Hiring for Keeps, with Art Boulay.

Drew McLellan:

If you’re going to take the risk of running an agency, shouldn’t you get the benefits too? Welcome to Build a Better Agency, where we show you how to build an agency that can scale and grow with better clients, invest in employees, and best of all, more money to the bottom line. Bringing his 25 plus years of expertise as both an agency owner and agency consultant to you, please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Hey, everybody. Drew McLellan here with you, again, with another episode of Build a Better Agency. I am really excited about today’s topic because if there is one thing that all agencies have in common, it is their reliance on their employees. For agencies, that is our greatest asset, our biggest costs factor, and oftentimes our greatest source of frustration. We’re going to dig into that today.

As you know, this podcast is all about helping small to midsize agency owners run their businesses better, make it more profitable, make it more fun. I know all too well because I walked the path with you, the risks that we all take as agency owners. I want to help you mitigate those risks and maximize the rewards that can come with agency ownership and that’s what this is all about. No better guest to join us and talk to us about how to do that than my friend Art Boulay.

Art is the owner of Strategic Talent Management and he helps leaders fully realize their own talent and the talents of their employees. What I love about Art is that when he works with agency owners or other business owners, he’s very practical. He gives you great ideas. He’s got a great sense of humor to help you sort of get over the bumps. He really has some common sense solutions for helping us either hire better employees or better fit employees, or make the employees that we have an even stronger, better fit. With that, I want to welcome Art to the show. Thanks Art for joining us.

Art Boulay:

Well, Drew, thanks for the invitation. This will be fun. Always good to talk to you.

Drew McLellan:

It will be fun. Art has been a partner of Agency Management Institute for quite a long time. Many, many years ago, Art decided and I think this was brilliant, and has really served a lot of agency owners well, he decided to profiles sort of the best of the best in many agency positions. We can sort of create an ideal profile to test against prospects for his clients. In other words, if I wanted to hire an AE, Art’s got a model for, we took sort of the top 15, 20, 30 AEs and we tested them, and we found some commonalities in all of them, both in terms of how they work and why they work and what motivates them.

Then, Art can lay your candidate against that profile and sort of tell you where they match up and where they don’t. I will also tell you, and Art, I’ve told you this before, my agency has used Art in several cases. Sometimes, I was smart enough to follow Art’s advice and other times, quite honestly, I thought I was smarter than Art, which always proved to be an expensive mistake on my part. I can speak from personal experience that that Art’s work is on the money. I know many other AMI agency owners are shaking their head and nodding saying, “Yup,” that they too have had the same experience.

Art, I want to talk a little bit about sort of how you came to be doing this kind of work and sort of your background and the kind of work you do day in and day out. Just tell us a little more about you and your company and the work that you do.

Art Boulay:

Sure. One thing I’d say is it’s not that very hard to be smarter than Art, but it’s the assessments that it’s tough to outsmart. I’ll give credit to where credit is due.

Drew McLellan:

Fair enough.

Art Boulay:

But we, my background was in business. I had a 10-year run in the IT field where I became a manager and I was, IT in those days was kind of new and exciting. There was a lot of people like me in the business who didn’t have Computer Science degrees because they hadn’t invented those yet.

As I became a supervisor and team leader, then I moved into management, I really discovered that’s what I enjoyed and went to a lot of conferences and read a lot of books and really tried to wrap my head around this whole issue of leadership and management, which was new to me but I realized from the beginning and even in my technical field, it was the people who made a difference and yet, because I was in a technical field, most of the courses and development opportunities existed in the more technical areas, how to be technically better IT shop.

I really preach that today as I developed my own business in ’91. I brought this idea with me. It was really about the people. As we accumulated these assessment tools that I use today, which is so important to the core to what I do today, the things we measure are the soft skills, the people skills, communication, relationships, how people’s attitudes about their work or about working in teams or about doing good work or being planners or organizers. It’s that kind of thing that makes the difference.

I’m assuming anybody listening, who’s run an agency, built an agency over the years, they know how to pick out that AE that you’re using as your example earlier. They know the skills to look for, the education to look for. They might even have a test or something they can run a candidate through to better determine their technical skills but we all know from experiences, it’s attitudes that make a huge difference.

Can they communicate? Do they bring a relationship attitude toward their work or are they just, the consummate technician who cannot communicate with team members and clients and so forth? That’s what we really focus on today is the people side of the equation are the soft skills.

Drew McLellan:

Some people have some kind of an aversion against assessments. I don’t know if they think they want to trust their gut. I think most agency owners are terrible at hiring in terms of interviewing. We break all the rules. We talk too much. We don’t ask the same questions every time. We sort of end up deciding to hire someone that we like, rather than somebody who might actually be good at the job. Talk to us a little bit about the value of an assessment and specifically the assessments that you use, because I know there’s a bazillion out there.

