2440 - Transforming Workforce Performance by Hiring for Innate Talent with The Talent Genius' John Pyke

0:05Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If you're committed to growing your business by serving audiences with generosity and real expertise, you're in the right place. This is a daily 15-minute show featuring leaders who believe real impact comes from generosity, not hype, which means as a listener, you're going to get the good stuff. In fact, we created podverified.com to give thoughtful leaders like you free tools to show up better on podcast stages like this one. That includes your free podverified score, free podverified guest training, a free media kit builder, and so much more. It's the first ecosystem of its kind built by podcasters who genuinely want to help guests thrive and grow in podcasting.

0:48Visit podverified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it.

0:58With us right now, it is John Pike. John, it's great to have you. You are the founder of The Talent Genius, and you were found on the web at mentormejohn.com. John, it's great to have you. Thank you for joining us. Absolutely thrilled to be here. Well, you're based in kind of a basketball-centric region of the country. And I understand that I always love talking with leaders about what they do for fun outside of work. And you're into the basketball scene. Tell me about what you do for fun when you're not at work. Yeah, you're absolutely right, Josh. I'm really passionate about sports. I have a division one basketball player as a son who just hits his birthday today, his 23rd birthday.

1:48Yeah, he's going to Arkansas State with a great, great, great coaching staff. A lot of NBA and G League experience that they have. And then my daughter, actually, I coached her in volleyball and she played for four years, division two, and was a setter. took her team to two championship conference championship games and also the first undefeated regular season in the school's history. So this weekend, I was actually coaching my younger son, 17U basketball at the Raleigh Convention Center, which is why my voice is a little bit strained, candidly. So, yeah, we're huge into athletics and it's a lot of fun.

2:36Well, mine is strained because, as I mentioned to my friends here, I've had the pneumonia. So I like yours sounds way more fun. You earned that strain. Well, congratulations on that. And a Division I basketball, you must be a proud dad. That's incredible. Yeah, I'm very blessed. I get to live vicariously through my kids now. Oh, that's great. That's great. Well, congratulations. Well, John, tell us a bit about your work. so um one of the maybe it would it would be appropriate to kind of start with a little bit of a story in terms of uh at a very early age i i was uh blessed to be able to work with the company that founded skills-based sales training so this was the 800 pound gorilla i mean the the least risk vendor at that point 85 of the fortune 500 was using this program it's called professional selling skills.

3:32And what I quickly came to realize is that the training doesn't work. So yeah, so I had this epiphany that really changed the course of my career in a powerful and very impactful way. So simply put, everybody on this call knows the Pareto principle. And it's absolutely true in business. 20 % of the salespeople at almost every single company globally consistently sell 80 % of the total sales revenue. And there is absolutely very little that traditional training, mentoring, or coaching can do to get those 80 % into the top 20%. So I went on this quest. I resigned from this company. I went on this quest to try to figure out, hey, what is it about that 20 %?

4:21What do they possess that the bottom 80 % doesn't possess? because that is like the holy grail. If you can figure out how to sift, sort, and separate and identify those people that have what I call the sales DNA or the performance DNA,

4:40your success rate is going to be just, it's going to be massive. Well, yes. So I just want to like kick back and keep teaching. Let's talk about how to get there. How to figure that out? Well, you know, it's interesting that, you know, the Boston Consulting Group found that companies that do an exceptional job of hiring the right people, they have an average stock growth 10 times the S &P 500, which is 109%. And they also found that, you know, when you do a good job of hiring, that your revenue growth is three and a half times, right? The average company. And it's also double in terms of the profit margin.

5:22There's a whole lot of other research that absolutely categorically proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that people make a company and that achievement comes from the right people. So the key question is, how do we, with laser-like accuracy, how do we cherry pick the top 5, 10, 15, 20 % of the people that are applying? And this is more relevant today than ever, as you know, with the emergence and the impact and the transformation that AI is having. A lot of companies are looking for less people, but a higher caliber or quality of people so that they get a better outcome. And so really, that's been my life's journey.

6:06That's my life's work. I'm passionate about it. And, you know, what we do is an absolute game changer in terms of return on investment. Yeah. Yeah. So would you mind sharing this, you know, with us some tips on like, you know, what to look for when recruiting, hiring, interviewing on the front end there? Because I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like if we can do that part a lot better and get people with the right soft skills, you know, some of these other things, you know, probably work themselves out a lot easier. That's my bias. You know, Josh, you're absolutely right. I'm going to make a statement that you probably will immediately resonate with.

