Attitude and Skills

Hire for attitude, train for skills is a well known and well-worn mantra largely because it is sage advice, but I wonder how many of us actually do hire for attitude and train for skills.

Hiring for attitude requires us to be very clear about what specific attitude qualities we are looking for. What exactly is the attitude that you are looking for when you hire?

‘To know and not to do is not yet to know’. Instead of paying lip service to the advice why not sit down with a pencil and paper (remember those?) and work out, for you and your business, what are the traits that are absolutely non negotiable? There will be at least two categories, I suggest. ‘Must have’ in other words I wont hire anyone that can’t demonstrate these, ‘must not have’ I wont employ anyone who evidences these, and perhaps ‘would like to have’ not mandatory but ideal.

It would be a waste of effort to do all this work and then not create a check list to use as part of the hiring process. If the applicant doesn’t tick all of the boxes, go no further. Recognise the red flags, the signs that indicate that this person will not be a good fit for your organisation. Again the watchword is specificity.

The interesting thing is that by doing this exercise you can refine it through repeated use and use it for every hire everywhere in your company.

So the questions for today are:

• The devil is in the details. What traits specifically are we looking for in a new hire?
• What attitude traits will rule someone out of the selection process?
• What are the traits that all of your A players have in common?
• What are the traits that all of your C players have in common?
• What impact would it have to replace one C player with an A player?