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I’m creating a boutique marketing experience for every business owner who works with my team – even though we have 75+ clients! Wanna know how we do it?

It’s all about the people I hire. And today I’m sharing the genius behind a hiring process that brings me the best of the best in ads managers and more.

I’m talking about…

  • Where we find ‘employees’ v entrepreneurs
  • The skills test that weeds out more than half the applicants
  • And why I believe it’s possible to hire people who care about your clients as much as you do!

If you’re growing any kind of a business that means hiring new people, this episode is for you. Tune in, share your takeaways on IG, and tag @emilyhirsh for a shoutout!

NOTE: Listen to Episode 21 for an insider look at the next step: how we train ads managers.

Key Points:
[3:35] Where we find ‘employees’ v entrepreneurs
[4:50] The 4-question skills test that weeds out 50 percent of applicants
[7:41] “I don’t even meet everyone before they’re hired!”
[9:16] The KEY to hiring people who can do the work better than you (+care about clients as much as you do!)

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Episode Transcripts:  

I’m Emily Hirsh, and this is the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast. Attention innovators, influencers, creators, and game-changing entrepreneurs: your Internet domination begins right here. We are the powerhouse marketers that you’ve been looking for. You’re already making waves in your industry, and we’re here to help amplify those waves of change by creating a connection that cuts through the noise. We take everything you’ve built inside your zone of genius and find its audience. With killer strategy, and laser-eye for impact, we launch multi-million-dollar campaigns and skyrocket your reach online. And now, we are doing the unheard of; we’re unveiling everything we’ve learned, taking you behind the scenes with the Hirsh Marketing Team, and giving away the secrets to our clients’ success.
Stay tuned for top converting strategy, ROI reports, and insider knowledge that you won’t find anywhere else. You’re changing the world, and we’re the team to help.

In today’s episode, I’m gonna share the secret behind our hiring on Team Hirsh that creates massive ROI for our clients, and our, what we call Hirsh partners, those are our clients.

A pretty far while back, I did an episode about training our new ads managers, and I got a lot of positive feedback about it, and people said they really enjoyed hearing about those pieces of the company and how we train. So, I figured I would talk today about how we hire, how we find the people. I think I touched on it a bit in that episode, but I wanted to go deeper into that.

Also, a while back somebody said something to me, and it really stuck with me, and it was, “Emily, I feel like you have created a company where you get this boutique experience no matter what client you are, but you have so many clients, but you would never know that,” and I realized that is what I’m trying to do, because one of the biggest complaints that I’ve heard from people is that they got forgotten in a marketing company, and in an agency. And I think that’s easy to happen as companies scale. So, my goal has always been that my ads managers, who are like… we have nine right now, currently, as I’m recording this podcast, and they are the liaison for the clients. They do everything from checking the ads, optimizing, like day-to-day work inside of the ads, plus client communication, and then they have high-level strategists that support them, but they are such a crucial role in the accounts. We’re constantly hiring those people, because they are the bread and butter in our business; if we don’t have enough of them, we can’t take on clients, so we’re constantly hiring those people.

My mentor said to me, about a year ago, “Emily, I want you to see your job as you just need to create a conveyor belt where you constantly are bringing in and training new ads managers,” and so that’s what I’ve done this year, is worked on creating that conveyor belt. So, today I’m gonna talk about how we hire them, and the process, and finding them up and to the point. And then you can go back and listen to the one on how we train them. But then also, I’m gonna share the culture on our team, and why I think that matters so much in actually getting our clients results, and why it’s so important that you have this in whatever ads team you’re working in, but also if you are a service-based business in your own team.

Our hiring process is multi-level. First of all, I find employees; and I learned a while back, “Don’t go find entrepreneurs,” because I made the mistake hiring entrepreneurs who then later on left, and that used to be one of my biggest fears. I don’t even worry about it anymore, to be honest, because I find employees. There’s a very small percentage of the population who actually wants to own a business. Most people are happy just being a part of a team, and having a secure job, and that’s who I go after.

