By Geoff Smart and Randy Street
The most important decisions business people make are who decisions, not what decisions.
Jay Jordan, CEO of the Jordan Company, told us how he once hired a candidate who looked great on paper but failed in the role. The executive demanded some feedback from Jordan on the day of his termination. Jordan didn’t want to add insult to the injury, but finally couldn’t resist himself from saying: “ Look I hired your resume, and what I got was you.”
The Art Critic: based on gut instinct. Some people believe they are naturally equipped for reading people. Gut instinct is terribly inaccurate.
The Sponge: Buissy executives let everyone interview the candidate. Typically with no coordination at all, so candidate answers same questions. Assessment rarely goes deeper than “He’s a nice guy”
The Prosecutor: Aggressively try to make candidates trip on mistakes by challenging them with trick questions. Knowledge and ability to do the job are not the same thing.
The Suitor: Spend their time selling and little time listening
The Trickster: Play tricks to test candidate behavior. Doesn’t evaluate the ability to do the job.
The Animal Lover: Interviewers who have guru questions like ‘what is your favorite animal’ and expect that to predict something.
The Chatterbox: yada yada become friends type, but collects no insights on the candidate.
The Psychological and Personality tester: not useful to predict fit, and easy to sidewalk.
The Aptitude Tester: good for screening, but not good enough on isolation.
The Fortune-Teller: questions on how to face hypothetical situations have proven to be useless, as candidate can adapt answers, be vague about them, and not reflect reality at all.
Its hard to see people for who they really are, thats why we need s method, and thats why voodoo hiring methods fail.
Finding A players: candidates who have at least 90% chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only top 10% of candidates could achieve.