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Managing People: How To Hire The Very Best - Tip #2

Every manager knows that a good hire is someone they like who does a great job. No problem there. But which is most important – good chemistry or good job skills? Neither, you say. Without both the odds are against success. Yep, right again! 

So what’s the secret? Why is getting both so hard for many managers to pull off? 

Remember the old film cliché, where the pretty blonde actress says: “If I’m going to marry someone, he might as well be rich, so I’m only interested in the rich ones.” It’s about priorities. 

Our experience tells us that too many hiring managers screen first for someone they like, and then for someone with good job skills. The risk in this approach: your assessment of their job skills may be influenced by your personal feelings about them. You might be inclined (consciously or unconsciously) to overlook the absence of some important skill because of your belief that you’d really enjoy working with them, they’d fit well with the team, etc. 

In fact, the first screening should always be for superior job skills. After all, the reason for hiring in the first place is to get a job done. 

How do you do that? We like a 4-step process that goes like this: 

1. Consider carefully the job to be done. It may or may not be the same job that was being done by the previous person. This is your opportunity to improve the functioning of that position, eliminate quirks that grew up around the prior occupant’s likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses. You can make the job more responsive to the current needs of the company, and this is your best opportunity to do that. 
2. Write it down. Put the job description in writing, not by dusting off the old one in the files, but by revising it to correspond with your thought process in step one. It’s more important to get the right job done than to match the old boilerplate description in the files. Include principal duties and responsibilities, required skill sets, helpful but non-essential skill sets, and the ways in which performance excellence will be measured. And don’t forget to comment on the manner in which this position contributes to the success of the company. Everyone wants to know that they contribute to the greater cause, and the more talent you are looking for, the more important this factor is in the romancing part of the process.
3. Use the written description – give it to recruiters, your in-house HR department, use it to compose any ads you might run, and make it the agenda for your actual candidate interviews. This may seem obvious after steps 1 and 2, but we often find that managers at the point of actually interviewing candidates will go right back to their old, familiar habits: like ‘em first, then qualify ‘em. Resist that temptation, and you’ll get better results every time. 
4. Seriously evaluate their representations of skills. Ask them to describe precisely their role in a former employer’s success. Being in the same department doesn’t count for much. Satisfy yourself that they made a unique contribution to that success. If possible, ask judgment questions that you already know the answer to, and observe their thought process at work. Key point: If technical skills are involved, be sure to have them interviewed by an expert in that technical skill area. We are constantly amazed by how many CEOs evaluate controller and CFO candidates without ever asking a financial management expert to evaluate the candidate’s technical abilities. 

If you follow this process, everyone you talk to a second time should appear to have excellent job skills. From that group, you then screen for most compatible personality – the chemistry. In that fashion, when you find someone you like, you will have the comfort of knowing that they’ve already qualified in the skills area, and your relationship building can proceed smoothly to conclusion – romance, a job offer, and “marriage.” Isn’t that sweet?

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