Franziska: Hi and welcome back. My name is Franziska Iseli and I am one of the founders here at Basic Bananas.

Today, I wanted to share something with you that I recently spoke about at a speaking engagement in Fiji. I was talking to maybe 60 or 70 accountants and lawyers on how to secure one of your biggest assets, which is your team.

So I shared one strategy with them which we actually use here at Basic Bananas to help us find really good team members. Team members that fit into our culture.

What it is, is actually is a strategy that I learned, I think I‘ve first heard about this from Verne Harnish. It goes like this, so of course we‘ve spoken before about the importance of having values. Now, I‘m not going to go too much into this. You can watch some of our other videos on this topic but once you have your values, you have clarity on what you stand for and what‘s important in your business, you can actually use those to hire the right people.

So what you can do is, I‘m going to share some of these with you now. What you can do is you can take your values and then come up with questions to ask someone, when you interview a candidate that are in relation to those values to see if they can display those values. Because, of course, you don‘t want to hire people that are exactly like you, but you do want to hire people that can display your company‘s values. It‘s super important.

So this is how we do it. I‘m going to give you some examples. One of our values, for example, is generosity. The question that we could ask someone, when someone comes in to be interviewed, “Is what is a kind act you have done for someone?” If they say, I‘ve never done anything for anyone. I don‘t really care about anyone else, then probably they‘re not the right person for our culture.

Another one is innovation. So innovation is another one of our values. We always want to be innovative here, improving on everything. It‘s one of our core values here at basic bananas. So a question that we ask is, “tell me about a time you have improved on something in your previous role?” Again, if they say, “I don‘t really improve things. I‘m not really the one to improve anything.” Again, probably not the right person to be in this culture. But if they say, yeah, you know, one time I improved, I came up with a new process to be more effective.” Then we know, okay, they have a mind to be innovative.

I‘ll give you one last. Let‘s see. Growth. The word that I can‘t say – growth. That‘s one of our values, too. It‘s to constantly growing and learning and developing ourselves. So the question is, “when was the last time you‘ve learned something new?” Again, of course, if they say , “I don‘t like learning things.” Not the right person. If they say, “you know what, just last weekend, I took a painting class to learn how to paint.” Then that means that they‘re into learning, growing and developing themselves.

This tip really has helped us to find the right people for our culture, because, of course, sometimes you meet people that are super skilled. That you believe that, you know what, they have the right skill. But if you don‘t have the right values or they can‘t display your values, it could be quite a bad hire for your company. We‘ve certainly make those mistakes, ourselves. But I think we‘re becoming better and better at using questions like these mixed in with all the standard questions to help us find the right person.

So I thought I‘d share this with you and hopefully, this will help you also find amazing team members for your own team.

Thanks so much for watching. Here‘s to creating ripple effects of awesomeness everywhere we go.