November 18, 2014: The Slippery Slope of Fit

This is part 5 of a 7-part series on the hiring process.

Your candidate has met your qualifications, has the experience you want, and shows the right attitude.  Actually, 3 of the 10 people you interviewed meet these criteria.  What would differentiate between them?

The concept of fit is poorly defined and often discussed.  It is essentially the answer to this question: When the individual joins the team, will his ability to interact with the team hinder or help the team?  There are 2 main schools of thought on fit.  One is that all team members should be alike to reduce friction.  The other is that each team needs to have certain capabilities, and adding a new team member should add another capability or enhance a capability that already exists.  Like a pair of jeans is not all denim, you need people who are the stitching, the buttons, the zipper, the rivets, to make a complete team.

There are managers who prefer to have their teams not question them.  To them, a team player is a person who does what he is told, period.  These managers usually prefer homogeneous teams.  There is a value and stability to it.  In some cases, where the objective is to maintain the status quo, this is perfectly appropriate.  It is dangerous, of course, because things do change, and if your people can't talk to you about it, you'll be managing into a vacuum.  Most businesses that are successful in the long term can not manage to the status quo.  Thus, most teams who attempt to do so will find they are not successful in the long run.

Other managers prefer a little bit of rivalry, a little bit of diversity in the team.  It provides a livelier team dynamic, and it's easier to manage a team with a little diversity because everyone gets a good feel for where he fits.

Other managers prefer a lot of diversity, the more the better.  It is an open secret that many many more engineers are male than female.  Or that fashion designers tend to be women or gay men.  Or that trades such as carpentry and plumbing are dominated by men.  My teams have been engineering teams, and I would usually receive 1 resume out of 60 or so that were from a female candidate.

I am obviously of the type that prefers a wide diversity in the workplace.  If a female candidate meets my qualification minimum, I'll interview her.  One team I managed ranged in age from early 60s to early 20s in age, very diverse in ethnic background, and we even had a little gender diversity.  That team gelled more and got along better than any homogeneous team I have ever seen.  There are all sorts of reasons why, a good topic for another time.

Now, back to our question of fit.  What kind of team do you need?  Will your team be tasked with doing the exact same thing day after day?  Is there a personality profile that all very successful employees have who do that job?  Does your team have set of tasks they must be able to complete, but not know from day to day what they will find?  What personality types might do best in that circumstance?  Or is your team completely self-directed, creating something out of nothing, and must improvise as a matter of course?

The more your team has to improvise, the more diversity you need in your team to be successful.  It's not optional.  If you hire people with all the same skill sets (in this finite world we live in, nobody can do everything) and they have to improvise, you will miss the creativity and leaps forward that you get with a diverse workforce.

There are many aspects of fit that used to be common 40 years ago but are no longer legal.  You can not make a hiring decision based on a person's race, gender, age (if over 40), national origin, etc.  You probably know the list already.  It is easy and dangerous to start speaking in code about these things where "energy" = youth, and "good speaker" = talks like a white person.  Do not get sucked into that trap.  There lies danger both of the legal and functional kind.  So, once you put all of these illegal and immoral things off the table, what are you left with to determine fit?

You have energy.  I once hired a white-haired man with 35 years of work experience who was switching careers.  He had more enthusiasm for the job that most of the people we interviewed.  He was qualified, energetic, and understood that he would be starting on the bottom.

You have attitude.  The person who sells himself as being dependable (but it sounds like he's plodding along) vs the person who sells himself as being a problem-solver where nothing is ever good enough.  You may need some plodders, some people who lack ambition or ability beyond the role you are currently hiring for.  You may need to bring some people into the team who have ambition or are potential leadership candidates later.

You have speaking choices.  Is the candidate happy?  Does she make a joke or two during the interview?  Is the person going to have fun bantering with the team?  Is the person, conversely, going to waste a large portion of the day bantering with the team?  Does the candidate answer questions coherently?  Does she use profanity?  Is that a plus or a minus for your work environment?

The question of fit is a tricky one.  You first have to know what kind of team you are building.  Once you have a vision of that, then hire the person for the team you want, not the team you have.  As people roll in and out of your team, you will eventually end up with people you chose.  So choose your new people to make your team into the juggernaut it can be, with an appropriately diverse set of skills and abilities.