Art Boulay:

Sure. What I’m very clear about is, I know there’s a lot of very small agency owners out there who run an agency of six or eight people. They might be thinking, “Well, who needs an assessment? I’ve got six great people. I’ve known them for years. I’ve worked with them in various places, maybe I was their customer or vice versa in past situations.

To those people, I will say you are exactly correct. You have the world’s greatest hiring system. In fact, all your systems in your business are working very well because it’s a smaller organization. The four or five or six of you can sit down around a table and quickly come up with new ideas, set a new direction in a bigger company that might be called strategic planning but you can do it almost without really thinking about it. When you go to hire somebody, you’ve got three or four people around you, you trust totally, you’ve each got a Rolodex, and you’ve got four or five people that you trust totally, you bring them in, and they work very well for you.

The key is, for when your agency gets to, I always say the teenth employee, whether it’s the 13th or the 15th of the 17th, we start to run out of Rolodex. We’ve hired all of our friends and close colleagues or the ones we’d like to hire are gainfully employed elsewhere. For the first time, we stick an ad out there on LinkedIn or the current internet job board, or what have you and suddenly, we find our hiring process breaks down. Well, it didn’t exactly break down. It’s just, it ran out of steam and you didn’t have a formal process. What the assessments and better interviewing and all those things represent is a formalization of a system to replace what always worked around here when we were very small. That’s really what I’m representing.

When you think about it too, and I just had this happen to one of your members, we’re just starting to work together and I got an email from him the other day and he said, “You’re exactly right in your assessment of that individual.” He said, “I think we get to the point where we really want to see what we want to see. We were kind of hungry for a new employee. We got a big contract on the table. We really got to make this work quick. The next person that comes in here with a decent resume, the right education, the right technical skills, maybe in our subconscious mind, we overlook some of the weaknesses we’re picking up in the interview or even after we hire them. We’re making excuses because we really want this to work.”

I think those biases are our biggest challenge is that the assessments, they don’t often tell you something that’s a complete shock. Like this gentleman, he recognized that the assessment had accurately labeled this person’s key fault. He sort of knew it. The problem was, he hadn’t really dealt with it or admitted it to himself and taking the appropriate action, which is probably should have never hired the person.

The assessment is usually, I talked about it as more of a validator to confirm some of the things you knew about but didn’t want to admit or you sort of knew but couldn’t quite put your finger on what the problem was.

Drew McLellan:

Well, I think oftentimes, agency owners wait so long to hire. They wait until they’re so desperate for an employee, that that desperation sort of shows up in the hiring process.

Art Boulay:

Yeah, and I’ve been there too. I mean, we really got to fill this position. We really want the next person walking in to work out. One of the things I always remind people is your own staff or maybe even these friends of yours that are in your Rolodex, you know all their faults because you’ve worked with them for years. The new person walking in has no faults.

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Art Boulay:

You’ve never seen them make a mistake. They’ve never blown a pitch to a new client. They’ve never upset one of your best clients. They come in with this aura of perfection and then when you add to that, I’m a little bit desperate. I really want this to work. Lo and behold, we end up hiring them.

Drew McLellan:

Yes.

Art Boulay:

I mean, it’s a human nature thing. That’s why I say an objective world class instrument that can really describe for you in plain black and white objective language how this person thinks they’re at the basic attitudes and beliefs that can be very helpful in making the final determination, should I actually hire them for this job, maybe a different job or maybe let my competitor hire them and suffer the consequences?

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, yeah. I think one of the things that you do that I find interesting and insightful is that when you’re helping an agency owner assess a potential employee, one of the first things you do is you also test the agency owner.

Art Boulay:

Yeah.

Drew McLellan:

Talk to us a little bit about that.

Art Boulay:

Well, it comes out of the, I used to be in IT. It was drilled into our head, you had to have a plan. You just couldn’t put a bunch of coders to work and say, “Okay, start writing code,” you needed a plan. One of the key things we do in that planning phase, among other things, like what are we trying to accomplish for business, and especially if it’s a new client, I need them to educate me as to their vision for the future and so forth but when it comes down to the assessments and individual hire, I don’t know, I only know the generic AMI agency. I’ve dealt with a lot of them.

I mean, there’s certain things I can expect. I know basically what you’re doing but the fact is, you’re all different. I mean, those people that meet with you in their groups, I mean, they recognize similarities but they also know there’s differences and they can learn from that. I need to measure that precisely. What we do is we use the assessments to assess typically the owner, maybe their spouse, if they’re working in the business, there’s always one or two highly valued people. I always tell them pick somebody who really, really deeply knows your business and what you’re trying to accomplish.

