Hiring with Gut Instinct? You're Probably Getting It Wrong

In this episode, Rob sits down with Michael Deutsch, Managing Partner of The Deutsch Group and owner of Sapphire Talent. They explore the often-overlooked art (and science) of hiring. Michael shares his insights on why most small and mid-sized businesses struggle with hiring, what needs to change, and how organizations can design better hiring processes—especially in remote and hybrid environments. They also dive into broader business challenges like getting stuck despite having the “right people” and how to break through those barriers.  

Key Takeaway: 

Hiring is more than just filling a seat—it’s about building intentional processes to find and empower the right people. Companies that invest time in preparing structured, curiosity-driven interviews and create culture by design, especially in remote settings, are more likely to scale effectively and sustainably. 

Questions I ask Michael Deutsch:  

01:46    What are most companies missing out with respect to hiring? 

02:48    Where should companies start in terms of improving their hiring process? 

03:35    Is it about hiring a good person or hiring the right person for a specific role? 

04:38    How do you evaluate whether someone is right for the job during interviews? 

 06:51    What should the person hiring look for in an answer to a follow up question during an interview? 

10:13    How do you assess if someone will thrive in a remote or hybrid environment? 

15:47    Other than hiring, what’s the biggest challenge business owners face in getting the most out of their teams? 

17:45    When a company already has the right people, where do they still get stuck? 

 

More About Michael:  

Check out Michael on EOS 

Connect with Michael on LinkedIn. 

 

More About Rob Levin & WorkBetterNow: 

Like this show? Click on over and subscribe to our YouTube channel! 

Follow Rob Levin on LinkedIn. 

Visit WorkBetterNow.com 

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Episode Transcript

Michael Deutsch (00:00):
As far as back as I can remember, we've always hired the same way. Nothing has changed, well, if you're gonna do it the same way, you're gonna get the same results. And so, to me, some of the big challenges, it's not a database decision making process, for the most part, it's gut feeling.

(00:01):
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I think the hiring process in and of itself is a bit broken, when you're a big sized company, when you're the Googles of the world, when you have McKinsey's at your back, you have all of the data to support the ability to change your hiring process; but if you look at small and midsize companies, we've always been doing it the same way, right.
I think it initially has to start with a mindset change, we have to recognize the fact that we're not good at hiring, even if we think we're good at hiring, take a look at the data to see that. So many of my clients, they tend to use the exception as the rule and say, well, I made a great hire, so and so was phenomenal.
I think it's a little bit of both, you need both sides of the equation to be successful. You need the good person, the person who's successful, who has the ability to be successful and you need the person who potentially has proven that they can be successful, they can do the job.
And it can't be a one source of information type of process, meaning very often the manager will do the interview, they may have a recruiter who goes through the basics of it at first, then the manager does an interview and the manager hires the person based on gut feeling, you need multiple sources of data here to help do that.
Follow up questions, correct, along the same chain, and I'm looking to uncover how they handle the situation or how they may handle, because there's really two types of conversations there, situational behavioral, I don't want to get too deep into the weeds, but ask follow up questions to really start to dig out and be curious, not interrogating them, but we want to be curious about the story that they're telling us to really pull out, can they do this job?
Well, I think you're looking at a few things, on the one hand, you're looking to make sure that the person is telling you the right story.
Your culture, your processes, your people are going to be very different. But I want to understand how you've handled a situation like this in the past and the process that you've gone through to solve that issue because that's going to give me an indicator of how you're going to approach the problem in the future.
You have to be prepared and you have to take it seriously, and I've told my Sapphire clients, I've told my EOS® clients too, if someone's not taking it seriously, guess what? They're off the hiring team. It doesn't matter if they're the manager, if they're not going to take it seriously, they're going to make bad hires, and if they make bad hires, that's expensive.

Rob Levin (00:10):
Yeah, I don't even think it's a matter of fairness, it's a way of evaluating people, right? Because if you give the same question, it gives you a little bit of a baseline there, I get that and thank you for sharing that.

