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As one of the people I was talking to said, “Hire hard so that you can manage easy.” What you want to think about is not simply the technical capabilities or whatever it might be of that person. Ask yourself whether that person fits the culture that you’re trying to create in your organization. Because if they don’t fit the culture, there’s going to be a problem.
So what we do see in hiring people – you want to think about whether they’re sort of T-shaped. Whether they’re very deep in terms of what they know, whatever that area of expertise might be. And whether they’re very broad. That is, they have a general sense, they can collaborate, they have a sense of the kinds of issues – in some ways, they’re open-minded and will over time develop a sort of a general business kind of perspective. So that’s what you’re kind of ideally looking for when you’re looking to hire people. It really is worth paying attention to sort of the soft stuff about them and not simply the hard stuff about them, and will they really fit into that team and that culture that you’re trying to create.
I think one of the things we don’t do is we don’t ask people enough about what they actually did and who they did it with and how they handled various situations. We just look at their resumes and assume we know what it means, whatever it says, that I worked here, they did this. You actually want to dig deep and listen to how they think about what they were doing in their work and who they worked with and maybe ask them a couple examples of: What do you do when you don’t know something? Because I think it’s very important to understand how people are going to respond when they actually are stressed or when they don’t know. Do they know how to ask for help, do they reach out?
The other thing that’s very important – it’s difficult to do in this legal environment – is to try to do some due diligence to find out, you know, you have to look and see and talk to people who know them, who know what it was like to work with them. And I think, again, the more you get closer to the behaviors – what they actually did and who they did it with – I think you’re much more likely to have the right kind of data to make good decisions.