Why Great Candidates Ghost You

On this episode of The KeyHire Small Business Podcast, Corey Harlock breaks down why so many small business owners take great candidates through their process only to watch them ghost before the final interview or the offer, and why candidate experience may be the most underused advantage a small business has.

Corey’s core message is simple but often overlooked: candidates are customers too. Generating candidates has never been easier, between job boards and a thousand AI sourcing tools. What happens after you find them is what decides whether you land them. And as a small business, you are not Google. The people applying to your job have never heard of you, they are interviewing at several other companies, and they are there to be educated on you as much as you are there to evaluate them. If you are excited about a candidate, at least one other company is too, which means you are already on the clock.

The episode focuses on three challenges. The first is hiring speed. Corey makes an important distinction: speed to hire is not about rushing, it is about using the correct process for the role and then holding the timeline. A CNC operator who walks in, passes a shop floor test, and shows they know the machine should have an offer before they leave the building. A manager or director role should move from first contact to offer within about ten business days. He explains why entry level candidates come off the market almost immediately, and why rescheduling an interview because you are busy tells a great candidate they are an inconvenience. If a client asked for time tomorrow, would you push them to next week?

The second challenge is the hiring system. Corey emphasizes consistency, the same people asking the same questions in the same order, and shares the one question that tells you whether someone belongs in the process at all: if you love the candidate and they do not, will you hire the candidate anyway? He also gives a sharp warning about C players, toxic high performers, and anyone who hates accountability, because they will either scare a candidate off or sabotage the interview outright. From there he walks through the peer to peer conversation that is a problem solving discussion rather than an interrogation, the owner interview that focuses on culture, and the power of giving candidates the good, the bad, and the ugly. Selling a future culture you have not built yet breaks trust on day one. Honesty gets you a hell yes or a hell no, and keeps you away from the amber flag maybe.

The third challenge is ownership. Corey argues that screening resumes should not fall on the business owner, especially now that AI tools make nearly every resume look polished and every phone screen look worth taking. He shows how to hand screening to a trusted team member armed with ten or twelve clear non-negotiables and a scoring threshold, so owners protect their time while the process keeps moving. Once a candidate is on site, though, nobody gets to say they are busy this week.

This episode is especially valuable for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and hiring managers who are competing for high quality talent, losing candidates late in the process, or trying to build a repeatable hiring system. Corey also points listeners to a free hiring assessment in the show notes, a 15 question tool that takes about three minutes and reports back where your process is strong and where it is costing you.

Your sales process is designed to close business. Your hiring process should be designed to close people. Tune in for a practical, numbers backed conversation on candidate experience, hiring speed, interview systems, and how to stop losing the people your business needs. Stop grinding, start growing.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Candidates are customers too: 83% of talent says a negative experience can change their mind about a company they liked, 87% say a positive one can win them over to a company they doubted, and 66% say it directly influences whether they accept an offer.

Generating candidates is the easy part: job boards and AI sourcing tools will find people for you. Nothing about your process after that point is automated, and that is where great candidates are won or lost.

They have never heard of you: in a market with more jobs than people, it is not the candidate’s job to research you. It is your job to make the case, and to assume that anyone you are excited about is excited by someone else too.

Speed to hire is not rush, rush, rush: it is picking the correct process for the role and then staying on the timeline. Entry level gets an offer before they walk out the door. Manager and director level is ten business days from first contact.

Every reschedule sends a message: pushing an interview because you are busy tells a candidate they are an inconvenience, and it previews what working there will feel like. If you have to move it, offer them something better, not a slot next week.

Same people, same questions, same order, and only your A players: if you would hire the candidate over someone’s objection, that person does not belong in the process. Never put a C player, a toxic high performer, or anyone who hates accountability in front of a candidate you want.

Give them the good, the bad, and the ugly: selling a culture you are still building breaks trust on day one. Every job is perfect for someone, so put everything on the table and aim for a hell yes or a hell no. The amber flag maybe is the worst outcome in hiring.

