Never hire a clown to perform brain surgery.
My daughter was a Division 1 college gymnast. When she got to college, she and all of her teammates were already highly skilled. Yet, each season, the first week of formal practice focused on the most basic gymnastics skills — tumbling. Here is a team full of elite athletes practicing the same skills that toddlers start on.
Why? Two reasons:
- No matter how good you are, you can always get better at the basic skills
- Being the best at basic skills lays a solid foundation for advanced skills, including learning new skills.
Step one in understanding that hiring is not dating is to weed out anybody without the basic skill set. You’re building a great team, and a great team needs competent players.
However, competence is not just about advanced skills or an impressive resume. Competence, although required, is the lowest bar to satisfy. We’re not even talking if you don’t have the basic competence.
It’s what comes next that starts to separate the wheat from the chaff.
