egg on training. And then the ones that do have training, it might be some 45-minute, 60-minute lunch and learn on the star method that they did four years ago. Right? It's like, here you go, good luck, bye-bye, have fun, try to remember everything. Good luck. Okay, bye, grow the team, bye-bye. Like it's bullshit. You know, these people are not trained. And why would they be? Companies don't train them. And why would they not train them? Because they're too busy. They think that they know it all. There's a massive, this is the intersection of ignorance and arrogance. And it's not that their fault. That's this doesn't mean people are arrogant. Okay, doesn't. And it doesn't mean that they're completely ignorant. Most people know I'm not that great at interviewing, or hey, I've only done 20 of these, or I've only done 40 of these.

Speaker 3 9:34

Right.

Josh Matthews 9:34

But we all know that practice doesn't make perfect. It's perfect practice makes perfect. And so in my career, when I've hired someone, how many interviews do you think I'm listening in on? Right? Sitting next to, sitting in with a candidate, or excuse me, with a with a new recruiter. I mean, dozens, man. Dozens. Right. And then spot checking regularly. So there's a quick thing that people can do. Start recording your interviews. Just do that. You can literally just record your interview, upload the transcript, and then have Claude analyze with a very good prompt, analyze your ability to one, ask good questions, but even more importantly, interpret the responses. Where could you have pressed deeper? Where have you exhibited bias? You could just do that. That would take literally you click one button and then you upload it. That's five minutes. And now you understand whether you're good at it not and what you need to work on. It's not that hard. It's hard to get good at it. It's hard to remember it. So let's talk about this. So running untrained hiring managers as lead interviewers. Google's work guidance actually says structured interviewing with consistent questions and scoring is one of the strongest ways to improve hiring quality and predict on-the-job success. And broader research also shows structured interviews are more productive and less biased than unstructured ones, while rubric-based interviewer training improves agreement and reduces bias in evaluation. So when teams let untrained hiring managers just have a chat, they create inconsistent interviewer interviews and low quality signals. So you would never send, Scott, you'd never send an untrained rep into your biggest client pitch, right?

Scott Stafford 11:20

Right.

Josh Matthews 11:21

Yeah. But many companies send untrained managers into the most important conversation in the funnel.

Scott Stafford 11:27

Hmm. You know what you're bringing out a lot that's interesting is there's a system behind this. You know, you don't just throw someone in to say, hire somebody, right? There's training, there's a system. You got to make sure that your questions are uniform across the different candidates. This is a really important topic, I think, that a lot of people that are doing hiring decisions need to pay attention to. Well, yeah, that's why we're talking about it. I mean, I actually didn't, I wasn't aware of how how much bias I would actually have, you know, without me actually going through something, I might, you know, just inadvertently say, hey, I like this person or I don't like this person. Yeah. And if they're they're not hiring to be my friend, they're hiring to do a job, right?

How Bias Warps Interpretation

Josh Matthews 12:10

Yeah, that's right. And and here's the thing. So most people who go into interviews as the interviewer have really good questions. They've looked them up, they've learned from other managers. They thought, oh, that's a really good question. Or, oh, I I heard this on a show from Josh. I'm gonna ask the question Josh said is his favorite question, right? And and I'll ask it. But now comes the problem of interpretation. So we all have, as humans, we all have filters. Yep. You know what I mean by that? Like you say one thing, it means something different to me, a very different personality type than you than you are. Of course it is. I've had a very different life experience than you have, and vice versa. So you could say something to me, and I could think, like, oh, he's shaming me. And you you're you might be thinking, I'm helping him. Right? So that's just a silly example, but this happens constantly in communication, constantly, constantly, constantly. So you have to be trained to understand like, what is someone really saying? Because there's what they're saying, and then here's here's one of the problems. The the interviewer, the interviewers who aren't that skilled but are smart start to think that they can start reading between the lines. Oh, I know what that really means. Right? These sort of armchair psychologists, oh, I know what that really means. I know what that means. Oh, he's hiding this. Oh, he's really this. Oh, he's actually lazy, or he's actually, you know, she's she's actually not reliable. Oh, she's not really willing to learn. Oh, that one thing she said, that means that she's not gonna do a good job. She said she'd rather do this. Therefore, I'm got I've got two jobs available. This one's no longer available. She'd rather have that one, but that means she's gonna quit in two months if I put her in this one. It doesn't mean that, right, guys. It doesn't mean that at all, you silly goose. Just calm down. Yeah, you have to do is probe a little further. And I'm not gonna train everyone how to interview today. I just want people to be aware, Scott, of these very, very ugly and massive gaps. They're not, they're not, they're not good gaps. I think that there can be some confusion with people, Scott, where people think that they're running a structured interview. Here's a structured interview. Everyone either has the same exact questions, right, and they're all going to score them on a rubric that's defined. When we say uh on a scale of five, a three is average. This is what three means. It means some capabilities in this area, or a five means this is a, you know, only one in ten people would score this high. Like you've got to give it some sort of context so that people aren't showing up at the end of the scoring session and then having completely different ideas of what getting an A is or getting a C is. I mean, you've had teachers, you went to school, you went to college, you know, this teacher, you learned a lot. They're really good, they're really tough. You got a C and you were grateful for it because, oh my God, are they hard? And then you go into the other thing, you barely did anything, you got an A.

