Skills vs. Personality – Hiring the Right People
Being a successful business owner, no matter how small the business may be, is by no means an easy task. Even the tiniest of businesses in the most rapidly growing industries require proficient management and leadership and for a person to be successful at running a business – the list of things to keep in mind can be a long, long one.
Among all those things, one that can play a huge factor in the actual success of the business is hiring the right people. Recruiting new people to fill different positions in your business is a process that may seem simple and easy to the untrained eye. In reality, this is an extremely sensitive and intricate process that needs to be approached with utmost care.
One of the more long-standing debates in the world of recruiting and hiring people is whether the business owner should concentrate more on the skillset of the candidate or their personality and more intangible traits. We will try to approach this as objectively and as factually as possible.
Going with skills
We will first look at the skill-based hiring process which is more common, but which is not always the predominant one as you might think.
Pros
It is really not that difficult to understand why many business owners and managers put the emphasis on the skills that their candidates need to have in order to be seriously considered for the position. In some fields and for some positions, proper education and licenses are a must and people who do not have these cannot even be considered for the position.
However, there are also jobs that do not require any formal education, but which are still very much skill-oriented. This is where the experience and the set of skills that the candidate has acquired over the years will play a huge role. When hiring for such positions, you will also want to find out what the candidate has done to expand and perfect their skills over time.
Cons
Quite often, the skills simply do not describe a person closely enough. Namely, at times, someone’s personality may be so completely wrong for your business that their skills, regardless how spectacular and impressive they might be, will not make up for what their personality lacks. Perhaps they are not assertive enough; perhaps they will be too assertive. Perhaps they will have the tendency to get into conflicts; perhaps they will lack the innovative streak that you are looking for.
In cases when the candidate’s personality is so wrong that it will hurt your business, the skill-emphasis approach may be found to be lacking.
Going with Personality
Basing your hiring decisions primarily on the personality of a candidate may seem like too unreliable, but there might actually be something to it, so let’s take a closer look.
Pros
When you are going with the personality of the candidate as the primary reason for hiring or not hiring them, you are taking more of a gamble than with a skills-based approach. Namely, you are rolling the dice that someone’s personality traits will ensure that they are going to do great at the position you are hiring them for.
There are businesses and jobs where this is definitely the way to do, especially in largely creative jobs where quantifiable skills are easy to describe and quantify. For such jobs, the personality and the cultural fit is everything.
In addition to this, according to experts from a Sydney-based RPO company, when you have a great personality fit, you can rest assured that such a candidate will do their best every single time, that they will want to improve their skillset and that they will do everything to help your business succeed.
Cons
Of course, there are some definite bad sides to hiring mostly based on personality. For one, a candidate can easily fake a personality, especially if the interview is not too long or if it is too predictable. Furthermore, they might have done research themselves and they might be aware of what you are looking for.
Another danger is hiring everyone based on their personality. What you will have in the end is a team of people who are all practically the same, which can end in disaster. Namely, such extremely homogenous teams tend to think alike and always go in the same direction, even if it is the wrong one. You need people with different personalities so that you get different approaches to various tasks.
In conclusion
In essence, the best way to approach hiring people for your business is to combine the skill-based and the personality-based approach. We will leave it up to you and your judgment to decide on the ration. One thing that you should remember, however, is that leaning too heavily to either side will result in hires that are not that perfect.
Category: Business
