Welcome And Guest Introduction

Amy Dardis 0:09

Welcome back to the Building a Clear Authentic Brand Podcast. I'm your host, Amy Dardis, and I am so excited to introduce you to TJ Castning. He's the founder and managing partner of Ambassador Group, a construction recruiting boutique that specializes in professional matchmaking for construction enterprises mostly on the West Coast. TJ, thank you so much for joining me today and being willing to share your story and expertise.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Thanks for having me. This will be fun.

Professional Matchmaking And Hiring In 4K

Amy Dardis 0:40

Yeah, I'm excited. So you use some interesting terminology. You prof used the term professional matchmaking when you're talking about recruiting. What exactly do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Well, hiring is really difficult. And if you think about things in terms of extremes, it might explain why. If we look at marriage, people get quite a bit of time to interview one another in in marriage. And the divorce rate is still, you know, around 50%. And so if you back that down to the hiring problem, how do we help people cultivate, you know, durable relationships in a way that serves both parties? Right. So how are we helping both parties win, achieve their goals? And that process I've found over the years to be more of a matchmaking type of process, obviously a professional orientation, not a romantic one, but there's a lot of facets to our humanity, to our goals, to our personalities, to our purpose, to our organizational missions that really need to be seen in high resolution from both parties' perspective. So I another catchphrase is hiring in 4K. And increasing the acuity or the precision with which we're going about building these relationships, the whole goal being durability. Like, how do we embark on this journey of working together, making a hire, onboarding somebody, training, getting them culturally inculcated and successful, right? How do we get compounding long-term results and value from the hires that we make and not have this? It seems like to some degree in work culture, we've almost accepted that, you know, somewhere around two to four years is the normal amount of tenure to see on a resume. And there's a lot of understandable, you know, acceptable reasons for this. But imagine if, you know, we're going through this hiring process thinking about, you know, 10 years out or more, right? And think about the advantages to an organization, to a person, to their earnings, to their career success, and to the organization's success, if these fits are being cultivated for for a particularly long term. So recruiters for a long time have used language like placement. And I I use this terminology as well for a long time, and I didn't know anything different. But the more I got thinking about it, the more I realized that if if I'm using this language and my client is using this language of placement, it's sort of unilateral. It's like this recruiter brought this person in and placed them in the company. And I realized that's not really the thesis or the mission of what we're trying to do. We're trying to help them cultivate this professional match, this professional alignment between the candidate's career and the company's mission and organization. And this is a much more thoughtful, nuanced approach and mindset to recruiting and to hiring, than the process of finding a candidate, interviewing and placing them in the firm.

Amy Dardis 3:56

Do you feel like that placement approach is the more widely accepted or like that is the route that a lot of recruiters kind of think about this process versus it being more of a thorough and long-term endeavor? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

And I don't I don't take that as necessarily a criticism. It it took me a long time to see some things that seemed really broken in hiring. I used to take it for granted that hiring authorities, people who are interviewing, were exceptionally talented and perceptive about the people that they hired. And I think that's to a large degree kind of taken for granted. But COVID came along and we started doing more Zoom interviews and we could participate and through that process realized that, you know, I work in construction and we all have things that we specialize in, right? So a lot of my clients specialize in building these incredible structures. It's very complicated. Hiring is to some degree, and I think this is true for a lot of industries, a little bit of a peripheral skill set. It's something you have to do in order to get the work done. And what I came to realize is that it's not a highly studied topic. And the people who are who are responsible for hiring are often not getting a ton of reps on it. So this is an opportunity for ambassador group, and I think any recruiter who's studying this problem to to in the repping of this process of recruiting someone, facilitating interviews, facilitating integration into the into this client company, to constantly be going deeper and more high resolution into what are the problems that we're solving in the company? What's the mission? What's the orientation? What are the values? And what is the culture? What is the underlying, maybe unwritten behavioral rules? And how can we make those apparent and transparent to a candidate as quickly as possible and be vetting with a high level of insight, investigatory level of insight in the interviewing process, not from a just a critical standpoint of screening out candidates, but also screening in candidates, removing tourists from the interview process, but also being very clear and transparent about here's where we're struggling, here's the choke points, here's the challenges that we need this role to solve, and bringing that high definition information into the interviewing process in a number of practical interviews, excuse me, and bringing in highly dimensional interviewing. And so, you know, if we're gonna spend three to, let's say, 10 hours of company time interviewing somebody, how do we get the most amount of alignment for everybody from that process such that, you know, we're minimizing the the chance and probability of regret in that hiring decision for either party, right? Because if it's not a a feature or if it's not a fit for the candidate, doesn't matter in a sense how good the hire is for the company,

Making Culture Visible For Candidates

SPEAKER_01 7:00

because at some point that misalignment's going to erode the the chance of a long-term relationship.

Amy Dardis 7:06

Do you find that when you're working with, well, whether it's your clients or just when you're talking to new businesses that are looking to place people in their organization, that the elements and the clarity that they need to have around their business, about their values, about those behavioral expectations, are you finding that it's already clarified and well defined? Or does that end up being another hurdle? You have to help them as well.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