Speaker 3 15:16

Right.

Josh Matthews 15:17

Right. That's different rubrics that they're using. And this happens inside of organizations and companies, right? The other thing that happens is even if they have structured interviews, even if they're doing this sort of correctly, right? When they show up for the team meeting, after they get off the call, they call up the person who's gonna interview them next and they tell them what they think about them. That's called anchoring bias. Right. So if you and I are about to walk into a party, and right before we, right before we walk in the door, I say, Scott, this is gonna suck. I don't like these people. This is gonna suck. I promise you, you will not have nearly as good a time as if I said right beforehand, Scott, this might be the most incredible party ever. It might not, but no matter what, we're gonna have an amazing time. Okay, so that's called anchoring. And managers and people involved in the hiring process sewer each other. Yeah, I don't know about him. I didn't get a I didn't get a vibe. It's like, why? They didn't play, they don't play golf, right? They don't look like you, they don't sound like you, they don't talk like you, they talk slower. They're from Alabama, you're from New York City. So you don't think that your clients are gonna like engage with this person, right? Meanwhile, they've got five years of successful experience. All you got to do is a reference check to validate, yeah, this person's a badass. Talk to one of their clients, validate, validate, validate. An interview should be validating their experience, not trying to trip them up, not trying to trick them, right? Like this isn't an interview for a law firm, a litigation attorney, is it? No. And even then, validate their results. I'm not a fan of the.

Scott Stafford 17:09

They might veto somebody that's not good just because they were like in a bad mood or that it didn't work for them. So you have to have a really good system to make sure that you're being fair and that everybody has to have a really good reason why they're actually telling somebody, hey, this isn't a perfect fit.

Josh Matthews 17:26

Yeah. And let let me let me help everyone out real quick. Okay. I'm gonna give everybody in the audience, the listening audience on a live show on our YouTube channel or on the podcast. This is something that you can do. Okay. Okay. I learned this, I think I learned this in Jeff Hyman's book. Um, here's what I want you to do. When you find that you really like someone, yeah, your job now, because you you have what's called confirmation bias. That means in the and studies have shown, I forget who said it, might be able to find it. I've got it here somewhere. Studies have shown, oh yeah, research from the University of Toledo, led by Dr. Frank Bernieri, and cited by Laszlo Bach, found that interviewers form judgments about candidates in the first 10 seconds of an interview. 10 seconds. Then they spend the remaining 99.4% of the conversation in confirmation bias mode looking for evidence to support the snap judgment they already made.

unknown 18:25

Oh my F.

Josh Matthews 18:27

What the Wow. Can you imagine? Can you you don't have to? We look at the world and we look at companies and we wonder why they're having challenges. Why is there even a job for me? Like if it weren't for bias and all this other stuff, like I wouldn't have I wouldn't have a job. You know what I mean? And by the way, I'm susceptible to it. Of course. But I combat it, and here's how I combat it. And this is what everybody else can do. When you really, really like someone, you now must spend the rest of your interview trying and probing to find reasons why you don't like them.

Scott Stafford 19:05

Okay.

Josh Matthews 19:06

This will save your ass. Okay, because we do two things wrong. One, we hire the wrong person. Right? Usually it's because we've had some sort of bias going in. I've told an example of me hiring someone. She was nice, she was smart, she had the work history, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I missed all the signs and she showed up for work, and within an hour I knew it was a failure. By lunch, my team was coming to me and saying, Josh, what did you do? Why did you bring this person on? I'm like, Yeah, but you guys all agreed too. And they're like, Yeah, we know. We didn't know what we were doing. We knew how to hire contract tech people. We did not know how to hire internally, right? And and those teams that I saw at that Fortune 500 company was churning a new employee every six weeks. Every six weeks, someone failed, failed because the hiring process was terrible. I should not, at that age, at that time, as a division director, which is basically like a team lead, should not have had final say. Not until I'd proven my ability to actually bring good people on and get rid of all that confirmation bias. Okay. I shouldn't have done that. They shouldn't have let me. They did.

Scott Stafford 20:17

Does that ever work the other way, Josh? You said, hey, you look at somebody that you like and then you say, hey, prove, you know, show me some areas in this interview where they might mess up. What about if there's someone that you don't like? Should you maybe do it the other way? You know, absolutely, a hundred percent.

Josh Matthews 20:33

So, and here's the funny thing: people are more inclined to say no in general, right? Especially at lower levels, right? When they're not the boss's boss's boss, they're more likely to say no and poo-poo the idea of hiring someone, unless they really just like like the person right away. Like kids on the school play yard, you know, playground when they're five years old. We're best friends, mom, mom, look, we're best friends. This is Johnny, we're best friends. It's like they just met two minutes ago. It's like, okay, let's stomp with with the elementary school stuff. So they're more likely to say no. Why? Because if that person never shows up, they can never be the person that rubber stamped a potential failure.

