As promised, today I’ll continue breaking down the psychology of good candidate interviewees and the anatomy of a decision within the minds of smart people.
Despite warnings from my high school English teacher, I am throwing caution to the wind and plan to mix as many metaphors and analogies in the following paragraphs as it takes to get my point across. 
We have to start with a dating analogy. How did you…or would you… find your ideal spouse? Would you wait for people to ask you out, or would you pursue multiple people before finding the best match? Were you one of those who waited for people to pursue you? Not the best plan folks. But this is exactly what many managers do. Desperate people generally grab the low hanging fruit. (No joke was intended here, but yes…I see it…and yes, a new metaphor!) It takes no skill, little courage, no risk, and absolutely no courting skills to ask a desperate person to marry. Often times, these folks later wonder why they are disappointed with the end result…
Of course, even though most of us can relate to the dating/marriage analogy, it breaks down at some point because you (as a manager) want to hire an entire office full of good performers, not just one. So back to the harvesting fruit analogy…
You certainly want to pick some low hanging fruit, (low hanging fruit are those people who you traditionally hire out of real estate licensing schools etc) because doing so eats up the fewest resources, and because you CAN find some great fruit there. But, can you really find the highest volume of good fruit if you settle for only low hanging fruit? The answer is an emphatic NO. If you want abundant good fruit, you have to work harder to get to the fruit that is out of reach and assume that there is fruit that your competitor is too lazy to find ways to harvest.
Great harvesters find the tools to capture every piece of fruit they can get their hands on, even if it takes more time and energy. Keep in mind, you will likely have to throw away a great deal of bad fruit in order to find the best. Remember Kevin Ryan, CEO of AlleyCorp who interviews someone EVERY DAY? He does this because he is willing to expend the energy and time to uncover the best talent. He says:
“I used to think business was 50 percent having the right people. Now I think it’s 80 percent. The best way to be productive is to have a great team. So I spend more time than most CEOs on human resources. That’s 20 percent of my week.”
When it comes to interviewing the best candidates, you have to change your entire mindset. The best fruit will probably not be low hanging. Any one of your competitors can find those folks–they’re easy to get to. But who is going to spend the time and energy working to attract the candidates who are already good at what they do…only they happen to work in a different industry? Who’s going to have the patience to court these people over several months of indecisiveness, licensing school, and occasional second thoughts? NEWS ALERT- The brightest and most motivated people will not say yes right away. (More on this next edition.)
Who among you are willing to turn over enough rocks and do the necessary work to dislodge those hard to find diamonds? (I warned you! If you’re keeping track, that’s metaphor #3.) Doing this takes patience, consistent engagement, and finesse.
The finesse part is knowing how to talk to people who you suspect will become very good agents, but who might not be able to pull the trigger as fast as you’d like. This is often the hard part. How do you get them to arrive at “yes” without sounding like an impatient salesman? The brightest candidates will resist this pressure.
In part three of this discussion I’ll explain the anatomy of a decision and how you can best facilitate arriving at the right decision. The process I’ll share is used in psychotherapy by every well trained psychologist and will enable you to help anyone through any decision.
Editor’s Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. Comments or questions are welcome. If you’re an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email. If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the “comments” link below.