Screening is not the owner’s job: AI written resumes make everyone look qualified, so screening costs more time than it ever has. Hand it to someone you trust with ten or twelve non-negotiables and a scoring threshold, and protect your calendar for the interviews that matter.

LINKS & RESOURCES

Free hiring assessment, 15 questions in about three minutes: https://www.keyhire.solutions/scorecard

Connect with Corey Harlock on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyharlock/

Learn more about KeyHire Solutions: https://www.keyhire.solutions

Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-keyhire-small-business-podcast/id1643962763

Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1FT9oqXSek3jMfiKrZPLQs

EPISODE CHAPTERS

0:00 - Why great candidates ghost you

0:35 - Show intro

1:23 - Housekeeping, and two episodes worth going back for

2:34 - Candidates are customers too: 83%, 87%, 66%

3:27 - Generating candidates is the easy part

5:29 - You are not Google, and they have never heard of you

6:49 - They are on a recon mission, not there to sell you

7:58 - Challenge one: hiring speed

8:23 - The correct process for an entry level role

10:21 - Manager and director: ten business days

11:29 - Every reschedule burns your clock

12:09 - Would you push a client to next week?

13:34 - How to move a meeting without losing the candidate

14:17 - Speed is not rush, rush, rush

14:35 - Challenge two: the hiring system

15:31 - Who to include, and the question that decides it

17:00 - Never put a C player in front of a candidate

18:51 - Same people, same questions, same order

20:16 - The peer conversation, not an interrogation

20:44 - The owner interview is about culture

21:15 - Do not sell a culture you have not built yet

22:35 - The good, the bad, and the ugly

24:16 - Every job is perfect for someone

24:59 - The amber flag maybe

25:53 - Challenge three: who owns the process

26:17 - AI resumes mean everyone looks good

26:37 - Non-negotiables and a scoring threshold

28:22 - Everyone makes time, especially for the on site

30:15 - Your process is a preview of what it is like to work there

31:00 - Close candidates the way you close deals

31:16 - The free 15 question hiring assessment

31:58 - If 80% of a process was wasted, would you keep it?

33:03 - Closing thoughts

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

As a business owner, do you think you're pretty good at hiring? You take people through your process, and when it comes time to bring them in for that final interview or make that offer, they disappear, they ghost you. Are you ever left wondering why can't we land the people we need? Why can't we land the right people for our business? Well, stick around because I'm going to show you how to do it on today's show.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

Welcome to the Key Hire Small Business Podcast, hosted by Corey Harlock, creator of Key Hire Solutions, where small business owners learn how to build stronger teams, simplify growth, and scale confidently. Got feedback or topic ideas? Send us a text. If you're listening on a handheld device, tap the link in the show notes to message the show. Subscribe or follow on your favorite platform. And follow Key Hire Solutions on social media for more insights and updates between episodes. To learn more about how KeyHire can help scale your business, visit KeyHire.solutions. Connect with Corey on LinkedIn through the link in the show notes. Mention you're a listener, and he'll accept your request. And now, on with the show. Here's your host, Corey Harlock.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

