How NOT to Make a BAD Hire

How to Guarantee You Won’t Make A Bad Hire
By Dave Logan | February 2, 2011

When most general managers fail to hit their goals, the problem can usually be traced back to hiring the wrong people.

The key is to hire for two factors: competence and values fit. If the person doesn’t have both of these elements, do not hire them under any circumstances.

Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz has an excellent blog post about how to hire for overall competence, including the following must-read section on the three traps to avoid:

* Hiring on look and feel. It sounds silly that anyone would hire an executive based on the way they look and sound in an interview, but in my experience look and feel is the top criteria for most executive searches. When you combine a CEO that doesn’t know what she wants and a board of directors that hasn’t thought much about the hire, what do you think the criteria are?

* Looking for someone out of central casting. This is the moral equivalent of looking for the Platonic Form of a head of sales. You imagine what the perfect sales executive might be like then you attempt to match real-world candidates to your model. This is a really bad idea for several reasons. First, you are not hiring an abstract executive to work at an arbitrary company. You must hire the right person for your company at this particular point in time. The head of sales at Oracle in 2010 would likely have failed in 1989. The VP of engineering at Apple might be exactly the wrong choice for FourSquare. The details and the specifics matter. Second, your imaginary model is almost certainly wrong. What is your basis for creating this model? Finally, it will be incredibly difficult to educate an interview team on such an abstract set of criteria. As a result, everybody will be looking for something different.

* Valuing lack of weakness rather than strength-The more experience you have, the more you realize that there is something seriously wrong with every employee in your company (including you). Literally, nobody is perfect. As a result, it is imperative that you hire for strength rather than lack of weakness. Everybody has weaknesses; they are just easier to find in some people. Hiring for lack of weakness just means that you’ll optimize for pleasantness. Rather, you must figure out the strengths you require and find someone who is world class in those areas despite their weaknesses in other, less important domains.

Horowitz gives lots of specific steps, including:

* Know what you want.
* Run a process that figures out the right match.
* Make a lonely decision.

(WAIT FOr next post for specifics on the "tips on hiring")

MY THOUGHTS

why can't managers (or CEOs to be precise) get this principle on hiring? this issue had caused me, and whole bunch of other people, a lot of heartaches. yes, heartaches. not just headaches. if you love your job and the organization, it's not just a head matter.

it breaks my heart to see people being hired (especially for high positions) without much thought on competence and values. it's disheartening to see someone, who doesn't have what it takes to influence people positively, being appointed to a leadership position. i feel sad when a person who doesn't have the heart for the job is hired simply because of the need to have a warm body in that position.