Yeah, I think we all need help with this. I think this is true for me and my own business is it this is a hard problem. I I call this the fish doesn't know water problem. And I have this problem in my own organization and have leveraged outside perspective to help me get a handle on what is our mission, what is our core values. Because if you think about a fish in an aquarium, that fish, if it doesn't have a lot of other context or perspective, just understands water to be whatever that water is. And a lot of different types of fish, a lot of different types of water, different salinities and pH and and so different, there's different ecosystems, right? And I think of culture like an ecosystem. And for people who live in that ecosystem, particularly leaders and founders, it's very easy to, and maybe even inevitable that that ecosystem will to some degree become taken for granted. Whereas, you know, if if from from our perspective, one of the things that we can help a client with is reflecting back to them that, no, you have a very specific ecosystem. And I know this because now I've seen inside hundreds of construction firms, particularly, but I think this is true of any company, any industry, where that founder and leader, and ultimately the array of senior leadership, is bringing specific beliefs, specific behaviors, patterns, strengths, weaknesses, and they're influencing their company in very specific ways that sometimes it can be hard to recognize from the inside. And so in our discovery process, we're trying to make these things explicit. And, you know, companies often have a varying degree of self-awareness. And I believe that self-awareness is really a critical component to good hiring because you know, if we go back to the marriage example, you can imagine it's very difficult to find a good partner in life, a good spouse, if one lacks self-awareness, right? It's a little bit more of just rolling the dice if one doesn't know fundamentally who they are, what those preferences are. And so we could say, like, hey, I want to marry somebody great, I want to hire somebody great, but the employer is, I believe, at least 80% responsible for the success of the hire, right? Because senior leadership own the culture, right? They own the interview process, they own how the role is structured, they own the customers that the person is going to work with, they own the ecosystem that this person's gonna come into, they can set expectations to whatever degree they want. They own the training, they own the onboarding, they own the leadership and the things that build loyalty in candidates. And so the more we can support leaders in having accountability and ownership and control mastery over these factors, the more we can reduce risk in the hiring process. It is incumbent upon the candidate to show up and and be honest and do the job as they're supposed to. But even then, there's a particular challenge in that, you know, the the candidate has the fish doesn't know water problem as well, right?

SPEAKER_02 10:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

They're interviewing a company that they haven't existed within. They don't know the unwritten rules, they don't know all of these factors. So the more that we can make the culture and parameters for what success looks like in an organization, how to get promoted, how to get fired at two ends of the extreme clear and evident to the existing team, to people who are coming on, the more we're setting them up for success, you know, in in their career.

Amy Dardis 11:03

Absolutely. That identity factor, I mean, it's like the what do they say? You can't read the label from inside the bottle. And even people who are highly self-aware and highly reflective and even spend time going through this clarifying process, it can still be so hard to objectively evaluate yourself. I was actually taking a behavioral assessment yesterday. I was taking the PXT that Kim had sent me, and I was going through and answering these questions about myself. And my husband was sitting in the room and I was reading these statements and I was getting stuck, and I'm like, Well, I don't know. And he'd be like, It's this one, like just so matter-of-factly, because he sees me and he can objectively evaluate whereas I'm in there and I'm like going back and forth in my head because I'm like, Well, am I this? Am I this? And it's just that he has that different view into my life where he sees all those behaviors. And I spend a lot of time like evaluating myself and trying to be aware of my strengths and my giftings, and that's like a lifelong passion, and I do that professionally, but I still struggle with it. And so finding that these businesses, like you said, are so inundated with it that it's it's even if they are highly self-aware, it's still never to the level that somebody can come in and objectively be like, Oh yeah, I see this, I see this in you. And that's almost reassuring, I feel like, to have someone say, You are this, I see this in you, and then

Fit Is More Than Skills

Amy Dardis 12:40

you're like, Oh, okay, thank you. Like all this, all this overanalyzing that I've been doing, and you just saved me from that.

SPEAKER_01 12:46

I really identify with that too. I mean, I'm I'm 37 and I feel like I'm still getting to know myself in a lot of ways, and I have all these niches of my personality where I'm still seeing patterns and behavior in myself where I'm developing more awareness of how other people are different and how they would think through that challenge differently. And that really informs my awe of the complexity of hiring because as hiring authorities and leaders, the more we can be aware of how personalities play out in how people execute the work, the more we can be perceptive about recognizing where there's going to be a particular fit with the team. I mean, I think of fit in a number of ways. You got fit to the team, you've got fit to the challenges or fit to the role, fit to the leadership, fit to the culture. And a lot of times you see a lot of emphasis on fit to the role, fit to this, you know, the actual skill. And this is important for sure. Yeah. But, you know, when you've got organizations who might do, in some sense, produce exactly the same type of work, right? For example, my clients, they they build wonderful structures, right? And you'd think that, you know, a project manager or superintendent who works in in the one of these firms would be in in a lot of ways a transferable into another organization. But it's surprising sometimes how a rock star in a certain firm, in a certain ecosystem, in a certain aquarium, when taken to a different aquarium with a different operating model, maybe a different mission in how they operate, how they interact with people, how they mitigate risk, can fail. And I've seen this. It took me a while of watching this where I would find a candidate who I was extraordinarily impressed with. They've got an incredible resume. And then they, and the client's very excited about what they bring to their organization. And then finding these rubbing points and these friction points when they started and realizing like, well, this is a much more multi-dimensional problem than just have they done this category of work before? And then now we're on this journey that we've been on for quite some time of how do we help the parties see these different facets of this problem of fit.

Amy Dardis 15:04

Do you find that when you are talking to your clients about this element, that they're like, yes, I totally get that? Or do you feel like it's kind of new information where they're like, oh, I've never thought about fit like that before, even just explaining that exact story you just shared.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

One of the one of the sweetest compliments a client paid us was I've never thought about hiring so much. And I I have to empathize with our clients a bit because a lot of times we get hired when a hire is painful or when a gap in the organization is painful. And we need a person, we come in and and bring these extra dimensions of fit that we're thinking about and try to clarify what is the mission, what is the values, what what are we trying to recruit and enlist someone into and align them to? And sometimes there's a little bit of work to slow down in order to speed up, to make sure that we're we're clear within ourselves about what we're trying to hire for so we can mitigate that risk. And it can that can be hard work to do when you've got projects that need support. You need this pain resolved. But the way to do it is to slow down. And I don't mean to go slower. I mean there's a lot of work sometimes that needs to be done quickly in order to create that alignment and that clarity. And everybody's on a different place of their journey with this. Sometimes this immediately resonates and sometimes it's new information. But I really see it as a fiduciary opportunity to help the it's my responsibility in serving the client to help the client see these different fit paradigms and to be managing this risk with them through the hiring process, you know, to improve their outcome. And it's different, you know, every every leader's in a different stage of understanding this problem. I myself am still on this journey, you know, in my own organization.

