Hiring for Values - My Learnings

At Jumbotail, we believe that the bedrock of a great enduring company is its core values, and how well its employees internalise them in their everyday life. After deep introspection, we defined our core values that are meaningful to us, and that will help us endure our long journey towards realising our vision. Our values are not ornamental things that we boast about during good times, but rather are our guiding lights that help us make everyday decisions, especially during challenging times. We go great lengths to hire the best talent who are deeply aligned with our values. If we need to make a choice, we almost always give the benefit of doubt to someone who we believe is a better fit in terms of alignment with our values.

That said, hiring for values is not straightforward, and required significant iterations and practice. We went through a learning curve. Here are the few things I have personally learnt:

Disclaimer: These learnings are not based on any scientific, data backed research but rather are summaries based on a few hundred interviews I have taken while building our core team. Needless to say, the goal is not to appear prescriptive but to publish my thoughts and learn from the community.

To become great at hiring for values, you need to first internalise the values.

Unless we internalise our own values it is impossible to hire for values. And, we cannot internalise what we don’t clearly state and communicate. Hence, even at a very early stage, we worked with our early employees to identify, refine, and clearly publish our core values. It is a subject of another blog post as to how we drive the internalisation of our core values within our startup, but suffice to say, we didn’t believe we could become great at  hiring for values if our hiring managers and employees themselves do not know what the values are, and if we do not use our core values to guide our everyday decisions.

Values cannot be assessed by asking leading questions.

It is not effective to ask questions like - “Tell me a time when you were customer centric” or “Talk about a situation when you displayed empathy”; Such leading questions would result in two adverse outcomes - Candidates would cherry pick examples. Or, even worse, they would narrate stories and situations without even understanding the real meaning of the values we were assessing, leading to poor and unreliable answers. We would rather look for signals everywhere - A candidate’s answers to every single question, even those highly technical ones; their para lingual communications, their offline and online behaviour, their approach to problem solving, their final solutions, their ability to endure the interview process, their offer negotiations. All of these would tell us more clearly about their values, rather than candidate's prepared answers to standard questions.

Look for historical evidence - how the roads they have taken have been guided by their values.

Candidates who really care about a set of values, would have been caring about those values forever, and not just after deciding to interview with us. Their value system would be evident in many critical decisions they would have previously taken in their life. When faced with options at critical crossroads, they would have taken a road because their values were aligned to the journey along that chosen road. We look for consistency in their approaches, and we watch out for outlier behaviours - both positive and negative. When assessing for values, we believe past performance is a good indicator of future potential. This is not necessarily true for assessing for skills; a skill may become useless if the problem domain changes, but core values transcend time and space.

Values transcend professional life; it must be pervasive in everything they do and everything they stand for. 

Values show up in every footprint of the candidate. We cannot afford to take a parochial assessment of the candidate’s value system purely along their professional side. Customer centricity is not just being literally customer centric. A customer centric person is more likely to put others first ahead of own comforts and welfare in every field. Likewise, a person who has taken a long term view of her own life, is more likely to be a long term thinker of the product/business he would lead. A respectful person would be respectful even in an anonymous online forum. Behaviours outside the interview rooms matter as much as what candidates say and do during the interview.

Some roles require perfect alignment of some values more than other values.

Not every role and every level requires mastery over all the core values. A research scientist must need to pursue excellence more than a business development executive who may need to have a strong bias for action on the ground. A customer support agent should have a higher level of ownership to solve customer problems in any domain, but may not be a long term thinker, yet. But everyone must be customer centric, must act with integrity and so on. Hence depending upon the role and level, we look for stronger alignment with some values more than others. But everyone we hire - from the janitor to the top management are assessed for values, rewarded for values, and promoted for values.

It is perfectly OK to be imperfect. Self awareness, learning mindset, and pursuit of perfection is key.

No one is perfect at all times. However, we learnt that the best candidates are those who are aware of their shortcomings, candidly admit them without sugar coating or losing self esteem, and who have demonstrated their willingness to pursue perfection in whatever ways that are meaningful to them. Some values such as long term thinking can be improved with mentorship and guidance, while others such as Integrity are less likely to be. When required, we do take leaps of faith with candidates found weak to be in those values that we think we can help the candidate improve over time.

Hiring for values is an imperfect process. It only gets better with practice.

Unfortunately, the interview process is indeed a thin slicing of candidates with limited information. This is not a perfect system. The fact that a candidate did not come across as empathetic does not mean the candidate lacks empathy. The fact that we had doubts about candidate’s integrity does not mean the candidates lacks integrity. Assessing core values a fine balance. It requires a lot of judgment and maturity to accurately assess a candidate. It is not about passing absolute judgement about candidate’s value system but rather finding enough evidence to give us the confidence that their value systems are aligned with ours. We believe we get better with practice. A lot better.

Do you hire for values? Whats your experience as a Founder or a hiring manager? Whats your experience as a candidate? Would love to learn from your thoughts. :)