Hiring for Fit

A Key Leadership Skill

Janet Webb

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781951527549
• eBook ISBN: 9781951527556
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Hiring for Fit goes to the heart of what fit really means and provides expert insight for anyone involved in making hiring decisions.

A key skill for any leader is the ability to hire a great team, and this skill requires a considerable depth of knowledge of the complex subject of fit. Most organizations talk about the need to hire for fit, but many go about hiring in the wrong way because their leaders don't fully understand the concept of fit.

Hiring for Fit goes to the heart of what fit really means and provides expert insight for anyone involved in making hiring decisions. The author studied the personality traits and attributes of successful hires and developed a comprehensive system to hire the right fit for any role. The entire process is an application of her unique Trait Alignment Protocol (TAP), which is the key to identifying fit and maintaining fit over the long term.

By applying the thorough and practical fit strategy described in the book, leaders will gain expertise in the complex subject of fit, replace seat-of-the-pants hiring with a reliable process, gain confidence in assessing a candidate's fit, make well-founded hiring decisions that avoid common hiring pitfalls, and pave the way for effective employee retention and advancement and for succession planning.

CHAPTER 1

Are You about to Hire the Wrong Fit?

How Does Hiring the Wrong Fit Happen?

The conventional wisdom is that a person needs to spend 10,000 hours in a challenging pursuit to become accomplished. Yet most managers ­undertake a key part of their organization’s success—the challenge of ­hiring the right employees—only occasionally. As a result, it’s difficult for managers to acquire the knowledge, skills, or experience needed to assess a candidate’s fit with much accuracy. Organizations hire candidates with the wrong fit for two main reasons:

1. Many interviewers rely on gut feel to assess a candidate’s fit, with unreliable results. There’s no question that instinct and intuition contribute to the assessment of a candidate, especially when backed by extensive experience in hiring. But even for experienced ­interviewers, gut feel has its limitations, and there’s always the possibility that interviewers’ personal bias may compromise their rational judgment. Instinct should play a secondary role in the assessment of a candidate and should never be the principal basis for determining fit.
2. Most interviewers primarily screen candidates according to the hard skills required for the role. They feel most comfortable asking questions about these hard skills, listening to candidates’ answers, and analyzing this information. Some hiring managers have occupied the same role—or a similar role—themselves, have many of the same hard skills, and are adept at screening for them.

Organizations also emphasize hard skills in the written description of the role. For example, the job description and interviews for a Director of Financial Reporting position may emphasize the candidates’ knowledge of consolidations and accounting systems, and experience in report writing and staff management. But the typical screening process pays much less attention than necessary to the critical soft skills required for the job, such as the ability to forge relationships across the organization, assertiveness, responsiveness, and highly developed organizational skills.

For a Vice President (VP) of Operations role, the job description and interviews may emphasize such hard skills as demonstrated strategic leadership accomplishments, previous P&L responsibility, and experience in operations management and quality control. But the screening process may pay less attention to such soft skills as building trusted relationships with customers and suppliers, setting high expectations for quality, and providing clear direction to staff, all of which may be essential to success in the role.

The Huge Cost of Failing to Identify Fit

Organizations invest time, effort, and money in assessing and hiring new employees. To receive the maximum return on this investment, organizations need to ensure that a candidate has both the hard skills and the soft skills needed to fit into the specific role and the organizational environment. Unless an organization adequately screens candidates for both sets of skills, the performance of newly hired employees may suffer because of conflicts with their colleagues and setbacks in their working relationships.

The negative consequences of hiring a bad fit can extend far beyond the individual’s effectiveness in a specific role. A bad fit can impose intolerable stress on other employees and diminish morale among the individual’s key colleagues and direct reports. In extreme cases, strong performers may leave the organization as a result.

When organizations hire a bad fit, they often compound the impact by revising organizational structures to accommodate areas of dysfunction, rather than addressing the fit issue directly. While the measures taken may alleviate the immediate problem, the revised organizational structures may not work in the best interest of the organization itself. I’ve frequently encountered hiring managers who have retained long-term employees who don’t fit within their organization. Ultimately, the organization may dismiss these long-term employees, but only after they wreak havoc on the productivity of the group.

Is Your Organization Vulnerable?

Organizations stand a much better chance of finding the right individual for a job if hiring managers articulate clearly from the outset the qualities that the job requires. In addition to the expertise and experience required for the job, such as finance skills or a background in marketing, organizations must specify the soft skills involved in doing the job well and in adapting to the new culture. These soft skills might reflect time-management ability, the ability to build rapport, and the capacity to work independently. (We will discuss soft skills in more detail in Chapters 2 and 3.) Organizations also need procedures in place so that everyone involved in screening candidates applies the same criteria and discusses each candidate’s skills from a shared perspective.

Answering yes or no to the following five questions will help you see if you’re already on the right track in establishing fit:

1. Can you name all the important soft skills needed to succeed in the role you’re filling?
2. Within your organization, will everyone involved in screening and interviewing candidates look for these same soft skills?
3. Does the job description clearly incorporate these key soft skills into the functional responsibilities of the role, so that interviewers and candidates clearly understand its behavioral requirements?
4. Do you know how to prescreen candidates for soft-skill fit, how to set up, prepare for, and conduct an effective interview, and how to analyze each short-listed candidate’s verbal responses, body language, and actions?
5. Does your organization have postinterview meetings to discuss and reach consensus on the soft skills of short-listed candidates?

