Hiring Trusted Talent with AJ Bruno of QuotaPath
Hire Power Radio Show
English - June 21, 2020 06:43 - 18 minutes - 16.6 MB - ★★★★★ - 53 ratingsEntrepreneurship Business Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Why you need to hire trusted talent to build and scale your startup. Referrals are still the strongest way to stack the deck with talent for your organization. But you cannot shortcut the interview process. Just because a person worked well in another organization does not mean they will be successful at yours. Diligence in gathering evidence of value, growth and cultural alignment must be gathered to avoid making a bad hire.
Our guest today: AJ Bruno, CEO & Co-founder of QuotaPath.
AJ leads the QuotaPath team as CEO & Co-Founder. Prior to QuotaPath, AJ spent 6 years at TrendKite, the company he founded and was president of in Austin Texas. At TrendKite, AJ led the go-to-market and sales strategy/execution and took that team from initial product inception through $20+ million ARR and 250+ employees. TrendKite was acquired by the public company Cision for $225 million in January 2019.
AJ is religious about vetting and hiring talent and has made over 300 hires in his career
Today we discuss
Why trusted talent is the best option to build and scale your startup.
What to do when you don't have a strong network
The steps to take to hire through referrals:
Why is hiring “trusted talent” the best route
Look into your own network of people you have previously worked with or go to a trusted source to help build the team you need to take you to the next level.
Why is this important
Avoid running into bad hires
How do we do it?
Reverse engineer your network
Looking for trust and loyalty
A lot of back channeling (connect with at least 5 people)
If you know the person?
He needs to justify why for both parties
In the Interview process
Disqualification questions- do you know who Elon Musk is?
Tie questions to the importance of the role
Rick’s Nuggets
Knock out questions
Provide a growth path to avoid a transactional experience
Key Takeaways:
Backchannel with at least 3 references if the hire is very strategic (the first hire in their position or respective position)
Create a consistent process (with knockout questions or frameworks) if it will be a hire you will make multiple times (sales reps).
Ensure that the person is sold on working with you and learning from you as much as possible if it is a strategic hire.