Hiring for Curiosity
It’s easy to think about hiring in pragmatic terms. We create job descriptions and we try to identify a pool of candidates who have the skills and experiences that can do the work. And it is important to assess these capacities. There is a job that needs to get done. But we are not just hiring people for what they can do, but also for the kind of person they are.
Over the course of this year, we’ve been writing about the value and virtue of curiosity which has led me to wonder how we might identify a curious person, especially in a hiring process. What would constitute a “CQ” - Curiosity Quotient - in a candidate and what indicators might exist that could be a clue to someone’s commitment to learning and their penchant for wonder, awe and exploration. The list of areas of curiosity that I would want a school leader or a faculty member to bring to a school community include both the macro and the micro:
Curiosity about the world around them - both the manmade and the natural world
Curiosity about people, teams, and group dynamics
Curiosity about young people - and specifically the age group they would be teaching or working with
Curiosity about what those young people are interested in
Curiosity about emerging technologies
Curiosity about teaching and learning
Curiosity about their own subject matter (if they are a teacher) and leadership ( if they are applying for a leadership position)
Curiosity about the school to which they are applying
Curiosity about themselves
There is an implicit irony that schools would need to think so intentionally about hiring for and cultivating curiosity since they should inherently be hubs of wonder, awe and learning. But other things - test scores, grades, high school and college placement, parent expectations, compliance - sometimes get confused with and get in the way of prioritizing curiosity and learning. For this reason, schools often hire knowers rather than learners, placing expertise over curiosity.
But what if we wanted to hire the most curious people? How would we find them? We could certainly interview candidates to try and determine their CQ by asking them pointed questions like: “What are you reading right now?”; and "What are your activities and hobbies outside of work?” ;and “What questions do you have for us?” But knowers have a sneaky way of showing up well in interviews, so beware the interview bias. It’s much harder to fake curiosity when you are asked to demonstrate it and not just talk about it.
So what if, instead, there was a portion of your hiring process that was singularly devoted to assessing curiosity? And what if that portion was more likely to showcase the truly curious candidates because it asked them to do something ?
What if you ask your candidate to design a learning demonstration rather than a teaching demonstration, where students and the faculty candidate learn something new together?
What if you offer a “curiosity challenge” while your candidate is on campus - maybe create a “scavenger hunt” for things that piqued their interest and now want to learn more about?
What if you asked candidates to submit, along with their CVs, a short description of their favorite professional learning experience?
What if you asked them to create their “future biography” of themselves in 10 years - what would they have learned about? What have they explored in their careers and beyond? What part of their work might be different because of emerging technologies?
What if you ask them to design their own personal Master’s Degree in anything they could study? What courses would that program include?
What if you had the candidate interview the hiring committee rather than the other way around?
The list could go on. But I think you get the point.
As much as hiring is about bringing on talented individuals with desired skills and personality traits, hiring can also be an extraordinary lever for sustaining, evolving or changing culture, and if you are trying to build a specific aspect of your culture, hiring can be central to that strategy. If you want to build a culture of curiosity - a whole community that prioritizes wonder over knowledge, asking questions over being right, and an ongoing pursuit of growing through learning - then every new hire is an opportunity to build that culture by bringing in individuals that move that culture forward.
Sometimes in a hiring process, we hear people talk about hiring for “cultural fit”, but that phrase can be a “cover term.” A cover term is a word or phrase that gets thrown out and there is an assumption that there is agreement on its meaning, but in reality the word or phrase is ambiguous and could be interpreted many different ways. What do we actually mean by “cultural fit”? Is that phrase just a stand in for having the right pedigree or being able to show up during the interview process in a way that feels familiar and comfortable? Or does it mean a higher probability for long term success in a community? And what if we are trying to evolve culture towards something new? If that is the case, maybe hiring the “cultural fit” is a missed opportunity.
Shifting culture, as we have shared in the past, requires telling new stories, creating new artifacts and building new rituals that make those shifts visible and tangible. Hiring in any organization is both a process but also a set of rituals that often include interviews, teaching demonstrations, and presentations. If your hiring process is designed to showcase the knowers, you might be missing out on identifying the curious at heart and the lifelong learners we all want in our schools. Design new rituals that intentionally uncover those harder to see traits and qualities that you want more of in your schools - with curiosity (I hope) at the top of the list.
Whether you are trying to hire just one curious person this year or moving towards a culture of curiosity, a hiring process that identifies that CQ is not necessarily harder to design, but it does require intentionality and maybe just getting a little bit curious yourself about what you currently do and why you do it.
