Everyone teaches you how to do your campaign job. Nobody teaches you how to hire for it.

Originally published on LinkedIn.

When I got my first shot at running a research department, I was terrified I was going to screw it up. So I started making calls to consultants who'd been in the business for decades and campaign managers who'd built and run departments a lot bigger than the one I was about to lead. I asked all of them the same question: how do you hire well?

The answers I got were tricky. When I actually sat down to build a hiring process around them, the advice didn't hold together.

I think part of the reason is that campaigns are like startups that pop up every two years and then evaporate into mist. You're working 60-hour weeks. Mentorship networks are thin. Nobody has time to systematize hiring advice when they're building everything else at the same time. I get why the advice is the way it is. But I think we can do better, and it starts with knowing what you're actually looking for when you sit down across from somebody.

I've spent years now thinking about how I hire, testing it, and passing it along to my staffers as they've moved into managing their own teams. This is the advice I wish somebody had given me.

The advice that didn't hold up

Three things came up when I asked people how they make hiring decisions.

The first was "hire someone manageable." I heard this more than anything else, and I think it points in the wrong direction. What does manageable even mean? How are you going to assess that in one or two interviews and a writing test? I think what happens when you engrave "manageable" into your mind is that you end up hiring people with low agency: people who wait to be told what to do instead of figuring it out. That might make your life easier in the first week, but it's part of why every department is backlogged with work. I want someone who can receive a task and go find the way it should get done. There's a Steve Jobs interview where he says the greatest people are self-managing: Once they know what you want them to do, they figure out how to do it. They need your vision for the department and not your micromanagement.

The second was some version of "my friend recommended them" or "they were on a winning campaign, so they must be good." Referrals are useful, but they're not a decision. You don't know what management system that person's old team was operating in. You don't know whether they contributed to the win or just happened to be in the room. And when that hire doesn't work out, the person who made the referral isn't the one dealing with it. You are.

The third was "You'll just know. It's vibes." I want to be fair about this one. There are managers with a lot more experience than me who have genuinely sharp instincts about people. But when you pass down "you'll just know" as advice to someone who's managing for the first time, you're setting them up to fail. They haven't had years to develop those instincts yet. There's a real difference between someone who is a good hang and someone who is going to help your team fight to expand Medicaid. If you're doing this for the first time, you need a framework.

Humble, hungry, and smart

Jim Collins talks about getting the right people on the bus. Everyone knows some version of that line and nods at it. But nobody tells you how to actually figure out who the right people are. One framework gave me that answer, and it's held up through every hire I've made since: Patrick Lencioni's model of humble, hungry, and smart. (If you want the deep dive, this Coaching for Leaders episode was my starting point.) I built my interview process around these three qualities. I make sure I'm asking a couple of questions for each one so I have a real sense of who I'm talking to.

Humble is about ego, or the lack of it. Does this person share credit? Do they show gratitude to the mentors and bosses and teammates that helped them get where they are? You're listening for whether someone talks about "I did this" or "we built this together." Now, I'll be honest: in an interview, everyone has to be the hero of their own story to some degree. That's the format we all expect. It's on you as the interviewer to make room for humility, not expect candidates to volunteer it against their own interest.

Hungry is about drive. Are they motivated to learn and do more without you having to push them? On campaigns this might be the most important one, because you need people you're willing to be locked in a room with at 11 PM on a Tuesday while votes are being counted. Lencioni makes the point that of the three, hunger is the hardest to teach someone later. That internal drive is pretty much there or it isn't, so interview hard for it.

Smart in this framework is simpler than it sounds. Lencioni describes it as common sense about people: Knowing what's happening in a group situation and how to deal with others effectively. Do they ask good questions? Do they actually listen to the answers? Can they read how their words and actions land on the people around them? For research positions, this shows up in whether someone can take a complicated finding and explain it clearly to a comms director who needs it in 30 seconds not 30 minutes.

Putting it into practice

Be friendly in your interviews. All the campaign hiring guides I've read suggest interviewing way too hard for what they're actually trying to assess. People think the fair thing to do is sit there stone-faced on Zoom and grill your candidate. You'll learn a lot more about somebody if you actually care about who they are and let them feel comfortable enough to be themselves.

Ask more thoughtful questions. Instead of "tell me a time that your boss was critical of your work," try: how do you receive feedback, and what's the best way for someone to give you feedback? That tells you whether someone has ever actually thought about their own learning process. Instead of grilling on your specific methodology, try: Tell me about an interesting research or policy project you've worked on. Then listen for depth and potential.

Expand what counts as relevant experience. Every job in politics is basically an entry-level job because you get asked to assume so much responsibility so fast. I encourage candidates to draw on academic work, extracurriculars, service jobs, whatever. If someone tells me they spent a semester working through Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, I don't need them to validate that they've used LexisNexis before. They have the firepower to read new clips. If they've worked at Cheesecake Factory, they can handle an all-staff call.

Test for ceilings, not floors. The way most campaigns run assessments, you end up seeing what candidates can't do instead of what they can. Give people more time than you think they need and see how they operate. You're going to need to coach them for the position anyways, so a candidate's ceiling tells you more than their floor.

A closing thought

If you're managing for the first time, don't be discouraged about the feeling that you're flying blind. Every manager is flying blind because everything the last team figured out disappeared when their campaign ended. You're figuring it all out while still doing most of the production work yourself.

That said: Every person you hire is someone you're going to train, invest in, and go to war with. Having a real framework for figuring out who belongs on your team — even a simple one — will make your life better and theirs better too. Build for high ceilings. Invest in your people. The staffers you hire now are going to become the managers who hire the next generation.