Almost everyone has hired someone to do a job and it just didn’t work out. I know it happened to me. There were times when I REALLY thought I needed the help and I “settled” on someone in the hopes that it would work out. (That’s like dating someone to improve them and the success rate is about the same!) Those experiences aren’t the ones that bothered me. In the end I knew I was paying “dumb tax” for not doing what I knew was right. The times that bothered me are the ones when I thought I had the perfect person and over the course of time I found that we weren’t a fit.
What went wrong? Did I ask the wrong questions? Did I not explain the job or my expectations? Did I not judge the person’s ability to do the job? It wasn’t until a few years ago that I realized that the way that I had been trained to interview had a few missing elements. One of the most important of these is the personality profile of the candidate.
If you are like me before I learned about personality profiles the first question you might ask is: “What does personality have to do with it?” After all, isn’t the person who has the aptitude and the best fit for me and my team the best person for the job? Not necessarily.
Most of us are taught to check for two things when we interview.
- Does the candidate have the capability to do the required parts of the job?
- Will the candidate fit in the “company culture”?
Yes, it is extremely important that the candidate have the ability to do the job they are hired for. Yes, they must fit in the company culture. BUT if you do not take into account the personality of the candidate along with the nature of the job they will be performing then you have a time bomb that will go off despite your and your candidate’s best intentions.
Here’s an illustration of one of my less-than-stellar hiring moments. During one of my first management jobs I had the opportunity to hire an Executive Assistant to help me in organizing a new department. The department was a new one with a mission to modernize the methods of manufacturing and test, reduce costs, and improve quality throughout the organization. I wanted a staff of visionaries and doers. When I interviewed several candidates for the position one young woman who I’ll call Cathy stood apart from the rest. She was young, bright, and energetic. She was almost as excited as I was when I explained the vision of the department. After completing the interviews that were scheduled I made a quick decision to hire her. In the beginning I looked like a genius. Cathy could do everything I asked quickly and efficiently. But as time progressed she began to slow down and she didn’t represent our department to the other parts of our organization with the same professional manner that had been her trademark. After we talked about it, it was clear to both of us that Cathy would never be happy in the long run doing the work of an Executive Assistant even though she thought she knew what that meant when she was hired. She discovered that she really wanted to do strategic planning. Unfortunately, she did not yet have the training to do that work. We worked out an arrangement in which she could look for another job while we planned her transition.
Looking back on that incident, if I had known that there is a specific personality profile that matched the job I would not have hired Cathy on the basis of her energy, intelligence, and enthusiasm alone. I would have realized from the beginning that she was not going to be happy in that job.
We all hire people that we like, which usually means people like us. Instead of doing that I recommend that you make a conscious effort to hire the right personality for the job.
I highly recommend the use of a DISC profile so that you can take personality into account along with aptitude. A “perfect” personality for a sales person is not the same as a perfect personality for an accountant.
Wishing you the best team you can have,
Jim
“We can’t all be lucky, but we can all be successful.”
