A Podcast | Mark Murphy

Pete Neubig: Welcome back everybody. As promised, I actually have, uh, multi time author Mark Murphy and also CEO of Leadership IQ. Mark, thank you so much for being here today.

Mark Murphy: Pete, always a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

Pete Neubig: Now, Mark, you've written multiple books, but I want to focus on the one that's near and dear to my heart lately. The book that you wrote called, "Hiring for Attitude" has literally, I won't say changed my life, but it's changed the way that we have, you know, started interviewing folks and the way we actually hire folks. So, I want to talk a little bit about that. What made you decide to write that book?

Mark Murphy: So every book I write basically starts with a study. One form or another, and Hiring for Attitude started with I didn't set out to write this book specifically, we did this study where we tracked 5200-ish hiring managers, and all we did was track how many people they hired and what percent of those people worked out versus failed. So it was basically 46% of new hires failed within 18 months, 19% became high performers. And the rest were, you know, somewhere in the middle, like, you know, okay, performers. And so basically, you hired ten people, five are not going to work, three are going to be middle performers, two are going to be high performers. Now, we finished the study and I looked at it and said, okay, well, that's mildly interesting, but nothing super earth shattering. And because other people have done that study before. And so I looked and I said, what are we missing here? Like, this doesn't feel great. It doesn't feel earth shattering. And so then we let it sit for a couple of weeks, and then one day I got the idea. Wait a minute. I wonder why the new hires failed. And I kind of figured, like, what most people figured is that, you know, they probably just didn't have the skills to do the job. I said, well, I don't know that for certain. Let's go ask. So we went back to every manager who hired a failed hire. We just asked the question, why did this person fail? And that's kind of where the big Aha came from, because that's where we discovered that 89% of the hiring failures were the result of things like coachability and temperament and motivation and emotional intelligence. Basically, the soft, fuzzy attitudinal stuff. And that's kind of when we went, oh, okay, that needs to be the book. And that's what kind of prompted the whole dive into, all right. If we are really going to hire for attitude, what are the tools? What's the science about what works and what doesn't work? Given that this is a pretty big revelation and wasn't really again, what I totally expected to see. So that's what prompted me to write it was that, listen, everybody's getting this wrong. This is a pretty big universal problem right now. It's not that you don't need somebody with skills. Of course you need somebody with skills. But if they don't have the attitude on top of that or in addition to that, like, well, they're not going to work out. And that was the impetus.

Pete Neubig: So one of the things that I learned by reading your book was some common mistakes that people make. And, um, what are some of the mistakes? What are some of the common mistakes that people make when they're when they're trying to fill a position?

Mark Murphy: So, uh, they start at the high level and then down to the hyper tactical. So I'll start with a couple high level ones. The first thing is that not prioritizing the attitude. So one of the things that makes hires go wrong is number one, we hire often from a place of need, slash, desperation, which is I need a body.

Pete Neubig: Yes, yesterday.

