Hire Experience to Build Teams. Hire Talent to Do Work.

The New Year reminds us how hard it is to change our own habits. It's even harder to change someone else's.

The season of attempted habit-change is nearly upon us.

And while I wish you each, individually, the best of luck in your New Year’s resolutions, it’s also a good time to reflect on habit-change within the organization. That is a major, and vexing, concern of any leader.

In my estimation, most of us drastically underestimate the sheer difficulty of habit change, including our own. I will never forget the time my wife rearranged the drawers in our kitchen. It was many, many annoying weeks before I stopped pulling open the drawer where the utensils USED to be every time I wanted to grab a fork.

Every employee in your organization has built up countless such habits, including around how they do their job. To be effective leaders, we must be realistic about how deeply ingrained those habits are and what it takes to alter them.

Specifically, I find that CEOs, HR teams, and managers often hire for “experience” without thinking critically about the ingrained habits that come with that experience. The great irony is that we often think that by hiring someone with lots of experience, we’ll save ourselves time on training the new employee - but what we’re really getting is a collection of habits that don’t apply to our business.

Let me give you an example.

Imagine you manage a McDonald’s. Across the street, there is a Burger King that just shut down. The best fry cook in that franchise walks into your restaurant with his resume. Do you hire him?

Maybe. But you might be better off hiring someone else.

Why? Because this employee has spent years building up a complete system of habits. He knows exactly where everything is at Burger King, he’s mastered their procedures, he can work their kitchen with his eyes closed. The problem is, you don’t run a Burger King. Your fryers are different. Your procedures are different. Your menu is different.

So now you’ve got someone who has to unlearn an entire methodology before he can learn yours. Building a habit from scratch is hard enough. Changing an existing habit is exponentially harder. It’s going to be frustrating for him, frustrating for you, and frustrating for everyone he works with.

This is a simplistic example of what often happens with knowledge work. We think we’re making a slam-dunk hire only to find the employee’s old habits bring trouble. We’ve all worked with that person who starts every other sentence with “Well, at my last company, we used to...” Sometimes those insights are valuable. Often they’re not, because what worked at their last company may have zero relevance to your business, your culture, or your systems.

This gets at one of my core hiring mantras: hire experience to build teams, hire talent to do work. As I wrote about in The CEO Tightrope, you typically do need experienced, successful leaders to build teams and establish new capabilities. But for the people actually doing the work? What’s more important is getting best raw talent possible. The challenge CEOs face is distinguishing one from the other.

When you’re bringing someone in to build out a new function or establish a practice your company hasn’t had before, experience matters tremendously. You do need someone who’s seen what works and what doesn’t, someone who knows the pitfalls. They can import best practices and save you years of painful trial and error.

But if you’re hiring someone to execute within your existing systems and culture - which is most often the case for a growing company - you want to prioritize talent and aptitude over a resume full of similar job titles. Otherwise, you may be getting a big un-training and re-training job. Which is about as frustrating as teaching someone to open a different drawer for a fork than the one they’ve been opening for ten years.

Habit-change is hard. Understanding the trade-offs between talent and experience (and the habits that come with experience) can differentiate an average hiring practice from a highly competitive one.

Have a very Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year!

—Joel