Scott Stafford 21:17

So no is actually the easier thing for someone to say, hey, I just don't like this person. No's automatic.

Josh Matthews 21:22

No's automatic. When your kids were little, you could say, hey, hey, girls, you want to go to the you want to go to Disneyland? They're five years old. You want to go to Disneyland? No. Wait, yes, no is at the tip of our tongue.

Speaker 3 21:34

Always.

Josh Matthews 21:35

No, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. Do you have time to talk? No. Right? Is now a bad time to talk? This is why we say when we cold call someone, we say, Is now a bad time to talk? And they go, no. Like, great. So now I have your attention, we can talk. You flip it because it's automatically going to be a no. Okay, so let's keep moving forward because we're almost at the bottom of the hour here and we've got a lot to get through, but I want you to put Push, okay. I don't like this person. Why? Oh, they look like my ex-stepdad. Right. Oh, they remind me of this one jerk who used to just like tap his foot sitting next to me for like a year and shaking the whole desk and shaking the whole floor, and that really annoyed the heck out of me. Or um, yeah, I don't like their music, or I don't like that they dyed their hair blue, or I don't like whatever it is, whatever your bias is, right? From wherever it comes from, you need to really try and find a way to get common ground. If you're interviewing someone, by the way, and you don't really like them, do you think that they're gonna know? I think, yeah, you can sense it. I mean, you Hell yeah, man.

unknown 22:43

Yeah.

Define Winner Criteria And Budgets

Josh Matthews 22:43

Now, yeah. And now and they're gonna perform worse. They're gonna perform exactly as you expected. Yeah. That's that whole confirmation bias thing. See, I was right. They sucked at interviewing. It's like, no, you sucked at being an interviewer. You never gave these people a chance. You got to get people, one, to like you so that they can relax, right? And once they're relaxed, then you can actually get them to open up and you've got to be vulnerable, right? David did a great show last year on uh Josh Force and the hiring edge. Definitely listen to that one about vulnerability in the workplace. Did a great episode. Go listen to that. All right, let's keep moving on, guys, because there's more to get through. I want to talk for a moment about vague winner criteria and creating moving goalposts.

Scott Stafford 23:36

Okay.

Josh Matthews 23:36

Okay, so I I go through this with clients. Josh, this is what we want. A B C D E F G. Okay. What about if it's can you live without G? Can you live without C? Yeah. Okay. So here's the hiring market right now. This is what the actual my silly, silly AI camera. There we go. And signals. So this is what we want. I'm like, okay. Then I come back and I say, here's the reality. Like just yesterday, I did a big deep report using perplexity. And I did it for a client of mine. We're hiring an RCA architect. They want an RCA architect for $180,000 plus 10%. Good luck with that. That's not going to happen. There's maybe 200 people, 150 people in the country. It's only been around for two years. The ones that are doing it are full-blown architects and don't also want to build flows. And they're making 200 to 220 plus 20% bonus. So I put together this report to share it, right? It's like, let's get clear on what actual winning criteria looks like because it's not, it's not these hopes and dreams. Who you want when you want them for the price you want, pick to. But if the money is not there, you've got to live within what your budget is. You just have to. Like there's no way around it. You got you got to, otherwise, you're just not going to hire the person. So having very clearly defined acceptance criteria for the candidates is critical. So I'll give you an example. I brought a candidate to a client. Ideally, they wanted a lot of NPC experience. The person had some, but it was on what was actually the most common module, fundraising, but it wasn't on grant making. And it wasn't on projects, which are, I mean, first of all, NPC's this much of a sliver. Uh, it's a tiny amount of Salesforce in general. And then those modules that they really want are even way smaller portion of NPC. Right. And then their budget is their budget. And so finding people has been hard. They're happy to look at people at the outset of this search who have NPC, but maybe don't have these modules. You can teach that, you can train it. Maybe it takes two weeks or a month. Then we bring them someone, they don't have those modules. And that is one of a couple reasons why they're saying no to that person, right? They've been looking for two months. Two months. And how long did you say it would take for someone to actually learn this? Just a few months? A couple, a couple months, someone could get really good at it. So in the meantime, you just put them on the fundraising stuff and then have them ride shotgun on some other stuff, you know? I mean, they can, they can in two weeks, they can get pretty darn ramped up.

unknown 26:20

Huh.

Josh Matthews 26:20

It's not that hard anymore with AI to learn something if you're smart. And this is where we come back to that opening statement. Yeah. Right? General mental ability. Yep. Are you smart? Criteria number one, are you smart? That's number one. Number two, have you done this before and can you prove it? Let's see. Here's a work example. Let's walk, walk Scott. Walk me through uh intake for a solution architecture project of $100,000 service cloud instance. Okay, walk me through that. Right? Oh, he did it. Yeah, Scott can do that.

