Creating Superfans Podcast Episode 310: Brittany Hodak

Brittany Hodak [00:00:01]:
One of the principles that I write about in my book creating super fans is that your customer experience will never be better than your employee experience. And that’s because if you have a team that is apathetic about their work, that’s going to be obvious. You cannot create engaged customers with apathetic team members. So a question that I get a lot is, are there some people that are just hardwired to be really great at customer service and customer experience? Like, are there some people who are just better at this job? And the inverse of that question that I get sometimes too is, are there some people who are just never gonna be good at this that we should just give a pass to or write it off as, like, they’re not people people? So this episode is about my thoughts on those issues. Spoiler alert. Anybody can be better at customer experience and customer service, and how to have these issues top of mind so that when you’re hiring for your team, whether you’re looking for one super key critical hire or whether you hire thousands of people every single month, I’m gonna give you some tips that you can use to find more customer centric candidates and ways that you can make the entire interview process a little bit more friendly for the people joining your team and some really great questions that you can ask to help you uncover how customer centric a potential employee is or is not. So let’s dig in, and I wanna go ahead and tell you now there is, a cool, freebie that you can get in this episode, and I’m gonna just go ahead and tell you about it right off the bat because I put together 10 questions that will help you identify supercandidates early in your interviews. We’re gonna go through those questions, and we’re gonna talk about some of the other issues that I mentioned.

Brittany Hodak [00:01:49]:
But I wanna go ahead and let you know that if you want a PDF of this resource, go to my Instagram at Britney Hodak and DM the word interview, and I’ll send it right to you. Or you can go to the link in the show notes, which is just the free resources page of my website at britneyhodak.com, and you can download this. So we’ll go quickly through these 10 interview questions. First up, I always like to ask someone, what led you to seek out this role at our company? The purpose here is to find out whether or not the candidate is passionate yet about your company and understands this role. You obviously would love for all of your people to be coming because they feel a sense of connection to your purpose and are passionate about what your company is doing. You don’t want it to just be like, I applied for 75 jobs, and you guys were the first people who called me back or whatever. Now that is not to say that everyone who interviews with you should know everything about your company. They shouldn’t.

Brittany Hodak [00:02:54]:
That’s a completely unrealistic expectation. I know there are a lot of companies that I’ve worked at in my career that I’d never heard of before I saw the job posting. The reason that I like to ask this question up front is because it not only gives you an opportunity to find out how much homework the candidate has done, but it gives you an amazing opportunity to tell the story of your company. You may be the very first person that a candidate is hearing about the company from. Maybe you’re the second or third or fourth depending on the size of your HR department and the the process of how the interviews unfold. But ask someone, what led you to seek out this role here with us? Find out what they say and then offer them your own feedback. Because as you may have heard me say, if you listen to this podcast on a regular basis, super fans are created at the intersection of your story and every other person’s story. Think of those 2 circles like a Venn diagram.

Brittany Hodak [00:03:53]:
The more you can get how much you love your company to overlap with what they think about your company at the get, that’s where you’re going to get them to lean much more toward the passion or the purpose side of the spectrum than the I want a paycheck side of the spectrum. So that’s the first question. What led you to seek out this role at our company? The second question, I always love asking, what’s an example of a brand or a company to which you are particularly loyal? You can ask what it is about the experience there that keeps them going back to that company. Now the reason that I like to ask this question regardless of their role is it begins to give you an insight into how much this candidate thinks about customer experience. Do they see the companies that they do business with as commodity providers or as categories of 1? So you start to get, again, a sense of if somebody like, I had somebody say to me the other day at a minute that I was doing. He was like, I’m so pragmatic. I never think about brands. Like, I just want the cheapest, the fastest, the most convenient, and that is just how I’m wired.

Brittany Hodak [00:05:03]:
And we got into a really fascinating conversation then about sort of his decision making process and why he’s like that and, if that’s true across the board or if he’s just sort of painting with a broad brush, and that’s that’s not actually the case. But to ask candidates how they think about certain brands or companies and if there are ones that they return to is gonna tell you a lot. It’s gonna tell you a lot about who they are as a person. It’s also gonna tell you about how much differentiation they see in their own lives when it comes to customer experience. Alright. The third question that I always recommend asking is this. Tell me about a time you had an amazing customer experience and what made it stand out. Great employees embrace the roles that they play in customer interactions, but they also think about CX when they’re on the customer side.

