[JOE SANOK] This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 713.

I’m Joe Sanok, your host, and welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast. I remember when I was first starting the Practice of the Practice podcast, I was doing all of the sound engineering, I would take a couple hours to make a beautiful graphic for every single one of the episodes. Did all the show notes and did everything because it was brand new. I didn’t know if I was going to even make money off of it. Didn’t want to spend a whole bunch of money to have people help out. I remember the moment when I passed on to Sam, the artistic side, because I love art, I love doing art, I like design, it’s really fun for me to just look at layout and look at how things look and I handed it over to her and I was just like on your own grip, like I love doing this work and I feel like I’m good at it and it’s not the best use of my time.

So I gave it off to Sam and I realized that I would spend a good half hour to an hour recording an episode, I’d spend probably two hours doing the design work and some of the show notes. I found I could do about three or four podcasts in the period of time that I used to be able to do one. Now I do art and watercolor for fun instead of doing it with the Practice of the Practice podcast. So I’m so excited today to be talking about assistance, virtual assistance outsourcing. When do you let go of things, how do you hire in this market? I mean, it’s a crazy hiring market right now. So I’m really excited that we have Jamie Van Cuyk, the owner and lead strategist of Growing Your Team. Jamie’s an expert in hiring and onboarding teams within small businesses and draws from 15 years of leadership experience. Jamie teaches her clients how to hire their early team members, including employees and long term contractors. Jamie, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast. I am so glad that you are here.
[JJAMIE VAN CUYK] Hi Joe. Thank you so much for having me.
[JOE] Yes, well, it’s often hard for business owners to let go of things and we’ll get into that. But I would love to just hear a little bit of your backstory of how did you get into doing this work of helping people grow their teams?
[JAMIE] So I’ll tell you what’s hopefully the short version of the long story. I came from corporate. Most people assume I was in HR in the corporate world, but I wasn’t. I was in operations leadership. So I was on the side of the hiring of everything where I was actually hiring people for my team. I was in a large international marketing firm. There were six other managers that managed teams like I did and they were constantly busy. So I was always helping them hire for their teams. We were in a position where our team members were entry level and would always branch off and go multiple places throughout the organization. We were always hiring for our team and I was always jumping in to help people hire for their teams.

Fast forward to 2016 I decided it was time to leave corporate and fulfill my dream of always starting, running my own business. My husband and I had talked about when we do that, it’d be a software development company because he’s a software engineer. I lasted six months doing that and realized I hated being on that side of the tech world. I love tech, love using it, being on the other side of it where you’re constantly talking about it and building things, not for me. So I decided I needed to get out of that and do something that I actually liked doing and that I was passionate about.

I realized that I liked consulting because the company I left asked me to stay on in a consulting capacity, helping train some of their new leaders. I realized I loved that, so I said, Hey, what can I do in the consulting world? I started going to local chamber events and found myself always speaking to small business owners. So I started asking them, what challenges are you having in your business? What struggles did you have over the years as you were growing your business? What I constantly heard was that they had struggles with hiring, that most of them never hired until they had to do it within their own business.

Or if they did hire before they were coming from corporate worlds where they had large HR teams, they had senior managers, they had all this stuff and people that were supporting them throughout the process. Now they were 100% on their own and they were making bad hire decision after bad hire decision and they wanted help. I started looking this because I was like I don’t know if I want to help in that area because I think I wanted, I thought I wanted to do corporate consulting versus working with small businesses. So I was like, I’ll find you somebody. I couldn’t find anybody to refer them to.