Scott Stafford 27:02

Great. So he can do it and he's smart. Got it. Just benchmark some other time where they actually learn something, right? And that way you're not so biased about a little small detail of the job. That's brilliant to think about.

Josh Matthews 27:14

Yeah. And that's actually it's it's a it's its own separate thing on here. And we'll kind of we'll kind of talk about that. It's the last one, which is essentially over-indexing on exact tech skills instead of coachability, right? So that's gonna be number five. But this big winner criteria, if you're working with an internal talent acquisition pro or you are running the search yourself, or you're engaging an outside headhunter such as me or anyone on my team, you can't move the goalposts.

Scott Stafford 27:45

Okay.

Josh Matthews 27:46

Right. You just wasted everyone's time. Right. And and how do you make sure that those goalposts don't move? Well, whoever's doing the actual hunting and searching has to have direct contact with the actual hiring manager, the decision maker. And in this case, the decision maker is the wrong person. It's the wrong person. The head of delivery should be making the final decision. The person with the most experience, the person who already built a good team, right? Not the person who's done 50 interviews in their life, right? Because we don't know if they're having a bad day. At least record it. At least record it. And then someone can go back and just kind of watch it at 2x speed and be like, wait a second. I see, I see here your reason for rejection was this, that, and the other thing. But I'm watching the video here, and it seems like you could have probed a little bit more deeply. And I didn't pick up on that. I didn't pick up on that at all. And this happens all the time, where I will pick up for, for example, here's a here's a person. I told him, this is at the risk of me getting canceled. I told him, look, man, you've got DEI all over your LinkedIn profile. Okay. I said, it's not, I'm not saying it's dead, but it is not like you're going to exclude yourself from a lot of places. One, a lot of it's been ruled like you can't do that anymore. Okay. Okay. With certain organizations. Like you're not allowed to. There are limits to it. Do you actually care? And he's like, no, not really. I was like, then take it off your LinkedIn.

Speaker 3 29:17

Right.

Too Much Veto Power

Josh Matthews 29:18

And then I was told by the client that he's not coachable. When he showed up with a LinkedIn profile that removed all the DEI stuff that I coached him on. Yeah, he's coachable. Are you a good coach? Because I am. How did you not pick up that he's not that he's coach? That how did you pick up that he's not coachable? How did you pick that up? And someone like me or someone who's a senior manager can look at a lead or a hiring manager, you know, more junior hiring manager's session and be like, I don't know about that, Scott. I get where you're coming from, but I think that that was maybe maybe you put too much weight into that question. Do you see what I mean?

Scott Stafford 29:55

Right.

Josh Matthews 29:56

Okay. So what we're talking about right now is giving the least trained person too much veto power. And I'll give you an example. I had a client, still have a client. They are a software company in uh in finance. They work with private equity software. And they were hiring two hardcore developers. These are like architectslash devs, hands dirty, roll up the sleeves, iterate, iterate on a product. It's very cool, very cool company. Really great manager. Thought the guy's terrific. And he puts them forward. Now I liked them. Okay. My recruiter who found him liked him. We both interviewed him, video interviews. Went and then he spent two, three hours with the CTO who liked him. And then he interviewed with four other people. And at least two of the four people really liked him. One, someone who doesn't really have much weight, just was like, oh, he just said this one thing and I wasn't sure about that. Okay, so that's the hell. All right, whatever. And then one other person, someone he'd be working with, someone who'd been there a long time, and someone who's known to have an ego, by the way, blackballed him. I don't think he's right for us. Why? I just didn't feel it. And then the CTO goes, okay, well, that's how we do it here. That's how we do it here, you know. So it's a no. It's like, wait a second. We found you a unicorn. You liked him. He's done this for 20 years. He can do the job. You work for a company that's trying to accomplish things. You're letting some guy who has the same job as him, who possibly might be threatened by him, possibly might be threatened by him. Right. Right? Oh, he didn't like his energy. Oh, he didn't like having an introvert on the team.

unknown 31:48

Really?

