Little things that matter when hiring a talent
People are one of the most crucial parts when building a business. “Great people build a great business” they said. Me and the company where I’m working now really believe in this statement.
Since I was one of the early team in Circles.Life Indonesia, I got the privilege to build my own team from scratch, adding one by one, completing all the commercial/marketing functions needed. My family on daylight-weekdays :)
During my last interview session with one of a potential candidate, he asked me “What is your key consideration when hiring someone? What is your Aha moment that make you decide “Ok this is the person that I am looking for”?
The first thing that popped up in my head “Well, yang penting nyambung sih ngobrolnya.” — As long as I get ‘that click feeling’ with the person, it will make the opportunity wide open. Doh, super strategic and thoughtful answer, isn’t it? :/
Then it got me thinking, what key attitude- which will reflect on the behavior- that I’m looking for, when hiring someone?
I believe the main consideration when hiring people is not only about expertise and work experiences. Skill and expertise can be trained, but not with attitude. It’s hard to be changed, it has to be established from the inner side of the person.
So then I recall most of my interview memories, and remember what moment that made me “Skip, next candidate please”, and which conversation that really drove my interest “This person seems the one that I’m looking for”.
I think I have 4 key attitudes as my consideration:
- A Fighter.
A fighter here means the person continuously trying to achieve the goal, despite all the challenges and barriers. S/he can think creatively to find a solution, and willing to get their hands dirty to get things done. I want to specifically highlight the last part: get their hands dirty.
Some employees avoid doing other stuff beyond their official job-desk. They don’t really care if there’s an issue in the company and think it’s not their job to solve it. Just let other people take care of it.
Another bad example, some managers want to be a manager so they can get their hands off from work, just forwarding the task to their team, and the worst part blaming their sub-ordinate if there’s problem occurs. so-called the “messenger-manager”.
I always look for someone that has high ownership; willing to jump to the ground (or even lowest basement) when needed; knowing the right time to zoom in and zoom out; contribute and help others to solve issues, despite their working-level, despite their main job-role.
2. A collaborator
There’s no such thing as a single winner in a company. A victory only can happen from collaborative works, involving so many team member that hand-in-hand make it happen.
Look for a good team player, not a lone wolf. A person that — even though s/he is the one that leads or initiate the successful project- but still proudly, and consciously aware that it’s a collaborative work. There’s no way s/he can’t be successful without others‘ help.
3. Proud of their success, also proud of their failure (and learn from it).
In Circles.Life we embrace failure, we force people to be brave, try many things, and it’s really ok to be failed. With one big rule: Learn from your failure, do not repeat it again in the future. I did fail in some projects during my tenure here, and there’s no single blaming came to me. Instead, founders and leaders just asked me “How can we fix this?”, “What did we learn from this?”. Yep, proudly said this place has the most supportive environment I have ever been.
One of my key question during the interview “Ok, so you have told me your successful project. Now tell me your failed project, and what did you learn from it?” I believe we have done so many mistakes in work-life (yet more in the personal life I assume :p ). Most of us prefer to hide it, choose to show the successful version of us, the angelic-savior version of us. By admitting that you have experiences in failed projects — and the more important thing — you’re fully aware of lessons that you got, it shows that you are a genuine risk-taker, but also highly responsible on the other side.
4. Love healthy debate, love healthy conflict.
I’m an extreme ISFJ-T. A win-win solution is my bread and butter. Being supportive is my daily goal. Yet somehow I have a tendency to avoid-conflict, better to be quiet and back off rather than rising a fight, I admit this is one of my weakness, and constantly trying to fix this part.
One way to improve myself: I need to be surrounded by people that love conflict, the healthy one. People that love to speak up their mind, opinion, give feedback towards other’s thought, make a standpoint, and rise some debate if necessary. By having this, it triggers me to also do the same: loving and get used with some healthy debate, with a single objective in mind: to deliver the best product and services to our customer.
. . .
So those are key elements that I look out when crafting and building my family member at work. I believe there are a lot of other attitudes that also matter when hiring someone. Do share yours here as well :)
