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It’s Only Common Sense: How Leaders Find Great People

There is an old saying that goes, “If you want someone to climb a tree, don’t hire a horse; hire a squirrel.” It’s kind of an inelegant quote, but you get the message.

To prepare for this column, my third in a series on leadership, I again looked through my library of business books to see what truly successful leaders are doing and saying when it comes to hiring great people. What kind of people do they hire? What qualities do they look for? And how do they match prospective candidates to their company’s needs?

Let’s start with arguably the most successful investor in the country: Warren Buffet. Regarding hiring the right people, Buffet looks for three things in every person he hires: integrity, energy, and intelligence. While energy and intelligence are important and germane to hiring the right person, he heavily focuses on integrity. Buffet says, “If you don’t have the first one, the other two will kill you. If you hire somebody without integrity, you really want them to be dumb and lazy.” By this, he means that nothing matters without integrity. He goes on to say, “IQ, Integrity, and energy cannot be taught.” People either have these qualities, or they do not.

Another industry leader, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, says that it would be impossible to be successful in the internet space without extraordinary people. His company has three basic questions they ask themselves about the people they hire before they hire:

1. Will you admire this person?
2. Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they’re entering?
3. Along what dimensions can this person be a superstar?

Bezos goes on to say, “The bar has to continuously go up. I ask people to visualize the company five years from now. At that point, each of us should look around and say, ‘The standards are so high now, I’m glad I got in when I did!’”

I always like to say that you should hire in the context of the overall team. How great will be the team be with this new hire? I have seen more than one company ruined by hiring the wrong person at the wrong time. In one particular company I worked with, the person hired had a great deal of talent but was kind of a lousy person. The owner, who was enamored with this guy, pushed him on the rest of the team. The team had met with the candidate and gave him a thumbs down. The owner hired him anyway, and his presence was so disruptive that the team lost all of the passion and momentum they had built up and went out of business in 24 months.

Sallie Krawcheck, former head of Merrill Lynch, said when it comes to hiring for the good of the team, “I don’t hire the best person for the job; instead, I look to put the best team together.” She hires for the team. If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. It’s a whole team you are putting on the field at one time. It is the best team that runs a company to success, not a bunch of individuals with their one individual agendas.

Another thing Krawcheck says, which I believe is probably most one of the important lessons of all: “I look for people who make me uncomfortable. I look for people with qualities and backgrounds that are additive to rather than the same as the rest of the team. Hiring in this way makes the workplace less comfortable for the team but is exactly the point.” If it is the right person and the rest of the team understands that they will all benefit from this person joining their team, they will embrace and take advantage of their differences, particularly when they are complementary.

And finally, one last bit of advice from Zappos’ Tony Hsieh (who, by the way, is now a part of Amazon):

“A lot of our job candidates come from out of town. We’ll pick them up at the airport in the Zappos Shuttle, give them a tour, and then they’ll spend the rest of the day interviewing. At the end of the day of interviews, the recruiter will circle back to the shuttle driver and ask how they were treated (by the candidate). It doesn’t matter how well the day of interviews went; if our shuttle driver wasn’t treated well, then we won’t hire that person.”

I love, love, love that! I think that is one of the most significant benchmarks of hiring that I have ever come across. It makes perfect sense, especially for Zappos, which is all about customer service. They are a company renowned for the great lengths their people will go to satisfy and elate their customers. Someday, I’ll tell you the famous red sneaker story.

And just one more piece of advice that I like to live by when looking for people to hire: Hire slowly and fire quickly.

It’s only common sense.

Dan Beaulieu is president of D.B. Management Group.