Top 3 Interview Questions to Use with Tyson Mutrux

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Are you a business owner looking for some insightful interview questions when hiring? In this insightful podcast episode, Tyson Mutrux unveils his top interview questions crucial for hiring at his law firm. 

Having a good hiring process is such an important aspect of a successful business. It is important to draft the right questions to ask candidates to ensure you are getting everything you need from them to make your decision. Tyson shares some of the questions he asks when hiring. One is related to how a client prioritizes their physical and mental health. In the legal field, attorneys are dealing with a lot of tough issues. It is not fair to hire an individual who is not taking care of themselves both physically and mentally. This will lead to a lot of problems for colleagues and clients alike.

Another question Tyson asks is around missing deadlines. This will give candidates the opportunity to admit their mistakes and how they dealt with them. For law firms to be successful, employees need to be able to deliver and admit when they are at fault. If not, firms are at risk of being sued and spending thousands of dollars fixing the mistake of an attorney. This helps build the trust of a potential employee.

Take a listen!

Episode Highlights:

• 03:01 The significance of having a structured hiring process and the risks of not having one
• 06:32 The significance of candidates admitting to and explaining how they handled a situation where they missed a set deadline
• 09:04 Tyson explains the unique approach of asking candidates what their best friend would say they could improve on

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Transcripts: Top 3 Interview Questions to Use with Tyson Mutrux

Tyson (00:27.726)
Hey everyone, Tyson here again for another Bite Size Saturday episode. And today I'm going to give you my top three interview questions. And so it's going to be a fun one. I think you will like these. We shall see. But before I get into those, I do want to remind everyone that Jim and I, we have started something new where we are…

gathering your video submissions. So we want to answer your questions on running a law firm, starting and running a law firm. So if you've got these questions and whether it's about starting the firm or you're in the middle of it, you're in the trenches fighting for your lives and you need some help, send us a video submission by going to MaximLawyer .com forward slash ask, submit your video there and

we will put it on the air and we will answer your question. So hopefully you will do that. It's something that is new that we're doing and it's something a little bit fun and I hope you'll do it. I hope you will dare greatly and dare to be a little bit vulnerable and share a little bit about you and your question and we'll air it. Thanks for doing that. All right, so this is…

something that's fun. We toss around different interview questions in the guild sometimes. These are this list of guild or this list of interview questions I've got in front of me. I've got every single interview question that we ask through all of our interviews from the phone interview all the way up to the team interview. Okay, so every single question that we ask, we ask all candidates the exact same questions during the round table one that we do, the team one.

We call it a round table, but it's a team interview that we do. We'll throw in additional questions that, like, based on their answers, okay, and this doesn't include follow -up questions, because there might be follow -ups to things that people tell us, but this, all of these questions we have in the guild, so if you're a guild member, you do have access to all these questions. They're in Kajabi, so you can find them there, but for non -guild members, I'm gonna go through…

Tyson (02:52.43)
the top three and I would say it was hard. It was really, really hard going through all these. We've several questions that we ask, something that I do not have in front of me are the questions that we ask the references, because we do reference checks. Part of top grading is doing reference checks. And so we do have specific questions that we ask the references as well. I don't have those in front of me, but those are in the guild as well. So if you have access to them, but.

This is a fun one because I do have these conversations quite a bit with people about hiring and there's people that do struggle with this quite a bit. And usually the reason why people struggle with it so much is they don't have some sort of system, some sort of process. And to be pretty honest with you, I don't care if you have a bad process, as long as you've got a process, it's better than no process. Because what happens is people will interview one person, they'll like that person and they'll hire them. And it's…

That's a really risky way of doing it. You're playing Russian roulette. That's what you're doing. So these questions all have a reason, I'll have a purpose and I'm gonna go through some of those with you. So let me get to these. I had to go through this list a few times to pick my top three. And number three on my list. So I'll go with, I'm gonna go in reverse order. So of the three.

The number one will get last. So my favorite question will be last, which I think I've talked about on the podcast before. So some of you will probably heard it. But number three on my list is, what do you do to take care of yourself physically and mentally? For those of you that have dealt with this situation before, you know why this is an important question. Sometimes you will hire people and…

There's a lot going on in their lives outside of work and many of those have to do with health, okay? Whether it's physical or mental, many of those things have to do with health. And I frankly think it's a little unfair for some of these candidates to come into the work environment and bring all that baggage with them. We all have baggage, okay? I'm not saying that we don't, but we all do have baggage and…

Tyson (05:18.222)
if you're constantly having to take off work because of health reasons, and here's the thing, a lot of it's not necessarily health, it stems from health reasons, okay? But if I know that you are working hard to take care of yourself physically and or mentally, and we're not looking for, hey, you know, I go to the doctor all the time, or I'm going, I'm getting therapy all the time. But what I am looking for is are you doing something, right? Are you doing something to take care of yourself? Are you, or more importantly,

Like, do you care about your health? Okay, I wanna hear the things you say about, and by the way, me, I'm not the one doing the interview. It's Kristen in our office is the one that's doing some of the first interviews, Kristen and Amy, so those two. Here's a little side tip. You don't wanna do interviews by yourself. You wouldn't have two people or more. You'll just have different perspectives, okay? So you might hear something that they might not hear and vice versa, but.

