Hire for who they are, not just what they can do

It's easy to collapse hiring into one blurry impression, but four distinct questions deserve separate answers: can they perform this specific task (skill), have they actually delivered before (performance), how much room do they have to grow (potential), and do they actually want to do this work (will). A candidate can score high on skill and low on will, or the reverse — and each combination calls for a different hiring decision.

Will is often the most under-weighted of the four, yet a moderately skilled person who genuinely wants the work regularly outperforms a highly skilled person who doesn't.

Culture-fit qualities — warmth, integrity, a bias toward helping — are far cheaper to hire for than to install afterward through training. Trying to coach basic disposition into someone after they've joined rarely works as well as simply not hiring against it in the first place.

This doesn't mean hiring only agreeable people; it means being honest that some traits are basically fixed by the interview stage, and skills training should be reserved for the things training can actually fix.

Attrition often costs multiples of a departing employee's salary once recruiting, ramp-up time, and lost institutional knowledge are counted — which makes a conversation before someone decides to leave far more valuable than the one after. A 'stay' meeting asks what would make someone consider leaving while there's still time to fix it, instead of only learning the answer once it's too late.

When someone does leave anyway, the exit conversation is still worth doing properly and documenting honestly, even for underperformers being let go — the patterns across multiple exits are often more revealing than any single one.

Productivity only becomes improvable once it's actually measured — a support agent's productivity might be resolution rate, a driver's might be trips per shift, a machine's might be output per rupee of input, but each role needs its own honest ratio, not a borrowed generic one. Profit-sharing tied to a fair, specific productivity measure builds loyalty in a way flat salary alone doesn't, because people can see their own effort reflected in their own number.