Amy Dardis 16:55

What is what has that journey looked like for you, both internally as a leader and having your own employees, but also from the recruiting side, getting started in this business? When you get started recruiting, you probably didn't have this level of awareness of all these different elements that happen in the hiring process. And then over time, like how have you kind of

Using PXT To Underwrite Hires

Amy Dardis 17:20

come to realize that, not only for your clients, but for yourself as well?

SPEAKER_01 17:25

Yeah. When I started, I think my my entire focus was on the candidate, right? I want to find the best candidate that I could. And we would or arrange these interviews and we didn't have the kind of tools that we have now with AI, with Zoom. And so, you know, I wasn't participating in the interviews. I'd talk to the clients afterwards and, you know, a lot of times, oh, I really like them and things are good. And then, you know, six months later, they're they're running into challenges, running into problems. And I couldn't, took me years. I I could not understand. And frankly, I took it personally as a recruiter that I must have failed. I must have missed something. I felt a deep sense of responsibility to find better candidates. And at some point I realized that I'm kind of finding the best candidates that are available. And I realized in also observing the spectrum of clients and leaders, that some of these clients are being more consistently successful and some of them are not. And then you start observing the different types of leadership in play. And I'm also observing myself in this and realizing that, like for instance, you know, you did you did the PXT assessment with Kim, which I love. I've been working with Kim for, I think, eight years now. Uh, we use the PXT internally for all of our hiring and and externally with clients, and realizing that a leader's capacity for understanding a wide range of personalities and empathizing with them and meeting those people where they are at behaviorally is really critical to expanding that leader's capacity to work with a wide range of people. Whereas if you have lower quotient, a lower quotient of self-awareness, maybe a lower quotient of awareness of how different other personalities can be. And if we're only looking at fit to the job as being a matter of can they solve the problem, then the you can think of like a pie chart. Some leaders are going to be capable of being successful with this sliver of the candidate pool, and other leaders are capable of being successful with a much larger sliver because of their self-awareness, because of their awareness of the person that they're leading and their ability to create an environment in which that person can be successful, the right support, the right accountability. That's critical. And so my my journey has been less now about finding a gold-plated candidate, because I come to find out no one's gold plated. We all come with foibles and weaknesses, right? No person is the complete solution. What I mean by that is, you know, on PXT, have you done the interpretation with Kim yet?

Amy Dardis 20:01

I have not got my results. Yeah, this will be fun. I'm anxious.

SPEAKER_01 20:05

You, you know, you have a certain, you have a certain profile, and it's not good or bad. It is. It is. And when you're taken in your role and stretched in ways that are behaviorally not your default mode, it's going to cost you energy. And I think lacking this information as a leader, it's been very easy for me to put people in roles that are not well aligned to their personality, to their behavioral profile, and then to be frustrated with why they're not being successful. And so layering in this behavioral data of their pace, of their agreeableness, of their assertiveness, of their boldness, of their decisiveness, their sociability, their intuitive to logical thinking styles, and layering that in with the leader and team that they're working with, we're starting to get a much higher dimensional, higher, I like to say, resolution concept of how does this person fit into solving this organization's problem functionally in the role and fitting with the team. Because you'll notice as you do PXT with more people that these teams are the people who fit have profiles. And we're kind of shooting in the dark if we don't have some way of creating some objective clarity on what are these behavioral profiles. I don't think PXT is the only tool that you can use to this. It's the best one that I've found. There's a lot of personality assessments that can give you some objective data, but then you use that data in the interviewing process and have a conversation about setting expectations of like there might be friction here. This is something I'm going to work through. And I like to help the leader see where these friction points might be for the candidate so they can support them, or for the leader so they can anticipate them to get to what I call underwriting. We want to support every leader in being fully capable of underwriting their hiring. Owning the risk management to know what their leadership investment's going to be to help someone be successful. And ideally, in a in a perfect world, we're only hiring people that we can afford to underwrite their success. We've done the work to understand where their baseline's at, where their personality's at, where the demands of the role are at. And I know as a leader, I'm going to need to step in and support them in a number of various ways. For example, pace is a pretty common source of friction where a lot of leaders and founders are fairly high pace and they're fairly assertive. But a lot of people who are team members may not have that same psychological profile. And so helping a leader to understand that this person's going to bring a lot of detailed thinking, a lot of detailed behavior process. And that may fit the role well or it may not. And they need to set their expectations appropriately of how this person's going to actually do the job. This is powerful, not just for the leader, but also this brings a lot of self-awareness to the candidates. And what we find is when a candidate goes through a process, they often, even if they're not hired, walk away with a much higher resolution concept of who they are professionally in their role, where their strengths are, and maybe types of roles to be careful about the how expectations get put on them. Asking a highly detailed person to always run at a very high pace of work might not be sustainable in the long run. And that might not be a moral character failing on that person's part. And I've seen a lot of this. I've seen a lot of people who who, just through not understanding these factors, have contorted themselves into different shapes that the position required that were very uncomfortable for them behaviorally. And some of them they feel like, oh, this is a burnout issue for construction or what have you. And it's really just about, you know, how do we honor the strengths of this person, leverage them, mitigate the weaknesses, and uh create a lot more holistic mutual awareness around these factors to success.

Amy Dardis 24:09

Yeah. I experienced that just in my own journey. And that was something that I kind of came to this revelation about, and I call it work style. And I saw some of the questions in the assessment talking about like how much freedom and flexibility and autonomy you like. And I'm way on that side of like, yes, I do not like to be micromanaged. And I had worked in jobs where it was like a set schedule, same thing day in, day out, very predictable, very detail-oriented. And man, within six months, I would be just a low performer because that type of working environment and style drained me, even though I worked for amazing people and an amazing company. Honestly, like they were doing so many things well, but I did not thrive there. And that friction builds up over time. And then it was realizing, like, oh wow, I can survive this for a little bit. You know, you first get that new job, and first six months, it's like, okay, I can do this, you know, and then the novelty wears off, and then you're like, is this, is this gonna be my life? And then you feel that dread on Sunday night and Monday morning, and you're just and then you're so excited on the weekend because you're like, can't wait to get out of that. And instead of thinking, just jobs suck or working sucks, it's like, oh, maybe there's something about this that is actually causing this. And I didn't realize it at the time, not until I became an entrepreneur and actually experienced a different type of working environment, was highly flexible, highly, you know, highly autonomous, and realizing, like, oh wow, I feel way different. Like this, this is so much better for me. But it was learning the hard way and then recognizing friction points are signals. And it's like, okay, what is that signaling? And I wish there was more of an awareness and more conversation around that for everyone, for leaders to know that not everybody operates this way. But then also for candidates, too, to realize, like, hey, that's not on you. I mean, your wiring is just different, and you're trying to be a square peg and a round hole, and it's just not ever gonna work out.

