Hiring the best and the brightest

The million dollar question that every hiring manager deals with is how to find the best and the brightest talent every time, and avoid costly hiring mistakes.  People have many philosophies and strategies to arrive at the right answer for this. So, what is the magic formula for hiring the right person? Do you look for the best…

• Technical skills?
• Talent?
• Experience?
• Passion?
• Communication skills?
• All of the above?

Throughout my leadership/management career, I have interviewed hundreds of people both for my own teams as well as for teams outside of my organization.  Like most people, I evolved my interview strategies over the years as I experimented with what worked and what didn't work, based on the success rate of the hires. For example, early in my career, my focus was on finding a good match based on technical skills and domain experience. I quickly learnt that having the technical match was no good if the hires weren't producing great results. So, looking for strong and proven track record was critical.  As I hired for managers and more senior roles, it became more important to hire people that not only get results, but get there while building great interpersonal relationships with their peers and teams. Even more important after that was to find people that are not only high performers themselves, but are great at building high performing teams and have great organizational skills.

However, no matter what the position was and what specific skills I was looking for, I noticed that there was one thing that set apart successful hires from the occasional misfires. This one thing isn't talent, technical expertise communication skills, organizational skills, experience, or track record. This one underlying phenomenon is hunger . Hunger is the desire and drive to do more, learn more, and to constantly better oneself. Those that had this hunger turned out to be far more successful in their careers in the long term, trumping people with the other criterion. This is probably not a big surprise, because people with hunger are genuinely interested in learning and improving their skills and talent continuously, seeking new experiences, and constantly pushing themselves to get better at everything they do.

As obvious as this may sound, we don't apply this filter as much as we should during our interview processes. It is most common to spend time looking for the right expertise, experience, team fit etc., and less time thinking about how hungry the candidate is. If I think back on the hires that didn't quite work out, while they all looked great on paper, hunger was the key missing ingredient in all the cases. 

In all the interviews I do now, I spend a lot of time looking for evidence of hunger, above all the other criteria, as it has a high degree of correlation with other skills, expertise, and experience. It is the one factor that often explains the past accomplishments of a person, and acts as a leading indicator as to how successful he or she will be in the future!