Job-seekers, whether fresh graduates or those who are thinking of transferring to another employer or company, do an honest evaluation of yourself before handing in that application and resume. Do you have the “right” attitude? Majority of employers nowadays don’t care much if you have straight 1.0’s or have the brains of Einstein. Not unless you are applying as an astronaut or eyeing a post in a highly technical profession, what is given the most weight in hiring employees is the attitude of an applicant. Here is a part of an article, Hire for Attitude (an interview of Mark Murphy by Dan Schawbel) that speaks about attitude and a job seeker’s “hire-ability.” Why do so many fail within the first 18 months of taking a job? When our research tracked 20,000 new hires, 46% of them failed within 18 months. But even more surprising than the failure rate, was that when new hires failed, 89% of the time it was for attitudinal reasons and only 11% of the time for a lack of skill. The attitudinal deficits that doomed these failed hires included a lack of coachability, low levels of emotional intelligence, motivation and temperament. Are technical and soft skills less important than attitude? Why? It’s not that technical skills aren’t important, but they’re much easier to assess (that’s why attitude, not skills, is the top predictor of a new hire’s success or failure). Virtually every job (from neurosurgeon to engineer to cashier) has tests that can assess technical proficiency. But what those tests don’t assess is attitude; whether a candidate is motivated to learn new skills, think innovatively, cope with failure, assimilate feedback and coaching, collaborate with teammates, and so forth. Soft skills are the capabilities that attitude can enhance or undermine. For example, a newly hired executive may have the intelligence, business experience and financial acumen to fit well in a new role. But if that same executive has an authoritarian, hard-driving style, and they’re being hired into a social culture where happiness and camaraderie are paramount, that combination is unlikely to work. Additionally, many training programs have demonstrated success with increasing and improving skills—especially on the technical side. But these same programs are notoriously weak when it comes to creating attitudinal change. As Herb Kelleher, former Southwest Airlines CEO used to say, “we can change skill levels through training, but we can’t change attitude.” How will the hiring landscape be different in 2012 and beyond? Between the labor pool from China and India and the fact that there are so many workers sitting out there unemployed, we can find the skills we need. The lack of sharp wage increases in most job categories is further evidence of the abundant supply of skills. Technical proficiency, once a guarantee of lifetime employment, is a commodity in today’s job market. Attitude is what today’s companies are hiring for. And not just any attitude; companies want attitudes that perfectly match their unique culture. Google and Apple are both great companies, but their cultures are as different as night and day. Source: forbes/sites/danschawbel/2012/01/23/89-of-new-hires-fail-because-of-their-attitude/
Posted on: Fri, 08 Nov 2013 13:20:37 +0000
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