We post on Indeed, WeWorkRemotely, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Craigslist, like all over online job postings, and we pay for some of them, because it’s absolutely worth it for me to get quality people in, and so those are constantly running. We review about 30-50 resumes a week; not me, but my HR Manager/Operations of our internal team person, she reviews those resumes. Then, they’re passed from there to a first interview. That’s really to verify their skills, and are they a culture fit? We have a set of questions. The key is that everything here is documented. So, we have a set of questions that she asks. So she does that first initial screening, they answer the questions; and then if they pass that, they then are sent a test.
I created this test beginning of this year; or this podcast comes out next year, so beginning of 2018. I created this test, and it’s not like a right or wrong answered question test; it’s testing for skills. So, I know that the most important traits, characteristic traits, that I need in an ads manager is attention to detail, and massive sense of urgency, because to me that’s our culture for our clients. We want to know if something’s not converting two days before it’s not converting, and you better have a plan and be doing something about it, and you better come to us with a plan. We want proactive, urgency people. Then, the third one that’s super important, is the ability to think for themselves; the ability to problem-solve … if they don’t know an answer, go find the answer, solution-oriented people, because we don’t have time in our company to babysit people. So, I know that those are the traits I want.

So, I ask questions; I’ll give you guys an example of one of them. There’s four total questions. It takes people about two hours; we don’t pay them to do this. It takes them about two hours. We also time them, though. We say, “What time can we send you the test?” If it’s one o’clock; and when they send it back, that’s their time. So, we know exactly how long it took them, too, because that tells me, “Do they work fast? Were they looking up answers? Did it take them a day to do this? Did they go get help?” That’s an important piece, and so that’s how we virtually have been able to actually time the test.

One of the questions is, I give people a bunch of stats from a real campaign, from a client’s campaign. I obviously change the stats for privacy reasons, but I give them a bunch of stats, I show them the landing pages, I show them the ads, and I basically say, “Here are the stats. What do you think is working, and what would you do to change it?” The answers are always pretty broad, broad in the different answers that I get back, because I’m not looking for a right or wrong answer. Again, I’m looking for how the person thinks. I’m looking for somebody to really go outside the box, above and beyond, about solutions that they would bring me, that they would do based on the campaign. Then, I’m also looking for understanding, obviously, of what is and isn’t working because I don’t tell them, “This was really good” or “This was bad.” I just say, “Here’s the stats. What do you think? What would you do differently? What do you think is working well? What do you think is not working?” and so they answer that. That’s one of the questions.

We also have them load a test ad, actually, in a sample ad account. We give them access to an ad account during that two hour, or whatever period that they’re taking the test, and then we have them actually load a real ad. Anyway, that’s the next step.
They take the test, send the test back. Then, at this point, my Senior Strategist, that’s who our ads managers report to is the Senior Strategist, review the test. Sometimes, I review them. Sometimes, my Director of Operations reviews them. Multiple people will review the test, give their thoughts, and they either then move on to a second interview or they don’t, and this is where we weed out probably 50% of the people to even go to the next interview.

Then, they go have a second interview, and that interview is with two of my Senior Strategists that have to be on it, two people, because I think it’s beneficial to have more than one person on an interview, because they’ll think of different questions and have different perspectives in what’s important in the company, so we always have two people. At this point, myself and my Director of Operations are not even on those interviews, and so people are hired that I don’t even meet before they’re hired; and it’s actually a really cool feeling, to be honest.

Then, they have that final interview. Then, from there, they are either sent a declined letter or sent an official offer letter. The first two weeks in the company, we set them up as a contractor saying basically that this is a trial, “You need to get through all of our training. You need to prove to us that you can do this. If you are, then you’re an employee,” and that’s our hiring process. So, it’s two interviews plus a test.

We also have them do the DiSC assessment because I like to see that. I’m looking for high SC’s; if you know the DISC assessment, that’s the attention to detail/processes people. So, we have them do that, and that’s how we filter them, the test being the most important piece.