Michael Deutsch (00:11):
I think remote and hybrid is still, in my opinion, is still a little bit of a challenge, I don't know that we've fully unlocked that yet; what I would tell you from experience and from what I'm seeing is that the success of a remote or hybrid individual goes back into hiring. You need to be even more diligent about your hiring process when you're hiring for a remote or virtual person because, everything is exaggerated when you're remote. Because everyone's not together, cultural differences are felt more extremely, the person's inability for, I don't want to say inability, it might be a wrong way of putting it, but the person needs to be a self starter, they need to be great at self management, we really have to dig into that to make sure they can do that because there's that disconnect; we're not there, we're not seeing them in person. I think there's a reason why many of the bigger organizations, we're reading it all over the place now, they're going back to in person and they're shifting away from remote.
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Rob Levin (00:13):
You know WorkBetterNow quite well because, you got to start it on EOS® as our implementer, and we're 100% remote, and I can tell you that what's worked well for us, and this is just in general, I'll peel it back to hiring, what's worked very well for us is, building all of those things that you mentioned earlier into our culture, all of that's done by design, and over communicating is a part of it; actually, EOS® in itself, is a great tool for remote as well, right? Because KPIs, don't lie, and everybody's got a KPI.
So, they tend to get a little bit of out of sight, out of mind, and it becomes that much more important for the business who's managing the remote individual, to make sure they've got it right. When they work with you, the benefit is, you've got the culture, you've got the KPIs, you're managing these people and keeping them engaged on behalf of the client. And I think that's a huge benefit.
Uh, sometimes, depends, the clients usually, the ones who are doing very well, which is probably most of our clients, in our case, offshore, but any remote employee are doing all those things that we talked about, which is, again, culture by design, I can think off the top of my head, I don't think you know him, even though he's here in New York with us; Larry Zogby, RDS Delivery, and he's an example when he onboard somebody, they virtually get introduced to everybody in the company, not only the other remote people, but the people in the office. And, if you think about that, back in the old days, when we were all in the office, you, somebody walked around, right? Like, Oh, meet our new employee, and of course, a lot of companies don't do that in a remote or hybrid environment, and they're missing out, right? It's the lack of intentionality.

Michael Deutsch (00:16):
The biggest challenge that business owners are facing when they want to get the most out of their teams, I think, fortunately, I think it goes back to the right people; that's probably the biggest challenge, I think that we still hesitate to really understand what the right people in an organization looks like.
I would argue that, in EOS®, we say 80 or 85 percent of the challenges of your business can be found in your accountability chart, which is basically the structure, and the people of your organization will lie because so much overlays on top of that, including process, including data, including, I mean, there's so many components that run through the people of your organization. That's the, to me, that's the biggest challenge is making sure that we've got the right people within the organization.
There's so many potential issues. By issues, I mean things that we could be looking at, doesn't necessarily mean challenges. It could be processes; they don't have the right process, they don't have any processes in place so that it just feels like they're winging it, they get different results all the time.
They're okay with sales and profit right now; they're stuck elsewhere, and when you get past the people part of it, do you have the pro where are they struggling? Oh, it's a quality issue, right? Our customer service levels are down, we're delivering poor services, we're not delivering on time, what's going on over there, and you start to unpack it, and it's, they're not tracking any data in the organization, they have no idea how the company is performing, they have process issues, they have, like I said, they have no processes, or they have poor processes, or they have potentially people issues lower in the organization, that, because you're never going to have perfection in terms of the perfect environment, but perhaps there are people who are in the organization who are not following the processes, and then unfortunately, we're getting different results, and that's impacting quality. These are the common things that we typically see, or that I typically see. It's kind of in those areas that I think is where the bottlenecks start to creep up and get quality issues.

Rob Levin (00:20):
Gotcha. And just for everybody there, his name's right in the corner there. Michael, thanks again. It was great to see you.