Connect Yorkshire EIR James Roach is the Managing Director of Headstar, a finance recruitment consultancy founded by qualified finance directors.
What do the special forces and Michelin-starred kitchen teams have in common? Spoiler alert – it’s not the great uniform.
Both hire on character – and that makes them exceptional.
Most businesses say they do the same. “We hire for attitude and train skills” has become one of leadership’s most repeated mantras. Yet when you scratch beneath the surface, few organisations can explain how they actually assess character – or measure their recruitment success rate.
Ask an MD for their margin or year-on-year growth and the number rolls straight off the tongue. Ask about their recruitment success rate and you’ll likely get a shrug. If people really are an organisation’s most important asset, why do so many not measure how well they’re hiring?
The costly illusion of good hiring
Most leaders fancy themselves as good judges of character. We all remember the candidate who felt right – someone we could “have a beer with.” But gut feel isn’t a strategy. At Headstar, we learned that the hard way.
Before we began hiring on character, our success rate was just 45% – meaning more than half of our new hires didn’t work out. After adopting the Hire Great People principles developed by Simon Hartley, a world-renowned elite sports psychology consultant and high-performance coach, that figure jumped to 89%. The difference was transformative, not just in performance, but in culture too.
Recruits took pride in “making it through” a rigorous process that focused on who they were, not just what they’d done. Trust grew too; no longer was it a case of “I wonder who management is going to hire this time?”. Instead, the team was excited to welcome someone who’d been properly tested and matched our values.
The financial case is clear: research shows a poor hire for a mid-manager role earning around £42,000 can cost over £132,000 once recruitment, onboarding, lost productivity and replacement costs are factored in – equivalent to three to four times the employee’s salary.
Why character beats credentials
World-class teams hire differently because they understand a simple truth: skills can be trained, attitude can’t.
You can teach a finance professional how to use Power BI or navigate a new ERP system. But humility, accountability and grit can’t be trained. In fast-moving finance teams, the people who excel are the ones who stay curious, bounce back from setbacks and take ownership when things get tough. That’s what lifts a team – not just someone who can do the job, but someone who makes others better.
The challenge is that traditional hiring tools rarely reveal character. CVs tell you what candidates want you to know. Interviews often reward confidence over substance. Even psychometrics show tendencies, not values. We learn only what the candidate wants to tell us, not who they really are.
How to hire on character
So how can leaders do it better?
Identify the traits that underpin success in your best people.
Don’t ask candidates how they’d act – put them into practical scenarios and watch what they do. How they behave, not what they claim, reveals their character.
Do their words, examples and tone align? Inconsistency is often a warning sign.
Look for people whose character reinforces your values and strengthens the environment you’re trying to create.
You can only improve hiring if you know how well it’s working – so track it. Recruitment success rate = successful hires as a % of total hires.
Hiring on character starts at the top
The way leaders approach hiring sets the tone for everything else. When leaders stay close to the process and make clear what ‘great’ looks like, the whole team feels the benefit.
The best teams in the world have known this for decades. Whether it’s a special forces unit, an Olympic rowing crew or a Michelin kitchen, they build success around who a person is, not just what they can do.
It’s time more businesses followed their lead. Hire on character and you build stronger teams – and stronger teams deliver better results.
Article via thebusinessdesk.com
