Do your auditions and interviews give too much weight to skill sets and not enough to value sets?
Overheard on the Simon Sinek podcast a while back: (second paragraph, especially)
I think that interviewing is like dating. You’re gonna go on a few dates with someone; you have to decide if you want to marry them. And so I think, when we talk to people, we sit there with their resumé, and we ask them questions about their resumé. And that has a role, but who are they as a person? When I’m getting to know someone as a candidate for a job, I want to go out for coffee with them, I want to take them for lunch, I want to talk with them about their family, I want to find out who they are.
Because at the end of the day, what makes somebody a great contributor to our culture is their value set. If they’re missing a skill set, we can teach that. […] It’s really the values that make someone the contributor to culture.
Simon Sinek, A Bit of Optimism Episode 65
I think it’s too easy to overemphasize skill set and underemphasize value set in our audition process and our job interview process. In both cases, the easily measurable and quantifiable is what we choose to value. It’s a lot easier to assess someone’s sight reading than to truly know their values and what they will contribute as a human.
I personally make sure my audition rubrics include a significant percentage that tries to put a numerical value to their value set. I take the time to evaluate what I know about them as a collaborator, as a team member. If I don’t know the person well, I speak to someone who does.
When I weight this more heavily, I have more cohesive groups. And when I have more cohesive groups, we make better music.