Google realised hiring ‘perfect’ employees was a mistake. Steve Jobs had a better rule

Rejecting strong job seekers with noticeable flaws is a common misstep. — Pixabay

Thousands of companies worldwide declare that they hire “the best people”. Of course, not all businesses can truly have the best people, but that doesn’t stop seemingly every organisation from making the claim.

McKinsey popularised the idea of the “war for talent” a few decades ago, and it has only intensified since then, with companies constantly competing for the top employees.

One of the ways startups attempt to build the most talented teams is to reject candidates who get negative feedback during interviews. For highly competitive roles, this often means hiring candidates with no apparent flaws, whose résumés indicate they have succeeded in everything they’ve ever tried.

Google used to hire this way. In the early 2000s, with thousands of résumés coming in daily, the company could afford to be extremely picky. Google would commonly reject senior candidates who had been very successful in their careers because they had poor grades in college, and placed tremendous weight on hiring from prestigious universities and companies. It can feel good to hire like that. But Google discovered years later that the candidates who performed the best were not the ones without faults, but the candidates whose strengths were so great that they overcame those weaknesses.

Strengths and weaknesses are often opposite sides of the same coin. The candidate who appears to have always succeeded has often avoided taking risks. David Foster Wallace discussed the stark tradeoff between strengths and weaknesses in his writing on tennis. He described how the world is enamored of the achievements of world-class athletes but hates remembering the sacrifices that got them there, such as thousands of hours spent in practice at the expense of academic learning. And yet, all professional athletes are recruited and rewarded on the basis of just their strengths, making those weaknesses irrelevant to their athletic careers.

In the 1967 classic The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker, the father of management theory, described an epiphany he had while working with Japanese executives. He was sharing American performance evaluation techniques and found that the managers from Japan did not seem interested. When he asked why, one explained that it wasn’t useful, because Drucker’s methods focused on identifying people’s weaknesses.

By contrast, in Japanese companies, with their traditional lifetime employment model, learning about employees’ faults was simply not that relevant, because there was no mechanism to fire them. So instead, the Japanese leaders focused entirely on matching people to roles on the basis of their talents.

Drucker proceeded to explain how Abraham Lincoln had a similar realisation during the American Civil War. Lincoln had hired three generals in succession, each without obvious weaknesses, who were all unsuccessful in leading the Union Army to victory. That was when he finally moved away from requiring his commanding general to look perfect on paper and came to Ulysses S. Grant. Grant had failed at numerous professions, and was working as a clerk in his father’s leather shop before the war.

Grant dressed poorly, didn’t fit in with the formal leaders Lincoln had previously installed, and had resigned from the military years earlier amid rumours of alcoholism. But Grant’s incredible administrative skill, his ability to not panic when attacked, and his relentless drive to aggressively move forward was an unparalleled set of strengths that nobody else could match.

Grant, of course, was ultimately successful. When Lincoln was later asked by others about Grant’s drinking habits, he purportedly quipped that he wanted to find out what type of whiskey he consumed so he could send a barrel of it to his other generals.

The benefit of hiring for key strengths and ignoring weaknesses is also one of the lessons from Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics, which the book and movie Moneyball are based on. Baseball scouts traditionally used an eyeball test and looked for five-tool players – athletes who were good batters and powerful hitters, who could also throw hard, run quickly, and field well. Beane and his team realised that this was an inefficient and flawed strategy. They shifted to building a team focused on different kinds of quantitative metrics.

As just one example, they went looking for players who helped them statistically get on base regardless of how weak they might look to a scout’s eye. They then proceeded to recruit numerous supposedly flawed players who were undervalued by the market. The result was a historic season, when they set an American League record in winning 20 consecutive games.

This same idea – of focusing on strengths instead of weaknesses – is actually true of the best way to use AI. Many people dismiss AI entirely because of the tech’s perceived weaknesses, such as hallucinations. But to dismiss AI is to ignore its strengths. After all, it can assemble the sum of human knowledge in a unique way to give us faster answers than any other tool we’ve had – even if those answers should be treated as approximations.

AI is objectively superhuman in its strengths, so why wouldn’t you want to use it to help yourself and your organisation? AI may be the Ulysses S. Grant of technologies: better than any human in what it does best, but occasionally prone to whiskey.

Many organisations have learned that weaknesses are often not dealbreakers. The way that great organisations have counteracted flaws in individuals is by assembling teams with complementary skills. Steve Jobs observed that talented team members temper one another’s faults so their talents can shine. Google discovered, after many years of requiring perfect CVs, that the people who performed the best over time were those who were dinged for a weakness during interviews, yet whose strengths were so great that other interviewers argued strongly for their hiring. These were candidates who ended up being some of the most valuable people at Google.

Of course, not all weaknesses can be ignored – every manager should use common sense and not accept dangerous faults or negative behaviours that would hurt the team or company. But if an employee has demonstrated strength in core areas of the job they’re being considered for, it’s entirely possible that they have ignored weakness in other areas to develop that talent.

This is ultimately why it’s possible for multiple companies to truly have the best people – because the goal is to find the most talented employees for your particular organisation, at this particular point in time. And those perfect employees are likely very imperfect – in ways that you can safely ignore, or balance out. – Inc./Tribune News Service