SPEAKER_01 26:20

Yeah. I love the square peg round hole analogy. I love analogies for some reason. And so a pet saying of mine is, you know, with square pegs and round holes, you hurt the hole, you hurt the peg, and you hurt your hand, right? Everything gets hurt when the fit isn't right. The candidate gets hurt, the company gets hurt, the customers get hurt, the team gets hurt. And so, you know, this hiring thing is really a process of very carefully studying the configuration of the peg and the configuration of the hole. And the more high resolution concept we have about these things, the more successful we can be fitting. What are really, it's not really square pegs around square pegs or circular pegs. It's it's radically and high dimension, it's more like complicated puzzle pieces. We all have so many different parameters of our behavior and our personality that are running as subroutines in ourselves, in a sense, like hardware that impact how we handle stress, how we think through problems, how we communicate. And the more self-awareness leaders we can bring as leaders to this problem in the hiring process and supporting candidates and having and advocating for themselves, the more we can create organizations where, you know, the engine, the economic engine that is the business can be very well lubricated and can run for long periods at high RPM because people are in roles that are well suited to their strengths and they're guarded from areas that would cost them a lot of energy. I mean, that's the utopia that I think we're all trying to get to. And looking at it from this perspective also saves us from, you know, we've all said, like, you know, boy, this person's not who they said they were. And how many times have we said that as hiring authorities or maybe as candidates, right? Boy, they didn't really tell me the truth about this job. And I think the reality of this is less that there's intentional deception, but there's just it's just not known. It's just

Expectations And The Cost Of Bad Hires

SPEAKER_01 28:20

the nature of the configuration of the roles and the people is just not known. And we're we're proceeding with taking on a lot of risk. And I mean, the hiring process is a little bit insane if you think about how much risk is being taken on by a company in middle-level management roles. A lot of these hires are easily minim minimum million dollar decisions, maybe more, right? When you look at the direct cost, the cost of team momentum, morale, impact on customers, reputation, just energy, the energy that that a bad hire can cost. And so to go into these hires with sometimes one, two, three hours of conversation is a little bit insane. And I realize you can't interview forever, but it's worth it, you know, in high-levered roles, which is what my firm specializes in, managerial and leadership roles in construction. It's worth it to really spend some time on configuration with the candidate. And I think this also makes the interviewing process highly collaborative because we need to create a space in which, you know, we're stripping away the interview veneer where everybody's just trying to look good to each other. Ego and interviewing go together, unfortunately, pretty well, right? Maybe a candidate wants to look good. They want the job, right? The company wants to look good to a candidate. But the reality of really high resolution hiring involves a lot of authenticity, transparency. We need to develop commitment to the challenge that we're trying to solve. And that means getting real with ourselves and with our candidate about what's broken here? What can be better? What do we need help from this person? Then how can we help them understand what they might be up against? Another pet saying I've got is you don't really hire for smooth seas. Fit for when everything goes well is easy, right? When everyone's making money, things are going smoothly. You can be successful with a wide range of people. Where fit really becomes essential is the hurricane, right? The problems on the on the project, stress, friction. That's when we really retreat to who we fundamentally are and where we see the fit breakdown oftentimes in hires. And sometimes that takes a while to surface. And so these kind of tools give us a chance as leaders and as candidates to take a look around the corner what it might be like to work on these projects long term with this leader long term and set our expectations because you know, success is properly set expectations. Hiring is all about setting expectations. Candidates should set expectations, hiring authorities should set expectations. And the utopic situation is perfectly set expectations so that when that person starts, the company has their expectations met, the candidate has their expectations met. And it's like, hey, this is exactly what I signed up for. I know what I was getting into, and we're set up for a long-term durable relationship.

Amy Dardis 31:16

Yeah. That makes like perfect sense to me. I'm like, yes, obviously. But then it's wild to me that for something that is so important, how little time and attention business owners can give to it because they're like, oh, I don't have time to do this. Or an interview is you walk in, you sit down, you have no plan, you literally just wing it, ask them a couple questions, be like, okay, seems seems legit. Let's go for it. And and there you go. And that is that's a lot of businesses' hiring processes today. And look at all the conversation around engagement and retention and productivity and nobody wants to work and high mental health issues in the workplace. But then no one's mapping it back to, okay, well, where did that relationship start? Where do all those expectations start? And what are we doing in this in this room or in these few hours that we have where we're making the decision? It just seems like that would be more of a topic than it seems like it is.

