April 12, 2012
According to Mark Murphy in Hiring for Attitude, “ …a lack of skills or technical competence only accounted for 11 percent of new-hire failures. When a new hire was wrong for a company it was due to attitude, not lack of skills… Our study showed that somebody was a bad hire for attitudinal reasons 89 percent of the time.”
Most interviews are great at assessing skills, but figuring out attitude is more difficult. There are three main steps for hiring for attitude.
- Identify attitudes that high performers at your company share. For Southwest airlines, it’s a humble, fun attitude, for other companies it’s a relentless drive for continuous improvement. We’ve heard a variety of desired attitudes from clients from “grace under pressure” to “relentless pursuit of goals” to “excellence without attitude.”
- Ask candidates open-ended questions about situations where the desired attitudes come into play. For example, “Can you tell me about a customer you found particularly difficult?” or “Could you tell me about a time where you got an assignment that didn’t make sense” or “Could you tell me about a time when you had to think outside the box?” The key here is not to lead the candidate to your desired response (for example, saying “and how you solved it”).
- Listen closely to their answers. Are they showing you behaviors that match up with how your high performers would act? A best practice we’ve found at Mom Corps LA is to take copious notes for later review. Your job in an interview is to listen and to write. You can evaluate and decide later.
As usual, the bulk of the work is done ahead of time. We guess the lesson is don’t interview unprepared!
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