Don’t Hire a Fa-Fa-Flunky – Find Out Who Your Hiring

If you’re looking for team members who will “run through walls for you” and do whatever it takes to get a job done, measure them on multiple criteria and across a spectrum of skills. If you are not a master at analyzing personality traits, a formal personality evaluation, something like Myers Briggs, helps to keep the selection process more objective and makes it easier to compare one candidate with another.

By profiling your prospects’ personality tendencies, you can look objectively at their passions, values, and desires. You uncover conscious and subconscious motivations. What truly drives them? What financial gain, lifestyle need, career fulfillment, or other motivation gets them up in the morning? Once you have the results on paper, it makes it easier to evaluate your prospect for the position you are trying to fill as well as how the person will fit in with the organization.

In many cases, companies look for a specific personality profile. These are often instances where multiple people do the same type of job, such as on a national sales team.

If you have not identified the personality attributes of the position beforehand, you can get a sense of what the person is like based on testing and then determine whether or not there is a fit.

Use social networking sites like LinkedIn to assist in evaluating your prospects. Identify whether they have connections that you can contact in addition to the references they provided.

Look for characteristics in their background that might enhance their ability to thrive in your company. Have they proven as self-starters? Do they have a history of success?

If a person doesn’t have experience specific to your industry, does the candidate’s background show that he or she can quickly adapt to different industries, technologies, and environments?

Many hiring managers make the mistake of matching a candidate’s qualifications only with the needs for a specific position. They overlook the big picture and the person’s ability to adapt to the culture.

In my book Stern Rules! I ask readers to imagine that Robin Ophelia Quivers left The Howard Stern Show and you were tasked with finding the new news anchor. Imagine that you didn’t know much about The Howard Stern Show, but you knew network news shows.

If Tom Brokaw’s resume came across your desk, it would be a slam-dunk hire, right? A twenty-year veteran of a major network evening news show could certainly take a position associated with reporting the news.

I can see it now. Brokaw walks into the studio on his first day:

Stern: “Tom, did you get laid last night?”

 Brokaw: (silence)

 Stern: “Well, Tom, I tell you, my wife was out of town last night, but I was so horny I just had to masturbate to some babysitter porn. Do you know what babysitter porn is, Tom?”

 Brokaw: “Um, today in Afghanistan, two U.S. soldiers were injured when…”

 Stern: “Tom, screw Afghanistan, I’m talking about porn where the daddy comes home and gets it on with the babysitter! Is that hot or what? I’m telling you I came in like two seconds.”

 It wouldn’t take long to realize that the cultural fit wasn’t there.

I think that’s why Howard has remained dedicated to Quivers for so long. She was put in the “Tom Brokaw chair,” she embraced the culture that Howard wanted to build and played off it. She helped empower him by going along with whatever he dreamed up. She could laugh at Howard’s commentary and not be offended by it.

When hiring your staff, keep a keen eye out for the right fit and the right personality types, and you’ll be sure to get more Baba Booeys and fewer Fafa Flunkys.

Jamie Troia is President of Greystack Digital Marketing and author of Stern Rules!