In 2004, Jeff Bezos, the top guy at Amazon was quoted in INC magazine.

One of the huge mistakes people make is that they force an interest on themselves. You don’t choose your passions; your passions chooose you”

Great advice. I was reminded of this today as I was looking at the profile of a person for a job we had benchmarked. He simply wasn’t a fit. No matter how much he SAID he could do the job, all indications were that he would not succeed. This led to a candid conversation.

Benchmarking a job involves interviewing key people overseeing the job and defining key accountabilities for the job. Then an online assessment is completed by those same people and a composite profile is created. Applicants for the job, or people already in the job, then take a similiar assessment and we are able to compare their real scores to the composite “ideal” profile. No hiring or promotion decisions should be solely based on an assessment but I have learned that a bit of data goes a long way to help you make the best decisions.

Passion is one of those intangibles that goes a long way. It gets people up in the morning and makes them put in that extra effort. If someone doesn’t fit the job it will be harder for them to get excited.

Next time you hire, hire for passion AND for skills. Make sure the person fits.

You can visit
http://www.firestarterspeaking.com/performance-assesments-hiring-assesments.php to learn a bit more about benchmarking

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 12:57 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.