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Hiring the right people

In an earlier post about giving credit to others, I discussed that one of the traits of great leaders is they have great people working with them. Sometimes we inherit people on our team when we take over, but other times we get the exciting, life changing opportunity to hire. The process can be cumbersome, time consuming, and laborious, but nothing can sustain and build momentum like hiring the right person. And nothing can become more costly to your time, resources, and energy than hiring the wrong person.

Hiring the right person must come back to your core values, and finding someone who fits within them. You want someone who will embody your purpose, but hopefully also bring some fresh perspectives and ideas to the team. And that team has to understand that they are there to support the new hire, but also learn from their new ideas and see what they can incorporate in to enhance their current performance.

In my leadership role, my primary hires are teachers. I'm hiring someone that is going to directly impact the futures of 150 or so adolescents each day for 180 days per year. In my state, teachers can earn tenure after 4 years. Once that happens, the process of being able to move on from a bad hire takes close to a year and a half of grueling effort, and perfect documentation, to maybe have a chance at that person being removed. When a hire is made, that person has a chance to impact those 150 kids per year for 35 or more years, or over 5000 adolescent minds. Add coaching, directing, or sponsoring kids on top of that and this is a huge decision.

I had a breakthrough a few years ago by being able to screen one answer on our applications. The question asks the applicant to define what makes a great teacher. I typically get an answer that includes the applicants love of one of two things. The first is a love of the content they will be teaching, and the second is a love of the kids they will be teaching. I wasn't yet using the question as a true screener, but when going through the interviews of candidates I felt were strong on paper, there was a clear divide in quality.

The applicants who said they loved their content had been strong students, members of academic honors societies, and non-engaging personalities. They had a hard time directly answering questions about working with kids. The applicants who loved kids may not have had the 4.0 GPA or Phi Beta Kappa recognition, but they were not slouches in the classroom and clearly had a desire to make a difference in kids lives. I wanted to hire them all! The one I did then, and the ones I have since, have all been rock stars with kids and colleagues. 

From that moment of realization forward, my screening process has become a lot easier. Love content, your out. Love kids, your in and I'll look deeper. I haven't had a bad interview since doing this, and even when hiring one person from my candidate pool, I typically have been able to help other good candidates find jobs associated with my school.

So what is your screening to hire the right people? Can you narrow it down to just ONE question that tells the story of if that person is worth your investment in hiring them? You may think it seems too simple, and you could easily overlook an otherwise great candidate, but in which case are you more likely to get the return on your investment that you and your organization needs?

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