What follows is the transcript of my recent video interview with Rick Girard
This is a powerful interview with a “disruptor” with a unique perspective on hiring. Watch, read, and act!
This interview grew out of my conversations with founders who shared that their greatest fear was the hiring of the wrong people. They don’t want to be rushed into partnering and hiring just to raise capital only to find out they hired the wrong people. This threw some cold water on my encouraging them to complete the team prior to coming to me for capital. If you pay close attention here you are more likely to hire the right people the first time which will make it easier to raise capital.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Rob Kramarz:
Hi, everybody. This is your Vision Master podcast. And this is Robert Steven Kramarz, founder of Intelliversity, the host of the Vision Master podcast. And today we’re a little bit different than normal because as , we mostly podcast with investors and founders. But today I really want you to meet Rick Girard, who is the founder of a company by the name of Stride Search, which is simultaneously he’s the founder of a company that’s going to be raising capital. But also, Stride Search is a company that’s doing something around hiring and partnering that’s highly aligned with what I do at Intelliversity and with Shepherd Ventures 3.
So let me introduce you to… You’ll be really interested in this, in what he does as it may help your company hire the right people and not lose the right people. So here you go, this is Rick Girard founder of Stride Search. How are you, Rick?
Rick Girard:
I’m doing great. Robert, how are you?
Rob Kramarz:
I’m great.
And you are in my old stomping ground, Southern California.
Rick Girard:
I am. Born and raised here. And yeah, did a few jaunts outside. Spent some time in Hawaii and in Idaho.
Rob Kramarz:
Where in Hawaii did you spend that time?
Rick Girard:
On Oahu as a matter of fact, back when I actually had a tan.
Rob Kramarz:
Yeah. You’re like me, your tan lasts about a week or something like that.
Rick Girard:
Yeah, exactly. My tan lasts a lot longer if I’m in the sun every day. But otherwise, yeah, it goes away real quick.
Rob Kramarz:
Do you wear a hat, Rick, nowadays?
Rick Girard:
No. I just put sunscreen on my head.
Rob Kramarz:
Out of the sun, yeah.
Rob Kramarz:
When you’re skiing?
Rick Girard:
Yeah. Yeah.
Rob Kramarz:
Well, you could blind people with that situation.
Rick Girard:
I try to sometimes. I mean, it’s part of my superpower.
Rob Kramarz:
As a matter of fact, I once shaved my head. I know it’s not shaved, probably on purpose. But I now am engaged in a contest. If my nonprofit, the Jericho Center of Medical Diplomacy, raises $50,000 by the end of September, I will shave my head in honor of cancer victims.
Rick Girard:
All right. I can give you tips on that.
Rob Kramarz:
I would love to have tips on that, but I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. What’s interesting-
Rick Girard:
Oh, not at all.
Rob Kramarz:
So you brand yourself as a rebel, as unconventional, which is familiar to me because I always say, “If you raise capital like everybody else, you get the results that everybody else gets, which is zip. So you got to be unconventional if you want to stand out.” But exactly what do you mean by being a rebel, by being unconventional?
Rick Girard:
It’s probably similar to you. I look at what everybody else is doing, and I go the opposite direction because what they’re doing is producing usually mediocre results. And if I go the other way and I can figure out how to fine-tune that in such a way where I can get extraordinary results, then that’s where I go. And usually, it takes a little while to get there, a lot of trial and error. But still, creating a scenario that’s different from what everybody else does, it produces a different result.
Rob Kramarz:
So, brief our vision masters out there as to what kind of results you provide, or you would like to provide your clients?
Rick Girard:
Gosh, I’m on a mission right now to help entrepreneurs to really conquer hiring, and specifically in the form of the interview, because the interview is where we fail. If you think about it, most of us have had zero training on how to interview. There are no classes taught. And the stuff that we pick up are like bad habits that come from really back when we probably interviewed when we were 15 for Burger King, right? Where do you want to be in five years? Can you work these days? And all these questions that really bring no value to the candidate itself from your company, or did they bring any value as to giving you any indication of whether or not the person’s going to be successful at your company? Yep. It’s just kind of putting a butt in a seat, and sometimes that’s what you need. But fact of the matter is that if you’re an entrepreneur, if you got a small company and you’re trying to grow it, you must get the right butt in the right seat every time.
Rob Kramarz:
So, this is highly aligned with what we teach at Intelliversity that it’s your team that matters. And in the venture capital fund that I’m now partners in, Shepherd Ventures 3, we really take seriously the idea of investing in the jockey, in the founders more than in the product or the market, although those are important too. And so that’s why I was really excited to meet you and bring you on board is what you’re teaching founders is, that you’ve got to take seriously all the hires, not just your partners, right?
Rick Girard:
Yeah, absolutely.
Rob Kramarz:
What could go wrong? What could go wrong? Let’s…
Rick Girard:
I mean, let’s say you’re at hire 20, and you put the wrong person in. Well, that wrong person could drive out all your high performers. That could go wrong. That person can cause a lawsuit. There can be all kinds of things that can… Scenarios can go wrong that are unintended consequences of hiring that person but affect whether the business will be successful.
