“He had done well everywhere he worked!”

“She had a ton of experience in her field.”

“The skills he brought to the team were exactly what we needed.”

“She had a Master’s degree in Marketing!”

In my career of hiring people and now developing leaders for companies large and small, many of the worst hiring mistakes were justified with similar statements.  Sometimes we get so excited about someone’s talent, we miss “Who they are.”

Nice but not enough

Talent Is Not Hard To Identify

The truth is, talent is easy to identify in the interview process. I can look at a resume and see what experience or education someone brings to the table. I can ask technical questions that tell me if they are qualified. Even differentiating the most qualified person is not that hard to do.

Most organizations are pretty good at finding people who CAN do the job. Most leaders are pretty good at defining who the BEST candidates are based on their skills, experience or potential. The problem is we get way too enamored with talent.

In each and every one of my leadership sessions, the stories I hear are not about employees who fail due to a lack of talent. They fail due to character issues.

Most leaders admit they would rather have spent the time up front to “train-up” a person of higher character, then spend the time dealing with the highly talented problem child.

Character Is Hard To Identify

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Yet many leaders use the same process for hiring talented people and get burned time and again.

We get burned because someone lacks the integrity, teamwork, or humility that separate the good hires from the bad ones. These people not only hurt profits, they also hurt morale and damage our credibility with the teams we lead.

Again and again, I work with companies and leaders who lament their bad hires, yet feel powerless to change the results.

If I want to accomplish something I’ve never accomplished before, I must begin doing things I’ve never done before!

I have written multiple blogs on hiring through the years. Click on the following titles to read a couple of them:

Interviewers Need Better Questions

Hiring a Low Maintenance Team – Hire Character

But, I want to share some questions, that I use and train leaders to use when interviewing candidates. The questions below are just a subset of a larger group of interview questions you can download by clicking on the following link:

The Overwhelmed Manager’s Guide  (click on Power Pack on right side of the OMG page)

Integrity Questions

Hint: Did they do the right thing even when it could hurt them?

• Tell me about a time a customer complained to you about another employee.
• Tell me about someone at work that you felt was unreliable or lacked integrity.
• Tell me about a time your boss surprised you with some negative feedback.
• Tell me about a time one of your supervisors may have had questionable 
motives.
• Tell me about a time at work you were asked to do something that went against 
what you believed.

With each of these questions, I am looking for specific situations where the candidate acted with integrity.

With Integrity I want to know: Did they do the right thing even when it could hurt them?

With Teamwork I want to know: Did they go out of their way to improve the team?

With Humility I want to know: Do they own their mistakes/failures and did they grow from them?

My goal in the interview process is not to find out if they have the right answers. My goal is to find out who they are —

Their Character.

The Bottom Line:

Talented individuals are not hard to find in most settings. More people are getting college degrees than ever and training is available online for anyone who wants to add to their skill set.

Talent is an important component when we hire for a specific position. But, every leader I work with agrees, the headaches that come from hiring talented people with flawed character are not worth it. 

As leaders, we must not let talent make us forget to dig into the character of the candidates sitting before us. The damage done to productivity is only the start of the problems when talent problem children join our teams. Bad hires destroy trust between the team and the leader and inside the team as well.

We as leaders must get better. I would rather have someone of high character that I can “train-up” in the skills, than someone with all the skills, whose character is flawed.

Question:

How often have you seen talented people create more headaches than they are worth?