Mark Murphy: Yesterday. And I need a button seat and I need it to happen now, as soon as that happens, we get desperate. It's not that dissimilar from you. Look at like an NFL team that doesn't have a quarterback. And it's like, oh my gosh, we got to get somebody with a pulse in here. And then you end up making terrible players. Basically same exact thing works in business when we're desperate. So we go in and the first thing that we set aside when we hire from a place of desperation is attitude, because that's where leaders say, I can coach this person. I can fix the attitude. And the truth is a no, you can't. And b you're not going to. There's no chance you're going to devote the necessary time to correct the attitude, if that were even theoretically possible, which nine times out of ten it's not. So that that would be one big one. Second thing that happens is kind of going along those same lines is that we get. So if you think about where attitude, if it falls in a hiring process, where it often falls, it often falls towards the very end. It's like the cherry on top. Okay, I'm going to get somebody who has all the skills. And then I'm now going to sort through attitudes. Now if you're serious about Hiring for Attitude you can make that work. Absolutely. But because so many people don't prioritize it in the first place, what ends up happening is they get wedded to the idea of this hire. They look at their skills, they look at their resume so instant, you know, thin slicing poof. We get an instant attachment to them. Then we interview them for skills and we go, oh yeah, they can totally do this job. And then by the time we get to attitudes, we're like, hey, you know, it'll be fine. I'm sure it'll work out. They, you know, look, they they used to work at XYZ company and I know that company, they're really good. So this person's got to be good. And so those are, you know at a very high level we're Hiring for Attitude where people kind of mess up. Hiring for Attitude is there. But then when we get into the hyper tactical side of it that just keeps cascading down. So on the list of things that people mess up when on the like, when they're actually doing interviews, for example, one would be they go in with their stock set of interview questions, the ones they've always asked, and they expect that they're somehow going to reveal attitudes from these interview questions. So tell me about yourself. What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? And if I go into an interview and I ask somebody, tell me about yourself. Well, I'm a I'm a motivated self-starter. I love individual accountability. But, you know, I also love working on teams. Wow, that sounds great. Uh, I don't suppose you have any weaknesses. Well, you know, I've been told sometimes in the past, I, uh, I care too much. Uh, you know, I can work too hard. I give too much of myself. And it's like, listen, if people actually answered questions like that honestly, yeah. Then they'd be great. Tell me about yourself. Well, you know, I. I drink too much. I got a bit of an anger problem, and I hit my last boss. Great. I'd say go nuts, but that's not how people answer those questions. Anybody with a pulse basically has a canned response to that interview question. So that's one major mistake as we dig even deeper into this and now really start to get into the science of it, another major mistake that people make, and this is universal. I see this with fortune 500 chief HR officers make this mistake. We ask if we do ask a good interview question, where we're actually now going to do something that reveals a person's attitude. You know, could you tell me about a time you made a mistake at work, for example, where I want to see, you know, did they learn anything, how did they respond, etc.? I'm if I'm a normal person, the typical mistake that gets made is I'm going to ask that question something like, could you tell me about a time you made a mistake at work and how you overcame that? Could you tell me about a mistake, time you made a mistake at work and how you learned and grew from that? And the most common mistake in interview questions, aside from asking the bad interview questions, is adding these 5 to 6 little words at the end of every interview question that makes it easier for the candidate, makes us feel a little warmer and happier, but utterly ruins our ability to learn anything about this candidate. For example, if you think of the world as kind of being broken into problem bringers and problem solvers. If you ask a problem bringer about a problem, they will tell you about the problem and then that's it. If you ask a problem solver about a problem, they will tell you about the problem. Yeah. But then they'll automatically, with no prompting ever necessary, tell you how they solved it. So if I ask, could you tell me about a time you made a mistake at work? A problem bringer is going to go. Yeah, it happened a few times in my last job, but that's because they didn't train me. Good. That's why I'm interviewing with you guys. It stunk over there, which is great. I mean, that's a terrible response. And you should not hire that person, but it's great because you just learned everything you need to know about that person. Whereas if you ask a problem bringer, a problem solver rather, could you tell me about a time you made a mistake? They're going to say, yeah, there was this project last week and I messed it up. But here's what I did wrong. But let me tell you what I did to fix it, and how I've learned something from it, and why I've never made that mistake since. Okay, well, now I've just revealed a lot more about this person's underlying attitude, kind of who they are really underneath it all. And so my basic rule is that your questions in an interview, if you're Hiring for Attitude, should feel almost awkwardly open ended. So could you tell me about a time you made a mistake at work? Notice how, like, there's this little lift at the end of that question in in music, they would call that being unresolved. And what it does is it builds up attention. So if you remember the old going a little off topic here, but if you remember the old Fox NFL, uh, NFL theme, uh, their theme song used to go "ba da da ba da da ba da dum ba dum dum ba dum dum ba dum dum bum bum bum bom bom." And it would hold. And it was like, oh, God, just finish the court. Just give me "ba dum, ba dum, ba dum ba ba." And they did that because when you leave it unresolved and it hangs there, it creates this tension where you need to fill the space. Now in an interview question, what we want to do is could you tell me about a time you made a mistake at work and now leave it for the candidate to fill in, and now they open up, but we kind of have to dare them with, I don't want to give away the right answer to my question. I want to leave it hanging because I need you to fill in all the really good stuff.

