Biblical Business Radical: Roll the Dice When Hiring

Almost immediately at its founding, the early church had lost two key executives: its founder and leader; and its CFO or controller, depending on how much influence over the money Judas Iscariot had. A couple of executives stepped up to be co-CEOs of the fledgling business—Peter, an older experienced hand, and John, a younger man connected to the moneyed or powerful families. Later the founder’s brother, James, became a key spokesman. Still, they needed a new money handler.

In business, we’d put out an ad for a person with years of experience. We’d interview the candidates several times, eat with them. We’d also assess them for personality type (MBTI e.g.), behavior, strengths/talent themes, thinking styles, internal/external world views, motivations, and ‘who knows what else’. We’d pack them off with forms, computer-based, cloud-based instruments with the promises from the consultants that these assessments are validated for what they’re assessing (i.e. a personality assessment is measuring personality). We’d also be reassured that the assessments are reliable (i.e. two people with similar personalities would score similarly).

And yet, we’d be guessing if the results are really the results we want in the person we’re hiring. We might have an idea of the ideal candidate. Often that person is like the successful person that was in the job. In the case of replacing Judas, we might want to look for someone more loyal—that is, we’d be looking for someone opposite of a failed predecessor. However, we really don’t know what type of person succeeds in our organization. Sometimes we try to test for cultural fit. And yet we still make poor hiring decisions. All this because we don’t validate our own hiring processes to know what works to recruit and sign candidates that will succeed in our businesses. We tweak some things and catch the next faddish wave of ‘new and improved’ assessments.

Most often our hiring decisions, after all of the above, comes down to one thing: likability and its cousin ‘getting along’. And that’s often determined in the first 30 seconds, maybe the first few minutes. As bosses, we often hire and retain people who can survive with our leadership—aka decision-making and communication—styles. We like those who will let us lead the way we want to lead. All others are fired or leave on their own. This is a criterion that’s hard to assess and rarely done.

In larger enterprises, the CEO has a median tenure of five years. In half of our businesses, every five years the whole leadership tenor changes and the executive staffs have to adjust or leave, and their lieutenants also have to adapt or leave...and so on. That’s a lot of management turnover. If you try to validate the assessments for hiring effectiveness, when you would want to know if your candidates are successful? After one year, they may not know enough, managed enough, led enough to show what they can do or their capabilities. After two years, their cultural fit (or lack of it) starts to appear. At three years, the effects of any policy or procedural or strategic changes they made in years one or two may start to appear. After four years, those changes may show their robustness for regulatory and market changes. Besides if they aren’t robust, market and regulatory changes, such as new competitors and new market segments and new laws, will suggest new strategies, policies and procedures; thus, the new-hire’s changes will have changed anyway in those four years at least twice. If the person hasn’t been fired in five years, I suppose we could say they were ‘successful’. But we really don’t know if they were as effective as we really needed.

So how did the early church hire their new CFO/controller? They set a single criterion: the candidate had to have been with them the whole three years—someone from within the company. Two people met this qualification.

They prayed, and then they cast lots—rolled the dice, drew straws, spun a wheel. And two thousand years later, we’re pretty sure Matthias was pretty successful in his new role. At least, we don’t have any indication that he got fired.

Maybe we need to do the same. I admit this advice would be hard to swallow. But isn’t it a little like what we do when we poll the interviewing team and hiring manager? We’re just getting their subjective perspective on the candidates’ likability and ability to get along. Rolling the dice also eliminates any biases for or against any of the candidates that are qualified. What do you think?

After you’ve rolled the dice and hired the person, then do the assessments so you understand your new team member a little better—how they think, what makes them tick, what perspectives they bring to your team, etc.