Questioning Character (Part 2)

  Career Development  

Mark Jaffe, president of Minneapolis search firm Wyatt and Jaffe, says companies ought to stop wasting time and stop thinking about character in broad, cliché terms. More often than not, they’re blowing its importance way out of proportion. “If you look at the personal lives of many of the top-performing managers over history, you’ll find that there are a lot of broken marriages, alcoholism and substance abuse,” he says. “They also may have been rotten fathers or mothers.”

The only question companies should be asking about candidates’ characters, according to Jaffe, is “What character traits are necessary for the position?” Social networks make it too easy to check character. If only it were that simple says Marni Helfand, director of human resources at staffing firm Hudson Highland Group, Inc. in Chicago. Helfand agrees with Jaffe--as far as he goes--but the character-evaluation process has been clouded by other issues.

Jaffe failed to mention the role of social networks in the character-evaluation process. Social networks have brought the character issue to center stage, she says, because companies now have an easy and very accessible information source for learning about candidates from several vantage points.

Until now, organizations have always looked at candidates’ characters in broad and elusive …