Hire Team Members who are People-Oriented. You Can Always Teach Them the Technical Skills

In February, we welcomed a new member to our team. Mary Rogers is our part-time Administrative Assistant. Her role is to take over many of the office duties previously performed by Kate so Kate can spend more time consulting. Kate will be utilizing her teaching background to present workshops and on-on-one sessions to our clients. Her areas of expertise are customer service and team building. As many of you may know, Kate has taught classes in career counseling over the past 15 years and this, combined with her experiences in administration and owning her own businesses, should provide a suitable spring board for her new role.

When we began the search to fill Mary’s position, we kept in mind the philosophy behind the title of this article. Mary does not come from a traditional administrative background. Her résumé indicated that she had basic computer skills; however, the things that were tremendously more important were:

1. Will her personality mesh with ours?
2. Does she genuinely like helping people and will this come across in her telephone manner?
3. Will she embrace our company’s philosophy?
4. Is she reasonably intelligent and willing to learn?

Mary was the only candidate we could answer yes to all four questions. After that, the rest is comparatively simple: learning where things are kept in the office, how client correspondence is handled, etc.

Making the commitment to hire great people raises the basic question: How do you know them when you see them? Over the last few years, many companies have analyzed what separates winners from losers, good hires from bad. They all arrived at the same answer: What people know is less important than who they are. Hiring is not about finding people with the right experience. It’s about finding people with the right mind-set. These companies hire for attitude and train for skill.


There are four principles, which define the new model for smart hiring:

1. "I y’am what I y’am." - Popeye the Sailor Man
The most common — and fatal — hiring mistake is to find someone with the right skills but the wrong mind-set and hire them on the theory, "We can change ‘em."

Forget it. The single best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Your personality is going to be essentially the same throughout your life. In the 1950s, the U. S. Air Force began research on personality types. For decades, researchers tracked their subjects by observing their families, friends, and colleagues. The conclusion? Basic personality traits did not change. Introverts were introverts. Extroverts were extroverts. The descriptions were constant.

Companies that ignore this Popeye Principle do so at their peril — although temptation is never far away. An executive vice president of human resources for a national hotel chain was hired soon after a merger to reinvent its culture by remaking its employee base.
Everything about the new culture emphasized freedom, informality, and flexibility. The executive’s acid-test interview question for job candidates is, "Tell me about the last time you broke the rules." A long silence or a non-committal response in an indication that a candidate is trying to figure out what she wants to hear.

The executive recently hired a senior financial analyst who told her he never broke the rules. When he sensed that was the wrong answer, he changed his story. She didn’t buy it, but his qualifications were so strong she made the hire. After all, she thought, maybe he’d change. "He was so by-the-book, he read from the book." He quit before the executive could fire him.

2. You can’t find what you’re not looking for.
Bill Byham, perhaps the world’s foremost authority on hiring, is president and CEO of Pittsburgh-based Development Dimensions International (DDI). He’s also the father of a hiring methodology that goes by many names ("Targeted Selection" is the most popular) but revolves around a simple idea: the best way to select people who’ll thrive in your company is to identify the personal characteristics of people who are already thriving and hire people just like them. In the Byham model, companies work to understand their star performers, identify their target behaviors and attitudes, and then develop interview questions to find people with those attributes.

3. The best way to evaluate people is to watch them work.
Nucor, a steel making giant, finds its best source of new steelworkers are the construction workers who build its plants. Managers monitor their construction sites, look for plumbers and electricians who demonstrate the work habits they value, and then hire them.

In its new factory in South Carolina, BMW has built a simulated assembly line. Job candidates get 90 minutes to perform a variety of work-related tasks. People who don’t have the mental stamina to meet BMW’s "aerobic workplace" don’t get hired.

In the dental office, "hire" your very best candidates for a day and work along side them.

4. You can’t hire people who don’t apply.
Companies that take hiring seriously also take recruiting seriously. Companies that hire smart usually start their recruiting efforts close to home — with their own people. It makes sense: it takes a certain kind of person to thrive in your unique, vision-driven practice, and those people tend to spend time (personally and professionally) with people like themselves. Thomas A. Morelli, vice president of human resources for Solectron, put it very well: "Around the world, our current employees are our best recruiting source. They understand the soul and spirit of the company."

Even the most elaborate hiring methodologies eventually boil down to one of the dreaded rituals of business life: the job interview. For most people, the only thing more painful than being interviewed is actually conducting the interview.
There are as many theories on how to do great interviews, as there are "killer questions." Recently an HR discussion group on the Internet identified 15 all-time favorite interview questions. DDI’s Byham dismisses them as meaningless, inappropriate, or illegal. They included such perennials as: Where do you see yourself in five years? What does your ideal job look like? Are you a team player?

Productive interview questions are narrowly defined and well crafted. They focus on probing for the specific behavioral attitudes that define successful employees. And they’re designed to elicit actual experiences rather than hopes and dreams — not what people say they would do in the future but what they have done in the past.

The ultimate goal of an interview is to help candidates tell coherent stories about their lives and then find the patterns that reveal their character.

What we’re looking for in every new employee is an emphasis on the team, personal flexibility, and those that are not inhibited by notions of how things were done traditionally. A whatever-it-takes-attitude. We’re seeking winners.