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Culture is about uniting great people around a purpose. It is about a group of people collectively sharing and working towards a vision. It is about creating an environment that inspires and enables people to do their life’s best work. It is about purposefully creating an environment with teams of people who understand the importance of what’s being done and therefore demand of one another that every single person performs and contributes.

Who you bring into your organisation is the number one determinant of culture. If you want to amplify the heartbeat of your company as you scale, you need to understand the instrumental impact recruitment has and embed systems and structure around this.

Over the last 6 years, my team at The Entourage has grown from a one-man team to a team of 100. In 2015 we were listed as the 4th Best Place to Work In Australia by Great Places to Work and BRW Magazine. Throughout this time, I have developed three fundamental principles around recruitment that have enabled me and my team to hire effectively and find people who are fundamentally aligned with who we are.

Principle 1: Deselection
Most recruitment processes are premised upon inauthenticity. They’re founded on the idea that companies need to talk interviewees into working for them, while candidates need to adhere to  a superficial  level of perfection in order to get the role.

We can all relate to this situation:

The employer sits on one side and tells the employee how incredible it is to work at their company. They speak about the flexible working hours, the perks, the benefits and promotion opportunities.

The candidate on the other end presents a perfectly manufactured CV and explains that their biggest weakness is that they “work too hard” or that they’re “too much of a perfectionist”

Essentially it’s a bullshit conversation, with zero authenticity.

When assessed logically it makes no sense to hire like this. By hiring someone you’re inviting them into an ongoing relationship with you and your business. Great relationships are built on authenticity, openness and honesty. So to start the process with a fickle, surface level conversation, jeopardises the potential of a future employee.

This is why we do the opposite.

Instead, I explain to interview candidates that The Entourage is a high growth, high demand, high-performance environment. I explain that it’s not a standard 9 – 5 job, but rather a lifestyle. I let them know that joining our team will probably be the hardest thing that they will ever do, but that if they’re the right person for the job, that it will also be the most rewarding thing they will ever do.

Ultimately my intention for doing this is to talk people out of working for us. I want them to deselect themselves. To put their hand up and say, “you know what, I’m probably not the right person for this job.”

Each candidate who joins The Entourage goes through four interviews with my team, and if it’s an executive level hire they do their final interview with me. It’s the person who is still standing at the end of these four interviews, who still wants to work for us and is still inspired by our vision, while understanding the challenges and demands of the journey, that I want on my team.

Principle 2: Vision, Mission, Values
It’s critical that new hires intrinsically identify with and are aligned to the vision, mission and values you have for your organisation. The one question, my team and I ask every interview candidate is, “why is changing education important to you?”

Having an authentic conversation around vision lets you see what really drives them to perform. Technical skill is still incredibly important, however, the differentiator in creating a world class culture is finding people who are united by a greater purpose.

A lot of people talk about hiring for attitude, training for skill, however if you’re a high growth company, you simply don’t have time to train everybody and skill. So we hire for attitude and we hire for skill.

For example, the vision for The Entourage is to push civilisation forward by enabling more people to live on purpose. Our vehicle to do this is through the power of education, specifically for entrepreneurs and innovators.

We only hire people who are deeply passionate about the change we create through our education because it’s the fundamental alignment that consistently fuels somebody to go above and beyond. It’s the people who genuinely care at their core about the contribution we are making and don’t need external motivation, who will fight to push our vision forward and perform at their best every day.

Principle Three: Find the essence of a human being
The third thing I look for in every interview candidate is what I call the essence of the human being. You need the individual you’re interviewing to drop the mask so you can tap into who they are at their very core.

In order to get a true insight into the individual, you need to ensure that they feel comfortable enough to open up to you and this starts with you being authentic with them if you expect them to be authentic with you.

“The essence of a human being” is a relatively broad term, so to make it more tangible for my team to assess, I break it down into these three elements – Heart, Head and Hand.

Heart: Ask questions that will enable you to identify if they are a truly genuine person. Do they want to contribute and make other people's lives better? Have they been through adversity in the past and how have they dealt with it? What brings them joy?

Head:  Find out what stimulates, excites and intrigues them. What makes them curious? Are they sharp? Do they already have or do they have the potential to develop the skills they need to perform in their role?

Hand: Have they truly demonstrated the work ethic required to contribute over a sustained period of time? Can they operate under pressure? Can they think fast? Can they work independently? Do they have a strong work ethic or are they just looking for a standard 9-5 job?

When these three things are all working in harmony, you are truly congruent in what you are doing – your outer world perfectly reflects your inner world. This is the space in which great things happen.

While hiring, you want to find people who have either already reached this point of alignment, or people who you believe will reach this point and thrive within your company – whether it’s a 2 person team or a 100 person team.

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I'll be diving deeper into how to build and lead a high performance team at The Entourage's FREE Business Growth Summit. Set yourself up for success and set your business up to scale, by taking a day out of the “grind” to learn sales and leadership strategies that really work. You can register for your free spot here. Hope to see you there. 

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