SPEAKER_01 32:26

I have a theory on why this is. And part of it comes from studying myself because I would think as a recruiter, I've got hiring in my own organization figured out. And I I would say I'm on this journey. I've gotten a lot better at it, but there's a couple of factors. One is until now, until large language models and AI, we haven't really had the ability to track what happens in the interview process. And a lot of interviewers are hiring as a peripheral responsibility to what their real work is. And so it's taken me as a recruiter who's literally sitting in this problem years to recognize these patterns. And that's accelerated the pattern recognition for us has accelerated as we've gotten more involved in the process. But, you know, if if I'm in putting myself in the shoes of one of our clients, you know, they're where their brain is at a lot of times is building. And we've got issues with subs and architects and owners and constructability challenges, and a lot of their mind share and their leadership is applied to that problem. And then there's not a lot of people who are talking about this problem that you and I have embarked on. And I don't know if much of a conversation has been started globally about the sophistication of the problem. And then on top of this, a lot of companies and managers, even if they hire a lot, are not doing it at an extremely high pace where pattern recognition really gets to kick in. If somebody's hiring, let's say, five times a year, or even 10 times a year, right? They're encountering these people. And it's difficult to recognize the pattern of what's making this successful or what's not making this successful, because it's also easy to stumble into good hires. And that's a confusing thing, because why did this hire work out and why did this other hire not work out? And if you don't have the time that, you know, a recruiting or a hiring strategist might have to mull on this for years, it might be hard to pick out these patterns. And what I what I've recognized in myself, I I love analogies. So another analogy I like to use is it's like hiring a salmon to climb a tree. If I do that, it's not a it's not a failure on the part of the salmon to fail, to fail to climb the tree, right? It's my failure of recognizing the appropriate environment and and system the salmon is going to thrive in. And I what I should have done is hired a monkey, right? And the monkey's gonna climb the tree exceptionally well. But if hiring is a kind of a once-in-a-while thing, it's a little bit of a peripheral responsibility. And in the system of hiring, we're not collecting the data in a rigor, rigorous way. We're not collecting our individual reflections. We talk after the interview, we mix all of our feelings on the candidate together. We're not creating a surface area where we can do organizational pattern recognition. And then we're also not creating a system in which we are really capable of going back and reverse engineering a failure, a hiring failure. On top of this, we're human beings, we've got egos, failure's painful. And it's very easy for the candidate to be the focus of blame in a failed hire. It's very easy for somebody to say, if they're not aware of these other dynamics and dimensions, for them to say, well, the candidate wasn't who they said they were. And on some superficial surface level, that might be true. But the hiring authority may not recognize their responsibility to, in some sense, maybe know the candidate, get to know the candidate at a deeper level than the candidate may even know themselves. That's a lot of responsibility. And now we're taking leaders who are, once again, construction, but I think this fits for any industry, but leaders who are really focused on solving a problem for their customers and they've got a lot of complexity there. We're trying to pull them into this anthro anthropological world, this studying of the human beings involved, and it's time consuming. And so we're on a quest. I think you're on this quest as well, of like, how do we create systems that support leaders going through this process, developing the self-awareness organizationally, developing self-awareness individually as leaders for their team, for the problem, so that their ability to connect the right candidate into the right seat, you know, is a lot easier than it would be if they had to reverse engineer and create all these systems themselves from scratch.

Amy Dardis 36:51

You actually one other thing.

SPEAKER_01 36:52

Sorry.

Amy Dardis 36:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:53

No, go ahead. Recruiting is functionally, functionally broken. Where if we go back to the language of placements, a lot of recruiters don't understand this complexity either. And so the way recruiters have traditionally sold their services is like, hey, we're going to help you find this top 5% candidate. And the way in which candidates are sold or the way their recruiting is represented is not highly dimensional. And so we're selling, we should be the experts as recruiters on this topic, on this complexity. But instead, we're selling a simple solution to what is actually a very complicated problem. And it appeals to a leader's need to solve the problem quickly, solve the problem easily. And so it feels like spend money on a recruiter, get this candidate. Candidate's supposed to be gold plated, our problems go away. And unfortunately, it's not really solving the problem. And this is a little bit of a of a constant injury in the recruiting industry. We've damaged our reputation as an industry, and then I think have missed some fiduciary opportunities to protect the candidates and the clients that we serve in not helping everybody appreciate the potential sophistication of what it means to have fit, you know, between a company and a person.

Amy Dardis 38:07

How is this journey, like this self-awareness, not only of yourself, but also of the problem? What are some of the big shifts you guys have made organizationally now that more and more awareness around this is coming? Like what are you guys doing differently now?

SPEAKER_01 38:25

One is a hyper focus on what is the problem in the company, right? So a lot of times there's a job description that's written and we need a certain person, and here's the job description of the fire of that person. And that's that's well and good. Help me understand the problem that this person is going to fit into and what are the pinch points, what are the dynamics, what are the pain points? Because I think there's a often a little bit of that you can't read the label from inside the organization. And we need to be careful about taking for granted that the company has the role all figured out. So that discovery process is important. And then we do this PXT process with our clients to help them understand that they have a very specific personality profile in their leadership, in their organization, and that there are people that are highly skilled that will still not fit with their culture, their values, their performance expectations. And so we can help them, you know, elevate their understanding of what that fit that fit means. And then when we go out to the market, we're thinking much more in terms of enlistment than simple recruiting. Like it's one thing to go out and advertise a position and attract interest and persuade people to come to an interview. In some sense, that's that's pretty easy. What's not easy is saying, hey, here's the journey this company is on, here's the mission, here's the people who fit, here's the people who don't fit, and helping people filter in or filter out according to these deeper fundamental factors. And when you do that, I think enlistment is one of the sweetest things that we can do with a client for a candidate is really understanding what is this person embarking on? What journey are they embarking on with the firm? And that starts in the recruiting process. It continues through the interviewing process, it continues through the onboarding and integration process, which I like to say onboarding never really ends. Onboarding is a process of aligning people, organizations and leaders should never stop thinking about onboarding. They should never stop thinking about alignment within their team and their people, cultural inculcation. And the more we are thinking about how to enlist this person into our mission, into our goals, into our value system, into what we believe is good and right in how our business serves the world, serves people, solves problems for other people, the more risk we can manage through that through that.

Amy Dardis 40:50

Do you guys write job descriptions for your clients?

