Much is talked about various leadership traits, but the one which is often overlooked in the management books, is the role of leadership in attracting strong talent. Strong CEOs, business leaders and entrepreneurs are powerful recruiters. They spend disproportionate amount of their time attracting the best of the very best for their organizations.

There are many schools of thoughts on how to hire great employees for your business or organization. You want to hire employees that make you proud, who deliver to the organizations success, ones who take little or no effort on part of every one in the team, and are fun to be with. Hiring great people is the essence of building a great organizational culture – one employee at a time.

So, how does one hire right? How do you go through the interview process to find employees who you want to hire and the ones who you want to reject? Over the years, I have recommended 5 Step criteria for entrepreneurs and leaders to look for great employees. If you are able to assess these 5 elements during the interview process, you will more likely be making the right hire for your organization or startup, thereby giving your leadership a shine!

Criteria #1: Aptitude
You are looking for basic aptitude in the candidate. If the person is very smart, or intelligent or has number of advanced degrees, all that is good, but not critical for making a successful hire. Degrees and abilities to solve logic puzzles all point to raw aptitude and intelligence. You need to see some of that in the prospective hire, but you want to be careful not to over emphasize the aptitude in your hiring decision process. A number of entrepreneurs and managers get impressed by strong aptitude alone, and forget to look into other critical elements of what makes a successful hire. You need basic aptitude, more than that is a bonus, but not an automatic selection criterion.

Criteria #2: Drive