The 5Cs of Hiring

Five NFL teams are looking for head coaches.  Here is the scary reality: the decision will rest with the owner, who may or may not have a good framework for hiring.  More than one NFL coach has been signed to a multi-year contract worth millions based on his past record with another team, or his record in college, and an hour or two with the owner.   NFL owners are very rich, successful people and fall pray to what I call “The Gut Fallacy:” The more successful a person has been, the more they trust their gut, instead of trusting a process.

A simple process I use is the 5Cs of hiring.  The first C is Competency.  Can they do the job?  Do they have the training or experience?  If not, do they show evidence of thinking like a person in that position?  Shane Beamer had never been a head coach, or an offensive or defensive coordinator.  When he interviewed with South Carolina Athletic Director Ray Tanner, he handed Tanner an iPad that contained a detailed plan of how he would run the program if he was the head coach.  Tanner was convinced that Beamer had the Competency to do the job, even if he didn’t have the experience.  Two years into Beamer’s tenure as Head Coach, he has proven he knows how to be a head coach.  Make sure your candidate can do the job.

The second C is Chemistry.  I discussed this in last week’s blog post.  Chemistry is about how well a person fits with the team.  Recently we interviewed a candidate for a position.  We all agreed we liked him.  However, we could not picture him on our team.  It was hard to say “no” to him, because he had done nothing wrong.  But we realized if we hired him, we would introduce abrasion to our team that would slow us down.  Wrong chemistry slows you down.

The third C is Character.  Character is both a person’s integrity and his or her personality.  We use several personality inventories that help discover who a person is.  While the Enneagram profile is popular now, we prefer a test called the Caliper test.  It is expensive, but we have found it to be the most accurate portrayal of a person’s personality.  A person’s integrity is difficult to assess, but this is why you should follow up with references.  I once received a phone call from an irate woman, wanting to know why I lied to the search committee of her church. A former employee of our church had taken a position there and apparently had upset people.  She assumed I had lied when the committee called me for a reference.  After a few minutes of letting her express her feelings, I told her that I would glad to confess I lied to the committee if I had done so, but the truth was the search committee never called me.  There was silence on the other end of the call, then she thanked me and hung up.  For the record, I would not have lied to the search committee if they had called me.  Do all you can to find out the real character of the candidate.

The fourth C is Capacity.  Does the candidate have the capacity to grow?  Are they coachable?  We interviewed a candidate who began to tell us how to fix our Groups at church in the first interview.  We had not even shared with him our perspective of our challenges.  Needless to say, we realized he was not coachable.  A parallel question is “Do I have the capacity to coach them?”  I like to think I can coach anyone.  I have several hiring failures to demonstrate I can’t.  Some people make it clear they need lots of social time.  Don’t have that capacity.  Some people are very wounded and need me to counsel them every week.  Not in my wheelhouse.  Some people insist they don’t want to be micromanaged, but are really saying, “Leave me alone and don’t hold me accountable.”  Not going to happen.  Don’t hire someone until you know if they have the capacity to grow and you have the capacity to coach them.

The final C is Call.  We use this word because we are a church and it is good Biblical word.  Jack Welch called this “passion.”  In the secular world, it means, “Will this person see this as more than a job?  Will they commit to your mission?”  In church world, we pray for God’s leadership and direction about who we hire.  We take Call seriously.  No matter how talented a person is, if they do not sense a call to serve this church, this mission, this community, we take a pass.

There are lots of grids out there to use.  The 5Cs work for us.  If any NFL owners would like me to guide them through the process, my fee would be very modest – a lot lower than what it costs to buy out a coach’s contract!