E123 – How to Effectively Hire and Get Hired (Kyle Maurer, Sandhills Development)

In today’s episode, we look back into our conversation with Kyle Maurer, Director Of Operations at Sandhills Development. It’s the most listened to episode ever in the WPMRR Podcast. 

Joe, Christie, and Kyle discuss strategies in hiring right, how a good job listing is formatted, and how to make your applications stand out.

Tune in to learn how to hire and be hired successfully!

What to Listen For:

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:28 Welcome to the WPMRR Podcast!
• 02:22 Let’s meet Kyle Maurer of Sandhills Podcast
• 04:32 Give Get Options Podcast a listen!
• 08:04 Hiring tactics to hire the right people
• 11:54 How to get a more diverse pool of applicants
• 16:15 What not to include in your job posting
• 21:07 The impact of adding the compensation program
• 24:29 Negotiations in salary discussions
• 28:02 Advertise posting in several spaces to reach out to more diverse demographics
• 33:20 How do diversity of new hires affect the team?
• 36:25 There’s a shortage of applicants who go the extra mile
• 42:30 Written and oral communication is important in a global setting
• 44:56 How to create an outstanding application
• 50:19 The biggest cheat: If you aren’t a stranger, you have an advantage
• 53:10 Telling stories during interviews to sell yourself

Episode Resources

• Listen to Kyle’s Get Options Podcast
• Check out Sandhills Development
• Leave an iTunes review or binge watch past episodes
• Send questions to yo@wpmrr.com for the next Q&A pod
• Visit the WPMRR website

Podcast Transcript:

Joe Howard: [00:00:00] Howdy folks, Joe Howard here it is the week after Thanksgiving here in the US I was supposed to record two episodes last week, actually, but one got postponed. The other actually couldn’t record because of the big AWS outage. So I was not able to record a new episode last week. So this week we’re calling a little audible.

We’re going to, re-release one of our previous episodes, but not just one of, actually our most listened to episode of all time. I thought folks would get a kick from either listening to it again. Or, you know, if you haven’t. Listened to it already listening to it for the first time. So we’re re releasing an older episode with Kyle Maurer.

It is all about how to effectively hire and get hired specifically in the WordPress space, but really in general, it’s got a lot of good information. So if you are potentially looking to get hired, there’s a lot of great advice in here from the people. Actually doing the hiring. And if you’re a small business looking to do some hiring, there’s a lot of great advice on men.

It’s in best practices, some strategies and tactics I’ve used at WP Buffs. Kyle’s used at Sandhills Development and yeah, hopefully it’ll be super helpful for you. All right. I’ll let you get on to the episode now. Happy December. Enjoy.
Hey good WordPress people. Welcome back to the WPMRR WordPress podcast. I’m Joe.

Christie Chirinos: [00:01:30] And I’m Christie.

Kyle Maurer: [00:01:31] And I’m your father’s brothers, nephews, cousins, former roommate, Lord Dark Helmet.

Christie Chirinos: [00:01:37] Off to a great start.

Joe Howard: [00:01:39] The only time I’ve ever broken up the intro to applaud. Wow. Amazing. And you’re listening to the WordPress business podcast. Lord dark comment on the pod this week. A big Spaceballs fan.

Kyle Maurer: [00:01:51] Happy to be here.

Joe Howard: [00:01:52] I haven’t seen Spaceballs in a long time. Is this a favorite of you and the fam years in the family?

Kyle Maurer: [00:01:56] It’s a favorite of teenage Kyle, I guess I was a teenager once. That was the most hilarious thing that was ever seen.

Joe Howard: [00:02:03] I remember the surrounded by assholes. That’s turning and bubbling it. Call this a radar screen. Yeah. They jammed the radar. Right? Transparency. There might not be the right flavor, but people have seen it. They know what I’m talking about. All right. We’ve got Laura dark coming on the pod this week, also known as Kyle Maurer. What’s up Kyle, you’re our first repeat guest in the podcast episode. People may know you already. And if anybody is in the WordPress space, they obviously know who you are, but tell folks what you do.

Kyle Maurer: [00:02:29] I work at a company called Sandhills development. Thank you for having me back on the show, Joe and Christie, I’m a loyal day one listener of this program and have learned a lot from you both. And I love everything that you do at WPMRR. And honestly, I would listen to you guys talk about, you know, just anything talk about the weather and I would probably tune in, cause I think that highly of you both in your expertise, but you’re talking about it WordPress business and earning recurring income.

And that’s important to me and important to the users of our products. At Sandhills Development, we make some WordPress plugins, e-commerce related stuff, mostly filet WP, easy digital downloads, restrict content pro. And so on. I run operations for the company. We’re a team of 26 people right now, and I’m in charge of making sure everybody essentially enjoys their work at this little software company and keeps working here. And it’s a lot of fun.

Christie Chirinos: [00:03:16] How are you 26 people now?

Kyle Maurer: [00:03:18] That’s right.

Christie Chirinos: [00:03:19] That’s a lot.

Kyle Maurer: [00:03:20] Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Howard: [00:03:22] I went on parental leave. I think you were 20, 27. Plus X and last, I don’t know, six to nine months. So that’s pretty cool.

Kyle Maurer: [00:03:30] Yeah, we did some hiring this year and I think that’s a fun topic to talk about.

Joe Howard: [00:03:34] Yes, agree. It’s funny. Cause we were talking before the show about what should we talk about today? And we kind of decided on hiring slash getting hired in the WordPress space during this time where. Well, there are some companies that are doing pretty well and continuing to hire. And then there may be some folks out there who are struggling a little bit.

Maybe people have lost business or like even lost their job. And so we also want to help folks who may be looking for new positions to be able to yeah, apply to new positions and hopefully be successful with that and what people can do to be more successful there, but appreciate the kind words, Kyle.

This is funny Christie like yeah. The only reason we have Kyle on the podcast is like to say how awesome we are and to get our spirits on me. Yes,

Christie Chirinos: [00:04:17] So we have Kyle, on the three-way interview podcast because he tells us both how amazing we are. And it’s just a little boost.

Kyle Maurer: [00:04:23] I could go on and on all day.

Christie Chirinos: [00:04:25] You’re amazing too, Kyle.

Kyle Maurer: [00:04:26] Oh gee shucks.

Joe Howard: [00:04:28] Kyle, before he even gets started, we got to tell people about your podcast a little bit as well. People are listeners to WPMRR podcast. They’re also going to love your podcast because, okay. Kyle already said he loves our pocket. We got to say, we love podcasts.

Kyle Maurer: [00:04:41] Don’t feel you don’t have to do this Joe.

Christie Chirinos: [00:04:44] I love it. I tell everyone about it.

Joe Howard: [00:04:46] Most fun one. It’s way more fun than this one.

Christie Chirinos: [00:04:49] So much fun.

Joe Howard: [00:04:50] I don’t want this to be self-promotional, but if people go back and listen to, I think it was episode 200, Kyle that I was on the get options podcast. Kyle did amazing. 100, 100, 400.