Pete Neubig: Now, when we talk about attitudes, I kind of equate that with like core values. And in your book you have basically you kind of broke it down to about 15 different attitudes and you of define them. And so from there you can easily, as a company, look and say, oh, which ones are the top 2 or 3 that really identify with my company, and all the stuff that we're talking about right now, it seems very subjective. What I love, what you did in your book, is you took the subjective of attitude, and you actually made it almost like a mathematical equation. So can we talk a little bit about, um, how what you look for in answers, like, I love the first person versus third person, maybe talk a little bit about that and then just talk a little bit about the scorecard, if you don't mind. So this way people who are listening to this be like, oh, there's actually a mathematical equation to attitude, which is just like just mind blowing to me because during my hiring process, core values attitude was like 25% of my of kind of like my, my decision making tree. But it was always like I just threw a dart at it. I think they have the right attitude or you know what I mean. And and I want it to be a bigger, bigger part of my hiring. I all the way when I owned my first company and now, of course, when I own VPM. So let's talk a little bit about that because I think that's brilliant of what you did. So talking about how how what what type of answers you're looking for and then your, your mathematical breakdown.

Mark Murphy: So one of the things we did when we were going through all the research is we actually started to take a look at candidate responses. And we did a little technical. We did a linguistic analysis on candidate responses because underlying this we're like, well there's got to be differences in how high performers talk versus how low performers talk. I mean, you can hear it when you're listening to an answer. I'm like, well, we got to be able to codify this and actually quantify what it is we're listening to. So a couple of things we found there were a lot, but I'll highlight a few. One is that when you ask somebody a question like a. Could you tell me about a time you made a mistake at work? Or could you tell me about a time you were asked to do something you didn't know how to do? A good question interview question is going to be asking about past situations, because that's going to be your best predictor. You could ask a hypothetical future looking situation, but and that can work for some skills. But it's a lousy predictor of attitude. It's terrible predictor of attitude. So if I'm asking you about a time in the past that tells me something out of the box, that probably the best answers are going to talk, the candidate's going to talk about themselves, and they're going to talk in the past tense. So one of the things we found is that literally, uh, high performer answers use a lot more first person pronouns and past tense verbs, so they are a lot more likely to say things like I did. I personally first person pronoun had a time in the past when I found the following, and here is what I did. So notice it's all I, me, we and then past tense verbs. Whereas a low performer is about 400% more likely to use um uh second person pronouns and present and future tense verbs. So they're more likely to say, well, you know, could you tell me about a time you made a mistake at work? Well, sure. When you have a mistake, when you make a mistake and everybody will, what you ought to do is blah, blah, blah. Or what I like to do when I make a mistake is I try and adopt this from an always learning mindset and I. Okay, sounds nice, but you did not actually answer my question. And if I'm listening to this answer, there's certain giveaways that instantly start to pop up. Like you, if I start to hear words like you or could, should, would, which are known as modal verbs and their auxiliary verbs, they basically imply uncertainty or possibility. So they are by definition telling you this person is not relaying a specific past event. They are telling you what could be. Well, I don't want to hire what could be. I want to hire because I know you have been able to recover from mistakes. I want to know that you have been able to service customers in a particular way, or display emotional intelligence or what have you. So there are things like that. We also found that low performers are a lot more likely to use adverbs in their answers, and a lot more likely to use absolutes. So words like never and always and impossible and unquestionably and every time. So, you know, I was always the smartest person in my department. I always did my work more thoroughly. Nobody else on the team was able to pick up the slack. I got stuck with way more difficult questions than anybody else did. It is just loaded with all of this black or white thinking. Not to mention its skews pretty negative. You know, there's a lot of negative emotion words in there. So as we go through this, you know, one of the things we teach and something, you know, is that once you get the hang of listening for these trigger words in candidates answers, you can instantly start to pick up, is this person answering my question? Are they actually hinting at some possible bad attitudes, some negativity, some blame drama, what have you just simply by listening to the way they speak? And it's one of the things about it that people tell me all the time after they've read the book and started using it is they go, you know what? I find that I am paying more attention to candidates responses now than I ever did before. And it's like, well, yeah, that's the thing, right? Is that I mean, listen, I'm as guilty of this as anybody else sitting through a meeting. And I'm like, you know, I'm half there. Uh, you know, it's catching me at the wrong time of day. I've already had three other. And I'm like, yeah, okay. And my mind's sort of wandering, or I get that narrative circuitry where I'm like, having a little conversation, like, what am I going to eat tonight? Do I have any wine left in the house? Am I going to have to run to the liquor store? Like, you know, whatever it is that's going through my head? And the problem is, when I start to fade like that, if I don't. And one of the reasons I fade is that if I don't have something specific to listen for, I. I'm not really there. I'm not really keying into what the candidates are saying. And that's why answers that sound good but say nothing are so they're so sneaky that people get by. They get hired all the time by giving fluff answers like that, because the interviewer really isn't paying that much attention. But one of the keys is that if you have a list of language and words that you're actually listening for It actually helps you stay awake more during the interview and be more present, because now it's like, oh, I got kind of a check for indicators. Yeah, yeah, I got something to do here. I'm I'm not just passively sitting here. Yeah it is. It's very much like a game like I, I'm going through like a little checklist and whether I have it in front of me or I'm doing it in my head, I'm like, ooh, yeah. Ooh, I got that. Ooh. That's something. Ooh. Oh, yeah. I bet nobody else noticed that before. And it's like, now I'm I'm half entertained doing this, but I'm also way more in the moment actually paying attention to this.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. Where do you come out on... And I think I know the answer, but I'll ask anyway. Uh, of recording your interviews and then having the interview transcribed, and then maybe thrown into a GPT of some sort.