SPEAKER_01 40:53

Uh we like to start with their concept of the job description. And often what we do is we add through this discovery process, we find other important factors that we'll add. And we shift job descriptions from being focused on responsibilities to being focused on outcomes. And we're trying to align those outcomes to, you know, what is the experience this client is trying to give their customers? What are the particular problems and ways they solve those problems, and shifting the job description to being pretty explanatory to a potential candidate of not just what you will do, because at least in construction, once again, I suspect this is true of all industries, but what you do can sound very similar. It can be deceptively similar. A superintendent might schedule projects and work with subs and do layout and quality control. But the way they do that and the outcomes that they're supposed to be working towards are different across a number of different organizations. For example, how they would deal with conflict can be very different. Some firms are more assertive, more, some firms are more collaborative. And so every company has a wide array of values that they bring, usually that there's some core values. And the more we can identify what are those core values, what are the missions, how do we align this job description to those things? And then through the interview process, how do we collect data that we can analyze? We how can we analyze the fit of this person to this particular role and help them, by the way, interview themselves for the role. Candidates don't want to fail, right? So the more information that we can give them that helps them assess the fit, we're serving them and we're serving ourselves because a good outcome would be helping a candidate recognize that they're not a fit for the role, right? So much better to realize that now, that's a win than like you mentioned, six months down the road when they're just burned out on a problem that they're not really wired to solve.

Amy Dardis 42:48

Cause that ends up weighing on us when we get into something that we think is going to be good, and then it doesn't work out, whether there's drama or you just hate the work and you resign. And then you go and you find something else, and you go and you find something else, and then you have a five-year period of your life where you start to believe this lie that you're not good enough, or that work sucks, or people suck, or, you know, and it's because you keep going after the wrong things for the wrong reasons, but you don't actually recognize that it's the wrong things for the wrong reasons. And I do think that's the beauty of the hiring process as well, is being able to actually use that to help candidates become more self-aware so that even if they don't end up getting hired, it's still a win. And they walk away knowing that, or they're like, Yeah, they were so clear about that that I know that's not going to be a good fit for me. But they also helped me kind of recognize why. And hopefully that puts them on a better path towards something that they're actually going to enjoy and be good at.

SPEAKER_01 44:00

I really think it helps companies preserve their employment brand when they give a candidate this kind of experience, because instead of just saying, hey, you're not a fit for the role, we're going with someone else, which is it's a pretty normal process for a company, they can decide together and and it's less of, in a sense, a judgment or a condemnation of the candidate, which is often what it feels like. You know, it feels like, hey, you know, if we're just looking at it from a fit to the job, fit to skills standpoint, it's like you're not good enough. We're not going to hire you. And I think most of the time it's less of a question of whether or not they're good enough. And and, you know, does their configuration as very special, unique, valuable human being fit, you know, the demands and needs of this role? And we get to frame that in a, hey, I I really appreciate getting to know you. And here's where you're strong. And this role requires this. And honestly, I think this would hurt you to try to expect you to carry this burden, right? The reason jobs exist is because of burden and stress. And if we're not well aligned to that job, then that burden and the stress is just going to drain us. But, you know, when you're well aligned with the type of problem and you have good skills and abilities to solve that problem, there's incredible meaning and impact and joy that one can get from being the solution for this customer, for the team. And I think we can recover a lot of the meaningfulness and the fulfillment that we would like to get from our work. I mean, because think about it, like people spend eight to or more hours a day, you know, in a working week at work with people, solving problems. And so, you know, this shouldn't be regretted time. This shouldn't be dys dystopic. This should be work that we believe in, that we're we feel of a value to other human beings that we're well rewarded for. And everybody wants to matter, right? The human the human heart is filled with a an unquenchable desire to have meaning and to matter. And so what we're getting down to is finding roles for people where they can matter most. They can matter the best. And that's well aligned with everybody creating more abundance in the economy, creating more abundance for the individual, the recruiter, not the recruiter, the employee. I guess it would create more abundance for a recruiter if they're serving in this way, but more abundance for the company, you're producing better outcomes for customers. This is supporting the protection and improvement of the company's reputation. There's so many cascading benefits to getting fit right. And so, you know, I'm I'm on a journey. I think you're on this journey as well of helping leaders see that spending the time to work on these things is so valuable. It's like getting the foundation right, right? If the foundation's not level, building the consequential stories on top of that, maybe it's possible, but it's structurally flawed and it's really hard. It's really hard because all those, all those corners have to be cut at at odd angles. And, you know, at some point that the structure is in danger of toppling over. And I think sometimes we build these structures on uneven foundations and organizations become brittle and fragile because the organization is not ready for the rough seas ahead. It's fine on a good day, but you add a lot of stress and and turmoil, and you know, the wheels start coming off.

Amy Dardis 47:24

Right. And it is that, I mean, running a business is hard and there's always going to be external forces coming at us on any given day. But it is interesting to see that oftentimes the downfall of a business actually starts on the inside. It actually starts because of that lack of foundation or that solid structure. Because when those storms come, they don't have what it takes to stand up against it. And that ends up being the difference between why some companies last and they innovate and they adapt and they work through it because they had the trust, they had the people, they had the skill sets, they had that internal alignment in order to brave that storm well. To me, it's like it always ends up coming back to people and this idea that, yeah, we do spend so much of our time at work. That's a majority of our lifetime, even sometimes. And so why would we be willing to compromise that? Why would we be willing to settle for something that just feels like, ugh, like it's Monday again, here we go. You know, instead of being like, yeah, I enjoy what I do. And it doesn't mean every day is easy, it doesn't mean it's great, but it means that it's it's like you said, time well spent.