I said, wow, most people out there are helping with hiring, they don’t want to help you until you have 50 employees and you can’t get to 50 employees if you don’t have a good solid team to start with. You have to start from somewhere. If no one’s helping small business owners, I’ll do it. I have the knowledge, I have the expertise. I have the ability to translate what it means to hire well in corporate to what it means to hire well in a small business so I’m going to do this. So now for the last, I think four years now, it’s been, I’ve been helping small businesses throughout the hiring process.
[JOE] Oh wow. Now just even thinking about when you and your husband were working together and you realized I don’t want to do this it’s one thing when you’re in corporate and so your husband had his own business and then you’re joining him. What was it like to be just married entrepreneurs and have it all fall on the two of you at that point and then make that decision to leave working with him?
[JAMIE] So he was starting the business as a side hustle as well. He still had his nine to five job. With our personalities, things actually were pretty well there because we defined roles and responsibilities from the start. He was the software engineer, I was the leader, so we made the decision that if there was, if something, we would talk about things. We would make sure people were aware of what was going on and discuss things but we said from the beginning, if a decision has to be made and it’s tech related, he’s the decision maker. If it’s a decision that has to be made and it’s outside of the tech things, but for the business, I am the decision maker. So we discuss things but if we can’t agree, here’s the person who gets to make the decision in these areas.

So it really helped and we had that open communication about a lot of things. When it came to deciding to end it, he was definitely okay with the decision as well, because like I said, he was working full-time job. He was doing this on the side. We had two little kids and he goes, I feel like I go from working all day to then working all night and working on the weekends on our stuff and I don’t see the kids. He’s like, so I’m burnt out. I’m ready to take a break too.
[JOE] Gotcha. So really you shut down that company at that time or took a break from it so you could do your consulting stuff and then he just went back to the nine to five for a while?
[JAMIE] Yes.
[JOE] Gotcha. Okay, cool. So when you were deciding what consulting you were going to do, I think it’s always interesting to go back in history, because people will see someone like yourself that has a successful company, you’re rocking it out, you’re doing podcasts and think this just happened. But there’s always so much messiness that helps people get to this point. How did you think through or decide what consulting you were going to do? So you’re at chamber events, you’re noticing you’re talking to small businesses, you’re doing research that people under 15 employees don’t seem to have resources. What other things were helping point you in the direction of the business you ended up creating?
[JAMIE] So there were a few of the things. One is I joined a group coaching program that was really part of it designing let’s figure out what you want to be working on. They brought us through this series of questions, and I wish I remembered what the questions were, but I remember they were questions that were very unrelated to each other. But at the end of the day, when I was going through all my answers, every one of my answers used the word people. I realized that I wanted to focus on the people within an organization because that’s where my passion was. It didn’t matter what the question was, what we were talking about, something about my answer revolved around people.

Then I was like, well, what do I do to help people because I also have a background in Lean Six Sigma, which is improving process and taking out waste of a process and making things more efficient and improving quality. So I was like, do I focus on helping to improve processes within organizations because that impacts people or do I focus on the hiring? Do I focus on helping people become better leaders and everything? First I was like, I’m going to do it all. Then I remember I was at a conference and I was speaking in the breakfast line to one of the speakers at the conference and she asked what I did, what my business focused on.

She goes, after I told her, I was like, well I’m focused on people and process and like all this stuff. I forget what my exact spiel was. She goes, “I have no idea what you just told me. We need to sit down and work on this and figure out exactly what you do and how you communicated out.” That conversation with that speaker at this conference just over breakfast made me focus on the hiring and managing because I was like, okay, take the process out there because it’s confusing people where I’m just like, I focus on all this stuff. Some of the process work comes out in what I do because we’re improving your hiring process.