If you answered “yes” to fewer than four of these questions, then you’re probably relying on your gut feel rather than a clearly articulated framework to assess a job candidate’s fit.

In subsequent chapters, we will discuss the key steps you need to take to improve your organization’s track record in hiring for fit.

Fit in Action: Learning from Mistakes

One of my search clients told me that, several years earlier, his company had hired a poorly screened individual who was now adversely affecting the entire department. The organization had hired the employee for her technical skills but without sufficient regard to the soft-skill aspect of her fit. The hiring manager had screened the candidate for her specific job skills, which she possessed in abundance. The new employee “knew her stuff,” my client said and looked as if she could get the job done well. But as she settled into her job, she began to miss deadlines. She revealed herself to have no concern for results, and she wouldn’t ask for help when she needed it.

The company was still dealing with the ongoing repercussions. To stick to important schedules, the employee’s manager asked her to alert him in advance if she didn’t think she could meet an imminent deadline. The employee agreed to do this but submitted incomplete work when the next deadline arrived. Her manager reminded her that she had agreed to notify him if she couldn’t finish a job on time. The employee said, “That’s what I’m doing now. As you can see clearly, the job’s not done!” Technically accomplished as she was, this employee fell far short of a good fit with regard to her attitude.

With proper screening, the organization could have avoided hiring a bad fit by identifying the candidate’s soft-skill deficiencies during the search screening process, including her inadequate regard for results and lack of humility. But, unfortunately, the hiring manager had taken for granted that the candidate had the soft skills required for a good fit, including a strong work ethic, respect for others, resilience, and a focus on results.

CHAPTER 2

What Are Fit Traits?

In Chapter 1, we stressed the importance of considering both hard and soft skills in establishing fit and indicated the greater difficulty involved in ensuring the compatibility of soft skills. One of the challenges that interviewers face is that they meet the candidate only in the atypical setting of an interview. They never get to see the candidate in action in the workplace.

The interviewer’s aim is to assess how well the candidate would work with key stakeholders in the organization, including their boss, their peers, and—for managerial roles—their staff. Some roles may also require candidates to establish productive working relationships cross-functionally or with external stakeholders. To assess the candidate’s likely future performance, the interviewer must closely observe how the candidate behaves in the interview and then ask the question “how will they actually behave in this role in this organization?”

From many years of experience, I’ve developed a rigorous method that facilitates this assessment process and termed it the Trait Alignment Protocol, or TAP. The method depends on the use of observed behaviors to establish the traits of the candidate and on the comparison of those traits with the ones needed to succeed in the organization and in the role. Whereas behaviors are the ways in which one acts or conducts oneself, especially toward others, traits are the underlying distinguishing qualities or characteristics.

For example, a candidate whose behaviors include listening carefully to all interview questions and always responding thoughtfully and clearly is likely to have such traits as respect for others, ability to focus, responsiveness, and straightforwardness. Of course, interviewers must consider the evidence as a whole in drawing conclusions. Should the same candidate behave rudely or indifferently toward the receptionist prior to the interview, the candidate’s apparent respect shown in the interview is more likely for show than an expression of a genuine trait.

When considering fit traits, it helps to separate them into two categories:

• Fundamental traits are characteristics needed for success in any role in your organization. They relate to personal values and compatibility with the corporate culture, values, and objectives.
• Complementary traits are characteristics needed for success in a particular role in your organization. They relate to the role-specific interpersonal, communication, and leadership skills required and can vary widely in complexity and sophistication for roles of different types at different levels of seniority.

Analyzing Fundamental Traits

We continually refine our methodology by monitoring the progress of successful candidates hired by our clients. Based on this information, we’ve analyzed the fundamental traits that contribute to a candidate’s long-term career success. These key hiring traits remain remarkably consistent regardless of the role that the candidate is hired to fill in a particular organization. In our experience, when newly hired employees don’t fit within an organization, they inevitably haven’t been screened tho...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Advanced Quotes for Hiring for Fit
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Disclaimer
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Are You about to Hire the Wrong Fit?
• Chapter 2 What Are Fit Traits?
• Chapter 3 Building Your Fit-Trait Lists
• Chapter 4 From Job Description to Position Profile
• Chapter 5 The Importance of Candidate Expectations
• Chapter 6 Prescreening for Fit
• Chapter 7 Approaching Interviews with Fit in Mind
• Chapter 8 Ensuring Fit for Senior Leadership Roles
• Chapter 9 Structuring Interviews to Support Fit
• Chapter 10 Interview Questions That Reveal Fit
• Chapter 11 Reaching a Consensus on Fit
• Chapter 12 Avoiding Hiring Pitfalls
• Chapter 13 Protecting Your Investment
• Supplement 1: Hiring-for-Fit Checklist
• Supplement 2: Fundamental Traits List
• Supplement 3: Complementary Traits List
• Supplement 4: Table 3.1 Recording and Rating Fundamental Traits115
• Supplement 5: Table 3.3 Recording and Rating Complementary Traits117
• About the Author
• Index