Leadership and Life Essentials: The Hiring Filter You're Not Using - How Your Core Values Should Drive Every Interview

Jackie Surgeon Ergaleni: Foreign. M welcome to Leadership and Life Essentials with Jackie, where I cut through the noise and deliver concise, actionable insights on effective leadership. I'm your host, Jackie Surgeon Ergaleni from Leadership in Life by K Rec, Inc. In a world overflowing with information, this show offers short, focused episodes packed with tangible advice and tools to help you lead and live better. Let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Leadership and Life Essentials. This is episode 88, the hiring filter your're not using how your core values should drive every Interview you're in an interview, the resume is solid, the person is personable, they're saying all the right things, and yet something feels off. You can't name it. Nothing they've said is wrong exactly, but yet something is nagging at you. Leaders often ignore that feeling, especially when they've been trying to fill a role for two months. The team is stretched. The pressure to get somebody in the seat is real, so they talk themselves out of listening to it. I'm probably just being too picky. Nobody's perfect. We can work on it and they hire them anyway. Sometimes it works out. Often it doesn't. And a bad culture fit doesn't just underperform. They can completely unravel everything that you've built fast. One person who doesn't share your values, who operates differently than the rest of your team, can do more damage to your culture than than almost anything else. And because culture is fragile in that way, it takes a long time to build and yet not very long at all to erode. So what's going on when that gut feeling fires? What does it mean? And more importantly, what do you do with it? Organizations often have core values. Most of those values are some version of integrity, excellence, innovation, respect, teamwork. Words that look great and sound great. And they are great. But they're often generic until they've really been defined. Here's a test you can do. Can you write an interview question around that value? Can you describe specifically what living that value looks like day to day and what's not living it look like? If you can't, you can't then screen for it. So saying we value integrity tells a client something about your aspirations. It tells you nothing about whether they share them. Anyone can nod at integrity. The question is whether they've actually demonstrated it and whether you'd recognize it if they had. This is the prerequisite for everything else in this episode. You cannot hire for culture Fit if you haven't defined specifically what behaviors you expect to see when someone lives your value the values have to be real, defined and concrete enough to build around. If you've been through a values definition process, you're ready to use them in your hiring. If you haven't, that's the first gap to close. That's a different conversation, but yet still an important one. I've talked about this in a few other episodes and, um, there's a blog post going up soon about it as well that goes deeper on the hiring side. Specifically. I'll link those in the show notes. Now. That gut feeling is really data. And for a stretch of my career, I did some hiring for a tech firm. I'd regularly have that nagging feeling in an interview. Something's not quite right. And then I ignored it. I set it aside because I couldn't justify or explain it. The candidate looked good on paper. They interviewed well. They said the things that you'd want to hear. So I'd move forward, and often enough I'd find out later I'd been right to hesitate. Once I started building questions specifically designed to draw out examples, non examples of our values, something started to shift. I started to understand what that gut feeling actually was, because it wasn't random and it wasn't bias. It was an unconscious pattern recognition. It wasn't picking up on the major red flags. Those are usually obvious enough. I was picking up on the subtle ones. The small moments where somebody's answered down quite fit the pattern of the person who actually lives your values. The way they described a conflict, who showed up as the hero of every story that they told, how they talked about a mistake. Your instincts in an interview are worth something, but you need a framework to help you understand and also to articulate them. Without that framework, your preference fills the gap, and you end up with a team of people who are a lot like you. And problems can slip through. When you pair that instinct with a clear sense of what you're actually listening for, it becomes something you can trust. I want to walk you through an example, because it's one of those things that's really easier to understand when it's more concrete. So let's say one of your values is take accountability and you've defined it. It means owning your mistakes, not deflecting and being honest about your role when something goes wrong. Your interview question might be, Tell me about a time something went wrong on a project you've worked on. What happened and what did you do now? Candidates prepare for interviews. They've often read the tips. They know behavioral questions are coming, and they'll give you A polished answer. And that's fine because you're not really evaluating the content of the story. You're actually listening for something they likely haven't prepared for, and that makes it really valuable. You're listening for examples and non examples of how they live that value. And the notes you are taking about those are, uh, your green and red flags. A green flag answer would take ownership clearly and early. The candidate would describe their role in what went wrong without a lot of qualifications. They can tell you what they learned or what they'd do differently. The story lands somewhere. There's a point where they say, in effect, yeah, that was on me, or they at least own their part in it. A red flag answer is busy. There's a lot of context about what other people did, about circumstances beyond their control, about what the situation required of them. The candidate never quite arrives at personal responsibility. It's not that nothing went wrong. It's that somehow the accountability always lands somewhere else. You're listening for that. Nobody has a perfect record, and you wouldn't want to hire someone who claimed that they did. You're listening for how did they relate to accountability when they think they're just telling you a story? That's what makes these questions effective. The candidate thinks they're giving you the right answer. You're listening for something they may not even realize they're revealing. And you would be surprised at what people will reveal. One question for one value is a starting point. Doing this consistently across your full set of values, building it into a repeatable process. So every candidate gets asked the same things, and now you're comparing apples to apples. And that's where it becomes a real hiring system. That's where most organizations realize they need some support to do it as well. But you can start right now with one value and one question. In your next interview, notice what you hear. Notice whether your gut feeling fires up and the answer starts to line up and we've reached the part of the show where we talk about what you can do. And I, uh, talk about values a lot. So I have lots of blog posts and radio shows and I'll link them on my show page. Try picking one of your core values and try to write a behavioral interview question around it. If you can't, it's important information about whether your value is clearly defined enough to use so you can go back and make sure that you've defined your values so you have a clear set of behaviors that demonstrate each value. You can then integrate your core values into all of your HR processes. If you want to take it even further in your next interview, listen for examples and non examples of the behaviors that you've listed. I love doing values work and I can help you identify and define your core values and also create an interview guide of values aligned questions along with green and red flags so you know what you're listening for. I have a free leadership toolbox with all kinds of different topics including core values and you can sign up for that. I'll link it on my show page. And for resources related to this show episode, you can visit the My show page at uh, leadershipandlife ca show 88. And remember, a bad hire is expensive, but a bad culture fit is worse. Your values exist to help you tell the difference, but only if you're using them.

Jackie Surgeon Ergaleni: You've reached the end of another episode of Leadership and Life Essentials.

Narrator: If you want to learn more about

Jackie Surgeon Ergaleni: today's topics, please visit leadershipandlife ca, where you'll find episode show notes and free bonus resources. I'm Jackie Sergener Gallioni, founder of Leadership and Life by krec, Inc. Where I strive to empower leaders with the skills no one taught them to create teams

Narrator: who want to work together.

Jackie Surgeon Ergaleni: Thanks for joining me.