The market scenarios are constantly changing. Every dawn brings some new challenges, opportunities, and struggles. The best way to deal with all these issues is by having a proactive and allegiant workforce. As such, it’s not enough to just hire the right set of skills. Companies must focus on hiring the personalities that will help their businesses thrive in this ever-changing economy.
Recruiting new employees is not an easy task in today’s landscape. It is very difficult to analyze the candidate persona on paper (resume) and off-paper (interview). The hiring managers and the recruiters are greeted with hundreds of resumes every day. Manually filtering through resumes to find the best is an intimidating task.
This post unfolds the secrets behind hiring the best personality traits to fit the job over a skilled workforce that seems to have a good resume.
How do you identify personality within a Resume?
To be honest, resumes don’t always fully convey a candidate’s full capability and potential. A candidate may lack in experience but could be a great learner and leader.
A resume may paint an ostentatious version of the candidate’s capabilities or over-exaggerate a candidate’s qualifications and skill set. Recruiters typically don’t have a clue what a candidate is really made of until they conduct the first round of interviews.
As such, your company may be losing great candidates just because of a poorly knitted resume. So, relying on the resume alone when you specifically need to hire for personality would be termed as being biased and judgemental.
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Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) have lifted the burden away from recruiters’ shoulders as it saves a lot of time and energy. Time that would have been spent sifting through resumes can be vested in understanding the candidates though interviews and personal interactions.
Why is Hiring for Personality Imperative for Small Business?
While making the hiring decisions, recruiters have to consider several factors that will affect the productivity and work culture of the organization. Recruiters have a tough task to churn candidates and select the best culturally fit one.
The truth of the matter is that organizations can teach professional skills but not necessarily coach an individual into the intuitive ones such as being courageous, proactive, adaptive, dedicated and emotionally intelligent. Therefore, “hiring for personality” carries more weight than simply bringing practical skills from one business to another.
Change is the only constant thing. Hiring a person for skill set never assures the organization that he will survive in this ever-changing pace. If the candidate is adamant at using the obsolete technology, how can he or she add value to an organization?
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Also, as a part of a small business, employees are expected to be multi-talented. Hiring a new employee to meet the demands of every specialized skill set is not only unrealistic, but it would be way over most budgets.
Why Hire for Personality Over Skills?
Personality never means “the first impression”. Personality is something much deeper and is depicted from the candidate’s attitude, behavior and thoughts. Recruiters need to determine how these traits can be useful to the company. The insights received during personal interaction rounds help to evaluate whether the candidate is culturally fit for the organization or not.
Most of the top software giants such as Google, Microsoft, etc prefer fresh college graduates over experienced professionals. These companies tend to look beyond the skill set of the candidate and look for traits such as willingness to learn, adaptability, ability to explore more, motivation and determination level and other soft skills; but why?
Read More: Check out some of the biggest mistakes made by IT firms
Here are a few reasons why hiring managers prefer to hire personality over skills.
Skills can be taught
Skills can be taught; attitude cannot. Some skills require professional assistance while some may not. Most companies prefer to train their employees to company standards or per the demands of the project rather than hiring an individual to “plug and play.”
Personality is hardwired
Skill-training is much easier than reshaping attitude and behavior. People learn from their life experiences and adapt their personalities to respond to their environment. It is incredibly difficult to break a person of strong personality traits that have become engrained and hardwired.
Workplace Compatibility
A company hiring for skills alone may be pleased with the quality of tasks performed, but there is no guarantee that the employee will sync with your current workforce. The spirit of teamwork is essential for the success of any organization. A candidate lacking this (especially in a team environment) can’t possibly be successful. It’s a cumulative effort of all the teammates who complement each other’s weaknesses and strengths.
A candidate lacking in willingness to learn will never try to experiment and will always try to remain in a safer zone. Today’s market needs people who are ready to take a risk and are proactive enough to predict the changes happening in the near future and act accordingly.
When you hire for personality, you’re more likely to hire an enthusiastic and optimistic candidate. These candidates can become a great asset to the company. These people have a magnetic aura and attract everyone around them thereby, infusing positivity in the workplace.
Read More: Improve Your In-House Recruitment Process
Having the Right Attitude is essential for Business Deals
The reality of business is that sometimes a company loses a project despite all of the hard work and excellent skills on the project team. Sometimes another company had a better price, sometimes it’s just stiff competition. When this happens, it’s a great litmus test of employee’s perseverance and determination.
An employee with a positive attitude will not only stay determined but will cheer the team for the next project in line with double the enthusiasm. Resilence is absolutely necessary. An ideal candidate will be able to circumvent the obstacles by offering considerable solutions.
3. Hiring for Personality leads to Customer Satisfaction
Personality plays a key role in prime areas of business success (i.e. customer satisfaction). If customers are delivered with an upbeat, professional and friendly support service, they’ll remain loyal to your company. These soft skills play a crucial role in customer building and act as a game-changer for any company.
Final Thoughts
The bottom line is that hiring for personality over skills has merit. Therefore, recruiters need enough time to understand the candidate. Having an Applicant Tracking System onboard will drastically reduce the time-to-hire as most of the tasks are automated by it. Thus, leaving ample time for the recruiters to interview and understand the personality of the candidate.
Hiring for personality helps the small businesses to not only meet the present requisites but keep on adding value to the organization in the future as well.
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