Kyle Maurer: [00:05:01] I don’t know.

Joe Howard: [00:05:04] He made up an amazing rap about me and it would be unbelievable. I need a copy of that crowd by the way, but we should go back and their show is so fun. And so people got to listen. So Kyle, what’s the podcast called?

Kyle Maurer: [00:05:14] The podcast you’re referring to is called Get Options. I do. I co-host it with a friend named Adam silver. We’ve been doing it for a couple of years and we try not to take it seriously. And we joke around and give sarcastic advice to people’s question. And it’s really just a bunch of silliness. Sometimes we play games. Sometimes we have guests like Joe has been on the show before. And a lot of other people who just like to provide sarcastic answers in response to serious WordPress related queries. I don’t know anything about whether it’s a popular show. I literally haven’t looked at any stats or reviews or anything in probably years, but it so far is still fun. So I keep doing it.

Christie Chirinos: [00:05:54] Can we do a get options episode with me? And it’s just bad advice from Christie Chirinos. I really want to do that.

Kyle Maurer: [00:06:06] Yeah. Okay. I’ll make it happen. Let’s do it. Let’s totally do it.

Joe Howard: [00:06:10] It’ll be upside down. World’s podcasts, do everything the opposite of this, and then you’ll be successful.

Christie Chirinos: [00:06:17] So funny.

Kyle Maurer: [00:06:18] I’ve never heard that advice before.

Christie Chirinos: [00:06:20] Oh my God. Let’s see. First time. Yeah. Get options is so fun. And for those of you who don’t know, we also did a co podcast event at our word camp us last year with Kyle and Adam. And it was super blast.

Kyle Maurer: [00:06:36] Oh yeah. That thing. Yeah. Yeah. That was fun.

Christie Chirinos: [00:06:39] It won’t happen because word camp us has gone completely virtual

Joe Howard: [00:06:44] we should do it anyway. Let’s do a virtual one. We should we’ll get everyone coffee or whatever, or tea, and then we’ll just have a little zoom room or something. I dunno.

Christie Chirinos: [00:06:51] It’s a really good idea.
Joe Howard: [00:06:54] I just decided here on the podcast. Okay, everyone, what’s your name? Yep. Create another slash page.

Christie Chirinos: [00:06:59] Now everyone knows how we plan our lives.

Joe Howard: [00:07:02] Yes. That’s the only reason we do. If we didn’t do the podcasts, we would never like move anything forward. We just have to recite everything in front of everybody so that we actually do it. That gives us the impetus to actually see it. Yeah. Productivity, hack, start a podcast. Tell everyone you do things. And then. They’ll yell at you if you don’t do it. Okay.
All right. Hiring, getting hired. Let’s start on the hiring side of things. This will be like a, like the first part will be more for employers. People running businesses or people looking to do hiring. We can talk about some of the things that we’ve found useful and maybe some of our strategies and things that we’ve executed that have been successful in hiring awesome people, hiring the right people for the right position. Maybe this is the right person for the wrong position, but then you found out.

That they needed to do something else. And they were still an awesome person and they shifted somewhere else. So I don’t know possible. There’s a lot to talk about here. So, Kyle leads the charge on operations over at Sandhills. Maybe you can start with some of the strategies you use or maybe tactics, whatever the difference are between those two things you do to hire.

Kyle Maurer: [00:08:08] I’m happy to share a recap of what we did this year, which I think we learned a lot of lessons from.

Joe Howard: [00:08:14] Yeah. I would love that because you went from 20 to 26 since the last time we talked and that’s you obviously had to do something right to get there. So let’s chat.

Kyle Maurer: [00:08:21] Sure. Here’s the short version of the story. A year ago, January of 2019, we were looking to hire, we opened up three positions, it’s a port position, a marketing position, and a developer position. We posted those on our sand Hills development, like corporate site. We shared that in like our email list. Sending out to all of our subscribers, tens of thousands of people. And we shared it on social media and not much beyond that.

Joe Howard: [00:08:49] So, and just a quick interlude had an audience already had an email list that you’ve been building for years. Totally. Now you can release this information for your folks.

Kyle Maurer: [00:08:59] List for each of our actual, like each of our product brands. So the santals development brand didn’t have any audiences of its own, but we’re sending it out to Easy digital downloads and a fleet WP, your subscribers and so on. This was January of 2019. We got over the course of six weeks for those three positions, a grand total of 58 applicants. And that was. Okay. It was enough for us. We build, I think we hired and we ended up hiring like six different people over the course of 2019. And we hired six in 2018 and six in 2017.

That’s been our trend for a few years. And all of those were people who did. That other one where people who applied during that round of soliciting applications. So 58 in total, and a lot of them were like familiar names and contacts in the industry and all things considered it is reasonably successful.

Joe Howard: [00:09:51] So, yeah. And just to touch on that even a little more, some people maybe you didn’t know they were new applications, people you were meeting for the first time and their application, but some folks maybe were folks, one either you already knew about in the WordPress space or two, maybe just someone who, yeah, maybe you didn’t know specifically, but it was like a name that was floated out that you’ve seen before in the WordPress space. So not totally new to you. So something someone has obviously done some sort of had some sort of visibility in the WordPress space that you saw before they were introduced to an application, which I think is probably important too.

Kyle Maurer: [00:10:23] Totally. Yeah. That application round went okay. But we wanted to do better. And in particular, like one of our key goals was to get a more diverse pool of applicants to begin because that application pool had people who were qualified for the positions. There’s no doubt about that. And we hired people that are still with us and we’re happy with the end result for the most part, but we wanted to improve.

Things in a number of different ways in the company. And one of those is we wanted to improve the diversity of the team, and that starts with having a more diverse applicant pool. And we also wanted, that was multifaceted. Of course, we wanted to bring people in with different backgrounds and perspectives and.
Different people in a lot of different ways. We looked at our pool and it, when it was far too homogenous for our goals people are all the same. They’re just people like us from our little WordPress bubble you know, our age, our location, our demographic and so.

Joe Howard: [00:11:23] Yeah, it’s a challenge a lot of WordPress businesses face, especially when you’re like getting applications from like your email list of people who you already know in the WordPress space or just in this WordPress bubble, as diverse as the WordPress space is pretty diverse compared to other tech bubbles.

Maybe it’s still you know, I’m sure 75% of the applications you got. Maybe white male there’s that demographic is pretty significant in the WordPress United States. Yeah. US-based so, yeah, a challenge. Everybody faces, including WP buffs worked, having a push towards that as well. So I’d love to hear more about yeah maybe some strategies you use to get a more diverse pool of people, because that sometimes requires like recruitment or like just a different strategy. So yeah. How’d you go about that?

