Steve Krull is the CEO and cofounder of Be Found Online, an award-winning digital marketing agency.
Building your company culture starts in the interview process—soft skills versus hard skills and hiring overall good humans. My own company has evolved our hiring process over the last five or six years, which stemmed from a big mistake we made in hiring somebody many moons ago. They didn’t last more than a few months, and we looked at ourselves in the mirror and said, “How the heck did we let them through?”
The answer: We let them through based solely on hard skills and didn’t evaluate them for soft skills. We had a need and wanted to fill it ASAP. We soon realized that this was a mistake.
Interestingly enough, their manager at the time afterward said, and I’m paraphrasing, “I knew I should have trusted my gut. I should never have let that person in here. Everybody else loved them, but there was something about them I didn’t think would be a fit.”
Now, there were plenty of resources to ensure a more effective interview process, but we simply didn’t use most of them. We thought, “Oh, we can talk to people and figure out who the good ones are.” In this case, it was to our detriment.
But we learned from this experience and evolved our hiring process accordingly. So now, we ask everybody on the interviewing team how good of a fit they think a new candidate will be. Questions that can help you ascertain this:
• How good of a fit do they seem?
• How well do you think they’d play with others?
• Frankly, are they going to be a really annoying coworker?
An Optimized Hiring Process
Our hiring process has evolved to more of a three-step process—one which I hope you find useful:
1. First, have HR perform a pre-screen interview. This does not need to be a full-on emotional intelligence test, but they can get into some of the emotional intelligence questions that are important to understand about a candidate.
2. Include the team in a group interview and ask everybody for their assessment. Then, as a team, evaluate their hard and soft skills.
3. Include yourself in the interview process. I insist on interviewing every candidate myself because, though I hate to say it, I consider myself the steward of our company culture, and I want to see how each person can help foster our culture.
There is a caveat to that third step: If they are a direct report to me, I will conduct a more thorough interview to evaluate their hard and soft skills. It’s a bit of a funky discussion, but for the soft skills, I will include questions to gauge emotional intelligence, such as, “How would you resolve a dispute between two colleagues?” or “Tell me about a time someone criticized your work.”
Based on your interview (or series of interviews), I recommend that you give a thumbs up or a thumbs down as a team. These days, for my team, we really want to be unanimous. So, if we’re scratching our heads about anybody, it’s typically a no.
When you’re hiring, I think it’s important to have a unanimous decision and ensure that the candidate has both the necessary hard and soft skills to perform the job well and fit within the company culture. Don’t make the same mistake we did years ago and rush into hiring someone just because they have the right technical qualifications.
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