Are You Hiring Skills, Values or Bank Robbers
I hire most people for their technical skills. Over the years, I have come to realise that this is a big mistake.
It was our book keeper who alerted me to the limitations of technical skills. She was good technically, but we should have read the warning signals.
She had a side business flogging cheap iPods to members of staff. One of the members of staff visited her socially and was surprised to see her pulling out a shoe box from beneath her sofa, full of high denomination bank notes, She did not trust banks, she said.
She may not have trusted them, but she certainly liked robbing them. One day she failed to appear for work. Her picture was in the papers, holding a shotgun and robbing a local bank. Time to look for another book keeper...
Aside from such giant disasters, there have been countless smaller disasters. The worst disasters involve skilled people with lousy values: people who like blaming and demeaning others, finding problems not solutions, empire building and being negative, not positive. They may be good at their job technically, but they spread poison through the system.
We all hate working for bosses with lousy values and we wish we could fire such bosses. But the same thing works in reverse. Good bosses hate staff with lousy values, and will fire them if they have any sense. Even better, good bosses will weed such people out at the recruitment stage. The values to look for include:
- how they deal with other people,
- how they deal with adversity and setbacks
- how strong their ethical and moral values are: do they like raiding banks as a hobby or not?
Recruiting to skills alone is a recipe for disaster. Recruiting to skills and values does not guarantee success: at least it loads the dice in your favour.
(Pic: Arenamontanus cc2.0)