Josh Matthews 31:48

He liked the competition. Well, maybe. I don't know if he didn't like the competition. I don't think he liked his style. I thought he felt like he might not stand up for himself enough. You know, he might not, because these guys can bowl you over, you know, the way I would bowl someone over. And I would, potentially. Potentially. So I kind of understand that, but I also know the value of like, wait a second. What about that guy who speaks 20% as much as I do? And is just processing and thinking about everything that he's seeing and hearing? Because he sees and hears better than I do. What are they going to say next? How is that going to change this product? How is that going to save us time, solve a problem, improve the company, increase sales, deliver something that no one else in the market can deliver. I want that person on the team. Right. That's diversity. That's actual real diversity, diversity of thinking, right? Not skin color people. So it's a real, it's a real tricky thing. It's a real tricky thing, this. So, you know, your team lead should be a witness, basically bringing evidence, not the judge and jury. Right? If the least trained interviewer has the strongest vote, then the process is built to magnify bias. I'm going to say that again. If the least trained interviewer has the strongest vote, the process is built to magnify bias. Right? A player candidates often get rejected, and not because they lack ability, but because one person didn't feel it. And by the way, the way they're conducting the interview is to get them to have enough reasons to say no to this person because they feel it. So all these other people, the hiring manager, the CEO, the director of delivery, they're all going like, no, but she had all these valid reasons. No, she didn't. And she's not a bad person. But she designed the flow of questions to catch this person so she could say no. Anyone could do that. We could do it right now, couldn't we? Like we could do it right now. I could lead you down a road, Scott, right now, that would put you on your heels, create mud in your brain, make you nervous. And by the way, you don't have anything at stake. This guy had his next career at stake, supporting his family at stake, right? Now I'm gonna jumble your brain. I'm gonna really throw you on your heels. And by the way, guys, I do do that. I do like to see how people respond under pressure. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just a problem if you're trying to do it to lead them down a road where you are uncon, again, it's unconscious bias. It's unconscious. You're not aware that you're doing it. Interesting. So everyone can be like, no, I don't do that. It's like, no, you do it. We all do it.

Scott Stafford 34:51

Do you have any tips on that? Like how you could actually, you know, counteract that. If you know, right, everybody's biased, right? I'm biased. Is there anything I can do that to keep that in check a little bit?

Josh Matthews 35:02

Yeah, have a professional behavioral interviewer. Okay. And you you get to you get to validate their technical skill set. Can they perform the functions? And that's it. And then I'll determine if they can take direction and if they'll follow through. I'll determine if they're smart and if they're conscientious. These are the top predictors of success. I'll determine if what they've done in the past will equal what you need them to do now and in the future. I'll do that. I'm trained. You're not. So don't bother doing it. You can have a nice meet and greet. That's fine. But ultimately, what you have to say, I don't care. You know why? Because you're a team lead. And you know what team leads get to do? Lead the teams that I build. Yep. Lead the teams that I build because when it fails, it's not your head on the line, it's mine. I'm the one responsible for the bottom line of the business. Okay. Not some salaried person who's making a buck fifty a year. Sorry. You don't get to determine the growth of this company. You get to manage the people that we ultimately decide. I'm interested in what you have to say. You might have something really interesting. You might be able to say the team lead could have something to say like, look, I know that you really like this person and I know that you really want to bring them on. But when I probed into this, which is one of our structured questions, and they said this and I pushed a little bit deeper, I got kind of a funny feeling. I think you should maybe talk to them one more time and probe more deeply. Or maybe Josh can, or maybe so-and-so can, right? Because I just gotta, I'm listening to my spidey sense. And, you know, it's good to have that, right? And I can't really articulate it, but I think it warrants some deeper investigation. Can you look into that? Because I and by the way, guys, like I don't know any Salesforce practice leads or team leads who are consultants who are expert interviewers. Do you?

Scott Stafford 37:11

No.

Josh Matthews 37:13

I talked to a guy once, I said, um, I said, How would you rate yourself on interviewing? He's like, Me? Probably nine out of ten. Really, really good. Like, okay. How many people have you interviewed in your life? Man, at least like 50. So, okay. So that's four weeks of work for a junior recruiter. Four weeks of work, right? 50 is nothing, man. 50 is nothing. And how much guidance did you get? How much training did you get? Were your interviews screened? Like, did someone review them? Did someone audit your interviews? What was the success rate of the people that you brought on? And the problem is, Scott, we don't get to ever know, ever, ever, ever know how many great people this person passed up on.

Scott Stafford 38:05

Right.

Coachability Over Exact Tech Skills

Josh Matthews 38:06

Because you only know that if you hire them, right? Good point. Let's talk about one more thing and then we're going to jump into some fun stuff here. So over-indexing on exact tech skills instead of coachability. We kind of touched on this a little bit, right? But the question is, is are you going to really wait another six or eight weeks for maybe a unicorn who maybe knows that exact little module, that exact little widget? You know, a lot of must-have tech skills are really like can learn fast skills. I'm not saying, okay, the person's never touched data cloud. It's a data cloud architect role. Yeah, it's a no. Okay, fair enough. Right. Fair enough, right? But okay, this is a Salesforce consultant. And I ask you, Scott, have you ever done a Slack integration on um Salesforce?

unknown 38:56

No.

Josh Matthews 38:57

Ever done that?

Scott Stafford 38:58

No.

Josh Matthews 38:59

Gosh, I'm really sorry. We really need someone with experience doing that. I'm so sorry. This job isn't for you, Scott.

Scott Stafford 39:07

I think I can learn that pretty quick, actually.

Josh Matthews 39:09

Yeah, dude, I did it for myself in like an hour. Huh. It's not freaking hard. None of this stuff's hard. I mean, some of it's hard. You need to be able to think. Sorry, I'm not putting down every Salesforce admin out there. I'm just saying it's not hard to do a Slack integration. If you can follow directions, if you if you can read a recipe and bake cookies, you can do a Slack integration. I'm not saying a Slack integration for some like 2,000-person company. I did it for my little company, right? So fair enough. But it's like this isn't, this shouldn't be stuff that's like, now we can't hire you. Sorry.