Sometimes when we focus on leadership, we’re improving the way processes work within the organization, but I’m not going to go out the gate and say, that’s also something that I work on. So then from there it was hiring teams and managing teams. Then as time went on and I was realizing which clients I was attracting, which clients I liked working with the most, it started to really focus on the hiring. That’s really where I liked to focus, I liked having those conversations the best. They were the packages and clients I was most excited about working on, working with and everything, we still do a little bit of work in the let’s teach you how to be a great leader and manage your team and packages that focus specifically on that. But when I realized where my focus was and what I enjoyed doing in my business, it was like let’s narrow down to just focusing on the hiring.
[JOE] Well I would love to take some time to really dive into that hiring because the hiring world right now, like I remember a few years ago people were getting so many quality applications for jobs and then there’s so much that switched post pandemic and all of that. Let’s just start with what makes a good hire because you had said a lot of these folks were hiring. They had never really had the job of hiring anybody and if they did like, I was on a committee at a community college and they gave us this whole decision making matrix and it was just following the rules with HR for a huge organization. So I really hadn’t done much hiring outside of my business either. So what makes a good hire in regards to what you’re looking for, what should people think through before they even start hiring for a role, all those different things?
[JAMIE] Great questions. The first thing is, well you really need to know what this person is going to do within your organization, within your company. I’ve seen so many people, especially with their first hires there said, I just need help. I’ll figure out what they’re going to do later. Well, you can’t hire someone if you don’t know what they’re going to do. So even if you’re hiring someone to do admin work, what type of admin work are they doing? Because you need to hire someone who is skilled at those areas or someone that wants to do those things because having someone who’s going to help you keep up on emails and scheduling appointments is completely different than someone who’s going to be doing the admin work for your social media. Someone might be able to do both, but there’s also other people that are going to say one or the other is where they want to be and the other one’s torture for them to do. So you really need to know what tasks and responsibilities this role is going to do so that way you hire the person that has those skills.
[JOE] I would much rather have one person that spends five hours a week doing email and scheduling. That’s really good at that. Another person that’s five hours a week, that’s doing social media and is really good at that. That to have someone that’s 10 hours a week, that is adequate at both. I think it’s so interesting how often I hear people say, I just want a virtual assistant that does everything. I’m like, if they can do everything well, they’re going to get gobbled up pretty quick. You’ll get them going and then they’re going to leave somewhere else, but they genuinely can do everything. So I love that advice, just starting with what are the exact tasks that you want them to start with?
[JAMIE] Then once you figured that out, it’s figuring out what it means to be successful within your organization. So if you look at those tasks, someone else can have that exact same role with those exact same tasks in their organization. It’s going to look different because they have different expectations for success. They are a different manager. They are a different business with different processes, different clients, different flow. So you have to figure out what does success look like for you? Then an additional layer to that is what is the culture you’re trying to build?

A lot of times we hear that hire for culture fit and people are like hire that person you want to go have a drink with on Friday afternoons once you get out of work. That’s not really hiring for culture fit. Hiring for culture fit is the person that’s going to be happy in your office, in your work environment, the person that wants to thrive there, the person that can follow your processes, the person who is going to treat your clients the way that you want them to be treated, is going to go through the processes and everything the way you want it, that builds what it means to be a worker within your organization.
[JAMIE] Once you figure out all those, the additional layer, it’s then more than those tasks and responsibilities and you can go out and find that idea team member, instead of someone who’s just checking the box for the tasks, but you might not be happy with long-term having them in your company.
[JOE] Yes, it’s interesting to think about hiring team members that also, and maybe you’re going to get to this that either compliment you or add to the team because I tend to be such a big ideas person that I also need to balance that out with some people that are very practical and very like different than myself. If you’re always thinking who would I want to go out for drinks with or have just like be a fun work environment. You’re probably going to have people that are more like yourself and you may not get those people that are maybe more introverted or quiet or need to be reflective. You need those people in the organization. So I’m really glad that you can move away from just like, who would I have drinks with?
[JAMIE] Right, exactly. When you bring that up, a person like you or someone that’s not like you, but compliments your work style and everything that’s another thing you really have to figure out when you’re trying to figure out what tasks and responsibilities is this person responsible for? Because are they doing work that you would do and you would thrive at, but you just don’t have time anymore because let’s say you have too many clients and you need someone to serve your clients. Those regards you possibly want someone that’s very similar to you in a lot of ways, because you want the experience to be the same, whether they’re with meeting with you or they’re meeting with your team member.