All right, we are in the middle of summer. It's heating up in Texas here. It is very hot. Just got back from New York where we had a beautiful time at our house in upstate New York. Lots of fun playing on the water and hanging out with family. You probably uh noticed the last couple episodes. I had my fake background going. God, I hated it, but it's uh had to be done. Our episode last week, if you have not listened to it, was with Kat Kibbon on the uh trials and tribulations of job boards and job postings. One in three job postings are fake and resume harvesting. If you haven't had a chance to go listen to that, I strongly recommend you do. It was amazing. Kat was amazing. And before that, uh we had Steve Rogelberg talking about the power of one-on-one meetings. And that again, that episode is getting lots and lots of great feedback. So if you haven't had a chance, you're gonna be driving, you have some windshield time, you got 30 minutes to kill, pick one of those two episodes and go back and listen to it. Okay, today, in a nutshell, we are talking about candidate experience. And here's how I look at candidate experience. Candidates are customers too. So we got to start treating them like they are our customers. I'm gonna throw a few stats at you here. 83% of talent says a negative interview experience can change their mind about a company they once liked. That's a big number. 87% say a positive experience can change their mind about a company they once doubted, or perhaps never even heard of. And 66% of candidates say a positive experience influences their decision to accept an offer. Your hiring process, your candidate experience as a small business can be your secret weapon to landing the people you really want and need to hire. So, how can we do this? And I've said this before, we're gonna go into it. Generating candidates is easy. That's the easiest part of the process these days. Job boards, as funky as they are, maybe they're still generating people for you. There are a thousand and one AI tools out there that will go find your ideal candidates, create a conversation with them, message them, and they're super, super effective. They can be pretty cost effective as well, but they make no mistake, they are kind of enterprise solutions for the most part. But finding the people is easy. It's what happens after we find them that matters the most. So I want to start kind of really simply with you. We are small business owners, and for our high horsepower people we're trying to bring into our business, we are always looking for that perfect mix of big company corporate background bringing that process and procedure, and what we always call an entrepreneurial spirit. So someone who understands how our business operates. It can be messy, it can be chaotic, you don't get to manage from the ivory tower. You have to create the plan and execute on the plan. We don't have the luxury of creating a plan and handing it down to our team all the time to execute on that plan. Not always, sometimes. So we're always looking for people that maybe they started in small business, they cut their teeth in small business, they grew into a larger, maybe corporate-sized business. Um and now what we always look for anyway, and what you should be looking for is someone who wants to take all of this experience they've amassed and they want to go back where they started and they want to have influence and affect the business in a really positive way. Essentially, they want to flex their muscles and see what they can do to take a small business and get it to where they left in their big business. That's kind of putting it really simply, but essentially that's that's what we're looking for. But as small business owners, we also have to understand that we're not Google. We're not Apple. We don't have name recognition. Oftentimes, if people are applying to our jobs that we've posted on LinkedIn or Indeed or ZipRecruiter or whatever, whatever platform you want to use, they probably never heard of us. No correction. They have never heard of us. So is it their job in this competitive market to get educated on you if they're applying for 10, 15, 20 jobs that are on the job boards? Is it their job? Or is it our job as business owners to convince them or make the case for them coming and working with us? And in this competitive job market where there are more jobs than people, very few candidates are gonna go out and do a ton of research. They're gonna look at your website, they'll they'll come, they should come fairly prepared. Let's say minimally prepared. But they're kicking your tires as much as you're kicking theirs. And actually, I hate that term because I hate tire kickers. Let's rephrase that. They're there to have you educate them on your company as much as you are there to learn about them and their experience and to see if they're a fit for what you're trying to do. No longer are we in the world of being able to sit in a chair and look across the desk at a candidate and say, tell me why I should hire you. Why do you want to work for my company? And as I often tell my clients, they don't want to work for your company. They probably don't know anything about your company and until yesterday, they had never heard of your company. They are there on a recon mission to learn about your company and see if you can move the needle, see if you have anything they need, because the assumption we always make is if you're excited and interested in a candidate, so is at least one other company. And that's the mindset we need to be operating from. Wow, I have someone