Knowing what a clean hire looks like is what 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 one of the most competent people I’ve met in my entire life.
He’s from Cameroon. His mother was impressed by Elvis Presley, and that’s how he got the name. That’s the story he told me, anyway, and I have always liked it.
The hire itself was uneventful. He’d the qualifications. The interview went well. His background was strong. Everybody who met him liked him.
Then he started, and things stopped breaking.
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. The reward structure in most companies is built around visible effort, so the people producing the best outcomes are frequently the quietest ones in the building.
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, which is 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.
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.
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 cannot tell which case you have, not because you expect the worst. 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. The whole thing, 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.
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 cannot offer.
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 earned that and I was glad to hear it.