But there’s other things that you are doing that while you might like doing them they’re not you’re zone a genius that, or you’re even not doing them because you’re like, oh my God, that stresses me out. You need someone who is going to be that person, that compliments your work style and your ability, because they’re going to in a way, pick up the slack within the company. They’re going to do the things that you are not good at. They’re going to do the things that you keep putting to the bottom of the to-do list because it doesn’t interest you, but these are things that need to get done. So sometimes if you’re that big idea person, you need that person somewhere in the organization that’s going to help reign you in and say, okay, you got this idea, but an idea is only so good if you don’t do anything to execute it, if you don’t follow through, if you don’t see it. Or you got five ideas, we can only do one at a time. So let’s help you narrow down to say, this is the one we should focus on this week. Once we get through this, we’ll go to that next one on the list.
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[JOESANOK] What’s maybe one last thing that is really important to think about in regards to a good hire? Then I’d love to dive into the unique hiring environment we’re in right now.
[JAMIE] One of the things, when it comes to really that good hire is just remember that for some things you want to, but other things you don’t want to is looking at the, for exact positions when you’re looking at our resume. So I always say, you want to look at transferable skills. Can they do the job? Can they prove that they can do the job versus have they done this exact job before now? There’s going to be things where you’re like, okay, they’ve need to done this job because they need to prove that they can do this type of work. So if you’re hiring, let’s say another therapist for your practice and you want someone with the experience, chances are, they’ve been a therapist before. But if you’re hiring an admin that admin doesn’t necessarily have to have been an admin in a similar practice before, but do they have the skills? That could be from one job or a combination of jobs to show that they can do this role that you’re hiring for. So don’t always think that the perfect candidate is the one that has done this job and the exact same type of business before. They could be coming from different industries, different positions, but still have the ability to succeed.
[JOE] Oh, such a good point. So what happened where now we have such a unique hiring environment? Give us a little context of why is it so employee-centric and hiring an owner, like it is an employee market right now. What happened and what can we do about it?
[JAMIE] Well, to put it into one word COVID, but COVID what happened during that time was I would say really two-folds with a lot of things. First is a lot of people looked at what they were doing and said, this doesn’t make me happy. Why am I in a position that’s not making me happy? Why am in an industry that’s not making me happy? They started looking for new opportunities, either completely switching industries or just switching companies to say, I want a job where I am happy. I want a job that not only is giving me a paycheck, is giving me that balance I want in my life, that makes me feel fulfilled, however that person defines being fulfilled with work.

So a lot of people started switching, which makes people very picky about what they’re applying for, where before they might say, here are 50 jobs with the title that I’m looking for that seem to be in the right pay range. Let me apply to all of them and see what happens where now they’re spending time and looking at each one of those jobs to say, which one of these opportunities sounds like it’s the best fit for me? Out of that 50, these tens sound like really good fits. These other 40 not so much. So I’m not going to apply to those 40. So candidates are getting more picky about where they’re applying to because they want that job that matches what means the most to them.

The other thing that happened with COVID is a lot of people said working is not for me anymore. I’m leaving the workforce. This was a lot of people that took earlier retirement. There were a lot of parents that said we have the financial means for me to stay home. So I’m going to stay home with my kids, whether it’s short term, to get them through virtual learning or anything like that instead of getting another job in the workforce. So people were leaving the workforce and this meant those positions now need to be filled. As people are retiring, those tend to be some of the higher up positions.

So candidates are, not candidates, employees in general are moving up the ladder. So those higher positions are become vacant. People have to move up into those positions, which then makes the next layer move up, which then makes the next layer move up, which means those positions that are at the bottom of the organizations, those more entry level, early career positions have fewer candidates buying for them because so many people moved up in the organizations. So it’s making it, so your admins, your office assistants, and a lot of those positions, your candidate pool just got a lot smaller.
[JOE] Thank you for taking us through that. I mean, I knew some of those dynamics, but to hear you talk about the whole thing, I mean, this is the podcast and work that you do every single day so it’s great to have an expert on the show to take us through that. What can we do about it?
[JAMIE] So you have to be prepared to navigate the market. First is when you’re going to hire, as I mentioned, people want the job that connects with them. So make sure that your job posting speaks to the person who’s going to fit well within your organization. You might no longer be posting a job and get a hundred candidates right out the gates. You might get 10, but hopefully those 10 are good quality candidates that match what you’re looking for because you really define who you want to hire in your job posting. What I say is your job posting has two main responsibilities. One is to attract your ideal candidate. The other one is to turn away your not-ideal candidate.

