Hiring someone great is among the best things that can happen to a manager, and I think most hiring processes are built to miss it. They train people to hunt for red flags, so a candidate who shows up with none makes the room suspicious of the very thing it should be grateful for. Knowing what a clean hire looks like lets you recognize one while it’s still a candidate.
What does a good hire look like before you make the offer?
Every source of evidence agrees with every other one. A candidate has a resume, an interview, a background, and references. In most hiring, one of those is impressive and the others are thin, and the impressive one carries the decision. A clean hire is different. Nothing carries anything, because nothing needs carrying. The qualifications are real. The interview matches them. The background matches the interview. Nobody has to decide how much weight to put on the strongest signal.
When that happens, managers tend to feel uneasy, because there’s no puzzle to solve and hiring is supposed to be hard. The absence of a puzzle is the finding.
What does an exceptional hire look like?
Elvis Niba came to work for me during my years running computer operations, and he’s among the most competent people I’ve met in my entire life. He’s from Cameroon. Elvis Presley impressed his mother, and that’s how he got the name. That’s the story he told me, anyway, and I’ve always liked it.
The hire itself was uneventful. He had the qualifications. The interview went well. His background was strong. Everybody who met him liked him. Then he started, and things stopped breaking.
I loved that about him, and I still think it’s the highest compliment anyone in operations can earn.
How do you measure operational competence?
By what stops happening. That’s why it’s almost never measured.
Elvis took over his area and there was never any real problem after that. Anything that did come up, he fixed. That’s the entire performance record and it’s the highest praise available in operations work.
Consider what that looks like on a performance review. No incidents to point at. No dramatic recoveries. No firefighting, because there were no fires.
Meanwhile somebody in the next chair is visibly saving the day twice a month, and getting noticed for it, and half of those emergencies exist because of decisions that person made earlier.
Doing this work well is invisible by its nature, and I think the way most companies reward it is a disgrace. The reward structure is built around visible effort, so the people producing the best outcomes are frequently the quietest ones in the building. They get passed over while the firefighters who lit half the fires collect the praise, and eventually the quiet ones notice.
Why do managers remember bad hires and forget good ones?
A bad hire generates events. Meetings, decisions, a difficult conversation, a departure, a rebuild. All of that is memorable because all of it happened.
A good hire generates a stretch of time where nothing needed your attention. There’s nothing to remember, because remembering requires something to have occurred. So managers accumulate a detailed library of what goes wrong and almost no library of what goes right. Then they design their hiring process around avoiding the failures they can recall. That’s a filter instead of a search.
Avoiding bad hires and finding great ones are separate activities. A process built only for the first will reliably produce adequate people.
I’ve got no patience for hiring processes built entirely out of fear. They screen out the obvious disasters and then fill the building with people who’ll never cause trouble and never do anything memorable, and the company pays for that mediocrity every year without ever seeing the bill.
What can you learn from a hire where nothing went wrong?
The signal is sometimes real.
I’ve written elsewhere about a hire I got badly wrong, where a resume claimed a language the person had never written a line of, and I found out from the code. That story has a lesson in it and the lesson is trust but verify.
Every one of those changes is a manager protecting their own comfort at the expense of the best person on the team.
Elvis is the other half of the same lesson, and the other half matters. Verification isn’t suspicion. Most candidates are telling the truth, and a process built on the assumption that everyone is exaggerating will insult the people you most want to hire. Verify because you can’t tell which case you have. When the evidence all lines up, believe it.
How do you keep a highly competent employee?
Give them the whole job and stay out of the way.
Elvis took over an area and owned it. Not a slice of it, and not a set of tasks assigned by somebody else. All of it, with the authority to fix what needed fixing. Highly competent people leave when the job shrinks. Somebody adds a layer of approval, or splits the ownership, or asks for a status update on work that’s never once been late. None of those individually looks like a reason to quit and together they turn a good job into an ordinary one.
Every one of those changes is a manager protecting their own comfort at the expense of the best person on the team. I think it’s among the most common ways companies lose people they can’t replace, and the manager usually tells everyone the person left for money.
A small company has an advantage here it doesn’t always use. There’s no layer to add. The whole area can belong to one person, and that scope is something a larger employer usually can’t offer.
My take
Good hires don’t make stories, so managers never learn what one looks like. They build hiring around the disasters they remember. The building fills with people who’ll never cause trouble and never do anything memorable. Screen out the bad ones, sure. Then go looking for the great ones, because that’s a separate job. Verify the resume and expect it to check out. Most do.
What happens when the quiet ones leave?
You find out what they were doing. The person whose systems never broke was making a continuous series of small decisions that prevented breakage, and none of those decisions is written down anywhere, because nothing prompted anyone to write them down.
Then they go, and over the following months things start failing in ways nobody can trace to a cause. There’s no single missing piece. What’s missing is the judgment that was being applied daily and silently.
Two things help and neither is complicated. Ask the quiet ones what they’re protecting you from, since they’ll tell you and nobody has asked. And make sure a second person has read enough to keep it running.
Elvis stayed a long time and left on his own terms for a new company, where he’s doing well. He deserved it and I was glad to hear it.
The worst mistake a manager can make is taking someone like that for granted. They won’t complain and they won’t make noise, so the only warning you’ll get is the resignation letter, and by then the judgment that kept everything running is already on its way to somebody else’s company. I’d go tell them what they mean to the operation while they’re still in the building.
| Question | Answer from the article |
|---|---|
| What does a good hire look like before the offer? | Resume, interview, background and references all agree |
| How do you measure operational competence? | By what stops happening |
| Why do managers forget good hires? | Bad hires generate events; good hires generate quiet stretches |
| Is avoiding bad hires enough? | No. Finding great ones is a separate job; a filter alone yields adequate people |
| How should you treat verification? | Verify because you can’t tell; when the evidence lines up, believe it |
| How do you keep a highly competent person? | Give them the whole job and stay out of the way |
| What drives them away? | Added approval layers, split ownership, status updates on work never late |
| How do you prepare for them leaving? | Ask what they protect you from; make sure a second person can keep it running |
Good managers notice what goes right. Street-Smart Management Wisdom follows three managers across fourteen chapters and makes you the hero of the story.
