over 3 years ago - Katherine Nguyen Thanh Tam

What Do You Look for When Hiring Talent? [Fitting Personality VS Professional Skills]

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What Do You Look For When Hiring Talent?

Fitting Personality VS Professional Skills

What should you value most when you’re making a recruitment decision – the skills listed on the resume or the personality of the person that sits before you? The choice isn’t always easy and there’s no “right” or “wrong” answer.

When you’re faced with a tough hiring decision, you need to pick the best choice for your organization, and that depends on a number of factors.

Read on as we discuss personality vs. skill, and what is eventually the most fundamental in today’s market. The result may surprise you.

Recruitment-To-Selection Process

Now, the common practice is hiring via job ads on some job portals. We look forward to a huge number of applicants there, yet the quality fails almost regularly.

Well, it is our professional and moral responsibility to appropriately look-overall applications to assign them the needed observation and assess every single one of them.

While assessing, you will probably analyze;

You might now go over to round two of a precise screening (after the first screening) for the best candidates and select the outstanding profile to the interview process, right?

While the resume screening process focuses predominantly on work history skills, the interview process focuses on the candidate’s personality, not to mention their fit with their potential co-workers.

There are tools though that enable recruiters to evaluate skill sets better, something resumes typically don’t,such as pre-employment assessments. Eventually, it’s time to make the call on who gets the job offer.

But if you have two candidates before you, one with all the skills for the job but few personality traits, and the other whose skills are inadequate but has an awe-inspiring personality, which should you hire?

As it is so often said, there is no silver bullet! When you make your way through the screening/ interviewing/ hiring process, do you weigh skills vs. personality on an even scale or is one more crucial than the other?

Although the interview is a great chance to assess personality, some hiring managers do not put much weight on this determinant. In the end, experience and special skills often win out. 

To me, skills and personality are both equally important. You need to employ talents that possess both features to some degree. Organizations—particularly those in the technology sector— are perceiving that hiring entirely for skills doesn’t work.

They’ve come to understand that intelligent people who have the right character for their culture can learn. Conversely, employing highly-skilled talents who have the inappropriate personality traits for their workplace can be devastating.

So, what skills to look at?

When we talk about professional skills, we’re generally talking about hard and soft skills.

Hard Skills

  • These skills refer to the capabilities, expertise and the level of education (degree/certificate) of the candidate.

  • They are basically the first introduction you get to a potential new hire because these are the skills most commonly tallied up on a resume before deciding whether you want to proceed an interview with the candidate. 

Soft Skills

  • When you’re conducting the actual interview, you’re customarily gauging their people/interpersonal skills.

  • These skills refer to the candidate’s personality, their aspiration, and even the way they impart their ideas or describe the hard skills on their resume.

However, I believe a candidate’s personality can be a much preferable touch stone of how well they’ll do in their career.

Now, it’s the first working day for our superstar and pride (indeed, they have become all of that on the first day), we walk them through the passage way and introduce them to our co-workers to build the rapport.

Subsequently, our new joiner has begun working (or at least it seems like that), the rest in the office involved in the process of shaking their hands (not so much after COVID-19 though) with a gratification of our great work.

However, the honeymoon is drained every now and then by incidents rooted by our fellow new member, but we see that as newcomer’s misapprehension (although they are not freshers but experts). 

No matter how hard we strive to justify their personality, the newcomer keeps creating issues on occasions, which now might’ve already started to devastate the peace in the organization.

Within the blink of an eye the new colleague has disconnected from the team and everything appears to be going in the wrong direction. Now we are sure – we have made a huge mistake. 

Let’s take a look at what we did not notice then...

Blinded by our strong believe and concentration, we did not perceive the obvious. We oversaw how this candidate might fit into our culture. We have seen their skills, knowledge, we even have their psychological profile, and yet we did not define whether their personality fits our values.

That said, putting in the time and energy to really discover your candidates’ characters and judging how they will jumble with your existing team, exploring their passion, potentiality for self-direction and aspiration– all while stabilizing that with their expertise and skill set can be no brisk nor elementary task.

What is needed in today’s corporate world?

A candidate’s skills and knowledge of the discipline are almost always considered more fundamental than personality in a potential hire. 

However, skills can be learned, but people can’t remold their characters. Once thrown in a job, most people can learn the demanded skills swiftly. Employees on an average know all the ins and outs of a new position after about three months.

Nevertheless, personal qualities are difficult to be transfigured. With this in mind, an applicant’s work ethic, uprightness, keenness to learn, presence and the connection with the rest of the team are often far more crucial.

When a recruitment agency is hiring for their sales team, which do you think they would rather get: an outgoing, positive thinker with a great personality who doesn’t have much experience with recruitment, or a fifteen-year sales manager who is so bored with selling that he has a hard time forcing a smile when presenting to prospecting clients?

Skills and knowledge can always be taught, but not attitude.

Today, employers are increasingly looking beyond an impressive resume and interview smarts to ensure they’ve hired an individual who’s the best fit for their company culture and environment.

51% of employers chose ‘great personality’ as the main criteria of a good employee, only 14% of them chose ‘qualifications’. Even if you lack the technical skills, employers are willing to overlook that if you have a teachable attitude. 

Taking these factors into consideration, do you think personality is an important qualification for new hires? Or do you think experience is more important?

Whether you’re seeking to hire specialized talent or looking for ways to continue your professional development, recruiters at ManpowerGroup Malaysia can customize an approach specific to your needs.

Please visit our website for details on how we can assist you or fill up the form below and our consultants will reach out to you with a free consultation within 24 hours.

25 August 2020

Posted by:

Yoga Kumari Sankar - Prospect & Content Development Executive

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