Hiring for Core Values - not "Fit"

“Tell me about yourself outside of work.”

This question typically comes up towards the end of interviews when you’re out of topics and have a few minutes to kill. It’s often your chance to decide if you would get along with this person in the office - the “would I like to have a beer with them?” test.

Yes - there is value to taking into consideration if someone would get along with you or the other people who will be on their team. But this approach often becomes an opportunity to latch onto superficial similarities between you and the candidate.

• “You golf too? What’s your handicap?”

• “That’s great - I have kids that age. Maybe we should get them together.”

• “I also went to State! Go Cats!”

This question leads to the practice of hiring for “fit.” It’s natural to gravitate towards the person with whom you have the most in common. If a few candidates seem equally qualified, what’s the harm in hiring the person you think you’d like to hang out with?

Tips for interviewing for Core Values

You’re Not Trying to Clone Yourself

In my experience, a major unintended consequence of overvaluing common ground with a candidate is that you often end up with a team that “looks” just like you. They’ll be the same gender, the same age, the same race. Maybe they went to the same school, had the same background, or even live in the same approximate part of town. You’ll say “they remind me of me from 5 or 10 years ago.” And what’s wrong with that? You’re a pretty good employee, right? Why shouldn’t the company have more of you?

Unfortunately, while filling your team with candidates who share your interests might lead to fun recaps of the past weekend during Monday staff meetings, it can lead to a homogenous team that falls short of the needs of you and your department.

Here’s a rough tip - if you look around at your team and they don’t approximate the makeup of the population of the area from which you hired them, you may need to adjust your interview process.

Risk 1: Missing out on great candidates

The first consequence of this interviewing approach is that great candidates can be overlooked.

Most managers would honestly self-assess their hiring style as bringing on the best person for the role. After all, the right hire makes their life easier as a manager. The problem doesn’t lie with the intent of the hiring manager; the problem is that the very process of interviewing for “fit” may screen out the best hires because they lack those superficial similarities. They’re not bringing on the best person for the role; they’re bringing on the best person for the role who also is a lot like themselves.

Since I’ve joined my current company, I’ve had to hire to fill our entire accounting team; I have only one holdover from when I first joined. Had I prioritized candidates who would want to go out for happy hour and talk about the Red Sox, I would have missed out on almost everyone we hired, and the department would be worse off for it.

Risk 2: Group think

The second consequence is that studies indicate homogeneous teams simply don’t perform as well as diverse teams.

Frances Frei & Anne Morris cover this in the second and fourth chapters of their book Unleashed (a great read which I highly recommend), more completely than I can. But the gist is that people with similar backgrounds often bring similar solutions to the workplace. If you clone yourself across a four person team, you won’t get four points of view; you’ll get one point of view four times.

In contrast, individuals with varied backgrounds will possess different information, and experiences, and can help you break free from a room full of common perspectives. The more diverse the set of experiences, the more wide ranging will be the set of ideas and potential solutions available to your department.

I had a former boss who always repeated the mantra “best idea wins.” He didn’t care who brought forth the suggestion - he always pushed the best ones forward. So if the best ideas are going to win, wouldn’t you want to ensure you have created a team that is more likely to come up with the best ideas?

Core Values are the new “Beer Test”

Your role isn’t to ensure a new hire “fits” with you and your hobbies and history. Your responsibility is to ensure someone is a “fit” with the entire organization.

Fortunately, many companies have already defined the ideal characteristics and standards of behavior for their team members: their Core Values. Typically these are four to six character traits that guide how a Team Member should conduct themselves with each other, with your customers, and with other key stakeholders. Core Values stay true across a company no matter the individual’s role or even the business model. Our perspective is that if someone doesn’t embody our Core Values, they are unlikely to realize long term success at our company.

Different businesses have different sets of characteristics - there isn’t a right set of Core Values, but only a right set of Core Values for YOUR business. If applied properly, Core Values are defined clearly (in onboarding materials, on the website, in common spaces in the Company) and are cited specifically during employee recognition and promotions. Those who best exemplify the company’s Core Values are those that everyone at your organization is eager to work with, regardless of their age, gender, ethnicity, college, or favorite hobbies.

