Strategic Hiring Process for Your Inbound Agency

Doug Davidoff is the founder and CEO of Imagine, which started in 2004 as a sales advisory firm and became an inbound agency that also runs sales development for clients. His mantra for the combination is “all bound”: one process from first awareness to a sales-ready lead. Andrew Dymski hosted this episode, number 44 of Inbound Agency Journey, and Gray MacKenzie joined him for the recap. Most of it is about hiring: how Imagine went from five and a half people to 12 in seven months, the three kinds of positions Doug hires for, and the mistakes that produced the system.

Stop hiring just in time

Doug said if he’d known how hard growing a team would be, he isn’t sure he’d have had the guts to change the model. They made every hiring mistake there is.

The biggest mistake that we made was that we kept trying to hire just in time… We’re not HubSpot, we’re not GE, we’re not GM, we don’t have ongoing recruiting where we’re constantly hiring every day. And so we have a tendency to wait until we need it to begin to hire it. And then the difficulty there is the talent’s just not out there, the need’s too big, you end up making bad hires all the time.

(Listen at 08:47)

The fix was to treat recruiting like lead generation.

About a year ago, we decided, if we’re serious about this, and if we’re going to grow, we’ve got to allocate some of our resources to continuously being in a hiring position, not necessarily hiring, but being in a hiring position. And so one of our key people, we actually allocated 30% of his time, it’s actually gotten up to about 50 to 60% of his time.

(Listen at 09:29)

That person is David, Imagine’s president. The team uses CareerBuilder, LinkedIn and its own content to start conversations with people who do the jobs it hires for, then soft interviews them for fit. One strategist started as a lead for the company. The nurturing is still manual, because urgent hires keep interrupting the long-term track.

Three kinds of hires

Imagine used to look at every position through the same lens and always needed more people than it could afford. Three types made the decisions simpler. Client delivery positions deliver programs: a senior strategist works with two or three strategists who run accounts day to day, plus an entry-level associate the agency can train up.

It’s a relatively low risk hire for us because by the time we’re hiring, we’re at least 30%, if not closer to 50% at the capacity of that next person before we really have to hire them… And so we have a hiring plan based upon our objectives. And that gets updated on a monthly basis based upon what the actual results are.

(Listen at 19:26)

Capability positions make the agency better at what it does without carrying revenue or capacity: a marketing manager, a dedicated sales development rep, a front-end developer planned for March. The third type is the easy one. The example was a freelance writer Imagine was almost paying a full-time salary without getting full-time access, which Doug said made it a people, fit and capability decision, since the money was already being spent.

Capability hires: three questions and a six-month wait

Capability positions are the risky ones, so they live in the strategic plan, which Imagine redoes every quarter and reviews monthly. Each one gets a trigger based on revenue and client count. Doug’s test has three parts.

That’s really the three decisions of, do we move forward with that person? Can we pay for it? Can we manage the risk that’s associated to the position? And are we in a position to actually take advantage of it? It’s really the third one that we made more bad decisions that we learned from.

(Listen at 26:26)

Because he’s a type A entrepreneur who falls in love with ideas, a new capability position now sits in the plan for six months first. One role was the strategic hire for three quarters running until the last review showed they didn’t need it. The symptoms pointed at other things that weren’t working.

This might be the biggest hiring mistake, and it’s just hitting me right now, is don’t hire a person to fix a process mistake, or I should say, a person can fix a process mistake, but don’t hire a person when what needs to be fixed is a process.

(Listen at 29:16)

The hire that got Doug out of project management

Doug used to want the final interview on every position. He let go by necessity when an urgent hire came up while he was out of town and waiting for him would have cost client business. The hire was a home run, and he now calls letting go of hiring the biggest thing that let Imagine grow.

I was not put on this earth to be a project manager… Actually, what led to us being able to successfully hire this person was failing at it miserably about two or three times, because we kept hiring a person, and what we realized was we had a problem with the process. The reason that I wasn’t able to get out was because the process wasn’t ready either.

(Listen at 32:16)

Imagine spent much of the prior year fixing processes and cataloging what Doug actually did with clients, so the job description became a list. When the right candidate said she planned to own her own agency in five years, Doug told her that was exactly what he wanted: own this one, as an employee.

The last stretch (from 36:37) covers the sales development side, where Imagine reviews about 100 candidates to hire one rep and has new reps productive by week two.