This year, I coached my older daughter’s soccer team again.
At the first practice, I enthusiastically took notes. Some players hustled. Others showed natural skill. A few seemed reluctant to accept feedback.
As the season progressed, I realized some of my first impressions were wrong. Players who excelled at practice weren’t always consistent in games. Others became exceptional learners, showing persistence I hadn’t initially noticed.
It took time—and repeated observation—to understand each player’s strengths and what I could expect from them.
Hiring has taught me the same lesson: first impressions are useful, but they aren’t a reliable predictor of long term performance.
Get the Right People on the Bus
I first read Jim Collins’s Good to Great in 2014. It remains one of my favorite leadership books, particularly for its emphasis on “getting the right people on the bus.”
The message stayed with me: attracting and retaining great people is foundational to everything else a leader hopes to accomplish.
Around that time, I took over a large department that had lost roughly half its staff amid burnout and organizational problems. We needed to hire—and retain—people quickly to avoid losing everyone else.
I began studying hiring, drawing on books such as Lou Adler’s The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired.
We hired about 60 people during that crisis. Some of them good. We also made mistakes. Poor hiring decisions led to difficult management situations, lost time, and the need to start the process again.
In 2021, I was asked to lead a new project that eventually required nearly 100 hires, many in a short period. This time, I brought experience and a more deliberate process.
The results have been encouraging. Our team requires relatively little intervention for performance or interpersonal problems. Average job satisfaction scores are consistently high. And in 2025, retention was approximately 95%, including our contract team.
One unusual feature: we did not conduct traditional job interviews for about 90% of those hires. Instead, we relied on strict application criteria, a work sample, and three strong references from recent supervisors.
That approach helped us focus on demonstrated performance rather than how much we liked someone during an interview.
I still remember applying for a job where the CEO told me, “Parker, I can’t hire you yet. I like you too much.” He explained that he relied on other senior leaders’ assessments and a slow hiring process to keep his own bias in check.
It was a valuable reminder: liking a candidate and having evidence that they will succeed are different things.
Poor hires usually fall into two categories. Problems with competence and personality quirks. Most managers know that personality issues are much harder to deal with.
If your screening process is good, you should be able to identify people who are competent mostly through your screening process. The rest of the process should be used to explore their interpersonal attributes.
Ten Lessons That Improved Our Hiring
1. Offer compensation that attracts strong candidates.
Pay isn’t everything, but reasonable compensation and competitive benefits get good people through the door. If qualified candidates aren’t applying, examine salary, flexibility, retirement benefits, vacation, and medical coverage.
We conducted a national pay survey for comparable roles to check our competitiveness.
2. Define the ideal candidate before recruiting.
You cannot reliably find what you haven’t clearly defined.
Identify the technical and interpersonal competencies the role requires. Then build your application criteria, work samples, reference questions, and interviews around those expectations.
3. Screen for competence at the beginning.
Don’t wait until an interview to discover whether someone meets the basic requirements.
Use clear application criteria and relevant work samples to assess whether candidates can do the job. Interviews can then explore questions that are harder to answer on paper.
4. Give recent supervisor references significant weight.
A candidate’s recent work history offers valuable evidence of how they may perform on your team. Past behavior is the biggest predictor of future behavior.
Ask supervisors for specific examples of reliability, judgment, teamwork, and follow-through. Look for a consistent pattern across references rather than relying on one enthusiastic endorsement.
5. Standardize reference questions.
Ask every reference the same core questions, covering performance and interpersonal behavior.
How does the candidate respond to feedback? Handle stress? Resolve disagreements? Work with difficult colleagues?
These questions have been especially important in helping us understand how someone will contribute to the team.
6. Observe candidates doing the work before you hire them when possible.
A temporary assignment or paid trial can provide insight that an interview cannot. In fact, I once heard leadership expert Patrick Lencioni suggest that ideally, every employee should be contract first before being hired on more permanently.
Seeing someone work over time helps you assess consistency, judgment, and relationships before making a longer-term commitment. Like coaching a soccer team, repeated observation reveals more than a single encounter.
7. Use behavioral interview questions that ask about past behavior.
When you interview, ask candidates to describe situations they have actually handled: a difficult coworker, disagreement with a supervisor, or stressful assignment.
What happened? What did they do? What was the outcome?
Specific examples tell you more than polished answers about what someone would do.
8. Train a diverse interview panel.
Choose panel members carefully and agree on what you are looking for. But get diverse members to reduce bias.
Agree in advance on the competencies you are evaluating and how you will assess the answers. Include different perspectives, and only use people who are a great face for your organization!Remember that candidates are also evaluating your organization.
9. Look for applicants who are “humble, hungry, and people-smart.”
Patrick Lencioni’s The Ideal Team Player describes these three qualities I have found particularly useful: humility, motivation, and interpersonal awareness.
Intelligence and technical ability matter, but they cannot compensate for an unwillingness to learn or an inability to work well with others.
In my experience, interpersonal problems are often harder to address than skill gaps. Hire for both competence and character.
10. Apply greater hiring rigor to leadership roles.
A poor hire creates work for a manager. A poor leadership hire can create problems for the organization.
Take particular care when assessing a leader’s judgment, integrity, response to feedback, and treatment of others. Again, look for people who already have a great track record. These decisions deserve your time and attention.
Look Beyond the First Impression
The goal isn’t to eliminate judgment. It is to support judgment with better evidence.
Define what success requires. Look for people who have already demonstrated what you are looking for. Have a consistent process. Listen closely to recent supervisors. Whenever possible, observe people doing the work before you hire them.
Most people think they are good at hiring but their hiring success is rarely tracked and may only be 50-50. The goal should be to get to 90-10.
Whether coaching a soccer team or building a professional one, the lesson is the same: consistently predicting performance takes more than a strong first impression.
Have a great weekend!
Parker
Additional Resources
- Jim Collins—Good to Great
- Lou Adler—The Essential Guide to Hiring and Being Hired
- Patrick Lencioni—The Ideal Team Player
