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Hiring–how to better an imperfect science
Q:
What’s the biggest hiring mistake you’ve ever made?
Stephan Klapproth, Zurich, Switzerland
A: Would
you believe that with about 60 years of combined
experience, we’ve made too many hiring mistakes to name
just one? It’s true. Now, many occurred when we were
newer at this game, but picking the right people never
gets easy. Just last month, we almost blew it twice,
saved only by a last-minute eureka in both cases.
Incidentally, even as we were in the midst of making
these almost-mistakes, we were cringing a bit, concerned
we were off-track. And yet we forged ahead, feeling
simultaneously hopeful and helpless. Our candidates
seemed bright and shiny enough, and we were just so
tired of interviewing when there was real work to be
done.
Of
course, hiring is real work. Given the central
importance of your people, it’s as fundamental as work
gets. Yet too often we rush headlong into its painfully
common pitfalls.
Take our
first near-miss last month, when we almost gave into the
universal impulse to hire a person who looked too good
to be true. There she was with an Ivy League degree,
several technology jobs at solid companies and exactly
the skills we needed. Well dressed, well spoken,
charming, eager—the works. Even her salary requirement
was in the low range. But she couldn’t tell us why she
hadn’t held a job for the last six months.
“She
plugs our hole perfectly,” we actually said to each
other, and, “Maybe the job market is tighter than we
thought.” Finally, we were brought to our senses when
her references, despite repeated requests, would not
call us back, forcing us to remember that anyone who
looks too good to be true invariably turns out to have
something not-so-good they’re trying to keep you from
noticing.
A
related hiring mistake is the rush to hire a person
because he possesses your missing pieces—the Wharton
MBA, the way with words, the “prestige” experience. Back
when one of us (Jack) was a new graduate of the
University of Illinois trying to build a plastics
business, he leapt at every candidate whose résumé
listed Dupont. Some of those hires turned out fine;
others were duds. In the end, the “pedigree” they
brought to the table was less important than the
entrepreneurial nerve and sales savvy they actually
needed.
Flip the
coin and you’ll find another common hiring slip-up,
going for the familiar—same college, social background,
favorite baseball team and so on. This dynamic crops up
especially in global hiring, where managers seem
irresistibly drawn to hiring the candidate who literally
speaks their language. Familiarity hiring can work. But
too often, once the new employee settles in, you begin
to discover the shortcomings you should have dug for
earlier but didn’t because you “knew” the candidate. You
knew only what he seemed like—you.
Another
mistake is hiring a candidate who has too much
experience for the job, or more aptly, too little
runway. It can feel reassuring to bring aboard a person
who’s seen it all. But eventually these individuals can
grow bored of seeing it all again, and if there is no
upward route, they become a managerial problem without
an easy solution. You’ve hired someone into a dead-end.
Finally,
a misstep we’ve both taken is hiring a candidate who’s
smart and capable but just too lacking in emotional
intelligence, or EQ, the term popularized by the
researcher Daniel Goleman to describe the combination of
self-awareness, realness, compassion and resilience that
helps make people great teammates and leaders.
Luckily,
most people develop EQ as they mature, through work and
life experiences both good and bad, and many others can
be coached to develop latent EQ within. But
occasionally, you bump into a talented and competent
candidate, as we did last month, who is so lacking in
the EQ components of humility and authenticity that you
can’t take a chance. Again, this young man had a lot of
the right stuff, but when he started telling us he had
never made a mistake in his life and didn’t expect to,
we knew we’d heard enough.
The
happy ending to this story is that we eventually ended
up with great people, but we’d have to predict that our
hiring travails will never end. As long as “real work”
beckons, time is tight and hope springs eternal, the
science of hiring will be imperfect. Just like all the
people doing it.
****
Jack
and Suzy Welch are the authors of the international
bestseller Winning (Collins). Their latest book is
Winning: The Answers: Confronting 74 of the Toughest
Questions in Business Today (Collins). They are eager to
hear about your career dilemmas and challenges at work
and look forward to answering your questions in future
columns. Please visit their new website at
www.welchway.com and submit questions through the online
form at welchway.com/Contact-Us.aspx. Please include
your name, occupation, city and country. |
