How to Hire People Who Can Survive Your Company’s Hardest Parts
What is the worst part about working at your company? Is there a lack of opportunities for growth and development? Or maybe impossible deadlines? Or do you want vague and anarchic organisational structures?
If you want to ensure that any new personnel will succeed, you must examine their ability to endure and grow in the face of these negative factors. If your organisation has a habit of assigning projects with unreasonable deadlines, you owe it to yourself to hire people who can take the strain. If most employees encounter competing priorities on a regular basis, you don’t want to hire someone who can’t work in an uncertain environment.
Of course, in an ideal world, you would eliminate all of your organization’s flaws. But, let’s be honest, the average talent executive lacks the political clout to make those adjustments. So you have to play the card you’ve been dealt, which involves employing people who can handle these difficult situations.
According to the “Hiring For Attitude” study, technical skills account for only 11 percent of hiring failures, whereas attitudes account for 89 percent of hiring failures. And, because attributes like dealing with unrealistic deadlines or surviving chaotic organisational structures are clearly attitudes rather than talents, your hiring managers and recruiters must incorporate attitudinal factors into the hiring process.
What to Inquire…
How do you tell if someone can handle absurd timelines, for example? Simply ask, “Could you tell me about a moment when you had to meet an impossible deadline?” alternatively, “Could you tell me about a time when your supervisor set an unrealistic timetable for you?”
If you want to hire people who can function in chaotic and unclear circumstances, you could ask them, “Could you tell me about a time when you had competing priorities?”
To recruit someone who can thrive in the absence of robust possibilities for growth and development, you could question candidates, “Could you tell me about a time when your firm did not provide robust opportunities for growth and development?”
You’ll notice that each of these questions basically takes a negative feature of a company and asks, “Could you tell me about a time you [faced that unpleasant situation]?”
…as well as What Not to Ask
You’ll notice that none of these questions reveal the “correct” answer. In the report “Six Words That Ruin Behavioral Interview Questions,” we noticed that most interview inquiries had phrases at the conclusion of them that detract from the usefulness of the questions. “How did you solve it?” “How did you conquer that?” and “How did you successfully come through that?” are some of these phrases.
Consider the interview question, “Could you tell me about a moment when you had to meet an impossible deadline?” Without such terms at the end of the inquiry, the candidate could describe how they froze or panicked when they were faced with an impossible deadline. Or you might hear that they thought every deadline they were given was unachievable. Alternatively, they may show a profound resentment toward the manager who issued such deadlines.
But suppose we add one of those words to the end of the question: “Could you tell me about a time when you confronted an impossible deadline and how you overcome it?” We’ve now made it clear to the applicant that we only want to hear about the times when they actually met the deadline, regardless of how uncommon those occurrences were. We’ve completely missed out on hearing about their mistakes and problems because we specifically instructed the candidate to only disclose their triumphs.
Listen, no business is flawless; every corporation has flaws. While I’d love for everyone to remedy those flaws, most of the time it’s simply not feasible (at least not in the next few months). What you can do is hire folks who don’t crack under the pressure of flaws. And it’s as simple as hiring for a specific set of attitudes.
