First off, I want to explain the constant business books as of late. It is just where my focus has been recently. To me, there is a functional need to read – it is supposed to help develop a skill or an attribute that is required for your job or life. It is why I loathe the question: what are you reading? It is specific to me in what I need to work on. I have no idea if this book is going to be useful to me; all I can say is that in my current situation, having a resource that helps me manage my business is needed. 

At the current moment, I am working through various skills that I need to adopt to make our business more efficient. Traditionally, we have hired and promoted from within our internship program. With Covid, we had a bottleneck in getting in-person interns. This created a clog in the pipeline for new coaches. We have expanded to a second gym and increased our workload through other revenue streams such as private training and consultations. This increase in workload combined with reduced coaches through our pipeline has created a functional need for more advanced hiring processes. 

Amazon’s hiring process is a really ingenious process. It really resonated with me. One of the key areas I wanted to figure out was how I address the feeling you get from seeing someone come in day in and day out over several months during an internship? Attributes such as work ethic, reliability, friendliness, earnestness, or even stamina are all things you see transparently over the course of an internship. How do you replicate that in an interview process? 

I have often relied on intuition to hire people, and so I am resistant to the concept of hiring someone off the street. So far, this method has been wildly successful; I have lost count of how many coaches who have worked for me have gone on to directorial roles, assistant coach roles, pivotal roles within our business. That creates a bias towards the process due to the successes I have had. On the other hand, is that the most efficient way to hire new employees? Especially when demand has exceeded capacity? 

An interesting note from the book was that the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, used to hire people directly for each position at Amazon during the start up years. He would ask very specific questions such as: why are pothole covers round or how many people walk through LAX annually? This was not so he could hire a bunch of random trivia experts. Anyone can memorize something, but few can logically respond to a question based on the body of knowledge they have. What Amazon was looking for were problem solvers. They did not need someone who could follow the script; they needed someone who could take on challenges and rise to the occasion.

Their process in hiring someone makes a whole lot of sense to me. I think the most important takeaway was having a clear and deliberate job description. If you do not know what the job is, how do you know if they can execute the job? Instead of hiring someone and figuring out what they will do, figure out what they are doing and then hire the right person for that role. From there, it sets up several steps from phone interview, to in person interview, to reference check (reference check last), and then onboarding. 

In the book Delivering Happiness, the process of hiring someone is not complete until the person goes through “onboarding.” The formal training process is what establishes whether the person will be a good fit for the company or not. At Zappos, a person interviews, is trained, and is then presented with a severance package where they can walk away with no questions asked. It is not an ultimatum but a test to see if the person is a good fit as an employee. The central theme of being hired to do a specific job needs to be followed through with training. If the person did not believe that the job description was what they will be actually doing and finds out they do not want to do that, they should leave. The same is true if they expected to do a job and were then asked to do something entirely different—they should be allowed to leave. 

The book is loaded with gems and is really good read. There are a lot of other really important topics to sort through. The book changed the way I personally do things or, at the very least, changed the way I think about things.