Finding your people
A couple of weeks ago, a video of Barack Obama was doing the rounds on social media. In it, he gives some career advice for those just starting out (although we can probably all learn something from it, regardless of career-stage). It’s worth watching the whole thing (it’s only a minute long) but the basic message is: be a person who gets stuff done.
I couldn't agree more with this. Over the years, I would say that, aside from essential skills based experience (e.g. knowing how to rig a light, or understanding what accounting software is and how to use it) it is the quality that I look hardest for when I’m interviewing people. From a leadership perspective, the total and utter joy of working with someone who, when they tell you about a problem, also shares a few ideas for solutions, is so significant. They are the people in the team that you trust with important tasks or projects - because you know if you give them something to do, they’ll not only do it, but take pride in doing it exceptionally well.
This leads to an interesting question. How do we best recruit for this? Forward looking companies often say that finding people who hold the right value set is more important than the skills that they have, many of which are teachable. But how do you test or discover those values or qualities during a 45 minute interview?
I really really love recruitment. When someone leaves a role, particularly someone you really value, initially all you can see is the loss of that person - a gap in the team where they used to be. Recruitment is the part where you start getting excited about who might fill that gap - the energy, qualities and ideas they’d bring, the way that they might add or enhance the dynamics of the team. Good interviews feel buzzy and exciting and energising - they often become a bit more conversational as they go on, and candidates sometimes ask really interesting questions which provoke useful thoughts in the answering. At the same time, we need to be mindful that we often have an inclination to recruit people that are similar to ourselves (known as similarity bias), and that we also house all kinds of other unconscious biases that we need to be careful don’t colour our views.
As we’ve gained understanding about this, we’ve, rightly, put in place some measures that can make the application and interview process fairer. I’m a big fan of anonymous, CV-less, applications, meaning a panel has to make the decision about who to interview based on answers to two or three specific questions rather than their employment history. Making sure you have a mix of views and experiences on the panel, sending out questions in advance - all these are things that help even out the playing field and mitigate against one person’s preferences dominating the whole process.
There is, however, a challenge here. Interviews are, in part, about a person to person connection, something that can’t necessarily be measured and quantified in an entirely objective way. That’s why I have a slightly mixed response to the approach of giving a numerical score to people’s interview questions - I can see its use, and allows for an interesting discussion between panel members if scores are radically different, but I wouldn’t want the scoring to be the thing that decides who gets the job. This is in part because some of those ineffable, intangible qualities (such as those that Barack Obama talks about in the clip) are pretty hard to extract through the questions, but can come across in the way a person presents themself and approaches the interview. Their presence in the room, how thoroughly they’ve prepared their answers, the kind of questions they ask at the end of the interview when the tables are turned - these are, I think, all relevant and useful in helping build up a picture of who a candidate is and what they might be like as a member of your team.
As I’ve gone on in my career and recruited more people, I am increasingly of the opinion that those qualities and traits that are less tangible and hard to test for are often more important than the skills and experience people have, which can be taught or trained. And whilst you have to be particularly careful about bias, how someone might fit within your existing team is a relevant question to consider, and also relies more on a more instinctive appraisal of a candidate rather than an answer that you can assess and score. (As a side note, I listened to this episode of a podcast I really like called Maintenance Phase, in which they delve into the slightly balmy and unscientific origins of the Myers-Briggs test, a personality test that has, and, in some cases still is, used by employers to try and get a more objective answer to the question: what’s this person like to work with?).
There are some things that I think can help give more empirical evidence on these areas, to add to any gut instincts that you have. I’m a fan of tasks - not only does it test someone’s actual capacity to do work that’s relevant to their job, but you can easily tell how seriously someone has taken it and how much effort they have put in. To be useful, tasks need to test something that someone would actually have to do in their job - at leadership level, presentations are often required, which makes sense given that part of your role is to be the face or figurehead of the organisation. However, making someone who is mostly going to be writing trust & foundation applications do a ten minute presentation is probably not that useful for assessing whether or not they can do the job well - whereas getting them to write a hypothetical two page application probably is. If one of your considerations is how well a candidate will fit into a particular team, then get them to meet the other members of that team as part of the process and factor those people’s feedback into your decision making.
I often feel that the system of taking references should be more useful than it is - my friends in the legal profession are always mind-boggled that an employer might give anything other than a factual reference (i.e. this person worked here between this date and that date) and it seems to me that references are usually taken too late in the process to be of any real use, despite the fact that previous employers are the most likely people to be able to share any information on what a candidate is actually like at work. There are (rightly) legal implications to giving a negative reference if you can’t fully and objectively back it up, so it’s unlikely any concerns about underperformance will be shared; however, I do think you can always identify a genuinely glowing reference from the language and enthusiasm past employers use about their former colleagues.
Part of the reason that I’m fascinated by interviews and how you make them meaningful is that I’ve been a candidate in so many of them over the course of my career. Sitting on the other side of the table is such a privilege and, also, a weighty responsibility - a good recruitment decision can be critical to the health of your organisation, a bad one can lead to many weeks, months, or even years, of heartache on both sides. Finding your people is both a science and an art - the more we reflect upon and fine-tune our recruitment processes, the better we’ll get at spotting the brilliant people who will help our organisation be the best that it can be.