What’s different about this approach?

We know that we often can teach a person the knowledge and the skills needed for a particular position. So, if we choose to do so, we can hire a person with the right natural abilities (such as, a great sense of responsibility and a love for numbers) and teach that person the skills and knowledge needed (such as, how to do accounting in our company).

This is in contrast, of course, with the historical method of choosing folks who seem to have the right experience (such as, a good resume) but lack the right attitude or lack some other needed natural ability. With these folks, we bring them on board as a top-quality hire (after all, that resume sure looked good) and then later fire them for incompetence. But the truth of the matter, all too frequently, is that we are at fault for putting the person in a role in which they couldn’t succeed.

The majority of companies that we’ve witnessed use a “traditional” approach to interviewing for new employees. They rely very heavily on the candidate’s resume to guide their interview and to influence their conclusion regarding the candidate’s suitability for the position to be filled.

In fact, we’ve witnessed too many interviews with candidates that were little more than recitations of the resume. We’ve even watched professional recruiters operate similarly: go down the resume, line by line, to ask the candidate to say the same thing live and in person.

So, you might ask, what’s wrong with that? Don’t candidates’ past records indicate whether they can do the job? After all, if they’ve done it before, they can do it again.

First, let’s be clear. The resume, if truthful, is a great starting point with regard to the candidate’s accomplishments. It’s a means of identifying past achievements and a springboard that can lead you to other questions and issues.

But remember that the resume is a marketing document. It is meant to cast the candidate in a very favorable light, and the candidate has had lots of time to revise and tinker with it.

Remember also that you’re seeking a truly outstanding individual to take the position that you’re seeking to fill. You don’t want someone who can “just do the job” because they have, perhaps, done something similar in the past. At least, we hope you don’t.

In order for you to find that truly outstanding person, you’ll need to look far beyond the resume. We focus on three things that will help you identify a terrific new employee.

First, we use the empowerment model we described in Chapter 5 to guide our process. More specifically, we know that employees can be empowered properly when they:

- Share our principles.

- Are reliable.

- Are competent.

So, we try very hard to construct an interview process that will reveal these three attributes in the candidates we meet. Make no mistake, this is not easy, but the better you can do this, the better your chances of finding that terrific new employee.

Second, we put high emphasis on the natural abilities of the candidate: higher emphasis, many times, than the actual accomplishments as indicated in the resume. We do this because we think that in most cases it’s easier to train someone with the right characteristics than it is to attempt to change the natural abilities of someone who has a nice resume.

Candidates with the right natural abilities for their position will make you smile every day. They’ll love the job you’ve assigned them, and they’ll require little in the way of management or motivational coaching. Your job is to find those people and be sure they’re in the right position, and that requires that you understand their natural abilities.

Third, we develop questions that are specific to the position we are trying to fill, questions that are intended to help identify the natural abilities that we seek for that position. We also create guidance on the answers to those questions, and this may include the way the candidate answers the question as well as the actual content of the answer.