My Favourite Failure: Disasters with hiring and being hired - and I’m a recruiter - Ken Schmitt

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0:38A state actor charmed them into stealing the company's flagship software, which they then took to the state-owned business instead, costing the company billions. If you want to get a better handle on your security, the Secure Innovation campaign can help. Check out npsa.gov.uk forward slash innovation and download their free quick start guide. There's a link in the show notes. But it was tough. I mean, it was, as you might expect, after five and a half years at one company where I was continually promoted and moved up and told that I had a long career ahead of me and I felt successful and engaged and acknowledged and respected, right?

1:20To go from that to having two miserable failures in the course of only four months time, it was very humbling and it was a very, very difficult, challenging time for sure. Ken Schmidt is the founder and CEO of a high-end executive search firm, which is kind of ironic because today we're going through his biggest career failures and they all revolve around hiring. Well, hiring or being hired, I should say, because Ken went through a period where he kept being fired.

2:01Earlier in his career, Ken spent a good five and a half years at Enterprise Rent-A-Car in California. He was running a P &L and had 10 employees reporting into him. But him and his wife had their first kid, and he didn't want to spend six out of seven days a week doing crazy hours miles away from them. He quit with nothing else lined up, despite a newborn and a new mortgage. The in-laws weren't exactly impressed. Then he saw a job ad at a Jaguar spare parts dealership, which he thought he'd excel at. It was completely different. It was basically, here's all the parts in the garage, go out there, memorize all the different parts, and then start reaching out to different dealerships to try to sell these parts and see what you can do.

2:44So it became pretty clear pretty quickly that it was not the right fit, both in terms of the actual job itself, but also in terms of the culture and the way that the boss ran things and his attitude. So after maybe six, seven weeks, I ended up getting called into his office and I knew things weren't going well. It wasn't a big surprise. And he fired me. But to kind of validate the fact that it was not a good culture fit, he actually said to me, I don't think you have any of the skills that you said you had in your resume. And I said, well, what do you mean? And he says, well, I think your wife wrote your resume for you because I don't believe any of this.

3:23So I thought, all right, well, this is very clearly not the right place for me to be accused of something like that was just kind of crazy. So I left that role after those six, seven weeks. So that didn't go to plan. But Ken found another job fairly quickly doing media ad sales for a group of local radio stations. So the first thing was that the owner was a very, very cheap owner. And he would not pay for the rights or the data to Nielsen ratings, which was at that time, that was what you looked at in terms of how strong was the listenership for the radio stations. So he wouldn't pay for that.

3:59So we never really knew for sure where we were in the rankings. However, he expected us to go out and sell our stations as though we did know where we were in the rankings to convince someone to actually come on board with us. That was the first thing. Second thing, and more importantly, was that the sales manager said to me, so here's literally, here's the yellow pages. You can go anywhere in San Diego to find a business. There's not really, I've asked questions about what type of business, what should I be looking for? What are the right types of organizations? No training, no support at all.

4:32And on top of that, she actually said, and don't even bother talking to the other sales reps around here because they're your competition and they are not going to help you at all. So you're on your own. Strike two. Ken was out in a few weeks, but the experience had been soul crushing. You know, literally driving around, like I said, in my Nissan Maxima, you know, trying to hold back the tears because if I did go into a business, I didn't want to walk in with puffy eyes and looking horrific. But yeah, it was difficult. It was stressful. There was a lot of second guessing of my decision, even though at my core, I still knew that family was the most important thing and the driver in my life that was going to be what led my decisions going forward.

5:16I knew that was still there, that hadn't been compromised. But that being said, it's really tough when you have such a huge blow to the ego and you just feel like, wow, maybe, you know, feelings like maybe I just got lucky at Enterprise Rent-A-Car at the right place at the right time. And maybe I didn't get promoted based on my skill or my ability to lead a team. And now that I'm out of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, you know, kind of the imposter syndrome sets in and you think, wow, maybe I'm not cut out to do this. Maybe I just got lucky and I should have stayed in my safety zone at Enterprise. So yeah, definitely that was It's a very stressful time.

5:53And then talking to my wife also. And my wife is a marriage and family therapist. So as you might expect, we're both very communicative. We've been married for 31 years now. At the time, we had been married for six years. And it was stressful. It was difficult, not only from a financial perspective, because I was the breadwinner. And we had a newborn at home, which she was obviously taking care of, and a new mortgage also. But just in terms of your own ego and your own self-worth and just questioning and second-guessing, what am I here for? What's my purpose? What value am I bringing if I can't find a job and I get fired from two jobs back to back?

