This is a guest post written by Hannah Spruce of High Speed Training talking about how (and why) to hire for attitude not skillset!
When you make the wrong hire, there’s always this realisation that the problem is attitude.
It might surface a week or a month in, but eventually, there it is, staring you in the face. Your new recruit has a bad attitude. Urghh.
On paper, yeah, they have all the skills. But they’re lazy, uncooperative, and bored. And at the end of the week, they’ve achieved nothing of value.
There’s no way to make sure you get it 100 percent right in a recruitment situation. But if you consider attitude as the single most important quality, you’re well on your way.
Hire for attitude. Skills can be improved – but only with the right outlook.
A bad attitude is a massive drain on organisational funds, time, and energy. Someone has to pick up the slack, and it can feel like your responsibility if you pushed for the organisation to hire them.
Choose recruitment methods and questions that reveal attitude.
Hiring mistakes based on skills are 100 percent avoidable.
A skills test can give you hard data about what someone can do, and once they’ve passed this step, the next and much harder challenge is to see if they are a cultural fit for the company you’re recruiting for.
Make sure skills testing is part of your application process. CVs can (and do) lie.
There are thousands of creative ways to skills test in-house, and you can do it for every role. If the organisation you’re hiring for don’t want to do it in-house, there’s also a whole host of companies who can do it for you to pre-screen candidates.
Find out about company attitude if you don’t know it
You need to make sure you can articulate the culture of the company you’re hiring for. You should be able to write down a set of values, attitudes, ethics, and beliefs.
If you can’t write them down, you need to define them. This is the only way of finding hires who are a good fit.
To get you started, try getting the organisation to answer these questions:
- How does your organisation learn?
- Is it formal or relaxed?
- What are your values?
- How do you get creative?
- What are your habits?
- Is there diversity in the workplace?
- What’s the male to female ratio?
- Does the management structure reflect the rest of the business?
Attitude reveals itself through conversation and body language
When you’re thinking about who’d be a good hire, focus on body language, how candidates use language, and trust your gut.
Are they talking about concrete situations or are they being hypothetical?
You want someone who is using the past tense for example. If candidates are providing you with solid stories about how they acted in the past, it is a good indicator that they are being honest. This can help you to identify who’s legit and who’s bluffing their way through.
How do your recruits learn? Find out whether their learning style fits with the methods that your organisation uses. Ask candidates and successful people already working within the agency to complete a learning preferences quiz to find out the fit. Compare the results.
You also need to detect how easily your organisation can train them. Recruits need to be coachable. Is there hard evidence of improvement and dedication on their CV? Have they completed extra training, developed in any way, been promoted?
Find Recruits Who Already Love Your Culture
Your client’s consumers, the people who use or love their organisation and service – these are the people who live their brand or corporate identity. They identify with it and believe in those same values.
These people are a resource. Use social recruiting to connect with them. Who knows how many are seeking work and will jump at the chance to work within the organisation?
To make the most of social recruiting, though. Companies need to communicate their culture in small ways every day and use a million means to do it: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, as well as their company website. These spaces can be harnessed to advertise their culture to attract the right people.
Save face, hire right and keep attitude at the forefront of your mind when you’re recruiting.
Hannah Spruce is a social issue and HR specialist for High Speed Training – a leading UK online training provider. She is also the author and researcher behind High Speed Training’s Interviewing Skills training programme.
