Jim: You've tuned into iWork4Him, the Voice of Collaboration for the Faith and Work Movement.

Martha: We are your host, Jim and Martha Brangenberg, and our mission is to inspire every workplace believer to recognize their workplace as their ministry place, where they work with God every day. What can that look like in your workplace? Well, let's find out right now.

Jim: You know, as believers, many of us are leaders who are hiring people to fill positions. How do we hire the right people every time? Seems like the most elusive question on the planet. You can't really hire the right people all the time, can you?

Well, probably not, but you can give yourself a first rate chance, can't you? It's amazing that hiring within most organizations is treated like a necessary evil instead of an incredible opportunity to help organizations grow and flourish, at the same time blessing a new hire with a new family. Think of all the detail that Jesus went through to hire the 12 disciples.

I mean, one hire went bad and the other 11 transformed the world. Will your next hire do that? Bob Spence is my mentor, a friend, and on our iWork4Him Board of Directors. Bob is an expert in hiring and has written an incredible book on hiring that I literally could not put down. And I don't say that lightly. Written as a story, Bob's latest book is an incredible resource that every person who needs to hire someone must read today. Bob Spence, it's not your first time, so welcome back to iWork4Him.

Bob Spence: Thanks, Jim. Thanks, Martha. Glad to be back.

Jim: You know, it's funny, Bob. The first time you were on iWork4Him, you were a guest of our guest host, Ross Harrop, when you were serving as a chair for Convene. Over the last 10 years, Bob, what's God had you up to?

Bob Spence: It's interesting. I moved to Florida not just for the good weather. But I also moved here,

Jim: but mostly for the good weather. . (laughing)

Bob Spence: I moved here for Convene, but it didn't work out, so I'm not with Convene. But over the last 10 years since then, God has put me in a position to write this book, and the book is about hiring and it also is about your faith. And also, during those years, I've been working on men's ministry at the church and things like that. So, he's kept me going forward, and as my grandmother said, he's kept me happy in the Lord.

Martha: Mm. I love that. And while you've been happy in the Lord, you have also had hiring as really one of your, a forte for you for decades. Where did you get all of your hiring experience?

Bob Spence: Believe it or not, in the public schools, and it wasn't as a student in the public schools, but I was a high school principal and was hiring teachers. I didn't know what to do. And so I met a gentleman by the name of Ken Cardinal, and he was superintendent of the Kent, Ohio schools. And I expressed to him my concerns and he introduced me to a group in Lincoln, Nebraska that had a teacher perceiver interview. So I learned that and then I stayed in touch with Ken over the years and he taught me hiring is simple, Bob.

It's a discovery process. And he mentored me throughout and then he eventually sold me his structured interviews that I had helped write some of them with him. And as I thought about that discovery process, in fact, that's the subtitle of the book, a discovery process. And if you take time to discover everything you can about a candidate before you make the offer, you're going to be a lot happier. But most companies don't do that.

Martha: How many, how many people do you think you've hired over the years, Bob?

Bob Spence: Personally, my own business is like 25. But helping clients hire, I've helped hire over 300 key executives. I've done over 6, 000 interviews. I quit counting at 6, 000 because it got to the point it was ridiculous.

Jim: That's awesome. We've done almost 6, 000 interviews over 12 years. Bob references his book. Here's the book, A Game Plan for Hiring the Right People, Game Plan for Hiring the Right People: the Power of a Discovery Process. Now, Bob, this book- I love this book. The Choosing Winner System, that's your, I call it your patented approach, but it's your copyrighted, trademarked approach to hiring.

But you didn't just write a book on blah, blah, blah, hire, do this, blah, blah, blah, hire, do that. You wrote a story that put the system into action in a book form. And I loved that. I mean, literally, I've been mad at you since I read this last year because you didn't kill off the antagonist, Brandon, in his, in his car wreck. I mean, I just, I was disappointed because he was so mean. Well, it's just fiction, so it's okay.

But I mean, what made you decide to put this in story form? I mean, it totally communicates the method, but what made you decide to make it intriguing?

Bob Spence: Believe it or not. I've written this book twice before . Both times when I finished each one, I actually finished them, and when I finished them, I started reading them and thinking, I wouldn't want to read this. This is just like every other interview book on the market. They're all the same, listed, regurgitated, listed, regurgitated. And I thought, there's got to be a better way. I was reading some of Patrick Lencioni's work. And he writes in a business fable fashion, which this book is, it's a business fable. And so I thought I could do that with my system.

