Hiring Great People Under Pressure (part 3)

Here are part one and part two of this series.

When hiring, never, ever, compromise on character, personality, and aptitude.

If a candidate has extensive, directly relevant experience and several degrees from prestigious universities, but has poor character, a lousy personality, or weak aptitude, don’t hire him. You’ll be so sorry if you do. Experience and education simply can’t make up for those flaws.

On the other hand, if a candidate has excellent character, a great personality, and strong aptitude, you can often overlook scanty experience and a lack of education. Ideally, you’ll compensate by creating your own in-house training.

Consider carefully what kind of character, personality, and aptitude you need in each position in your organization. I’m lucky that my business needs require me to hire people who are honest, diligent, curious, verbal, smart, likeable, and energetic. It makes for a delightful working environment.

Not all organizations need people like these. I’ve heard of companies, for example, who administer standardized tests to candidates for sales positions to determine whether they’re sufficiently immoral to perform the job successfully. They reject candidates whose test results indicate they are too honest to do the work. I’m glad I don’t work in an environment like that, but at least they know what they’re looking for.

So, for example, if you need people to perform repetitive, routine work, don’t hire inquisitive social butterflies. Think carefully about what your actual needs are and how to identify candidates who will meet those needs. Don’t kid yourself.

Let’s wrap up this series by addressing the four potential objections to this strategy that I noted in the previous post:

1."This doesn’t help me, because I can’t set up a year-long fancy-pants training program."

I think training is hugely important. I still meet every week with one of my directors and the training manager to continually expand and improve our training program, and I still personally present some training topics to new hires. I understand that not all managers are in a position to create an extensive formal training program, but you can certainly provide new hires with an experienced mentor, a how-manual, and your own personal training. Make training one of your highest priorities and create the best solution your circumstances allow.

2."I require college degrees because I’m committed to excellence, and I thought you were too, Pufall."

My father was a college professor with a PhD and my mother has a Master’s degree. Higher education is a big value in my family. So when I first became a manager I "knew" that employees with more education performed better work and I set out to prove it so I could justify raising the educational requirements in our hiring standards.

Try as I might, I could never make the numbers match my theory. The truth is, every time I’ve done this research, I’ve found little or no correlation between education and performance. I manage by facts, not by personal prejudice, so now I set low educational requirements and focus on aptitude. This is not compromising quality at all. In fact, by paying less attention to pedigree I’m able to hire higher-quality people. Many of them have bachelor’s or graduate degrees and some of them don’t. They all do great work.

3."How the heck do you hire for character, personality, and aptitude? They don’t show up on a resume."

Well, it’s hard.

That’s why most companies focus on experience and education: it’s easy to do and it makes them feel like they have high standards. A manager who wants too feel like he has high standards can slap a "must have ten years of experience and an MBA" onto a job description in about two minutes if he doesn’t take the time to figure out whether those requirements actually matter. This is a prime example of what I call "False Selectivity." It’s a lazy substitute for the real thing.

I’ve been looking for a standardized test that reliably predicts character, personality, and aptitude but so far I haven’t found one that works very well. My company uses a couple of screening tests in our hiring and they help a little but you can’t rely on them.

The best solution I’ve found is to identify people who have the knack for spotting these qualities in others and including them in conducting interviews. I’m pretty good at it myself and I have a few people working for me who are also good at it. Some of my best managers don’t have the knack at all; they’re willing to hire even obvious turkeys. So just because someone is a successful manager doesn’t mean he should be involved in hiring.

(I should confess that I’m quite spoiled in this regard. My company has an excellent recruiting department that fills most of our positions and they send us a steady stream of great new hires. It’s much better to have a professional recruiter doing your hiring than relying on a mechanical HR process. A good recruiter can spot personality and character problems with a fair degree of accuracy.)

The other thing you can do is to realize that the hiring process doesn’t end when the candidate accepts the job. I’ve trained my managers to view new people as "candidates" for the first 90 days they are with the company. The supervisor assesses the new person’s behavior at frequent intervals and if we see red flags for poor character, personality, or aptitude during that time we promptly "unhire" them. This gives you an excellent opportunity to assess the new person thoroughly and accurately. It’s much better to nip these problems in the bud than to have to deal with a lousy employee a year or two later after they’ve caused a lot of trouble and maybe poisoned other employees with their bad habits and attitude.

4."Sometimes you need all six items on the list. For some positions education and experience are important."

That’s true. I have some positions like that. That’s when you just have to recruit diligently and creatively until you find that one great candidate. We have a job for which extensive experience and a specific degree are truly necessary and we’ve been trying to fill it for about a year and half!

Well, that wraps up this series. I hope I’ve given you some useful nuggets. Good hiring!

Comments

[Emily]

I feel like there still needs to be a bare minimum expectation in terms of education, skills, and experience when hiring. At what point would you refuse to hire someone with great character and personality but just not enough education?

[Reagan]

This is a great question. Of course, it depends on the position. One way to find the truly necessary level required is to ask yourself, "If a really wonderful, brilliant person with high integrity were in the position but she only had X education and Y experience, could she do the job well?" Keep asking yourself that with lower and lower levels of X and Y until the answer is "no." In my experience most companies and most managers use excessive education and experience requirements as a crutch, and place too much emphasis on them rather than on the more difficult but important work of discerning an applicant's true qualities. I'm hoping managers reading this blog will reconsider the education and experience requirements they've attached to their positions and reset them to reflect the actual requirements of the position. Most of the time, you can actually increase the quality of the people you hire by lowering the formal requirements.