You can listen to the podcast and read the show notes here.
In this interview, I spoke with Mads Singers.
Michael: I'm here at DCBKK with Mad Singers and he is a management coach and also helps people out hiring staff.
Mads: Yep.
Michael: Hello, Mads.
Mads: Hello, Michael. How are you?
Michael: I am doing great. We're talking about intuitive hiring.
Mads: Yep.
Michael: You hire a lot of people. What's your experience with that?
Mads: I run an outsourcing company and I do a lot of management coaching. At the moment, we hire about a hundred plus people. Either for our own outsourcing company or separately for other people's businesses. It's a lot of people every year. I used to work in IBM as well, where we did similar volumes of hiring. I have probably hired more than a thousand people in my life so far. Definitely a lot of volume in regards to hiring at this stage.
Michael: So you've probably hired a lot of good ones and a few duds.
Mads: I've definitely made some mistakes as well, there's no doubt.
Michael: Where does intuition come into hiring?
Mads: The way I really use intuition in terms of hiring specifically is as much trying to look away from the most common things people look at. Mostly when recruiters and business owners are recruiting, they tend to look a lot at skillset; they tend to look a lot at CVs. Oh, this guy have been in sales for twenty years, he must be great. Now, just because you've done something for a long time does not mean you're great at it. As an example. What I tend to use a lot when recruiting is really looking at, first of all, understanding what's the type of personality I'm looking for in the role.
Michael: Can you say more about that?
Mads: Generally I use a behavioral model called DiSC usually.
Michael: What does DiSC stand for?
Mads: It's called this. That's the actual name of the behavioral model but basically what it does is it breaks personality down into four different personalities, I guess you can call, the four different primary behaviors. The key purpose of that and the key purpose of DiSC is really to isolate the natural behavior people have because that generally helps you understand what they would be good at. What their natural behavior is in general. The obvious example is the likes of salespeople, where anyone have had one of these very loud, rowdy, non-stop talking salespeople talk to them, right? These are the people that generally are very good at sales.
When people have that type of behavior, there's also other things that they're not good at. An example of that would be spreadsheets, numbers like big Excel, accountants for example. If you ever have a guy that talks a lot and is really salesy that way, he will very, very rarely be a detail oriented accountant. That's the sort of stuff-
Michael: You take a DiSC profile, how would you know someone's a good fit for selling from their DiSC?
Mads: Basically, without going into too much details around DiSC, really the way to look at it from a sales perspective, for example, is do they have the personality to talk with people? Are they afraid to, do they seem reserved to go up to other people or are they comfortable with it? In general, if you have someone that's reserved they will generally, I'm not saying they can't do sale, but they would generally never become the best of the best. Generally, when you hire, you want to hire people that can become the best of the best.
Michael: That makes sense. Where does intuition come into this?
Mads: Really the key thing is utilizing, from my perspective is DiSC, but it's really utilizing your knowledge and your understanding about people. To try and understand, when you interview people, not just do they have the right skillset but much more are they the right fit for this specific role in terms of personality and really in terms of understanding. Do they really fit the culture, as well, in the company? Within a company you obviously have a lot of different work cultures and-
Michael: What happens if they're not fit for the culture but they have the skills and the personality? Is that a bad thing?
Mads: It could be. An example of bad fit for culture could be people that have been used to work in a work environment where eight-to-five, or whatever. They show up, they do the work and then they go home. They don't really care very much. In most high performing companies you generally manage to develop a culture where people are really bought into the company. Where they're really, I'm not saying they're working twenty hours a day, but they're really bought into it and they really put everything they can behind the day-to-day work. Now, if you bring in one or two people that have a very different approach to that, that can very easily change company culture to a lesser good, at least.
Michael: Can you tell that they're not going to be a culture fit, or do you get a gut feeling?
Mads: I think a lot of times you can get a gut feel. The one key thing about intuition, again, is understanding the personality. A lot of the people I work with, for example, they try to hire developers. Now, developers as an example is generally not very outgoing, very talky people but that's really where you have to use your intuition a little bit to really understand. Even though this person is not necessarily that crazy, not outgoing, not selling himself very well, that doesn't mean he can't be a good developer. When you look for developers, when you look for accountants, when you look for people who are really, really detail-oriented personalities you really want to look for the people that aren't particularly selling themselves very well. That aren't particularly assertive and rowdy and so on, but the people that are much more focused on details and have that kind of personality. You obviously still have to work with them and understand their … Do they have the kind of skills you're looking for? But in the end of the day, a lot of skills can be learned.
Michael: But culture can't be learned.