And so I created this fictional company with a fictional leadership team. And in the book, they go through hiring a new director of ops and you get to experience the system on how to do it. At the same time, it's a story. And like Jim referenced, there is an antagonist in there , and no, I did not kill Brandon off.

Jim: But you should have, but you should have, Hey, we're going to talk a lot more about this book and about hiring and really how this should impact us. I mean, as believers, how we hire people causes our business to flourish, our organizations to flourish. And those people we hire to flourish, not to mention all the people around us. We're going to be right back with more of Bob Spence. Hang on. More from iWork4Him right around the corner.

 

 

 

Jim: Hey, welcome back to iWork4Him as we're talking today with Bob Spence about his book A game plan for hiring the right people all the time. Well, he doesn't say that, right? The power of the discovery process. But listen, you know, this is a show about living our faith at work, and, Bob, , we get into I want to do a mention here for about something else, but before we do that, how does hiring in your mind connect your faith to your work?

Bob Spence: You know, years ago I was working with a company that you may have heard of n- In N Out Burger.

Jim: We ate there one time in Arizona. (chuckles)

Bob Spence: Okay. Anyway, at the time, Rich Snyder, who passed away, but Rich was the president and he had me training all his people how to hire. And at one point he asked me to help him hire a CFO and then he said to me, make sure you teach us how to hire only Christians.

I said, well, Rich, one, there'd be some legal issues with that, but I don't worry about legal issues. But why don't you just hire the best one available, who's competent, can get things done, and then share your faith with them and maybe they'll decide to come to the Lord? You know, if you have a hiring only Christians, you're not gonna have a chance to witness to anybody.

And so with hiring, what I've taught people to do is identify the values that you need to have in an employee in your organization. And they can be Christian values. You're not going to be in any legal trouble unless you say you got to be a Christian, and then you have a problem. But if you identify the values and you interview people and you interview the right way, they'll share their values and they'll be genuine and honest about it. And you can build an organization.

I've got a client out in Iowa that they hire and they don't worry about the person's faith, but they are all people of faith, and when the person comes in, all of a sudden they realize, Oh, he's starting a meeting with a prayer. Hmm. Well, he's a private company, so he can do that.

I think that's the key to it is, and in the book, you'll have a chance to read where the members of the leadership team, the ladies on the team are part of a prayer and squares group at their church. And the president, the CEO of the company, he always begins the meeting with a prayer in the book. And then when they have problems, they gather for prayer and it's all woven through the idea of hiring. So I hope that answers that.

Jim: And isn't the guy that's, you know, owner of the business, isn't he also on the iWork4Him board of directors?

Bob Spence: Yes. Yes.

Jim: I love that. I love that. I love that. All right.

Martha: Real life stuff.

Jim: I hate to correct my mentor, but if you are an organization of under 15 people, you actually can discriminate and only hire Christian people and tell people you are only hiring Christian people.

And if you're a nonprofit organization, then in your statement says that you're only going to hire Christian people, you can do that. But I recommend no matter what, if you're running a business, to hire nonbelievers, because how in the world are you going to get a chance to reach them for Christ? Like Bob said.

All right. Speaking of books, as you're hiring people for their next career, they may be people listening that are planning to end their paid career and focusing on retirement. At iRetire4Him, we say if you're not dead, you're not done. Do you want to hear more about this next chapter of your calling? Because if you've got a pulse, you've got a purpose.

Order one copy of iRetire4Him for 50 bucks and we'll send you a pack of 10 to share with your peers. It's a game changer. Just send me an email so we could ship it direct to you. Jim at iWork4Hiim.com and Martha will have that link and the show notes.

Martha: For sure. So Bob, your approach to hiring someone is very different. Do you think our culture is ready for your approach?

Bob Spence: Only if they want to be successful.

Martha: Oh, well, that's, that's a good response. (Jim laughing) That's how much Bob believes in this process, right?

Bob Spence: I've just seen so many positive results, like out of that 300 plus key leaders I've helped hire, the average tenure of those people has been 7, 8 years, which is really high, actually. And also, out of those over 300, only one got fired. And so we know it works. It works because you involve everybody in the organization that's connected to that hire. And it works because you're using a value based approach. What are the values? It works because you take time to put them through several interviews to come up with the right hire.