When we put those two, three, four people together in a larger agency, maybe it’s half a dozen people or 10 people but when I do those assessments, a lot is going to happen as a result. Number one, I always tell my client or my new client, you’ll see these assessments and first of all, you get an idea of what they can tell you and when you see assessments of yourself and people you know very well, you’re going to have as good an idea of anybody on this planet if that instrument is accurate.

They get a sense of what we are doing but it also gives me a picture of what makes that agency unique. There is often some small factor that comes out of the 93 different specific factors we measure. There’s often something or some combination of factors that pops up as kind of a unique identifier for this particular agency. That becomes a key piece of my work because that’s part of your culture that you’re not necessarily going to pick up or be able to quantify in any other way.

As you said, at the beginning of this interview, when we actually bring in a candidate and do that candidate’s assessment, now I can bounce it off this, what I call a cultural assessment. I’m looking for, not a perfect match, but I’m looking for somebody who’s at least complementary to this unique set of characteristics that makes agency A different from the other agencies around them. In this way, we can be reasonably certain that we find somebody who fits who will kind of hit the ground running because they get it. They understand what you’re doing and how you think right off the bat because we’ve purposely picked somebody who fits that mold.

Drew McLellan:

Well, what I love about your assessments, it’s not really about finding the right fill in the blank AE art director, whatever, but it’s really finding the right AE art director for you and your agency or you and your business because I know you work with folks other than agencies as well but it really is about the sort of the matchmaking aspect of it that I think really elevates the work you do sort of to a different level, because as every agency owner knows, it’s not that hard to find someone with the right skills but it is difficult to find someone with the right skills, the right sort of client service attitude regardless of what role they play in the agency and someone who fits into the culture. That’s a trickier combination.

Art Boulay:

It is tricky. We use words like fit. We use words like culture. We use a word like attitude. Generally, when we’re using those, what we’re saying is, I know this can’t be measured. I know it’s not very accurate. I’m just going to use this tagline to describe this kind of fuzzy area that we all tripped over as people who hire employees.

The point is, we can actually measure those things. The key is, as I tell, especially a new client, I could run this on a candidate and I can measure the candidate very accurately but again, I need to have some idea, I call it a benchmark, or a cultural standard, whatever language you want to use, but I need that target so that I can say, “Okay, this is what makes Drew’s agency unique among all those agencies.”

Now, when I run this assessment on an individual, I can actually say, “There is a match or a reasonably close match,” or sometimes we can say, “This is maybe not a great match and there may be some very good business reasons you want to hire this individual but at the very least, when you bring them aboard, you’re going to have my report that will help you understand there will be some issues, and they’re going to be in these areas. If you can work around those, build around those, talk those through, maybe even do a little development on a new person, you can make this a successful hire.” Sometimes it’s a matter of taking the mystery out of it and making sure there’s no surprises when Art Boulay shows up and isn’t exactly what you were hoping for.

Drew McLellan:

Right. Well, and then I think about the conversations we’ve had where, I think for a lot of agency owners, there’s such relief after you hire someone but unfortunately, agencies are horrible at onboarding clients or new employees and getting them sort of up to speed and feeling comfortable. I joke around when I teach the workshops that typically our training process is, “Hey, it’s nice to meet you. Let me give you a quick tour and introduce you to everybody. Here’s where the supplies are. Oh, by the way, you have a client meeting at 10:00.” Talk to us a little bit about what owners should be doing after the hire.

Art Boulay:

Well, that’s a great point and I have a whole flow I call for hire to retire and a key part of it is the onboarding process because it is important. I’ve accumulated different facts and articles about onboarding over the years, but most of them will tell you that about a third of your new employees will be lost in the first 30 days. Very often we find that it’s not because of any single dramatic point of failure. It’s typically an accumulation of small things that, “Oh, well, the hiring contract didn’t quite get implemented the way I expected,” or some aspect we talked about didn’t quite get delivered upon or I hear this a lot too, the owner or my boss is so busy, they really haven’t had time to work with me as I was hoping.

One of the most important things I recommend to people is put your expectations both from the new hire’s point of view and the hiring person’s point of view. Put your expectations out there in plain English. It shouldn’t be a six-page document but several bullets, five, seven things at the top, what are the expectations for this position?

Again, if both parties do that and they have something specific to pay attention to in those most critical first days, 30 days at the very least, I usually like to say the first 90 days, keep a regular conversation going about these expectations because as I say, it’s not often that there’s a major breakdown but if two or three or four of the expectations I had as a new employee are not being met, or that you had as a new employer aren’t being met, there’s going to be accumulating dissatisfaction on both sides.