Kyle Maurer: [00:12:04] Well, we acknowledged when we knew the hiring round was coming up, that we wanted to do things a little better, a little differently in 2020, that’s the result that we had in 2019 January, we did a few things over the course of 2020 for one, we redesigned the Santos website.
It was super plain and vanilla before, like just thrown together as like a splash page that had links to our main brands, just plain black text on a white background, minimally styled, super, super simple. And Sean, a member of our team is an expert designer, threw something really nice together over the course of like maybe the summer of 2020 looks grand.

We’re really proud of it. It tells the story of the company highlights. Everybody on the team tells about all of the unique projects that we do beyond just the WordPress plugins we’re known for and so on. And that really made a big difference. I mean, it’s look I think a more legitimate software company that serious people will be happy to apply for, even if they haven’t heard of us.

Joe Howard: [00:13:00] As someone who’s just gone through a rebrand. I totally resonate with that. And I agree. See the site and I’m like, this also was fine, but this one I’m like, I would totally apply to this company. This looks awesome. So I dig it.

Christie Chirinos: [00:13:12] I could really see that helping even within the community too, because I think that there’s people who are very involved with word press, but they know the names of your products, not the names of your company. Right. They don’t understand Hills. They know, I feel like WP, they know easy digital downloads.

Kyle Maurer: [00:13:26] Well, that was one of the things that we did. Another thing as I transitioned from a previous role where I was more marketing focused to operations in the summer. And as a part of that, I took on the responsibility of owning DNI and training and hiring and recruitment and team development and all that kind of stuff.

Everything from team diversity and inclusion. Right. So I took that under my scope of responsibility. Formerly there wasn’t anyone officially like being responsible for those things, but we all were kind of on the same page wanting them, but nobody was like actively responsible for them. So I took that over and said this is now my responsibility to improve our, the diversity of our team, the inclusiveness here at our team, and to grow the team in alignment with our long-term strategies and.

So I spent a lot of time looking at how we put things together on our corporate site and which positions we really want to fill to align with those strategies that we have for the future. And along with some colleagues, we put together some job posts for January of 2020. This is exactly one year later.
Similar situation. This time we posted. Two open positions. They were slightly different of junior developer position, which we never hired before, as opposed to a senior developer that we hired for last year. And then another support position very much the same as last year, the differences were, we had a newly designed website.

We spent a lot more time working on the actual job postings to provide a lot more detailed than before. It was really just a couple of paragraphs and outlined like a bulleted list of these are your duties and these are the qualifications we’re looking for before now. Lengthy described, like what your typical day might look like working here at sand Hills.

What emphasizing a lot of the good qualities putting making the appealing aspects of the position, highlighted first, pushing some of the barriers to the bottom of the post, like the things that we really need or that are important to us. And I’ll also like I spend a lot of time researching language and the effects that.

The language you use in these job postings can have on different demographics and their willingness to apply for a position. There’s a lot when we’re writing these that we don’t realize we’re writing something that may be. Would resonate with us or that we personally would connect with, but a lot of phrasing can dramatically affect way a message is received by a potential applicant and how excited they would be to submit their information. So I spent a lot of time researching that and rewrote a lot of our job posts in order to and make the language more appealing to a more diverse group and to be more welcoming and inviting.

Christie Chirinos: [00:16:06] What were some of the key takeaways from that research like top three phrases that you should not include in your job listing? I’m super curious.

Kyle Maurer: [00:16:16] Something that I would recommend doing a little research on if you have if you have job post writing in your future and on the spot, it might be tough for me to think of a good example of this. I’ve read some recaps that other companies like this have put together and some studies that have been done, there are some studies that people and companies have conducted where they experiment with like different phrasing and and mostly the evidence that I’ve been able to find.

Is pertaining to the difference in applications for men and women. Now it’s been like several months since I was actually doing that. So I’m trying to think on the spot, think of really good examples, but men and women do connect with different, like types of languages, as a there’s evidence that suggests that you know, I’m not thinking of a good example here. I would have to pull up our job posts. I don’t have to pull up our Dropbox.

Joe Howard: [00:17:07] No worries. I might think that when I’m writing job posts, I try to be. Inclusive by not using like he or she. Language maybe. Yeah. And that’s a whole area. People can Google and find like how to write inclusive job posts.

Because someone who like, as an example is like in the LGBT Q community, when they read a job post, those kinds of folks really realize when you’re using inclusive language, because they’re so, you know, they’re very aware for it to it. And. I think they’d be more likely to apply if you use LGBTQ friendly language, as opposed to he, who we want for this position is X, Y, and Z. Obviously you want to be pretty inclusive.

Kyle Maurer: [00:17:49] So that’s got to watch out for that sort of thing.

Joe Howard: [00:17:51] Yeah. That’s like a pretty basic example, but yeah, one night we try to definitely be aware of so.

Kyle Maurer: [00:17:56] I think they’re one of the things that we see that has seen in like a lot of job posts is language describing like the ideal candidate that gets a little bit that uses a lot of Strong descriptions that really connect with super ambitious driven people, using things like describing someone who has a go getter or a Ninja or a superstar at such-and-such. And that’s the kind of person that we’re looking for. And he’s saying.

Joe Howard: [00:18:23] We need a SEL.

Christie Chirinos: [00:18:25] Ooh. I would find that really annoying.

Joe Howard: [00:18:30] There you go.

Christie Chirinos: [00:18:31] That’s it. That’s interesting. I would, yeah, totally not apply for a job that was like, be a Jedi at this. I would immediately be like, I don’t have a problem with Jerry’s you know, but something about that, that felt weird in my stomach. Okay. This boy, nerd star Wars, culture, sweet. And I love star Wars, but it would be weird in the job listing. Ah, okay. Thing.

Joe Howard: [00:18:56] I totally get you.

Kyle Maurer: [00:18:57] So I think it is a lot of that, like adjusting your description of what you’re looking for. Just to be more inviting and make it anybody reading. It feels like I, that could be me. It doesn’t, it’s not conjuring a very specific picture in my mind of what, of a certain type of person. That may or may not be me. So watching out for that is really important. And there are really good articles that I’d be happy to share that I read where they describe at length, like a lot of key examples and the results from their studies and tests about how using some of them affected the willingness of certain demographics to actually apply.

Joe Howard: [00:19:36] Yeah. Totally. One other thing you could also do Kyle and it’s if you have a few people on your team and your team already has some level of diversity, he just got a few people to read it on your team, maybe from different backgrounds and say well, what do you think about this? And maybe have a really open conversation about posting. Would you apply for this? Which is there anything that’s stopping you? I bet you’d get some yeah, I guess I could do that. And maybe it would get some blood. I bet you would get some really juicy like stuff from that, that you wouldn’t even have expected.

And the, just the one other thing you mentioned before you mentioned putting like the positives of the blog posts or excuse me, the positives of the position in the job description about like how awesome it is to work at Sandhills. I think that you want to like on some hands, like vet the kind of people who are coming in to make sure that they’re like, somewhat, like they’re going to be a good fit for the position, but like selling the job post is or selling the job position is also like really important.