On this particular question, what I'm looking for is, is this something that you care about? Because if you don't, that could cause problems. It just could. And for those of you that have never hired before, you may not have experiences, but you might have, you probably had a coworker that you've dealt with that they're always taking care, they're always having to take off because they're just not taking care of themselves. Okay, maybe they're sick all the time. I don't really want to hire someone that's sick all the time. Just don't. But if you are, if it's something that you do care about, something that you think about,

Okay, then we're good. Okay, so that is why we asked that one and it's pretty effective. It's a really good one. Number two on my list, and by the way, again, this is really hard. I got this down to five and I was like, okay, how do I pick this top three? So some of these, I mean, some of these are top five questions maybe for some of you, but for me, these are top three. Number two on my list.

Give me an example of a situation where you weren't able to meet a set deadline and how you dealt with it. This is a really tough question for them to answer. Really, really tough. And this one is done during the first video interview. We have a similar one, and I'll give you a bonus question. In our first interview, which is a phone interview, because we want to, I mean, you're talking to the clients a lot on the phone, and so we got to make sure that you can talk. And…

Tyson (07:41.428)
One of the questions that we ask is tell me about a time you failed and what you would have done differently now that you know the result it's similar to that but it's different and In both of these particular questions what I'm looking for is I'm looking for you to admit a time that you screwed up Okay, because what you do not know you do not want is someone that's in your firm that it's gonna hide every time that they screw up All right. So obviously you don't want someone that screws up all the time

But what you do want is you want someone that if they do mess up something, they feel comfortable enough to come to you and say, listen, Tyson, I screwed this up. I need some help fixing it. That is what you're looking for. You don't want people that are gonna sweep things under the rug. That's really, really bad. Those type of people are the ones that are gonna get you sued because something happened and they didn't tell you about it. And you've got this ticking time bomb just waiting. And they're also the type of people that are…

probably going to point the finger at someone else. Because if they've never screwed up, that means that everyone else is the one that screwed up. So this is a very effective question where if you can't find, and the deadline one is really, there's why it's so tough, why this one's tricky. Because I think everyone can come up with a time pretty easily where they, you know, if they didn't do something right, they failed. Okay. And you can come up with sporting events, you can, you name it. You can come up with a lot of things off the top of your head where you just didn't win. Okay. And you can say you failed, but this one is,

you have to give a specific time where you didn't meet a set deadline. And when we're talking about deadlines and the law, like that is, that's a tough thing to admit sometimes. And we're, I don't care who you are listening to this. At some point in your life, you have missed a deadline, whether that's you were late for school or you were late to a meeting. Those are deadlines too, right? That's a type of a deadline, but I'm looking for you to come up with something and we get people time to think about it, all right?

If you have to circle back to it, we'll do that to you. But we need you to come up with something. So like, I need to hear, or Kristen needs to hear how they're going to respond to that. So that's why we asked that one. And then the number one question that Kristen always asked during the team interview, it's interesting. We had a candidate interview recently and she was going to skip this one. I don't know why. I never…

Tyson (10:03.598)
found out from her why she was gonna skip this one, but Amy asked her and made a reference to, well, I'm sure Kristen's gonna ask you her question about her best friend. And Kristen said, well, I wasn't going to, but I guess I will now. But this is one that's, it's a really good one. And I wonder, we end up hiring this person, I wonder if Kristen just didn't wanna risk it by asking the question. But the number one question, my favorite one, and.

I think when you first hear it, you might think, well, that's kind of a little, that's a little bizarre, but it's, if I could have breakfast with your best friend, what is something they would say you could improve on? Okay. And here's what's really interesting about this one. If I ask you directly what you can improve on, a lot of times people are, what they're going to do is they're going to, like, this is a standard question, right? Like, what are your weaknesses? This is a variation of the, what are your weaknesses?

What's really fascinating about this, and if you had told me this before I saw this question asked, because this is something that Kristen had come up with, and I actually think she came up with the question. I don't think she didn't find it on some website. She actually came up with this question, which I think is really interesting. It was an organic thing that came up. But when I watch it in action, that's what's really interesting about it, because when they think about their best friend, it's like almost like it disarms them. So they let their guard down.

and they give you very honest responses. And if you would have told me that before I heard it, I would have told you no, no way. It's just like the weakness question. They're gonna try to spin it into a positive. And that is not how this works. I'm telling you, I've seen it countless times where she asked the question, their guard immediately comes down and they give us very honest feedback. And it's a fun one too, because they get a little chuckle out of it as well.

And because you see them thinking and they're like, well, they might say this. And it's a fun one. It does lighten the mood a little bit, which is it helps in them letting their guard down. So I highly recommend that question if you don't currently use that question. Add it to your arsenal. Add it near the end. This isn't one I would add early on. We do this one near the end on purpose, but this time we've…

Tyson (12:27.914)
Spoken to them quite a few times so their guard is going to be down a little bit more anyways because they know that they've progressed down the process, but That's all I have for you today. Hopefully you got something out of this again any any guild members You can you can get access to all these inside of Kajabi in the resource center so you can you can find those there But as a reminder before I close things up

If you have something you want me to cover on the Saturday show, make sure you shoot me a text and I'll try to cover it. Just text me 314 -501 -9260. We do get lots of questions. I promise I'll get to them as quickly as I can. And sometimes people will have to text me a couple different times because it just, you know, life gets in the way sometimes. So don't worry about sending me a nudge if you have a question. So feel free to do that, but.

Until next week, remember that consistent action is the blueprint that turns your goals into reality. Take care.