5 Secrets to Hiring Great Talent

I am stoked to get right into this email.

I sat down with Kasim Aslam, Co-Founder of FIVE 7 & 8 figure businesses, and we talked everything delegating, hiring international talent, and how to scale your small Marketing team.

Here’s what he had to say in his own liiiiightly edited words.

1. Setting Yourself Up for Hiring Success:

“You have to set yourself up for success when hiring, you need to hire for one job at a time. 

A big mistake that I see people make, especially small business owners, is they get greedy and scared too. They think if they’re going to spend the money it takes to hire an employee, they need them to be able to do a variety of things.

And the job descriptions always read like some magic fairy dust unicorn of a superhero (this is ALL too real lol). 

They’re saying they need a graphic designer or a software engineer and someone who can do a little bit of content and customer service.

I mean, who in the world can do that? There are people that are capable of that, technically speaking but generally, they’re the entrepreneurs. 

So as a small business leader, hire for a job. And if you don’t have enough work to support a full time person, hire part time. 

But if you need a graphic designer, hire a graphic designer (boom). 

Now, can your graphic designer end up building landing pages? Who knows what kind of extension opportunities are available. 

In the beginning, just get myopic in your scope because you’re going to find what you’re looking for.  And if you go out looking for a jack of all trades, you’re not going to find them. 

So if you need a client manager, hire a client manager and then that’s it. That’s all you’re asking of that person. 

2. Scaling a One Person Team:

The first role you should hire for is an executive assistant. Even if you’re not a one person band, let’s say you’re a 3 or 5 person band, all of you are doing work you shouldn’t be doing right now. 

If you’re a Marketing director, you’re worth $150k a year, I bet we could isolate about 50% of your work to be beneath your pay grade. Things like inbox management, calendar management, scheduling, updates, research. 

There’s so much beneath your pay grade that everybody in the professional world just has to do because it exists, it’s work that needs to be done, and there aren’t systems set up for delegating that work. 

And so you take your $150k a year employee, you still make them do horse sh*t (earmuffs) work. The fact that people spend on average about three to four hours in their inbox a day is insane. 

The amount of time we spend just managing communication is nuts. If you had an employee who just did that, that would be a massive unlock for you.

3. The Pareto Effect:

The paradigm shift that I’d ask of entrepreneurs is when you pay 10, 20, 30% more, you don’t get 10, 20, or 30 % more work, you get 5 to 10 times the amount of work. 

That’s the Pareto distribution. My recruiting agency is called Pareto Talent for that reason and the Pareto distribution exists in every organic ecosystem. When

I sold my agency, 50% of my revenue was managed by one resource, one guy, because he was the best Google Ads guy in the whole wide world. And the Pareto distribution exists no matter where you’re zooming in.

So if you have 1,000 employees, 20% of those employees are going to produce 80% of your outcome. And then if you zoom in on those 20%, 20% of those are going to produce 80% of the outcome.

What you want to do is find the Pareto talent, especially as small businesses, find the winners, find the peak performers (find the people that run through walls).

Winners want to win and money’s how we keep score. So, the average Argentinian right now is making $300 USD a month. We pay them three, four, five times that, depending on the role. I also don’t want you working 50 hours a week, I am hiring you for an honest 9-5.

But when you’re working, I want you to work and most employees don’t do that. The common mantra is “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”

Well, if you’re paying somebody the minimum, they’re gonna do the minimum, so pay more (THIS).

And as long as you don’t have communication errors, it will work out.

We’re all grownups who are proactive, do our jobs and want to propel the organization forward. And if your employees can see their future tied to the success of the organization, for the first time in your entrepreneurial life, you won’t feel like you’re the only one pushing the boulder up the hill. 

4. Putting Together Job Descriptions:

What I like to do in my job descriptions is outline very specifically what it is that I’m looking for and I include fly traps.

Because if I’m going to be paying 3-5 times what candidates can make domestically, I’m going to get thousands more applications and that becomes a problem. 

It’s a bad thing because you have all these applications to sift through. The fly traps are all about putting yourself in a position where the applicants filter themselves.

When people apply, I send them to a very specific hiring inbox for that role and the subject line is based on instructions I give in the job description, if the subject line doesn’t follow the instructions then it is immediately filtered out (now THAT will save some time lol).

Other little things I do are asking applicants to send me their resume in a PDF format with a specific naming convention. 

Usually when people are applying for a job, they’re applying for every job that comes across the list and they’re just hitting copy, paste.

These fly traps force them to stop, they have to rename the document, they have to change it into PDF

If you’re going to be working remotely for me and you can’t follow basic instructions, I don’t want to work with you. 

My favorite one though is, before I’ll ever do an interview with somebody, I’ll say to the applicant, let me pay you $20 to do two hours worth of work, I will send them the $20 and I don’t send them the project. 

I’ll do this for about 10 people per roll and now I’ve spent $20 to find out whether or not you’re honest and can actually follow up on something. 

This simple tactic has saved me so many hours on the back end (this is GENIUS).

5. What to Hire for:

Don’t make people do things they’re not good at (SAY IT LOUDER).

If I hired you tomorrow and I gave you 10 tasks, 2 you were amazing at, 6 you’re okay at, and then 2, you suck at. 

The current paradigm of employment is, I have to have a performance improvement plan for Daniel for those last 2 things, because he sucks at them.

How about you just take them off of the freaking slate. Make them stop doing those tasks. 

(If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it spends its whole life thinking it’s stupid.)

I had the top Google Ads guy in the world working for me, John Moran. There’s nobody better in the world of Google Ads, truly, full stop. 

John cannot follow processes he is incapable of doing it. 

So I could either sit there and beat my head against the wall trying to figure out how to get John to check off the little tasks and if I did that, I would have lost the best Google Ads guy in the world.

Instead what I did, was hire somebody to follow John around and complete those tasks so my automations could continue forward. 

Moral of the story, don’t make people do things they’re not good at, find the thing they’re good at and make that their job.”