Like giving people all the benefits and getting people excited to apply. That’ll get you more applicants and hopefully like more applicants from more diverse pool as well. Yeah, I think that’s probably a good idea as well.

Kyle Maurer: [00:20:35] Exactly. What, another thing that we did on the post, very small, just like one line on the page that had a lot on it. We showed the salary. We showed the starting salary down to the penny.

Christie Chirinos: [00:20:45] That was going to be my next question to you. Yeah.

Joe Howard: [00:20:49] Let’s talk about that. Did you have a cause having a specific salary off the bat is not something everyone does because I know your team’s remote. Kyle people are from different places. They have different costs of living these different places, but you just said, I forget about all that, or maybe not forget about it, but you said that’s not going to affect the salary of this position. This is the salary of this position, regardless of some of those things, I guess you have the mentality of the people who are applying, know what the salary is. So I guess how that worked for you.

Kyle Maurer: [00:21:18] Two questions like the impact that it had on the hiring process, I think was significant. So that’s one, we can continue that in a moment, but sidestepping a little bit, the question of salaries that also fell under my responsibility when it took over the role of operation. And one of the first things I decided to do was change how we handle compensation at the company, because I have strong opinions about how that should be done and wanted us to implement a structured, consistent, fair system. That is data-driven. That is fair for everyone that is easy to understand.

Absolutely consistent. And works well for now and for in the future. And that was a lot of work. And I had to learn a lot in that process. I’ve never developed a compensation strategy before, but I spent some months on it and we worked pretty hard together. Shoes. The specifics that are right for our organization, but ended up developing something where we have now a structured data driven system, which determines the salary levels for all the roles in our companies.
And now it is, we are moving entirely away from. Negotiation being a factor at all and the determination of one’s compensation. And there’s a lot of reasons, I think why this is important, but I think it’s the right. Ultimately I think it’s the right thing to do to move away from personally. I don’t believe that negotiation should be a factor in determining how much one makes I don’t think that’s right and we’re moving away from that.

And now we have a pretty consistent. System that works for everyone that determines based on the level that you are, what your salary is going to be for the role that you have using that we were able to figure out exactly what the starting salary should be for these roles we were advertising and just share that. So everyone knows what you’re going to be making initially.

Joe Howard: [00:23:21] Yeah, I think just the two pieces that jump out to me about that are the one I think it would definitely help. Hiring more diverse. Workforce because different folks may negotiate different ways. You know, as someone who’s loves talking with people and loves doing that kind of negotiation may get themselves a higher salary, but just as good worker, who’s more sticks to themselves, make it a lower one.

And I don’t know if that’s fair. So I totally agree with you there. Kyle, the other thing is that obviously helps pay discrepancy between men and women because. You know, that’s, if everyone has standardized salaries, then if everyone in the world, if every company in the world had standardized sets, standardized salaries, there would be no pay gap.

Christie Chirinos: [00:24:00] So there’s an amount of research surrounding how negotiation in salary discussions drives, pay disparities. Because there’s a lot of cultural and social aspects that feed into someone’s willingness to negotiate and somebodies even familiarity with negotiation. Right. And obviously that is the sort of thing that more negatively affects women and people of color.

And I took a class on negotiation because I knew that it was a weak spot of mine and I wanted. To know how to negotiate, like the best of them, you know, the richest, most confident. Yeah. I serve the world kind of dude, you know, and yeah. Taking that out of it does take out all of those cultural and social and economic forces at work that would then translate into weird salary gaps.

Kyle Maurer: [00:25:07] Yeah. That’s awesome. That’s interesting that you did, that is one of those kind of life hack skills, you know, that prosper in the future. They, you know, there’s one of those skills you can learn JavaScript or something like that. That’s growing, that’s an in demand skill, but really. Learn to negotiate is gonna dramatically affect every path that you take and the way that you’re compensated in every case.

And that’s one of the reasons that I got into like public speaking early in my career, it was because I just looked and observed how the people who were willing to stand up in front of everyone else and talk and just open their mouth and share their ideas. And those are the people who got somewhere.
Yeah. They got the opportunities. They got the spotlight on them and they got the cool chances. Wasn’t particularly interested in editing. I didn’t care about it, but I said if that’s the fast track to getting somewhere, well, I guess we’ll just learn to do that. I’ll get comfortable with that. And it’s been really rewarding.

Getting comfortable in front of a crowd is another like advantage if you will, but negotiation as well. But the thing is, it’s not a skill that. Is necessary for every job. That’s some might argue with that a little bit, but I don’t think that the skillset you need to negotiate in that context is.

Particularly useful for someone just answering support, tickets, writing code, or designing graphics. It’s a different skillset and how, why it should affect how much money you make is lost on me. But it does, but not here. I wanted to do away with that.

Christie Chirinos: [00:26:29] I love that.

Joe Howard: [00:26:30] You could argue that hiring someone for a position that doesn’t require that skill set of negotiation and requiring them to do that in negotiation, as part of bringing them onto your team might cause you to bring on someone who’s not.

As good doing the things that’s important for that position. So I think that’s, I don’t know if that’s true. I think that’s an argument one could make, so you may actually get someone who’s not as good of a fit for the position because you required negotiation, which may have pushed out some candidates who are actually a better position for that. They just didn’t have that negotiation like part of their skillset. So sure. I get that.

Kyle Maurer: [00:27:04] Yeah. Yeah. There’s that? Well, anyway, so we made a comp strategy and that was how we generated the number. And we decided to be transparent about sharing that on the job post. So it’s another one of the things that I’ve listed here.

You know, we redesigned the website, we wrote much lengthier job posts. We, it, we went combed over them to have the most appealing, inviting inclusive language that. We thought we could, and maybe we could do better. This is our first time, like really getting serious about that. We were transparent about the salary.

And the last thing we did is we actually advertised the posting in a couple places. So we paid a couple of hundred bucks here and there on a couple remote women in tech job boards to try and specifically get our posting in front of demographics, which we’re not. Applying in the past, our applicant pool was not diverse before. So we said we have to get these postings in front of people who are not seeing it.

Joe Howard: [00:27:53] Now we’re talking about really actively like getting in front of more diverse people. Do you happen to remember the names of some of those job posts?

Kyle Maurer: [00:28:00] One was like women in tech and another was remote woman. I’m pretty sure those were the two. We weren’t super aggressive on it. I think I just paid for the two. Then the application started pouring in. So in 2019, like I said, we had the post open for six weeks and we got 58 applicants in 2020. And over the course of four weeks for two positions, not three, we got 770 applications.

Joe Howard: [00:28:24] That’s more, applications in the first time.

Kyle Maurer: [00:28:28] Quite a bit more. That’s quite a bit, a lot more than we expected. I was hoping to like double or triple

Christie Chirinos: [00:28:33] How did you go through all of those?

Kyle Maurer: [00:28:35] It was a lot of work. Christy. Let me tell ya. That was a lot.

Christie Chirinos: [00:28:38] When you look at every single one,

Kyle Maurer: [00:28:39] You bet we did. You bet we did.

