Finding the Right Candidate

Hiring or promoting people is one of the most important and impactful things I’ll ever do as a leader.  It can lead to great teamwork, morale and productivity…or it can lead to the destruction of all that. As with most things in life, the opportunity for great benefit usually comes with great risk.  In every organization I’ve ever been a part of, there has always been significant energy put into mitigating the risk and maximizing the benefits when it comes to hiring or promoting people.  I’ve never seen a risk-free process and I don’t believe one exists.  But there are five questions we can ask about every candidate – questions that can help us to make great decisions:

1. What are his/her personal and professional background, experience and qualifications? I know this seems like a no-brainer, but so often we can overlook the obvious.  I have found the popular adage, ‘the best indicator of future behavior is past performance’ to be generally true.  I specifically want to look at their performance in the areas of teamwork, attitude, effort, perseverance, and of course, effectiveness.  I’m not turned off by some failures (I’m turned off by the lack of any, though), but I want to hear how a person has grown as a result.  Bottom line, I’m looking for people who have a winning track record.
2. Going through the core competencies for this position, how well does he/she align? Every position has a set of core competencies that are required for success.  This is true whether or not we’ve been disciplined enough to write them down.  As the leader who needs to fill the position, we need crystal clarity on the necessary core competencies.  And, it’s important to have a decent idea of a candidate’s relative strength in each competency.
3. If I were to project out 6-12 months from now and imagine that this person wasn’t working out, what are the most likely reasons why he/she would be struggling? My experience has been that we tend to focus on the positives of what a person will bring to a role.  We often know the downsides of a particular candidate (we all have them, don’t we?), but we don’t want to think about them when we’re feeling on a positive roll.  Answering this question is a great way to give voice to those concerns using an emotionally safe ‘what if’ approach.
4. What do I believe about the future promotability of this person? If we’re hiring good people, it’s a fair bet that they aren’t going to want to stay in a particular position forever (and if they’re that good, I’m not going to want to limit them by keeping them there indefinitely either).  I want to have a pretty high level of confidence that this individual’s ceiling is well above the position for which they are being considered.
5. Do I believe this candidate could be a game changer in this position? In these challenging times of having to accomplish more with less, I want to surround myself with game changers – people who can take quantum leaps forward.  If I think this candidate is such a person, I ought to be able to identify at least a few specific ways in which I think they might change the game.

These have helped me to make better decisions.  Not perfect, just better.

I’d love to hear what you do to ensure that you’re making great hiring and promotion decisions.