From the Ask Tom mailbag.
A week or so ago, I received an interesting cross communiqué from Joshua Herzig-Marx, who was compiling some thoughts about hiring. In his article he was discussing the sometimes misguided tendencies of hiring managers to consider fuzzy ideas like
How well will the candidate fit with our existing team?
Does the candidate share our organization’s values?
Will the candidate bring the right attitude?
And I got to thinking. These ideas are actually good ideas, fuzzy as they may be. Here is the rub. How can the hiring manager, who is not a psychologist, evaluate the candidate on fit, values and attitude?
Actually, I observe many companies who spend lots of dollars on psychometric testing to learn the answers to these elusive questions. These are not unimportant. (I love double negatives, drove my English teacher crazy).
You have to get down to behaviors. You are not a psychologist, but you can spot positive behavior and negative behavior in the workplace. Observing and evaluating behavior is what managers do. Play to your strength. Interview for behaviors.
Fit. How does a person who “fits” our organization behave?
Values. How does a person with our values behave?
Attitude. How does a person with a positive attitude behave?
Now, interview for those behaviors. Yes, the fuzzy stuff is important and it can be a valuable part of the interview and the criteria for hiring. -TF
Thanks for your response to my thoughts. I’ve discovered I’m a bad judge of character–at least in the hour or so you typically have in an interview. Interviewing for behavior forces some discipline around the process. I need to spend preparation time figuring out what behaviors I want in the position.
I’d like to distinguish between the fuzzy and the touchy-feely. I’m a proponent of the latter – the best teams I’ve worked with have heterogeneous personalities and a lot of emotional intelligence. As you say, these were expressed in concrete behaviors. Fuzzy qualities, though, are (in Justice Potter Stewart’s words), “[Not worth trying] further to define [it] . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it . . . .”
(BTW – I’m generally against psychometric testing as pseudoscience but really appreciated the insights gained from the Social Styles Inventory which a former employer had us all take: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0814477232/)