Mark Murphy: Mhm. The short answer is everybody is far better able to discern the kinds of language and patterns I'm talking about when you see it written and you can go back and read something, reread something, then you are just poof doing it in the moment. So yeah, when you've got the opportunity to look at something again, I mean, it's, you know, I mean, we all learned this in school, right? It's like I may have if I faded out for half a minute in English class and I didn't catch. What was Hemingway talking about again? Okay, you know, where am I going to go now? I got to go read the whole book. Oh, and but if I, you know, blanked on what the teacher was saying, but if I have the transcript of what he or she was saying, I can go, oh, wait a minute, there it is. It's just so much easier because now it's like one less thing I have to retain in that moment. So it has been, um, something that is, you know, a powerful change that we didn't used to have ten years ago. Uh, I mean, if you think about it now, even if you're doing an interview, uh, yes, there are, you know, all sorts of, um, video interviewing systems. But even if you're doing interviewing over zoom, I mean, my gosh, the amount of AI and transcription and note taking that is built into the basest, most basic level of this platform, it's like, oh yeah, how could I even if I faded for 10s, I got what they said right there. Okay, now it's a lot easier for me to actually pick up on the nuance of this. There's like even less of an excuse nowadays, uh, for getting fooled by those answers than there used to be.

Pete Neubig: So one of the things that you talk about in your book is having, like, a scorecard. Uh, so, uh, talk a little bit about that and, and how that takes the subjectivity kind of out of it. I mean, obviously you have to look for the patterns and how they answer the questions. But then you have like this 0 to 7 kind of scorecard and like if it's a 0 or 1 like don't even, like that's a no. So talk a little bit about that.