Brittany Hodak [00:05:53]:
So one of the cool things about this question is you can see how long it takes somebody to come up with the answer. Again, it’s less about the example they give. I don’t care if somebody had an amazing experience at a diner where they spent $8 or, like, a really expensive vacation or hospitality experience. I wanna know how long it takes them to recall an amazing experience, and then I wanna ask the follow-up question of, did they tell anybody about that experience? Question number 4 that I love to ask is the inverse of that. Tell me about a bad customer experience, and then ask not just if they told people about it, but how that experience impacted their perception of the company behind it. Now an interesting thing here is that you if you’re asking this right after you ask the question about the good customer experience, you can see how long it takes them to come up with an example. Did they think of the good thing faster or the bad thing faster? Did they say that they told nobody about the good experience and a lot of people about the bad experience or vice versa? Again, it’s less about what they actually tell you and more about how you’re uncovering the way that they think about and process the experiences that they have. Because as somebody who is going to be interacting with customers in any capacity, you want them to make the association that if they in any capacity, you want them to make the association that if they were to get this role, they are an ambassador for the company, and the interactions that they have with customers matter because every customer is an influencer.

Brittany Hodak [00:07:24]:
Up next, I always like to ask if the candidate has ever given feedback to a company about a product or service. And here, I really just wanna know how connected they feel to the things that they buy. If they had a really great situation or maybe a really terrible situation or even an average situation, are they giving feedback and why? If you have somebody that you’re interviewing for a customer facing role, you should always ask them what are, in their opinion, the most important elements of excellent customer service. This is a really great question to ask because you’ll get to see the lens through which this candidate views service. Is it in alignment with the way that your company thinks about it? Are they able to answer this question very quickly to say these are the things that matter to me, and these are the things that I think I can do, or is this something that they haven’t given a lot of thought to? Again, you don’t wanna necessarily exclude a candidate because they can’t answer quickly, but it will start to give you a sense of how they think about it. I I open the episode by telling you that a lot of times people ask me, are there some people that are just wired to be great at customer experience and other people who aren’t? And an analogy that I make sometimes is think about it like a sport. A lot of people can play basketball. Not a lot of people are gonna make it to the NBA.

Brittany Hodak [00:08:48]:
But if you have great coaches and you do a great job of choosing your team, whether it’s for a pickup game at the y or something that’s a bit more competitive, you are going to increase your chances of winning because you’re getting the right people, and then you’re hopefully having the right leaders and coaches to encourage them and help them get better. Now does that mean that everyone is going to be LeBron? Of course not. But it means if you get the right people in the right positions and then you give them the right tools and resources to help them get better, they’re going to improve, and they’re going to get better. Now another time another question that I love to ask is asking a candidate to describe a time when they went above and beyond to ensure a customer left satisfied. Now when you ask this question, again, it matters much less about what they’re saying. It could be a very sort of mundane example of something that happens, you know, dozens of times a day or something that is a little bit more extraordinary, with circumstances that aren’t going to happen all the time. What you are paying attention to here is how they talk about their coworkers, if at all. This is gonna give you a sense of if somebody is, like, the hero of the story or if they are talking about an entire supporting cast.

Brittany Hodak [00:10:12]:
Talk about how they set up the problem of what went wrong and the resolution of what they did to ensure that a customer left them better than they found that customer. Another great question that you can ask is about task prioritization. When somebody faces multiple requests or projects or needs coming in at the same time, ask how they prioritize those. This is gonna help you understand how their time management skills, come into play in customer facing roles and really how how they handle stress. So, task prioritization is a question that I love to ask. Another great question is, tell me about a time when you had to solve a problem for an unhappy customer. This is related to the one a couple of questions above, and it’s gonna give you a really good sense about their problem solving skills. How were they able to hopefully leave the customer, not just better than they found them when the problem broke out, but better than that customer would have been had nothing gone wrong in the first place? And then I’m not always a fan of off the wall questions.

Brittany Hodak [00:11:22]:
I actually, don’t like the practice of asking about sort of the impossible things of, you know, do you think it’s more rational to be afraid of heights or spiders, or why are manhole covers round, or what would you do with an elephant that you had and had to get rid of? Like, I know some people really love those creative types of questions. And for some roles, they probably are fitting. But for the most part, I feel like they may rattle candidates, more than they’re they’re going to, like, actually tell you anything useful about them. But a question that I always love to ask that’s not necessarily related to any role is tell me about the last interesting thing that you learned. The reason I love this question is because candidates who are lifelong learners are going to be some of the best people you can ever hire. Because if they’re eager to learn outside of work, they’ll be more likely to be eager to learn inside of work because they wanna develop new skills. They wanna be better. They wanna be a better team player, and they wanna be better for themselves.

