~by Haley Lynn Gray~
When I was building Extension of You Home Care, the thing I looked for in people wasn’t primarily experience. It was passion — genuine enthusiasm for providing care in a way the industry mostly wasn’t.
That sounds soft. It’s one of the more practical hiring decisions I’ve made.
What you can and can’t teach
You can teach someone your systems, your software, your paperwork and most of the technical parts of a role. It takes weeks, sometimes months, and it’s entirely doable.
You cannot teach someone to care. You cannot install curiosity, or the instinct to notice that something is wrong, or the willingness to do the unglamorous thing properly when nobody is watching.
So hire for the parts you can’t install, and train the rest.
What passion is not
Worth being precise, because this idea gets abused.
It is not enthusiasm in an interview. People perform enthusiasm well. Ask instead about something they did without being asked to.
It is not a reason to underpay anyone. “We’re looking for people who are passionate” is, in too many job adverts, a euphemism for accepting less money. Passion doesn’t pay rent, and treating it as compensation is how you lose the people you most wanted.
And it is not the same as liking the industry. Plenty of people love the idea of care work, or marketing, or running a restaurant. What matters is whether they enjoy the actual daily work, most of which is ordinary.
How to find it
Ask what they’ve done that nobody required. The improvement they made because it bothered them. That’s the tell.
Ask what they’d change about how the job is usually done. People who care have opinions. People who want a job have answers.
Listen for specifics. “I love helping people” is a sentiment. “The handover notes at my last place were useless, so I rewrote the template” is evidence.
Use structured interviews. The same questions for every candidate, scored against what the job needs — otherwise you’ll hire whoever most resembles you and call it passion.
And check the mundane parts. Will they do the paperwork? Show up on time? Passion that evaporates on contact with admin isn’t passion.
Then don’t waste it
Hiring people who care and then managing them as though they don’t is the fastest way to lose them.
Give them room to fix things. Let them own something real. Notice the work, specifically and out loud. And pay them properly, because the surest way to extinguish enthusiasm is to make it clear that you’re relying on it instead of on fair compensation.
The best hire I can make is someone who’d do a version of this work anyway, and whom I get to pay well for doing it here.
