Now don’t flip out on me here. I know the very idea of hiring someone you don’t like sounds crazy but there is a good reason for it.

Good rounded teams need a broad spectrum of personality types. Everyone has a “difficult person”, a personality type that you simply clash with.

But that person that gets on your nerves, makes you grind your teeth and squeeze things till they hurt, just may be the thing you need.

The temptation when recruiting is to hire the person we like. It’s human. We will call it all sorts of things to justify it but at the end of the day the likeability factor is very influencial. So I am suggesting that you may want to suspend it sometimes and make your team more rounded.

Go hire an irritating person that you just don’t understand and then learn how to work with them and get the most from them. Don’t just take the apparently easy path.

If you like everyone you hire then there is a risk that you are creating a very imbalanced team, which will ultimately be an underperforming team. It’s not easy and you and others will have to learn how to manage the situation but when it works, it really works. When opposites find a way to work together, magic happens.