We’ve driven over $10M in revenue for our newsletter clients and are unpacking the plug-and-play system thousands of people are using to turn a small email list into $2k-$10k/month.

(…without needing to quit your job, without needing to get on camera, and without needing prior experience).

We’ll show you how to start a newsletter in <30 minutes, scale to 1,000 readers, and make your first $10,000 in revenue.

Save Your Free Seat

Most interview processes aren't designed.

They accumulate.

Someone adds a phone screen here, a panel interview there, a take-home assignment that made sense two years ago and nobody has questioned since. The result is a process that is exhausting for candidates, inconsistent in what it measures, and far longer than it needs to be.

Meanwhile, the best candidates — the ones you actually want — are interviewing at multiple companies simultaneously. Every unnecessary step, every scheduling delay, every moment of friction is a quiet signal about what it would feel like to work for you. And strong candidates draw their own conclusions.

Here's the reframe: your interview process is not just a screening tool. It's the first real experience a candidate has of your organization. Design it accordingly.

💡The Vault Insight: The candidate experience you create in the interview process is a preview of the manager you are. Make it reflect the team you actually want to build.

Most managers think of the interview as the phase where they evaluate the candidate. That's half right. The other half — the half most managers skip entirely — is the phase where you sell them.

Before you ask a single probing question, before you dig into experience or test for skills, you sell. Completely. Without reservation.

Here's why the order matters.

If you open with "tell me about yourself" and jump straight into evaluation before a candidate understands what they're evaluating themselves for, you get guarded, generic answers. You also lose strong candidates who aren't desperate for a change and need a compelling reason to lean in before they open up.

Phase 1 is a 30-minute conversation with one purpose: make the best candidates want this job.

Tell them about the business — where it's been, where it is, where it's going. Give them the honest version, not the pitch deck version. Tell them about the role and why it matters right now. Tell them about yourself as a manager — what you value, how you give feedback, what your team culture actually feels like day to day. Then ask directly: does this sound like something you'd want to explore further?

Only after they've said yes do you move to Phase 2.

Phase 2 is your full interview day. Structured, intentional, and efficient. Everyone whose opinion matters is in the room — on the same day. No second visits. No callbacks. One strong, well-designed day tells the candidate you're organized, that you respect their time, and that you make decisions with confidence. Multiple rounds over multiple weeks tells them the opposite.

A few things that make Phase 2 work:

→ Assign each interviewer a specific focus. Culture fit, skills fit, and managerial fit are distinct dimensions. Three interviewers, three lenses, one day. Clean and comprehensive.

→ Use behavioral questions anchored to your scorecard. "Tell me about a time you did X. What was the outcome?" Past tense. Specific situation. Real result. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior — not what someone says they would do in a hypothetical.

→ Dig on follow-up. The first answer a candidate gives is almost always a summary. The real goldmine is in the follow-up questions. Push for specificity. Ask what they said, what happened next, what they'd do differently. Strong candidates get more compelling as you dig. Candidates who were telling you what you wanted to hear start to run out of road.

→ Collect feedback independently before any group discussion. Send a simple anonymous survey to every interviewer immediately after the day ends. Collect ratings and observations before anyone talks. Group debriefs are vulnerable to the loudest voice in the room anchoring everyone else's judgment. The survey solves that.

The managers who build exceptional teams don't just evaluate well. They create an experience that makes exceptional people choose them.

Design the process. Don't let it accumulate.

—Sean McGinnis, 2X President, 2X CMO, COO & EOS integrator