Interested in more careers-related content? Check out our new weekly Work Life newsletter. Sent every Monday afternoon.

When Mary Crossan joins Ron Francis to assess candidates for the NHL, she isn’t there to judge skating ability or effectiveness of their slapshot. The Ivey Business School professor helps the longtime NHL general manager to understand their character – just as you should be doing, she believes, when interviewing your own recruits.

It’s been said that we hire for competence and fire for character. That applies in hockey as well. Her work focuses on 11 dimensions of character, such as drive, collaboration, temperance, integrity and transcendence, which covers commitment to excellence and future orientation.

Mr. Francis reached out to her when he was with the Carolina Hurricanes and the collaboration has continued during his tenure with the Seattle Kraken; she joins him at the NHL draft combine, where the future NHLers are assessed, and then later meets with coaches and those ultimately chosen for a workshop on how to develop character. “Most organizations don’t understand what character is, let alone how to develop it. So my job was not only to help them see what it was but then to have an interview or conversation that starts to reveal it in a player,” she says in an interview.

Strengths become apparent quite quickly in those conversations. She describes them as muscles the individual is exercising quite........

© BIV