Hiring for Skills, Talent AND Values? One Story

In a recent Forbes article, Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles state,

Repeatedly we hear from executives that the talent pool is not nearly as
challenging to navigate as is what we have come to call the "values pool." We
suggest that, [...], the real shortage facing companies in the future will be less
about finding individuals with the knowledge, skills and abilities to do the job
than about finding individuals whose personal value system provides a fit with
the company's values and mission.

Anyone who has run or worked in a startup knows how true this is. In our own startup Impulsesoft, at the very beginning (circa 1999) there was no such separation of values and talent. When you are less than eight people, everybody better be able to pull their own weight - but then again the reason you do a startup (at least the reason we did) is to work with people who share your values and vision. It's when you try to begin hiring beyond the first few - the core team, the importance of values becomes real apparent. We went through four distinct phases in our startup -

[i] can we get anyone else to even join us?
we got started without a lot of forethought or planning. We even got our first customer signed up, before we bought our first computer. Now there was the minor matter of actually doing the work. It dawned on us then that with no money, no office and no clear grand strategy could we even get anyone else to join us. We talked a good story I can tell you that - but when our first prospective employee's dad showed up to check us out, we knew we had a challenge on our hands. However values were paramount at this phase, as we felt we had the talent to get the job, any job, done!

[ii] lets focus on bringing only these three/four folks on board
Once we had our share of new college grads (NCGs) come by, wisdom bloomed. We were not going to be able to do it all - hustle customers, write proposals and actually write code - let alone direct the still not-steady-on-their-feet NCGs. By now we'd been talking to ex-colleagues who shared our values and skillwise walked-on-water; they saw that we were not yet dead and realized there might be something here after all. Suddenly we had a core team, that was incredibly talented and well aligned.

[iii] how fast can we hire hands & bodies and bring 'em on board?
Suddenly we were a real business, with customers signed up for products we hadn't built yet, and paying customers expecting us to support them with prototypes we had shipped as product. The software managers wanted more coders - the hardware folks more designers and everyone wanted more testers - we just went crazy trying to find the "talent pool" - if you could walk, string a set of C code together and didn't drool excessively, we hired you! Even the talent bar probably got shaky in this phase.

[iv] what the hell where we thinking in phase [iii]
When products still didn't work as advertised and customers were no happier, having paid up even more money and our own managers ready to kill some of their staff, we began wondering what the hell had we been thinking? The questions now were how do we let go of these folks and get folks with the right values and attitude even if we have to teach 'em the right skills? The lesson we learnt was that though we had hired talented folks, they had come up real short in both attitude and vision alignment. Our hiring process about which we had become quite proud (It's hard to get hired at Impulsesoft, we'd say) had become too much talent focused and too little value focused in phase [iii]; the fact that I am writing this today means we learned from this and while it hurt us, it didn't kill us. But then again that's the sort of lesson that stays with you. Bennett and Miles are right - only the future is here NOW!