Mark Murphy: So one of the things that this wasn't even something we discovered, but it was something when we were looking at how most interviewers handled their interviews, they would handle their interview, they'd bounce to the next interview. And maybe at the end of the day, they'd go back over their notes and they'd go, okay, you know, let me let me look at, uh, you know, how I what I thought about each of these candidates and it's like, well, that's not how people in note taking industries tend to operate. And we looked heavily at clinical psychologists and lawyers. And like a clinical psychologist, for example, they tend to do 50 minute hours. And the reason is that that last ten minutes is where they actually do their notes. And that's for two big reasons. The obvious one is so they don't forget. But the second reason is that because that's when you're going to be most accurate in what you're assessing and what you're writing down. If you wait till the end of the day, well, now, A, you're going to forget a lot of stuff, but B now you may have either accentuated bad stuff or glossed over it, and now what you're focusing on is kind of the overall gestalt of this person rather than the specific things they said. So one of the things we started to really push interviewers to do is don't do this like in a batch. At the end of the day, don't think you're going to get a glass of wine, put a game on, and now all of a sudden go through and take notes on the interviews you did, you know, eight hours ago. That's ridiculous. It's not going to be accurate. So if you take each of the attitudes for which you're trying to hire, as soon as the interview is done or even during the interview, if you're able to do it, you're going through and you're essentially evaluating this person on to what extent is this person a great fit or a terrible fit with our particular sets of attitudes? So we know what attitudes we're looking for. We know how they answered the question, whether they gave great answers or terrible answers. Okay, so we know this. And if we're going attitude by attitude by attitude, well now it starts to become a lot easier to go. That answer was fantastic. They were specific. They told me exactly what they learned from it, how they overcame this challenge. They were hyper detailed about everything or this was a total nonsense answer. They did not answer my question at all or they answered my question, but that answer was horrible. That was terrible. Whatever my evaluation is, I want to do this. And while there is still some subjectivity in that, you still have humans doing evaluations. It is a lot more objective because now we're actually rating the candidates kind of in real time, as close as we can get to in real time. And there's two caveats to this or two twists. One is that one of the big mistakes that people make is if they get somebody who is a terrible fit, if you don't mark this person, as you know, let's say you mark them as a one out of seven, like this is just a colossally bad fit. The classic mistake is I don't rate them as a one, and then they go back into the pile and I might forget about how bad they really were. As I get more desperate the longer this hiring process goes on, the more desperate I become, and now I'm more likely to loosen my standards a bit. Um, you know, to put this crassly, this is what happens at a bar. The difference between 8 p.m. and closing time. And that's what happens in a hiring process, is the longer this drags on, the more it's like, yeah, sure, whatever. And we don't know. We don't want to be in whatever mode we're talking about, selecting somebody who we are probably going to talk to more per day than we talk to our spouse. This is a pretty high stakes kind of thing. That's one. Second issue is that so if you give somebody with a one or a two, you know they need to be removed from the process. That's it. It's like a final if you if this is a deal breaker thing, if this is an important attitude for us and I find that you are just a terrible fit, you need to be out of consideration moving forward. That's one issue. The other issue then is let's say that I have multiple people in my company or on my team doing interviews. Okay. Well, how do I bring objectivity across these multiple people? Well, one thing I do is I take a couple of candidate responses. And, you know, you mentioned the having a transcript, for example, of a candidate response. One thing I would want to do is take one of those actual answers, a real life answer, and then have the three interviewers on my team, each of us rate this candidate and then come back together and discuss why we gave that rating.

Pete Neubig: And you found you found some really interesting answers. Right. Answers.

Mark Murphy: The the first time you do it, and I tell this for every client, I'm like, listen, I promise you, the first time you do this, you're going to get some people rating this person a six or a seven, and some are going to be rating this person a one or a two. You are going to be so far apart and it's going to be horrifying. But that's we want that to kind of shock ourselves into this. Like we are not remotely on the same page, but then you do it again, and then you do it again, and you do it a third time and a fourth time. And then what we find is, after you do this a couple of times, your gap starts to narrow until you get to. I always tell people that you're not going to get if you have a you know, I do this with large groups, for example, where there'll be like 50 hr recruiters in the room. Yeah, you're not going to get all 50 people to be at a three, but I can get you to where all 50 people are going to be within a point of each other. Like as long as we're in the same basic like, okay, we're in the 1 to 2 neighborhood or we're in the 5 to 6 neighborhood, okay, fine. That's as long as we can identify the deal breakers. And we know that, you know, this wasn't calamitous or this was pretty solid and maybe I would have liked, you know, two more sentences to turn it from a six to a seven. Okay, I can live with that. But if we're talking about across 40 people and you see this even across 2 or 3 people, we are not on the same page.

Pete Neubig: Not in alignment.