So you want people to read your job posting and say, “Nope, not the position for me. I’m going to go apply elsewhere.” Because once again, like we talked about how people really want a job that matches what they’re looking for and that’s more than just a paycheck. It’s more than just tasks and responsibilities. Now it’s that fitting into that whole culture, being able to live the life that they want. With that you don’t want someone joining your company and then realizing that it’s not a fit. So you want to be clear from the beginning, what it means for it to be a fit and hire and speak to that person throughout the entire process. That is number one thing to do to start attracting the right candidate so you have people applying that you want to hire.
[JOE] So when we think about the actual posting, making sure you talk to the culture, what the job looks like, the exact roles, what else should be in there to give your company a competitive edge, to find the best candidate, the best fit hopefully?
[JAMIE] One of the things I want to tell you about that is be honest and be clear and really think about everything that you’re putting in there. One of the things that I see a lot of people make mistakes on is when they talk about things that are required for the person to get the job. And they list things like bachelor degree required, this experience required, so many years of this, so many years of that and anything that you list there, I want you to ask, why is that important? Do they actually need five years experience in this? Do they actually need a bachelor’s degree in order to be your office admin? Or do they not? Do they just need experience to show that they could be a good office admin?

For example, I had a client of mine that in the past, they always included on their job postings bachelor’s degree required or equivalent experience. Well, when we were talking about what was really important, that bachelor’s degree requirement never came up once in our conversations, so it wasn’t included on the job posting. Then as we went on through the process, they realized that the candidate they made an offer to, and that they were hiring didn’t have a bachelor’s degree and they started questioning how they could really present that to their team because they have always talked about the person’s got a degree in this and now this candidate didn’t have a degree.

They said, what do we do? How do we tell them that we hired someone without a degree? I was like, well, why does the degree matter? You also said degree or equivalent experience. How much experience is equivalent experience? Because this candidate had 10 years doing almost the exact same position that they were hiring for. I was like, if 10 years is not equivalent experience, how much experience is equivalent experience? They realized that with that, having a bachelor’s degree didn’t make someone qualified for the job. It was the experience that they needed. So make sure you’re not including things on the job posting that aren’t really needed to define an ideal candidates.
[JOE] Oh, it’s such a good point
[JAMIE] The other thing that you want to include is the salary. What are you paying these team members? Because that matters, especially nowadays where we see in a lot of areas, the cost of living going up, people need to be able to afford to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. Depending on their situation on whether they have a spouse or roommates or other people that are helping to contribute financially, sometimes that means that they have to make decisions based on what the pays going to be. The more upfront, you can be about those pay levels the more likely you’re going to have a candidate that’s going to accept the position.
[JOE] Wow. I hear a lot of companies talk about how to stand out, that they feel like sure they can define who they are. They can take all these steps that you are saying and they feel like I’m still not getting people. Do you recommend getting into Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups? Are there strategies that you found that work that aren’t, I mean, there’s those like cheesy ways that people do it. I’m not talking about just, I don’t know, flashy ways, but like what are practical ways that people can stand out in such a competitive market?
[JAMIE] So one is really being true to who your company is, standing out to any way that you would with that normal marketing that your business does. So if you’re someone who’s always active on social media, continue that up as you’re going through the higher end process. If you’re a company that’s never really been active on social media and now all of a sudden you’re going to pop up just because you’re hiring and then you’re going to go into the shadows again afterwards, it’s probably not worth your time because those posts probably aren’t going to get enough attention in order to really stand out in the crowd.

