Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill

In a conference room on the first floor of the Houston Hobby Hilton, José Colmenares surveys a group of 13 women and 3 men and wonders which -- if any -- have the "right stuff" to become flight attendants with Southwest Airlines. Colmenares is not looking for a fixed set of skills or experiences. He's searching for something far more elusive and much more important -- the perfect blend of energy, humor, team spirit, and self-confidence to match Southwest's famously offbeat and customer-obsessed culture.

This search occupies Colmenares all day, every day, and it unfolds in hotel meeting rooms from Texas to California. Southwest has been the country's most acclaimed airline for the past decade. And runaway success attracts lots of attention. Last year, the 22,000-person company had openings for roughly 4,500 new employees -- and received more than 150,000 applications. It's the job of recruiters such as Colmenares to work through that vast applicant pool and identify the elite few who can make it at Southwest.

Libby Sartain, vice president of the People Department, says, only half-jokingly, that taking a job with Southwest is like joining a cult. The ultimate employee is someone whose devotion to customer and company amounts to "a sense of mission, a sense that 'the cause' comes before their own needs." Colmenares speaks in the same near-spiritual terms. What's he looking for in a candidate? "An attitude," he says. "A genuineness -- a sense of what it takes to be one of us."

To begin today's group evaluation, Colmenares asks the 16 hopefuls to fill out and read aloud a personal "Coat of Arms" -- a questionnaire on which applicants complete statements such as, "One time my sense of humor helped me was"; "A time I reached my peak performance was"; "My personal motto is." Most of the answers are unremarkable, but a few stand out. One man declares his motto to be, "I am the master of every situation." One woman describes herself as "zippy" -- a term that fellow applicants find hilarious, but that Colmenares finds intriguing.

The day's most involved and revealing test is a group exercise called Fallout Shelter. Applicants are told to imagine they are a committee charged with rebuilding civilization after a just-declared nuclear war. They're given a list of 15 people from different occupations: nurse, teacher, all-sport athlete, biochemist, pop singer. They have 10 minutes to make a unanimous decision about which 7 can remain in the only available fallout shelter. As the candidates propose, wrangle, and debate, Colmenares and some colleagues watch from across the room. They grade each person on a scale ranging from "passive" to "active" to "leader."

At the end of the session, Colmenares and his team compare notes on what happened. They decide to ask back four people for in-depth interviews. That's not bad; many sessions end with no callbacks. They like the "zippy" woman, who was active without being domineering. They like the poise and assertiveness of a young man who emerged as the leader toward the end of Fallout Shelter -- although they're not without their doubts. The man has declared himself a fan of self-help guru Anthony Robbins and described how he built his self-confidence by walking over a bed of live coals.

"We wonder if he's for real," Colmenares confides. Finding out is what the next round of evaluations will be all about.

Four Rules for Hiring Smart

The proposition is undeniable: you can't build a great company without great people. But how many companies are as rigorous about hiring as they comfortable evaluating job candidates as they are deciding on an investment proposal? The all-too-common reality, in far too many companies, is that hiring processes are poorly designed and shabbily executed.

Of course, making the commitment to hire great people raises an even more basic question: How do you know them when you see them? Over the last few years, a number of companies have asked themselves that question. They've analyzed what separates their winners from their losers, good hires from bad hires. These companies compete in a wide range of industries -- from airlines to steel, computers to hotels -- but they all arrived at the same answer: What people know is less important than who they are. Hiring, they believe, is not about finding people with the right experience. It's about finding people with the right mind-set. These companies hire for attitude and train for skill.

Eric Lane, director of worldwide staffing at Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) , the fast-moving, 11,000-person manufacturer of computer workstations, servers, and supercomputers, says his company's hiring philosophy has evolved as it has grown. Sure SGI still needs world-class chip designers and software programmers who write elegant code. But technical virtuosity seldom determines who makes the grade. It's all about mind-set. SGI's culture is autonomous and informal to the extreme. It's the kind of place, Lane says, "where the main mode of transportation between cubicles is the skateboard." People who are uncomfortable in this kind of environment tend not to succeed -- no matter how technically capable they are.