6:48And that's this, that 80 % of business challenges are actually hiring challenges in disguise. Wow. So let me kind of pull back the curtain and give you, save you a 30 to 40 year learning curve and drop some specialized wisdom that I have learned over the years because it is profound. And again, I have dedicated my life to this professionally. So a person's capability to perform is a very complex thing. But the first thing that I want to mention is that a lot of what is required for high performance cannot be taught. It cannot be learned and it cannot be seen in an interview. So simply put, today's systems of hiring, onboarding, interviewing are in the dark ages.

7:45They are completely broken. So let me just mention something here. Unless you are using a three-dimensional hiring assessment on the front end to help you sift, sort, and separate from all the noise and all the candidates, because candidates either have a professionally done resume and it overstates their ability, or they did it themselves and it understates their ability, right? And so just using technology to try to determine from a resume if someone has what it takes to perform is going to fail you and fail you miserably. Now, for the sake of time, let me just mention the single most important transformational discovery that has to do with a company's performance and individual performance.

8:32All right. Here's the challenge. Here's the area of opportunity. The vast majority of executives have absolutely no idea what talent is, let alone how to measure it. So let me give you a little bit of backdrop. I was invited to speak at three talent acquisition conferences loaded with Fortune 1000 executives. And they had done something pretty wise. On the front end, they decided to send a survey to all the participants that were going to attend to find out, are there some common challenges or themes that we should address? The very first one across all three conferences was faster identification of talent because we all know that, you know, good talent doesn't stay in the market for very long.

9:23The second one was compressing or shortening the time to hire. The bigger the company, the more bureaucratic, and it typically takes a long time, and they were missing out on a lot of candidates. Okay. Yep. I'll just say, like, as my son, exactly what you were talking about. I'm seeing this play out in real time from his perspectives, you know, recent mechanical engineering grad. And yeah, you know, there were a few companies, one I won't name is an auto company, and he would have been a great fit for them. They were just so slow, so bureaucratic, so impersonal in their HR process. And just it was, it just gave a bad taste in his mouth.

10:05And he's like, these are this, this other nimble, high growth company. They were just, you know, he, he just, he felt welcomed right out of the gate. And it's like, you know, even though I'm the other company just missed out. And that's, that's a shame because I just, I'm biased as you are about your son, but I think my son's a pretty good hire. Josh, that's a brilliant observation. I'd like to cycle back to because part of what I teach is how for an employer to become the only logical choice. In other words, the differentiation and the contrast is so massive in terms of the experience that they have, that your son literally, there was no other logical choice for him, but to choose this progressive, you know, fast moving, right.

10:53Uh, nurturing type of company versus this old, you know, kind of stoic and, you know, bureaucratic company. So getting back to this conference, And based on that insight and that intelligence of having those two top challenges, the thing that comes to mind first is to ask the audience, well, if talent is supreme and if it's that important, what actually is it? How do you define talent? And then the second step to that is how do you evaluate, identify, or assess talent so that you're in the captaincy and you're able to make consistently amazing hires? Now, you might be shocked to learn not one executive, and I'm talking three different talent acquisition conferences with hundreds of people got the right answer.

11:38And this is the essence of high performance and consistently hiring the right people. Our ability to perform has to do the most of anything. It has to do with the hard wiring of our brain. Okay. So listen very carefully. I'm talking about things that are innate, that are invisible, that you can't see. You can't teach it. You can't learn it. You have a certain amount of it. And that's what you've been given in life. So let me mention some of these so that it'll be more practical. Persistence, drive, initiative, handling rejection, rapid rapport building, problem solving, right? The ability to connect and build trust and rapport on an emotional level.

12:23You see, these things cannot be taught. Now, I have had this assessment, right? And I've had over 2 million people go through it over the last 30 years. And there's over 30 different validity studies globally on tens of thousands of people. But equally as important is it works and has results unlike anything else. So I'll just mention one backup statistic. Harvard Business Review published some research, and they found that cognitive abilities or our innate ability, our talents, or you may call them strengths or abilities, not skills. Skills can be learned. Talents cannot be learned. 92 % of the correlation between top performance on the job, 92 % has to do with our cognitive structure, our cognitive abilities.

