Selection Process For Hiring – Jamie Irvine
SUMMARY
In this episode with Jamie Irvine, a sales professional since 1997 and now manages over two million dollars in annual sales, he shares how utilizing a profile-first approach makes it easy to identify if someone is ideal for a role.
Doing the profiling in the beginning transforms the hiring process. Make sure to remember this important step.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
When hiring someone, do a profile-first approach first.Using titles to define a role can be misleading.
Outcomes dictate what personality profile you need to find the ideal candidate for a role.
Seven behavior traits that dictate what the person is going to look like from a personality profile perspective:
- Assertiveness
- Sociability
- Haste
- Detail Orientation
- Behavior Adaptability
- Emotiveness
- Creativity
Do the profiling at the beginning of the hiring process.
Understand your personality before using the profile-first approach when hiring other people.
TRANSCRIPTION: SELECTION PROCESS FOR HIRING – JAMIE IRVINE
Luis Congdon
Hey, Thriving Launchers, on today’s episode, we’re going to talk about what it takes to build the right team.
Selection Process For Hiring To Put The Right People In The Right Places
Luis Congdon
You got to put the right people in place and put the right people in the right places. How do you do that? You profile them through the selection process for hiring.
How do you profile them? We got that in today’s episode and more.
Kamala Chambers
We are here with Jamie Irvine. He has been a sales professional since 1997. He now manages over two million dollars in annual sales. We’re excited to have him on the show to talk about the selection process for hiring.
Luis Congdon
All right, Thriving Launchers, here we are. Let’s talk about building teams.
Jamie, are you ready to launch?
Jamie Irvine
Let’s do it!
Luis Congdon
You’ve got this exciting insight about building teams, and I loved it.
Thriving Launchers, we were talking before the interview, and one of the things Jamie said is that a lot of times, people get what they’re given or what they can get in regards to their teams.
That to me already sounds like something could be off with that if you’re just getting whatever, and Jamie said we need to profile and know what we’re doing when we’re building that team.
I’m curious about that. What does profiling your team mean?
Where People Go Wrong In The Selection Process For Hiring
Jamie Irvine
I think that where people go wrong is they take the people they have available to them or they look for employees, and it was the first time hiring.
Whoever they can find with the most experience or the best education, they hire that person. Then, they try to fit them into the role that they had hired them for, and need to turn that paradigm upside down.
Using The Profile-First Approach In The Selection Process For Hiring
Jamie Irvine
Do what I call a profile-first approach where you focus on building out a profile for the role that you’re trying to fill.
What I mean by a profile is “What personality characteristics does the ideal candidate for that role need to have to be truly successful?”
You build out that profile first, and then it makes it so much easier to identify that ideal person to fill that role, and everything works a little bit better. I’ll change that. It works a lot better.
Kamala Chambers
This is a great concept, and I love it.
How do we take this concept and start to apply it to our business, into selection process for hiring?
Selection Process For Hiring – Ask Questions About The Role As The Business Owner
Jamie Irvine
It starts by taking a step back as the business owner or the entrepreneur and asking yourself a few questions about the actual role.
I think, sometimes, we use the titles to define the role and sometimes, that can be a little misleading. You can say something like sales, or marketing or accounting, but what does it involve? What outcomes are you looking to achieve and accomplish?
Selection Process For Hiring – Know What Outcome You Want To Achieve
Jamie Irvine
The outcomes will dictate what kind of a personality profile you need to be designing the role and finding a person that’s a close match with that.
Kamala Chambers
So if I were to sit down and start this process, what are three things that we want to do?
Selection Process For Hiring – Build Out A Profile
Jamie Irvine
The first thing is to ask ourselves is what kind of activities does the individual have to be engaged on a daily basis to achieve the outcomes we’re looking to gain? And then, based on those actions, we can start to build out this profile.
Seven Behavior Traits To Look For During The Selection Process For Hiring
Jamie Irvine
We want to look at the seven behavior traits that dictate what the person is going to look like from a personality profile perspective. Those qualities are assertiveness, sociability, haste, detail orientation, behavior adaptability, emotiveness, and creativity.
When you look at those seven traits, I guess the third thing is to get a scale in place of what that person’s personality needs to be like to be successful in each one of those categories.
Selection Process For Hiring – Gauge What The Person’s Personality Need To Be Like To Be Successful
Jamie Irvine
A great example is a salesperson. You wouldn’t want to build a role for them where they have to sit in a room by themselves and work alone all the time because they’re probably going to be someone who’s not very detail-oriented and very sociable, and wants to be out there talking to people.
Conversely, you wouldn’t build a role for someone who’s going to work in an office doing a lot of detail work for you and create a position where they have to interact with people all the time.
When you get those things right in the selection process for hiring, it makes the whole thing works so much better.
Luis Congdon
One of the things you’re making me think about is how people show up for interviews.
Interviewing Candidates In The Selection Process For Hiring
Luis Congdon
When people are desperate, or people are in a transition, they’re willing to try anything. When people need work, or they need paychecks, they’re eager to fit any job for the interview. However, the role might not be the best role. Or they may interview well for a particular type of position, but their personality and their skill sets are better suited in other areas.
I’m curious if this thing helps with that. It’s because I know that I’ve interviewed well for particular jobs and I was terrible at the job because it just wasn’t in my innate traits or desires, goals, and aspirations.
For example, one was sitting in an office and doing a fair amount of office work. The guy next to me was a tax agent, and he did great. He loved the mission of the company. He enjoyed helping people with their taxes. He didn’t mind that he had to dress a certain way every single day.
I, on the other hand, hated being in a cubicle. Even though it was a pleasant environment, we had to sit in cubicles for a majority of the day. There’s just so much I didn’t like, and I ended up being fired because I just wasn’t suitable for that job.
