I’ve been talking to CEOs and Founders over the past few weeks since announcing that I’m transitioning out of Rent Dynamics at the end of Q1.

One of the top questions that everyone has asked me:

“What do you attribute the rapid revenue growth from your last 2 growth companies to?”

My answer has always been:

“Getting the team right. Specifically, building highly functioning teams.”

Regardless of the chapter of my career that I’ve been in - being part of a high-quality team, an A-Team, has always made work that much more fun.

Today, I want to share the simple and actionable concept of hiring Bar Raisers… something I learned from Amazon while preparing for a keynote presentation for the Denver Apartment Association.

What it means to hire a Bar Raiser

You’ve heard the general advice about hiring in business.

• Hire people that are smarter than you

• Hire people that will make others better

• Hire slow and fire fast (or some switch those)

When I first stepped into a hiring manager position, I followed baseline hiring advice like this. And, I also leaned heavily on the opinions of panels and/or peers that were part of the interview loop.

What I found, is that many times people had a bias when recommending a hire. They picked hires based on who they liked the most - personality, culture, team-fit etc.

And, that often meant we were not always bringing in people that would raise the bar on our team.

Meet Amazon’s framework for hiring… the bar raiser program.

Amazon has a specific part of their interview loop where a person comes in to interview the candidate - and that person is a bar raiser.

Their job is to assess the candidate they are hiring to make sure that the candidate coming onboard will raise the bar that specific team - are they stronger than the average of the team?

I like this simple framework/approach for a few reasons.

• This lens of hiring can really help remove bias.

• This approach requires that you truly evaluate the strengths of your team. Keeping a pulse on that is very important.

• The overall, spoken principle of wanting everyone on the team to be a bar raiser is a really strong direction to create a highly functioning team. It drives very healthy competition.

Additionally, I think you can apply this more tactically than the general approach of questioning if the candidate will raise the bar.

I like assessing the strengths/weaknesses/gaps on the team and hiring to fill those in.

Is this type of content helpful?

Personally, it’s super fun to research frameworks and approaches that are used across industries.

A few other areas I’ve been researching:

• Ancillary Income programs in the airline industry

• Sales frameworks/processes used in retail

• Centralization strategies used in hospitality

Let me know if if anything is top of mind. As always, thanks for tuning in and I’ll see you next week!

Mike