People are the engine that makes your business go and grow, and they can be the number one biggest challenge in your career. They can be brilliant stars that make magic happen, and they can be the cause of sleepless nights. Hiring the best collaborators and contributors out of the gate can often save you a few sleepless nights in the future – it won’t prevent them entirely, but it does help.
Between my clients and my own experience, we’ve made all the mistakes, and we’ve made a lot of good choices. There are some blind spots I consistently see in interviewing and hiring practices. Here are key principles to help you hire the next brilliant star and maybe help you sleep better.
There’s More Than Just Doing “The Things”
Of course, you need to ensure that your interview candidates are competent and can execute the tasks of the job. That’s critically important and can require a tremendous amount of vetting, because some people represent their experience humbly, while others exaggerate lesser contributions to make them sound worthy of a Nobel Prize. You have to see beyond how they speak to discern their true capacity and expertise.
At the same time, how they speak and represent themselves can give you important clues and cues to the four most overlooked qualities in a candidate: Communication style and capacity, core values, motivation, and how they think. These qualities are harder to teach (except for some types of communication), so it can be beneficial to make sure a candidate has the qualities you want before you hire them.
Communication Style and Capacity
I once had a very frustrated product leader complain that he’d been doing a candidate search for months, and his boss rejected every single candidate. We dug into their needs and realized that excellent communication and presentation skills were vital for this role, but weren’t stated anywhere in the job description. Once they made that change, they hired the right candidate almost immediately.
Communication skills can make or break work relationships. You need your candidates to have the communication style and capacity that fits you, your team, and your company. Here’s a sample list of communication skills that you may want to prioritize in your hiring process:
- Strong writing skills
- Excellent presentation skills
- Negotiation experience
- Strong capacity to build 1:1 relationships
- Good tools for collaboration
- Good listening skills
- Emotional and social intelligence
- Facilitation skills for meetings.
What of these do you need most in your next hire? Is there something else you need more?
Cultural and Work Values
What are the values around work, collaboration, and culture that matter most and fit best with your team, stakeholders, and the company overall?
How do you want them to ideally approach their work? What’s the fundamental relationship to work you want them to have? Consider:
- Intense drive vs. a laid-back attitude
- Good attention to detail or even being a perfectionist
- Not lost in detail at all, or good at big picture strategy
- Strong time management skills
- Solid, consistent good work vs. a level of mastery and a high standard of excellence.
What kind of teammate do you want them to be? Consider:
- Solo, quiet worker
- Highly engaging and collaborative
- Supportive, helpful, encouraging
- Challenging thought, free to speak up or voice dissent
- Go with the flow.
What are other cultural or team values that are important? Just to give you a few ideas, at companies where I’ve worked or coached, these values have included:
- Comfortable with change, experimentation, and learning from failure
- The ability to pivot quickly and keep a fast pace
- Compassion to give colleagues and customers the benefit of the doubt
- Service-oriented, generous attitude towards the customer
- Willing to do whatever it takes to succeed.
Some of these can be illuminated through your interviews, and some can be further investigated through good questions with references.
Motivation
Many things motivate people, and it can be important to illuminate a candidate’s underlying work motivations. This is not an exhaustive list, but here are some of the most common motivations I see:
- Creativity
- Individual growth
- Innovation
- Collaboration
- External validation/visible accomplishments
- Competition
- Being of service to others, having a positive impact
- Building new things, creating new processes
- Maintenance and stability
- Things outside of work entirely (family, side projects, etc.).
Ideally, what would motivate your next hire? Misaligned motivations can be disastrous, so it’s helpful to get clear about this as early as possible.
Depending on the role and company, you might ask the question directly. Such as, “What are your top three motivators?” Or, “What lights you up? What drains you of energy?” Or, instead, you can ask a variety of questions that illuminate their motivations.
Hire for How Someone Thinks
You can train them on tasks, but it’s much harder to change how someone fundamentally thinks, approaches problem-solving, how they relate to their work, and their colleagues. It may also be relevant to screen for their appetite for the unknown, ambiguity, or change.
Discerning how someone thinks happens by observing how they answer questions. How do they arrive at their answers? What stories do they choose to tell you? How are they engaging with you? What does their body language or facial expressions tell you?
If you are new to this observation, it may take you some time to track and identify patterns. Eventually, you will be able to identify patterns more accurately and understand how people think.
What Are You Willing to Teach?
Your candidate is going to have gaps. The more complicated the role is, the more gaps they are likely to have. What are you willing to teach or coach? How are you willing to invest in this hire? For example, you may be willing to train someone on the nuances of your industry or send them to public speaking training, but you may not be willing to coach someone to be a self-starter or collaborate well with stakeholders.
Ask the Right Questions… and Then Metabolize the Answers
You’ve likely heard me say by now that there’s an art to asking the right questions in all kinds of circumstances, and of course, it’s true for interviews. In addition to asking the right questions, it’s also important to:
- Actively and attentively listen
- Ask follow-up questions
- Metabolize the answers after the interview
Important note about metabolizing answers: Your brain processes every little cue in an interview – intonation, facial expressions, body language, word choice, etc. But that information is largely processed in the subconscious, and only a small percentage of that data gets sorted as relevant and delivered to the conscious mind. There are ways to access more of this data. Here are a few tips:
Access Your Other Two Brains: Biologically, we have three brains, and if you check in with your heart brain and gut brain, they can help reveal some of that extra data you gathered. It can be as simple as putting your hand on your heart or gut, and asking: What does my heart brain know about this candidate? What does my gut brain know about this candidate?
What Do You Feel? Some of what we process in the subconscious doesn’t come out as analytical thought; it comes through a feeling state. What do you feel during and after an interview? What do you feel when you think about the candidate now? It’s not that feeling states are always true (just as thoughts aren’t consistently accurate), but they are data points that can be helpful or direct a new line of questions in a follow-up interview.
Instant Replay and Reflection: Replay the interview in your mind as if you are an outside observer. What do you catch in the replay that you may have missed in the moment?
Each of these methods also helps you see/feel if the candidate has all the right words and no substance behind them, or if they walk their talk. Some of my clients’ most painful hires came from candidates who had exceptional interviewing skills but nothing to back them up.
Trust Yourself
In the end, you will learn how and when to trust yourself, and which voices within you to trust. This is critical, and especially important if you disagree with others about a candidate. Especially if you are the one who has to live with the hire, trust yourself!
Investing in your team is the #1 most important investment you can make for the growth of your company. I hope this guide will help you build and upgrade your team!