A positive mindset – the most important factor for hiring new people

I have been doing quite a lot of HR work recently: reading CVs and interviewing potential new employees.  I never really considered HR to be a really super important topic until I actually started thinking about it more.

Here’s my approach to HR: I hire a person only i they have an exceptionally positive mindset.

My judgment about that is mostly down to gut feeling.  If That means that my decision is based more on the vibe that I had with that person in the whole communication process (first e-mail to last interview) instead of their qualifications.

Obviously a certain amount of skills for the position is required.  However I found myself recently neglecting the factor a lot of times if the person has an exceptionally positive mindset.  That means if the person has a skill only down to 80% I would still hire him over another person that had a 100% but a more negative mindset.

Why is a positive mindset so important?

Psychology knows a principle called emotional syncing.  It goes something like this: if you are together with another person in a room after 15 minutes you and that person  have roughly the same mood.  In short: emotional states are being transferred to other people.  A negative person makes other people negative and if you have a negative mindset chances are, you are not able to perform at your best.

I believe the two most determining factors in making a company successful are effectiveness of communication and a positive attitude. You simply cannot have a positive attitude within the company if any of the team members has a negative attitude.

And to be honest and I personally don’t want to work with negative people.  Bitching and moaning is not something I like around me.

How to find out if a person has a positive mindset?

This is actually surprisingly easy as it is mostly based on gut feeling.  I simply almost completely  ignore what my head says and focus on purely my gut feeling.  If it isn’t 100% positive it is  automatically a no.

In fact we do it like this: if anybody from our company that the person spoke to doesn’t like his attitude the person is out.  This is copied, I think, from google.  Makes a whole lot of sense.

Another thing to do is to simply ask them directly about it.  I say for instance “Would you consider yourself to be a happy person?” or “How do you react if something doesn’t go your way?”, “Are you worrying a lot?”. Most people are actually honest about it and if they lie most of the time I can tell.  Another thing that I found out is that a negative person does not want to work in an environment that emphasizes a positive attitude.

After I have hired someone I keep monitoring for their mood levels.  If a person goes on with a negative mood for a longer period of time I will have a talk with them.