Hiring for Character: How to See What Résumés and Interviews Hide
I once filled five key leadership roles with the most rigorous process I had ever designed. Four of the five were the wrong hires.
It was 2015, and I had just assumed leadership over a country operation in Indonesia, with more than nine hundred employees. Within six months, over half of my leadership team had left. Promotions, poaching, politics: you name it. I needed to rebuild quickly, and I was determined to do it properly.
So I added a values panel. I wrote a role-specific business case for every position and sat in on every presentation. The candidates were capable. They were reliable. They worked hard. Two of them later became General Managers themselves.
They still weren't right for what we were building. I got one version of those leaders in meetings with me and another version altogether when I left the room. We spent a brutal year and a half in constant friction over how people should be led.
The process hadn't failed because it lacked rigor. It failed because it was rigorous about the wrong things. We had never defined the behaviors our leaders needed to show. We were hiring for credentials and hoping for character.
What Our Hiring Tools Can and Cannot See
A résumé tells you where someone has been. It doesn't tell you how they behaved when the plan fell apart, who they blamed, or whether their team would follow them again.
Past success can mislead us too. Performance is never built in isolation. It is shaped by the leader someone worked for, the team around them and the culture they operated in. What worked there won't necessarily work here.
Interviews should close that gap, but only if we run them with discipline. In their 2022 review of personnel selection research, Sackett and colleagues found that structured interviews had the highest average validity of the predictors they examined, at .42, ahead of job knowledge tests at .40 and cognitive ability at .31. They also found wide variation around that average. That is the point for practitioners: the tool works when it is designed well, and how well it is designed is up to us.
Most of us don't use it that way. We ask each candidate different questions, talk ourselves into a favorite in the first ten minutes, and call it instinct. What we often end up measuring is who interviews well.
Character is the Part You Can't Train in a Workshop
Character is what you choose. Personality is who you are.
That distinction matters in hiring. Personality describes someone's natural style: how outgoing they are, how they prefer to process information. Great leaders come in every style. Character shows up in the choices someone makes when those choices cost them something: owning the mistake, sharing the credit, staying steady when the news is bad.
After Indonesia, I started writing down what the best teammates I had ever worked with had in common. It came down to four behaviors:
Work-ethic: They do what they said they would do, on time and to standard, without being chased.
Heart: They care about the mission and the people beside them, and they show it by supporting someone else's success.
Optimism: They face the facts and then look for the way forward. This is not cheerfulness. It is resourcefulness under pressure.
Maturity: They know themselves, take feedback, handle conflict directly and own their part when things go wrong.
You may choose different words for your organization. What matters is having words at all, defined clearly enough that two interviewers can look at the same answer and judge it against the same standard.
Five Practices for Hiring Managers and HR Partners
None of these requires new software or a bigger budget. They require slowing down at the moments that count.
1. Define the Behaviors Before You Open the Role.
Ask what this person must do when the work gets hard. A team in hypergrowth may need unshakable optimism and work-ethic. A team recovering from a difficult period may need more maturity and heart. Agree on this with everyone who will interview, before the first résumé arrives. If you can't describe the behavior, you can't assess it.
2. Write the Behaviors Into the Job Description.
Most postings describe what the person will do and say nothing about how they should do it. Add it: "Operates with urgency without sacrificing quality." "Leads with empathy and integrity." This gives the right people a reason to recognize themselves, and it gives everyone involved a shared standard from the first touchpoint.
Look at your experience requirements while you are there. "Ten years in the industry" measures time served. "Five years leading leaders" points to what the person has had to manage.
3. Ask Every Finalist the Same Questions, and Ask About Real Events.
Choose a small set of questions for each behavior, and tell candidates there are no right or wrong answers. Ask what they actually did, not what they would do. For example:
Work-ethic: "Describe a time you worked on a project where success was not guaranteed. What kept you committed, and how did you handle the outcome?"
Heart: "Tell me about a time you actively supported someone else's success. What did you gain or learn from it?"
Optimism: "Describe a major setback. How did you regain focus and find the motivation to move forward?"
Maturity: "Describe a decision you made that later proved to be wrong. How did you address it, and what did you change?"
Then listen for who owns the story. Strong candidates say "I" when describing the mistake and "we" when describing the win. Be wary of the reverse.
4. Score Each Answer Before You Talk to Each Other.
Rate every answer from one to five, independently, against the behavior you defined. Compare scores only after that. This is the step busy teams skip, and it is where bias gets in. When the most senior person speaks first, the rest of the panel tends to find reasons to agree.
It also keeps us honest about familiarity. Without a standard, we keep hiring versions of ourselves and calling it culture fit.
5. Keep Using the Same Standard After the Offer.
If you hire for these behaviors and then promote for something else, people will learn what you actually value within a year. Use the same language in onboarding, coaching conversations and promotion decisions. Be just as rigorous with internal candidates. My own costliest assumption in Indonesia was that tenure equaled fit. We know the people we promote, which makes it easy to fill in the gaps with what we hope is true.
The manager's role is central here. Onboarding is not an HR checklist. The person who hired for character is the person responsible for showing, in the first ninety days, that character is what the team rewards.
What Changed When We Made the Shift
Our first real test came in 2017, when our Compliance Director left. The candidate who won the role didn't have the deepest résumé. She did have heart, resilience and emotional intelligence, and she was the right hire. We used the same approach for our IT Manager, Digital Director, Key Accounts lead and Medical Affairs heads. Collaboration deepened. Toxicity faded. By early 2018, the culture I had been fighting for was finally the one we had.
That July, I moved to Brazil to run a three hundred million dollar business, and we used the same approach to hire leaders across every critical function. Six years later, almost every one of them was still thriving. Many had been promoted. One succeeded me as General Manager and now leads the Latin America region.
I offer this as a practitioner's experience, not a controlled study, and two markets don't prove a universal rule. Your own hiring data can test it. Track what your interview scores predicted at twelve and twenty-four months, and see which behaviors separated the people who lifted the team from the people who drained it.
Where to Start This Quarter
Pick one open role. Before you review a single résumé, get the hiring team in a room and answer one question: when this job gets hard, what must this person do? Turn the answer into three or four behaviors, write questions for each, and score every finalist the same way.
Hiring carries real pressure. Seats are empty, projects are late and someone is asking when the role will be filled. But speed is an expensive thing to optimize for when the wrong leader can cost you a year and a half.
Skills can be taught. Tools can be learned. What we should be selecting for is who someone chooses to be when the day goes wrong.
Reference:
Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection: Addressing systematic overcorrection for restriction of range. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107, 2040–2068. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000994
Omar L. Harris spent twenty-two years as a pharmaceutical executive across four continents. He is the author of nine books, seven of them on leadership, character, and team performance. He is the founder of Intent Consulting and creator of the WHOM Character Signature™.