in front of me who looks really great, and I think they would be a good fit, and I really want to explore this. Um and if I'm that excited about it, we have to then we have to say, oh crap, if they're good and they're interviewing, I'm on the clock. Which leads us to the first part of or the first um mistake or challenge, let's call it a challenge that small business owners have is hiring speed, speed to hire when we engage a client and when we get that offer out. So we always need to be using the correct process. And that the the role will tell us what a correct process looks like. For instance, if I have a CNC shop and I need someone to run my CNC, uh, and someone walks in the door and they have CNC experience, and we schedule an interview, they walk in the door, they have experience, I give them a tour, I set them at a machine and say, hey, here's if I gave you this job, what you would you do? And they say, Oh, here's how I would unlock the machine, get in there, do the job, lock it out, and they know what they're doing, and they seem like they're a good fit, and all the indications they've given to you are they're a hard worker and they know what they're doing. That process should be you get them an offer before they walk out the door. Or you at least say, Hey, what are you looking for? An hour, I'm looking for X. Yeah, I think we can do that. If I get you an offer today, what are the odds of you signing that offer? And they're probably gonna say, yeah, it's pretty good. Or they might say, Well, it depends. I'm interviewing with a couple people. So then if you say I'll give you X, maybe you give them X plus just to push it over and say, Hey, I know we talked about 25 bucks an hour, but I know you're interviewing and I think you'd be a really good fit. So I'm gonna give you 30 bucks an hour. Um, if you could sign off on this agreement and get it done. That's the correct process for an entry-level role. It's a get a resume, call them, maybe a 15-minute conversation to see, do you have what I need? Come on in. When can you come in and see us? And don't let them leave until you get them to agree to the job. That's a correct process for an entry-level person. Now, someone in a manager role, a director level, it's going to be more. It's not going to be pick up, give them a 50-minute pre-screen, bring them in, offer them a job. So maybe it's a pre-screen, a video interview, then we bring them on site and we have them talk with some stakeholders, then we debrief with them and say, What are you looking for? How do we make this work? And we want to get them an offer within 24 hours of them walking out of our building. That might be the correct process for a manager or director level. So when we get to hiring speed, we know that entry-level people are off the market like that. After each interview, if they like the place and they offer them the right dollar amount, they will accept the offer. Um, geez, my glasses are crooked here. It's driving me a little crazy. Uh if uh it's a manager or director level, we have two weeks. We have 10 business days from first contact to getting them an offer, or they too will be off the market. But what happens often in our businesses as small business owners, we have things that come up. Hey, Corey's coming in for his interview this afternoon. Oh crap, I just have a sales meeting. I have to go. Can we push that? I'm really busy this week. Can we push that to next week? And now you just wasted three, four, five business days of your 10. And maybe you've already been in the process for five to ten days before you push that meeting. So it's very hard to get your hiring speed moving. Now, my premise of this entire episode is your candidates are your clients. If your client said, Hey, I have something I really need to talk to you about, would you have time tomorrow? Would you say, pretty booked up the rest of the week? Can we push it to next week? I doubt you would do that. So what if you treated candidates with the same level of urgency and importance that you did your clients? I know many, many business owners have told me that the the right people, the people they have, are the key to their business. Yet, when push comes to shove and you have the opportunity to land a great person who we now know will be off the market in five to ten days, and 87% of candidates, you can change their mind by offering them an amazing candidate experience, by saying, I'm busy this week, cancel it and push it to next week. You are shooting yourself in the foot. A, you're on the clock. So the odds of that person, if they were the right person still being available, just got very small. Secondly, now you're calling someone who is excited to talk to you and saying, we're not excited enough to talk to you right now. Can we push you to next week? Because we're really busy and it's inconvenient, right? You're in inconvenience right now. So let's push you out a week or four or five days. Caveat some things will come up where you have to call someone and say, Man, I am so sorry. This came up, it's a deal breaker for us. I can't find the time. But then you might say, Can I call you on my drive home? I don't want to miss the opportunity to speak with you. Can I call you on my drive home and at least check in and we can have a chat? Or would you be able to come in? You know, what's a great time or convenient time for you to come in tomorrow or later this week? What works for you? Not I'm busy, so I'm gonna push you. Anyway, hiring speed. Speed isn't rush rush rush. Speed is using the correct process, outlining what that looks like, and