On hiring the right people, the right way

"Hire character. Train skill."
Peter Schutz

I've been having a lot of conversations with friends and colleagues lately about hiring, and it's gotten me thinking back to the chapters in my career where I was responsible for leading others. Of all the things I did as a leader, recruitment ranked at the top of the list. It allowed me to bring people on board who "got" the mission as much as I did, who taught me more than I could ever teach them.

It also taught me how limited conventional recruitment processes could be. The process of rooting through resumes, ticking off boxes for each requisite skill, was, to be kind, a joke. Behavioral traits were far more likely to determine overall in-role success, and time and again I leaned toward the behavioral side of the process.

Peter Schutz was at the helm of Porsche for much of the 1980s, a pivotal period for the storied automaker, so I'm pretty sure we'll want to heed his sage advice. Because anyone can be trained in anything. But character is a whole other story.