SPEAKER_01 48:44

I like that Victor Frankel quote that, you know, if a person's why is strong enough, they can endure anyhow. And Victor Frankel was this psychologist who survived the concentration camps, went through incredible suffering. And as a psychologist, he was observing who survived and who didn't. And he noted that the difference maker in the people who survived the turmoil and the trauma was those their will

Mission And Belief Drive Retention

SPEAKER_01 49:10

that was dependent on how strong their why was. And this is a good segue to jump over to the concept of mission. What do we all try and what are we all here to do together? And it's not just to make money. Money is a byproduct of a good business, a good economic engine that runs well, but it's not the point. The point is what do we believe about the world that the world needs, that customers deserve? What are we here to do together to create as a as a product, as an outcome that we're willing to sacrifice for, that we're willing to have power conversations for, that we're willing to work late for? And if that mission is clear enough and compelling enough, then organizations can create a lot of loyalty and and retention to that mission. But when you have organizations where let's say the mission was written by the marketing department and they're just telling customers what they want to hear, or maybe they don't have clear mission values, what ends up getting defaulted to is personal self-interest, which is largely around money. And so organizations who lack a clear cohesive mission, a clear concept of how they are a moral good for the world, how the world would be a worse place if they didn't exist, those organizations are going to have a hard time creating the kind of loyalty structures you can't pay someone enough to work in a meaningless environment. And so one of the most important things a leader can do is get real clear about what is our non-monetary reason for being here, for dealing with stress, for doing all this work together, what's the journey and quest that we're on? And when I'm hiring people, how am I enlisting people into this mission and this journey that I believe is worth sacrificing for? One thing I like to say is, you know, what do you believe so strongly that you're willing to be punished for that belief? Because whatever that is, that's your real mission. That's your real core values. Those are uncompromisable. And the more explicit we can make those in our organization, we can then translate those into the interview process. We can communicate clear expectations for the team of here's how you get promoted, here's how you get fired, here's how we cultivate and curate this special thing, this team that we have. And it's not just about retaining people, it's not just about paying people more. But then when you have clarity on this mission, can start to build structures of mission-aligned compensation where a project manager, let's say, who comes in and serves the mission particularly well is more valuable to the organization and deserves to be paid more than maybe a very experienced PM who doesn't. And this becomes a very clear lens for hiring, for promoting, for firing, for coaching, remediating, and takes out a lot of the commoditization of jobs. The more we see jobs as commodities and we're just competing on pay like a gallon of milk, the more we're missing the incredible complexity and beauty that is in the people and the organizations, and we're missing fit.

Amy Dardis 52:09

When you talk about belief, you actually I found this. You wrote it and you said, guided by the foundational philosophy that belief is everything. You've built your firm on the profound conviction that hiring is the most is arguably the most important responsibility of any leader, but about this foundational philosophy that belief is everything. What do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_01 52:35

We don't do things that we don't believe in, at least not long term. Like if you want to think about, you know, each of us is on this quest to build the life that we want, our ideal life, which is different for each human being. There's a set of beliefs about the world, about ourselves, about relationships, about work, beliefs we have about money, beliefs we have about service and product and impact and meaning. We have value systems. Maybe another way to say belief is value systems. And the more we understand our own value system, the more prepared we are to create the ecosystem that supports and is supported by that value system. And so I believe that that work intersects belief and even a moral sense of right and wrong in this value system. And an example of this in the extreme is, you know, there's a lot of rejection of this dystopic, corporate, faceless, mechanical, inhuman type of business that's become very large, very powerful, but is like grist mill for people. You know, they go in and they they invest their lives, their souls, their time into this business for 20 years, only to be laid off heartlessly in an email or a Zoom meeting. And this does not honor the God-endowed nobility of human beings. And we all feel that. We know that that is wrong. And so an organization does well to think about what do we really believe about people? And if we're pursuing money at the cost of everything else, then maybe we're willing to behave that way. But if we're not, if we see a higher calling than purely optimizing for profit, then perhaps how we go about interfacing with these people, building our company, building teams, building alignment, building loyalty, showing loyalty to our employees in the hard times is very different than this experience that millions of people all around the world, billions of people maybe have had, where they they've come to find out that they were they were treated well when they're important and they were treated as disposable when the company's interest shifted. And loyalty was not really loyalty, it was really convenience.

Amy Dardis 54:46

Yeah. It's taken me a long time to really come to this understanding of what we believe drives our actions. And so everything that we do, values, mission, purpose, how we behave, what we think is acceptable in a business, does come down to the leaders' beliefs in what they think about themselves, what they value. Instead of it being this marketing exercise or b it being this aspirational exercise of what's right, something that sounds good, it really is just a process of clarification because it's like you're not creating this, you're not coming up with this. You already believe something. And that something is driving what you do. So the question is, what are you believing that's driving these actions? And that's all there is to it. Unless you end up shifting your beliefs, which definitely happens. I think we we we change the way we think. We're transformed by the renewing of our mind, and that can change. But fundamentally, it still is going to come back to what do you believe? And so core values and mission and who we choose to hire, it it's not this foo foo buzzword type stuff. It's like you're doing it whether you recognize it or not. And it's not a branding exercise. It's just let's talk about what's really going on here. Let's talk about what's moving this ship forward.

SPEAKER_01 56:19

In another sense, you're right. It's not a branding exercise. But one thing I'll note is it is actually also a profound branding exercise, right? Because like Simon Sinek's famous for that start with why question, right? And what we're talking about in this mission is what's your why? Why are you building exquisite buildings? Why do you suffer for these things? Why do you absorb this stress? And organizations that have clear identity around their beliefs, around their mission also develop these brands that are so unique and so distinct that I do think they develop competitive advantages over people who are over organizations who are telling the market what it thinks it wants to hear, but hasn't soaked that those core values and that mission into their bones. And there's a lack of integrity in those types of organizations where it's really driven more by convenience, about the the quickest and easiest path to the money that they want to acquire, the customers they want to acquire. And that organizations with clear mission, vision, values end up realizing that they don't really have competitors. There's other companies out there that do similar types of work, but if you really boil it down, none of these companies function the same way, believe the same way, operate the same way, and that customers who are a fit for their mission, vision values shouldn't go to these other companies. And you can start ignoring competition on some level because you're you're defining, you're drawing a line, a clear line about who we are, maybe the type of customer we'll work we will work with, the type of employee we'll we'll work with. And then those we won't. And making a stand on those convictions creates a ton of internal clarity for navigating change, right? If you don't have that internal locus of control, it's easy to get blown around by the competitive wins and oh, this company's doing that, and we need to, you know, offer services over here. But it's all external locus of control, which from a leadership standpoint is very diffusing to the organization. It's very energy intensive. It diffuses the clarity of your brand internally and externally. And so I like, I love it when I find a leader who has really committed to a belief system and is willing to then filter aggressively based on that belief system and uh is not being driven around too much by those external factors.

