Hire for Personality, Train for Skill

Posted 24 July 2014

In hiring, one of the biggest challenges is finding an employee whose personal values and attitude align with the culture and attitude of your company. It’s easy to read a resume, but it’s often harder to read a person, especially during a traditional interview.

For that reason, in our previous blog post, we gave examples of fun and quirky interview questions that you could use during your interview process. Depending on the culture of your company, your questions could differ from our proposed list. But the point is using pointed questions to learn who a person is, how they think and how they learn should be a part of your interview process.

For example, if a burger joint’s mission is to be “a home away from home, where customers can come to relax and have a great meal in a friendly and warm environment,” they need to hire employees that reflect this mission. It would be their advantage to hire a friendly and warm person with the potential to learn technical skills like using the cash register than to hire someone who doesn’t have a warm or friendly personality but has 5 years experience behind a cash register.

You see, you can usually train for skills but it is much more difficult (if not impossible) to train for personality.

Someone who is willing to learn, can work within a team (or individually, depending on your company) and is adaptable and flexible will often be a greater asset to your team than someone who has the resume to do the job. Sometimes, skill and personality intersect – and you have the perfect candidate. But this is rarely the case.

If you’re not sure where to start in terms of hiring for personality, look at the employees that are thriving within your company. What type of personalities do they have? Are they fun-loving extroverts that are able to manage stress well and thrive on learning new things? Well, then those are the types of personality traits you should look for in your potential new hires.

Almost anyone can learn how to use a cash register, but not everyone can successfully manipulate a cash register while smiling and making conversation with customers and successfully up-selling and building rapport with their co-workers. Build something special within your industry by hiring for personality and training for skill. Your customers will notice and your business will benefit, we guarantee it!

Want to learn more about successful hiring? Check out these blog posts:

Attitude, Culture, Employee, Hiring, Interview, Skills, Staffing, Training