Stop Hiring Smart, Likable People – Finding the RightFit™ for the Roles in Your Company

Today, it’s not enough to hire the job candidate who interviews the best. If you want a long-term answer, you need to find the best fit for your company and the best fit for the role.

It helps to examine a candidate's resume (education and experience) and evaluate their personality to ensure that the company's values match the candidate's values. But there's a third piece, a dimension often overlooked but as vital as the previous two: how a candidate naturally does things, approaches tasks, analyzes, and completes assignments — the conative part of the mind. 

In this episode of Powered by Instinct, Amy Bruske, the President of Kolbe Corp, joins our host Eric Herrera to discuss the role Kolbe plays in successful recruitment, hiring strategies, and onboarding, and how to successfully implement the hiring cheat code to reduce the many costs of turnover.

Host: Eric Herrera (5392)

Guest-at-a-Glance 

Name: Amy Bruske (3583)

What she does: Amy is the President of Kolbe Corp. 

Company: Kolbe Corp 

Noteworthy: Amy is one of the company's three Senior Master Consultants. She is also in demand for executive coaching and team building for a wide range of businesses worldwide. 

Where to find Amy: LinkedIn 

Podcast Insights 

🎙️ Avoid building a team of like-minded individuals. As our relationships revolve around common interests, we focus on surrounding ourselves with people who have the same values, habits, and behaviors. The business world is no different. ''Leaders clone themselves in hiring all the time. And, as you said, sometimes you need someone who's the complete opposite of who you are. [...] Likability can't be the only piece just because you're attracted to the way they get things done, or they're just like you. But we human beings are attracted to certain kinds of behavior and the way people do things, and that might lead you astray.'' 

🎙️ When hiring, examine a candidate's education and experience, pay attention to their personality, and familiarize yourself with their unique talents/capabilities (their natural way of doing things). ''We first screen for skills. We look at the resume. We do a phone screen. We ask some questions and see if they are going to be able to do the job. Then we do this Kolbe piece — how they most naturally solve problems. We get a pool of candidates, and then we interview them. And that's when we screen for cultural fit, values fit, personality type — all of those things that go in that affective part of the mind. That's the best way to screen for all three parts of the mind because Kolbe is one piece of the puzzle. It's fundamental because it's the most predictive of long-term success in a role, but you want to take this three-parts-of-the-mind approach where you're doing all three.'' 

🎙️If a candidate is not a good fit for a particular role, it doesn't mean they're not suitable for a different role in the company. For example, you may come across an individual whose education and experience blow your mind, but once they take the Kolbe Assessment, you realize they would not be such a good fit for the role. However, just because someone wouldn't succeed in that position doesn't mean they should not be part of your team. ''One thing I want to say to all the leaders out there is that if you can focus on the end result you need to get out of a role and then give people the freedom to get there in whatever way is most natural for them. There's a lot of flexibility in most of our companies. I always joke that if you're running a nuclear power plant, maybe there's not a lot of flexibility in some of those positions — it has to be done a certain way. But, for most of us, we can do some minor tweaks and adapt the role to suit the person better.''