Job skills aren’t everything when it comes to the right hire - Mark Murphy
Special to Globe and Mail; Published Friday, Jan. 06, 2012 7:00AM EST
The following book excerpt is from Hiring For Attitude by Mark Murphy.
If your organization is going to excel, it needs the right people. But virtually every one of the standard approaches to selecting those right people is dead wrong. And here’s why: whenever managers talk about hiring the right people, they usually mean “highly skilled people.” For lots of executives, the war for talent is a war for the most technically competent people. But that’s really the wrong war to be fighting.
Most new hires do not fail on the job due to a lack of skill. My company, Leadership IQ, tracked 20,000 new hires over a three-year period. Within their first 18 months, 46 per cent of them failed (got fired, received poor performance reviews, or were written up). And as bad as that sounds, it’s pretty consistent with other studies over the years and thus not too shocking.
What is shocking, though, is why those people failed. We categorized and distilled the top five reasons why new hires failed and found these results:
1. Coachability (26%): The ability to accept and implement feedback from bosses, colleagues, customers, and others.
2. Emotional Intelligence (23%): The ability to understand and manage one’s own emotions and accurately assess others’ emotions.
3. Motivation (17%): Sufficient drive to achieve one’s full potential and excel in the job.
4. Temperament (15%): Attitude and personality suited to the particular job and work environment.
5. Technical Competence (11%): Functional or technical skills required to do the job.
You’ll notice that a lack of skills or technical competence only accounted for 11 per cent of new-hire failures. When a new hire was wrong for a company it was due to attitude, not a lack of skills.
ATTITUDE IS A BIGGER ISSUE THAN SKILLS
Our study showed that somebody was a bad hire for attitudinal reasons 89 per cent of the time. In some cases, these new hires just weren’t coachable, or they didn’t have sufficient emotional intelligence or motivation, or they just didn’t sync with the organization. But whatever the particulars, having the wrong attitude is what defined the wrong person in the majority of cases.
If you want more proof, do this little exercise. Make a quick list of the characteristics that define the low performers who work for you. These are the people that you regret hiring, the ones who cost you time, energy, and emotional pain—the kind of people who make you happy to hit some morning rush hour traffic because it’s a welcome respite from them. Don’t think about it too hard; you’re going to be doing plenty of that in later chapters. Just jot down the first four, five, or six things that come into your mind when you think about what makes these folks low performers.
I happen to have just conducted this exercise with a client who was happy to have me share his results. Here’s the list of the low performer characteristics this CEO came up with:
Top Characteristics of Low Performers
Are negative
Blame others
Feel entitled
Don’t take initiative
Procrastinate
Resist change
Create drama for attention
I’ve done this exercise with countless clients, and while the low performer characteristics I hear tend to vary widely, one factor remains consistent: I rarely hear anything skill related. Overwhelmingly, the characteristics that define mishires (low performers) are attitudinal. In fact, whenever I’ve probed for more feedback, I’ve generally been told that a good number of those negative, entitled, blaming, change-resistant low performers have really good skills. That, of course, only makes the whole low performer situation even more painful. (Parenthetically, most companies are currently paying people they regret hiring because it’s usually harder to fire someone than it was to hire them, especially if they have decent skills but a lousy attitude. This is all the more reason to learn how to Hire for Attitude.)
The same exercise can be done with your high performers. And again, you’ll likely find that what makes these folks so great is all about their attitudes and not their skills. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that skills don’t matter—they do. But I’m also saying that the biggest challenge in hiring is not determining skill but rather determining whether or not someone has the right attitude to be a good fit in your organization. Besides, figuring out if someone has the right skills, or enough raw IQ points, is actually pretty easy. Virtually every profession has some kind of a test to assess skill. If you want to be a board certified neurosurgeon, you have to pass a test. If you want to be a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (considered perhaps the toughest networking certification), you have to pass a written and a lab test. If you want to be a nurse, pharmacist, engineer, nuclear physicist, car mechanic, or whatever, there’s a test to assess if you have the skills and horsepower to do so.
And even though I personally lack the skills to pass the tests for any of those jobs, I could easily proctor the exam. And if I buy the scoring key, guess what? I could grade those tests as well. And so could you. If you’re looking for a Java programmer, give her a page of code with bugs and have her debug and rewrite the code. Google holds a Code Jam that they describe as “a programming competition in which professional and student programmers are asked to solve increasingly complex algorithmic challenges in a limited amount of time.” Some hospitals hold competency fairs to test clinical knowledge. (“You say you know about infection control, chest tubes, and insulin protocols, so show me.”) There’s really no excuse for hiring somebody who lacks the skills to do the job, which no doubt is a contributing factor to why only 11 per cent of new hires fail because of skill.
So when you see your colleagues get fixated on hiring people who can “do the job” and who have the “right skills” and enough “talent,” you’ll want to explain to them that attitude, not skill, is the top predictor of a new hire’s success or failure. Because even the best skills don’t really matter if an employee isn’t open to improving or consistently alienates co-workers, lacks drive, or simply lacks the right personality to succeed in that culture. Skills still count, but the data overwhelmingly tell us that attitude is the hiring issue that should demand the most focus.
Reprinted with permission from The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
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