Rob Kramarz:
So somewhere in your career, you must have had a mistake that you made that drove you to start to this business. What would that be?
Rick Girard:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, I’ve made every mistake in the book. And hopefully, I haven’t repeated them twice. I’ve come close. Or if I’ve done it twice, I haven’t done it three times for sure. But I made the mistake of… And I think an aha moment for me was, I had a really high-performing person who did really well in my company, but totally brought down the rest of the team. And I was wrestling with the fact that I had five other people that weren’t really producing that well, that were complaining about this one person. And then I’m kind of really catering to this person because they’re bringing in a lot of revenue. Lucky for us, the person went on vacation and then ended up getting an offer letter from one of her clients at the same time.
Rick Girard:
And it came to our work email, right? So they sent her an offer letter. And what ended up happening was, person came back from vacation. We had a conversation about it. She let me know that she was going to be leaving. And she left and celebrations ensued after that from the rest of my team. And as a result of her leaving, the whole environment just changed. It lightened and everybody was having fun. And that very next month, our revenue went up at 3X, like in the course of a month.
Rob Kramarz:
So you’ve taken this learning and developed a system to help and hire?
Rick Girard:
Yes.
Rob Kramarz:
So describe that really in brief as to what makes your system different?
Rick Girard:
Yeah. So, I mean if you think about it, if you build an interview around the core values of the company, then you have a much greater chance that somebody’s going to align well with the organization and be successful, independent of just skills. And most of the time when we hire, we hire purely for skills. And I learned this from… I interviewed at Amazon probably about seven, eight years ago now. And one of the things that I pulled in is that 70% of their hiring decision is based on whether or not you align with their leadership principles. That’s a huge amount of validation right there.
Rob Kramarz:
Right, right.
Rick Girard:
And if you look at what Amazon’s been able to achieve, because they’ve done that almost from the beginning, they’re unprecedented. So they’ve proved the model. And why we don’t pay attention to it, I don’t know. But I was able to kind of take that, make it better and duplicate it. And then replicate it and then be able to make it so that it works really with any role. You’re hiring a leader all the way down to the person who’s taking out the trash.
Rob Kramarz:
Well, everybody talks a bit about this, managers, leaders, but they don’t do it.
Rick Girard:
Oh, yeah.
Rob Kramarz:
Why don’t they do it?
Rick Girard:
I ask myself that question all the time, and I probably would have a full head of hair if I didn’t ask myself that question so many times. I think it really has to do with the fact that it’s going that little extra mile and it’s spending the time to write these things down. And there’s also a belief that these values in culture and all these things are kind of just a bunch of hooey, right? The truth is, they’re not. They do exist whether or not you put them down on paper. But being able to evaluate people for that, that makes all the difference in the world-
Rob Kramarz:
So… Yeah. Sorry.
Rick Girard:
I think it’s a path of least resistance; people naturally fall back on what they’re comfortable with.
Rob Kramarz:
So you found yourself to be a very good interviewer, but that’s one thing. Then you wrote a book, which the name of is Healing Career Wounds.
Rick Girard:
Healing Career Wounds. Yeah.
Rob Kramarz:
Which is out on Amazon, no doubt.
Rick Girard:
Yes.
Rob Kramarz:
Yes, yes, yes. So people can get it. Healing Career Wounds by Rick Girard. That’s G-I-R-A-R-D in case you’re listening for that.
Rob Kramarz:
But what’s the main message of Healing Career Wounds, because it kind of sounds a little different than what you say here?
Rick Girard:
Yeah, it sounds like it’s actually written for people looking for jobs, but it’s not. I made the title as the punchline, right? So if you want to attract really solid performers to your organization, the key to doing that right now is not giving them more money. Lying to people to get them to join your organization and then spending a whole bunch of money does not keep people there because somebody else with a bigger checkbook can come in and steal them out from under you.
Rob Kramarz:
Right.
Rick Girard:
But if you can demonstrate and they can acknowledge that your role helps heal their career wounds, the reasons why they’re really looking to leave, then it puts you in a position where you’ve got somebody who’s going to stick it out and they’re going to thrive within the organization.
Rob Kramarz:
So in my book, which is called Born to Star, I described how a number of billionaires hired the right second-in-command. And that was a key element in their success. I’m talking about Elon Musk, Steve jobs, many others-
Rick Girard:
Steve Jobs didn’t with Sculley.
Rob Kramarz:
But he didn’t with Sculley, but he did with Tim Cook.
Rick Girard:
Yeah, definitely.
Rob Kramarz:
He’s one of the great-
Rick Girard:
I think he learned his lesson for sure on that one.
Rob Kramarz:
He’s one of the great, don’t do, do, do kind of contrast because it’s the same guy twice, right?
Rick Girard:
Yeah.
Rob Kramarz:
So how does your system apply to hiring?
Oh, and Mark Zuckerberg with Sheryl Sandberg. So a classic case, she is still with a company after all these years and have made billions doing it.
