I have been thinking about writing an un-resume.  This would be the list of all the things I have done wrong.  It is a long and sometimes scary list.  I always tell people a resume should never be more than two pages long.  Unfortunately my un-resume would break that rule!

My Un-Resume

If I wrote that resume, I would have to have a sub-section on hiring mistakes I made during 15 years in sales leadership.

  • I hired someone just like me but discovered he lacked the character to work hard.
  • I hired a highly experienced person who was not willing to learn new ideas.
  • I hired a pilot that was un-coachable and had anger issues.
  • I hired someone I liked personally that proved to be a professional liar.

The lessons I learned from my hiring mistakes made me better at finding talent.  As time went on I realized hiring someone who had the skills to do the job was the easiest part of the equation.

Competence Mistakes

Competence is easy to measure.  Metrics abound for most jobs and my ability to investigate a person’s competence to do the job was high.  In fact, when someone failed because of competence it usually stemmed from my poor decisions.

  • Right person-wrong job:  They failed because I put a good person in a job their talents were not suited for.
  • Right person-unclear expectations:  They failed because I did not lay out clear job expectations from the Day 1.  They were left floundering and went in the wrong direction.
  • Right person-poor training/coaching:  They failed because I did not spend adequate time up front training them. I had the attitude that they needed to learn on their own like I did, or I put them with a mentor who had that attitude.

Character Mistakes

While some of my hiring mistakes were around competence, most resulted from a character issue I failed to identify in the hiring process.  I’ve talked about Hiring For Character previously.  But, how do I handle a character issue that I missed during the interviews.

When determining whether I missed a character issue I learned to evaluate the individual using Dr. Henry Cloud’s descriptions from his book Necessary Endings. (My April Book of the Month)

3 Types of Personal Character

    • A Wise Person
    • A Foolish Person
    • An Evil Person

“The mature person meets the demands of life, while the immature person demands that life meets her demands.”  -Dr. Henry Cloud

  • A Wise Person—Have Hope!
    • They appreciate feedback.
    • They own their performance.
    • Your relationship is strengthened as a result of giving them feedback.
    • They express real concern about the results of their behaviors on others.
    • After feedback, they go into future-oriented problem-solving mode.
  • A Foolish Person—Have Strength!
    • The fool does the opposite:  he rejects feedback, resists it, explains it away, and does nothing to adjust to meet its requirements.
    • The fool tries to adjust the truth so he does not have to adjust to it.
  • What to do with a foolish person?
    • Stop treating them like a wise person and establish consequences.
    • Make them feel the cost of their lack of performance.
    • Documentation and follow through are vital.
  • An Evil Person—Get Help!
    • They are intentionally divisive and enjoy seeing others fail.
    • Don’t expect them to change by giving in to them, reasoning with them or giving them another chance to hurt you.
  • What to do with an Evil person?
    • Bring in reinforcements:  HR, Legal, etc.
    • Go into protection mode.

The Bottom Line:

Hiring is not a science.  There is risk involved. The process I implement as a leader to hire my team is simply a way to limit my risk.  There is no way to eliminate hiring mistakes because we are dealing with flawed and sinful human beings.

Hiring On A WHIM by Garrett Miller is a book that will help any leader reduce the risk involved in hiring because it explores the character of a candidate.  A lot the examples on my un-resume could have been avoided using the system in this book.

Dr. Cloud’s book is a great resource once a person is hired and you are determining whether you made a hiring mistake.

The better I got at hiring people of character and quickly ending things with my hiring mistakes, the more quickly I built a Low Maintenance Team.

Question:

What have you seen as an early clue that someone was a hiring mistake?