Determine the position’s needed characteristics and questions to verify them. Then, along with (the position profile), what I’ve done is I’ve defined what the superior candidate is going to be and how I can state that in some sort of quantifiable language. What are the behaviors, what are the skill sets, how do they need to fit into my organization, who they are?
(I have) a list of 15 leadership traits, they’re like problem solving, technical learning, consumer focused. Each type of job needs different traits. I re-rank these traits to what are the most important ones to the least important ones for this job. When I’m looking for a CFO, I may be looking for something different than the head of my charitable foundation because of the traits they need to do the job. So when I interview people, I use these traits in my interview.
If I know I’m going to be interviewing more than one person, I try to use the same questions in each interview. So if one of these traits is problem solving, if that’s a really important one, then I want to ask them questions about telling me about situations where they might have to deal with X type of problem and how did they deal with it. If it’s presentation skills, they’re really going to make a lot of presentations, ask them about how do they prepare for a presentation, what are they at ease with, how do they go about giving a presentation. Taking any of these qualities and just trying to bring those back in to using their work history along with the leadership traits.
Understand your own culture. Finding the right fit is so important. There are a lot of people out there with wonderful backgrounds and skills. If it’s the CFO they probably know accounting, they probably have done management of people before, they’ve probably done major financing.
Those are almost the easier things to find out about a person because it’s quantifiable. What’s hard is the value system of how do you find that they could be a good part of a team. Every person’s team has their own traits — they work differently, they have a different culture.
You need to understand your own culture, and the people not who will be working for that person, but the people that will be working with that person, the other executives that they will have to interact with. Know how that person, or get the best feel of how that person, would react with those personality types.
So you really need to know the personality types of each of your executives that are on your team. That’s why you interview to the leadership traits.
After you’ve found out the person can do the job, they know the books, then you say what are the traits that are most important.
