Potential Dealbreakers
A short post this week on a simple—but difficult—topic. When you like a candidate but they are deficient in one part of the Target (scorecard), what do you do?
An example would be a candidate that scores well across all Facets of the Target except one (e.g. “concise communicator”), where they have a clear liability. In theory, all of these Facets are “must have” so this would create a default presumption of no hire. While there’s no simple algorithm to handle all the subtle factors you’d consider in a hiring decision, here is a simple three-step test you can try on:
- How teachable is the trait in question? Some things are fairly hardwired; others show a lot of change in response to good mentorship, feedback, incentives, etc.
- How coachable is this candidate? (How much of a growth trajectory have they shown in the past? How low ego are they? How quickly and proactively have they learned from past mistakes?)
- Can we coach it? (I.e. do we have a person—or process—that is believably positioned to make this coaching work?)
Some things are more teachable and coachable than others. And some people are also more coachable than others. It’s of course crucial to not optimistically delude yourself into rationalizing a bad hiring decision. You can’t just go around saying “oh we’ll coach them to do X” just because you want to make the hire. What you need instead is a shared understanding ahead of time as to which traits are teachable and which are not. As well as which ones you as a company are realistically in a position to tackle.
Most companies make the mistake of settling out of desperation ("we need this hire now, so we’ll make it work”) and end up regretting the decision when they need to eventually re-hire for the role after a painful termination. So the general advice is still: if you’re unsure, the answer is probably no.
However the above 3-step framework is one part of how you can think about making intelligent gambles in close situations. If there’s a close-to-dealbreaker flaw but it’s one that’s moldable and the candidate has shown a history of being very coachable on analogous dimensions and you’ve got a believable coaching/onboarding plan in place, it may be worthy of a shot.
