Are You Trying to Hire You?

No BV practice leader or manager starts with the objective of hiring someone just like them. Most people will take the time to create a job description and give some thought to the position’s responsibilities. If you’ve advertised, you’ve probably included verbiage about the years of experience required to handle the job.

Even so, it’s easy to slip into a “hire in your own image” mode as you begin interviewing.

One way to know that you’re hiring in your own image is when you dwell on the shortcomings of your candidates. That’s often a sign that you’re measuring them against your own level of knowledge and/or experience. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have standards and expectations. But it does mean those standards and expectations should be realistic for your hiring role.

Another clue is asking technical questions to judge your candidate’s grasp of valuation concepts but overlooking the disparities in your experience. Put another way, you’ve known what you know for so long that you’ve forgotten what it’s like not to know it.

Although you don’t want to attempt to replicate your career path or combination of experiences, you do have characteristics that are important to look for. One of the most important is integrity. Can your candidate be counted on to be honest and fair in serving your clients? Or will she take shortcuts that will cause trouble in the end? Try asking:

• Have you ever been in a situation where you had to make something look better than it really was?
• Tell me about an instance when you had to go against company policies or procedures to get something done.
• Have you ever observed someone stretching the rules at work? What did you do about it?

Another characteristic is motivation. This doesn’t mean testing your candidate’s willingness to put in the same hours that you’ve put in to make your practice what it is today. But it does mean checking whether your candidate has a grounding of belief and principle that can be counted on when the going gets tough. Will your candidate devote herself to serving clients like you do? Or will she jump ship at the first signs of trouble or if a better opportunity comes? Try asking:

• If you think about a time when you were operating at peak performance in your job, what was motivating you?
• Can you give me an example of when you kept pursuing a goal when others gave up?
• Tell me about a recent engagement you worked on that gave you great personal satisfaction. What was it that made you feel that way?

Yes, there are ways in which it’s futile to try to hire another you. And yet, there are other ways in which you do want to pay attention to how your candidate measures up. The key, of course, is knowing the difference.