Behaviours to look for while hiring someone

Photo by Charles on Unsplash

Hiring is considered to be among the most critical activities for a CEO/Senior Leader to get right. And those, who are able to lead their company to success, often give high credit to hiring great people and building great culture.

But when it comes to picking great hires, hiring reveals itself more as an art than science. Mark Zuckerberg famously remarked: “I’ll only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person”. Which sounds very practical for him but difficult for anyone else to directly use. Reid Hoffman says that he lays great emphasis on ‘explicit learning’, which takes an astute eye to see and evaluate. Another piece of widely accepted advice is to hire for culture fit (which again is difficult to measure and act on).

Lazlo Block in his book ‘Work Rules’, mentioned following broad attributes for selection of employees: 1) Cognitive ability, 2) Leadership, 3) Intellectual humility, and 4) Role related knowledge. When I read it first, I thought that these attributes are good starting points for someone trying to figure out a hiring approach.

After personally using them for many years, and combining them with diverse advice on hiring, I realised that there were still some mistakes that we made. Basis the learning derived from my experiences, I’ve fine tuned my hiring approach to check for following additional attributes:

• Raising the bar on oneself: It’s common to expect good people to try and live up to the expectations. Which is why candidates from top schools are more likely to perform better initially, because they try hard to exceed the expectations of their managers. However, this constant dose of external motivation may not work in a startup (which is more easily available with closer supervision). So someone, who has a habit of raising the bar on themselves, without additional supervision, will be able to drive sustained and continuous improvement in their work, far more than someone who performs mainly because of their environment or because of external pressure.
• Connectedness to the problem: I think the better you become at solving problems, the more you enjoy solving them. May be because of this, some people stay mentally connected to a problem longer than others. They are able to imbibe the vision, they stay connected to it, and their thinking gradually becomes far more clear, deep, and systemic which is why the impact of their work is more signifcant and lasting.
• Getting hands dirty: I often ask people for instances where they had to get something done but couldn’t find someone else to do it and ended up doing it on their own. This is an often overlooked attribute and one of the major destroyer of momentum in small teams. Someone who is habitual to getting their hands dirty will not only be willing to take on challenging problems but they’ll also expect their team to follow suit. Otherwise, you risk the culture of excuses being built in your organisation.
• Usefulness as a value: I believe values are like the default mode of our decision making mechanism. For me it’s one of the toughest thing to figure out in a candidate. I try to see if they value ‘being useful’. This is not something that can be thoroughly evaluated in an interview, but also needs to be encouraged amongst your team to culturally inculcate.
• Gratitude: Lastly, while almost everyone goes through tough phases and difficult situations in their lives, some are able to stay optimistic, and others become negative and pessimistic. One reason in the difference of outlook could be linked to the amount of time they’ve spent in zero sum game environments. It is important to filter overly negative and pessimistic people, specially in the early stages of your company, as they tend to form bubbles of zero some games and hierarchy. Also, they affect the overall moral and motivation of the team by exaggerating the impact of failed experiments and set backs. The best antidote to such negativity is to have people who are more grateful by nature or consciously practice gratitude in their lives. As with usefulness, it is equally important to develop a culture around gratitude rather than only checking it during hiring.