Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

Stop Hiring the Wrong People—Match Traits to the Job and WIN

27 Aug 2025 · 1 min

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Short excerpt from a talk by Cameron Herold arguing that behavioral traits must be explicitly defined and matched to roles. Uses 'tenacity' as a concrete example—defining it as a dog-like work ethic to overcome obstacles—and recounts an anecdote where two evaluators disagreed because one conflated 'works hard' with 'has to work hard.'

Chapters

Behavioral traits have to match the role that you're looking for. As an example, we were hiring and one of our traits had to be tenacity. So we defined it as the dog like work ethic to get over, under, around any obstacle put in one's path. Then we actually knew what questions to ask to see how tenacious someone was. So One of our VPs one day said that somebody was a five out of five in tenacity. I'd rated the person as a one, so clearly there was a mismatch. And I'm like, how could they possibly be a five? He goes, they're a hard worker. They were a bricklayer. I'm like, no, they were lazy. They dropped out of everything. They never got help in anything. They ended up with a shitty job to be a bricklayer. They're not a hard worker. He's like, oh my God, you're totally right. There's a difference between someone who works hard and somebody who has to work hard.