Mark Murphy: Yeah. We're not calibrated exactly. We're not aligned. And that's but it takes a couple of times through and then lo and behold, we will get there.

Pete Neubig: So Mark, any anybody who reads business books has heard the term "slow to hire, quick to fire."

Mark Murphy: Mhm.

Pete Neubig: With the Hiring for Attitude, is it almost like a little bit of a hack where I can hire maybe a little bit faster. Um, so where do you come out on the slow to hire thing?

Mark Murphy: So number one, if you are really doing a good job of assessing candidates, it doesn't need to be slow to hire. Now I like slow to hire. Metaphorically, in the sense that I don't want to make a, "I actually want to talk to this person. I want to do a robust interview, and I don't want to make a knee jerk decision." But in real life, if you're going after a real high performing candidate, most organizations they go through their hiring processes that are so inefficient they touch the candidate so many different times, they leave them hanging in silence for weeks at a time. Like, listen, you're going to lose really good people if you don't speed this up.

Pete Neubig: And people have what's called options, right?

Mark Murphy: Exactly. They're not sitting around waiting for an offer just from you because you're their magical best hire ever. And it's that's the thing that a lot of organizations mess up is if you are slow to hire, you are going to lose talent. So with Hiring for Attitude, one of the things if you're starting to use attitudinal questions to screen candidates, well, you're now able to wipe out candidates that are just going to be terrible fits quickly and move on to a pool of candidates that are all going to be acceptable. So one of the things that really messes up organizations is when they hire somebody that is a terrible fit or has a terrible attitude that does damage to the organization. But if you hired somebody whose attitude was a fit and their skills were good, maybe not the best ever, but, you know, acceptable, they're not doing any damage, and they're probably doing good because there are skills that maybe they don't have that exact skill, but those are things that you are probably pretty good at teaching them. So you eliminate the risk of doing damage, which allows you to speed this up drastically. Plus, if I am actually being honest in the interview like we talked about with the assessment, if I have a candidate and I'm giving them a one or a two on an attitude in our interview, like, okay, I don't need to do this again, I don't need to have another conversation with this person. I can churn through this a lot faster and get to the candidates where I know that they they are a fit. And now, you know, I don't need to spend all day. If I've got three candidates, all of them have the right attitudes and they each have a slightly different mix of skills. Cool. Great. I can make this a much faster decision. I don't need to spend two months, you know, debating this endlessly. I know that whichever one of these three I pick, I'm in good shape.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, the way I interpret the hire slow to me is just, I interpret it as red tape. How many little tasks can I give somebody that shows that they're interested. And if you give those tasks over like a two month time frame, you're going to lose just just about everybody. And so when we hire people for remote team members, for entry level jobs. So the skill set for us is the bar is not super high, right? We really want the attitude. That's why when I read your book and I got to meet you like it unlocked. Like just like the missing piece for us. Right. And so we asked them to take certifications, take a DISC test. We asked them to do a video profile, a self interview. We ask all that within like four days. And then we were interviewing people like literally day five. And we present candidates less than two weeks just like we get it done. Now if it takes them a long time to do that stuff, well that goes against them. And we actually have a, what do you call it like, you know, are they reliable or, you know, responsiveness? Responsiveness is one of our values that we look at. So, Mark, I can talk to you all day. As a matter of fact, I'm going to stop the lightning round and I'm going to talk to you and ask a couple more questions. And I'm going to go through and not do the lightning round with you because I don't get a chance to talk to published multi-authors all the time. So I had a couple more questions here for you. All right. I just mentioned, like, DISC, where do you come out on is personality profile... To me the attitude is the right person in the organization and then the DISC or, you know, predictive index, whatever you want to call it, your personality profile is the right fit in the job? Would you still recommend doing a personality profiling or with the attitude you don't need it anymore, where do you come out on that?

