You hired William, a change agent to shake things up at your company, someone who can “speak truth to power.” In interviews, he talked up building consensus and creating change without overstepping his bounds or badmouthing past employers and their challenges.
Turns out the hiring process dealt you a change agent lemon.
William is a little too enthusiastic about his role, a little too blunt in his candor. Rather than being helpful, his criticism starts to annoy and sounds like he’s pretty down on the company. Maybe there’s just too much change on his plate. You and your team start to tune out his opinions.
Eventually, you cut your losses and let William go. Never mind the costs of making a bad hire. Now you have a choice.
Do you look for another candidate with the same skill and personality sets, simply chalking up William’s revealed flaws as one-time flukes? Or do you keep the skills yet only source candidates with distinctly non-William personality traits?
Don’t just hire the opposite
In situations like this, too many hiring managers overcompensate, concluding that every last personality aspect of a bad hire like William led to his ultimate failure. Taking a lesson from Seinfeld’s George Costanza, they shun anyone who remotely reminds them of William and his annoyingly critical personality.
That approach may work on a “show about nothing,” but in real-world hiring, this tactic can create an entirely new hell for your recruiting.
Yes, by all means, reconsider your thought process after a failed hire. But why do a complete about face just because you were burned once? On the rebound from a pushy, overly critical hire like William, I’ve seen too many hiring managers look for a timid candidate who will never rock the boat. So much for your agent of change! Ultimately, the timid new hire will fail too, but for entirely different reasons.
Overcompensating limits your candidate options
When hiring managers overcompensate after a failed hire, they often say things like, “I want someone who has nothing in common with William. If someone reminds me of William, even a little bit, I won’t consider them.”
They take their (now tarnished) image of the entire person, attributing every trait (positive, negative or neutral) as problematic. Think Parks and Recreation’s Ron Swanson, who dates only brunettes. As he puts it:
“Why do I only date brunettes? You know sometimes you eat chicken and you get food poisoning, and then even the sight of chicken makes you sick? My first wife is my blonde chicken.”
Like Ron, hiring managers can overgeneralize out of fear of previous failure. You can just hear the conversation: “The last person talked too much, this candidate went overlong answering an interview question—so they’re out... The failed hired worked outside our industry—so don’t bother bringing in another outsider.”
It’s an unworkable way to evaluate candidates, shallow and ineffective. It may look rigorous and exclusive, because you end up with an intimate group of “qualified” candidates. But you’re ultimately ruling out candidates for traits, not flaws. In the end, you are actually removing any semblance of rigor from your hiring process and severely limiting your candidate pool.
How to strike the right balance
Instead of swinging back and forth between extremes, take a step back and remember that business impact always takes priority. Never ignore that out of fear of past failed hires.
So before any new hiring process:
- Consider what you’re trying to achieve with the position.
- Be clear on big picture goals.
- Balance each goal against (potential) tradeoffs in dealing with a less-than-ideal personality trait or characteristic of the candidate.
Finally, take a cold hard honest look at your open req. See if you altered the position or evaluation criteria simply to “hire the opposite,” i.e., “Not another William!” You may find your own overcompensation bias creeping in.