Joe Howard: [00:28:43] So this is also an example of you wanted to recruit a more diverse, have more diverse candidate pool by attempting to do that and putting measures in place to do that. You what? 700 times the application. So it’s all the work you put in had an enormous positive effect on the quality of candor you get at the end. So that’s awesome.

Kyle Maurer: [00:29:03] It did. And that was great. So this was like, awesome. We did it. And then it was like, Oh, man. You’ve got a lot of work to do. Oh man. I really thought that we would like double or triple our applicant pool, but to go from roughly 60 to, well, over 700 was a dramatic increase in a lot of work suddenly. So I dropped everything I was doing for the next month, basically to work on this, we ended up interviewing 134 people, which is 1700. Yeah. I interviewed over a hundred myself, passed those tickets along that I wanted to advance to my colleagues. And we did three rounds of interviews for each of these.

Joe Howard: [00:29:50] And are you using like hiring software or just is it kind of manual at this point? You’re laughing.

Kyle Maurer: [00:29:56] I mean, it was, yeah, it was a little manual.
Yeah, totally. You remember, like last year the applicant pool was so small though. I felt like we don’t need anything for that.

Joe Howard: [00:30:03] Totally. You didn’t think you would get 700 applicants. You would have 700.

Kyle Maurer: [00:30:07] We had to turn that form off. And we wished we would have sooner, but you know, it was great. I had a little Zapier set up a little workflow that made. The interview scheduling a lot easier where, you know, all the applications go into help scout and they would get assigned to me. And then I would just like. I would send like maybe a saved reply or tag something, or there’s a workflow that I would say this person needs an interview and then they would get the email invite to my Calendly link. And then that would schedule the interview Uber calendar. Right.

Joe Howard: [00:30:37] That’s why we do it because this is literally the exact same thing. We tags and triggers and say, send an email. Yeah.

Kyle Maurer: [00:30:43] Generates a zoom link for them. It depends. I had it automatically append a link to their application, to the Google calendar event.
So that I could just click on that when I was opening up the app interview link and it would also send a note to append a note to the help scout ticket that said, like interview scheduled at this time. So it was all kind of like interconnected and automatic. So when the time come came and over two weeks, like I had back-to-back 20 minute interviews all day everyday interviewed like 110 people or so myself and all I had to do was just like click on the Google calendar event, open up the zoom link and open up the conversation with a couple of clicks.
So it was pretty efficient. And it was grueling very tough couple of weeks, but it was great. It was really great. I got to meet so many amazing people. It was really rewarding. And and we learned a lot, there were a lot of observations that I made during the process, but in terms of the size of the applicant pool, like the first improvement that we have for the future is to somehow split the difference between 2019 and 2020.

And find something a little bit in between. And I think our goal in the future is going to be, to maybe require a little bit more information from our applicants upfront so we could do a better job of screening them. Pre-interview cause we asked the minimum questions we really wanted just, we simply wanted more applicants.

Let’s get more people let’s make it easier to apply. Let’s make it more inviting for anybody, regardless of whether you think you’re qualified or not. So we did that to a fault and got a lot of applicants.

Joe Howard: [00:32:09] That this is how it works a lot of places you don’t get as many. And you’re like, well, let’s try the other side of the, you know, of the, of everything. And then you get too many. I mean, right now, I guess, you know, it’s harder to get into Sandhills and it does get into Harvard or Yale. So two out of 700 plus. Yeah.

Christie Chirinos: [00:32:25] It’s a really small percentage rate. That’s what I was thinking. I was like, okay.

Joe Howard: [00:32:30] Yeah. But you’re pretty much guaranteed to get a high quality candidate. I think it’d be pretty hard to not get someone awesome out of 700 people who apply. So sounds like Kyle and you hired, you’ve hired six people over the last little while. How was, how did this like. How did this affect the diversity of the people who ended up hiring?

Kyle Maurer: [00:32:45] It’s good. Yeah. And that is something that we are, you know, never done with for sure. But we did hire a couple developers who are women and we had a lot of really great applicants. So now I was quite delighted to find once we got through a round of interviewing that our finalists and for both of the positions were very diverse. I was really pleased. By that. And we had great discussions internally about what we want this team to look like over time and the characteristics employees that are important to us and had really healthy debates about it.

And I’m really happy with that. The people that we ended up hiring that they’re not people that I expected from the first round, but they were like all men, all kinds of great people.

Joe Howard: [00:33:28] That’s I think I just want to touch on that for a second. Cause that is. That’s a really important thing that I think you just said, it’s like from the first round you bring in a lot, you know, a good amount of people, like you said, you interviewed a hundred people.

You’ll never know who the like great high impact candidates are going to be. Unless sometimes you give them a chance. Like we, one of our best developers, honey, Lou, like she is phenomenal. She’s amazing. And she was not the strongest at like application that we got when we hired her. But I remember being like, well, she’s, you know, really nice and she has good qualifications, so let’s like, try it out. And she’s arguably our best developer at this point. So I think that that’s a really important thing you just said, and I want you to like that. Right.

Kyle Maurer: [00:34:08] There’s so many interesting things that we learned about ourselves, those of us involved in the hiring process. And I want to kind of maybe factors that I want to neutralize or minimize like our own personal biases and preferences, which really can leak in.

Into the decision making process. We run through this like series of interviews and at each stage we’re kind of more or less ranking the candidates based on how they performed at this state and who we think is the best fit and so on. And that is a process which I think needs a little bit the improvement.

Like it was helpful and easy to follow, but imperfect. Yeah. And I definitely, it was like after the fact as I’m assessing, like how I ranked people, I’m noticing a lot of things, a lot of trends, like certain characteristics, which I ended up like kind of rewarding and not recognizing at the time and characteristics, which like I was essentially punishing candidates for, but not really conscious of when I’ve really thought about it. And that is. That is something that I want to personally improve upon.

Joe Howard: [00:35:07] Totally, you’ve mentioned a help scout earlier that you’ve seen applications come in to help scout. We I’ve had Leah nobler on the podcast before she’s from hopscotch. She is I don’t know if she’s head of HR there, but she’s part of the HR team and they talk, she talks, I mean, they have a team, probably like a hundred plus now at this point, I think when I talked to her, I was like 90, but yeah, she’s great.

And they have, they’re very big on this. Like how do we remove biases from our hiring process? How do you hire diverse? People to our team and all that stuff. So you’re echoing a lot of the stuff she said. So I think you’re on the right track. Can we talk a little bit about the, as someone who hires like an, I do have some hiring too.

A lot of the stuff I just learned a ton from what you said I’m going to, and this is something we’re thinking about a lot about what this looks like in the rest of this year. We want to make some big changes, but yeah, there are folks out there who are like, again, may have lost jobs and this time, or or maybe just looking for new opportunities.