Mark Murphy: So I have a client organizations that, uh, fall on both sides of that, that some will look at it and say, yeah, we don't really need it doesn't really matter. Other organizations look at it and they their basic approach is that it's one more piece of data. And if we know, for example, that, um, everybody who succeeds in this role tends to have, you know, maybe their high D or low EI or whatever it is that they're looking at in this particular job. Okay, then that's an interesting point of data. And that may tell us something. But if we find that, for example, we're looking at a job and, you know, if we did a disk on every single person in this role, in this department and they are all over the board and there's no consistency there, there's nothing, you know, there's no great insight about, oh, you know, are they D's eyes? Whatever. Well, now it's probably not going to be a big deal from a hiring point of view, but it could be useful information that we can bring into onboarding if we do hire them. So it's always going to be, you know, wherever you put it in the process. If you do it in the hiring process, as I said, you know, for some organizations it's a useful bit of information to have. It's pretty easy to get, uh, it's, you know, it's a low cost of time and effort to gather that data. It's another piece of data. And even if it's not helpful to you in the hiring process, because there's just no pattern of the people that are already in the job. Well, again, now you got one more piece of data that you could give to the manager after this person gets hired and go, yeah, here's some insight about this person that may be useful for you to know in getting to know them and getting to work with them. So it's like, listen, and any data is going to be good data. And especially for something like the personality test these days, it doesn't it's easy to get that information. So, you know, my approach generally is use it, don't use it. But it's good data to have and you can use it at some point in the process.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, it served me well for the last 20 years. I'm a big fan of it. And, uh, you know, one of the things I do is I look at every job role that we have and I then determine what personality profile that job role is, and then I try to match it. And at VPM, you can actually create and take a free DISC test. And you can actually see any candidate. You can see what their DISC is. So it's pretty cool. Alright. So, last topic I want to touch on here before I let you go. And one thing that I was laughing when I was reading your book was when you talk about job descriptions and I'm like, oh my God, totally my job descriptions. So just talk a little bit about, you know, the job descriptions and what you've seen and, and, and some of the things that you recommend on, on making your job description pop out.

Mark Murphy: So one of the big things we discovered, and this was, uh, we were doing this before ChatGPT. So we would have to do this and, you know, statistical software. So it's much harder to do than it is nowadays. But we started looking at job roles, job descriptions and job ads for the same job, but across multiple companies. And what you would find over and over again is they were using the same words. This is a organization based in such and such, and we have a highly collaborative team, and we are seeking for motivated self-starters. And uh, we like to work together. And this is a great opportunity to learn and grow your career. And it was like the same clichéd phrases over and over and over again. Um, one of the tests I always encourage people to do is literally take your job ad um, and then two or 3 or 4 of your competitors who are, you know, hiring for the same positions you're hiring for. Put them all into ChatGPT and go run me a similarity analysis. Tell me how much my job ads sound like our competitors job ads. And as I said, you know, we used to have to do this with like, you know, SAS and SPSS and you know, very, you know, $10,000 statistical programs. Now it's like I just, you know, 20 bucks a month, throw it into GPT and call it a day. Uh, but you know, it will you can start to get absolute similarity analyses. And what you find is that there is nothing in our job ad that speaks to how we're different, how we're unique, why we're a special place, what unique advantages we offer. And the thing is that if you think about this from a high performer point of view, the question is like, why would they leave their current job to come work for us. If there's nothing different or special about us, if we sound the same as everybody else, why would a high performer quit their current job and come join us? And, you know, it's interesting. Um, if you really strip it down, uh, hr and you know where the HR side of things and I mean, HR and like little H, little R. So human resources generally personnel staffing, recruiting whatever versus sales and marketing, they are usually not the best of friends. But the truth is when you're hiring, especially when you're talking about recruiting, less so with interviewing. But with recruiting, um, we are really talking about this is a marketing job. This is I've got to make ourselves appealing to candidates. Otherwise, what am I getting? I mean, a great marketing pitch is going to say, here's why we're really special. But if this isn't for you, don't fill out the lead form and waste our time. Like they're not going to say it that blatantly, but that's in effect what a good advertisement is going to do. You know, when Apple runs an ad, what they are inherently saying is this is why we're awesome. But also, if this isn't for you, man, don't waste our time and a great job ad will say something similar, you know? Are you frustrated working at an organization where you're just bogged down by red tape every day? Come work here because we have fixed that problem and we let high performers do the stuff that they were put on earth to do. Now, if you're not comfortable working in a super free flowing, proactive entrepreneurial environment like that, this probably isn't the right place for you. And that's cool. But if you are that person, you should totally apply. And what's something like that starts to say is, okay, this place is truly unique. They believe this stuff and it will appeal strongly to the right kind of people. And then it will actually chase away some of the wrong people. And I get, you know, organizations will say to me regularly, well, Mark, we're going to not have as many applications.

