The Business & Faith Podcast®

#113 - John James - Nine Times Out of Ten

• Dataliction • Episode 113

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0:00 | 30:46

Most firing decisions have nothing to do with performance.

In this episode of The Dataliction Podcast®, John Staub talks with John James, president and CEO of Flex Tech, the Texas staffing firm he built for the low-voltage and electrical trades. John has been in staffing since 1994, and he says that nine times out of ten, a leader thinking about letting someone go is looking at a core values problem wearing a performance costume. He explains why keeping a mismatched employee costs more than replacing one, what goes into an Ideal Candidate Profile before a role is ever posted, and the five things his team screens for that a résumé will not tell you. Then he describes shutting off about $4,500 a month in job board spend because he was fishing in the same pond as every competitor, and the four days with a spiral notebook that produced the plan he still runs on.

Chapters:

  • 00:00 Four Days and a Spiral Notebook
  • 00:28 Meet John James and Flex Tech
  • 01:19 Firing Is Almost Never About Performance
  • 02:39 Why Waiting Costs More
  • 04:31 Core Values as the Real Filter
  • 06:21 The Ideal Candidate Profile
  • 07:47 Two Hires and What Changed Between Them
  • 10:35 Losing a Job and Learning Empathy
  • 13:42 Thirty Seconds After the Prayer
  • 16:47 The Five Things
  • 21:00 Stop Copying Your Competitors
  • 22:40 Turning Off the Job Boards
  • 27:16 The Sabbatical That Made the Plan

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