What Skills Matter Most When Bringing Someone On (James Dooley Interviews Mads Singers)

James Dooley: Hi, today I'm joined with Mads Singers and today's episode is about how to identify what skills are needed for specific new roles when you're taking somebody on.

Mads Singers: Yep. Are you ready to hire, James? Anyone you're looking to hire right now?

James Dooley: Technical SEO personally.

Mads Singers: Technically, okay. So generally what I try to do when I'm working with clients, right, is to identify the particular role because many people come to me and they say, oh I want to find someone who can do graphic design and SEO and some social media and this and that and I'm like you aren't going to find them, right. My core philosophy is very simple. What is the one thing an individual need to do to be a success or to be good return on the investment, right? So I always start by identifying what is the one thing. So if you're looking for technical SEO for example, the real question to you is what is the one thing they must be able to do well to get you a good ROI. So is it running audits, is it a particular, is it doing schema, like in your case here, what is the one thing.

James Dooley: So for me it's applying schema and being able on a basic level audit and doing like the basic level fixes. If they can do more than that, that's great. But I'm trying to just literally the 1% gains of fixing something and someone who can easily run Screaming Frog, easily just go and fix it. I don't really need them to be very advanced. I'd still prefer to outsource that with regards to a freelancer and stuff like that. But generally speaking, it's just a doer that can just come in and do the bare minimum and fixes.

Mads Singers: Right. So the core skill here is really understanding schema, understanding the technical aspect, right? So I would focus on that in the job description. So I'll put a job description together with the core focus being that, right? And you can say, hey, you know, it would be a benefit if you know about this. It would be a benefit if you use Screaming Frog or whatever. But putting a core job description together around the schema and around that basic stuff that you're looking for, right? Because instead of finding someone who is okay at 10 things, and I see a lot of people like that in SEO, there's a bunch of people who are kind of okay at a bunch of stuff. You really want the person who is an absolute freaking superstar because if you go and hire someone who is a next level shark at schema, right, they can really improve that part of your technical SEO across your entire business. And if they understand that incredibly well, they can add significant leverage in that area to you, right? And they can probably learn other stuff. They can get into other things. But by starting with something they're really really good at, you pretty much ensure success at a very early stage, right? So that's how I effectively try and go around identifying the role. What exactly am I hiring for and why am I hiring this person? Sometimes it's not obvious to people where's the ROI coming from, right? So sometimes they say, oh, I want to hire someone to do customer service because I hate doing it. I'm like, okay, that's great. So you realise there's a cost. You're hiring. It takes you 20 minutes a day, but you're hiring because you really don't want to do it. That's okay, right? But here's the cost and here's the impact, right? Whereas if you hire people, and this is a big one, right, like I love looking at what I'm doing personally. And if I have something that's taking up 30 40% of my time, hire one person just to do that full time. And most people are afraid of letting go at the stuff they're good at. But the whole thing is that's how you grow, right? Because if you're spending a significant chunk of your time in a specific area, that means that you fundamentally are having a lot of time that you could be doing better and more valuable things with and you can bringing someone to just focus on that full time, right? And for me, if I hire a full time person, even if they take 30% of my workload away, it's more than worth it.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I mean, for for me, this is exactly what I've been working on this year. So, I've been taking myself completely out of specific businesses. Maybe I might do like a 30 or an hour kind of management meeting once a month. I'm not even jumping on the weekly management meetings. Where I just I'll go in once a month just double check everything's okay, completely myself out because what I've realised is I'm good at networking and I'm very scatter. I'm all over the place so innovation and networking are the two core strengths I have and you know what they're really hard to hire and replicate but I enjoy doing those parts. So just day to day like you said the technical even the sales I used to think, oh I can do the sales and I'm like do you know what I just better to get sales people in. So when you ask me for a role I'm looking for and I said technical SEO something that we're always looking for is A players or salespeople. So we have consistently we always have a job role in our businesses and we can fit whichever business it fits into for a good salesperson we will always get them on. So we're always marketing for sales, but just at present is for the single like you're on about the technical. I want someone that's an I don't want them being good at lots of different things. I want them being an expert. I want them to have 10,000 hours in that one kind of task and them going, I'm an expert in this and like you said, they're way better than what I am at it and they take their whole business onto another level. But how do you identify yourself the skills? Some if you're not good, let's say myself, I'm not I don't do the hiring anymore, but let's say it was me that was doing the hiring of a technical SEO and I'm not very technical. How do you identify the skills to bring someone in that is good?

