Hire 49% for Skill and 51% for How You Make People Feel
The Shake Shack founder looks for people who feel happier when they make others feel better, and he has two interview tests to find them.
The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk · 708: Danny Meyer - How You Make People Feel: The Founder of Shake Shack & Union Square Hospitality Group on Culture as Soil, the 49/51 Hiring Formula, and Leading With GenerosityDanny Meyer, the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group and Shake Shack, hires with a calculator in his head. Forty-nine percent of the decision is whether the person can do the job, and 51 percent is who the person is.
The 49 percent is technical skill, and it changes with every job. When hiring a chef, he says, skill with the balance sheet is good for a chef to have, but it is not the primary technical skill he is judging.
The 51 percent is what his company calls hospitality quotient, or HQ. A person with high HQ, in Meyer's definition, is "actually happier themselves when they make someone else feel better." It grows out of six traits he looks for: sunny optimism, eager curiosity, grit, care for others, clear self-knowledge, and honesty. Great cooking, he says, only gets a candidate to the 49-yard line. HQ scores the touchdown. Meyer wants a high HQ from everyone, not just servers.
To test for it, he does not ask people if they are self-aware, because everyone says yes. He asks, "What's the greatest misperception other people have about you?" The question works, he says, because you cannot answer it unless you know yourself well enough to explain the gap between who you really are and what you put out there.
His other test is the feedback loop. Once he knows a chef can cook, he watches what it feels like to give criticism. Will the candidate get defensive, or be grateful and have a thoughtful conversation, even if the feedback turns out to be wrong? Business, as he puts it, is solving problems all day, which is hard work that should feel like walking off a sports field tired and sweating but glad you did it with that team.
Interviewing is harder for him because his own HQ is high. He calls that a liability in an interview, and says he has to sometimes park his own HQ at the door. His job then is not to make the candidate feel good, but to assess how the candidate will make staff members and guests feel.
Start with the misperception question in your next interview, and listen for whether the person can describe that gap between the inside and the outside.
Questions people ask
Does 51% for personality mean hiring people who are nice but not very good at the job?
No. The 49 percent is a floor, not an afterthought. Meyer still insists the chef can cook and the accountant can account, he just will not hire someone who is great at the task but likely to make coworkers and customers feel worse.
Can you teach hospitality quotient to someone who does not have it?
Meyer does not say in this interview whether HQ can be taught. He presents it as a hiring screen, with specific interview questions to detect it before someone joins. My inference, not his claim, is that he treats it as harder to instill than cooking or accounting.
What does a good answer to the misperception question sound like?
Listen for specifics and self-correction. A strong answer names a real gap, such as seeming aloof when feeling shy, and shows the person has heard this before and thought about it. A weak answer is flattery in disguise, like claiming people mistakenly think they work too hard.