Hiring Attitudes Over Skills

While reading It’s Not the Big That Eat the Small… by Jason Jennings, I came across a one-pager that precisely summarizes what I’ve believed all along about hiring the right people. What follows below is an excerpt from this book.

"Fast businesses have come to the same conclusion: you have to hire attitudes over skills. […]

“Skills can be developed, but an attitude is a deep and mysterious thing. Professionals spend years trying to undue [sic] the mess created during early life in many psyches. You just don’t have the time.

“When we’re asked for the attitude we most want from a new hire, the answer is “proven initiative.” We want to see how someone has overcome disadvantages and adversity. We want to measure resilience and ingenuity. And we favor candidates who’ve struggled, blown it, gotten battered or bruised, and persevered. That runs counter to the things most people look for in interviews. They look for high grades from top-notch schools, a history of successes in a similar business, and all the nice things people have to say about the applicant.

“To find the willingness to prevail, you have to hear about failings, weaknesses, and mistakes. A lot of success comes from luck. Until it is tested, you don’t know what someone is made of. That’s why boot camps and survival courses are used to train people for the most critical missions in the world.

“Are you making the interview too easy and selling others on the idea of working for you rather than vice versa? Do you offer new recruits a boot camp-like environment to show them how tough things can be?”