How the experts hire: Beyond cultural fit, achievements, and personality

This edition of the Expert’s Playbook looks at the best advice and guidance for hiring employees: the foundation of any business.

Three key lessons

1. You should always hire for cultural fit, not just talent.

2. Hire people with a track record of excellence in what you’re expecting them to do.

3. Leaders need to take the hiring process seriously and personally check references.

“When I was younger I didn’t really understand the saying, ‘Hire someone better than you’,” entrepreneur and business thinker Ray Dalio writes in Principles: Life and Work.

“Now, after decades of hiring, managing, and firing people, I understand that to be truly successful I need to be like a conductor of people, many of whom (if not all) can play their instruments better than I can — and that if I was a really great conductor, I would also be able to find a better conductor than me and hire him or her.” 

“People’s personalities are pretty well formed before they come to you, and they’ve been leaving their fingerprints all over the place since childhood; anyone is fairly knowable if you do your homework,” says Dalio.

“You have to get at their values, abilities, and skills: Do they have a track record of excellence in what you’re expecting them to do? Have they done the thing you want them to do successfully at least three times? If not, you’re making a lower-probability bet, so you want to have really good reasons for doing so. That doesn’t mean you should never allow yourself or others to do anything new; of course you should. But do it with appropriate caution and with guardrails. That is, have an experienced person oversee the inexperienced person, yourself included (if you fit that description).”

“Instead of focusing only on, ‘I need someone proficient in this and that’, bottle the magic of the early culture to inspire,” said Bumble co-founder Whitney Wolfe at a Forbes event.

“If they are with you at the beginning, it’s because they believe in you. You don’t have a successful product. You don’t have a huge brand. You don’t have a big following. The people that join you early are genuinely taking a chance on your vision as the founder. They’re on board with it.”

“A candidate’s skills, aptitude, and experience are all important considerations when it comes to hiring, but these factors are less significant than how the new hire fits with the organisation’s culture,” writes leadership expert Randy Grieser in The Ordinary Leader: 10 Key Insights for Building and Leading a Thriving Organization.

“If there is not a match, regardless of the skill set, the chances of long-term success will be limited. We believe in this so strongly that we have at times selected candidates who have less experience and skill but fit better within our culture. To be clear, the successful candidates did have the aptitude and drive to become more skilled. While skills can be learned and improved upon, especially for those with the aptitude for the right skill set, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to train someone to fit your culture. Fit is about personality, attitude, and lived values. These three things are very difficult to change or teach.”

“When leaders don’t value the hiring process, we risk costly mistakes,” says Grieser.

“While leaders don’t need to participate in every hiring decision, they should recognise the importance of talent and lay the framework for how new people are brought into the organisation. Too often, speed and cost are considered the most important indicators of a successful hiring process. Yet the hiring of new employees needs to be much more thoughtful and intentional than simply finding adequate people to fill jobs as quickly or cheaply as possible. When efficiency is the barometer of success, poor decisions are often made. Instead, we need to centre the hiring process on how to reliably find the right people for the right roles — candidates who will not only excel at the job but also fit the organisation’s culture. Quality and fit are more important than speed and cost.”

“Finding the right people is also not a matter of ‘culture fit.’ What most people really mean when they say someone is a good fit culturally is that he or she is someone they’d like to have a beer with,” says Patty McCord — chief talent officer at Netflix from 1998 to 2012 who now advises startups and entrepreneurs — in Harvard Business Review.

“But people with all sorts of personalities can be great at the job you need done. This misguided hiring strategy can also contribute to a company’s lack of diversity, since very often the people we enjoy hanging out with have backgrounds much like our own … The process requires probing beneath the surface of people and their resumes; engaging managers in every aspect of hiring; treating your in-house recruiters as true business partners; adopting a mindset in which you’re always recruiting; and coming up with compensation that suits the performance you need and the future you aspire to.”

“I look for the same kind of qualities most look for in choosing a spouse: integrity and passion,” says Starbucks founder Howard Schultz in Fortune magazine.

“To me, they’re just as important as experience and abilities. I want to work with people who don’t leave their values at home but bring them to work, people whose principles match my own. If I see a mismatch or a vacuum where values should be, I prefer to keep looking.”

“Interviews test how well someone interviews,” advises Dr Pierre Mornell in Inc magazine.

“A good con artist can fool you every time. As a psychiatrist, I have been blindsided by alcoholic and drug-addicted lawyers and doctors who were so convincing that even they didn’t know when they were lying.”

“When hiring, consider your team average,” suggests Emma Isaacs, founder and global chief executive of Business Chicks and author of Winging It.

“There are two questions I always ask myself when considering someone for a role in my team. The first is, ‘Will this person lift the average of the team, or will they bring it down?’ My goal is to consistently send the average upwards. The other question is, ‘Is this person an A-grade team player, or am I settling for second-best?’ My experience is that your gut never fails on this one. You know when you’re trying to convince yourself that they tick all the calibre and suitability boxes that, really, you’re cutting corners to just get someone into the role. Yes, it can be painful trying to fill a vacant position, but it hurts more when you make a wrong hire.”

“At a macro level, everybody views the world through her own personal prism,” says Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, in The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

“When interviewing candidates, it’s helpful to watch for small distinctions that indicate whether they view the world through the ‘me’ prism or the ‘team’ prism. People who view the world through the ‘me’ prism might describe a prior company’s failure in an interview as follows: ‘My last job was my e-commerce play. I felt that it was important to round out my resume.’ Note the use of my to personalise the company in a way that it’s unlikely that anyone else at the company would agree with. In fact, the other employees in the company might even be offended by this usage. People with the right kind of ambition would not likely use the word play to describe their effort to work as a team to build something substantial. Finally, people who use the ‘me’ prism find it natural and obvious to speak in terms of ‘building out my resume’ while people who use the ‘team’ prism find such phrases to be somewhat uncomfortable and awkward, because they clearly indicate an individual goal that is separate from the team goal. On the other hand, people who view the world purely through the team prism will very seldom use the words I or me even when answering questions about their accomplishments.”

“First I might ask people what their greatest failures were and see whether they take responsibility, and what they did with that failure,” says psychologist and author of Mindset, Carol Dweck in this video interview with Google.

“Did they capitalise on it to do something even better than they could have imagined? Did they use it to put value added back into the company? Or on the other hand, did they say well, I had this failure: I worked too hard. Or do they make it something that really reflects well on them, or was it someone else’s fault? 

Carol Dweck. Source: Youtube

“You’re looking for three things, generally, in a person. Intelligence, energy, and integrity,” says legendary US investor Warren Buffett as quoted on the Farnham Street website.

“And if they don’t have the last one, don’t even bother with the first two. I tell them, ‘Everyone here has the intelligence and energy — you wouldn’t be here otherwise. But the integrity is up to you. You weren’t born with it, you can’t learn it in school. You decide to be dishonest, stingy, uncharitable, egotistical, all the things people don’t like in other people … They are all choices. Some people think there’s a limited little pot of admiration to go around, and anything the other guy takes out of the pot, there’s less left for you. But it’s just the opposite.”

“For the final candidates, it’s critically important that the CEO conduct the reference checks herself,” insists Horowitz.

“The references need to be checked against the same hiring criteria that you tested for during the interview process. Backdoor reference checks (checks from people who know the candidate, but were not referred by the candidate) can be an extremely useful way to get an unbiased view. However, do not discount the front-door references. While they clearly have committed to giving a positive reference (or they wouldn’t be on the list), you are not looking for positive or negative with them. You are looking for fit with your criteria. Often, the front-door references will know the candidate best and will be quite helpful in this respect.”