Character Before Credentials
You’ve spent the past month interviewing Senior Project Manager candidates for a highly visible strategic initiative. You’ve narrowed the slate to two finalists you believe can do the job. You have their resumes in front of you and now it’s time to decide who gets the offer.
Candidate #1 has the years of industry, business process and technology domain experience you said you wanted, as well as the right degrees from the right schools, the certifications, and has worked at the right employers. When exploring lessons learned with them, they had little to offer having never managed a project that failed. Unbelievable right? On paper, it’s a plug n’ play. There are no knowledge gaps you need to mitigate, and it would seem foolish not to hire this candidate.
The problem is… your “spidey-sense” is sending signals and something about this person isn’t sitting right with your gut. You haven’t caught them in a lie (that would automatically rule them out) but their responses to many of your questions were redirects versus answers. The net result is that the person presents zero weaknesses but deep down, you don’t trust them.
Candidate #2 has almost everything you’re looking for, but their resume is not quite as strong as Candidate #1. Maybe they’re missing a certification or some of their experience is tangential versus direct. However, they pass the decent human being test with flying colors. You're confident they'll mesh well with your team and you trust the candidate because they answered your questions directly and candidly. They were also open about past projects that didn’t go well and more to the point, were specific about what they learned from it as a result. You know exactly where their experience may present knowledge gaps and may require domain expert pairing to fill the holes.
Still... With all eyes on you and this initiative, no one would fault you for making a bad hiring decision by picking Candidate #1.
Which person do you hire?
I’ve hired both battle scarred industry veterans with years of experience and bright-eyed entry level hatchlings just beginning their careers. I’ve made bad and good decisions with both.
I believe perfect people do not exist, and success has more to do with how well their strengths are leveraged and weaknesses managed (by them and you) rather than it simply being a good or bad hire. As a rule, I won’t hire someone if I can’t discern both.
But at the determinant moment, whether weeks or months later, when I knew if I made a good hiring decision, the answer almost always sided with their character versus skills.
Obviously, this doesn’t mean you should hire an entry level Eagle Scout with impeccable character references to manage a multi-year, multi-million-dollar software implementation project. But given the choice of multiple candidates with “sufficient” capability to do the work at hand, I’ll always go with character.
Skills can be trained. Character is in place by the time they leave their parents.
