Better Hiring With Personas
Hiring is hard … because we’re doing it all wrong.
The biggest mistake you can make as a leader is to hire the wrong person. You create friction within your team which inhibits growth. You damage your company culture. You spread negativity throughout your network. A person that does not mutually fit into your team is a compounding debt.
Conversely, the “right” person in your team is like rocket fuel to your mission, an investment with compounding benefits. Nothing beats working with someone who is truly on your team.
I’ve made the mistakes of hiring badly and paid a big price. This has forced me to look deeply into the process of hiring and the assumptions behind it. And through that experience and research we can see that there is a better way.
We are doing hiring all wrong because we focus on individual skills instead of designing integrated personas.
That’s the TL;DR. Read on for a full explanation.
The Legacy Approach
Let’s begin with a quick insight into the status-quo. Job ads generally list desired individual “hard” skills and “soft” skills. Hard skills are considered more important and tangible whilst so-called soft skills are difficult to measure. These skills create a mental checklist which then becomes a model for assessment.
But this model has three essential flaws. It is -
1) Reductionist — we ignore the interactions between / synthesis of skills e.g. the synthesis of creative thinking and logic programming.
2) Static — we focus on a current snapshot rather than the potential for change, risks of not changing and rates of change e.g. velocity of learning
3) Legacy — as we automate more and more hard and soft “skills” using AI, this model becomes less and less relevant for post-AI knowledge work
But more fundamentally, hiring in a skills-first approach is the wrong methodology. We are operating at the wrong level, because skills are not useful individually to describe the overall performance of the person who is more than the sum of his / her parts.
Hiring a software engineer based on isolated skills is like hiring a goalkeeper based on reflexes, hand-eye coordination and aerobic fitness — instead of hiring them for stopping goals.
Design Personas
Instead of starting with skills, design a persona who is the ideal team member for a new role. Give that persona a name and identify ideal behaviours under typical and edge conditions within your team. This forces you to consider interactions, dynamic behaviours and future environments in a natural way without getting caught up in the details of skills.
For example, in the software engineer example I could be looking for a Startup App Coder persona who can operate within the remote-first, highly changeable environment of a software start-up. I can identify three key desired behaviours within specific common situations:
1) Not getting blocked — when faced with a gap in information for a remotely executed task, find a solution autonomously through online research
2) Deal with changing requirements — deal gracefully and constructively with changing requirements, including challenging and re-negotiating the task
3) Iterate and communicate — communicate daily online in a summary form to keep team informed of the current tasks status and especially changes
Only once you have done this work at the persona level do you move to identifying key skills, now within this context. The higher-level thinking makes it much easier to rank and prioritize key skills.
People and Personas
People are poly-intelligent and able to take on many different personas in different contexts. We know that from our own lives and how we move through different jobs in our careers. A person might make a great Startup App Coder in one company; and a great Harmonizing Team Leader elsewhere.
Your objective in hiring is not to find a “persona” but to find people who can move effectively into your team and take on your identified persona.
The fit will never be 100% of course — no person will ever be your idealized persona. That’s always important to keep in mind. You are looking for a “fit” that is above your minimum threshold and better than the other competitors.
Hiring through Stories
Analyze how your persona interacts within your team by identifying key situations and storylines within your company.
For example, a key story for us: the moment that a start-up app coder encounters a specification that is not complete — does s/he block and wait for more information or make an autonomous decision to fill in the gap and proceed? We might name this story as Poly-Fill-In.
These stories are an invaluable resource for conducting interviews, writing job ads, interacting with recruiters etc. The more you can put candidates into your stories as a persona, the easier it will be to see if that person is right.
At Polynize these stories are the basis of our Battle and Game types where our players take on different personas to train their intelligence skills and learn which personas are a best fit for them; and employers can sponsor Battles and Games to quickly find people to fit their hiring personas.
It’s not exactly getting your goalkeeper to play a Premier League match — but you are on the field with them and they are stopping goals!
Virtual AI Personas
It is too early to say exactly what will be the ecosystem that will grow around a persona-first approach to talent, but we are already seeing a very interesting role for AI — both sides of the hiring market love to interact with AI personas.
Using a unique approach as outlined earlier, we create virtual AI personas with character names and “personalities” that exhibit the intelligence skills of the persona. This makes the abstract personas tangible and ready to insert directly into human-AI interactions.
Both sides of the market love these “NPCs”. For candidates, it gives them a benchmark against which to measure themselves when engaging in stories. And for employers, it gamifies the process of designing and testing personas before they even begin the hiring process.
Which of course begs the question — will employers hire the AI personas themselves instead of humans? Maybe, but that’s not our vision — our mission is for people to train themselves, level-up their intelligence to fulfil their potential — and compete and win in the post-AI hiring market.
Next Adjacents
At Polynize we are releasing the platform you need to implement a persona-first hiring process, but you can adopt elements of this framework immediately within your existing processes.
Primarily it is a shifting of mindset above the current skills-first approach.
By thinking in terms of personas you synthesize a lot of information into a cohesive concept that really helps to frame the hiring process and to communicate it others.
