Are you hiring the best person for the role—or simply the person who feels most familiar? In this episode of The Experimental Leader Podcast, Melanie Parish and Mel Rutherford explore how hiring bias can limit team performance and why diverse personalities create stronger organizations. Learn how tools like DISC can support better hiring decisions, when it’s worth extending your search for the right candidate, and how curiosity can help you build a more effective team.

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Skill Up: Hiring Beyond Your Bias

Welcome to a special Skill Up edition of the Experimental Leader Podcast. I’m Mel Rutherford, co-host of the Experimental Leader Podcast.

Welcome to the show. I’m Melanie Parrish, and I’m an author. I’m a coach, content creator, and I’m super excited to be here with you today.

Thanks, Melanie. So, what skill are we going to work on today?

Well, I’ve been thinking about hiring and how people tend to hire themselves. They they we feel the most affinity for people who are like us. We’re drawn to the resumes of people that we perceive in the written form are like us, and and I just want to talk about for a second, like why why that may not be the best decision.

Yeah, what’s wrong with that? Why don’t I want to hire a lot of people who have who look like me and and have my skills?

Well, I think it’s interesting. So, in some professional services like software development, we we actually do want to look like look for people who have certain personality types, and so in those fields it makes a lot of sense. But if we’re putting together a team of different function, we want people who serve different roles on the team, and each role might have an optimal type, rather than having everyone in the organization look the same, your organization can improve if you have a variety of personality types. If you if you look at kind of an introvert extrovert scale in an organization, sometimes in your sales function, you might want someone who’s more extroverted. If you look in your customer service, you want might want somebody who is better at talking to people and creating relationships. If you’re looking at someone who does study tasks over and over. You want somebody who their brain works that way. It’s not someone working. It’s not someone who would rather be talking to people who’s doing the accounting, for example. Yeah. So I think I think it’s important to think about what’s the function of a role, and then figure out how you can actually find the people that that might meet that function more naturally.

So some of your examples, like a salesperson or a programmer, seem kind of to have obvious stereotypes associated with them. But a lot of times we’re hiring for a job that maybe doesn’t fit that obvious stereotype. How do we know what person we’re looking for? Does Phyllis?

So I will confess, I use DISC for hiring. So sometimes I’ll use that as a way to set a profile for a position, and that’s really useful. Not always because the organization ends up hiring someone who’s exactly in that profile, but we can have a conversation about what has to happen in the rest of the organization if they don’t hire for the profile they set. So, for example, in an organization that doesn’t have a lot of people who like to talk to people, the extroverts, then if there’s one or two, they may do a lot of heavy lifting in the sales department or the customer service problem solving. And if they aren’t going to hire someone else to take on some of those roles, they will continue to be taxed by those roles because as an organization grows, those calls become more frequent and regular, and so the organization needs to make a decision about how they’re going to handle it if they if they hire someone like that.

Right. So let’s say I have a really clear idea of a skill set and a personality type that I’m looking for, and then I get a small applicant pool that doesn’t have that person. What do I do then?

I mean, I think you have to decide how important it was to you. It it is it worth having someone in the job at all if they don’t fit, because employees that don’t fit take up an enormous amount of time, you may need to extend your search or raise your pay. Sometimes a role is looking for someone who has sort of unicorn characteristics in DISC. If I see someone who’s both good at staying. Detail and an extrovert; those people are sort of unicorns. They make people feel good and handle things. Both, you may want to pay a premium for that person because their impact on the organization is going to be so positive. On the other hand, I’ve done some hiring consulting and had someone who came in mostly just as a dominant personality, and they didn’t fit the role, but they interviewed so well. They were so they sounded so visionary. They sounded so confident that the organization hired them against my judgment, against my advice, and that person didn’t last long in the role and created a lot of havoc while they were there with their certainty and their dominance. And so, I think I think the biggest thing you have to be aware of is to be a choice and to understand the biases that exist in hiring.

So is there is there some? I I want to examine this assumption that you get what you get, and somebody’s got a personality and a skill set, and that’s all you’re going to get. Is there some room for professional development and shaping a person once you’ve hired them?

Yeah. So when I use DISC, it doesn’t measure skill, and as a practitioner for a long time, I don’t think that you always get like skill. You can skill up, but you won’t be able to change your profile. So, for example, my attention to detail is not particularly high. If I look at my calendar and I go to schedule 20 appointments, probably three of three of them are going to be wrong. So I always function with an assistant because I actually my brain doesn’t work that way. That said, am I good at keeping a calendar? Absolutely. Mostly, I put one appointment in at a time, and it’s okay, and it works. But it’s not my natural. I would be a horrible assistant to someone else, even though I can do the tasks for myself. If that makes sense. Yeah. So I have the skill of knowing what I should be looking at, but the personality type that it doesn’t come naturally to me to do a lot of detail. I get fatigued and then I make mistakes.

So, what’s the one thing that a leader needs to be thinking about when they’re when they’re hiring?

I think there’s some curiosity about Some curiosity about what they don’t know they don’t know. I think people think they are going to go look for somebody they like. That’s the natural thing. HR departments and stuff have tools to test for personality and things like that. But when someone who is in a smaller organization is hiring? They meet someone who’s just like them, and they go, “Oh well, I really like this person, and then they get really tied to that person. So I think to be very curious about what the job type is, what you want them to be like. DISC is a good way to to look at it if you’re doing something, but also just being really aware of your bias and being curious about that bias is a really good start for looking to hire somebody who’s different than what you’ve hired in the past.

Well, thanks, Melanie. It’s really interesting to think about developing that skill of hiring.

Yeah, and I mean this is a tiny piece of it. There’s all the questions and all the tech, you know, the the technical interviews and things like that that happen in software. So this this this is just in the leader decision making that I want to talk about a little bit. So it’s been it’s been great to be here with you today. And go experiment.

Go experiment.

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