A Case for Character-Based Hiring

The Context

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, my boss handed down to me the most challenging task of my career – hire for a brand-new team of 30 members.?We needed to get them yesterday, but thankfully we still had a short window of a few weeks to execute the task.

We planned on an aggressive recruiting campaign where we targeted to hire at least one in every three candidates we spoke with.?It entailed a tall order of speaking with nearly a hundred candidates via video conference over the next three weeks.?What defined the game plan was neither our method for conducting interviews nor the plan’s aggressive timeline, but the unorthodoxy of hiring based on character.

An Extreme Example

I was scheduled to speak with a candidate one morning, one of several that day. A few moments into her introduction, I noticed that she was getting distracted and nervous.?Then, an infant’s cry in the background made her move her head as if signaling the child to stop crying.?I gave her instruction to bring the child in front of the camera, to which she obliged. ?It turned out to be her daughter, about two years old.?She was the cutest little thing, and she and I playfully spoke over the next few minutes!

I then turned to the mother and told her that our organization espoused a people-first culture, and that we value the families of those who work with us because they are our extended family.?I added, “If you care for your family that way, I know you will care for our customers the same way.”?I then casually asked, “How badly do you need this job?”?She started tearing up and said that, as a single mom, she had to support her daughter and pay for the family bills.?I told her that I read enough of her CV to know that she has transferable skills to be able to do the job, and that I was letting her through to the final round of interviews.?I asked her to thank her daughter for helping me make a strong case for us to hire her, and hire her we did.?Fast forward to some months after that interview, she was slaying the job!

Though this may have been the most extreme story in our candidate interviews for that recruitment effort, we did hire the rest of the team predominantly based on character – positive behaviors that they showed in the interview process.?They too didn’t disappoint!

What We Did

Lest we are blamed for hiring recklessly, we did our due diligence of doing paper screens.?We looked into skills and past experiences, and did give credit to those who did or were doing similar roles.?We checked for salary expectations and potential flight risks.?But unless there were glaring red flags (e.g., too much of a flight risk, or not demonstrating enough care to make their CV presentable), we gladly gave everyone the chance to show their characters.

Hiring based on character was about our organization letting go of the conventional logic of hiring the best fit, which, in my view, almost always ends up in a wasted effort to search for the utopian plug-and-play person who will hit the ground running on day 1.?It wasn’t about discounting our standards.?It was about using something intangible yet visible, character, to assess whether a person has what it takes to meet or even pleasantly raise our standards within a reasonable amount of time, and to do it consistently and sustainably for the foreseeable future.?But more importantly, whether it was out of giving trust or making a calculated risk, it was about relying on our gut to sense that a person could be invested in our organization’s core values and reason for existence.

Why We Did It

Why did we do it??It was not only to fulfill an objective of hiring a new team and have them get work done in the short term. ?This was certainly a consideration.?But the way we saw it, it was about deliberately walking our talk that we value people and granting equal opportunity, and that we appreciate that the diversity of characters will lead to creativity and innovation in the way we do things.?It was about breaking free of the usual programmatic way of hiring so that we could meaningfully create a win-win situation: 1) For the talent that we hired by providing them livelihood in an ongoing global pandemic, and at the same time, 2) For our organization by building a diverse and passionate workforce that was positioned to deliver near- and long-term success.

Making the Shift

The next time your organization will need to bring in talent, whether it’s one person or a whole team, take an introspective view of how you have been hiring talent in the past.?Consider how a shift towards character-based hiring will support and benefit your organization.?Lastly, don't be afraid of making tactical changes in areas of your recruiting process where there should be clear messaging of premium placed on character and not just listed skills and experience. These areas include how you craft your job descriptions, how you carry out paper screens, and how you relate with real human beings during their interviews.