then staying to the timeline. That's what speed to hire looks like. So hiring speed is uh one of the biggest challenges for a business owner. It's being able to fit people in. The second biggest challenge a business owner faces is the system by which they hire. And having spoken with a lot of business owners, these processes are generally very ad hoc. Probably not using the right, correct process, but we're probably also uh who has time to speak to this person? Okay, I'm gonna get you to speak to them. I'm gonna get you to speak to them. And when we talk about having a hiring system, consistency is a big part of that. We like to say we always want to have the same people ask the same questions in the same order, which means to have the right process, which essentially equals process equals experience in this case. Outlining the right process so your candidate has a great experience is paramount. So when we're hiring for a position, we want to talk about who are we going to include in this process. Sidebar, only your best people. Never include here is I'm gonna give you two things to think about. Only include people if you if you say to them, and I've done this, I we're interviewing for an engineer, and the engineering manager said, I want to include this other engineer in the process. And here was a question I asked. If you love the candidate and this other person you just wanted to include in the process doesn't like the candidate, will you hire them anyway? And he said, Yes. And I said, Then why are you including them? Because you have a 50-50 chance, or maybe it's a 25% chance if we do it correctly, but a 25% chance that you're gonna piss them off and demoralize that person. There's a 25% chance that you're gonna say, I love them, and they're gonna say, No way, I don't like them at all. And you say, Too bad, I'm gonna hire them anyway, and they're gonna say, Well, why the hell was I involved? What value did I bring? All you've done now is told me you don't care about my opinion. So if you're not gonna use their input to make a hiring decision, don't include them. If they're they've they've not been included before, they're still not gonna be included, they don't expect to be included. It's way easier to manage that than managing here's why I didn't listen to your opinion. The second thing is your C players, your toxic people, your high-performing assholes, your people that aren't a culture fit but are really good at what they do, your people who cause more trouble and turmoil than they're worth, never, ever under any circumstances include them in the interview process. They will only do two things. These people hate accountability. And if you're hiring a manager who is going to hold them accountable, they will see that very quick because they're smart. They understand job preservation and how to keep their little world intact. And if you have them interview the very person that is going to destroy their world, they will do one of two things. They will either try to sour that that interviewee, that candidate, and they'll say things like, I hope you like working 60 hours a week. Oh, this place is a nightmare. I hope you like hard work. And they'll try to scare people off. Or they will sabotage the interview. They'll do something that will make it very hard for you to hire the individual. And we've talked about that on previous podcasts. I know I mentioned it a couple podcasts ago, and after we were done recording, Matt said, What did the person do? And uh if you want to know what it is, use that text button in the uh show notes and text me, what did the person do? And I'll tell you. I'll I'll tell you what the candidate did to sabotage the interview we were in. Um, so we only want to include our A players, and people were going to take their input. And we might not include anyone, it depends on the role. Maybe it's just going to be the hiring manager and the owner, and that's enough, and that's it. So we want to take whoever's included and we want to sit down and break it out. We want to have the same people, ask the same questions in the same order. So here's what I will cover. I will cover the walk me through your resume. Let's understand your timelines, why you left each job. Maybe that's the business owner that's going to do that. Or maybe it's the hiring manager that's going to do that. And you're going to vet and say, yes, they have what we need. They have the skills we need. Their uh employment background makes sense. They have the right tenure and their jobs and the reasons they left makes sense. They had a short one in there, they explained it to me. I feel comfortable with the individual. Then maybe you hand them to uh another peer. Maybe it's uh it's uh someone that they would be working side by side with, maybe it's another department, maybe it's purchasing and shipping and supply, uh um shipping receiving, I don't know, but an adjacent department that you want to include. And you would say to that person, you're not interviewing this candidate. What I want you to talk to them about is some of the problems you've run up against here in the past and ask them have they had those similar problems and how would they solve them? So the peer to peer interview isn't an interview, it's a conversation about can you solve the problems I'm having? And have you seen them before and how did you address them? And if you haven't, how might you address them? These this is just a peer to peer conversation about can we Work together, and are you going to bring the skills and experience I need to be successful and you need to be