But some of the things that you want to do when you’re going to hire is people are going to see the job posting on the job boards. What are they going to see when they then go look up your company? So one of the things that I have noticed with a business that I worked with in the past when candidates went to the website, the website was when hundred percent about the business owner. This wasn’t like a self-branded company where you’re like, well, that makes sense because that business owner is the name of the business. It is their business. This was a business that had 10 employees and your chance, if you called in, you are never going to talk to the business owner. You’re going to be talking to someone else.

But it gave that feel like my employees don’t matter. It’s all about me as the business owner and who cares about them, even though they’re doing all the work. So for them, we changed things around to make it more about the company on the website and less about that business owner because like I said, it wasn’t a self-branded business. People could work with that business and never even know who the owner was. So it wasn’t needed to be branded and focused on the owner and all of his past business accomplishments. So you really want to show off of what that culture is like to work with you on whatever platforms that you currently use because people are going to go and look at your company before they go and apply for the job.
[JOE] Such great advice. Well, the last question I always ask is if every private practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know?
[JAMIE] With that I have something that I always like to ask my questions whenever, or excuse me, I always like to ask my clients whenever they’re getting to that point of trying to figure out what to delegate, what to give it to a new team member or even after they hired actually delegating and not just saying that they’re going to delegate; is does it have to be done by you or does it have to be done right? Because you can always train someone to do it right. There’s going to be things in your business that you need to do, or at least you need to do it for now as your business continues to grow. You might be able to delegate those items later, but then there’s items that you are doing, but you don’t have to do. It just needs to be done correctly. If that’s the case, those are the things you need to start getting off your plates so that way you can continue to scale your business, work less hours and really be happy.
[JOE] Oh, so awesome. Well, Jamie, you have a free checklist to help people with their hiring process. Tell us a little bit about that and if they want to follow your work where they can find you.
[JAMIE] I have a hiring checklist that takes you through the eight steps that you need to go through when you’re ready to hire your team member. You can get that checklist at growingyourteam.com/hiring-checklist. It’s a free download that will take you through each one of those eight steps, give you all the details that you need to know so that way you can be on your way to making that perfect fit hire for your business. Then if you want to connect farther, you can go over to growingyourteam.com. From there, you can follow us on social media platforms or schedule a call with me.
[JOE] Jamie, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice podcast.
[JAMIE] Thank you, Joe.
[JOE] I don’t know about you, but I am so grateful that there are people like Jamie in the world because I hate thinking through the operations of all of that stuff and to just have her put together a checklist and talk through here’s the steps to do. We’re doing some more hiring with Practice of the Practice and to just be able to talk with her about how do you stand out and what does that look like and defining it? My gosh, it saved me so much time. So if nobody listens to this, at least I got a ton of awesome information from Jamie, which I know lots of you will listen to this.

But thanks so much for hanging out with us today. That idea of expanding your team, it’s amazing, especially in the counseling world, when you look at your hourly that you’re to do one extra session, how many hours you could purchase by having another person that you bring into your company to just be able to do the work that you’re awesome at and to have that free time to put into thinking big about things to level up in whatever way you plan to level up.

Also we couldn’t do this podcast without our sponsors and one of our newer sponsors, Noble has some exciting news to share. They’re helping mental health professionals to serve more people in less time, support a worthy because and also earn some passive income. They’re on a mission to add 50,000 mental health professionals to their platform. You can join Noble right now and you get to use Noble totally for free forever. Learn more over at www.noble.health/joe. Again, that’s www.noble.health/joe.

Thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have an amazing week. We’re doing four episodes a week now, so tons of content coming your way. If you have ideas, if you have people that have interesting stories, we’ve got some really great series coming up this summer. One series we’re doing as a follow up to our Black Leaders Matter series is all about diverse clinicians. That’s going to be in June. Then we’re doing a different series throughout the rest of the summer, the How I Got Through it Series about people who’ve been through really tough, tough things, just how they got through it, hearing some really interesting stories from folks for that as well. So make sure you tune in. A lot of great content coming your way this summer. Thank you so much for letting me into your ears and your brain. Have a great day. Talk to you soon.

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