Hiring for Talent

Filling a senior position is one of the most important tasks a nonprofit manager faces. It is important because it can make such a difference in the overall success of your organization. If you make a good hire, your work going forward will be so much easier. The new person will achieve the results you need in a way that contributes to the success of the whole organization, thereby freeing you to devote your time to other important actions. On the other hand, if you make a poor hire, you will be faced with the time consuming chore of managing the person’s performance, providing excessive guidance, monitoring their work, putting out fires for them, intervening when they have problems with other staff, and disciplining them. Whenever you find that you have a senior level employee who needs to be “managed,” it’s a sure sign that you’ve got the wrong person for the job.

The hiring decision is also one of the most challenging tasks you face. Every nonprofit leader can recount stories of hiring someone whom they thought was perfectly suited for a position, only to discover rather quickly that the person lacked some basic trait that prevented them from succeeding. Sometimes what is missing is a certain skill, which through some coaching or training may be acquired. At other times, though, the deficit is related to a person’s talents.

The concept of talent used here is based on the work of Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman in First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently (1999). They define talent as “a recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behavior that can be productively applied.” These are behaviors that occur often in an individual. For example, a talent that is common among great accountants is a love of precision. If you do not possess this talent, you will never be a great accountant. You may be a mediocre one, or an adequate one, or even a good one, but never a great one.

Here are some recommended steps to follow when you need to fill a key position in your organization. This approach is designed to reveal a person’s talents by asking them to tell you about real situations they have faced in the past. Rather than presenting them with hypothetical situations, you use open-ended questions that give them an opportunity to say something specific about themselves. How they choose to respond will tell you something about their talents.

This technique can be incorporated into the other processes you use for finding good people.

1. The first step is to determine the talents that are crucial to success in this position. There is a list of talents in First, Break All the Rules that can be a good starting point for you. Select at most five or six talents.

Example: A Major Gifts Officer

1. Service: a drive to be of service to others.
2. Focus: an ability to set goals and use them everyday to guide actions.
3. Responsibility: a need to assume personal accountability for ones work.
4. Empathy: an ability to identify the feelings, values and perspectives of others.
5. Interpersonal: an ability to purposely capitalize upon relationships.

2. Develop a set of open-ended situations that would reveal whether an individual has the requisite talents. Present a typical situation for the position in question, and ask the candidate to describe how he has responded to such a situation in the past.

• Be specific: the situation should be as concrete as possible.
• Be brief: the situation should be typical and straightforward, not requiring a lot of explanation or qualifiers.
• Avoid descriptors that show what you feel is the “right” answer.
  
  Example: Major Gifts Officer
  • Describe a situation when you dealt with a difficult donor.
    Answers to this could reveal the candidate’s talents of service, responsibility and empathy.
  • Describe a time when you worked with many different prospects at the same time, each at various stages of cultivation
  • Answers to this could reveal the candidate’s talent for focus and responsibility.

3. Develop answers for each of the situations by discovering how the best individuals in such positions respond.

• Identify four or five successful individuals who hold this position in organizations similar to yours. These may be people you know from your profession. You can also network through your peers. You want to find the best, not for the purpose of recruiting them, although that may be a side effect, but to see how they respond to the situations you present.
  
• Interview them over the phone and listen carefully to their responses.
  
• Make note of what they say first. The “top of mind” response is the most revealing of how they really behave.
  
• Make note of key words, phrases, and tone of voice – anything that reveals to you the underlying talent they have for the work.

Their answers may lead you to modify the list of talents or the situations you have developed. This will enable you to be even more precise about the kind of individual you are looking for.

4. During the interview of a candidate, set aside a defined amount of time to present the situations. Do not get distracted by other important activities, such as telling the candidate about your organization or learning about his career and interests. This is a time for focus, the sole purpose of which is to learn as much as you can about the candidate’s talents.

• Present the situation and listen carefully for the indicators you have determined are key, based on your interviews with the best in this position.
  
• Listen for specifics. If the candidate does not give specifics it is a clear indicator that she has rarely encountered the situation. Note: do not ask them for specifics; listen to see if she provides you with specifics on her own.
  
• Pay particular attention to what she says first. If she has to think about it too long, chances are that the response may not give you an accurate read on her talents. Remember, a talent is a recurring pattern of thought, feelings, or behavior. A response that takes a lot of thought before answering may be honest and accurate, but may not tell you anything fundamental about her.
  
• Avoid the temptation to ask her to explain or tell you more, thereby leading her to make different or additional statements. Let her respond on her own, without prompting. If she has too little to say, this may be because she is unfamiliar with the situation.
  
• Believe what you hear. No matter how much you might want to hear something else, trust the candidate’s unaided response. Don’t think “she must have meant to say this.”