MANAGEMENT
Three questions to ask to ensure you hire the right people
H
iring is always a hit-and-miss affair, but over the years I’ve gotten better at it. I now ask candidates three questions that help me filter out who is most suitable for the task at hand, who will get the job done and who is most likely to stick around. These questions have proven remarkably efficient in helping me hire A-grade players, spot B-grade players who can be coached to become A-grade players, and actively avoid C-grade players. I ask these questions because I’ve been burned in the past by people who say one 40 INCLEAN NEW ZEALAND November 2023
thing, and do another. They tell me how good they are, how much they want the job, how hard they’ll work. They get the role, but their hype doesn’t live up to their reality; they’re not half as good as they say, and they can’t do the job at hand. That’s a costly own goal. I need to prevent that from happening. These three questions help elicit emotional reactions that are imperceptible to the untrained eye. But if you are good at reading people and noticing the non-verbals, as I am, you get a better picture of how truthful their answers really are. I can see when a question makes a candidate flush,