Had they appropriately interviewed, maybe they would have put me in a different role.
Jamie Irvine
Absolutely. There are two sides to that.
Understand Your Personality Profile To Better Understand The Selection Process For Hiring
Jamie Irvine
If you are the hiring person or the entrepreneur that’s the foundation of the company, you need to know yourself. You have to understand your own personality profile.
For example, in my case, I have high levels of drive for results, but above that, I even have higher levels of drive around relationships. What that means is if someone comes along and says, “Jamie, I’m in a bad way but look all the experience I have” and deep down I know that they’re not a good fit, I might override my better judgment. I might hire them just because I feel like I want to try to help them. Then, it doesn’t work out, and it doesn’t make the relationship healthy, and everything goes sideways.
You have to know yourself and that’s part of the puzzle.
Putting The Profile-First Approach As A System In The Selection Process For Hiring
Jamie Irvine
The other part is by putting this profile-first approach in place as system within your hiring process. You’re able to weed out anybody that isn’t a good fit from a personality profile perspective first, and then you start looking at their situation, education, and experience to make sure that they’re a good fit. You look at the culture and things like that.
By moving the profile to the beginning of the stage of hiring as opposed to going through that whole process, and then your perception and perspective are being skewed by certain things like “Look at what school they went to.” Then you get to the end where you say “We better do a profile to make sure that they’re a good fit.”
Better Quality Hires With Selection Process For Hiring
Jamie Irvine
You got to put that in the beginning. What that does is it transforms the hiring process, and it makes your hires excellent quality, and people stick around a lot longer.
Profiling at the beginning of the hiring process makes your hires better quality and people stick around longer.
Kamala Chambers
I would love to hear what are some of the specific questions that are a must to ask people to make sure that you’re getting the right profile?
Selection Process For Hiring – Craft Questions
Jamie Irvine
Well, we’re getting into the scientific side of it, and I’ve had a lot of exposure to this, but I didn’t study the psychology behind it. I’ve looked at the different characteristics and how they apply for the job.
For instance, in that example that you gave where it was a bad fit, you can think back and say, “Okay, what issues have we had with this role?” or “What issues can I foresee that could come up if we get a bad fit?” And you can craft questions to try to uncover whether or not the person will be a good fit.
Knowing If A Person Has High Levels of Sociability In The Selection Process For Hiring
Jamie Irvine
Again, I’ll go back to the sociability. If you have a job where they have to be interacting with people all the time, you want to build a few questions into your process where you’re asking them things like, “Do you enjoy socializing all the time?” “Do you enjoy being in front of a group of people and having to carry the conversation?” “Do you enjoy having to go and talk to people on a regular basis outside of the office?”
You can build several questions like that in the selection process for hiring and thread them through the conversation, and you’ll get a good feel of whether or not this person has high levels of sociability, and I just use that as one example.
Kamala Chambers
I love that example.
Selection Process For Hiring – Have The Person Perform A Task To Get An Interview
Kamala Chambers
One thing that we do in our hiring process is it’s not just even the questions we ask, but it’s the task that we make people perform to get an interview with us. It shows me that the people we’re hiring what we need or the personalities need to be people that are self-motivated, that can manage themselves because I’m not a manager. I bring people to the team, and I want teammates.
That’s something I find to be important. It’s to bring on people who can follow the deadlines when things need to be done. They fill out the application the way we asked them to fill it out for me to even consider them.
Are there any other things like that that you would toss in?
Jamie Irvine
That’s a fantastic example of how you would measure someone for detail orientation.
Measure Someone For Detail Orientation Through The Selection Process For Hiring
Jamie Irvine
If there’s a position you’re hiring for that requires a high level of detail work where they need to follow instructions since you’ve got systems in place and you want them to follow those systems, you can build into your whole hiring process several objectives that they need to complete.
You can gauge it around time frames, accuracy, or several different of those detail type jobs and look at the results. People will disqualify themselves very quickly if they’re not following the rules that you’ve set in place.
Selection Process For Hiring – Take The Person Offside
Jamie Irvine
Another great tactic is after you’ve gone through the interview processes, one thing you can also do is take the person offside if you will where things get a little more relaxed, and there’s not so much of that official interaction, and just talk to the person. It is amazing how many people will disqualify themselves after they have tested very well in all the other areas.
You’ve got to drill down and understand what makes this person tick. It’s because the thing is about our personalities, they do not change over the course of our adult life very much.
Kamala Chambers
These are all fantastic points that you’ve brought forward today.
Before we go, is there anything else that the Thriving Launchers need to know, something specific about what they can apply to this selection process for hiring?
Jamie Irvine
You have to get to know yourself before you can use this system in the selection process for hiring other people.
Where To Get Started With A Profile-First Approach In The Selection Process For Hiring
Jamie Irvine
But it’s also going to liberate you and free you up to have your mind open to how this applies to other people. That would be my number one recommendation of where to get started using a profile first approach.
Luis Congdon
There we have it, Thriving Launchers.
The Selection Process For Hiring All Begins With You
Luis Congdon
Building a team takes some intelligence, and the main thing I got out of this is the power of knowing yourself. It all begins with you. Your team is going to be a reflection of you.
That example that I gave about where I got hired for a job and I wasn’t a good fit, I used to blame myself a lot for that. Now, I look back on that, and I think as an employer, I would have blamed myself as well.
If I was the employer, and I knew myself and the role better, then maybe I could have hired someone ideal for that position. You’re going to make mistakes regardless, but perhaps that mistake wouldn’t have happened, or maybe mistakes like that would happen a lot less.
Thriving Launchers, whatever you got out of this episode about the selection process for hiring, I hope you take some action, utilize it in your business. Until next time, keep thriving you all.
