A Silicon Valley practice I work with was hiring for an administrative position. I voted no. The owner was a maybe. The rest of the team said yes. Six months later she is a model employee, and on our weekly Zoom I told them, “I guess I was wrong on that one.”
I still hold to the rule I’ve held for years: hire as close to a perfect match as you can. That vote is one reason we teach clients not to rest a hire on one person’s read, mine included. It is also part of why we teach them to start with commitment. Skills show up on paper. Commitment to the company takes looking for.
The line in my Business Owner’s Playbook is plain: always hire for commitment first, then train each employee with the skills the position requires. We teach it in that order because skills can be taught. A good trainer can take a willing person from never having seen the software to running it. Nobody can train commitment into a person who doesn’t bring it. An owner who hires for the résumé and skips the commitment question ends up facing the choice the Playbook describes: fire the person, or spend countless hours training them to meet the need.
Always hire for commitment first, then train each employee with the skills required for that particular position.
— Gary Henson, Consultant
Commitment takes more work to see than a skill does, and the Playbook lays out the steps, starting before the interview with the job posting. The posting should attract candidates who align with your culture, so it says plainly what the company values and asks for a cover letter and résumé along with the position and pay. Then the steps run in order. Write a job description so your expectations are clear. Look for commitment in the track record: time in school, length of past employment, memberships in organizations. Keep the first interview to 15 minutes or less, because many candidates don’t show up or show up late, and how they do one thing is how they do everything. Go deeper in the second interview. Check at least three references before you make an offer. Be slow to hire and quick to fire.
Most owners who get this wrong are in a hurry. The Playbook warns that many act too hastily to fill the need and unknowingly hire the wrong person without vetting them. Its answer is that there are no shortcuts: you have to be patient and extremely careful to find the right candidate without compromising your values. A vacant seat is uncomfortable, and I understand the pull to end that quickly. Ending it quickly is how the commitment question gets skipped.
Hiring for commitment doesn’t let you skip the training. In my experience a hire with no track record in the work succeeds about 20% of the time, and the exception is a leader who combines strong training with strong accountability. So we teach both halves: how to screen for commitment before the offer, and how to train and hold people to the standard once they’re inside. The job description template covers the document the candidate reads, the first 90 days covers what happens after the hire, and the Inside-Out Method ties the two together.
Before your next second interview, send the candidate your company commitments and the job description, and ask them to read both first. Then pay attention to whether they did. A candidate who skips the reading before the job is offered has told you something about the first 90 days.
