Employers looking for ‘people who play well with others’

NEW YORK – A resume and a brief job interview can’t answer the question that matters most to a new hire’s co-workers: Is this person an absolute pain?\nDespite a labor shortage in many sectors, some employers are pickier than ever about whom they hire. Businesses in fields where jobs are highly coveted – or just sound like fun – are stepping up efforts to weed out people who might have the right credentials but the wrong personality.\nCall it the “plays well with others” factor.\nJob candidates at investment banks have long endured dozens of interviews designed, in part, to see if new hires will get along with everyone they’ll work with. Whole Foods Market Inc. holds group interviews, in which people who will work under a manager are part of the team that grills candidates and collectively picks hires.\nNow other companies are setting up higher hurdles.\n“In this bloggable, cell phone camera world, your brand on the inside is going to be your brand on the outside. If you have a bunch of jerks, your brand is going to be a jerk,” said Tim Sanders, former leadership coach at Yahoo Inc. and author of “The Likeability Factor.”\nWith the national unemployment rate at a low 4.7 percent, and the Baby Boom generation heading into retirement, employers from Microsoft Corp. to rural hospitals are worrying about finding enough workers. But companies like Rackspace Managed Hosting are bucking that trend, working hard to find reasons to turn people away.\nRackspace CEO Lanham Napier said, “We’d rather miss a good one than hire a bad one.”\nThe 1,900-person company is divided into 18- to 20-person teams. One team is so close, the whole group shows up to help when one member moves house, Napier said. Job interviews at the San Antonio-based company last all day, as interviewers try to rub away fake pleasantness.\n“They’re here for nine or ten hours,” Napier said. “We’re very cordial about it. We’re not aggressive, but we haven’t met a human being yet who has the stamina to BS us all day.”\nThere’s a possible downside, however. In a Harvard Business Review article titled “Fool vs. Jerk: Whom Would You Hire?” Tiziana Casciaro of Harvard and Miguel Sousa Lobo of Duke University point out that people generally like people who are similar to them, so hiring for congeniality can limit diversity of opinions. One venture capitalist told the authors that a capable manager he worked with built a team that “had a great time going out for a beer, but the quality of their work was seriously compromised.”\nThat’s not the worry at Lindblad Expeditions, a 500-employee adventure cruise company.\nKris Thompson, vice president of human resources at Lindblad, said, “You can teach people any technical skill, but you can’t teach them how to be a kindhearted, generous-minded person with an open spirit.”\nIn the mating dance of job interviews, employers traditionally put their best feet forward, too, trumpeting their wonderful benefits packages while leaving out the bit about working late and eating cold pizza.\nNot Lindblad. It sends job applicants a DVD showing not one, but two shots of a crew member cleaning toilets. A dishwasher talks about washing 5,000 dishes in one day. “Be prepared to work your butt off,” another says.\n“It’s meant to scare you off,” company founder Sven Lindblad said.\nIt does. After watching the DVD and hearing an unvarnished description of life onboard a Lindblad ship, the majority of applicants drop out, Thompson said.\nNew hires “undergo a drug test, a physical exam, they have to pack up their life, we buy them a plane ticket and outfit them with hundreds of dollars in uniforms,” Thompson said. “If they get on board and say, ‘This is not what I expected,’ then shame on us.”