“Just hire the most qualified candidate.” I’ve told myself that many times. Sounds simple enough. However, as anyone in hiring knows, you soon realize that identifying the “best” candidate is much harder than it seems. If it was just about hard skills that you could put a metric on, that would be great. You wouldn’t need a human to do the hiring. A computer could do that. Or even an intern, given the right guidance.
Experienced managers know that you have to take other factors into consideration, because the last thing you want is a bad hire. That can wreck a team’s productivity, sap managerial time, and cost lots of money. It’s important to point out that a “bad hire” is often someone who has all the technical competence—the hard skills—necessary for the job.
When hiring someone, use this simple checklist.
- Technical competence. Can this person do the technical aspects of the job? If not, can they be trained? (By “technical” competence, I mean the hard skills necessary to do the job; the actionable parts… nursing, engineering, driving, designing, coding, putting out forest fires… whatever the job requires.)
- Time vs. Benefit. If training is involved, how long will it take? Is the potential benefit that the person brings worth the potential time I have to spend training him or her?
- Chemistry. How well will this person get along with others on the team?
Now, out of those 3 steps, 2 of them are fuzzy. Technical competence is really the only measurable criterion. Everything else on that list is based on judgment and the better manager you are, the more accurate those judgments will be. Not every manager will have it laid out exactly like that, but I guarantee that every good and productive manager will refer to something like this when they’re thinking about hiring someone.
Unless the job involves very little human contact, the fuzzy stuff is a big part of determining overall job performance. The point of all this is to say that the fuzzy stuff matters.
5. December 2008 by Craig Peters
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