If it gets to a certain point, again, the employee is brand new to your company, they don’t know the history, they’re only going from what they’re experiencing in those first few weeks and the idea begins to creep in their head, I made a bad decision. I shouldn’t have taken this job. I should have taken the other job. Maybe even the employers having a similar thought, have that conversation right off the bat, keep it going in the early days about expectations. If something’s going a bit off the rails, you deal with it.

You can at least talk about it. You can apologize, whatever it takes but basically, the onboarding process is the opportunity for both parties to say, “Hey, I’m getting to know you. It’s looking even better than it did when I first read your job ad and talk to you in the interview. I really want this to work,” but if you don’t jump on that early, you never get the opportunity and slowly but surely, the relationship breaks down and quite often ends badly. It typically ends before that, in that 30 to 60-day window.

Drew McLellan:

Well, and I think agency owners for a while certainly right after the recession sort of had the luxury of, A, hiring anybody they wanted because there was a ton of talent out there, and B, they were a little laissez faire about their attitudes about employees because they were sort of a dime a dozen for a period of time but now, the pendulum has swung and agencies are struggling to find good employees. They’re competing against other agencies and they’re having…

Art Boulay:

Right.

Drew McLellan:

… up the ante money wise and I think this is particularly a problem when you’re hiring millennials, who have a very different attitude about longevity and their career in terms of how long they’re going to stay somewhere. They’re much more likely to bail if it doesn’t feel good. Everything you’re saying is even more critical today than probably it ever has been for agency owners to …

Art Boulay:

Absolutely.

Drew McLellan:

… be mindful of. Why don’t we do this better, Art? I mean, for agencies, it’s such a critical factor if our agency is successful or not, or if we make money. Help me understand. I certainly have fallen into this as well, help me understand why agency owners are so bad at hiring.

Art Boulay:

Well, I don’t think it’s just agency owners. There’s some agency owners out there that are very good at it. My wife, for example, is very good at hiring people. She has a good intuition. She reads people very well. Those skills are wonderful when it comes to hiring. I’ll be honest with you, I’m not as good as my wife is. I’ve always marveled at how effective she is at screening employees and picking out excellent people.

I think a lot of us are more like me. It doesn’t come naturally. We don’t have that kind of sixth sense or we have biases that get in the way. I don’t mean big ism type biases, but just little subtle things that get in the way of our judgment. That Canada who kind of looks like somebody we worked with one time that we didn’t like or didn’t get along with somehow various subtly, we cast them in a do not hire category or it’s a good friend of ours, we’ve known them for years, and we have a little bias to make a job for them.

It’s these biases, I think, that we have to be aware of. The assessment is just simply one tool that you can plug in, you can add to your process. That’s a key thing. I don’t let anybody think, well, somehow we can just replace interviews and all kinds of hiring devices with Art’s assessments, because it’s so accurate but we add the assessment in to counteract that bias that we all bring to the table. We may or may not be that aware of those biases. It isn’t that your agency owners are such bad hiring people. Drew, shame on you…

Drew McLellan:

Oh, we’re all terrible.

Art Boulay:

… but we all bring those biases to the table.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Maybe the question is why are humans bad at hiring? There you go.

Art Boulay:

Well, that’s kind of what I’m getting at too.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Well, back to your story about the guy who has sort of said, “Hey, I guess I’m seeing what I want to see,” I think one of the things the assessment does is it forces you to sort of acknowledge that sort of nudging you might have had in the back of your head or in your gut about something that candidate said or didn’t say, but you don’t really want to see it but the assessment sort of demands that you at least acknowledge that there’s something there.

Art Boulay:

Well, I’ll give you a perfect example and again, it happened with one of your members just over the weekend here, is that I had assess core team. We’re in that getting to know you phase. I’d asked to assess the four or five core people around the owner. There’s this one individual that I felt, if I just saw this as a hiring applicant, frankly, the owner would have never seen them because I would have just considered that a huge red flag and may or may not have even phoned interview them because it was that dramatic.

But I’m looking at them and thinking, “Well, this person has been an employee for three or four years, I believe it was, and the assessments are not infallible. I don’t pretend that they are. I was cautious on how I worded it but the point I made was that this person is rather full of themselves and the consequence of that is they don’t see, they kind of have arrived. There’s no need to work at this anymore or study or grow. It puts a little bit of damper on their energy and drive. I could see that very clearly in the assessment.

