To hire the right person, behave like a caricature of yourself

I was in the lucky position to hire many people in my professional life and all I wanted was to hire the right person. A person who will stay long enough to make a difference. A person I could trust, who would fit in my team and who is capable. I could not afford a wrong hire. Time was too tight and the eyes of rival peers were watching. Failure was not an option.

No matter how senior or junior the position, I learned to run self made mini-assessments. With this article I want to share with you the basic structure of a typical mini-assessment based on the one I have recently run on behalf of a customer. Please note that I am not a hiring professional and that my role in the hiring process has always been the hiring manager's role. I have gone this extra mile ever since because I believe that hiring skills belong to the essential toolkit of a successful manager and because I mistrust the standard process made of numerous interviews and conversations. I want to see the candidate's behavior under pressure. I want to see her keeping her attitude for a few hours, I want to experience the person professionally and personally.

Let's start with a set of 3 rules:

• Rule #1 Don’t trust your gut feeling, trust the result of a structured evaluation.

• Rule #2 Listen to your gut feeling and challenge the prejudice. Your gut feeling gives you right hints. It's up to you to investigate beyond the gut feeling, discern the prejudice from the fact.

• Rule #3 Behave at your acceptable worst. You are not perfect. The most common origin of employee dissatisfaction is feeling offended, badly treated by their managers. When you are under pressure your personality may change and the perception your employees have of you may change, too. This is why I recommend to behave like a caricature of oneself at his worst to avoid later disappointment.

Preparing the mini-assessment

Define competencies, skills and the personality the new hire should bring along. When defining competencies, skills and personality treats, list as many as you can. Exaggerate. And when you’re done, pick 3 of each: 3 competencies, 3 skills and 3 personality traits. They should all be equally relevant. Every action that you will undertake from now on, will have to be aimed at challenging and checking these 9 core criteria.

Now you have a canvas to work on. Those who have read my previous article "Unique jobs require uniquely fitting people" know why I avoid the term “profile” and prefer canvas, instead.

Writing the job ad

The job ad describes the position briefly and the implications broadly. Be honest about the down sides of the job, don’t oversell to look good. It’s not about you and your company, it’s about what it means to work for you and your company. Allow more room in your text to say something relevant about daily joys and challenges of the job. Company information and position details can be published in the website or on a landing page connected to the job ad. Close the ad with an invitation to do something specific when applying.

Running the mini-assessment

From the moment you publish the job ad, the mini-assessment has officially started. From now on all your observations will need to feed into the evaluation form.

Most of the time you will se that very few applicants will have complied to what you have asked for in your last sentence of the job ad. This is in fact represents evaluation criteria #1 where those who have read with attention (and have complied) will be separated from those who did not. Assign to all respondents 1 point and 3 points to those who fully complied.

Store the emails and curricula of those who complied in a dedicated folder and reply to those who did not comply with a notification of incomplete application. This is evaluation criteria #2. Applicants have been confronted with a (negative) feedback because their application is incomplete. Each one of them will deal with this feedback differently. Some will excuse themselves too much, some will not excuse themselves at all, others will just deliver what was missing and thank you for letting them know. Others again will never reply.You will be amazed by the variety of replies that you will receive. Assign to each of the different responses evaluation points from 0 to 3 (0 = no response/ 1 = poor response / 2 = response ok / 3 = extraordinary response).

Check their CVs and experience against your 9 core selection criteria. Select those who fit and arrange a date and a time for a phone interview. My personal trick here, is to move this appointment with a short notice via email to assess their flexibility and attentiveness. Ever since I have started working, I have been exposed to continuous agenda changes, organizational changes, strategy changes, etc. Those who get upset with changing plans have a harder time and make it harder for the team to perform effectively. Don't be satisfied with the verbal promise of flexibility. Flexibility is a state of mind, not a lip service and you are in charge of challenging it for real. Some candidates will accept the change and suggest an alternative date, some will get nervous and others will not even read your email in time because they're not attentive. This is evaluation criteria #3. Assign to each of the different responses evaluation points from 0 to 3 (0 = no response/ 1 = poor response / 2 = response ok / 3 = extraordinary response)

"Don't be satisfied with the verbal promise of flexibility. Flexibility is a state of mind, not a lip service and you are in charge of challenging it for real."

At this point you'll have reduced the number of candidates to a relatively small number of potential hires. You still don't know how many of them are potentially right hires, though. The next step is to invite them to a half day mini-assessment center. You can also call this a technical interview during which they will be asked to run 4 to 5 exercises in groups of maximum 10 people. Depending on the position to fill, you will chose open questions or more specific technical exercises.

My last mini-assessement started with an ice-breaking exercise called "sense of time". We were searching a digital project manager. Sense of time is a critical success factor for a project manager. I asked the group to think about their impressions on the way to our office and gave the group some time. Without them knowing, I was giving them 3 minutes. Exactly 3 minutes after, I asked each one of them to tell their impressions to the group. When the last finished, I told them that I have been cheating and that all I wanted to know from them was how much time they were given to think about their impressions. A few guessed right, the majority gave answers far from 3 minutes. Besides assessing the candidates' sense of time, this game gave us the opportunity to stress the importance of time management for the job.

Thereafter, we proceeded with 4 exercises:

• They were asked to reply to a typical customer complaint via email (30 minutes).

• They were shown a video from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge that went viral social media last summer and asked to explain why it was controversial and why it worked so well (60 minutes). This was an open question to

• We asked them to describe a brand's online presence and to prepare a presentation to be given to the group (90 minutes). This was an open question to check their method and competence in terms of digital marketing.

• Each of them gave their presentation to the group. We evaluated their

Four people in different roles with different backgrounds observed and evaluated the results by assigning points to their performance. Candidates who earned enough points, were invited to join the final biographic 1:1 interview. We started up with over 200 candidates, run three assessments of around 10 people each and finally selected 3 people. 2 of them have been hired and are proving to be great hires.

The right hire exceeds your expectations ways above your imagination. If not, run the assessment again and again, until you meet the perfect hire.

Do not hesitate to contact me if you have questions on how to define exercises for a different position or in case you are looking for a sparring partner.

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