Yeah, totally. As someone who’s like done a lot of hiring Kyle, like what positives stuck out for you? I know we talked, just talk about biases and stuff, but just for you personally, what are the things that stuck out really positively for you when you saw applications were like in the initial hiring pieces? So like a place to get people like people’s foot in the door and then what things were.

Kyle Maurer: [00:36:18] Oh man, Joe, you’re getting me started. We’re not gonna have time to cover everything that I’ve gotten for you. Coincidentally, I actually, some many jobs ago. I taught at a college, some career development classes a while, a couple of years, semester after semester of all about training, how to write effective resumes and how to interview really well and how to get jobs and advance your career.

And I really. You got into that for a couple of years and develop a set of curriculum that I thought was really effective. Some spiels that worked well for students and it’s remained a topic that I’m very passionate about. The reality is if I’m being honest, everybody’s stuck.

Joe Howard: [00:36:58] Thank you. Yes, everybody applying.

Kyle Maurer: [00:37:04] Yeah. It’s trash. The whole system is trash everywhere. All the applicants, like just don’t know what they’re doing and do a terrible job. And everybody hiring pretty much out there it’s also kind of doing a trash job. It’s just like the whole system is just garbage.

Christie Chirinos: [00:37:20] That’s the biggest thing I’ve told people who are looking for jobs and are looking for advice. I’m like, you don’t understand what it’s like to be on the other side of the hiring table. And we’re looking at a mountain of garbage. It’s so hard to find good people. And it’s actually a problem.

Joe Howard: [00:37:41] Totally way, like when we get applications in for positions, we get a ton of applications. Like we drive a lot of traffic to WPBS and a lot of people who are developers, so they’ll apply for a job. And like the list in teamwork desk, the same as fly with you have Scouts, like so many applications. Like I have to go through all these, this is crazy. So this is a good opportunity to maybe say yeah, How can people make their applications unique and how can people stand out from the crowd? Because I think that’s the first step towards if you’re applying for a job, like, how do you say I’m awesome. And you should like, look, yeah. Okay.

Kyle Maurer: [00:38:13] Oh man. Yeah. You’re getting me fired up, Joe. There are a lot of ways to stand out and if you try, like you’re going to be. One of the few that does, there’s not a shortage of good people out there, but there is tremendous shortage of people who.

Go the extra mile and stand out and do more than the minimum. 90, 95% of the applicants do the minimum. They provide their resume. They provide good information about their background. They provide a basic explanation of why they want the job. And in our application form, they provide links to relevant material and maybe they read through our website and become.

Minimally familiar with what we do. That’s the minimum and 90% or more of the people that we see do that. And that’s it. And there’s like a 5% of people who do less than that. And like hop on an interview with me and don’t know the first thing about what we do. And didn’t even look at our homepage obviously and do below the minimum.

But there’s a 5% group also that does above that. And it’s not actually that hard. I’m not talking about like a tremendous amount of work or huge time investment, but there are people who kind of go above and beyond. And so some of the things that I’ve seen, which I really like the kinds of above and beyond efforts.
Are getting really relevant. I’ve had some people make pages on their website dedicated to this particular employer too. I’ve had that too. And it’s always awesome. Or even a whole site dedicated. Yeah. This is really, it’s rare. It’s rare. Like one round of hiring, we might see at once where somebody has like my portfolio website.com/sandhills.

And that whole page is like dedicated to everything that we should know or have had some people make. Custom built for us with like them speaking and saying I really like the opportunity. I know a lot about you. I’ve done my homework. I think I’m a good fit. Here’s the skills that I have, which I think you need the ideas that I have, which I think would make a difference here. I had a company, the background, which.

Joe Howard: [00:40:18] I think is relevant to like, just go like in the video, like I’ve had that too. And it’s always thank you for stepping out from the field. Like it’s pretty cool.

Christie Chirinos: [00:40:27] Wow. Am I asked to grow because I’ve never done that application, but when I got those, honestly, yeah, honestly, that’s exactly it though. It’s like my experience with hiring has been that. It’s shocking. The number of applications you get that aren’t personalized that have grammatical and spelling errors that, yeah. And when you’re looking at a pile of 770 applications, it’s okay, you know, if you can’t bother to spell. The name of the company correctly then, right?

Joe Howard: [00:41:03] How are you going to bother to put your heart and soul into this company when you work here? Not going to happen? Yeah.

Christie Chirinos: [00:41:07] But then for people who are seeking for jobs, it’s this sort of reminder that, let me tell you what it looks like on the other side of the table, half these applications are spelled incorrectly. If you can spell. And include two sentences about why you want this particular role. You’re already above 60% of the competition.

Joe Howard: [00:41:31] Yeah. Grammatical things I think is huge Christie, it’s a small thing, but yeah. I mean, it depends on the role kind of, but like everybody has to be able to write well and communicate well, especially in a remote team. So there’s no room for Obviously, if he’s built a company named wrong, like it’s probably not a good indicator, but like even just like putting good sentence structure together. And I, this is also part of people have English as a second language and part of being inclusive. So it causes and talking about, it’s hard to find I don’t just want to like, delete those applications and weren’t worded, right?

Like I want to read a little bit more into them, but there’s also it has to have some sort of semblance of like strong English language. Not that I’m trying to like, not hire, you know, So there’s this funny middle ground you have to find, but I like. I have to be able to communicate with folks and Dave, you have to be able to take care of the rest of my team, or how are they going to be a strong team player on our specific team?

Christie Chirinos: [00:42:20] I mean, I believe strongly in judging people by what they’re going to be doing and educating ourselves on the cultural nuances and differences between the ways that different communities use the English language since it is sort of how our global business language can be really helpful. Right. I don’t write people off for insignificant things that don’t actually matter, like writing, sir, Madam, right?

That’s still taught in a lot of countries. I don’t write people off for things that I know to be simple cultural nuances, and somebody’s doing their best in their context. I do write people off if you spelled the name of the company wrong, because it shows a lack of attention to detail. Right.

Joe Howard: [00:42:58] We have another company in there that you copy and paste it.

Christie Chirinos: [00:43:00] So, you know, I look for attention to detail. I look for care, right? That one sentence that says, I think I would be a great fit here because you do this. And I do that. Bam already 60% above the competition. And I definitely look. More closely if your role is going to involve external written communication.

Right? So if we’re hiring for something that’s a little bit more inside, then, you know, the written communication, if we can communicate with you, that’s what I’m looking for. But if you’re going to be applying for something that requires you to talk to customers, I’m thinking about what the customers are going to expect. I mean, I think it’s super important. To be mindful of the way that communication is different and nuanced cross-culturally while also keeping business goals in mind.

Kyle Maurer: [00:43:57] If I were a job seeker right now, and I saw it, you know, which I’m not super happy, but if I were seeking a job right now and there an opportunity that I really want, I feel like I could get it.

I feel really confident that I could get it if I wanted it. It’s not really that hard, this isn’t rocket science. It doesn’t require a specific skill set that you just have to have requires like working harder than the other. Applicants and I would do that. So here’s what I would do if I were a job seeker right now, there’s like the bullet list of the minimum that I would do first, I would make a page or even a dedicated website for that employer.

