Many of Guy Kawasaki’s posts on his blog Let the Good Times Roll have reiterated ideas familiar to readers of The Art of the Start. His recent post, The Art of Recruiting, has been the best yet. What’s his best point? Hire smarter than yourself? The shopping center test? Recruit every employee every day?
I think it’s to double-check your intuition:
Double check your intuition. Everyone has stories about the candidate that they “knew” wouldn’t work out who turned out to be a nightmare employee. Or the employee they “knew” would work out despite a lack of qualifications who turned out to be the employee of the decade. The problem with intuition is that people only remember when their intuition was right–truth be told, their intuition was probably wrong as often as right. My recommendation is that you ask every candidate the same questions and take extensive notes. You might even conduct the first interview by telephone so you cannot judge the candidates by their appearance. In particular, startup founders believe they have a good “gut feel” for candidates, so they conduct unstructured interviews that are way too subjective, and they end up with lousy hires.
Tom Foster has been hammering this point home on his Management Skills blog: when making hiring decisions, the only reliable predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Way back in December last year he said:
Here it is, then. Stop trying to play amateur psychologist, you are not qualified. Play to your strength. You can spot positive and negative behavior in an instant because you are a manager. Play to your strength as a manager. Especially during the hiring interview.
More recently, he suggests a technique for helping to determine, in an interview, if the candidate possesses the desired pattern of behavior:
“In the interview process,” I replied, “if the behavior is frequent, examples should come from the candidate easily. If you have to really probe and dig, it is likely the behavior is not frequent; in fact, the pattern of behavior may be only occasional, even rare. If this is a critical behavior for the position, you may have the wrong guy.
Too frequently, our hiring decisions hinge on fuzzy ideas like, “How well will the candidate fit with our existing team?” “Does the candidate share our organization’s values?” “Will the candidate bring the right attitude?” My wife is a clinician–she’s trained to evaluate and diagnose patients. Even so, her literature, coursework, and experience warn her that once initial diagnosis is made, even if it’s wrong, it’s very difficult to change. An untrained schlep like me? I’m totally unqualified to make any sort of psychological or personality assessment of a candidate after even a few hours interview. Why? Because our reality is subjective–and we generally see people as we expect them to be. Hiring based on personality equals hiring by guessing. Is this good hiring?
Our most important role as managers is recruiting and hiring. And you shouldn’t trust a random blog from someone you’ve never met. Try HIRING SMART by Pierre Mornell. He devotes too much time to psychological tricks (boo) but balances it by discussing the importance of getting concrete examples from the candidate and following up in a meaningful way with the references.