Jim: You said involve everyone who's actually going to be directly involved with that hire. So you're saying, so let's just say I'm coming in as a CFO. Normally I get interviewed by the CEO and maybe the COO, but you're saying I'm going to get interviewed by maybe my assistant? Or maybe my managers or VP level people? I mean, so people that are going to report to me are going to interview me as well?

Bob Spence: Yes. And what we do is we set up interview day and in the example you just gave - good example, by the way- the CEO would do a one to one interview, about 75 minutes long. Their leadership team would do a 75 minute interview, and the future direct reports would do the same thing.

And then they gather at the end of the day to talk and compare. Plus, we have, every candidate has a host for the day. I used to call this my James Bond technique, because the host learns more because they're with the person for the tour at the first part of the day. They spend every break with them, they take them to lunch, and the team members at the end of the day turn to the host and say, tell us about the person you hosted. They have so much information, it's unbelievable.

Martha: You know, I love your approach because I, I don't think enough people put weight in the fact that when you're making a commitment, both to work for an organization and the organization hiring somebody, it's a really big deal. You know, you're expecting results, you're expecting a good, you know, the culture to translate all of those things.

And a lot of times it's like a half hour, an hour, whatever. And I know you're doing higher level, but I think that the emphasis you put on the time that you spend with that person is so incredibly important. Okay, so let's talk about before you ever start advertising for a position you recommend that people really define the position and also the character of the person that they're looking for. Why is that so key?

Bob Spence: Because the greatest, single, most important thing about hiring is the who. W H O. The WHO means their behavior, values, beliefs, characteristics, and traits. You have to sit down with your leadership team if you're hiring a member for that team, or if you're a manufacturing team hiring for the manufacturing team, you sit down ahead of time and you brainstorm, who is this person? And when you get done with that, you brainstorm a category I call the WHAT. What are they responsible for? And you spell that out. You spell out what does good performance look like? And then you take time to do the ticket. What are the experience, education, and skills we want to require, prefer, and desire?

You put together a position profile. Now, that position profile is not the job description. I want to stress that because people think, well, then we got the job description done. No, you don't. The job description is finished when the person arrives on the scene and you sit down with that person, the CEO with that CFO, and they put together that job description together. And every category is based on performance metrics because that ensures competency. The person owns it.

And I always tell people during the process, like candidates, I'll say, understand something. I am working for this client and I'm helping them find the right fit and match. I'm also going to make sure it's the right fit and match for you. It's not a one way street. And when you interview with my client, you better be assessing as to whether you're the who or not the who.

Martha: Are you the who?

Jim: I'm really trying to keep that song from coming out of the microphone right now. (laughing)

Martha: No singing, Jim.

Jim: So I know for a fact that sometimes you can go through this process and have an offer fail. Do you automatically go to your number two or do you start the process all over again?

Bob Spence: I've done it both ways. In other words we maybe had a search, and I always send it, when I lead the search, I narrow it down to three for the client. And I tell them, if they're doing their own, they also narrow it down to three. I had a client one time say, can we have four? I said, you don't want to do that. And he said, Oh, let us have four. I got to have four. Instead of taking two days to make the decision, it took two months.

Martha: Oh, man.

Bob Spence: And they couldn't make the choice. Human beings do well when you got three options. And so we do that with the three options, and then when they get done, they choose the one that's the best fit and match.

Jim: Right. So if they choose the one that's the best fit and match, and then the offer fails, is there really a point to going to number two because that wasn't the best fit? Should they start the process all over again? Because a lot of people are like, I don't want to go through this again, I'll just take number two.

Bob Spence: No, I won't let them do that, but what we tell them is this - look, let's talk about the other two candidates out of the three. And in one case, we definitely did go to number two because it was so close. You know, they really had trouble. And most of my clients, that's the problem. At the end, we get hard to make the choice because at least two of the three are really close. At times we've said, no, let's go back and repost and start over. And then they look at me and say, oh. I said, wait a minute. Understand, you did not make a mishire. Let's celebrate. So we're going to spend more time. We're going to get the right fit and match this time for sure.

Martha: And I love your perspective, Bob. And you know, none of us like to have what we might consider failure. But like you said, you were kept from maybe a worse situation down the road just because of circumstances. So when something fails, it can really get frustrating or feel like it's time that's being stolen from us. And that's really what can happen when our computers are our phone get compromised.