But once identified a specific employer that I actually want to work for, maybe they’re hiring. Maybe they’re not. If I decide it’s I decided I wanted to work for a specific company. If I like, I want to work for the buffs, like I would just. Learn everything I can about their company, I would make a, my website.com/wp buffs would have a custom video on there where I tell Joe everything that I believe about me and about the bus and why we’re a perfect match made in heaven.

I would get videos of recommendation from other people, especially people that I think Joe knows, and I would have them sing my praises and share those videos on the page letters of recommendation, kind of a thing. But I would have somebody like, you know, I’d get whoever I could recommended tweets. Yeah. Joe is awesome. He’s in the best.

Christie Chirinos: [00:45:16] That’s awesome.

Kyle Maurer: [00:45:17] I’d put those on the page. Them saying Joe, you need to hire Kyle. I’ll get somebody to say that.

Christie Chirinos: [00:45:22] Will you guys make my video recommendations next time I’m looking for a job.

Kyle Maurer: [00:45:26] Yeah, absolutely. Christie for small fee totally. Whatever you want. I would memorize things like my dad always loves this story because once I was a young applicant and I was applying for a job at the library and I was just a teenager at the time, but I sat for a long time in the waiting room and they had library’s mission statement printed on the wall. And I just memorized it while I was sitting there.

And in the interview, everyone, it was a big panel, a lot of people. And they, somebody asked me the question what do you think is the purpose of the library and word for word verbatim? I just recited the mission statement. Like, it was coming to me off the cuff and everybody in the room was just like, Oh, that’s a good answer.

Joe Howard: [00:46:08] They’re like, wow. That is the mission. How do you feel like they did?

Kyle Maurer: [00:46:10] They didn’t know. Didn’t know, literally just recite it word for word. And I got the job. Yeah. That’s such a silly, but know who you’re talking to and know about them and their mission and speak to them in their language is like extremely powerful. So those are some of the things that I would do. I would also remember that. You don’t stop trying until you’re officially rejected. It’s not over when you have sent in the application, you’re still potentially a candidate and there’s still work that can be done. So I’d be checking in with the potential employer.

I would be sending updates about the things that I was learning, and I would make sure that at every stage where I’m interacting with the employer, I would be asking questions like, what can I do to get this job? What can I learn? What could I add? That would set me apart. Those kinds of questions.

Joe Howard: [00:46:58] I liked that piece about keeping the employer updated. If you’re sending in an application, sending an email, if you haven’t heard or, you know, there are people waiting on, you send an email like a month later saying Hey, I applied for this job. Here are like the three big things I’ve been working on this month. That actually, I think make me an even better candidate just want to keep you updated on my progress.

As an employer, I would love that. I think it would help someone to stick out for me, just not even I’m trying to get the job thing, but like kind of subtly yeah, you are trying to get the job in here. Why I’m here? The things I’ve been improving on to be even better for this position.

Kyle Maurer: [00:47:29] Our application process took a while. It took a month and a half before we were actually sending out job offers and we did have some candidates kind of updating us along the way on their journey. Some candidates like in the first interview asked me like, what. Do I have to do to get this job? I’m like, what do you want to see?

And I would give very honest answers, great answers about what I think is maybe lacking in their resume, what skills maybe they haven’t emphasized, what are the things that I would like to see more of? And they went and did that. They went and learned WordPress and installed the plugins that I recommended and played with them and learned about the code.

Concepts, which I saw were missing in their expertise and updated me on. I said, I’ve been studying this, I’ve been taking this course. I’ve been familiarizing myself with this code base. I’ve been learning, you know, this JavaScript library or whatever it is. And some of them, I even been blogging about it.

There were a lot of the junior developers were kind of doing a good job of documenting their process. I can read there. Journey on Twitter as they were like documenting everything that they have learned through like the boot camps and courses that they’ve taken. Many of them were blogging about the exercises that they run through and the skills that they’ve learned. And that was really helpful to watch them grow and see the efforts that they’re putting in to become the candidate that we want.

Joe Howard: [00:48:43] And as an employer, you know, this is the kind of. You know, action. You can expect if you were to hire this person, which is huge, like you hire people who are gonna be helpful for your business, we’re going to help, you know, fit into your culture and stuff obviously, but who we’re going to be like proactive, like contributing members to the team.

And if they’re just doing this, the application you know, that’s, it’s like the most, the biggest thing you can say to say is this person going to contribute? To our team is have they contributed to like other teams and other projects in the past. And they’re just like proving that in this application process, that’s cool.

Kyle Maurer: [00:49:11] The biggest cheat that I would probably try and pull off. And this was, I think like an unfair hack kind of like the fast track, the one that is it’s a cheat, it’s unfair because it’s kind of from the employer’s perspective, it’s not like perfectly fair. But it’s a real thing. The fact that if you are not a stranger, you have an advantage, a big advantage.

So I would not be a stranger. I would make sure that when my application actually went in, they knew me. They knew who I was a minimum, they recognized my name. But that is like the cheat. And it makes a big difference because the things that you guys all know as employers or former employers, is that.

Hiring an employee is taking a risk, is a big risk that you take and anything we can do to make it feel like this is less of a risk is a good thing to us. And so if we recognize someone, if we recognize their name, we see them. There’s some level of familiarity. We naturally feel like they’re less of a risk.

Joe Howard: [00:50:06] Totally. And I think I understand why you. We’ll categorize that as like a cheat or it’s just, it’s kind of a fast tracked way to get your application looked at. But I also think that, cause it doesn’t mean I’m a better candidate. Correct. But it also doesn’t mean that like we haven’t put effort and time into Cultivating our network in the WordPress space.

So it’s we’ve put it’s the result of time and effort we’ve put in over years to like, be part of the WordPress community. So while I do agree that it’s like, it may get you a little bit ahead in the application process and people can argue whether that’s fair or not fair. We’ve also put the time in to make it that.

So that’s the case. It’s kind of like making your own luck a little bit, but it does take time and resources on our end and years of time that we’ve put into the WordPress community to do that. So I just want to. Just throw that out there. It’s sure. I don’t know. I think an idea.

Kyle Maurer: [00:50:51] There’s a lot of ways to not be a stranger, you know, many companies have online communities, there’s forums, there’s Facebook groups, there’s social accounts.

You can engage them there. You can be first and foremost, a user of the product. That’s like a bare minimum. I was shocked. I was actually shocked at how few applicants. Had ever used or leak even took the minutes it takes to use any of our products because they’re free. You can for free use one of our products and just run through it and familiarize yourself with what it does.

Almost no one did that. And so when someone actually did if you were applying for a company that sells an app or ships, like some kind of a phone app, doesn’t it make sense that you would try and install it and like fiddle with it before you interviewed with the company? Makes sense. No one does that. Nobody does that.

Joe Howard: [00:51:36] Yep.

