Legit question: How often do you feel like you’re fighting fires at work?

• 15 minutes a day

• 30 minutes a day

• 60 minutes a day

• More

Whatever the answer is, they all have the same problem.

People.

People create fires. You’re an expert at putting them out.

But what if you had other people who knew how to put them out?

If you could do that, you’d have to manage a lot fewer fires. That equals:

• More peace of mind

• Leaving work on time

• Inbox zero

• Less time talking to your spouse about work and more time talking about fun stuff

Today, we talk about how to hire people who will fight fires for you (or prevent them altogether).

Let’s go!

Who to look for

Weekly I hear people saying, “Indeed doesn’t work.” or “ZipRecruiter is terrible.”

I challenge that. These platforms are powerful, and I’ve been successful dozens of times in finding top-notch candidates.

It’s not the platform. It’s who you’re looking for.

When I hired in the past, I sought a list of prerequisite skills. I failed to get the most out of my hired people because skill-finding is the old way.

Personality-finding is the new way.

I’m in digital marketing. There are 40,000+ digital marketing agencies in the USA.

Do we all have different strategies?

Nope.

So what’s our differentiating factor?

The people.

Therefore, we’re not a digital marketing agency with great customer service. We’re a customer service agency that does digital marketing.

Get it?

When you start flipping your priorities from skills to personality, you’ll be much happier with your hiring.

This is the first step in finding firefighters.

Ways to help:

• Ask their enneagram.

• Make a DISC assessment a requirement before the second-round interview.

• Have a company one sheet. It’ll feature qualifying questions showing if someone aligns with your mission.

Double down

Another failure of mine? I put the title the person would have when they got to the company as the job posting title.

That’s not reflective of the person I’m after.

When I put “SEO Project Manager” as the title, many people applied with zero customer service skills and exclusively technical skills.

But we already had the systems and strategies in place. So these people’s technical skills would get stomped on, AND they wouldn’t be able to communicate our service effectively.

This translated into hundreds of applications and hours of reviewing and interviewing, all for a population that wouldn’t succeed.

Then I wised up. I changed the title in the job description to “Customer Success Manager.”

Doing so gave me less technical people and more soft-skill people.

The lesson?

The job title on Indeed or ZipRecruiter should reflect the key thing the hire will do, not the actual title they’ll have.

Doing this will save you hours of work.

Why? It’s 1000X easier to teach subject matter than personality.

Weed them out

All good firefighters (or fire preventers) have attention to detail.

There’s a surefire way to find these people when hiring.

Place a nugget in your description.

Don’t do it at the beginning. Don’t do it at the end. People applying to many jobs will read the first and last paragraphs and skim the rest.

That’s where you put the nugget. The middle.

I like to put something like this as one of the “Job Requirements” bullet points:

I like to call this the “Attention to Detail Clause.”

I used the above clause in my latest job posting. I got 500+ applicants for it.

Only 53 people gave me their coffee order.

I’m sure some great candidates didn’t give me their order, but if they didn’t have time to read the job description, I didn’t have time to interview them.

This tactic alone saved me 50+ hours and $10,000 for my company.

Key traits of firefighters (and fire preventers)

1. They align with your company’s mission inside and out

2. They have insane attention to detail

3. Their personality matches your culture

Everything else comes after.

• Skills

• Experience

• Age

• Location

• Certifications

• Etc.

These are bonus traits.

Never hire on these first. You can teach skills. You can teach subject matter.

You can’t teach attention to detail or personality.

Hire based on inherent traits that align with your culture and mission.

Summary

Were you expecting a huge playbook? Hiring on personality and attention to detail is all you need.

Here’re my numbers to prove it (from the last 2 years):

“Project Manager” Job Title:

• 121 applicants

• 21 interviews

• 5 second-round interviews

• 3 hires

• 1 let go

• 1 left

• 98 hours invested

“Customer Success Manager” Job Title (w/ Attention To Detail Clause):

• 541 applicants

• 25 interviews

• 4 second-round interviews

• 1 hire (already leading previous hires)

• 35 hours invested

This Customer Success Manager hire:

• Got up to speed faster than anyone else

• Solves problems before I have to step in

• Is creating systems that will benefit the next round of hires

• Has exceeded the metrics on their performance plan

• Saves me at least 5 hours every week

They had zero technical skills coming in. Within 3 months, I taught them our services and technical skills and within 6, they were fully independent.

My firefighting has been nearly nonexistent since hiring on personality and attention to detail.

And yours can be too.

1. Personality

2. Attention to detail

That’s all you need to prevent your firefighting and get back to enjoying your work.

Speaking of hiring

I’ve invested 1000+ hours, so you don’t have to.

I’m building the playbook in a video course. 100% Free. Want to get notified when it goes live? Reply “Hiring Playbook” to this email or head to my site.

Here’s something that revved me up.

From my good friend, Alain.

Systems and resources I'm using right now to improve 1% every day.

I'm a Webflow disciple. It's what my website is built on. Get started for free. Need help designing a site? Let's just call it a hobby of mine. Book with me here to chat about it.

Want to start your own newsletter? beehiiv is the best place to get started. And it's completely free.