Culture Fit vs. Skill Set: Who Should You Hire?

Culture Fit vs. Skill Set: Who Should You Hire?

Sean: How do you identify who’s going to be a good leader or who’s your potential leader? How do you process these things? Because we make wrong decisions about putting some people in the leadership role, and all they want is the title, the perks, right? And not about serving others. How do you know who’s in it because they want to serve other people?

Michael: Yeah, that’s a great question. Mean Shawn, our company, we’re not involved in that process. We get to an organization after a leader’s already in place. Now, do I have my opinions? Can I tell pretty early on if I think somebody has what it takes to be a dynamic leader? So a transformative leader? Yeah, absolutely. But our team is not involved in that process. I will say that one of the things we work with teams on in rebel culture is around hiring and what’s your hiring process looks like? All of this stuff goes back to culture. You’re hiring process has to resemble. It has to mirror what it looks like to actually work there. So if your organization values data, your hiring process has to be rife with exercises where the potential leader is using data. If you value feedback, you’ve got to provide the person with feedback and you’re taking notes on meticulous notes on how well this person responds to that feedback. I worked with an organization a few years back that valued feedback and coaching above all else. We did some interviews. I helped them design some of their materials and we did some interviews. And it was actually a really interesting process because folks would present potential employees, present performance tasks for us, and then we’d give them feedback. The feedback and their response to it held more weight than the performance task. Everybody was smart. Everybody did a good job in their performance task. What was more valuable was whether folks were nodding heads when we were giving them feedback. Were they taking notes? Were they asking follow-up questions with a reflection on their own work? The folks who did move much higher and much further in the process than the folks who didn’t and acted as if that process, part of the process was a formality. So to answer your question, organizations have to hire people. Are there going to be some folks who just want the title, that slipped through? Absolutely. I’ve seen it. I know you have as well. The hiring process has to mirror the culture and you’ll weed folks out right away, or at least many folks. And just recently, somebody, a team we were working with got a quote-unquote rock star to interview for them. They realized right away that this person was more interested in money than doing a great job. And money’s great. I’m not knocking money, but this person was very focused on the dollars and cents, and this organization wanted somebody who is more focused on their product and their end results, and they didn’t hire the person. And the person was shocked because of their reputation and in that industry, it didn’t align with the organization’s values and beliefs to hire him. And so he didn’t get the job.

Sean: That is how important that is. I agree with you, 110%. Your hiring process is super-duper important. It is critical to guard your house, and your culture. You know, in the preshow I mentioned that we are having a difficult time hiring people. We got so many applicants, so many, but it’s hard to hire the ones who fit our culture. And the reason behind that is we are very intentional about our culture and SEO Hacker as well, and we are willing to be penalized. Because the workload is getting tough, we are willing to be penalized for that, for keeping our culture intact.