Hiring a staff member is not Moneyball. That’s what Google has learned. Adam Bryant of the New York Times sat down with Laszlo Bock, Google’s SVP of People Operations and asked what they’ve learned at the Goog about hiring people. (source)
- The ability to hire well is random.
- Forget brain-teasers. Focus on behavioral questions in interviews, rather than hypotheticals.
- Consistency matters for leaders.
- GPAs don’t predict anything about who is going to be a successful employee.
Let’s infer a couple of learnings from this for churches in the hiring process
- The interview process should identify people who are qualified, hard-working, and willing to learn. Don’t over think it. Don’t over-spiritualize it. The reality is that there are lots of people who can fill the job.
- The ability to hire the right person is far different from the ability to set a person up for success. Most churches seem good at finding talent but they suck at managing talent.
- The interview & candidate process is for checking each other out. When I’ve interviewed at churches my posture is always that I’m interviewing them as much as they are interviewing me. Just like they want to know what type of leader I am, I need to know what type of leader they are looking for.
- Look at past performance, not hypotheticals. The worst interview questions are the hypotheticals. “What would you do if…“
The last two things I want to point out
- You can’t create a superstar all-star team by cherry picking talent from other places. Developing a winning staff team takes time… there’s no short cuts.
- Hire diversity. Yes, I mean race and gender. And yes, I mean you should hire people you can get along with even if you disagree. That’s a strength and not a weakness. And any leader who is afraid of that needs to mature as a leader instead of holding their organization back.
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