Risky Hires
I was meeting with Kelie’s fantastic 10th St. Talent team the other day and they asked – and demanded I be honest – if I actually read all of the extensive background material they pass along when they recommend I interview a candidate.
I confessed that I do not. Not because I don’t think it’s valuable, nor because I’m a lazy degenerate (though some might disagree), but because I trust that they do, and I trust their judgment. After all, they have no incentive to pass along a candidate that they didn’t believe is qualified and likely to be a good fit.
What I do do is read just enough to understand who I’m meeting and why.
That’s because the only thing I do when I’m interviewing a candidate for a job opening these days (at the risk of revealing a secret to getting a job with Permanent Equity) is go on a 30-minute walk around town with them and see if they can hold an engaging conversation the entire time. If yes, then I usually think we should hire them.
My reasoning is that if you can hold an engaging conversation with a stranger for 30 minutes, it means you’re entertaining, likable, and curious. And being entertaining and likable and curious are the three traits that make for the most successful professionals.
That brought us to the idea of risky hires – individuals who might not have the skills or experience for the job. Because if you’re a recruiter, you’re probably on thin ice recommending someone for a position for which they might not be qualified even if they are those three other things. So I told my own story of not really being qualified for any of the jobs I’ve been hired to do.
A concept I’ve been toying with recently (and it might be too cute) is something I call skillability – a portmanteau mash-up of skill, ability, and scalability. The idea is that no one you hire will have exactly what you need today and you don’t know what you’ll need in the future. So what you’re looking for in a job search is someone with skillability i.e., a track record of building skills and scaling them into ever more important areas.
The thing about risk, remember, is that it’s negative reward. Variance. Without variance, upside is limited. So another way to look at a “risky” hire is that it’s a hire with more potential upside. And another way to look at a “low-risk” hire is that you might fill the role, but perhaps no more.
Our good friend Graham from Chick-fil-A shared an insight from NASA recently (we all went space crazy in April thanks to Artemis II and Project Hail Mary) that one of the most important traits of a team leader is a sense of humor because “Laughter, as much as courage, will sustain astronauts on their long quest to Mars.”
Sounds like I’m not the only one who thinks funny stories are the best.
– Tim
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