Who Do You Get Your Hiring Advice From?

Not all hiring advice is created equally.

I do my best to monitor my marketplace.  I get dozens of Google Alerts daily on various hiring terms.  This is just one of the tools I use to stay on top of my subject and marketplace.

Today I received an alert about an article on how to select winning employees.  The article boils down to 2 pieces of advice.

1. Ignore experience

2. Interview for personality

The author contended that experience didn’t matter and that personality was the driving force behind success.  He said to identify 8 personality traits, ask questions to see if the person had them.  And if they did not have at least 5 of the 8, eliminate the candidate.

Thanks for nothing!

Even if this advice was correct which it most definitely is not, nowhere in the article did the author explain what to ask or how to determine if the person had the personality traits.  On other words, he told you what to do without telling you how.  Not much help.

I could spend the rest of this post explaining why the advice is wrong but I won’t.  You can get volumes of quality advice on my Selecting Winners Blog.   The purpose of this post is to help you evaluate the the advice based on the source.

After reading the article, I spent some time researching the author.  It turns out the person who wrote the article is a financial adviser.  I am not quite sure why this person was writing an article about hiring employees but it is a huge red flag.

The source of the advice you pay attention to is critical.

It is not a good idea to look for advice on your investments from your golf instructor.  It is also not a good idea to look for hiring advice from your investment adviser. Remember, everyone has an opinion.

Hiring is one of the most important jobs you have as a manager or business owner and cannot be left to chance.

The advice you follow needs to be from a reliable, proven source.  Try to evaluate the source of any advice before you put it into practice.

As always, I would love to hear your comments!

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