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Make a great hire: you’ve hit a grand slam.
Make a bad hire: you might as well hit yourself over the head.
But it’s not always as simple as “hire good people and you’ll have a good team,” or “don’t hire bad people.” The longer I study hiring, the more I realize the question leaders are faced with is:
“How do I tell if a good candidate will make a great member of our team?”
When I first started Vanderbloemen, I never dreamed we would need a hiring strategy. If you’ve ever started a business from scratch, you likely know the feeling. I wondered if my idea for a company would work, or if I could feed my family. I never wondered about needing to add team members, let alone a system for hiring. As we grew, that all changed.
At first, our “hiring strategy” was a euphemism for “who can I talk into joining this fledgling idea?” I remember those first hires so well. They came in total faith. Our first hire, who is still on our Lead Team today, often says, “It was the dumbest decision I ever made, and the smartest decision I ever made.” Recruiting was strictly a sales gig: an exercise in selling a potential future to people I could persuade to join the cause.
As we grew, our reputation grew as well. We began to attract great talent from across the country. I still had to actively recruit, but people started taking my calls, and within a year we had a “dream team” of talent from within our little niche of the executive search world.
What I didn’t anticipate was the challenge of managing and systematizing our dream team. They were great people as individuals, and most of them worked out really well. But there were a few incredibly gifted people, with good hearts, who didn’t work out over the long haul. If I’m honest, I felt like a bit of a failure not being able to make these few (really talented) people work out over the long haul. Why didn’t pure talent work?
Because culture trumps competency.
During those early years, we started to notice that the qualities that made us great at our job also made us a strange group of people. We got serious about figuring out what “our kind of crazy” was. We began codifying our team culture. We spent a long time on a process of gathering, naming, and systematizing our culture. As we did, we were able to begin interviewing around our values. That changed everything.
I learned that no matter how talented, and no matter how experienced, and no matter how likable a person was, they weren’t an automatic a fit with “our kind of crazy.” Even if they were world-class talent, we had a tough time teaching them how to be the same kind of “strange” that we were. Highly-qualified candidates with years of executive search experience don’t always make a great cultural fit on our team.
Conversely, we began to test a hypothesis: “What would happen if we focused on finding cultural fits, and worry about teaching competency as we go?”
We shifted our interviewing. We began trying to talk people out of working for us, telling them specifically the ways we are strange, and the reasons a “normal” person might not like working with us. We would say things like, “If you don’t think you fit, then you’re probably the normal one and we are probably the crazy one. But better to figure that out now, before you ever start work, than after you’ve committed your next career stop to us.”
The results have been fantastic. Granted, there are some very technical, skill-dependent roles in our company. But for the most part, we have been able to teach, develop, and systematize competency. In our search practice that helps churches find pastors, one of our best consultants hasn’t ever served on a church staff. That was never on my radar as possible years ago. I thought I had to have the best pastors around the world on my team for our work to “work.” Turns out, trusting a culture fit has worked for us better than a talented all-star who doesn’t quite match our code.
I’m still figuring things out, but I know this: I have a lot less guesswork than I used to when it comes to hiring for my team. I have a lot easier time recruiting. And I have had a lot more success in predicting whether a good person will be a great hire for us. If you’ve run a business or team before, you know that the most expensive hire you’ll ever make is the wrong person.
Try my hypothesis. Get to know your culture, then hire around culture before you hire around competency. There are exceptions to the rule for sure, but my guess is the hypothesis is true more often than not, and could lead you to more team success than ever before.