successful? Then maybe you have the owner interview them. And the owner would be all about the culture. If and what you have to understand is if the hiring manager has moved them to the owner, it's a green light for the owner to say they have all the skills we need. I don't need to address that much. Maybe I'll touch on it or have any questions. But I really want to talk about culture and here's how we do things in our business. It's really important throughout the interview process that we don't um gaslight people by giving them future cast ideas. And what I mean is, we may have a culture in progress. We may be working towards a very specific culture, but we're not there yet. Don't sell them the future culture, sell them the current culture and say to them something like, Hey, here's a culture we're working towards. We're not there yet. We got a lot of problems, but we see you as someone who can help us build that culture. That is a very different statement than, oh, we got a great culture. You're gonna love working here. Then on day one, someone says, the water cooler, oh yeah, watch out for our owner. He's a he can be a real bastard. And you're like, oh, didn't expect that. That's not what I was told in the beginning, right? Um, so you're starting that relationship on a lie, and some people might already have like, oh, did I make a mistake? And we don't want them there, not in day one, not in week one. I would much rather have them go, oh yeah, the owner warned me about this, told us we're working towards it. That makes sense, that checks out. I expected that. That's way better, right? So we always want to give what we call the good, the bad, and the ugly. Warts and all, man. Like give it all to them. Don't try to sugarcoat things, don't try to hold things back and keep them under your vest and not expose them. The idea of the interview process, the hiring system, is to get as much information on the table from both sides, candidate and hiring company and candidate, so everyone can make the most informed decision possible. And our experience, and overwhelmingly, when we give the good, the bad, and the ugly, and we get all the information on the table, and we get the candidates good, the bad, and the ugly, and get it all on the table, and we move forward with a hiring decision. That hiring decision is effective, long-term, and uh very generally very good for both parties because everyone understands what they're getting into. There's nothing I get more uh pride out of when a candidate calls me after they've started a job and they say, Man, this place is exactly like you told me it would be. That's someone who feels comfortable and felt like they were the company was honest with them and the trust is starting to build, versus, man, you told me it was going to be like this, and it's nothing like that. The trust is broken. We're not building confidence. We're wondering what the hell just happened. So give them the good, the bad, and the ugly and and and let them know hey, we're not great here. We understand that, but we're hoping you can help us get better. The caveat here is it or it's important to understand, every job is perfect for someone. And you're as a someone who's in charge of hiring, the hiring process isn't designed to sell someone by sugarcoating and omitting and um using semantics to get them to believe it's the right job for them. The hiring process is to give them everything about the job. And if at the end they're still saying, yeah, this sounds great, now we know we're getting closer to the right person. We haven't scared them off, right? We want a hell yeah or hell no. We don't want, oh, it sounds like it could be, sounds like it could be a good fit. There's nothing, no worse words have ever been spoken than, yeah, I think I could do this job. I think I could, you know, I think this sounds like it could be fun. It could be a good place to work. That is that's like amber flag, we're in the middle. We want them to either say, yeah, I am not interested in what you're trying to sell me, or we want them to go, yeah, man, this sounds great. There's a nuance there. And most hiring managers work for the middle. If we can just get them and not tell them about the bad stuff and really play up our good stuff and get them excited about it. But then when they get in there, we we haven't had an honest conversation. And one side or the other is gonna be happy if not both. So that's the hiring system. And the last one is ownership. Who's gonna own this process? Business owners, it shouldn't be you. You should have someone in your business who we talked right up off the front. It's easy to generate resumes. Your time is way too valuable than to sit at your computer for an hour or two every morning screening out all the shitty candidates that don't fit. And mind you, I'm gonna change that because now with AI, it's harder to screen people out because people are using your job out in AI to make perfect resumes, so now everyone looks good. So now you're gonna have to spend even more time phone screening, which is an even bigger waste of your time. Give that to someone in your business, someone you trust, someone who knows your business, and someone you can sit with and say, when you screen these people, here are the non-negotiables. Maybe there's 10 or 12 of them. And if they they score any less than 80%, so as soon as they they fall below the threshold, you just say, Hey, it's thanks. I've really enjoyed the conversation. I don't think this is going to be a fit because we need someone who has all of this experience. Um, you don't