Pete Neubig: Good.

Mark Murphy: Yeah, that's the point. You have limited people to evaluate and do interviews. What, are you trying to make their lives worse? No, I don't want to. This isn't a numbers game in the sense that I get points or I get paid for. You know, how many bad applications can I get to fill out my ZipRecruiter ad? No, I don't I don't get points for that. I get points for being able to have the right candidate. So if I can get the right candidate and only interview five people versus having to slog through 50. Yay me! Because now I'm more efficient. I'm more effective. Like, I would much rather only have to talk to five people to find the perfect person than I would slog through 50 to find the perfect person. So, you know, that's a but again.

Pete Neubig: A great example is, uh, you know, we're property managers at a listening to this, right? And, uh, when early on in my career, when I had a vacancy, I would write bad credit, okay. No credit. Okay. And I would get, you know, hundred people, phone making calls. And guess what? They all have bad credit, no credit. And the one person that was good, I had to sift through a hundred people to get to the one person I should have just said, you need good credit. You, you know, you need credit. And I would have got four phone calls and I'd have been able to pick one person. So is this the same kind of concept? Right.

Mark Murphy: And and even more ironic is that in a case like that, who was it? Uh, W.C. Fields said, I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member. It's like, you know, when you say bad credit, no credit. The person with good credit is like.

Pete Neubig: I'm not going to reply. I'm not going to. Yeah, I'm not going to apply to that thing.

Mark Murphy: I don't want to go to that place. I don't want to go to a bad credit place. I want to go to only a good credit place.

Pete Neubig: Right. That's right.

Mark Murphy: High performers, when they see a job ad that's like, you know, basically implying that we're no different than anybody else. The high performers like, why would I want to go there? That doesn't sound cool.

Pete Neubig: Mark, thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate it. It's, not often you get to read a book that changes your business, your life, and then you get to meet the author and have a nice long conversation with them. So I really do appreciate you being here. If anybody's interested in learning more, or where can they buy your books and learning more about Leadership IQ, how to get in touch with you or where do they go?

Mark Murphy: So LeadershipIQ.com is a good place to start. And of course you can get Hiring for Attitude anywhere. You know, Amazon, Barnes and Noble wherever your preferred book vendor is. Uh, most of the world these days seems to be Amazon. Um. But yeah.

Pete Neubig: Talk a little bit about Leadership IQ, what you guys do over there.

Mark Murphy: So we are essentially we take all of the research that we do and we turn it into training and consulting. So our job is like in the case of Hiring for Attitude. We help organizations actually assess their culture, build the interview questions, build the answer keys for them. There's even a turnkey system for smaller organizations that are like, I need someplace to get started. Give me the interview questions we need to ask. Give me the attitudes I need to pick from. So, you know, depending on the size of the organization, all of these different training programs are designed to make it to kind of fit whatever size and urgency of company we're talking about.

Pete Neubig: Awesome, man. Knocked it out the park. Appreciate you. If you are listening to this and you are not a NARPM member, shame on you. Go to NARPM, narpm.org. Or call the good folks at (800) 782-3452. And I'm trying to read that off of my word doc and I gotta be honest with you, I need my glasses on. And then if you are interested in remote team member or you're too busy to hire and you want us to do it for you. We actually have a Gold Glove service. We are clients of Leadership IQ, Mark. We're literally putting into all of Mark's learnings from the book. Sorry, all of his teachings from the book we're putting into place. And, if you want us to help you with your next remote team member, go to VPMsolutions.com or email me, Pete@VPMSolutions.com. Mark, thanks so much for being here.

Mark Murphy: Thanks, Pete, I appreciate it.