View: Do not overcomplicate hiring
By Don Pawlowski | Chief Technology Officer, University Tees
Hiring the right people is the most important activity a leader will be responsible for. As we all know, without a team of solid contributors, nothing gets done. Hiring can also be one of the hardest things to do correctly. There is a lot of advice out there on hiring; some good, some bad. Much advice becomes overly complicated or unwieldy. For example, I often see articles toting the dozens of questions you are supposed to ask a new hire to gauge their underlying behavioral psychology. I’ve been on both sides of those rapid-fire question interviews and I’ve never walked away feeling great about what had just happened. So, how do we simplify this?
When I am hiring someone to join my team, I am looking for three traits in that individual. Are they motivated? Do they demonstrate an ability to learn? Are they a nice person? In my humble opinion, if you can build a team made up of people that overflow with those characteristics, your team will be capable of anything. This is a team that is driven, filled with people who can adapt to a changing mission, and love working together. This team needs little guidance and will thrive on delivering.
Many people talk about finding a “culture fit” and I believe those people are wrong. Finding a “culture fit” is automatically exclusionary. I want to find someone that is nice. Someone that you wouldn’t mind having in the passenger seat on a long road trip. That person will work well with others. Identifying this person is easy, as all it requires is having a few in-depth conversations with them, which you will already be doing as a part of the hiring process.
Motivation is something that, as a leader, I cannot teach you. It is my opinion that the candidate must bring that to the table. Look for what this person has done in the past. Dive into their education and participation in various groups. Try to inspect the work they’ve done or listen for clues about how excited they were to deliver a project.
Finally, a person's ability to learn ensures their ability to change. Change is constant. Your team’s mission will likely look different in two years. Would you like to rehire an entire team, or would you rather have the ability to pivot an existing team that already works well together? This trait is probably the hardest to ascertain. Giving a candidate a project to do or signing them up for a short term contract is probably the best way to identify this skill. And please, pay them for the work you ask them to do before you hire them full time.
Next time you are hiring an individual or a team, remember to identify people with motivation, the ability to learn and their propensity to be nice and you will be amazed at what can be accomplished.
Connect with Don on LinkedIn.