Scott Stafford 39:47

So what should you be looking for to be able to judge whether people can do things rather than this hard criteria? What are you actually trying to figure out during the interview process?

Josh Matthews 39:58

What am I trying to actually figure out? Yeah. Are you smart? Can you take direction? Are you coachable and are you conscientious? And have you done this before? That's all. Like really, that like that's that's it. Because think about this, okay? Um when I'm doing an when I'm people think it's an interview and that you're getting looked out over your interview. You're getting, we're looking at, at least in my company, we're looking at you from the minute we reach out, or you reach out to us or we reach out to you, we are watching to see what happens. Right? So do you respond to text messages from us? No? Oh, you're a little bit slow? Did you, were you late for the follow-up conversation? Did you answer your phone when we called? How long did it take you to return my voicemail? I don't care that you're at Disneyland. I don't fucking care that you're at Disneyland. Do you want the job or not?

Speaker 3 40:58

Huh?

Josh Matthews 40:59

Sorry, people. It's real life. You can have all your fancy rules for yourself and I don't interfere. Fine. Okay. But if you applied for a job and then you're not picking up your phone, I'm gonna pay attention to that. I'm going to advise my client. I don't know if this person's really that interested.

Scott Stafford 41:17

Okay.

Josh Matthews 41:17

Do you see what I mean? So we're looking at the person the whole way through. The whole way through. Right? From start, do they did they accept their interview? We sent you an invite. Did you click accepted? Or are we waiting there? And is the hiring manager waiting there until five after whatever o'clock? Are you gonna show up? Because you never accepted it. And then you show up and then you say, Oh yeah, sorry, I'm late. It's like, okay, is that conscientious? Huh? It's not, right? It's not. So, and conscientiousness is about a 40%, 40% value, 40% predictability on someone's ability to perform a job really, really well. If you're not conscious, and uh Jordan Peterson talks about conscientiousness a lot. Like it's the number one predictor of whether or not you can have successful relationships. And all that means is are you thinking about other people?

Scott Stafford 42:15

Okay.

Josh Matthews 42:15

Now, in the the case I just described, yeah, maybe someone's thinking about their kids, but we all know that those lines are two hours long. And you can just fire a quick text message and say, hey, I'm in, I'm in line at Harry Potter and like it's gonna be a minute. That's just conscientiousness. The other thing is intelligence. And I think that they kind of go hand in hand, not always, not always, but they kind of go hand in hand, right? So someone can be very, very, very, very, very, very book smart and not be particularly gifted in thinking about how to meet other people's needs. I do want to um cover a couple little things here, my friend. And that is again revisiting the top ways to actually predict someone's success. General interviews are not a very good predictor.

Scott Stafford 43:13

Okay.

Josh Matthews 43:14

So if you're if you start a company, you start interviewing people, you're gonna do what you know how to do, which is connect with people, be nice, and try and understand them. And if you vibe with them, you'll think, I could probably work with this person. But let me ask you this, Scott. How many people I think that you like more people than I do, and I'm a particular person, and that's why I'm good at my job. I think that you like more people than I do. I really believe that. How many times have you really liked someone, started working with them only to find out, gosh, this isn't actually a good fit?

Scott Stafford 43:45

A lot. A lot.

Josh Matthews 43:47

Okay. And that's because you're wired to be optimistic about people's you equate likability with workability. Like you think if they're nice and if they're friendly. I'm not making a big judgment call on you, by the way. I think everyone knows this. If you think someone's nice and friendly and they're a good person, that that will probably equal good work output.

Scott Stafford 44:11

Yeah.

unknown 44:12

Yeah.

Scott Stafford 44:14

I think a lot of times too, when someone comes across to me and I don't jibe with them, you know, I made like a judgment call. But then as I got to know them better, they were actually literally like a diamond relationship. I learned the most from them. They performed amazingly. And I'm like, huh. You know, I read this wrong. And I read a lot of things wrong, you know, but I I tried to keep that in in check more, trying to think of, okay, you know, I was, or maybe it was me. I could have actually just met somebody, and you know, I have bad moods, believe it or not, right? I do get grumpy a few times. I'm like, sure, you know, I someone hit my car, and then you meet somebody and you're like throws you off.

