270 - The Heroic No - Hiring

A counterintuitive hiring habit

We’re doing a lot of hiring at Mayday at the moment. It feels like a great time to write about the subject, both to share my learnings, as well as organise my thinking for practical application.

The Heroic No is a counterintuitive hiring habit I’ve actively developed. It is the acknowledgment of finding a “no” about a candidate as a heroic act. Earlier in my career, I would only have celebrated making a hire. A candidate who did not successfully make it through the hiring process was nothing to be celebrated, or so I thought.

Here’s the thing. The best candidates make it impossible not to hire them. This is true of every great hire I’ve ever made. By the end of the hiring process, it was inconceivable that we wouldn’t hire them (assuming they said yes). And so if you can find a way to a “no”, that is a truly heroic act. It is the avoidance of hiring a candidate who wasn’t going to be great. If they were, it wouldn’t have been possible to find the “no”.

Let’s add fuel to the counterintuitive fire. The further into the hiring process you find the “no”, the more heroic it is. For someone to have made it that far, they must have had the veneer of greatness. To identify that it is not there is an even more heroic act. This is particularly tough to train yourself to do as it flies in the face of the bias towards sunk cost.

In service of the heroic no, I’ve found it invaluable to invoke the power of the pre-mortem and pose the question: “how could this person prove to be a mishire?” And if we can find a “no” as a result of doing so, that is something to be celebrated.