Rick Girard:
Yeah.
Rob Kramarz:
How would you use your system for our vision master founders to find their second-in-command?
Rick Girard:
Well, again, it comes down to… Actually, so if you’re looking for your second-in-command, number one, it should not be a fast process. It should be a slow process. And you should be in alignment for sure on the values. But then expectations, spending the time to really understand whether or not the person’s really positioned for your organization is key. You can chase people all day long, and I think a lot of times we get starstruck, oh my gosh, I recruited somebody out of Facebook, or Google, or some name brand company. But if that person’s not really… If what they desire is not what your company is, then all you’re doing is just chasing somebody who’s never going to really… If they do come over, they’re going to be a bit of a disappointment most likely.
Rob Kramarz:
Right, right. Right.
Rick Girard:
Because they don’t share that passion. What they desire is not what you desire. So that alignment is key.
Rob Kramarz:
Now many of our clients, and those listening, are in impact-driven companies. Is there any difference between, say, a pure SaaS company versus, say, an impact-driven company, which may be a SaaS product doing an impact job? But is there any distinction between your method regarding pure tech versus impact tech?
Rick Girard:
Well, can you tell me what impact tech is?
Rob Kramarz:
Like impact might be in medical care, environmental issues, or social issues.
Rick Girard:
Got it, got it.
You know what? So I’ve deployed this with clients throughout, like everybody from home healthcare to fiber optic connectors, to SaaS products, to enterprise software. So I mean, it’s worked across… We even helped out a law firm. So it’s worked in every application. I know it sounds weird.
Rob Kramarz:
It’s okay.
Rick Girard:
But I mean, everybody claims to have something that works for everything, but I haven’t had it fail yet.
Rob Kramarz:
Now, a lot of our clients are women-led companies. So is there anything in particular in your system that might apply to a women-led company, particularly if the CEO is a woman?
Rick Girard:
No. I think the goal here is to take it out of gender, take it out of race, or anything like that. It’s really to drill down on who will be the most impactful per person in the organization? And that comes in eliminating the bias that you have when you go into an interview, or whatever your motives might be, or really what your likes and dislikes are because what tends to happen is we get somebody and we view their LinkedIn profile. And we look for the things we like, and we look for the things we don’t like that are on their profile. And then we already have a decision that’s made before we even talk to the person. And that’s pretty dangerous from my perspective. Could get you into trouble.
Rob Kramarz:
So you want to go into the interview with a clear mind, unbiased by prior opinions.
Rick Girard:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It doesn’t serve the business well for you to go in without a clear mind.
Rob Kramarz:
Well, I’m really looking forward to working with you Rick, because I think your system now… Before I get to how people can contact you, one more thing, you’re working on a SaaS software product that extracts and focuses your expertise via the SaaS products so that you don’t have to be present for al of the clients.
Rick Girard:
Yeah.
Rob Kramarz:
Right.
Rick Girard:
Yeah. Right now, I deploy it in our searches, and we’ve actually been helping companies deploy it individually as well. It kind of grew out of, Hey, you did a really good job placing this executive here. Can you teach the rest of us how to deploy this? That’s been a nice byproduct of it. But the idea is that we want to provide a tool, actually a solution, that eliminates bad interviews. If we can eliminate a bad interview, we can get to the truth and get to the right person that we’re bringing on board every time.
Rob Kramarz:
It’s really crucial. When I interview my clients and prospects, generally speaking, the highest concern, the most salient concern that CEOs have is hiring the wrong person who ends up killing the company.
Rick Girard:
Yeah. I’ve seen it happen hundreds of times throughout my career. Because I came up through the ranks of being a contingency recruiter in the Silicon Valley, primarily working with software startups. And you’d be working really hot and heavy with one company. And then all of a sudden, two weeks later, they’re out of business. It happens like that.
Rob Kramarz:
Well, okay. I think we’re running short of time. So what our audience of vision masters need to know is how to contact you. So-
Rick Girard:
Yeah, absolutely. So email is the best way to get me. You can get me at Rick@stridesearch.com. You can also catch me on LinkedIn, Rick Girard. I also have a podcast. I hope you don’t mind if I plug it-
Rob Kramarz:
Okay, go ahead.
Rick Girard:
… but it’s called Hire Power Radio.
Rob Kramarz:
Hire Power Radio.
I like that, that’s very good.
Rick Girard:
Yeah. I didn’t come up with the name but, I was like, I could not go with it, right? It’s not a religious show.
Rob Kramarz:
It could be.
Rob Kramarz:
And just in case you guys need to know how to contact me or Intelliversity, just go to intelliversity.org/connect. And it’ll set up a meeting with me if you want to talk about raising capital or about managing your finances after you’ve raised capital. So we’re there for you.
Rick Girard:
Important stuff.
Rob Kramarz:
Rick, it’s a pleasure. Look forward to working with you.
Rick Girard:
Yeah. Thank you, Rob. I appreciate it. It was great to meet you.
Rob Kramarz:
Yep. My pleasure. See you soon.
Rick Girard:
Thanks.