Brittany Hodak [00:12:29]:
So ask a candidate, what’s the last interesting thing that you learned? And then pay attention to the enthusiasm that they answer the question with. You can ask them, what can you teach me? Like, what’s something interesting that you just learned that you can share me or teach me? And, again, I don’t care if it’s something that they learned about Beatles and a bedtime storybook they were reading to their kids or something that relates to a hobby they have. What I do care about is how long does it take them to think of an answer, and how excited are they to share it with you? Again, I don’t care if they read it in the New York Times or saw it in a TikTok video. I don’t care of what it is. I just wanna know, is this somebody who is a lifelong learner? Is this somebody who enjoys collecting knowledge and collecting resources to help them be better today than they were yesterday? Because if they wanna be better today than they were yesterday, that is somebody who is going to continue to grow and flourish on your team. Okay. So let’s talk about the interview experience. As I mentioned before, if you are talking to a candidate about joining your team, that may be the very first or one of the first experiences that they have with your company.

Brittany Hodak [00:13:43]:
So you are an ambassador for the entire brand. It should go without saying, but clearly does not, that you want the interview experience to be positive. Whether you ultimately end up hiring that person or not, you want them to feel like they had a great experience interviewing for that job. You don’t want them to feel like they were set up to fail or that you made them jump through a 1000 meaningless hoops or that they did a bunch of work, never heard back from you. So make sure you have that experience on lock. Again, maybe you’ve got a small team, maybe you’ve got a big team, but common courtesies, not asking for a thousand things, not leaving candidates hanging, not making somebody come in 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 different times on different days. Think about if you were in the experience, what would you want the interview process to be like? And then try to make it as much like that as possible. I think some of the common mistakes are unnecessary group interviews.

Brittany Hodak [00:14:42]:
I am not a fan of the group or even the panel interviews. I don’t think it’s super fair to candidates to be expected to talk to 4 or 5 or 6 people. I also don’t think it’s a great use of the time of those teammates. So I think it’s a good idea to avoid group interviews. And, you know, along those same processes, I I don’t think it’s fair to not have transparency about what your timeline looks like and what it’s gonna look like. Like, it is not fair to ask somebody to do 6 interviews if you did not tell them up front there may be up to 6 interviews or there may be up to 7 interviews. Because when it feels like you’re not being transparent or it feels like you’re moving the goal post, you can get to the point where by the time somebody has offered the job, they don’t even know if they want it anymore because they think, wow. If it was this hard to just get hired, what’s it gonna be like when I work there? Because a lot of times, what it feels like is, oh, this company is making things unnecessarily difficult, or this company is indecisive, or this company is sort of changing the rules or making the rules up as they go.

Brittany Hodak [00:15:57]:
Now, of course, there are a lot of situations where you’re gonna have to do duplicate or maybe even triplicate interviews. Right? You’re gonna wanna have people identify with with people in different parts of the company. You’re gonna have different rounds of processing and hiring. Do what you can to make sure you’re not duplicating interview questions. If somebody is having to answer the exact same question 4 different times on 4 different days and 4 different interviews for 4 different people, that tells me that your processes are not as optimized as they should be. There’s no reason you can’t use a tool like Fathom AI to record that first interview and share that answer. Again, you wanna show that you aren’t wasting people’s time. To that same line, make sure you’re upfront about all of the information that people care about.

Brittany Hodak [00:16:46]:
You should be able to and it is now required in some states for you to be able to see the salary range, the requirements about how many days you’re working in office or remote, what the travel requirements are, what the benefits are. Make sure that you’re sharing as much of this information upfront as you can. It’s not fair to ask somebody to do a ton of work to apply to work at your company if they are gonna find out 7 steps later that it was not a good fit in the first place because think about it. If you are applying for a job and you feel like a company wasted your time or made you jump through 11 completely unnecessary hoops, you have a company now that you went in probably with a neutral, maybe even a positive feeling about, that now you’re like, I hate those guys. They are awful. Right? You don’t want any amount of people out there in the world that are unnecessarily, like, telling others that you either don’t have it together or don’t treat potential employees that well. Because if people think you’re not taking great care of potential employees, they probably think you’re treating potential customers and maybe even existing customers even worse. Because while customers give you their money, employees give you something way more important, and that’s their time, their lives.

Brittany Hodak [00:18:14]:
So as you build your team, I hope that these thoughts and these questions are impactful and helpful to you. If you wanna get the list of those 10 interview questions that I ran through, you can go to the website in the show notes, or you can DM me the word interview. You can also listen to the 3rd episode from the 1st season of the creating super fans podcast. It’s an interview that I did with my good buddy, Dennis Snow. He is a Disney veteran, and he shared lots of different tips and tricks from his days of hiring cast members at Disney that you can plug into your company right now to make sure that you’re getting the right teammates in the right roles to help your company turn even more of your customers into super fans. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you back right here next week for another interview episode.