Again, the fact was that they’d been an employee for several years. My client thought enough of them to consider them a top player and somebody he depended on. Who was I to say, “Oh, no, you’re completely wrong. Your judgment of four years in the making is completely wrong.” Well, when I sent the report through, that’s the message I get back is, you know what, this is absolutely accurate. I have kind of been overlooking at for all this time but you’re right, this is not going to work because this person is rather full of themselves and everything you’re saying as a consequence, is actually coming true. I’ve been trying to see them as somebody who could move up to the next level.

That issue of ego is a tough one to discern sometimes, because I’ll get the pushback from a client quite often all, “No, I disagree.” I simply say they have their self-confidence. I’m saying, “There’s a fine line between self-confidence and over the top or ego-driven or self-absorbed. I’m saying they’re a little more on the self-absorbed side, which is dangerous but that’s a perfect example of even setting aside our biases and setting aside this is what we’d like to see in the person.

Sometimes we like to make excuses for people in the interview and say, “Well, maybe they didn’t come across well because they’re nervous,” or “Maybe they’re coming across as a little bit self-centered because they’re trying to make a good impression and they’re simply good salespeople.

That’s what I want out there in the public but that is another area where we fail, I think, in the interview process, particularly, as I said earlier, people like myself, who may not pick up on these cues perfectly well, we may have a few biases in our brain floating around is that we make excuses.

One of my number one interview tips for people is do not make excuses. Do not press forward when you see anything that doesn’t look right, dig deeper, be skeptical, assume the worst. If you assume the worst, and you say, “Well, maybe it’s ego and maybe they got too much ego. We’ll push on that and if it turns out, you’re wrong, Well, then you’ve just proven to your satisfaction, that they are, in fact, self-confident. You don’t have to be worried about an overly built up ego but if you never conduct that test, you never push, you never be a little bit skeptical. You may miss what was a clear red flag in the interview and you could have avoided hiring the wrong person to start with.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, that gets us to a great point. The assessments are dandy, but a key component in hiring obviously is the interview process.

Art Boulay:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Drew McLellan:

I know you have some best practice tips around that. Can you just walk us through, how can we be better interviewers? Because I think we struggle with that. It’s one of those things. You don’t learn that in college. You don’t usually learn that in your job as you’re moving up the food chain and voila, of a sudden you’re an agency owner, and you’re hiring people, so you end up just having a conversation with folks, which is interesting, but it may not be as helpful as we would want it to be?

Art Boulay:

Well, there’s a couple of ways to approach that. One, would be from a point of view of the job itself and one phrase I like to use is, let the job speak for itself. You mentioned the conversation. I think you mentioned this right up front is that many times, agency owners, owners of all stripes, they talk too much in the interview. I think partly they talk too much in the interview because they haven’t really planned out the interview. What am I going to ask?

What I suggest is, number one, keep the talking to a minimum. You should only talk about 10% of the time. To do that, you need very good kind of open questions where the person can talk for five or six minutes on a 10-second question. One set of questions has to be built around the job. When I work with a client and we’ve spent the time I’ve already discussed setting a benchmark for this job, say an AE, for example, the benchmark might be around more of a and by the way, there’s different flavors depending on my clients I have found over the years.

Let’s say one flavor of an AE is much more of a customer service person as opposed to sales. If that’s true with your agency, and you know that and you’re comfortable with that benchmark, then we need to tune your questions around the benchmark factors that we’ve already agreed are accurately describe this new position.

Again, let the position speak for itself. Ask questions that will reveal a person’s attitudes, feelings, beliefs, strategies, whatever they are, around the factors core to that job. Ask them in such a way that you, again, you can ask a short question and get a lengthy, rambling answer from the individual so you can really get deeply in there about how they really think about these core factors that we’ve already established, describe that job or benchmark, the ideal candidate for that job.

The next thing I recommend is always press forward. Don’t be satisfied with one answer especially in your business. I mean, think about it. We’re interviewing people who are experts in marketing and selling and branding and all those sorts of things. They know all the correct words. They know all the right phrases. If they’ve been around at all, then they’re pretty smart about these things. In other words, they can paint a pretty good story. I always assume the first cut of my question is going to get a really good answer.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Right.

Art Boulay:

[crosstalk 00:34:13].

Drew McLellan:

They’re salespeople, regardless of their job, they’re good at sort of spinning things.

Art Boulay:

Oh, that’s right. I mean, if I was hiring you to be my new marketing director, I mean, you know all the things I’m looking for. You would play to that and use all the right words. I always discount how wonderful that first response came. I always have a followup. This is again, where the planning comes in, is I’ll ask a hypothetical question like how would you deal with this particular client, this particular situation or this particular job opportunity, whatever it is digging into. Then, I will be prepared with at least a couple of follow up questions.

