Should we hire for the strengths we need even though other aspects of the candidate should be a bit rough or for well-rounded difficult to blame candidates with no visible weaknesses and no visible world-class talents? You may think that is not an easy choice that requires careful consideration but you may have already decided implicitly when you have chosen who is interviewing candidates and who will participate in the decision.
We have learned from Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive that exceptionally talented individuals, those who make great contributions to their teams and fields, typically do so by their remarkable strength in a few connected areas, but they are often significantly flawed in other aspects. Weaknesses in unconnected skillsets do not significantly limit their strength. Unconnected is a fundamental word in this last sentence.
When we get hiring decisions taken by a committee we will inevitably end up with the most difficult candidate to knock out being chosen. Choosing the least amount of visible weaknesses does not guarantee that the candidate can do anything exceptionally well, but that none of their weaknesses are as visibly big when compared to the other candidates’.
On the other hand, when a single person is interviewing personal biases play too prominent a role. We risk choosing for proxy attributes: things that are easier to judge than the actual skillset and attitude we need. Paraphrasing the joke we are searching for our lost keys under the street light because there is better light under it, not because it is more likely that we lost them there. Exaggerating to make the example, in the USA for many hiring officers overconfident male middle-age W.A.S.P. candidates present proxy attributes that can be confused for talent proxies, but that are no guarantee of skill or likely success. That is one in the long list of ways in which well-meaning hard-working professionals err when searching to hire a star performer.
A possible way to cut this Gordian knot could be to design a single hiring decision maker, but supported by a diverse but small interview panel asked to provide their input to the decision but not to decide themselves. Every individual in the panel can be asked to focus on specific areas of performance, attitude and skill during the interview and when providing feedback. Ideally the panel would interview the shortlisted candidates (too expensive to select from a crowd), then they provide their input collectively and anonymously to the hiring officer so his bias towards the people in the panel does not skew the balance. Then the hiring officer conducts the final interview round and finally makes the decision of hiring or not any of the candidates.
Anecdotally the few times I have tried this approach it has worked well and resulted in hiring people neither I individually or a committee would have chosen and that later on shined in the roles for which we hired them. My conjecture is that this combined approach can help balancing individual biases and avoid the lack of big weaknesses trap, keeping the organization aimed at finding exceptional strength and talent.
The Adaptive Executive 