Hiring

In my post on Culture I made the observation that “what we call character in a person we call culture in an organization. Both are central guides to behavior.” It is inevitable that at some point of your working life you will experience a hiring process either as a job applicant or a person placed in charge of interviewing a job applicant. And that is when that observation will reveal your character and the culture of the organization involved, through your behavior.

The reason this will happen has nothing to do with business. Business just happens to be the environment we are examining. Our behavior in that environment is guided by the role we find ourselves in. Within broad limits any person, within that environment, experiencing the demands of the role, behaves more or less identically.

Let me unpack this. If you’re interviewing you’re looking for someone who is “a good fit”, who is also “self-motivated”, “a team player”, able to “show initiative” and “take responsibility”. If you’re being interviewed you want to show you’re all that while hiding anything that may make you seem unsuitable. It’s a charade of course.

The interviewer is looking to hire someone who will do and won’t bring their judgement to question. The interviewee is looking for a job that will provide the security of a regular paycheck without completely draining their emotional and psychological resources. The behavior of everyone caught up in this tableau is determined by, in this context, the words we use to describe what we think we want. And those words trap us.

In a recent talk, Ruchika Tulshyan, made much the same case in the much narrower case of inclusion and diversity in the workplace. While both are admirable as sentiments and, arguably, necessary to create an enriched, stable and dynamic workplace environment by stating what we seek we usually succeed in achieving the exact opposite.

This leads us to the paradox of hiring. The interviewer/interviewee process is a construct where everyone is looking out for themselves. Interviewers are judged by their choices. Interviewees want a job. No one thinks, truly, what will be best for the organization in question. This too is entirely understandable. The process is a modern-day mutation of an age-old holdover from the time when employers held all the power and employees needed the work to survive, which is why companies continue to make bad hires and people still find themselves in the wrong job.

The Cost Of Bad Hires And The Value Of Attitude

The late Tony Hsieh once estimates that bad hires had cost Zappos an eye-watering $100 million. When you consider the potential of long-term disruption, and increased internal friction in the work environment, the cost is probably understated.

Even in small teams and companies whose turnover is the tens of thousands rather than millions, wrong hires disrupt teams, create a toxic work environment and end up costing a lot of money and reduced productivity.

A World Economic Forum article on the subject highlighted how even the best of companies get it wrong when they hire for skills and fail to take attitude into account. At the other end of the spectrum is an outlier like W.L. Gore & Associates, the makers of Gore-Tex fabrics, who have consistently topped the “100 Best companies to work for” list by basing their hiring process on attitude over skills. ???

In Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully I devoted an entire chapter on attitude.

To understand why consider that “Our beliefs then are filters based on our values that determine our attitude. Attitude leads us to behavior. This is the chain that leads from the internal states of our being to the external, observable actions we take.”

How To Hire Or Be Hired For Success

If you’re hiring or if you’re on the other side of the hiring process and are making the interview rounds and really want to break the cycle of self-serving performative questions and answers, you will need to be different.

Here’s how.

• Focus on what matters. Sure getting a job or filling a vacancy are important but long-term the success of this activity lies n everyone feeling happy in what they do and fulfilled by their doing it. This can only happen when companies and job applicants are focused on getting the whole package instead of a picture-perfect fit. The willingness to work together in a mutual give-and-take humanizes the experience of work for everyone involved and makes work a cooperative, evolving activity.
• Listen to your gut. Your body and mind know when things are wrong even if, on paper, they appear to be right. Intuition is the neurochemical result of reactions to stimuli we cannot always articulate. You know your decision is right when you feel like a weight has lifted off you, afterwards.
• Hire for attitude. A lack of the exact mix of skills you want or a dearth of experience can be fixed over time. The wrong attitude will create problems from the start.

The way we do work needs to change. That change will only happen if we start to make the right decisions and focus on what is truly important long before we need to hire someone (if you own a business) or be hired. ?