The Three Keys to Hiring Well
Hiring is not an event. It is the discipline that determines everything else.
Seven of the eight sessions in the Esteemed MBA are devoted to the art and science of leading people: how to inspire them, develop them, and bring out their best. We explore roles and responsibilities, the discipline of distilling every job to three to five mission-critical objectives. We discuss the science of communication, the power of listening, the architecture of trust, and why a message must be delivered seven times before it is truly heard. We go deep on empathy, management by wandering, goal-setting, delegation, and the relentless pursuit of productivity. We talk about values, purpose, vision, and the all-important why.
All of that effort, all of that nuance, becomes dramatically easier when the person sitting across from you was the right hire. Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg has spent decades studying talent mobility and organizational performance. His conclusion is both simple and sobering: the quality of a company’s people is the single greatest predictor of its outcomes. That is why, of everything a leader does, nothing matters more than hiring.
At the Esteemed MBA, we teach three disciplines that produce exceptional hires. Not occasionally. Consistently.
One: Hire for Behaviors, Not Credentials
Behaviors drive results. Behaviors also represent values made visible. When we hire, we are not simply filling a seat; we are adding a pattern of conduct to our culture, for better or worse.
Here is the exercise I give every hiring manager in the program: think of the single best person you have ever worked with in the specific role you are trying to fill. Put a name to the face. Then imagine following that person through a full workday. What were the three to five things they did, habitually and almost invisibly, that made them extraordinary? Was it their follow-through? Their ability to prioritize under pressure? The precision of their communication? Their natural instinct to own a problem rather than pass it? Write those behaviors down. Those are your hiring criteria, and they belong at the top of the list, well above where someone went to school or what their last title was.
Research from the Harvard Business Review supports this instinct. Studies consistently show that behavioral and situational interview techniques, which ask candidates to describe specific past actions rather than hypothetical responses, are among the strongest predictors of job performance. The question is not “How would you handle a difficult client?” The question is “Tell me about a time you turned a difficult client relationship around. Walk me through exactly what you did.” The answer reveals the behavior. The behavior reveals the person.
Apply the same thinking to your core values. If one of your values is professionalism, do not let it remain an abstraction on a wall. Define the behaviors that professionalism produces in your organization. Is it timeliness? Accountability? A commitment to preparation before every meeting? Name the behaviors. Those become the character traits of the person you are seeking.
I have hired people from retail shops, coffee shops, and the YMCA. Some of them became the best performers the company ever had, not because of their resumes, but because they had the exact behaviors the role demanded. A diploma tells you where someone has been. Behavior tells you what they will do.
Two: Always Be Recruiting
The most common and most costly mistake managers make is reactive hiring. A person leaves, a gap opens, and suddenly the hiring manager, who is now doing two jobs, is sitting across the table from a candidate and seeing not a person but a solution. The horns disappear. The halo glows. The offer goes out in a hurry. Months later, the team is carrying a C-level performer and wondering how it happened.
The antidote is a bench. Not a metaphorical bench, but an actual, maintained, living list of talented people you have met, observed, and would call the moment an opportunity opens. No job posting. No recruiter fee. Just a phone call to someone you already know is exceptional.
Nick Saban, the most decorated coach in college football history, understood this better than anyone. His dynasty at Alabama was not built only on strategy or preparation, though both were extraordinary. It was built on a relentless, year-round commitment to recruiting talent so that when one great player moved on, an equally gifted successor was already waiting to take the field. The best organizations operate the same way.
Building that bench requires programming your brain with radar. Because you know exactly what behaviors you are looking for, you can spot them anywhere. The barista at Starbucks who makes every customer feel like the only person in the room. The vendor representative in a meeting who asks questions so strategic you find yourself leaning forward. The competitor’s salesperson at a trade show who commands a room without seeming to try. Get their names. Get their contact information. Follow up with a cup of coffee, nothing formal, just a conversation. Add them to your list.
If you are unsure what behaviors to look for in a specific role, ask. I was once recruiting for an account manager and frankly did not know exactly what the ideal profile looked like. So I called one of my best clients and asked her directly: who is the best account manager you have ever worked with, and what made them great? She lit up. She described someone who had never worked in my industry but who had every behavioral quality the role required. I hired that person. It was one of my best decisions.
Your clients, your peers, your industry contacts all have an opinion about who is exceptional. Ask them. The answer is usually generous and almost always useful.
A Note on Referral Programs
Your best employees are your best recruiters, because high performers tend to surround themselves with other high performers. Research published in the Harvard Business Review found that employee referrals produce hires who onboard faster, perform at a higher level, and stay longer than candidates sourced through any other channel.
At gap intelligence, we compensated employees up to three thousand dollars for referring a candidate who joined the team and stayed. To put that in perspective, a retained search firm typically charges twenty to thirty percent of a hire’s first-year salary. The referral program was not a cost. It was a substantial savings, and it kept our bench full of talented people who were already culturally aligned before they walked in the door.
The question to ask your best people, regularly and sincerely, is this: do you know anyone who would be great here? They will. And they will tell you.
Three: You Should Never Have to Post a Job Opening
That is the standard I set for myself, and it is the standard I encourage every leader in the Esteemed MBA to hold. A posted job opening is a signal that the bench is empty. It means hiring has been treated as an event rather than a practice.
When you know what behaviors drive success in every role on your team, when you are actively observing the world around you with that knowledge in hand, and when your best people are sending talented friends your way, the bench fills itself. And when an opening does appear, you make a phone call, not a posting.
None of this is complicated. But like most things worth doing, it requires intention. It requires that you think about talent not only when you need it, but every single day. The leaders who do that consistently are the ones who, almost without exception, build the strongest teams and experience the kind of organizational performance that makes all the other work of leadership feel, finally, possible.
Give it a spin. Know the behaviors. Build the bench. Ask your best people. The right person is already in your universe. You just need the radar to find them.
Be Esteemed.
