How Do You Know When To Take A Chance On a New Hire?

3 unconventional methods for finding great people.

There’s one thing that we all know about hiring: It’s hard.

That’s why we put so much effort into recruiting, and why we spend so much time with candidates before finally making an offer.

Quantifying and rationalizing a hiring decision is a tough thing — someone with the best resume on paper might turn out to be a terrible fit. And as a startup, you can’t afford to be adding anyone but star players to your team.

The underlying issue: We have limited data. And in the absence of data, we need to rely on our senses.

Here are three techniques that we use at my company Drift (Free Customer Platform for Businesses — Sales, Support and Marketing Teams) that I’ve learned to lean on throughout my career that can help you hone your hiring senses.

1. Pay attention to a candidate’s body language and tone of voice.

You want to find people who are fired up about your mission and their role, but anyone can tell you anything in an interview.

It’s easy for a candidate to fake their way into a role because they want to join your team and tell you what they think you want to hear. But I’ve learned a little trick over the years.

Whenever I am interviewing someone, I like to bounce all over the map and try to find a personal topic they are really passionate about — whether it’s CrossFit, skiing, or a particular author they love.

When you find something (this can be anything), you’ll be able to hear it in their voice and see it in their body language. That can serve as your control for when you start asking the job specific-questions, making it easier to tell if they are truly passionate about the role you’re looking to hire them form.

2. Use the morning after test.

At a startup, hiring is more of an art than science — all of the 10x people I’ve hired in my career didn’t look like 10x people on paper, but they looked like they had 10x potential.

The best test I’ve found for this is what I call the morning after test.

When you get the follow up email or phone call from a candidate the next day, you need to ask yourself in a split second: Do you want to answer this email? Do you want to stop everything you are doing and get back to that person? That’s the feeling you need to look for.

If the answer is no — then you have your answer on how you’d feel about working with them every day.

The morning after test is a way for you to tap into your instincts in the hiring process. And typically, the more data you have access to, the worse you are at tapping into your instincts, since it’s easy to rationalize and talk your way into a talented new hire.

3. Rely on personality types.

Team fit is arguably the most important of any qualification in the hiring process.

Startups are hard enough as it is — they become impossible if you don’t work well with the people around you. And no matter how stellar a candidate’s skills are, if they don’t fit well with your team, it won’t work out for anyone involved.

But team fit does not mean conformity. Building a great team is like putting together a puzzle — it would never work if you had all of the same pieces. This is one of the reasons why I’ve always relied on personality types.

There’s no right or wrong personality type, but personality types do matter when compared to the rest of the team. For example, I am an INTJ, while my co-founder Elias is an ESTP. And that’s one of the reasons we work well together as a team.

So one of the things we like to do is have candidates take a quick personality test (here’s a good one from 16 Personalities) and then look at the personality types of the people they would be working with everyday.

This is definitely not a make or break thing when it comes to hiring, but it gives you another data point to better understand how this person would work once they are actually on your team.

Have any unconventional hiring techniques? Please share them in the comments, I’d love to learn from your experiences.

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David Cancel is the CEO of Drift and the co-host of Seeking Wisdom. His company’s mission and his personal mission is to help every company on earth know, grow and amaze their customers.