Do not recruit people who are too smart, recruit people who are curious

Warren Buffett once said: "When recruiting people, I often look for candidates with the following three qualities: integrity, intelligence and energy. And if you don't meet the first criteria, the following two will break. cancel your company ". Clearly, integrity is the first requirement when recruiting talent. However, the quality right behind it - intelligence - is ironically always accompanied by a lot of unpredictable disadvantages.

Intelligence is essential when recruiting people for companies with rapid growth. Smart people can create innovative, innovative ideas to solve problems. Intelligence allows the "owner" to own it to innovate the method of working whenever they need to shorten the project implementation time while ensuring the same or higher results. Smart employees, at the same time, also quickly acquire problems, do not spend much time training and their work efficiency can be clearly seen in a short time.

However, smart people will also encounter difficulties when considering their ability to learn. In an article published in Harvard Business Review, published in 1991 under the title "Teaching Smart People How To Learn" , author Chris Argyris listed the dilemma. Smart people 's version and some measures to solve this problem. Specifically, that dilemma is that the smartest people in an organization that are often attributed to being able to learn quickly are not really good at it.

"Simply because those talents almost always achieve success in every job they do, so they rarely experience failure. And because they rarely taste the failure, they don't ever learn how to stand up from failure, so whenever their single-loop learning ^{( 1)} strategies are wrong, they start room Player, check the correctness of criticism and find a way to "blame" everyone, except them. In short, their learning ability will greatly diminish when they need it most. ".

Easy to get angry, defend and like to blame will kill a group's ability to solve problems together. Meanwhile, rapid improvisation and market learning (the inevitable process once your company grows quickly) always requires each member of the team to capture emerging events and trends. When things don't work out as planned, don't focus on blaming others, stay calm and look for solutions to solve the problem.

. smart people often have difficulty learning. When a problem occurs, they often blame the external effects rather than considering what they have done, they destroy themselves when they repeat those errors - Chris Argyris.

According to Tim Askew, founder of Corporate Rain International: "Before reading the Argyris article, I often justify these problems with the phrase" although smart but they often suffer from those problems. " After reading the article, my conclusion was " because they were so intelligent that they had such problems. "

So having to rethink yourself before listing other people's mistakes, such as "what my assumptions and beliefs made me unable to accept this failure?" Smart people who can do this naturally can learn faster in complex business situations. Meanwhile, people who are too confident in their abilities, too arrogant will not be able to do it.

Having trouble in the beginning (such as your first time at school or in your first job) and / or experiencing failure will help you practice humility. It forces you to look back on yourself and with practice, you will develop the habit of rechecking your hypotheses before blaming someone.

How to help you determine the actual behavior of an intelligent person, not the theory of who they are, is to spend time with them when they meet failure. Can they describe to you when they failed? Situations take place, what is the cause and how do their actions differ? What are they still doing to correct the mistake both then and now? When I look back at my past wrong recruits (and I made a lot of mistakes), I recalled the interviews and realized that I had skipped a step from myself.

Some people are very smart but it is impossible to tell their failure in a logical and interesting way or they just give reasons why it is not their failure. Meanwhile, an ordinary candidate always knows how to present what he is doing (to develop himself), looking for suitable people to fill the skills he lacks or find an environment for them to learn practice and development.

Notice that the issue mentioned here has nothing to do with emotional intelligence (Emotional Intelligence - EQ). A person who makes a big impression in the interview and leaves you with many beautiful impressions is not necessarily the person who will be able to learn excellently and suit your team.

When measuring intelligence, the first step to check is whether the candidate is smart enough in the job you will entrust to them. To do this, apply technical tests or simulate real-life situations. At the same time, be sure that the person you recruit will have good flexibility and adaptation when the environment changes, even if you fail, you can overcome it without hesitation for too long.

If they have such people, they will not only work hard to develop the company even when the harshest business environment they create will motivate the team to move forward with a spirit of readiness. acknowledge and learn from mistakes.

(1) Single-loop learning is a part of a broader concept of organizational learning theory developed by Chris Argyris and Donald Schon. 70s. Accordingly, Single-loop learning refers to efforts to solve problems by finding other methods of action while values, goals, plans or principles . remain the same. .