Ditching the investor’s pet candidate
“I’ve got someone for your team,” the investor said. “She’s smart, capable, enthusiastic and she’s looking to help build a business.”
I made all the right noises. The candidate’s background sounded great and – crucially – she was willing to take a big pay cut in return for the opportunity to be in at the start of a startup. Plus hiring a potential investor’s golden girl couldn’t hurt.
Or could it?
Things started going wrong at the assessment stage. It’s our business to know what drives success in a specific job, and to identify those characteristics in candidates. Candidates complete a set of assessments that tell us about the capabilities, preferences and skills, then we compare their profile to the demands of the job. The result is a candidate shortlist, ranked according to the likelihood that they will deliver superior performance in that role.
Ms. Golden Girl didn’t make the shortlist top ten. Or the top twenty – quite an achievement for a job that had not been advertized in a company nobody had heard of.
I dug into the detail and saw why. On the top three match factors for that role, her predictive profile was way off what we were looking for. Her cognitive aptitude was fine, but she wasn’t likely to behave in the kinds of ways that lead to success in this kind of job. And it looked very much like she wanted a far more structured and comfortable environment than we could provide.
Here’s where I made my first mistake.
Focused on the money, I decided not to trust the science. I reasoned that psychometric assessments – like medical treatments – had margins of error. A surgery with a 99% success rate won’t deliver for one in every hundred patients. Maybe this candidate was the 1%? And, after all, she came highly recommended. I should give her the benefit of the doubt.
The structured interview nixed that doubt. When you take a candidate through real work experiences in detail, asking focused questions to find out exactly what they did, how they worked problems, how they coped when things didn’t go well, it’s pretty easy to see how their potential maps onto the demands of the job.
This candidate was exactly what the assessments had predicted. When I asked about situations where she would have had the chance to demonstrate the job-crucial behaviors, she made every mistake in the book. She talked incessantly about what “we” did, ignoring requests to tell me about her contribution. She blamed others for failures and retreated into generalities when I pressed for details.
She wasn’t all bad. She showed evidence of great competence in other areas, she was focused and smart and engaging. In a different role she would probably have been great. But we weren’t hiring for a different role. We were hiring for this one. No way was I giving her the job.
I cursed myself for not trusting the tests. Not only had I wasted an hour on a pointless interview, I had raised the hopes of a candidate who had no realistic prospect of being hired. Now I had to find a sensitive way to let her down without losing a potential deep pocketed investor.
Reader, I flunked it. When I called the candidate to explain why she had not gotten the job I tried the lots of highly qualified candidates, tough decision kind of excuse. She asked for more details, not unreasonably given our business is the accurate matching of people to jobs. I blathered on: outstanding talents, just not the best fit with this job until it became clear it was only common courtesy that stopped her asking why, given the mismatch, I had bothered to interview her at all.
I don’t know what she told the investor – those tests don’t work, that company’s full of dozy people who don’t have a clue about their own products. Perhaps nothing. I felt too embarrassed to initiate closer contact with the investor. I should have called, explained what had happened and tried to convince him that this proved how good our system is. I should have called, whatever I said.
But I didn’t. Luckily, we got funding elsewhere. I learned a valuable lesson about trusting science over gut feelings and prejudices. And I ran my profile against the job demands for recruiting in a startup. As a result, I no longer handle recruiting for Matchpoint Careers. I think I’m better off. I know candidates are.