In our case, our Core Values are:

• Delight the Customer

• Be Jerk Free

• Do What You Say

• Be the Force of Change

• One Mission; One Team

Core Values are a Job Requirement

Like many, when I interview, I dive deep into the “hard skills” and experiences of the individual to vet if they are the right candidate for a role. I ask for multiple examples that demonstrate the experiences we need and press for specifics to confirm the depth of the candidate’s involvement in that activity or achievement.

I recently was seeking someone to help me with the Company’s Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) work. When interviewing, I wasn’t taking the candidate’s resume at face value, but instead dug into specific examples to build as much confidence as possible that someone’s skill set matches the needs of the role.

Interviewing for Core Values should be no different.

Let’s highlight one of our Core Values that I viewed as particularly important for this FP&A Role: One Mission, One Team. Through this we are saying that the company, while made up of different departments and roles, is ONE entity, for which success is realized together. A team member in a forecasting and analysis role will demonstrate this Core Value while building effective working relationships with peers across the organization, both to gather the data she needs and to communicate the results of her analysis and reporting.

Assessing our candidates’ embrace of this Core Value was as critical as assessing the hard skills. I couldn’t simply rely on a candidate telling me that they “were a people person”. Instead, I used a sequence of questions to let the candidate share her specific actions so I could reach the same level of confidence I did in her forecasting experience, including these below.

• When did you work with departments outside of your own?

• When you first joined this company, what did you do, specifically, to learn about the business?

• What is an example of a time when you had difficulty building a relationship with someone outside your department? What did you do to resolve it?

• What did you learn from that experience to apply to future relationships?

• What’s the strongest relationship you built outside of your core team?

Your Turn

Not consciously evaluating Core Values during the interview process has been the source of most of my hiring mistakes over the years. I can teach someone the details of our business, and share best practices in Excel. But if someone doesn’t have a customer-focused mindset or isn’t accountable for their actions, I won’t ever be able to change that.

If this is your first time explicitly interviewing for Core Values, there are a few specific tactics you can use to avoid my pitfalls and improve your likelihood of success.

1) Put your Core Values in your line of sight

This is not a metaphor. I mean literally put your Core Values in your line of sight. This is a little easier with virtual interviews, when you can open your company’s website up to the Core Values pages and leave it on one of your screens. In an in-person interview, try just jotting them down at the top of the candidates’ resume, if that’s the document you’re otherwise taking notes on.

Like so many changes I’ve discussed in these articles, you’re trying to build some muscle memory around a new activity. What easier way to remind you to evaluate a candidate’s consistency with your company’s most important behavioral norms than to have them staring at you for the length of the interview?

2) Build your question sequence ahead of time

I like to think that I’m a reasonably quick thinker on my feet. But organizing talking points in writing ahead of time is like pressing the Easy Button, whether I do it for a negotiation, a difficult performance review, or an interview. If I know I want to dig into a particular set of hard skills, and handle it similarly across candidates, I’ll type up an outline of those questions and carry it with me into a candidate’s interview.

Handle your questions around your company’s Core Values similarly. As with the example above, you can probably imagine how certain of these Core Values will present themselves for a person in this role. In that case, build an outline of your questions ahead of time and, again, bring it with you to the interview (either print it out for an in-person interview or pull it up on your screen for a virtual interview). Until interviewing for Core Values becomes a consistent habit, don’t leave this critical part of your process to chance.

3) Bring a second person into the interview

We employ the topgrading interview process at our company, which prescribes a tandem interview in every hiring process. There are a number of benefits of a second set of eyes and ears during a conversation, and as it relates to not hiring for “fit”, this will help you in two ways.

First, it adds some diversity into the interview room. It’s more difficult to clone yourself in a new hire if there are two people to clone. Second, you can ask the second person to be especially focused on the Core Value questions. While both people should be assessing how candidates demonstrate both hard skills and adherence to your company’s Core Values, assigning accountability to one of the two participants in the tandem makes it more likely that those questions are remembered.

Start with your next interview

Assuming your company’s Core Values are well established, start deploying these tactics in your next hiring process. Be mindful of the trap of hiring for “fit”, and, as always, reach out with any questions.