Which kind of person would be good at conducting LCA’s?

One of our customers had a positive problem recently: they are recruiting a new person with our help, through our LCA training & support program, and we were able to present a few excellent candidates to them. The hiring person wrote to me (Poul) that “I want to hire them all” and she asked for some guidance on which person to choose. This is obviously a good position to be in but a hard choice, nonetheless. Asking for help was the right thing to do of course.

Choosing which person to hire can be one of the most difficult decisions for a hiring manager and it is also certainly one of the most important ones. So what to do when you have several equally strong candidates?

My initial advice was to listen to your heart, trust your instinct. I have done that and made excellent choices. I have ignored that little insecure feeling and made bad choices. Our intuition takes into account those little signals that we might not be able to put our finger on.

Another important hint is to discuss the different candidates  with another person who also interviewed each one. Talk about what the intuition of that other person says. Especially HR professionals will potentially notice things that very fact oriented managers can miss.

So how do you do that in practice? One way to do it is listing all relevant facts about the applicants you want to choose between. Positive and negative things regarding competence, experience, personality, and also what “vibes” you get. Do you think you will get along? Will the person fit into your company culture and add diversity to the team? Make a list of all these things and then… sleep on it. The next day, choose the one that feels right. The one you want to meet at the office on Monday morning and work with on some challenging tasks.

That is just my personal advice that can be applied to more or less any position.

Another question more specific to Environmental Impacts Academy is which sort of person would be good at learning and doing Environmental LCA’s, whether it is a new hire or an existing employee that you want to upskill.

Some personal qualities that would be important to have are:

-An analytical mind. LCA is about collecting data, building models, interpreting quantitative results and deciding whether something is relevant or not. So the person needs to be comfortable with working with data and crunching numbers

-Communication skills are also important. It is important to be comfortable with asking for data from both company internal stakeholders and external ones both upstream and downstream in your value chain. Demanding data from your suppliers and subcontractors, but also from your customers, requires a fair amount of both confidence and diplomacy.

-Last but not least, perseverance is very important. More often than not, you will have to request information time after time and keep reminding about it. You don’t want someone who gives up after asking for some input once or twice.

Usually you might not have several perfect candidates to choose from. In that case, if you are in doubt, go for the person who is the best cultural fit into your company and your team. Skills can be learned but personality will not change.