What are the qualities of a good employee? What does it mean when an employee has good character?
To build a strong team, you must recruit strong people. However, Marty Cagan and Chris Jones argue that you shouldn’t place too much emphasis on hiring the perfect fit.
Discover what to look for in an employee, and how these qualities will benefit your company in the long run.
Recruiting Your Team
Employees don’t need to be picture-perfect. Instead, you should hire people with competence and character. Below, we’ll go more in-depth on what to look for in an employee.
Competence: Look beyond traditional qualifications such as elite college educations, and instead look for people who combine technical skills with a passion for work, an eagerness to learn, and a desire for personal growth. You generally want people who already have the skills to handle the work, but sometimes it’s worth taking a chance on someone with unproven potential—as long as you’re willing to help that person build the necessary skills on the job.
(Shortform note: If you’re in doubt about a candidate’s potential, one option is to let them show off their skills before permanently bringing them onto your team. In Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson suggest you contract your best candidates to do a “tryout” project so you can see the quality of their work. A test project can not only determine whether a candidate has potential, but by identifying strengths and weaknesses, it can give you a place to start building their personal development plan, as the authors discussed earlier in this guide.)
Character: Cagan and Jones caution that looking for people with good character doesn’t necessarily mean looking for people who have a good “cultural fit” with your company. Companies that hire for cultural fit often end up hiring the same type of person—typically, male graduates of top universities—which creates teams where everyone thinks alike. Instead, hire people who think differently from you and who come from various career and education paths, as diversity promotes innovation in tech fields. People with a variety of backgrounds bring an equivalent variety of ideas—a recipe for empowering out-of-the-box thinking.
| Diversity Versus Cultural Fit Business experts debate whether you should hire based on how an applicant fits your company’s culture. Contrary to Cagan and Jones’s thoughts on the matter, Tony Hsieh argues in Delivering Happiness that in addition to hiring team members who already fit the company’s values, you should also look for candidates who will actively improve the company’s culture. In Leading Change, John P. Kotter writes that changing a company’s culture is often necessary to keep it current with the times, but he still argues in favor of hiring based on how well candidates mesh with the current culture. He argues that cultural change must be approached slowly and only in conjunction with other incremental, organizational shifts. However, hiring employees based on cultural fit is a slippery slope toward discrimination. If you can avoid it, the converse to Cagan and Jones’s argument may also be true—that in addition to diversity benefiting business, tech companies can become a positive force for diversity. For example, businesses can form partnerships with historically Black colleges, both to provide students with technical skills and to give them access to networking opportunities. Plus, many tech roles don’t require a college degree, so providing different entry points, such as code schools and tech bootcamps, can be a way to introduce underrepresented groups into the technology sector, enhancing inclusivity across race, gender, and class. |