A good follow up question is to take something with the candidate just told me and turn that back into a question. For example, if I say, “Well, I’m very good at handling clients who have feels they have limited budgets. I can do a deal with that very well.” Okay, well, there’s a perfect example. Let’s just say this hypothetical I had just painted for you a moment ago, let’s say they did come back at you and said, “Gee, we’ve got half the budget that you’re talking about, so what can you do for me?”

By pressing forward a couple of times, what you’re doing is increasing the stress of that interview. You may think, “What kind,” of stress it’s just an interview. That’s the point. If you’re pressing forward, building a little bit of stress, taking away props and ideas that this person is relying on to make their first initial clean statement in the interview. But if you’re increasing the stress on the interviewer, you’re getting a sense of how they’re actually going to handle a real life situation.

If they can’t handle the stress very well in a simple interview, what on Earth are they going to do in a real life meeting with a real life client, where their job is on the line or the productivity of the agency is on the line? You’re going to get some real insight but you got to plan the question and you have got to follow up with a couple of hard hitting or not hard hitting questions so much as questions that dig deeper, that press deeper, when you suspect that something they don’t they’re not handling very well, or they’ve kind of glossed over, ask them to explain it.

The third thing I would recommend is don’t always pay so much attention to the words people give you back. Pay as much attention to their emotional state, that their nervousness, their comfort level, because this gives you a sense, again, of what’s really going on emotionally with them and at the stress level. Again, if somebody is being very, very nervous, again, do not, going back to something I said earlier, don’t make an excuse for them, press forward and find out well, where is the stress coming from? Why are they nervous? Again, if they can’t handle this stress level in an interview, what on Earth are they going to do in front of an actual client? I always say, plan the questions, dig deeper, and pay close attention to, as close attention to emotions as you pay attention to words.

Drew McLellan:

When you’re listening for those emotions, I want to follow up on the third bullet point you just gave us, when you’re listening for emotions and they look nervous or anxious and you say follow up, give me an example of how I would do that. If I’m the one being interviewed, and you get a sense that I’m anxious or I’m uptight about something you just asked me, how do you probe on that emotion rather than the topic we were just talking about?

Art Boulay:

Well, we get to it through the topic. For example, let’s say it is about money and I noticed [inaudible 00:38:17] every time I’ve talked to you, every time the word money comes up, or billing the client or chasing that delinquent account or anything like that, if it has to do with money, I’ve noticed consistently, there’s some nerves or apprehension or anxiety that’s starting to emerge in the interview.

By the way, as an aside, this is one reason I recommend that you always interview with a couple of your closest colleagues or advisors. I mean, they could bring you in, Drew, or they could call in one of their trusted employees to conduct the interview with them. I always say the person asking the question should pay attention to the words and the flow of the interview. The person not asking the question, should be charged with tracking the emotional state than the body language of the interviewee so that literally we have two people tracking the entire breadth of the interview.

Again, if I found it was every time money comes up, I see that you get a little bit nervous and you’re going to be in some key account position for me and I need you to be comfortable with money and comfortable with collecting money or billing or stating a price and sticking to your guns or whatever, then I need to ask a deeper probing question around money and I might even bring up the world’s most difficult situation when the bill isn’t getting paid or that something, a very difficult topic around the financial side that I suspect is bothering you somehow.

If I see the nervous only get worse as I probed, and that’s going to confirm to me this person is not comfortable with this topic. Now, you don’t have to be a psychologist, you don’t have to nail it 100%, but if this is a topic of interest, and I’m being nervous about it, or I’m not handling it, well, it’s not going to get better as an employee dealing with a real situation. When you start to track that nervousness equates with these kinds of questions and you’re still not exactly sure, I always say don’t leave the interview until you’re absolutely sure.

Ask another question. Ask a probing question, dig deeper. If it your turns out you’re wrong, and the person actually handles it fairly well. Then, you could say, well, maybe that was nerves in the interview or something else but if you have really exhausted the line of questioning, then you can be certain that you have the answer to your question.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Great. Great. All of this has been really helpful as I knew it would be. I want to sort of wind us down towards the end of the podcast. As you know, I’m all about action. I want people to be able to do something with all of this. I want to give you two different scenarios. Then, I’d like you to give us two or three things that the folks listening to the podcast could do immediately to sort of elevate the way either they work with their existing employees or new hires.

Let me give you this scenario. The first one is, if someone has an intact team and they are not in the process right now of hiring, but they want to improve the skill levels, the leadership levels, the connection their employees have with the agency, their commitment they have with the agency, in other words, they want to just elevate their employees to maybe a different level, what are two or three things they can do inside of their shop to do that?

Then, the second scenario, is if someone who’s listening is in the process of either thinking about hiring, or maybe starting to run an ad, or starting some interviews, what are two or three things they can do that will make that outcome better?

