After reading Chip and Dan heath’s article in Fast Company called “Why It May Be Wiser To Hire People Without Meeting Them”. I couldn’t help but agree with the findings in the article having fallen into that trap myself over the last few years with some key hires. In short, they talk a lot about how the interview process has little to do with the success of a candidate in your organization.
It's true that every manager has their blind spots but I think marketing managers have it worse than other managers when it comes to hiring since most marketers are optimists by nature. Marketers want to believe in our products, marketers want to believe in our sales team, and most of all marketers want to believe in people. This is why the hiring process has always bedeviled me. Ask any of my new hires that I made interview with a half dozen people after I interviewed them! It was a way of compensating for my optimism.
They go on to say that: “Research has consistently shown that one of the best predictors of job performance is a work sample.” So if you agree with this premise I would say that those work samples should be the “social presence” of your candidate. What are they contributing on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Do they have a blog? What do they say?
Moreover my favorite sales guy here at Avaya (who writes the blog called: A Sales Guy) recently wrote an article on: Why Your Social Graph Will Be Worth as Much as Your Home - where he cites: “If employers, or recruiters can’t learn about you online, through your social graph, they won’t be interested.” Moreover he expects online vetting of dates, baby sitters etc will only increase and “having an online social presence will be the required price to play.”
And I agree with him – what better way to get inside the mind of a potential new hire than to see how they market themselves and whether their viewpoint matches up to your. Yet another use of Social Media we didn’t expect at the inception of Web 2.0.
(June 2009) (