Amy Dardis 58:43

Yeah. I've actually been guilty of that, which is honestly, it was that it was that guilt and that journey that actually led me to start the brand Clear Authentic Brands Today, because I have experienced that so immensely of being thrown and tossed by the wind of this trend and that trend and this. And this is when we were running our web agency. But it was like, well, what are these guys doing? Or what are these guys doing? Or how do we need to price? And we were constantly changing. And it was so demoralizing. And you do it year after year after year. And so we had 10 years of just back and forth. And I looked at that and I was just like, I am ashamed of that. I'm embarrassed by that. But also I have felt that rock bottom and realized that, okay, if I'm ever gonna figure this out, I have to know who I am? Like who, like, how am I wired? What do I believe? What do I stand for? What am I gonna fight for? And I need to be so grounded and so solid that when the temptations come, because they do, social media is everywhere. And it's like you can't open an app without being inundated with somebody else's opinion. And is that going to deter, you know, what you feel like you're called to? And that to me has been like a journey of being like, all right, what do I believe? What am I gonna stand for? And how do I do this clearly and authentically going forward? Because it does come back to this like identity piece, like this purpose and identity. And I'm seeing this in branding, I'm seeing it in leadership, I'm seeing it individuals and in hiring of at the end of the day, it's all people's purpose and people's identity and how it plays into their life, how it plays into a business, how it plays into how we lead. And that's where I've become just super focused and passionate on that.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:41

It's a wonderful journey. Who said that? That line, don't try to be someone else. That person's already taken. Yeah. Right. I might have butchered that a little bit, but but we're all our our unique person. And the more we try to conform into trying to be like someone else or organizationally trying to be like a different company, you know, we miss the opportunity to bring the unique power and values. And and the another cool to just tie this all back to like PXT and hiring is like the more self-awareness organizations and people have, the more we can create these incredible artistic, artisanal expressions of our work. Like if you look at the famous painters, you know, nobody's watching, none of the famous painters went and observed Michelangelo and then just painted like Michelangelo, right? The people who whose art has survived painted something extraordinarily unique to them, right? Monet's lilies, lilies, right? But here we are hundreds of years later, obsessing about lilies, paying extraordinary amounts of money for a painting of lilies. And if somebody would have said, like, no, no, no, dude, like you got your your target market all wrong. You shouldn't be painting lilies. This other person is painting and getting all sorts of money for this other, you know, they're painting horses or whatever. That is the cart leading the horse. That is the tail wagging the dog. And we got to figure out who we who we are, what our mission is, how we're gonna bring our unique selves and all of our power to the to the market, to each other, to

Interview Data, AI Tools, Closing

SPEAKER_01 1:02:10

serve each other, to create something unique for ourselves. And I think there's a lot of fulfillment in that.

Amy Dardis 1:02:14

Yeah, absolutely. So for you going forward, I mean, what what are you kind of focusing on right now? And what platforms and channels are you using to do that?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:26

I feel privileged to be coming to some of these realizations and having the opportunity to talk about them, like in this conversation, and to maybe benefit candidates and hiring authorities with some of the pattern recognition that we've come up with. And then also systems and processes like you have, right? We share so many insights and shared values, even though we've come at it from slightly different perspectives. That's a really cool gift that we have to bring this mission of like how do we promote durable relationships with meaningful work so that our candidates and our clients can live happier lives. And so I think AI is and AI and the way that we can collect data on interviewing has unlocked some really interesting ways of taking the data that we develop in interviews and recording it and developing cross-sectional views of looking at the data in multiple ways instead of having to write everything down or remember everything, which is frankly ludicrous. Now that we have some of the tools that we have, it's shocking to me how high consequence of decisions we've made with so little ability to reflect on the data. So we're deep in building a data set for each hire that the hiring team can reflect on. We're collecting individual impressions of the candidate of through the process. And we're helping hiring authorities to see before they mix all the ideas together into a soup, which is an important process, but after we've created individual impressions. And I think you've got a very similar process to this as well. I think creating that accountability and that clarity is incredibly valuable and then can also help us when we do have a hire go back. We now have all this data to go back to and learn, right? Because this is not something that this is not a problem that's going to be solved in a couple of hires. This is a journey that every organization is on, that every leader is on. And we need to be able to go back to this data, learn from it, and accelerate our ability to hire for alignment so that we're, you know, we're we're just mitigating our risk, mitigating our losses. The fewer failed hires we can have, the more our mission is going to succeed. It's better, I like to say it's better to not make the hire than to have a bad hire because it's just not worth it. The costs are too great.

Amy Dardis 1:04:39

100% agree. So you are, I mean, you're putting content out, right? You have a YouTube channel, you are talking about these ideas, trying to bring awareness to just thinking about hiring differently.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:54

Yeah. Hiring in 4K is a little tagline that we've got, right? So if you think about hiring in 360p, like an old black and white television versus 4K, right? We all want to watch the Super Bowl in 4K. Let's hire in 4K, right? Let's bring out this highly dimensional, good expectation setting, mission-driven hiring process that's honoring the people, the candidates that we're we're interfacing with. These people are coming and trying to trust their career with a leader and with a company. Let's honor that. Let's do the work to honor and take care of them, to maximize their economic value for themselves and for the organization and for customers and solving their problems. And let's let's do hiring so much better because I mean, if you look at the economic, the macroeconomic costs of bad hiring, I mean, GDP wise, what is that? $500 billion in the economy, a trillion dollars? I don't know exactly, but it's a big number. And so, you know, if if Amy and TJ and our work, we can have uh an impact on helping companies get better results, people get better results, you know, that's that's an impact I'll be proud. Of that's meaningful work that I'm trying to do.

Amy Dardis 1:06:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:02

That my employees will be happy to do.

Amy Dardis 1:06:04

Me too. Awesome. Okay. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. That's all for this episode, and we'll see you guys next time.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:15

Good chatting with you. Thank you, Amy.