13:16So what we know also is that from a hundred years of research, If companies are only using a one-dimensional personality instrument like DISC or Myers-Briggs or others, it's only slightly better than just looking at someone's resume and not even meeting them and making a hire based on looking at their resume. Oh, my goodness. So that's where companies are absolutely missing the boat. They don't actually know how to identify, how to assess or evaluate talent. And that's an absolute game changer. You know, and of course, you know, a lot of employers now are using AI tools for scanning resumes and hoping that that's going to surface some of these things.

13:57How does AI play into all of this? And of course, a lot of potential employees or potential hires, they are using AI to craft their resumes to match the positions that they're hiring for as well. So it's like AI just kind of talking to AI there. And then you got this, you know, AI decide, you know, we'll decide, you know, well, here's the, you know, the 10 best people out of this group of 80 that you should move to an interview process. I don't know, how is this impacting the work that you do? So here's my prediction that in spite of all the advancements that we have made with AI, that the 2080 rule will still maintain itself and will continue to take place year over year over year.

14:41So how many performance, how many people that you put on a performance improvement plan suddenly and instantaneously make a dramatic recovery and instantly become a high performer, right? It just doesn't happen. Most of the time, the people that are in the bottom 80 % don't make it to the top 20%. It's because they have a deficit. it. Let me give you an example of what I mean. So Furnitureland South is the largest furniture retailer in the world. They have 20 football fields of showcase, you know, showroom space in one location, 175 straight commission salespeople. So back in the great recession, they called on me as the first consultant they ever hired in the family's history of the business.

15:22They had seven consecutive years of sales decline. Six of their seven competitors went out of business. It was a brutal time. The housing market, there were only 10 % or one 10th of the homes being sold during that recession than what would normally take place. And their business is directly connected to the housing market. So I had everybody take the assessment. I was able to identify the top 20 highest performers without having spoken to them or meeting them or looking at any resume or any type of performance metrics just based on the scores that they had in terms of the assessments. So I delivered my signature one-hour sales keynote to 175 people, okay, all in the same place at the same time.

16:10They all heard the same message. The top 20 people in the company had an average sales growth of 57%. The bottom 155 people had an average sales growth of 9%. So the key here is that when someone has the right blend or combination of personality, motivation, and drive, and innate talents, they're predisposed to be exceptional in sales. And when you train them and give them additional skills, right, they're going to have a higher return on investment. Their sales are going to be an awful lot more. So in this Great Depression, or Great Recession rather, we had a 48 % overall increase in sales in the first 30 days.

16:58And we were featured on CBS National News with Katie Couric because everything was upside down, Josh. The unemployment rate was continuing to go up. The consumer confidence was continuing to go down. So again, the assessment is not only powerful for hiring, it's also unbelievably powerful for elevating the performance of your existing staff. Yeah. Well, John, your website is mentormejohn.com. And then of course, thetalentgenius.com. Our friend that's been listening to our conversation, where would you recommend they go? I don't know if you have any resources you'd recommend as well for folks that would like to hire better?

17:42Sure. So the talentgenius.com is my primary website, and it actually gives you a lot of case studies and shows you some examples of this transformational assessment and the results that it can deliver. MentorMeJohn.com provides every listener an opportunity to actually test drive this assessment firsthand because as as as powerful and as perhaps compelling as some of the things that i'm saying are you want to know whether or not it works in your environment in your industry with your people right so uh for those of you that would like to test drive this assessment um you can do that by going to mentor me john.com and if you like i can actually interpret the results for you um i'll just mention one thing uh josh that you know how i like to have people test drive this.

18:30I say, give me your absolute number one best salesperson and then somebody that's really struggling. Okay. Have them both take it. Don't tell me who the high performer or the low performer is based on just looking at the scientific data. I'll be able to tell you not only why the high performer is the high performer and why they will continue to be a high performer, but also why the low performer is a low performer and why the amount of improvement that they're going to be able to achieve is very, very small. I have never been wrong. Not one time. That's the power of science, science on your side.

19:06All right. John Pike, mentor me, john.com. Again, you're also the founder of the talent genius.com. John has been a great conversation. Again, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for sharing your insights. Absolutely. My pleasure.

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