How to hire: detecting motivation
In this entry, I’ll share with you how to detect in a person what drives them.
The head of our marketing major at ESC Lille, Christophe Sempels, has brought us exceptional speakers: the first one was Arnaud Pêtre on neuromarketing, in November last year. Today, we received Pierre Moorkens on Developmental Psychology. He talked to us about humans, what drives them, and how to understand the person we have in front us. Be it spouse, friend, or colleague.
First, you must understand the distinction science makes between Character and Temperament. Temperament is acquired during the first 3 months after birth, Character is acquired onwards until between 18 and 22 years.
Temperament drives people through the pleasure they take in doing something. Character drives someone only so long as they succeed in the undertaking.
Take your relation to order. Say you just finished cooking, and your kitchen is messy. Do you clean up because you like to? Or because you don’t like the mess? Or do you think to yourself that you should clean up, but now’s not the time?
In the first case, you clean up because you like to. It’s in your temperament. In the second, you do it through aversion. You were taught or influenced in disliking messes by your relatives. In the third, you postpone cleaning up, because you don’t really care. You know it needs to be done, but there is nothing compelling to do it. If you do it because you like it, it is temperament; if you do it because you have to, it’s character; if you aren’t compelled, it’s neither.
So what?
Well, lets say you’re hiring an accountant. You ask him about what he likes in accountancy: he answers he likes precision, numbers, calculus, etc. You then put him in an imaginary scenario where he takes over from an accountant that made a poor job. His reaction to this situation will determine how he’ll fare.
If he mentions disliking numbers that don’t add up or anything similar – stay away from a hire. You are looking for someone who will see this as an opportunity to make it right.
Say your company acquired another one. If the acquired company’s books aren’t perfect or don’t match the formatting of your own, your new accountant will be stressed. And will perform poorly.
If you do something aligned with your temperament, you enjoy the process. If you do something aligned with your character, you enjoy the results. You want to hire someone who enjoys the process.
Doing something aligned with your character consumes energy, doing something aligned with your temperament produces energy. If you consume too much energy, you burn out. You then need to fall back on something that produces energy to restore morale.
So what this means is that when you are hiring someone like a software developer, try (among the many other things you need to do) to figure out his temperament. See if there is a match with the job you are offering. He enjoys making things run fast? Give him a job optimizing code. He likes making new things? Assign him to a new product development projects. This might seem trivial, but this is often overlooked.
As you can imagine, a good indicator of motivation are the person’s personal projects: the ones he does for pleasure.
Disclaimer: I did some research, and there does not seem to be any consensus on this. And I have never yet hired anyone. It rang true to my ears, that’s it. So take with a grain of salt.