Art Boulay:

Okay, well, let me start with the last one because I think that’s a fairly easy one to deal with. I mentioned early on part of the planning process, whether I’m doing a recruiting assignment or I’m just assessing somebody for potential promotion, or whatever it is, I always have to do or I always feel the need to do that cultural assessment of the core team.

Putting the ad together is a perfect example of how central that process is to the entire endeavor that we’re about to undertake because it isn’t that we do this, take the time and effort to do a cultural assessment and then just we use it for, I don’t know, one, whatever Art’s mysterious purposes are. It creates a benchmark, and then we set it aside and never look at it again, that actually, that information becomes central to everything we do. One of the most critical things you do at the beginning of a recruiting or hiring effort of any kind, is putting an ad out there.

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Art Boulay:

Your listeners are expert at marketing and they understand the power of words and the power of a keyword to capture attention and that’s exactly what we use the assessment for, is to make sure that our ad is as appealing as possible to our target audience and is displeasing as possible to folks that we really don’t want to apply.

For example, we’ve been using the account executive right along as an example, and I said earlier, in a hypothetical or typical agency, I find that they have one of two flavors, being a slightly heavier on sales or the slightly heavier on service. Let’s say we’re talking about an agency, their AE’s are really service delivery people. They take care of their accounts. They help the people they’re responsible for. They’re very much a more of a customer-oriented profile. In that case, I would use all those words: customers, helpful, listening, doing things for, any kind, any words in the ad that would help give paint a picture, I’m really looking for a customer-oriented person.

Now, a person who’s looking that thinks, “I’m a fantastic salesperson. I could sell the proverbial refrigerators to Eskimos, I’m going to apply for that job.” When that pure salesperson reads it, the advertisement that’s full of words like helping and customer service, and supporting and listening, when they read those things, their stomach starts to churn. They don’t like those words, and they’re thinking to themselves, “I don’t want that job.”

That’s one very clear way we can take your assessment, your cultural profile, where we have identified what’s unique about your agency, and maybe not as overtly as I’ve just given in this example but subtly, we’ve been key words and thoughts and attitudes that we want somebody to read and get excited about. Again, somebody else to read and say, “I’m not going to waste my time applying for that job” because I always caution my clients, “When you follow my advice or use us for recruiting, we don’t get the 200 applicants that you might through your monster.com advertisement.”

In fact, I look at that as a failure because we’re getting 200 applicants, either we were in a wonderful position to hire people, which as you said earlier just isn’t the case these days or that I’ve made the ad so generic, everybody reading it thinks they can do this job.

The other point, when you say you want to take an existing team, you want to up their game, you want to up the game of the team in terms of communication or leadership, creativity, or whatever it is, the I guess the first thing that comes to mind is because I know in a lot of agencies, the average age is of the employees is considerably lower than your and my age Drew.

Drew McLellan:

Sadly true.

Art Boulay:

I mean, we’re often talking about people that they have a lot of energy, they have a lot of creativity to just wonderful people. They might not have that much experience or knowledge but age is not. and this is one of those biases, age is not a good indicator of knowledge and skill and capability. We sometimes think it is but again, the assessments can help dispel that myth.

I’ve got as many people that are even older than we are, who have tons of energy and drive and creativity. I would recommend I’m in a heartbeat and I’ve got as many young people who have either no energy or their egos are so overblown that they’re not going to fit well as most of my clients’ agencies.

If we’re looking to up the game, that’s the kind of information I need to hear on the planning side. You can do this at home too but be clear about what are your business objectives? Where is your agency going to be in 5 or 10 years? What are you trying to accomplish? Is there some new client you’re targeting or a new industry you’re targeting, and you really need to have a different mindset on your team.

If we hire somebody, they might not be technically in a leadership or management role but going to, they may be playing a critical role of this important new client we’re bringing on or something like that. What you’re really saying is I need to hire a leader, somebody who’s a fantastic communicator, somebody who can easily build relationships, both inside my team, an agency and outside my agency with potential clients. You need leadership capabilities. This gets right to the heart of my entire presentation, which is what you’re really saying is I’ve got to put a lot of thought into the soft skills I’m hiring.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely.

Art Boulay:

It’s less important if they’ve got 22 years of experience as can they communicate? Can they paint a picture that whether the young people of my team or the people in my agency who just haven’t been challenged enough with the last couple of clients, is this new person capable of getting that point across, making their addressing these subtle shifts we’re trying to accomplish and really getting their point through, not just through their own efforts, but the way they communicate and the way they relate to people.

The way they approach their work, what they consider important, what they consider less important, all from a soft skills or people skills point of view, that’s where you really need to focus your attention, especially if you’re looking to change the direction of your team or their internal attitudes and drivers.

