Making the Right Hiring Decisions for Your Organization
Peter Cappelli
Let’s talk about hiring. For many people, this is the most consequential thing that businesses/employers do.
You getting hired, for example—you hiring other people. It really matters to them, it really matters to their lives, and of course, it matters to the health of the organization going forward. Certainly one of the most consequential things any organization does. Let’s talk about how to do it well, because there’s a million ways you can do it wrong.
The very first thing we want to do is make sure we’ve got agreement up front as to what we actually need done in this job. It used to be a generation or so ago there were specialists in human resources who would come in and answer this question for you. We more or less got rid of those people, so now the hiring manager and maybe some of the team have to figure that out.
First thing to recognize, you may think you agree on this, but unless you actually talk it through, you find the people actually are pretty different in what they think they want. And the downside, if you’ve got that problem, is you just add up what everybody wants, and you end up with a description that no one could fill.
So the most important thing is right up front. What are we actually looking for? Let’s get agreement on that.
Let’s write it down.
And the second thing is to recognize that what we really ought to be looking for is evidence that the person, the candidate, can actually do that job. Have they done it before, for example? Do they have evidence from classes they’ve taken that they understand at least the material? Nobody’s going to be able probably to step in and just do a job from the very first moment, but it is important to understand whether this person is going to need a lot of ramp-up time or not. So we want to look at evidence that indicates they can actually do the job.
The other thing we want to recognize is that many of our maybe implicit judgments about people are pretty bad. We’re pretty biased about this. And I think, frankly, one of the worst biases comes when we start talking about culture fit, which is a very common topic these days. Here’s the problem with it: we typically don’t define what our culture is; we don’t define what culture fit looks like. So what that means is that every individual person is making their own judgment, and when given a vague criteria like that, we tend to hire people who look like us. We’re not doing that on purpose; it doesn’t mean we’re trying to be biased, but that tends to be what happens.
So, to avoid that, particularly in a context where we care about diversity in hiring, we need to be systematic, first, about what we’re looking for; second, about what we think is criteria indicating that somebody can actually do the job; and third is, let’s focus on objective measures rather than assessments that are person- specific, my own judgment about how I think this person is going to fit.
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