Hire People Before They’re Ready

The worst job interview of my life was in the fall of 2016.1

I flew to Southern California to interview for Director of Baseball Operations with the Los Angeles Angels. I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare, but I learned as much about the organization and their players as I could. When I walked into Angel Stadium, I felt relaxed and confident.

Then the interview began. Every question seemed to be about my experience in the core responsibilities of the role — things like negotiating player contracts, providing guidance on the Major League rules and regulations, and managing CBT payroll. I was drowning because I had no experience in any of those spaces. In most interviews, even if you don’t give a great answer, you can still make a good impression with your thought process and communication. That’s not really the case when response after response is some version of “I haven’t done that before.”

It was demoralizing. It felt like they had me confused with someone else. Like they accidentally interviewed me instead of a candidate that had the background they were looking for. At one point, I interrupted the interview to share how excited I’d be to learn and how hard I’d work to get up to speed. Once the conversation finished, I left the stadium feeling farther away than ever from a leadership role. I clearly wasn’t ready.

Three days later, the Angels called and offered me the job.

Readiness is a common theme in most job searches. The more senior the role, the more it seems to matter.2 Candidates are quickly crossed off or passed over because they’re not ready. But in many processes, we don’t bother to ask what we mean when we say that.

It’s sort of a catch-all term that excludes less experienced candidates based on what they haven’t done. Maybe they’ve never managed anyone or been involved in high-level decisions. Maybe they’ve spent limited time in their current role. Or maybe they’re coming from a different department or industry.

That’s all relevant and useful information. Past experience is part of a larger equation that helps project future performance. The problem is that when we talk about readiness, experience starts to feel like the only thing that matters.

When the Angels hired me, I had never done most of the duties listed in my job description. I wasn’t incapable of doing them; I just hadn’t done them before.

That’s a subtle but important distinction. And critically, it’s how the Angels viewed the situation. They didn’t hire me and expect me to figure everything out on my own. They helped me learn and grow into the role.

In some cases, they had me observe something before trying it myself. The offseason I was hired, I didn’t handle any arbitration cases. Instead, I put together research and strategy as if the cases were my own, and then I listened to calls while others negotiated. When the next offseason arrived, I took on my first three cases with the confidence of someone who had been through a cycle already.

In other situations, they threw me right into new experiences to learn through trial and error. Almost immediately, I was drafting formal documents for agents, players, and league officials. I reread each memo what felt like a thousand times before I hit send — and I still managed to make mistakes. That discomfort pushed me to get better and made the learning concrete. And I was never truly on my own; I could ask for help whenever I needed and my screwups were treated as growth opportunities.

By any definition of the word, I wasn’t ready for the role with the Angels. But they were able to hire me because they realized what many people get wrong: readiness isn’t only about the candidate; it’s largely about the organization.

As an organization, you have to ask yourself how ready you are for someone. Can you coach them? Do you have the necessary expertise around them? Are you prepared to let them make mistakes and learn?

If you’re unable or unwilling to support a candidate because of their experience, don’t hire them. Simple as that. I’ve seen too many individuals fail to reach their potential because they weren’t set up to succeed. It’s much better to admit your constraints than end up in that position.

But more often than not, organizations can afford some risk with their hires. And they only stand to benefit from pursuing the upside from a wider range of candidates

For one, the outcome you’re hiring for is rarely output on the first day. It’s value added over some reasonable time horizon. Once you think about it that way, readiness becomes much less important. The best long-term candidate might still be the most experienced person — but it won’t be solely because of what they’ve done previously.

Needing to develop also doesn’t limit more immediate contributions. There are a number of ways new employees can make an organization better while they learn: finding different ways to operate, performing duties outside their core responsibilities, or pushing those around them to be better.

Most importantly, belief can play a huge part in how ready someone is. Part of the reason I was excited to take the Angels’ job is because they made me feel like they believed in me. They knew I lacked experience and they hired me anyway, telling me — explicitly and implicitly — that they were more concerned with the long-term than any immediate outcome. Expectations can become self-fulfilling. Research has repeatedly shown that very effect. When leaders carry high expectations, employees respond by working harder, learning more, and delivering better results.

Hiring is one of the most important things any organization can do. But that importance can lead people to prioritize safety over upside when the opposite should be true.

Performance isn’t normally distributed. The top one percent of employees generate ten times the average output, and the top five percent produce more than four times the average.3 That feels true when we think about our own experiences. The best people contribute far more, and in many cases, they make the people around them better as well.

And yet, we often approach hiring as if avoiding a bad hire is just as valuable as finding an exceptional one. It’s not — as long as you’re willing to recognize a poor hire early on and make a change.

It also requires that you do your part to make new employees successful. How much support they receive, the environment they’re in, and the expectations others hold for them all play an enormous role in what they can accomplish.

So the next time you find yourself or someone else referring to a candidate as not ready, ask what that means. Maybe there’s a solid reason to go in a different direction. Or maybe you’re focusing too much on what they’ve done instead of what they can become.