The Metiss Group's Blog

Have you ever heard the phrase opposites attract? It’s wrong. It makes sense to us, but it’s still wrong. The data on relationships are completely convincing – people who are like one another tend to be attracted to one another.

The problem with this “opposites attract” mentality is that leaders are naturally attracted to hiring people who are like them. And, if they only hire people like them, they will end up with a team of people who have all of their strengths, and all of their weaknesses.

What’s the danger in that? If a leader makes a mistake, the other people like them on their team are less likely to catch it. In fact they’re likely to not even notice it is a mistake.

The best way for leaders to solve this problem is to benchmark their jobs and determine the specific profile to be successful in the job and then hire against that profile.  This unbiased, objective job matching approach reduces the chance a leader may hire against their own personality profile.  If very early on in the selection process, they’re “totally in love with” a candidate, chances are the candidate is similar in style to the hiring manager. They may work out fine, or they may be adding to their weaknesses in a way that they don’t expect.

Hiring managers should add empowering behavioral tools to the selection process for future success.

This entry was posted on January 4, 2016 at 2:26 am and is filed under Leadership, Selection. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.