Hire For Character, Teach The Skill
You can teach anyone to make coffee; you can't teach them to care about people, so hire for that.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 91%
Behar's hiring philosophy is that character is the ticket to play, because you can teach almost anyone to make a cup of coffee but it is very hard to teach someone to care about other people. When interviewing, especially for senior and leadership roles, he ignored resume line items and instead asked about the person's siblings, what their parents wished they'd become, the hardest human relationship they ever had and how they resolved it. He warns that a top salesperson who is a jerk will be a jerk at your company too and blow the place up. At Starbucks, the fastest way to get fired was to mistreat people; it was hard to get fired for missing your numbers.
Origin
Behar formalized this interviewing mostly senior people at Starbucks, having watched skilled but low-character hires damage the organization repeatedly.
Core principles
- 01Technical skill is teachable; caring about people is not.
- 02The ticket to play is who you are as a human being and how you treat others.
- 03A brilliant technician with no human skills will blow up your organization.
- 04Interview for character by probing relationships, not resume line items.
How to run it
- 1
Screen for character first
Treat human skills and how someone treats others as the primary qualification, assuming technical skills can be taught.
Watch out A brilliant but low-character hire will blow up your organization no matter how skilled.
- 2
Ask character-revealing questions
Probe their relationships: what their siblings like and dislike about them, what their parents wished they'd become, their hardest relationship and how they resolved it.
Pro tip Skip 'tell me about your accounting experience' for leadership roles; ask how they got out of a bad relationship.
- 3
Require technical skill only where it's essential
For genuinely technical positions demand the hard skills, but for merchant or leadership positions, weight character.
- 4
Enforce it after hiring
Make mistreating people a firing offense and missing numbers a coachable one, so the culture backs the hiring bar.
In the wild
At Starbucks the quickest way to get fired was to 'screw with the people,' while it was difficult to get fired for missing your numbers, signaling that character outranked output.
→ The hiring and firing bar reinforced a people-first culture consistent with the company's identity.
Common mistakes
Hiring the skilled jerk
Bringing on a top performer who lacks human skills because of their technical prowess reliably damages the organization.
Interviewing only for competence
Asking only about skills and experience misses the character question that actually predicts whether they'll help or blow up your culture.
Is it for you?
Best for
Hiring managers and founders building a people-first, service-driven organization.
Not ideal for
Highly technical roles where specialized skill is a genuine non-negotiable prerequisite.
From the transcript
“we can teach anybody how to make a cup of coffee... it's very difficult to teach people how to treat others”
“if they don't have the human skills they will blow your organization up”
From the episode
Howard Behar: Former Starbucks President Reveals How Starbucks Grew to 15,000 Stores