1568 - Hobby Hiring: Finding Talent

Foreign. Doctor James Beckett Sports Card Insights. Thanks Sponsors Beckett Media, Beckett grading, Beckett authentication, compse.com, burbank sports cards, Mike Stadium Sports Cards, Heritage Auctions, Huggins, Scott Auctions, Topps, Panini and Upper Deck. I had a friend contact me about looking for a job in the hobby. He had just left a position. And what I've done in the past is I've person and we've walked through some of the possibilities. Some of those I've done in person and some of them I've done as a podcast episode. And so they're out there. But this time I thought I'm going to come at it a little bit differently. First, I'm going to do an episode today about hiring in the hobby and kind of what I went through when I was hiring people, as well as what some of the other hobby entities that are looking for good people. That's the perspective today. If you own a company or manage or whatever you're doing, you need help. So you're trying to figure out what does your business really need. And you don't need warm bodies. You need somebody that can really contribute. My friend is probably late 20s. He'd been six or seven years with one company. I'm aware of the company. There was a change in management and we don't really need to get into his details, but I'm trying to help him. So what are companies in the hobby looking for and how are they going about it? Maybe he can get some perspective from that and you can too. So this is going out to job seekers as well. But I told him, you have certain skills and things you've done, but in addition to that, you've got a work ethic, you've got an integrity. You came through for me a couple times when I needed something. You were in customer service, a little bit of selling, but you never gave me the hard upsell. So I've been impressed by the guy. But again, this is about what are companies doing? I hope that companies are not hiring just for a job title. It's usually what they do that I need this person with this title, when in reality, I think the first motivation is as a company, we've got a problem or we've got an opportunity for growth. What do we need? Now? The job title for that may be very clear. In my case, in running Beckett Publications and Beckett Media, it wasn't always obvious what the job title was, but we knew the problem we were trying to solve or the opportunity we wanted to pursue. You're growing fast or you're disorganized or you have social media problems or technology problems, whatever. You're missing out on the TCGs, poor customer service or a need for more aggressive sales or process. Lots of different things. My first point is just I wouldn' at just what's the job title? But what are you trying to accomplish? What do you want to bring somebody in to help? Again, problem or opportunity? The other thing I think our company did well on was we really separated out the teachable skills from some of the foundational traits we are looking for. If somebody's got a good strong foundation and is teachable, and not all skills are teachable in the hobby, some people you've got to figure out what's teachable. Not everybody can grade. You can't hire somebody to grade. It might even be not teachable but not interested. You really got to think about what am I looking looking for? And clearly somebody has to have something on the ball the first day. But instead of just looking at when you interview with them, what can they offer? What can they offer in three to six months? Clearly they've got to make a contribution and get to work and roll up their sleeves the first day. But what's the history of them doing that? If you're checking references, which you should, you're going to check and see is this person that follows through. They talk a great game, but they follow through to deliver. It's not the draft in the various sports where you're just drafting for potential and superstar or bust. No, you want contributors. You want somebody to come in and make an impact, make a difference and grow in the position. I hope the other thing is for companies which I don't think we did this, but unless it's a senior position, you really shouldn't demand a finished product. My young friend, he's still got a lot of potential. His growth path as an employee, he's still on that path. Some of these positions he's looking for, I think they're going to be looking for somebody with potential that's not a finished product but has 7 years of experience in exactly what we're doing, what we need. Sometimes that's what you need, sometimes it's not. Like I said, I wasn't big on job descriptions. I was big on team and in basketball, the positionless players. I like to have a lot of three and D guys. For me, that was people that had a lot of skills that could help as well as great hobby knowledge. That would be what I've encouraged this guy to have. Demonstrate what Your skills are and certainly your hobby knowledge. And for the companies in the hobby in the industry, I wouldn't rule them out. If they don't have sports card expertise, I think that's a negative. But if gets supplanted or replaced by heavy TCG knowledge, many of the companies in this industry, there's a real opportunity with TCGs, Pokemon, things like that. If you add somebody that knows something about. This guy's done some Whatnot with sports card as well as tcg, so he has some knowledge. But how much sports card expertise when we were hiring, it can't be. Yu-Gi-Oh I was a collector when I was a kid. Everybody can say that. But what are you doing now? Even if they've been working in some other industry in your interview, if they're saying, Yu-Gi-Oh I'm going to get back into that, to me that's a negative. I'd like to hear somebody say, I was into it in as I'm now a free agent, I'm not working anymore. I have just seen how exciting things are going on there and I've jumped in full tilt to get back into the sports card scene. And I'm having a ball and I'd like to make it a career. So that's an attitude I'd like. If you need a technology person, yes, I think it's helpful if they have sports card expertise, very helpful. But they've got to have the technology experience, too. If you want somebody that's going to work a card shop or at a card show, what's their experience in coming to those things? They're showing interest as well as aptitude. If you want a customer service person. We had great success with customer service people who had the right attitude. But when you combine that great attitude with sports card knowledge. We had talked about Louise Byrd, it was just masterful. But she had been a store owner with her husband and her family. They'd had a sports card store. And after her husband passed away and they shut down the store, we brought her onto our team and she was just terrific. We weren't looking for her, but when she became available, she was a lottery pick. Another point, if you're a smaller hobby company, and I'm going to be involved in this shark tank thing at the national next week, a lot of companies start small. And whether these shark tank companies get funded and take off and these other new companies that are trying things, smaller hobby companies for sure need versatile people. Again, not worrying about the job title. And so my friend who has a bunch of things he could do. And I'm not exactly sure what he must do or really wants to do. But in a smaller company environment, if he's got versatility, saying, last seven years I've done this and this, and it generally goes into customer service. But I also did some sales and I did some events and things like that, I think that would be good. So small companies, as we were