It’s Not the How or the What but the Who
Hiring someone for a job is a critical decision every leader has to frequently take. Outside of work, choosing the right life partner can have far reaching consequences. People decisions change our world dramatically. But most of us are not trained or skilled enough to do it right.We could make one of the two mistakes — we hire the wrong person or worse still, we reject the right person. So what is the best way to do this?
Interviews are not about asking clever questions. They are all about the skill of the interviewer to look for insights and predictors of behavior in the answers and avoid the cognitive biases that all of us have. For instance it is easy to mistake good articulation as confidence. In an interview, the smooth talkers often dazzle the panel and skid past the people who may be more capable of delivering results. In Don’t Hire The Best”, I found that understanding the personality of the candidate allows us to discover the best person to do the job, but also the person who will be the happiest in firm’s culture.
Claudio Fernández-Aráoz does exactly this for a living. This former McKinsey consultant joined Egon Zehnder in 1986, the search firm that helps companies hire people for leadership roles. Claudio teaches at Harvard, has spoken at the World Economic Forum and is the author of two fabulous books on hiring. Seven years back he wrote Great People Decisions — a must read book if you want to get insights from someone who enjoys teaching people how to hire right.
Seven years later, Claudio is back with a book called It’s Not the How or the What but the Who which I found even more helpful. There are questions in the book that make you pause and think.
“If you were building your company from ground up, what percentage of people would you rehire?”
Most people say that at four out of ten should be replaced. So why don’t we do just that? Blame it on procrastination, loss aversion and compassion. It is not just external hires where we get it wrong, we simply do not work equally hard to evaluate insiders. Even the timing of the interview matters. We make better people decisions in the morning when we our energy is not depleted. The book is loaded with research based insights you can easily implement to improve your hiring decisions.
For example, “Is it better to promote home grown leaders or to hire from outside?”
The verdict
“… look for opportunities to promote your top internal candidates while also benchmarking against high-quality external ones.”
What is a predictor of talent? Claudio speaks of four factors that show potential as a person who continuously demonstrates curiosity, insight, engagement and the determination to not give up. The insights are built through anecdotes and then summarized.
“In my twenty-eight years as an executive search consultant working across all major industries in more than forty countries, I’ve discovered that the key to outstanding performance and fulfilment — in both work and life — is the ability to surround oneself with outstanding people.” That’s just this book is about. Recommended reading for everyone who believes that hiring is the most important decision they take.
What did I not like about the book? The title could have been shorter and more creatively written than to call it It’s Not the How or the What but the Who: Succeed by Surrounding Yourself with the Best. That’s hard to remember but the lessons in the book are precious.
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Read: Twenty first century talent spotting <click here>
Originally published at www.abhijitbhaduri.com on December 7, 2014.