Thoughts on hiring right people

Tanmay Vora
Posted on

Seth Godin has an excellent post again – “Who should you hire?”. Managers and Leaders are often responsible for this challenging task of hiring people and this post surely a good reference for hiring people in your team as well as for doing some introspection ourselves.

Seth says –

“There is a fundamental shift in rules from manual-based work (where you follow instructions and an increase in productivity means doing the steps faster) to project-based work (where the instructions are unknown and visualizing outcomes and then getting things done is what counts.)”

I would certainly opt for people who know how to get things done. This also deals with an all important issue of accountability. People who are used to follow instructions can never really be accountable, as my recent experience suggests. They depend on someone else for taking small decisions related to task – they are afraid of being responsible for outcomes of their decisions. But that is not how we get things done.

We get things done by being passionate about the work we are doing, taking initiatives, following our instincts and by being accountable, taking responsibility for outcomes of our decisions – that is perhaps what differentiates winners from the also ran.

4 Comments

bvamsidhar May 30, 2007

I agree about the importance of people who are smart enough to get things done. But also feel that all organizations have a mix of manual-based and project-based work. So the kind of people hired should also match this mix of work. Infact, whatever amount of automation we introduce there is some manual-based work left out that is inevitable and the people who are smart at getting things done usually are not inclined to do work that is repetitive and predefined. So, doesn’t the kind of people you want depends on kind of work that you want to get done? Yes you are right about opting for people who know how to get things done if that is the kind of work they are hired to do, may be someone above the lowest level in the org. chart.

Thanks Vamsi, for sharing your thoughts.
For any job and at any level, you need people who are driven by a personal initiative. People driven by personal initiative don’t just do as directed but strive to add value to a given piece of work and hence make a difference..
Even for people at lowest level in organization chart, same applies. Their growth is directly proportional to the value they are able to bring on table and difference they make to their workplace. It could be generating a great design, writing a flawless piece of code or a better way of doing a particular thing. It could even be something that they are not directed to do – but they do it out of their own urge to do it..
As far as manual tasks are concerned (e.g. generating reports periodically), yes they are important ones. Tasks should not be actually valued based on the repititiveness – since repititive tasks do add value to the business and they are important. People with a personal initiative would rather look for ways of doing a repititive task differently.

smart things 😉

I still go after the same kind of folks that Joel Spolksy does…smart and get things done…see http://www.robneville.net/software/the-essence-of-a-good-software-person/2007/02/ for more details but in short, I think Seth is right on the money.