when we started out, love versatile people. I tried to be versatile. I was better at certain things than other things. But as you get bigger, you let the people gravitate toward what they're really good at. So if you're a large company, Yu-Gi-Oh you can hang out an ad for a specialized position where you're looking for a lot of experience. Nothing wrong with that. But my buddy here, he's not going to get that kind of job because he doesn't have the exact experience for seven years of exactly what they're looking for. But with versatility, I think he's got an excellent shot. And versatile means you're pretty good at a lot of things and hopefully really good at certain things the first year you're there. If you're versatile, they're going to figure out that you're more valuable doing this than that. So I'm not seeing a lot of general ads from. Maybe those just aren't the jobs that get posted. Again, not looking for a warm body, but. But to cast the net widely, which we did. So if you're a company in the industry and you're looking for talent to come onto your team, I'd have some more general job postings that would draw the wider net because you never know what you're going to find. And so where you're looking, you just put a post. You can put an ad or these digital monster.com or something like that. I think word of mouth is still the best. Your customers could be good future employees. Your vendors may know some good employees. For you people that are out there, we hired family members. Somebody said, my cousin is looking for work and he used to do this. And I said, let him apply or her. We had some husbands and wives and brothers and sisters and I didn't want to discriminate against them, say, hey, don't apply because we've already got your related person. But the related person was terrific. And I thought if they're like that, then Yu-Gi-Oh I'd love to get this person's sister when the brother is doing great. We had father sons, we had mother daughters. My rule was not to rule out people and to get interviews and Try to see them in action. We hired a lot of interns and we paid our interns. They weren't paid as well and they didn't get benefits of our full time employees, but they got a decent pay and they did contribute. We had them doing different things. That's another source and an encouragement that I would have for you out there. Companies that are looking, that have a growth path or have a need, your employees may know, collectors may know. In fact, you want to get some candidates, put a bounty out there instead of having a bounty for cards companies and just say, look, we're looking to hire this. I've thought about this frequently with BGs. In the days when it was just going crazy, we needed more graders. The graders found other graders, other friends of theirs that knew what they did and so we wanted to give a bounty. The other thing I encourage my friend and I think this is something companies should be more explicit about is that any corporate culture, any small company or large company culture, and many of them have this is promoting from within. If your culture is to promote from within as much as possible, sometimes there's just nobody inside that has the expertise that you're missing. But your employees that you already have know that we're looking for this. Nobody really qualifies for that. And the learning curve is too steep. So companies, I think it encourages loyalty and longevity if you're promoting from within. So giving people a growth path. We did have some situations where we promoted people one step too much, but that's not really for this episode. I think it's indicative of companies that sometimes are optimistic. Looking back, I probably should have been slower to hire and faster to fire, but I think we were slow to hire and we hired wisely and so we didn't really need to fire. It was very rare that we let somebody go for performance because I think we were making good choices. People enjoyed working there and they worked hard. But again, I think we were matching people with capabilities. And I encourage you hiring people in this industry. And the other thing we did and I would encourage companies to do this is we didn't necessarily have a hiring committee. We had hr. But most of our hiring at some point involved an opportunity for several of our team to meet. And in the early days it was me. But later on it sometimes was who they were going to be working with if there wasn't compatibility there. But frequently there was. Again, the capabilities have to be there. Then I'm big on face to face. So I think you could submit a digital resume and have references and that all sounds great, but I'd like to see the person face to face. I have hired people. In fact, in the 80s and 90s, I hired people at the National. They may have lived near where the national was. And we said, got your info, but I'm going to be there once you stop by the booth. When they did, I thought, I want this person to be on my team and hope they thought they want to be on the team. So I hope each of the booths at the national, if you're looking for talent there, I don't know that you put up a sign or you circulate something, let it be known that you're not just trying to sell stuff, but you're looking for some new employees in the following years. Maybe it's posted at your booth and I think people would respond to that. I can think back of a couple Nationals where we did well financially, but we also hired a couple people that were strong contributors for a very long time. I think that's an unexpected bonus at the national. Your old friends, new friends, maybe even new employees. I don't think you have to have a big long line of candidates at the National. I think it's good to be selective because you're not there just for that. But if you want to work for Com C, one of my sponsors, if you go up there, Comp C has some kind of a notice or the people at the booth say, on Saturday we're going to be having a little orientation of what it would be like to work here. I think that would draw some interest. And BGS second did that. PSA is looking to hire lots of places. So my buddy, if there's a job posted that has too many specifics, he's probably not going to get it. Even though I think he'd be a good candidate for the companies out there. I think if you only have these Zebra specific jobs, again, that may be your strategy. But I think you may be missing somebody who could really contribute in some ways that are perhaps intangible or not recognizable at first glance. Another way to think of it is if I don't hire this person and one of my competitors hires this person, is that a bad deal? In a few cases for me, it would have been terrible. Some of our best employees that we hired definitely had other opportunities and I'm really glad we made not offers they Goldin refuse, but we made them very competitive offers. And again, like I said, we had a lot of intangibles that caused them to say yes. In those days, we made a move to Dallas. We provided some assistance in doing that. And companies, maybe you have multiple locations, maybe you work from home, but nowadays I think talent is really important. And when you find somebody, somebody great, you try to make it work for them and not upset the apple cart too much, but try to make it work for them. So thanks. I hope this national is mutually beneficial to the companies as well as to the job seekers, that there's a meeting there that results in some great matches. So thanks everybody. Be back again in a couple days. Another episode. In fact, I'm looking at the same problem from the job seeker perspective. So until two days. Thanks.