Drew McLellan:

Okay. That was awesome. Go ahead.

Art Boulay:

No, I was just going to say, I just find leadership, a lot of our assessments are keyed or one of them in particular is keyed to a particular role. I quite often will run the appropriate Suite of Assessments for the role the person has. I’ll also ask them to do this leadership profile.

The reason I do that is exactly for the reasons I just gave. A leader, as you note, it could be somebody on your reception desk. It could be the top person in your agency, but somebody with good leadership capability, no matter what their age or their role is somebody that I want on a team.

Drew McLellan:

Well, and in a small to mid-sized agency, you sort of need everybody to step up and take a leadership role…

Art Boulay:

Exactly.

Drew McLellan:

Because, most owners very much want to be a hands off leader in terms of I don’t have to give everybody direction every day. I want you to go and do what you need to do. Oftentimes, you’re asking 27, 28, 30-year-olds to lead a team or a client somewhere. You’re right, that’s a skill that every position benefits from in an agency, the size we’re talking about.

Art Boulay:

Yeah.

Drew McLellan:

This was awesome, Art. Any final thoughts or something you think agency owners need to hear as we wrap up?

Art Boulay:

Yeah, one of the, again, it’s a simple enough tool and they probably heard it before, but it’s worth repeating, I mentioned it earlier in terms of setting up expectations for new hire but that’s just as important for your existing team. Performance management is key. Again, if you’re very small, and you’re thinking, Well, I know all these people. They’re all very capable of independence, so forth, this is less important but as you grow, as you start to bring on that 13th, 14th, 15th 20th person, you begin to realize I need a system here. Use that system of expectations, and discussing the expectations as a a key part of your performance management process.

One of my favorite ways to approach this is we can use the assessments to pick out some of those areas that need work but you don’t really even need the assessment to start this process. I often recommend sitting down with a key person and coming up and you probably know what these are, but work with them to come up with specific challenges that they have.

Then, break those challenges down not so much into we’re going to go from a challenge into goal setting. For example, maybe they have a little bit of challenge around communication, or relationships, or they’re just out of a habit, or they’re just struggling a little bit when it comes to that aspect of their roles. They’re not performing quite at the leader level that you’d really like them to but it’s awfully difficult to go from a challenge like that right into goal setting. I like to break those down into obstacles. What’s preventing them from being a powerful communicator or powerful relationship builder, if you can identify two or three obstacles, then you start to look at those obstacles and say, “What can I do to improve that? Work around that obstacle or defeat that obstacle.

Now, you’re starting to identify particular goals or action items that could be plugged right into a performance management system. That’s a pretty reliable way to do it. The key, of course, is once you have identified these challenges, obstacles and action items, is then to have regular meetings and I’d say with existing staff, at the beginning, it wouldn’t hurt to meet with them weekly but after a fashion, maybe bi-weekly to literally go through this list, talk about how they’ve improved, things are still struggling with that you can help them address, but keep a focus on those challenges.

If they’re working hard at it and you’re following up with them and supporting them, you will see progress and let’s face it, if we all made progress on our biggest three challenges, we’d be 20, 30, 50% more effective in our jobs and that’s why that technique works so well.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely. Could not agree with you more. This has been awesome. Thank you very much. I knew you would bring it in a big way and you have, so I appreciate your time. If people want to reach out to you, if they want to learn more about the work that you do with agencies, what’s the easiest way for them to track you down?

Art Boulay:

Well, they can go to our newly redesigned website, whose graphics and attractiveness I had zero to do with because that’s not my thing but they can learn a lot there. There’s actually some good resources on the website. And they can find that at strategictalentmanagement.com and we’ve made it a little bit easier. You can abbreviate management with MGMT, so strategictalentmgmt.com.

Drew McLellan:

Awesome. They can also reach-

Art Boulay:

Take a look and-

Drew McLellan:

They can reach out to you there for email and all of that sort of stuff, right?

Art Boulay:

Yes.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Art Boulay:

Absolutely.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. The website looks great and there are all kinds of good resources. This is an area that we can all get at. Again, I know you’re crazy busy helping people find and keep the best employees. I appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today. Thank you very much.

Art Boulay:

Well, Drew, it’s been a pleasure as always.

Drew McLellan:

We will talk soon. That’s all for this episode of Build a Better Agency. Be sure to visit agency management institute.com. To learn more about our workshops and other ways we serve small to mid-sized agencies. While you’re there, sign up for our E-newsletter, grab our free ebook and check out the blog. Growing up bigger, better agency that makes more money, attracts bigger clients, and doesn’t consume your life is possible here on Build a Better Agency.