Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill

"In interviews," Lane says, "I give people an opportunity to be fun, to show their sense of humor. We look for people's passions, what they've done with their lives: the guy who took a year off after his MBA to play the violin or travel the world."

Don't get the wrong idea. Just because finding great people is all about the soft stuff -- mind-set, attitude, personal attributes -- that doesn't mean hiring becomes an exercise in amateur psychology, executive intuition, or "gut feel." It's possible -- necessary, really -- to be as rigorous and demanding in hiring as in any strategic process. In fact, it's only by designing rigorous selection processes that you can give great people the freedom they need once they're hired.

"The overarching idea is that you hire hard and then manage easy," says Alan Davidson, an industrial psychologist in San Diego whose clients include Chevron, Merrill Lynch, and the Internal Revenue Service. "That means doing a lot of work up front."

Four principles define the new model for smart hiring.

1. What You Know Changes, Who You Are Doesn't

Popeye was right: "I y'am what I y'am." The most common -- and fatal -- hiring mistake is to find someone with the right skills but the wrong mind-set and hire them on the theory, "We can change 'em."

Davidson's response? Forget it. "The single best predictor of future behavior is past behavior," he says. "Your personality is going to be essentially the same throughout your life." As evidence, he points to U.S. Air Force research on personality types that began in the 1950s. For decades, researchers tracked their subjects by observing their behavior and interviewing their families, friends, and colleagues. The conclusion? Basic personality traits did not change, Davidson says. "Introverts were introverts, extroverts were extroverts. The descriptions were constant."

Companies that ignore the Popeye Principle do so at their peril -- although the temptation is never far away. Ann Rhoades, executive vice president of human resources at Doubletree Hotels Corp., admits she's strayed on occasion. Rhoades is something of a legend in hiring circles. She spent much of her career at Southwest and is the executive most closely identified with its current hiring methodology. She joined the Phoenix-based hotel chain two years ago, soon after the merger that created it, to reinvent its culture by remaking its employee base.

Everything about the new Doubletree culture emphasizes freedom, informality, flexibility. Rhoades's acid-test interview question for job candidates is, "Tell me about the last time you broke the rules." A long silence or a noncommittal response is an indication that a candidate is trying to figure out what she wants to hear. "The good ones," she says, "don't care."

Rhoades recently hired a senior financial analyst who told her he never broke the rules. When he sensed that was the wrong answer, he changed his story. Rhoades didn't buy it, but his qualifications were so strong that she made the hire. After all, she thought, maybe he'd change. Think again. "He was so by-the-book, he read from the book," she marvels. "Literally! 'It says here on page 10 that I can't do that.'" He quit before Rhoades could fire him.

2. You Can't Find What You're Not Looking For

Bill Byham, perhaps the world's foremost authority on hiring, is president and CEO of Pittsburgh-based Development Dimensions International (DDI) . He's also the father of a hiring methodology that goes by many names ("Targeted Selection" is the most popular) but revolves around a simple idea: the best way to select people who'll thrive in your company is to identify the personal characteristics of people who are already thriving and hire people just like them. In the Byham model, companies work to understand their star performers, identify their target behaviors and attitudes, and then develop interview questions to find people with those attributes.

Byham is quick to emphasize that these questions are about facts and achievements, not psychoanalysis. "The worst thing you can do is ask managers to pretend they're psychologists," he says. "You want to take the interpretation out of it. Behavior predicts behavior. When interviewers ask theoretical questions -- 'tell me about your father' -- they don't get useful data."

Ann Rhoades is using just that approach at Doubletree. She's hired DDI to conduct interviews with 300 employees to analyze the personal attributes of her standouts and washouts. (Employees don't know in which category they fall.) She's using the results to create a database of "dimensions" for success and to search for people who fit the dimensions.