Now, the second part of this that I wanted to talk about is really the culture that I’ve created from the beginning, when an ads manager is hired. And that is the massive expectations. Our training, if you go back and listen to that, it’s a 27-page workbook and it’s intense. So, I want to push people that first couple weeks because I’m like, “This is not an easy job.” I also want them to know how accountable they will have to be, and this creates this culture where everybody who gets through … People have asked me, “How do you keep your people accountable? Do you monitor their screens?” and I’m like, “No. I don’t even think of doing that.” You wouldn’t survive if you’re not accountable, because you wouldn’t be getting your stuff done, and we’d know within one day that it wasn’t getting done, right?

So, we’ve set it up so like, first of all, in the interviews we say, “This is not an easy job. If you want to just have a nine-to-five job that you can clock out, and you can just unplug, and you show up to work and that’s it: this is not the job for you. This is marketing; it never stops. Our clients are high-profile clients. We expect very fast turnarounds, urgency. This is a fast-growing company. We serve fast-growing…” I almost make it sound like, “This is not an easy job.” Right? So, some people withdraw, and that’s what I want; I want those people gone earlier.

Anyways, I create the amount of accountability; in turn, it makes it so that the only people who get through, by the end of the training, are ones who I don’t even have to incentivize and they care about our clients 110% because it’s who they are. Because we’re hiring, at the end of the day, for those characteristics and those personality traits of very hard, fast workers who have urgency, who have initiative, who can go solve problems, and our system for hiring is set up to weed out anybody who doesn’t; in return, this creates … My ad managers have a very strong relationship with my clients, and they care about my clients as much as I would.

I was at an event, and someone up front asked, someone asked the speaker and said, “How do I make people care about, or do the work, like I would in my business?” and the speak stood up there and was like, “You never will.” That’s what he said. He said, “You’ll never have anybody who cares about …” Not “cares about your business,” because I do agree who cares about the growth of your business, you care about it the most, but, “who can do what you do?” he said, “You’ll never have somebody who could do what you do as well as you do it,” and I 110,000% disagree because at this stage in my business I’ve honestly hired people who sometimes I think can do it better than I can, because I would be too spread thin, and my attention goes to business-growing activities so much that it would affect the quality of my work for clients.

So, I honestly believe my ads managers, my senior strategists, and my Director of Strategy serve my clients better than I could, and that’s because of the systems that we have in place, and the expectations that we have set up, and the people that come through from our hiring because of that. So, if someone tells you nobody will ever be able to do it as good as you can in your business, they’re wrong, because I honestly feel like, I really feel like, my team does it better than I could do it, in many cases. I step in at a very high level as needed, but it’s rare anymore that I even need to, because the key here is weeding the people out who wouldn’t be able to meet that expectation before you even hire them.

We have about 30% of the people actually make it only through their first couple weeks, so we’re still weeding people out; but by the time they make it in their first 30, 60, 90 days, they are solid, and they can get our clients results, and they can do the job better than I could, and they are supported with systems through the entire thing, and this is how we can deliver to clients. This is how we’ve become not an agency, but a marketing management company that can do so much, so powerful and so many pieces at a large scale, but still make it feel like a boutique personal experience for the client, which is so important; especially when you’re working with who we work with, which is influencers and people with smaller businesses, not massive corporations ,at this time. So, hopefully that was helpful in your own business.

Hiring, it’s just really important that you put the time and the effort, and the systems, systems, systems in place to get the right people in from the beginning, because it’ll save you time and money in the long run, and it will also help the overall quality of your product or service.

So, if you want to work with our dream team, you can go to HelpMyStrategy.com and apply to work with us. We are picky about who we work with, we call them Hirsh partners now, and we are looking for clients who really want the long-term relationship, and a team that is at a full marketing management team.

Thanks so much for listening, guys.

Thanks for listening to the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast. Go behind the scenes of multi-million ad campaigns and strategies, dive deep into the Hirsh process, and listen to our most popular episodes over at HirshMarketingUnderground.com.
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