Kyle Maurer: [00:51:37] It seems like so obvious to me. So I’m familiarized myself. With the product actually use it, be a user of it and subscribe just whatever. And, you know, listen to Joe’s podcast. If I want it to be a buff, I could only if only I could only be so lucky, but maybe even review the products publicly.
And so on little things you can do. Yeah. I think I used to teach a lot was about telling stories in your interviews. And that is something that I think. Most of us, I’ll just say pretty much everybody could work on. I mean, maybe not Chris Lama, but most of us could could really work on our storytelling.

And it’s a means to practice this a lot in the classes that I taught because it’s one of the hardest things for people to do. Like storytelling in your interviews is just about the most powerful thing you can do to really to sell yourself and to paint a picture of what kind of a worker you are. And they resonate with, they mean a lot to people and we all suck at it. We’re just terrible. We’re just terrible storyteller.

Joe Howard: [00:52:34] Totally. I have three things I’ve written down here that I want to just touch on quickly because I feel like they’re important. I’m like itching to get them out. One is like being a power user could put you in a great position to be a.

New team member there. I know the team at BeaverBuilder hired Anthony, who is like their marketing guy and does a lot of the marketing and content stuff over there. He was just used to be a power user and he applied to a job there and they just knew him. And he was like, Oh, he loves Beaver builder and uses it a lot.

Yeah. Let’s hire that guy. So I think that’s like a, I think Kyle, what you said is totally perfect there. When people apply to WP bus, a lot of it, like I’d really like to see like personalized stuff. We have a question, all our applications, it’s like, what’s your favorite blog post on our. Website and the amount of people that are like, I haven’t read any blog posts.

That’s literally the answer is okay, I guess they don’t go. It’s like the opposite. I don’t know what else to do, you know? So yeah. But people who like have listened to the podcast even like a half an episode, Or like a minute of an episode, they have something to say about the podcast. That puts you in the, like probably the top 10% of applicants really like spending your time to research.

The company is huge. The last quick thing I’ll say is I think it’s job hunting is kind of counter intuitive in the idea that like, People think if they put out a hundred applications, it’s just like a numbers game and they’ll like, get a job. And that’s actually probably way more time consuming to get a job than applying to 10 companies and putting the time into those 10 applications that you would have put into a hundred applications.

And it’s counterintuitive. It really is because. I’m a numbers guy. Hey, throw a bunch out there and maybe one will come back. But that’s not what job seekers are looking for. Especially in this economy, they’re looking for someone who can contribute, who can do an awesome job for them even more so right now.

So I think that take. Two hours to apply to one job. Don’t think like I’m just going to throw in a whatever boiler plate resume and cover letter. And they’re going to look at it like that’s not 2020 job application anymore. So, so forget the counterintuitive things. I know it’s hard, but like job seekers.

Put the time into applying to these jobs because the time will be reflected in what people see. And especially from Kyle and I and Kristi as a former employer or someone who to hire, we know when the someone copy and paste it a thing. And we know when someone’s really put the time in. So I think that’s just a huge thing I’d want to, I want to out there, but I don’t know. Christie, any final thoughts on?

Christie Chirinos: [00:54:49] Yeah. When people ask me for advice on this, I always say the one thing though, That I think you should really remember is interviewing is a two way street. You’re interviewing them as much as they’re interviewing you. Not only because that helps you be a happier, better, more productive human, but because it also makes you a better interviewer.

If you come in with the approach of, I’m just looking for a job, it’s okay, so is everybody else, like, why do you want to work here? Do you want to get paid obviously. Right. But also, you whereas I think that job seekers who come in with a curious and the careful mind and are thinking, I’m looking for the next place, that’s going to feel like home to me that comes across.

The interview process and their relationship and this mutual desire to build something cool. And that comes from empowering yourself to realize that if you shoot 100 applications out, you probably don’t want to work. 80% of those companies. Yeah. So just start spending the time, applying at the companies that you want to work on, that you can actually legitimately sit back and honestly be like, this would be really cool.

Kyle Maurer: [00:56:11] Yeah, for sure. Go deep. Not wide is a spear, not a net, whatever the analogy is, but focus on one, get one job. All my jobs are yours for the taking. You can get them. Any of you can get them. You just got to put in more effort than everybody else.

Joe Howard: [00:56:25] Totally. After listening to this episode, I mean, Kyle, you talked about five, 10 different things people can do to make their applications more unique and just to apply to things that prove your chances. And I think Christie, what you said at the end, there is just. Totally spot on. It’s don’t just try. I mean, obviously in this economy, it’s hard to, you know, everyone needs a job. Everyone needs to make a little money, but look for the jobs you’re really going to want to work at for the next 10 years, not just the ones that are going to be, I just need a stop gap with, and whenever possible, that’s going to help your application, you know, shine out because you are passionate about it and really want to do something that entails that job.

So cool. I think that’s a great spot to end for today. We had a nice extra long juicy episode today, so, and I learned a ton too. I know the good episodes cause I learned a ton just sitting here, listening to you. So let’s finish off Christie. You want to do a little, well, before you do the wrap up, Kyle, where can people find you and Sandhills and fancy new websites online?

Kyle Maurer: [00:57:17] That’s right. Yeah, man, this just flew by a ludicrous speed. Right? You can find us at Sandhills dev. Dot com. I encourage you to check us out, take a look at our products. Maybe it will be higher end soon. Who knows?

Joe Howard: [00:57:29] Cool. Oh yeah. Kyle, can you wait, hold on. Cause Kyle has asked people for iTunes review.

Kyle Maurer: [00:57:35] This show is like under appreciated. This is like one of the hidden gems. Right?

Joe Howard: [00:57:40] Mom loves it. Okay. She says, that’s a great show, Kyle.

Kyle Maurer: [00:57:45] I don’t know, but your mom could only leave one review.

Joe Howard: [00:57:47] She’s got a thousand fake accounts. She’s one of those Russian trolls. She just for us.

Kyle Maurer: [00:57:54] Well, folks, you guys got to review this show. They deserve it. Christie and Joe work hard to bring you great content that is going to help you succeed and grow your business and WordPress. They are an asset to you. They’re here to help you grow and prosper, and the least you can do is give them five stars on iTunes. That’s the absolute least you can do. So do it. Get to it right now.

Joe Howard: [00:58:16] Nice.

Christie Chirinos: [00:58:19] Send us your questions at yo@wpmrr.com.

Joe Howard: [00:58:25] Anything else they want to learn WordPress businesses. MRR, listen to some past episodes. We got almost a hundred episodes now coming up. So go back and listen to some old ones, Christy and I, and some guests have scraped combos in the past. That’s all for this week. What could be in your podcast players again next Tuesday, Kyle. Thanks again. Thanks again for being on. It’s been real.

Kyle Maurer: [00:58:42] My pleasure. You guys are awesome.

Joe Howard: [00:58:43] Woo.

Christie Chirinos: [00:58:44] Bye guys.