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Jim: Yeah, Bob, let's go into this a little deeper as believers. Why should the way we hire be different?

Bob Spence: Well, I'm going to answer it two ways. One, ideally, it shouldn't be different because everybody should be doing the same thing to get the right fit and match for their organization. But as believers, it's more important than non believers, or I'm going to call them pre believers, because eventually they're going to face Jesus and realize, oops, I made a mistake. However, as a believer, if you're going to hire people, if you're going to bring them in, you want to make sure that you're getting people that are going to believe as you believe and be part of this team.

Jim: What I love about your book is the simplicity of the method. I mean, somebody can really buy a game plan for hiring the right people and get a very good idea of the choosing winner system and put it into action. But while they're reading it, they're going to go, I want to know how it happens. I want to know who they end up hiring in the end.

And I was going to ask you a question that kind of was a little spoiler and I'm not gonna do that. I changed my mind because listen, don't give it away. You gotta read to the end of this book. I am guaranteeing you, listen, I'm guaranteeing you that if when you read this book and you're not thrilled all the way to the end, because I literally couldn't put it down, Bob will give you your money back. I'm guaranteeing that for Bob.

Martha: You know what? Jim, I just want to say one thing. You and I for years have been advocates of fiction and learning through fiction, and Bob, you call this a business fable and we love that approach because it's not telling, it's experiencing. And how much better to remember when you've been in the scene and you've seen it happen and you saw it put into place.

And so I just want to commend you on that because having a different approach, instead of it just being a bullet pointed, like you said, tell and retell and all of that, you gave people an experience and people can start with that to get some better ideas and how, no matter what level of position they are hiring for, to try a fresh approach and to really see some success there. And so I just want to commend you on that because we are fiction lovers and we believe that every author that writes has a purpose and there's a message that's being shared, but it's not telling. And so thank you very much for doing that.

Jim: And I want to tell you, you know, sometimes people write fiction and put in their agenda within it and it just, you're like, you want to poke your eyeballs out and burn your fingernails out with acid. (laughter) This is not that book. I really couldn't wait to find out who they hired. And I was also again, as I said, disappointed that the antagonist didn't die in the car wreck.

Martha: He's there for another day.

Bob Spence: Here's some good news for you, Jim. The antagonist is in book two.

Jim: Book two? Okay! If you got the guy, if you got him hired, what's book two about? No, he wasn't hired. Okay, but at the end of this book, somebody gets hired for this company. Tell us about book two. What's book two going to be about?

Bob Spence: Book two is from my experience working with clients. After we hire somebody, they sit there and they say, wow, we've learned we got a lot of issues we have to deal with. Our managers don't know how to coach. We found that out during hiring. We found out our managers don't understand budgeting and processes. They don't understand decision making. They don't understand how to communicate. So the second book, this whole team, same team, same characters, they move forward and they make a list of the seven key issues. And during the second book, you see them work together to resolve it. And the antagonist comes back and tries to throw a monkey wrench into that whole thing.

Martha: Oh, there's a reason he's around.

Jim: Duh-duh-duh...

Martha: That's great, Bob, and we look forward to book two.

Jim: Yes, we do. I will be happy to read an early version and help you with any editing so I can figure out what happens to Brandon, because I want to know what happens to Brandon.

Bob, what I love about this conversation, and we've just barely touched it, is that there really is the right way to hire people. And as believers, we should want to hire the right way because we're really, our businesses are about flourishing, flourishing for our employees. So if you're hiring somebody, they're going to be an employee. The employees, families, our customers, our vendors, I mean, everybody that's involved. And so hiring is so important because it's got to match where you're going as an organization, and I've known you long enough now to know that when you hire somebody or help an organization find people to hire, those are good fits and it works. So Bob Spence, I'm glad that you brought a game plan for hiring the right people to iWork4Him so we could talk about it.

And I do appreciate you, especially being my mentor and friend too. Thank you. Any final questions, Martha?

Martha: No, I think we covered it all.

Jim: Check out Bob online at Bobspensconsulting. com or on Amazon to get his book, Game Plan for Hiring the Right People. You've been listening to iWork4Him with your host, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. We're Christ followers. Our workplace, it's our mission field, but ultimately, iWork4Him.