Fool vs. Jerk: Whom Would You Hire?

July 25, 2005 from Harvard Business School – “When given the choice of whom to work with, people will pick one person over another for any number of reasons: the prestige of being associated with a star performer, for example, or the hope that spending time with a strategically placed superior will further their careers. But in most cases, people choose their work partners according to two criteria. One is competence at the job (Does Joe know what he's doing?). The other is likability (Is Joe enjoyable to work with?). Obviously, both things matter. Less obvious is how much they matter—and exactly how they matter...

These two criteria—competence and likability—combine to produce four archetypes: the competent jerk, who knows a lot but is unpleasant to deal with; the lovable fool, who doesn't know much but is a delight to have around; the lovable star, who's both smart and likable; and the incompetent jerk, who…well, that's self-explanatory. These archetypes are caricatures, of course: Organizations usually—well, much of the time—weed out both the hopelessly incompetent and the socially clueless. Still, people in an organization can be roughly classified using a simple matrix.

Our research showed (not surprisingly) that, no matter what kind of organization we studied, everybody wanted to work with the lovable star, and nobody wanted to work with the incompetent jerk. Things got a lot more interesting, though, when people faced the choice between competent jerks and lovable fools…”

180 View – As I (Lawrence Young) have repeatedly observed, the great majority of individuals empowered to hire new employees are genuinely concerned with ensuring that each new employee will be effective with respect to fulfilling the duties stated in their job description (alas, the importance of a clear job description!).

How likable the candidate is, while significant, is normally secondary to his or her core competence. As the article states about one person’s view on the subject: “I really care about the skills and expertise you bring to the table. If you’re a nice person on top of that, that’s simply a bonus.”

It’s also well understood that how the new employee will be perceived by others becomes an important factor in that employee’s overall effectiveness. As the article states, “…social psychologists have long known that we like people who are similar to us.”

My experience has often showed, as the article states, that the problem of choosing to work with similar people is “the limited range of perspectives that a homogeneous group often brings to bear on a problem”. In other words, a group comprised mainly of people who are similar often suffers from the’ drinking your own bathwater’ syndrome. In acute situations, the authors suggest that “if you keep hiring only people you like, you can kill a company.”

Given all of the above, who is the ideal candidate to hire? Cleary, it’s the ‘lovable star’, someone who’s both ‘smart and likable’. Only one problem-the candidates you have to choose from may not always include such a sought-after individual.

Assuming you will always avoid hiring the ‘incompetent jerk’, you may have to choose between the ‘competent jerk’ and the ‘lovable fool’. Not an easy decision to have to make, but sometimes in life, ‘it is what it is’. Given this choice, I suggest that the job description may facilitate the decision. For example, hiring a chemist who will be working in a laboratory and who will be secluded from the rest of the work force is arguably different than hiring a front line individual who will be answering the phones in a call centre. And as the authors point out, when given the reality of having to hire a less-than-ideal candidate, “that doesn’t preclude executives from doing some things that will positively affect those interactions…”