Mads Singers: So again, if you're a relatively small company, if you don't have any technical SEO in the company right now, what I would do is find a friend. So what I've done many many times, and I've done it in sales, I've done it with SEOs, I've done it in PPCs. But basically find a friend who knows and say, hey man, can I pay you a little bit of money to interview these couple of people and tell me, you know, who is better at this particular skill set? Right. So I love absolutely doing that because it can be very hard as you say when I don't know a skill set myself. Like I've hired CMOs and I'm not a marketing guy by any stretch of imagination. Like I can talk about it but really going in depth and so on I can't do but I've multiple times found a couple of friends to actually talk with them and and for me that's that that's the simplest way of going around it, right? I think particularly in sales, as you say, sales is very critical in most businesses. The one issue that I see happening again and again is people go and hire salespeople without having a sales process. And the biggest thing we do that help generally make our sales succeed is that we generally build out the sales process before we hire the salesperson. Because if I as an owner is doing sales, I hire a sales guy and I'm just like, hey, you know, here's what I'm doing and here's what I say and listen to some of my calls, they're not going to win, right? Like the likelihood they're going to win is so slim. So building out a solid sales process with solid scripts, solid presentations, here's how you sell, like have the whole thing ready so someone can go in, run through the scripts, run through the scenarios, and take it from there. That is that is from my experience the way to succeed, right? So we have a big outsourcing company where we hire a lot of staff in South Africa and many many of those people we hire are salespeople and I know that if the people hiring don't have a sales process the failure rate is like 95%.

James Dooley: Right.

Mads Singers: If if if they have a really good process the chance of success is maybe 70%. It's still nowhere near 100 because sales is not easy, right? And hiring good sales people, everyone wants them, right? So, it's not an easy thing, but having a really really good sales process enable you to really make sure that the people you bring in have something to learn from, have something to start with, and they have like a training regime to get into and get started with.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I mean, for us personally, we've we've got someone full time that all up there doing for the different businesses is looking from step one to step two to step three. Where are things dropping out? Almost like a conversion rate optimisation person on a website. Like, are they dropping out on the cart page? Are they doing this? But we've done that for our off page. So, why is it that from step four to step five, people are dropping out? Why is it that people aren't willing to give the budget? What do we need to start asking of why we're asking for the budget for specific businesses? So, this specific areas where we're going too many people are dropping off here. And then a big one that we found actually was to do with completely separate to sales and the role of sales was something called the zero moment of truth. And it was all to do with branding. And it was like the sales team had done a great job, but at the 11th hour when we're up against another company and we're 50 50 with another company and somebody else comes along and decides who's going who like what business are they going to go with, they go and start looking at the branding and like us doing actual proactive reputation management massively improved all of the conversion rate. So now part of the process of the training is for them to try to start identifying as a salesperson why would you not use our company? Go and find reasons why you not use us and then let's try to improve upon that. So it could be like little things like testimonials are like four years old. Where's our recent testimonials? Case studies is several years old. And just doing all these little things and once they started to even just asking AI, why would you not use Promo SEO? Why would you not use Fat Rank over this company? And then they can then start getting information back from AI saying well these have got more reviews, these have got this, these have got this legislation and stuff like that. And what it allowed them to do in the mindset is going these have got a longer guarantee. So there's just certain things that was put in place that part of their role, like you always say, don't delegate tasks, delegate responsibility. And when we started to delegate responsibility to the salespeople for them to find reasons why they wouldn't use us, their mindset changed as well. And they knew then potential pain points of what we had as a company and knew how to counter and be able to sell it.

Mads Singers: And that's a big thing, right? Because we're always staring ourselves blind. We always know how like even looking at your own website, right? Like to you it's obvious what you do, but sometimes you know get a stranger to open a website and they're like, what the hell does this company do? And you're like, oh, well, we don't actually say that, right?

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So if anyone is looking to identify certain new roles or you're not even certain what roles are needed, how can someone reach out to you Mads to try to get some sort of, because for me I always say I don't know what I don't know. There's times I need a member of staff and I don't know what member of staff that it is and sometimes being able to have a 30 or 40 minute conversation with you. You clearly start to identify specific roles and I'm like is that even a job role? And you're like yeah of course it is. Like people hire these people full time on doing let's say cultural architect to improve the culture of the business and stuff and as you start growing bigger and bigger there's there's more roles that are needed to make certain that everything's being done. So how can someone reach out to someone like yourself to have some sort of like management consultancy to understand what roles are needed?

Mads Singers: Yeah. So mads singers dot com is the simplest place to get hold of me and you can also find me anywhere on social meds. Only person in the world with that name.

James Dooley: Perfect. So if anyone's struggling with regards to identifying not knowing exactly what roles they're looking for next, make sure you reach out to Mads. Leave a comment in the comment section. I'd love to know what your main concern is moving forward of like you're struggling to hire a specific role or specific skill set to take your business on to the next level. Appreciate having you, Mads.

Mads Singers: Cheers. It was great.