The Personality Traits Most Favored By Hiring Managers (And Why It's Bad News For Your Teams)

There's something rotten in the state of recruiting. When a candidate looks at a job ad, they would be forgiven for thinking that all employers are looking for people with a specific list of skills  - 10 years' experience within an S&P 500 company/advanced understanding of technology platforms/specific industry certifications/proven track record of managing large teams.

Once the candidate gets to the job interview, it's a different story. Now, employers start looking for qualities that aren't listed in the job ad. Suddenly, it's not about being the best qualified, it's about having the right personality. Hiring managers are looking for a collection of unspecified traits that match the workplace and the people who work there; candidates who possess a "spark of commonality" with the organization's culture. 

What's the problem with that? Surely, if everyone in the workplace has similar personal values and qualities, then they'll all get on like a house on fire and be a highly productive team.

Well, perhaps......

Who Gets Hired?

According to a 2014 CareerBuilder study, hiring managers actively seek out candidates who are hardworking, dependable, positive, self-motivated, team-oriented, organized, effective communicators, flexible, confident, and who work well under pressure. That's quite a list of demands.

Other personality characteristics that repeatedly feature on a hiring manager's wish list include multi-tasking skills, strategic thinking skills, decisiveness, risk-taking, independent thinking and "the natural marketer."  Regardless of the position they're hiring for, hiring managers seems to want an independent-minded Extravert with long-range planning abilities who is not afraid to pull the trigger. It's beginning to sound like they're hiring for the company's....hiring manager.

In 2012, Northwestern University professor Lauren Rivera found that overwhelmingly, people with hiring responsibility sought out candidates with the same experiences, tastes, self-presentation style, leisure pursuits, and personal characteristics as themselves.

Drawing from interviews and observation in the professional services industry, she found that hiring managers had a natural preference for people who, in the words of one director, they would "enjoy hanging with." What's more, hiring managers admitted they would be willing to overlook technical deficiencies in order to find someone who fitted in. As one banking director put it: "One of my main criteria is what I call the 'stranded in the airport test.' Would I want to be stuck in an airport in Minneapolis in a snowstorm with them?"

Rivera's research centers on elite professional services firms, a sector where candidates are likely to be culturally pre-screened through the requirement for higher level degrees and professional certifications. But top to bottom, recruiters have an unconscious bias towards recruiting "mini-me's."

A Head for Hiring, the CIPD's report about the behavioral science of recruitment, argues that every employer unconsciously prefers people like themselves. The bias isn't as obvious as preferring male candidates over female, or one ethnicity over another. Rather, it's based on gut-instinct; the warm feeling you have towards some personalities over others.

No Such Thing as Objective Hiring

Even when there's a rigorous, objective set of interviewing criteria from which to evaluate a candidate's suitability, there's a tendency to fall back on the candidates who are "just like me." Consider this:

• We all instinctively prefer people who are similar to us.
• Conversely, we have a negative bias towards those who are different from us. This bias persists even when we know that we could not do the job ourselves and need someone very different in the role.
• If there's an attribute we admire, for example gregariousness, we assign a greater positive bias to someone who possesses that quality even if the candidate is woefully inadequate in other areas. This is called the halo effect - the tendency for our overall impression of a person (she's friendly) to impact our perception of that person's competence or specific traits (she must also be smart).
• We allow our past experiences to color our present judgment. For example, if a hiring manager had a poor working relationship with a shy or unconfident person, a candidate who displays these attributes is already starting off on the back foot.

Interviews, which are notoriously high-pressure environments, tend to exaggerate these biases. And this is bad for the diversity of our teams.

Who's Missing from Our Workplaces?

By hiring clones, companies may be missing out on people with complementary skills that could create a more challenging, innovative and growth-oriented mindset within their teams. The inevitable result is groupthink, where team members fail to challenge each other, never voice alternative opinions, and settle for the conformist viewpoint where disagreement would arguably produce more perspectives, options and viewpoints.

Let's look again at the top 10 personality traits favored by hiring managers according to the CareerBuilder study:

• Hardworking
• Dependable
• Positive
• Self-motivated
• Team-oriented
• Organized
• Works well under pressure
• Effective communicators
• Flexible
• Confident.

Now let's look at who's missing from this list:

• The cautious person: Someone who can act as a counterbalance to risk takers.
• The distracted person: Someone who may not be organized or on-point when it comes to the work that needs doing, but who will consider a broader range of information and think outside the box.
• The cynical person: Someone who can release their emotional attachment to situations and interactions and be critical of the world around them. Being skeptical stops a team from following flights of fancy and can bring a healthy dose of realism to the table.
• The negative person: Someone who thinks about everything that could go wrong helps the team to plan for those situations, so it can either avoid them or minimize the damage if they did occur.
• The lone wolf: Someone who exists independently of the team and is prepared to propose a different line of reasoning, regardless of whether this upsets others. 
• The maverick: Someone who will play devil's advocate, break the rules, and deliberately disrupt the group "just because." Mavericks are extremely goal focused and will shake out ways to achieve the desired outcome at all costs.  
• The shy person: Someone who is more reflective and observant than outgoing people, who doesn't feel like she has to connect with every person in the room. The shy person will listen to everyone's input before carefully processing and implementing the team's ideas. It's not smart for everyone to do all the talking. 

Each of these people can bring a unique - and yes, sometimes difficult and challenging  - approach to the workplace. But when was the last time your organization set out to hire a shy, cautious, distracted cynic with a negative outlook and a penchant for breaking the rules? 

What Can a Hiring Manager Do?

Once you realize that bias is impacting your hiring decisions, you can take steps to avoid it.

The first trick is to spread out the workload. Research shows that you're far more likely to make bias-based decisions if you interview four or five candidates in quick succession and hit interview fatigue, so be sure to spread interviews out over several days or weeks.

Another trick is to avoid making hiring decisions in the interview, and instead use the meeting to collect information against a list of standardized questions that you've prepared in advance. Sticking closely to an information-gathering script stops you getting sidetracked by a candidate's personal qualities.

A third trick is to give people who were not involved in the interviews a say in the final decision. The more people you can involve in the selection process, the less likely it is that you will end up with an identical workforce.

Finally, you could use psychometric tools and scientific personality assessments to measure someone's behavior. These tools can objectively assess someone's character traits and help you hire for diversity, without leaving things to chance.

Summing It Up

We know from a lot of research that employees with differences can challenge each other and spark people to think in new and different ways. Diversity helps groups make better decisions, think more creatively, work more productively, and feel more attached to their organization. The long-term payoff is tremendous.

By contrast, hiring for similarity (an airport buddy) can signal a slippery slide in group think. When you fall into the trap of selecting candidates who think like you do, you deny your teams the variety of perspectives, skills and experiences that allows the whole team to become greater than the sum of its individual parts. You might not instinctively warm to the shy, cautious, distracted, cynical candidate. But ask yourself, would your teams perform better if you did?