What Matters Most When Hiring Candidates: Skills, Attitude or Potential?

   
So, how do you ensure you're making the right hiring choices?  Focusing on skills is common, particularly for companies trying to avoid unconscious bias.  Prioritising skills over attributes ensures you can hire team members with the right abilities to thrive in a specific role.

 
However, while more than 80% of employers say they take a skills-based approach to hiring, focusing on skills alone may not be a good idea. After all, the skills team members need are constantly changing, and while you can teach employees how to leverage new skills, it's much harder to shape a team member's attitude or potential.

 
Here's what you need to know about hiring for skills, vs attitude, vs potential.

The job market has changed significantly in recent years.  The competition for top talent is increasing in an environment where every company faces significant skill shortages.  Worldwide, more than 75% of companies struggle to find skilled workers.

Additionally, employee priorities are changing.  Following the "Great Resignation", candidates focus more on finding roles that offer the perfect blend of work/life balance, development opportunities, and a strong focus on diversity, equity and inclusion.

To attract and retain top talent, companies can't afford to rely exclusively on scanning resumes for evidence of the right education or experience.  CVs offer a stunted insight into a candidate's potential, focusing solely on their achievements.

A more comprehensive approach to analysing a candidate's "potential matrix", based on their hard and soft skills, personality traits, and ability to adapt to changing situations, ensures you can hire more resilient, successful employees.

Skills-based hiring, which involves prioritising candidates based on their abilities, does have value.  Deloitte research found that companies that take a skills-based approach to hiring are 63% more likely to achieve the results they need from their teams.

Evaluating the skills of your potential employees ensures you can look beyond how many years of experience a candidate has in the sector or which certifications they've earned to focus on how well they'll be able to carry out specific responsibilities at work.

This can reduce the risk of unconscious bias in hiring and lead to benefits like:

•  Quicker hiring decisions: Skills are often relatively easy to verify through portfolios, certifications, and practical tests, accelerating your hiring decisions.

•  Immediate productivity: Employees with the right skills can instantly contribute to your workforce without additional training.

•  Reduced costs: Because your candidates will already have the skills they need to thrive in their role, you can spend less money on training, mentoring, and development.

•  Improved retention: Some studies show that skills-based hires have a 9% longer tenure at their companies than traditional hires.

•  Competitive advantage: Focusing on emerging skills, such as digital literacy, can help you give your organisation a competitive advantage in the industry.

Focusing at least partially on skills is often crucial for virtually all roles and positions.  Ensuring your team members have the right competencies to complete the tasks essential to their roles means you can hire more efficient, productive team members.

However, there's a risk to focusing on skills alone, particularly in a world where experts predict employers will need to reskill more than 1 billion people by 2030, thanks to changes in the workplace.  That's where a focus on attitude and potential becomes a priority.

Skills are undoubtedly important in any role, but they can't accurately predict a person's chances of success in your organisation alone.

They're either missing motivation, don't have the resiliency to adapt to changes, or can't thrive in the culture your company offers.  Technical skills can be easily taught in the industry with coaching, training, and mentorship.  Adjusting someone's attitude is much harder.

Focusing on attitude and potential by examining a candidate's personality, soft skills like communication and adaptability, and work ethic drives incredible results, such as:

•  Greater resilience: In the fast-moving industry, companies need adaptable employees who can adjust quickly to changing challenges.  Hiring employees focusing on continuous learning, improvement, and a growth mindset improves resilience.

•  Improved retention: Studies show that 90% of new hires lose their job due to their attitude or personality.  Hiring for attitude improves your chances of retaining critical team members who mesh well with your team.

•  Enhanced performance: Candidates with the right attitude and soft skills are more effective at collaborating with team members, serving customers, and solving problems.  This can significantly improve the performance of your teams.

•  Diversity: By hiring for attitude and potential over technical skills, you can improve your chances of building a more diverse workforce, boosting your employer brand.

Ultimately, the best option for improved hiring strategies isn't focusing on skills, attitude and potential independently – it's taking a holistic approach.

When hiring a new team member, focusing on certain essential skills, such as proficiency with certain software or exceptional communication and customer service skills, will help streamline the recruitment process and reduce the cost of future training.

Skills-based hiring will also ensure you can hire team members who are immediately productive in their role, improving the ROI of your hiring strategy.  Plus, it can reduce the risk of unconscious bias in your hiring decisions, ensuring you can assess each candidate objectively.

However, focusing on attitude and potential by evaluating a candidate's soft skills, personality traits, and work ethic ensures you can choose diverse candidates who can contribute to your company culture and remain resilient in a shifting landscape.

Here are our top tips for hiring for skills, attitude and potential.

Assess the roles you need to fill carefully and determine which skills are crucial to your candidates' responsibilities.  Focus on prioritising skills that would be difficult or time-consuming for staff to learn on the job.

For instance, while it's easy to show a candidate how to use a new piece of software, delivering comprehensive skills training for things like accounting, analytics, or customer service would be much harder.

Once you've identified the most crucial skills your employees need, search for those capabilities consistently across all applicants.  Take additional steps to minimise unconscious bias in your hiring decisions, such as using structured and standardised interview questions and blind resume screening.

After assessing the most essential "technical" skills your candidates will need, consider the attitude and personality traits that will make them a good fit for your business.  Focus on things like:

•  Soft skills: Great time management or communication skills.

•  Mindset: A growth mindset and commitment to continuous learning.

•  Personality traits: Such as proactivity, intrinsic motivation, and flexibility.

Finally, ensure you have a strategy for continuously developing your new team members.  While you might not be able to change their attitudes, you can improve their potential and enhance their integration into your workforce with group training and coaching sessions.

You can also look into options for improving your staff member's soft skills, such as offering communication and collaboration training resources.

Regardless of the technical skills your team members already have, make sure you're constantly offering access to new development opportunities.  Think carefully about the future needs of your business, and offer access to a range of solutions to boost skills in digital literacy, technology, and niche-specific capabilities.

Ultimately, neither skills-based hiring nor focusing entirely on attitude and potential will ensure you can hire the right employees for your team.  The right results require a holistic approach, focusing on skills, attitude, and potential in equal measure.

With a holistic strategy, you can ensure you're hiring employees who contribute to your company culture, respond well to changing circumstances, and perform well in their roles.