Mads: Culture, personality, attitude generally can't be learned.
Michael: It's a little harder to test for culture.
Mads: It is and that's why the key questions in general is trying to figure out how they feel about previous jobs. A couple of questions that I actually really love asking is about people's previous bosses. “Who was the best boss you have ever worked with and why did you feel that person was the best boss?”
Michael: Why does that help you in picking someone?
Mads: The reason why that really helps me is because it helps me understand what they see being a good leader. If they say, “Oh, this boss was great because he didn't really check on me. I was just sitting every day. I did my job and then I went home.” Or if they say, “Oh, he was really good. He really impressed me to the maximum. He got the best out of me.” There's many different answers people come with and some of them, sometimes it might be right in the middle of a pack, but sometimes you get some really outstanding answers where you can really see how people have bought into that company. How they have really bought into a role. Sometimes you get some answers that are the opposite and you can really see that people that's just looking for a way to easily pass eight hours everyday.
Michael: I'm guessing as you've hired so many people you probably have a quicker way of hiring than when you first started or that many managers have.
Mads: Yes.
Michael: Do you get hundreds of résumés to people who are applying?
Mads: Thousands.
Michael: How on earth do you manage to get through that so quickly?
Mads: Luckily I have a whole team of great people.
Michael: Okay.
Mads: Obviously for some roles-
Michael: Are they going through every single one in detail or is there some kind of shortcut that they have?
Mads: Yeah, so there is some kind of shortcut. What I tend to say is, the people I like working with … Sorry, there's a few exceptions. Developers, for example, you need people with skillset. You don't want to start to train a developer from scratch because that could take years but in most roles, as I said, things can be learned. In most cases, what we're really looking for is people that have either had a mix of experience, so not just one company. It's generally people who have ideally no education or limited education. The reason why we like that is because very often lengthier education tend to make their mindset more streamlined to the rest of the population and generally the best hires I've ever had have generally been people with less education but a lot more drive and a lot better attitude.
It's difficult to see out of a CV sometimes, but definitely education is one of the things. We don't disqualify people with education but generally there's certain triggers. One of the things we love, for example, for customer service roles, we love hiring people with a background in any kind of restaurant or waiters or the likes. A lot of people that do customer service on the phone, they're paid regularly. When you talk to waiters and so on, they're generally paid a lot in tips. If you're a waiter and you want to make good money, you actually have to be really, really good at your job. The best customer service people that I have hired over time have generally either been either a waiter or in that kind of industry in the past. They have been very used to being pushed to really deliver excellent customer service.
Michael: I know when I've talked to other recruiters that they can just scan through a pile of résumés and throw out the ones that are crap very quickly and they can pull ones they want to look at further.
Mads: Yes. At the moment, I hire a lot of Filipinos and, to be honest, it's very clear to see that there's not a lot of résumé writing classes in the Philippines or there's not a lot of culture for doing that. Generally the résumés are pretty poor. In general, when-
Michael: So are you using some other thing to determine who's worth interviewing?
Mads: Generally when I'm working in the Western world, the quality of a résumé would generally tell how much effort people have put into it. If someone doesn't put very much effort into things, that would be a warning signal in general.
Michael: But in other countries, that may not be true.
Mads: In the Philippines, particularly, where I'm recruiting a lot right now, that is definitely not always true. What we generally look for, so again I have an actual team to do this, we basically do a bunch of sort of follow ups. We want to see how responsive are people to gauge their interest. What that means is my HR basically have a couple of small tests. For certain roles it could be send us a sound sample of your voice. For some roles it could be oh, here's an English test. Can you take this test?
Michael: Somewhat practical tests about what skills they need for the job in question.
Mads: Exactly, but the key thing is not actually the test themselves. What we're looking for is how quickly do they respond. In what way do they respond. One thing is the test itself that kind of helps you-
Michael: When you say what way they respond, what would be good or what would be bad?
Mads: Very often you'll get someone saying, “Okay, I'll get this done this week.” Now, that tells me you're not particularly keen on getting a job.
Michael: Sure. There's no urgency there.
Mads: If there's no urgency, if there's no drive. Really good people are generally keen to get started. They're keen to move. They reply five minutes later with what they have.
Michael: Let me just switch to a similar, related topic which is do you look at cover emails at all or is that ignored?
Mads: Again, in the Philippines, that pretty much doesn't exist. In general, I used to look at them quite a bit.
Michael: What were you picking up from the cover email?
Mads: The number one thing is if it's customized to our company.
Michael: Like do they care?