have bad experience, you just don't have the right experience for our job, and move them off your book and go on to the next person. But business owners, save yourself some time and create a system where the ownership of this falls on someone else. It could be an EA, it could be a receptionist, it could be your heck, I don't know, your accounting per or not accounting, it could be accounting, it could be marketing, it could be someone who has the couple hours a day to screen. And when they find the people they like, they have a hiring system now that we just talked about to say, hey, that's great. I'm gonna set you up with a video interview with our hiring manager. What days and times work for you, or over the next two or three days, what what day and time? Give me a couple days and times that it worked for you, and we'll get you on the calendar. And now we're into the process following those timelines. Each person involved, remember, we said we want to have the same people ask the same question, the same order. All the people involved have to make your candidates, aka your new clients, a priority. No one is allowed to say, I'm busy this week, can we push it? Something else gets moved to do this interview, especially the further it goes. So if your screener says to the hiring manager, okay, that hiring manager is they're the next one in the uh next person in line, and this needs to happen within two or three days, they got to make a priority. They're gonna screen people out. So for every person that comes to them via the pre-screen, let's say 50% of the people make it through. Now your business owner, you're only gonna see 50, 25, 50% of those people. You have to make it a priority and you have to make time. But the farther this goes down the line, the fewer time slots we're gonna need to make, if that makes any sense. So then if a business owner goes, hey, I really like this candidate, then everyone in the higher, we're gonna bring them on site and everyone's got a block time. And we have an agenda, and here's here's the time slots I need. Pick what's gonna work for you, who's gonna work. It doesn't have to be. You can mix up the order of the people they meet as long as it's the same people in the same order, asking the same questions, right? So um, but the order can be mixed up based on calendars because I I understand people uh sometimes it's hard to move things. But once you have an on-site visit, everyone has to make time. This is the most important thing we have going on in our business today. So I hope that helped you work through your hiring speed, your hiring system, and your hiring ownership. Remember, what the impression a candidate gets from your business and the process is telling them what it's like to work there. So if you schedule a meeting with me and cancel it and move it and cancel it and move it, what you're telling them is while you work here, I'm gonna be really hard to nail down and talk to. The companies, and you're also hurting now, their mindset is definitely changing from I was excited about this role, now I'm not. Now I don't want to work for these people because of this process they put me through. What were the numbers? 86% of people's mind will change due to a negative process. 87% of people will change positively with a good process. Just like your sales process is designed to close business and make as much money as possible. Your hiring process should be designed to close people and make the best hires possible to advance your business in the future. So, having said that, uh, we're gonna put a uh a link in the show notes. We have a hiring assessment. It's free. All you got to do is put your first, last name, and email in there. You answer 15 questions, it'll take you about three minutes, and you will get a comprehensive report of where your hiring process is good, where it's strong, where it's okay, and where you're failing. And it'll tell you, give you some tips on how to improve those areas of your business so you can be better at hiring. Because hiring is getting really, really important. It's getting harder. And the people who are taking the time to improve that process are winning. I often ask business owners this question: if you had a process in your business where 80% of the input was wasted time, what would you do with that process? And they always say, I'd get rid of it. And I say, okay, well, how can you accept that in your hiring process? So I just gave you some clues and tips and ways to make your hiring uh more valuable, make the inputs more valuable, save you time, and make it more a more effective process. If you have any questions about this or ideas around it, again, use that text text us button in the show notes and ping me and ask me questions about how to improve your hiring process. I'm happy to walk you through it. We're here to help, we're a help first organization, so I'm happy to uh to answer those questions or hit me up on LinkedIn and I will get back with you and we'll throw some time on the calendar if we have to to walk through it. So I hope that was helpful for you. I know it's a lot of information, but we got to take hiring seriously. If people are our biggest asset, and they are, of course, we believe they are, and I believe most business owners think that the people are the most important part of their business. We have to start prioritizing them and making them and showing them they are the most important part of our business. Okay, that's enough of me. My name's Corey Harlock, I've been your host today, and until next week, stop grinding and start growing up.