How to find the best candidate
Is the candidate sitting in front of you right for this job? How do you know when market conditions are so volatile it’s hard to predict all the qualifications and attributes you’re going to need six months or one year down the road?
Perhaps the most important choices that you make as an employer are your hiring decisions. As the old adage states: hire in haste and repent at your leisure. Faulty decisions can cost you scarce financial resources and distract managers and staff from more productive activities.
If you get it right the first time, it will be much easier for all concerned.
5 Tips for selecting the right candidate for the job
1. Is the candidate highly adaptive? You want someone who is fleet on their feet in adapting to changes in the work environment, since right now change is the only constant in most organizational systems. Can the candidate offer you examples of how they were able to grow, shift, and evolve to workplace change in their last position? Adaptability, the capacity to take on new roles and embrace new ways of thinking, are critical when the winds of the economy swirl.
2. Are they voraciously curious?What else do they want to know? Are they lit up with questions? Curiosity is about appreciating and seeking out the new. Instead of desperately seeking certainty, it is about embracing uncertainty. Because a great employee now needs to be a great learner, being voraciously curious is key to high productivity and breakthrough thinking.
3. Can they admit to mistakes? Many of us learned in school that making mistakes was an indicator of lack of ability. New research describes how adaptive learning requires mistake making; you can’t go forward without experimenting. Really able learners make lots of mistakes and are able to glean important lessons from them. Look for the candidate who can easily describe three failures, and what they learned from them. Take it as a warning sign if they can’t readily describe their screw-ups.
4. Are they good resource managers? Knowing how to do best with less is a critical new skill as the world downsizes and gets focused on using, owning, and consuming less stuff. Can the candidate use both sides of their post-its? Are they morally committed to the project of more for less, because it’s good for everyone?
5. Is this the kind of learner you want on your team? You are hiring them, not their skills. No candidate has exactly the right skills for the job or is perfectly qualified. Who is the person sitting in front of you, and are they someone you want on your team after a restructuring, business crisis, or redesign of the firm? Do they have values and habits you respect? Can you trust them to do the right thing? Every employee is going to have to “learn into” any job they are hired for now.