Mads: Yes. In general, a lot of cover emails are just the same it's obvious that they just changed the company name. If that's the case then I don't even look at it because it doesn't matter but if they've written something, if you can see they've really spent the time researching your company, that's, again, a great sign.
Michael: Do you find you can pick up their personality just by looking at their cover email on their résumé and get some hint as to what's-
Mads: Yes. Yes. A lot of time, again, that's from my background with DiSC but a lot of the time when people write the way they write, the length of what they write and how direct and specific it is tells you a lot about the kind of personality that they have. That's really some of the things that I use to determine the personality of a person. The same, I mean, that thirty second audio sample I can pretty much tell. Whoever they are, I can tell their personality and so on. I can say if that's the kind of personality needed for the role or not.
Michael: Right, so your intuition gives you that information just by hearing a few seconds of them speaking?
Mads: Yeah.
Michael: What kind of job they would be good at.
Mads: Yeah.
Michael: You don't have to read through all their résumé and the detail and their education to get that.
Mads: No. I mean, generally, as I said I have a team doing pretty much all the stuff up until I talk to people. For me, generally, when I meet people face to face it generally takes less than a minute to judge their natural behavior and then it's a question of, the first question is do you have the right behavior for the job? If you do, the second thing is do you have, as we said before, do you have the right attitude? Do you have the right cultural fit? That's if they have the right behavior that's really the things that I look for in the interview.
Michael: Great. I know when I'm hiring I, if they're not a hell yes, if they're just a maybe or I've got some doubt, I don't hire them. Is that something you do?
Mads: Hundred percent agree.
Michael: Why is that in your case?
Mads: For me, the thing is you have to feel great about a person. Sometimes you'll interview person and you'll have a doubt in the back of your mind. If you ever have that, don't hire.
Michael: Because it may not turn out well?
Mads: Your intuition generally do tell you a lot of things that, yeah, you should listen to. A lot of the time I see people, they're very pressed for resources or the likes, and very often when they interview, they interview, for example, three people or five people and they hire the best of those five.
Michael: What should they do? You're saying the best of those five may actually still be crap.
Mads: Exactly. The key thing is having a clear understanding of what is your expectation and what is the requirement for the role. If you don't have any hell yes, you need to go source more candidates. Don't just take the best of the pile.
Michael: Let's just play devil's advocate here. Someone's desperate to fill a role. You're saying if none of the first five candidates met your hell yes criteria and the other things, the culture and the personality and the skills, you need to go off and find more. They're saying, “Hey, I'm losing money every day I don't have this position filled.” What would you say to someone who-
Mads: Generally, recruiting people is a long term goal. A long term play. In the end of the day you might be losing money right now, but if you find a hell yes great employee, they're going to help make you money for years and years and years to come. If you take in a mediocre employee or, even worse, someone that turned out bad, that's going to be a headache for you for a potentially very long time.
Michael: What's the cost of having a bad employee in a role?
Mads: Particularly in smaller companies, it can be the end of the company.
Michael: Wow.
Mads: No, but at the end of the day, if you're a small company. If you only have a couple of employees, if you get-
Michael: One bad apple could be the thing that sinks the boat.
Mads: Yeah. Definitely.
Michael: What about in a larger company? What kind of dollar cost would you put on having a bad person in a role?
Mads: Actually it depends a little bit on process. The stronger processes, the stronger workflows you have, the lesser negative impact, generally, a bad employee will have. If you have many of your jobs structured like you can put anyone into it, you can pull anyone out then it's all the much easier to hire and fire. Generally when you hire, you should be willing to fire quickly. If you find out within a week or within a month or something that the person is just not right, then it's much, much better to cut the person out at that stage rather than to keep trying.
Michael: Right.
Mads: Again, a lot of time what happen is people keep trying, they keep trying-
Michael: And really they've got this little voice in the back of their head saying, “This person's not a good fit.”
Mads: Yeah. That's generally how I look at it because in the end of the day, if you want to build a big company, you need to have great people. The smaller the company the more important the people are.
Michael: That makes sense. Well, Mads, this has been really interesting. I appreciate you sharing it with you. Where can people find you online if they want to learn more about you?
Mads: Usually my website madssingers.com.
Michael: And that's madssingers.com.
Mads: Yes. Very odd name but that is my name. I am on all the social channels as well so you can find me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on. I always love hearing from people and helping people so if anyone have any questions about recruitment or want some help, I'm happy for people to reach out.
Michael: Great. You can find me, Michael Smith, on intuitivebusinessgrowth.com and thanks very much for joining us today.
Mads: Thank you, Michael, it was a pleasure.