How Candidates Can Defuse Bias

Josh Matthews 44:55

So yeah, man. I think of it like this. Okay. Clearly, I like music, right? I've got a wall of guitars over here, I've got keyboard, piano in the other room. That's a drum kit. So ukulele, I love music. I love plain music, especially with my kids. It's a lot of fun. And think of the song Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind, which is a great song. It's a great album. And it's it's a song that doesn't really kind of wear out. It takes a while for it to wear out, but it wears out. Like it does wear out. Do you know what I mean? Anytime we hear a song and we're like, we don't do it so much nowadays with MP3s, not even MP3s, with just like Spotify and and the and Apple Music and stuff. So it's different. It used to be we'd go out, we'd get an album, we'd have to spend 20 bucks on a CD. You know, or I mean, I remember I had like cassette tapes of Paul and Oates back in the day. We're I'm we're both that old, by the way. Yeah. You know, the police synchronicity on on cassette. So we would list you you buy the album for the one song that they play on the radio, and it's catchy and you like it. Yeah. Right? It's like you two, Josh Vitrie, you put it on because whatever, where the streets have no name. Like, okay, most played airplayed song from that album. It might be the worst album. It might be the worst song on the whole album, as far as I'm concerned, right? There's so many other like way better songs. They're just not radio songs. There's so many way better songs on that album. You've got to start thinking about interviewing like that. Are you just watching a hit single that's gonna wear out three months into their work career with you? Or is this the song that you need to listen to a little bit better? Is this the candidate that you were originally like, I don't know. I remember it was 1986, and I was standing in Tower Records in London at Piccadilly Circus. Yeah. And a song came on, and it was um it was just like heaven by the cure. And I was like, oh my God. And I went up to the guy at the counter and I said, What is that song? And he just kind of pointed to the CD that was or the cassette tape that was on the counter. He said, Oh, it's the cure. I was like, Oh, I want that. So I bought the album. I had a little bit of money and I bought the album. And I'm I gave it a listen, and there's this one song called Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. And it's like rough. I'm 14. I grew up on like disco and Duran Duran, right? Like, so then this song comes on, and it's like, kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, eh. Your tongue's like poison. It's like, I'm like, whoa, what is this? It kind of scared me. It definitely made me uncomfortable. Right. And I would fast forward that song. And then till like one day I'm just like kind of zonked out because I was traveling with my family a lot. And oh, thank you, Larry. Take care, buddy. And I just let the whole album play. And like I had like two tapes, two cassette tapes for like, you know, two weeks or three cassette tapes or something. Right. I I started to realize, like, oh no, that's a really good song. I softened to it. It's a lot more listenable to me now. Right. And not only that, it will probably be more enduring than a lot of the other popular songs. If we can start thinking about candidates like that, just start there, people. Just start there. Understand that we all know that you're doing your best. I know it sounded probably like I'm picking on a lot of people here. I'm not. I'm trying to wake people up. Okay. This is not a small thing. It's a terrible, terrible thing to step over a quarter to pick up a dime, to step over a gold piece to pick up a nickel. And it's happening every single day in America. And my clients even do it against my advice, and they still do it. Right. So please be awake, be aware, understand what anchoring is, what confirmation bias is, what conformity bias is. Just look those three things up and put them up on a little post-it note on your little monitor there when you're interviewing. And so you can just kind of check in with yourself. Like, oh yeah, do I feel this way about this person? Oh, that's right. Jenny said she wasn't sure about this gal before I jumped into the meeting. Maybe that's why I'm thinking, yeah, Jenny's not sure. So maybe I'm not sure. Because I like Jenny. Do you see what I mean? That's that's conformity bias, anchoring bias. So let's do that. And then for all of you CEOs, founders, C-suite, VP level, senior director level people, please pick up those reins. It's your team. It's fine that you've got other people and you're trying to empower them. Congratulations. I think that's a great move. You want to empower your team, you're trying to delegate. That's great. But when you empower and delegate without training, you're doing something that I would call silly. It's just silly to do that, right? You can check out my recent blog. I put up a meme on LinkedIn the other day too. And it shows a, it shows uh like a professional pizza guy in a nice pizza uh parlor, and he's on the phone, and then there's a six-year-old standing on a stool pulling out a burnt pizza, right? That burnt pizza is your top candidate. You're on the phone, you're too busy, you've delegated it to your six-year-old who doesn't know how to cook yet. So until you teach these people how to cook, until you teach them, just don't delegate. You don't delegate and hope that they learn on the job with that most important decision. Your delivery team. Why would you do that? Don't do that. Okay. Scott, do you have any last questions before we wrap up? It's been a really interesting and fun hour. Sorry, I feel like I've talked my head off.

Scott Stafford 50:54

We've talked a lot about this from the perspective of the hiring manager or from the company, right? But let's just say that you're somebody in an interview and you sense that there's some bias going on. How can you counteract that? They ask you one question, and maybe you were a little bit nervous on that one. What could you do mid mid-interview to try and even out the field, right? A little bit to to break down some of that bias? Is there any other thing?

Josh Matthews 51:21

Yeah, common ground. Yes, common ground. Right? Common ground. Right. So if you're feeling like I'm losing this, yeah. I feel like I'm getting cornered right now. I feel like they're just trying to pick on me and come up with reasons why I'm not a fit, then you have to take the bullets out of the gun. Scott, can I just jump in for a second, bud, real quick? Sure. Thanks. First of all, if I haven't conveyed this already, I really want you to know that being here in this meeting with you has actually been the only thing that's been on my mind for the last two weeks. I've done all my research on your company. I've done backdoor references, I've done deep dives on AI, and I've validated that what I've been able to learn about your you and your company and how I operate, I I'm confident we're a really great match.

