Dear Tony,

I am hiring someone to be in a leader role for a team of 10 people. I know I’m going to have many qualified candidates, some of which I know personally. I also expect several excellent candidates from the outside to apply. I know there are lots of ways to rate people, and we have all those tools from HR, but how do you go about hiring for senior positions when there are so many qualified candidates.

-Overwhelmed in Orlando

Dear Overwhelmed,

First off, I think HR and those professionals who work in HR are in thankless roles. It seems like no one likes to work with HR group, until you are really in trouble and need their expertise, and afterward you realize you couldn’t exist without their help. So a shoutout to HR is probably warranted in this question.

I would take all the interview forms from HR and use their process to its fullest. Including interview panels to get broad perspective, unbiased assessments, and a mapping of candidate’s capabilities to the job requirements. My guess is from what you said you have plenty of these kinds of tools. My advice is to use them, even if it takes a little while longer to hire someone. The cost of making a suboptimal hire is orders of magnitude greater than waiting a week to get it right.

Now, your question I believe is really asking that even after using these tools, you still have several outstanding candidates. So here is what I would do in addition to these tools:

Rate your top candidates on 4 criteria:

1. Emotional maturity – do they exhibit a fact pattern of performance under stress, dealing with conflict, and mature work relationships?
2. Lifelong learning – do they regularly update their “operating system” with more knowledge, curious about how things work, build strong relationships to learn faster?
3. Initiative – do they have a history of initiating things? Or waiting to be asked to initiate things?
4. Rapid Mastery – do they show a history of quickly adding value, and adapting to circumstances in a relatively timely manner?

The above four criteria are what I have seen separate the good from the great.

Another concept you might want to keep in mind is not just “who can do the job”, but “who needs this job for their development to eventually take on a senior role in the firm?” To figure this out, you need to talk to your boss and others involved in succession planning. It might make the difference in who you hire for the good of the firm.

One last idea from social and economic scientist Daniel Kahneman (“Thinking Fast and Slow” book fame). When he was 22 years old, he designed an interview process for the Israeli military. Hiring leaders did not want process to impede their judgement, but military leaders wanted more process control to improve hiring. Daniel split the difference and created a process to quantitatively evaluate every candidate (the HR process above), but then also asked each interviewer to “close your eyes after you have met everyone, and imagine who should get the job”. Compare the quantitative to the “close your eye process” and between the two create a debate on who to offer the job to. The critical aspect of this process is to do 100% of the quantitative assessment BEFORE doing the close your eyes process. It is imperative to stay non-judgmental when evaluating quantitatively according to Kahneman.

Hiring the right people and surrounding yourself with great talent is like a superpower. Getting good at hiring is a must for any successful executive.

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