The first person I ever hired, I hired wrong. I hired him because he ticked the technical boxes. I should have hired the one whose technical skills were a bit weaker but whose temperament fit the team and the business. I would have taught them the technical stuff. We would have been fine.
He told me, to my face, in a one-to-one meeting designed to address some declining performance, that he had never been more bored in a job in his life. Top marks for honesty. He was, in fact, correct about himself.
The moment I knew
The real diagnostic moment had come a few weeks before that meeting. It was a fire-drill afternoon: the phones were ringing, a project was leaking heat in every direction, multiple emails firing across the floor, the whole team running. He had clocked off at his usual time and gone home. I came back into the office that evening to sort the mess out. He arrived the next morning as if nothing had happened.
That was the moment, although it took me another fortnight to admit it to myself. The behaviour wasn’t laziness exactly. He had done his hours. It was that the business had no claim on his attention beyond his hours. He had not internalised the work as something he was responsible for. He was technically present and emotionally elsewhere, and you cannot manage your way past that.
We terminated the contract a couple of weeks later. It was the right call and I should have made it sooner.
What I should have done in the interview
What I had got wrong, six months earlier, was the interview itself. I was new to hiring, I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I had decided, wrongly, that what the business needed was the strongest technical candidate available. I optimised for the wrong variable. I had a candidate in the same round who was less technically polished but visibly the better team-and-business fit, and I passed on them to take the one with the better CV.
The technical skill was teachable. The fit wasn’t. That lesson has been the loudest thing in my head every hiring round I have run since.
The rule I use now
When I’m hiring into a marketing team I run two tests in parallel. The first is the technical test, and the bar is good enough to do the job at a reasonable standard within a reasonable ramp-up window. Not the best technical candidate in the room. Good enough. Most of the technical skills marketing rewards are learnable in months.
The second test is the fit one, and the bar is much higher. Would this person be the kind of colleague the rest of the team is proud to introduce? Would they walk back into the office that evening to sort the mess out? Would they care about the work past their hours? That last one is not the same as expecting them to work late as a matter of course. I do not want a team of burnt-out martyrs and neither should you. It is about whether they care.
If they don’t care, no amount of technical skill will rescue the hire. If they do, you can teach them the rest.
There is a third piece to the rule, which kicks in after the technical and fit tests have both passed on paper. For any candidate I genuinely think might be the right shape, I drag the rest of the team in to meet them before the offer letter goes out. Half an hour, no script, no rehearsed answers, the people they would actually be working with on the other side of the table. It is a bit of a baptism by fire for the candidate, and it is meant to be. It is also the cleanest team-fit check on either side. The team gets a vote, even if the vote is unspoken. The candidate gets an honest look at the room they would be walking into on day one.
Oddly, the only hires I have ever made without doing that final team meeting have all been the ones that did not work out. I am not sure whether that is causation or correlation. I am sure the rule has held long enough that I no longer bend it.
My first hire taught me all of this. He taught me by being the wrong shape of person for the role I’d put him in. The mistake was mine, not his. He deserved a job he wasn’t bored in. He went and found one.
I heard that he now works for TV Guide. 😜
