Dive Brief:

• Elaine Chen, Founder and Managing Director of ConceptSpring, and Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, writes for Ivy Exec, sharing a concept developed by Jim Baum, serial entrepreneur from Boston, about the most important characteristics of a new hire. He points out that experience is the least of the factors.

• These candidate characteristics are easy to remember, as they are developed from the Old Macdonald had a farm song: E,I,E,I,O. E stands for Enthusiasm, I for Intelligence, E for Experience, I for Integrity, and O for Organizational fit.

• Baum points out that, "While experience is important, hiring managers often place a disproportionate amount of weight on this single metric — to the point where they will take someone with great experience and less passion over a best-athlete with great passion who is light on experience."

Dive Insight:

Baum's concept that other characteristics trump experience when evaluating candidates may seem foreign to many recruiters. He points out that certain experiences in past jobs do not dictate success in future roles and that candidates can be trained new skills. He also says that, "hiring for enthusiasm ends up paying better dividends than hiring purely for experience."

Chen challenges recruiters to hire for innovation, and to steer clear of candidates who are driven purely by compensation because they will eventually jump ship.