6:31It was a very emotional, very, very stressful time to say the least. Happily, Ken's next job was in recruitment, which he ended up loving. After that, he set up his own executive search firm, and the biggest failures he's experienced as a founder have likewise been in hiring. The biggest failures that I've had really over the last 16 years being a founder and a small business owner, which is very ironic because I'm running a recruiting business, my biggest failures have been my own inability to hire good salespeople for my own company. And again, it's ironic because not only am I a recruiter, but about half of our business is hiring, on behalf of our clients, hiring good salespeople.

7:13But I have failed miserably in my own business hiring salespeople. I have tried three times and all three times failed. The good news is that I failed faster with each successive failure. It happened more quickly, but there was three different ones. And each one was the failure on my part to hire the right kind of person. The first individual that I hired was very, very junior. This is back in 2016. I heard somebody who was very, very junior, who had been in inside sales, but had not done any kind of high level, more discretionary type of a sale, which is what we do as a retained search firm. And we do leadership position recruiting.

7:53So very high level,$200 ,000 to$500 ,000 jobs. And these are all leadership positions. So my first failure was hiring somebody who was very junior, who I thought I could train and bring this person up to speed, I made the mistake of giving this person all the inbound leads that were coming into the firm because I thought, well, it'll give her a chance to be able to understand the business, see the ins and outs, get a sense for how we operate, and also help to build confidence. And eventually she would then use that confidence to go out and secure her own leads. Well, unfortunately that never happened.

8:29She continued to rely just on the leads that we actually were giving to her. And my failure was that I didn't sit down with her and have a frank conversation earlier on. So I was constantly second guessing myself. Am I a good leader? Am I a good manager? Why can't I help her enough to help her be successful? I hired an outside business coach to work with her. I spent a long time coaching her myself and sitting with her. The rest of my team was telling me about nine months in that she was just not the right fit. Back to that, you know, putting the square peg in the round hole that I mentioned earlier, that was what I was doing.

9:07And so it took me a whole year and a half before I finally sat down and let her go. It was a very painful conversation. And I had continued even at that point to second guess myself. So that was failure number one. Fast forward about, let's see, three years later. So in early, in late 19, I'm sorry, in late 2019, so right before COVID, I hired somebody else, another business development person, this person had come from a background selling high end events. So really large event media sponsorships, which I thought was similar enough to being the discretionary service that we were selling as executive search consultants.

9:46You know, I thought there'd be enough similarities there. And he was pretty senior. He wasn't a junior person. He had been around for a while. He, you know, he knew the ropes. And I was very, very clear throughout the interview process to tell him, I'm not going to be giving you any leads. Don't expect the leads coming in. They're not going to come from me. You have to be, this role is going to be self-generated. You've got to bring in all your own business. Great, no problem, no problem, he said. He comes on board, you know, within 30 days of him being on board, he's asking me, okay, where are the leads?

10:16And I said, you know, I'm not going to give those to you, right? So that was my second failure was hiring him, thinking that we could bring somebody in from a different business that would work out. And that one, like I said, lasted less time. It was about six months total before we parted ways in April of 2020. So that was failure number two. Again, hiring the same kind of person. Failure number three came in 2021, a couple years later. And we hired somebody else. Again, very senior. Came from selling high-end consulting services at one of the big consulting firms. And really understood the business.

10:52Seemed a great personality fit. My whole team loved her. Thought she'd be a really good fit. She was based out of Chicago, was moving to the West. So really good fit. And I was very clear to explain that this is a long sales cycle. It's not going to happen overnight. 30 days into the role, she says, you know what? I don't think I really have a passion for recruiting. And I don't think I want to do this anymore. So that was 30 days. So at least I failed faster with each successive failure, which was great. But it's all been around the same attempt to hire a salesperson. And to this day, I am still the only salesperson.

11:28I haven't gone out to attempt it a fourth time. And I don't know if I ever will.

11:37Ken Schmidt, whose advice for hiring is to really understand the role you're hiring for and make sure that's in the JD, especially the particular dynamics of working at your company versus every other one. Plus, get the honest view of your team members by not telling them what you think of candidates before they can tell you. Thanks for listening to this episode. I've been your host, Dan Murray-Surter. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend. I'll see you next time.