Scott Stafford 52:31

Oh wow.

Josh Matthews 52:32

But I also want to tell you that I haven't done a lot of interviews. And I may have put so much pressure on myself about wanting to do well in this one that I might I get the feeling that you know, Scott, how when you know you're like not being yourself, when you know like you're not yourself, like maybe you're at a party and you have to talk to someone that you didn't really want to talk to or you didn't know, you know, you're nervous about, or you know, whatever it is. I I actually feel that way now. And that's not your fault. I've just built this up in my head, and I want to just let you know that. And I also want to ask you to take that into consideration in your evaluation of me because I've got five references that will attest that I would do great here. I just want to let you know that.

Scott Stafford 53:27

Wow. Josh, that just broke down, right? My whole perspective of anything negative that would have been said before, right? I you almost like want to follow up some questions and wow, that was powerful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So just say like, just say that. Yeah. Okay. You would have to practice to be able to say it that well. You really didn't. I mean, you made me re-question like all the decisions. You were like, okay, yeah, maybe he was just nervous on that question. Or this person, he just stated it. He really wants the job, right? And you know now that he's dedicated right to doing his best here. So it just reframes everything right away. Yeah, that was powerful.

Josh Matthews 54:10

You you know, a little bit more than a year ago, we did a big giveaway with my friend John Klein, People First Method. Right. One of the gals who won uh won the free experience, coaching experience, training experience. I wound up placing her at a client of mine. They love her. She's fantastic. She already got a promotion.

Scott Stafford 54:29

Okay.

Josh Matthews 54:30

She hadn't worked in two years. Military wife worked really hard, went and got like five or six certifications during her time off, stayed engaged, and we chatted, just kind of like lightly chatted about stuff. But then when it came time for the actual interview with me, oh my God, was she so nervous? And I was like, where'd she go? Whoa, this is not, this is not the person I talked to. You know? This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. Like, where did she go? And I just told her, I was like, I know you're really nervous. She's like, Yeah, I'm like, just chill, man. Like, it's okay. We're just hanging out, we're just gonna hang out. Okay. Now I still had a structured interview with her, yeah, because structured interviews doesn't mean behave rigidly. That's not the same thing. Structured means first we do this and then we do that, and then we score on this, and then we do this, and then we score on that, and then we do this, we score on that. Now I do it a little bit differently because I've been doing this for a really long time. But at the end of it, all she calmed down, she settled down. Her nerves were so high. Oh my god, it's like stage fright. You ever acted in a play, Scott? Yep. You ever performed music live or anything like that? No one can hear your nods. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay, so you know. So you know, like it's hard if you haven't done it before. It's really hard. Oh my god, the first time I ever played drums live, just so tight. Want to be really bad at drums? Be nervous while you play them. It's horrible. It's horrible. Same for any instrument, right? Or singing or anything or acting. So, also, folks, you the candidates out there who are listening to this show, what can you do? Well, you could take the bolts out of the gun right away. You could sit down and you could say, Scott, thank you so much for meeting with me today. I'm going to be honest and tell you, I am nervous because I've really built up this role in my head. I'm sure that it's going to affect your perception of me. I just want it on record that I'm telling you up front right now that that's likely to happen. When you say that, you automatically relax. It's kind of for them. It's mostly for you. Right. That's a good point. Yeah.

Next Guests And Closing Requests

Scott Stafford 56:50

So you could do that. All right, guys. That that also was interesting because you empowered yourself too, right? You just actually showed exactly. You're an assertive person. You want this role, right? It takes guts to do that. And I think people would appreciate it. That's a really good point. Yeah.

Josh Matthews 57:07

So we will be back in two weeks. I'm excited. We're going to have a guest, Jason P. Carroll, C-A-R-R-O-L-L. He is the founder and principal behavioral scientist at Active Index. It's job prediction performance using AI. I'm really excited about this because you guys know I love my um testing stuff, my MBTI stuff and uh personality indexing and performance indexing. It's also probably right up there with structured interviews and intelligence, et cetera. The best way to gauge your candidates' ability to perform the job that you're hiring them to do really well, right? Testing, predictive testing. So Jason's gonna be on the show. We're really looking forward to him. I just met with an author yesterday who wrote a book all about like, do you really need college in the age of AI right now? So I'm excited about Herschel be on in about a month. Got a lot of wonderful guests lined up all the way up through May, right now, May, June. So please like, subscribe. If you enjoy this program and you're listening on Apple or on Spotify, throw up some five stars, drop in a comment. Makes a big difference for us. If you're watching this on Josh Force, please go ahead. Give us a thumbs up, drop in a comment, ask a question. What did you think made the most sense? What about this conversation today? Did you think was BS or annoyed you? We want to hear all of it. And Scott Stafford, thank you so much for quarterbacking this show today. Really appreciate you, my friend. You've been listening to the hiring edge. We'll be back in two weeks. Bye for now.

Scott Stafford 58:39

Bye, everybody.