Shawnee Love   •  
February 23, 2010

I had a conversation awhile back with a business owner about the beauty of owning his own business. He had a firm rule on the type of people he wanted to hire.

“No Whiners” was his rule. He couldn’t care less whether you were blue or purple and hailed from a distant planet as long as you didn’t whine.

I love this rule. How many wish their company had that requirement as part of the selection criteria before they hired Jane sitting next to you or Tony who is asking for next Friday off, AGAIN!

But as a hiring manager, how can you find out whether someone is a whiner or not?

This HR person thinks you can weed out whiners through the recruitment process. Key steps in a recruitment process include posting the job, interviewing the candidates and reference checking the finalists. Let’s take a look at how to use the recruitment process to suss out unsavoury characteristics.

Start out the recruitment process with a job posting that indicates not only what is necessary to do the job, but what characteristics are important to success in your organization. You might include a strong work ethic and necessity to be a team player as keys to success and give the whiners the opportunities to self screen themselves out of the process by not applying.

During the interview, you can begin to assess whether a candidate has a tendency to whine just like you assess any other characteristic, by asking questions.  Behavioural questions work the best because they demonstrate not only what a person did but how they did it.  Since a whiner isn’t likely to say they whined, you have to probe deeper into why they were successful or unsuccessful and what they learned about it. Example questions might include:

“Tell me about the time you were denied a promotion (or anything the person might have wanted). What happened and what did you do? What did you learn? What would you do differently next time?”

OR

“Give me an example of a situation where a colleague received recognition for work you had done. What happened and what did you do?”

And of course, you can also assess a candidate’s tendency to whine during the reference checking process (yet another reason why reference checking is useful). Questions like:

• “How did Tony handle disappointment?”
• “Did Tony ever try to convince you to change your mind?  If so, how did he do that?”
• Or get right to the point with “Did Tony ever whine?”

Like being born under a particular star sign, blond, physically unattractive, or not too smart, whining isn’t a protected ground under Human Rights legislation and as such is a legitimate albeit less than pc reason for not hiring someone.

One of the benefits of owning your own business is the right to hire to fit your culture.  So if “no whiners” fits your culture, then fly at it. I know quite a few people who will applaud that particular selection criterion.