How to Hire Great People
photo by jason lippa
RoundPegg held a roundtable on hiring this morning with some of Boulder’s most forward-thinking CEOs. Needless to say, it’s a topic where everyone has learned a lot from their failures and the conversation was a lively one.
While it was universally acknowledged that how one fits with the company’s culture is directly linked to success, how everyone got to the point of whether a candidate ‘fit’ or not was interesting.
Here are a few of the more intriguing approaches:
- Know what you’re looking for. Focus on those who are successful within the organization and find the commonalities between them all. What are the shared values, communication styles, personality traits etc. Once you know what makes one successful it’s much easier to identify that in others
- Lean on your high performers. Ask those same high performers to interview the candidates. We all naturally gravitate toward those who are ‘like us.’ If the high performers think highly of the candidate then the odds are better that the candidate will work out
- Listen between the lines. You’re asking questions about the person. But you learn more when they talk about others. Do their greatest successes involve anyone other than themselves? How do they reference others who contributed to that success?
- Watch them live. Get the candidate out of the conference room and observe how they handle various non-work situations. Travel with them (a stretch) or go out to a meal. See how they treat the waitresses, gate agents etc. People often let their guard down when doing the mundane. If you’re particularly sneaky you can set up a situation - e.g. ask the waitress to overcharge the table or give too little change. True colors will often come out.
- Role play. Put them through a scenario that your company is facing. Ask a product manager to spec out a new feature and lead a couple folks (e.g. engineers and marketers) to hone the concept and scope the work. With so little time to work on it, look beyond the thought that went into the specifications and pay attention to how they work with others to improve the concept and get buy-in.
- Interesting questions. A couple interesting questions arose. One was to define leadership. How they answer that illustrates the type of individual behind whom they would most likely throw their energy. Another was to identify their favorite literary character and to describe the values that character held. Again, you get a lot of insight into the types of values the candidate admires. Finally, asking about their greatest successes and failures has proved helpful when you listened to the amplitude of their feat/failure, how they described their role, the role of others and what they took away from it.
It was a fantastic hour of discussion that wandered down other paths on culture, managing people and the like. So I’m sure we missed a ton of great ideas. What specifically works for you?
Related posts:
- Discovering Culture + Values
- Hiring is Hard. Here’s Proof.
- Sales People Are People Too
- Making Great Hires
- How To Develop Great Cultures
This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.
4 Comments
Great post! Every single tip is relevant and helpful. My favorite tip is the fourth one. It is so vital to understand how a person acts outside of the interview in order to really get a sense of what kind of person he/she is. Thanks for the tips!
Thanks for stopping by. I too like #4. It's amazing what people will reveal. Lacking the self-awareness to realize that you're always being 'interviewed' is a big indicator that they find it hard to look beyond their own needs. Thanks again for commenting. Great to hear what resonates!
Great ideas. Love this stuff.
Thanks Mark, glad you dropped by. We've recently thrown up a 15 minute webinar around how to make great hires and what RoundPegg is all about. We'd love your thoughts and feedback.
http://roundpegg.com/blog/2010/04/07/making-great...