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Excerpt

Do you think emotional quotient is more important than intellectual quotient?

EQ is more important than IQ in doing business. I think EQ is more important than IQ because IQ is a test of what you know not really of how you use what you know. But just what you know. EQ is more of how you use your understanding of other people.

There is no business that is not a people business. All businesses are affected by people. And people are a big factor when you do business. So EQ, knowing how to deal with them, knowing how to understand them, and communication as well and sales are affected by EQ. So I think EQ is a lot more important than IQ in business.

That’s it. Patrick Lencioni mentioned humble, hungry, smart. That’s what they look for in a hire. That’s also something that we look for in SEO Hacker whenever we have to hire someone. How we’re able to look for these things is to ask questions. How do you know when someone’s humble? You ask them, what’s the biggest mistake you’ve made in your past job? You ask them what’s the reason why they left. You ask them what is the biggest thing that disappointed your leaders in your last company? If they’re humble, they will tell you the story.

Then you have to probe, you cannot take things at face value. You have to ask the same question in different trousers. What that means is when you ask them, is there something that disappointed your leader or your direct leader or your direct report during your tenure, in your past company? And so they tell the story and then you ask, so what did you do to fix that? And then you ask, so what did these people say about you?

Because they can make stories up. They can invent stories. But if you keep on asking these probing questions, pretty much the same question, just ask them a different way or ask in a deeper way. Then they’d have to tell you the story. If there’s inconsistency, you know, that this person is not really that humble because if they were, they would tell you the entire thing. They would have the integrity to tell you the entire thing.

How we measure hungry is we try to figure out if the person really did his or her research. Do they know things about us or not? Are they from a rich background or not? Are they here for just a couple of months and then will they leave? Will they just try to learn from us, make us a stepping stone? We cannot grow with people who are mercenaries. We cannot grow with people who are just going to make us stepping stones, it can be a good trade. Six months of work, six months off this amount of salary. It could be a good trade in some cases, but most cases, we would rather hire someone who is going to play and work with us long term.

That means they have to be hungry enough. Usually, we check the person’s background. What do their parents do? Are their parents working or are they retired? Are they married? Do they have kids? Are there other people depending on them? How hungry is this person? Will this person choose their job or pick jobs or say, that’s not my job? Will this person have a winning attitude, a winning drive?

Because usually, in basketball, the center player does not tell the point guard that it’s not their job to dribble the ball and vice versa. The point guard doesn’t tell the center player, it’s not my job to rebound the ball.

Why? Because they play to win. If you play to win, you’re not going to tell the other people in your team, that’s not my job. People who are not hungry enough will say, “that’s not my job”, somewhere in their tenure with you.

Smart. Lastly, we see smart, easier, because for me, if it can not be straight in the eye during the interview, if you don’t know how to answer my questions during the interview or if you don’t have questions after all the interviews and I ask you, do you have questions for me?

If you don’t have questions, usually I consider that it’s not being smart enough because you should have questions, right. For me, for the company, because you don’t know so much about us and you should know you should be curious enough. To be able to relate with us better. You should ask questions. So that’s another thing that I’m looking at whenever I interview someone.