Hiring the best IT talent isn't easy, particularly when skill shortages are increasing. The cost of making the wrong decision can be huge. Not only do you waste time and resources onboarding and training the wrong employee, but your team's productivity can suffer, too.
So, how do you ensure you're making the right hiring choices? Focusing on skills is common, particularly for companies trying to avoid unconscious bias. Prioritising skills over attributes ensures you can hire team members with the right abilities to thrive in a specific role.
Focusing on skills alone may not be a good idea. After all, the skills IT team members need are constantly changing, and while you can teach employees how to leverage new skills, it's much harder to shape a team member's attitude or potential.
Here's what you need to know about hiring for skills, vs attitude, vs potential
Despite positive economic shifts last year, such as reduced inflations, financial issues still disrupt hiring practices.
At a time when IT job stability is fragile, now is the time to prepare yourself for financial headaches and job-seeking complexity.
Assess how to accelerate and improve your job-seeking process by working with recruiters and building a strong personal brand. A recruitment team can help direct you towards roles you will not find on your own.
An effective personal brand, characterised by a strong online presence, will help make you more ‘attractive’, particularly now that companies rely heavily on social media for recruitment.
increasing in an environment where every company faces significant skill shortages. Worldwide, more than 75% of companies struggle to find skilled workers.
Additionally, employee priorities are changing. Following the "Great Resignation", candidates focus more on finding roles that offer the perfect blend of work/life balance, development opportunities, and a strong focus on diversity, equity and inclusion.
To attract and retain top talent, companies can't afford to rely exclusively on scanning resumes for evidence of the right education or experience. CVs offer a stunted insight into a candidate's potential, focusing solely on their achievements.
A more comprehensive approach to analysing a candidate's "potential matrix", based on their hard and soft skills, personality traits, and ability to adapt to changing situations, ensures you can hire more resilient, successful employees.
Skills-based hiring, which involves prioritising candidates based on their abilities, does have value.
Evaluating the skills of your potential employees ensures you can look beyond how many years of experience a candidate has in the IT sector or which certifications they've earned to focus on how well they'll be able to carry out specific responsibilities at work.
Focusing at least partially on skills is often crucial for virtually all roles and positions.
Ensuring your team members have the right competencies to complete the tasks essential to their roles means you can hire more efficient, productive team members.
However, there's a risk to focusing on skills alone, particularly in a world where experts predict employers will need to reskill more than 1 billion people by 2030, thanks to changes in the workplace. That's where a focus on attitude and potential becomes a priority.
Focussing on skills can reduce the risk of unconscious bias in hiring and lead to benefits such as:
Quicker hiring decisions:
Skills are often relatively easy to verify through portfolios, certifications, and practical tests, accelerating your hiring decisions.
Immediate productivity:
Employees with the right skills can instantly contribute to your workforce without additional training.
Reduced costs:
Because your candidates will already have the skills they need to thrive in their role, you can spend less money on training, mentoring, and development.
Improved retention:
Some studies show that skills-based hires have a 9% longer tenure at their companies than traditional hires.
Competitive advantage:
Focusing on emerging skills, such as digital literacy, can help you give your organisation a competitive advantage in the IT industry.
Skills are undoubtedly important in any role, but they can't accurately predict a person's chances of success in your organisation alone. They're either missing motivation, don't have the resiliency to adapt to changes, or can't thrive in the culture your company offers. Technical skills can be easily taught in the IT industry with coaching, training, and mentorship.
Adjusting someone's attitude is much harder.
Of course, hiring for attitude alone also has its setbacks. If you focus on personality over skills entirely, you'll need to invest more in training and development programs and spend more time evaluating candidates for personality traits.
Focusing on attitude and potential by examining a candidate's personality, soft skills like communication and adaptability, and work ethic drives incredible results, such as:
Greater resilience:
In the fast-moving IT industry, companies need adaptable employees who can adjust quickly to changing challenges. Hiring employees focusing on continuous learning, improvement, and a growth mindset improves resilience.
Improved retention:
Studies show that 90% of new hires lose their job due to their attitude or personality. Hiring for attitude improves your chances of retaining critical team members who mesh well with your team.
Enhanced performance:
Candidates with the right attitude and soft skills are more effective at collaborating with team members, serving customers, and solving problems. This can significantly improve the performance of your teams.
Diversity:
By hiring for attitude and potential over technical skills, you can improve your chances of building a more diverse workforce, boosting your employer brand.
Ultimately, the best option for improved IT hiring strategies isn't focusing on skills, attitude and potential independently – it's taking a holistic approach.
When hiring a new team member, focusing on certain essential skills, such as proficiency with certain software or exceptional communication and customer service skills, will help streamline the recruitment process and reduce the cost of future training.
Skills-based hiring will also ensure you can hire team members who are immediately productive in their role, improving the ROI of your hiring strategy. Plus, it can reduce the risk of unconscious bias in your hiring decisions, ensuring you can assess each candidate objectively.
However, focusing on attitude and potential by evaluating an IT candidate's soft skills, personality traits, and work ethic ensures you can choose diverse candidates who can contribute to your company culture and remain resilient in a shifting landscape.
Here are our top tips for hiring for skills, attitude and potential.
Focus on prioritising skills that would be difficult or time-consuming for staff to learn on the job.
For instance, while it's easy to show a candidate how to use a new piece of IT software, delivering comprehensive skills training for things like accounting, analytics, or customer service would be much harder.
Once you've identified the most crucial skills your employees need, search for those capabilities consistently across all applicants. Take additional steps to minimise unconscious bias in your hiring decisions, such as using structured and standardised interview questions and blind resume screening.
After assessing the most essential "technical" skills your candidates will need, consider the attitude and personality traits that will make them a good fit for your business. Focus on things like:
Soft skills: Great time management or communication skills.
Mindset: A growth mindset and commitment to continuous learning.
Personality traits: Such as proactivity, intrinsic motivation, and flexibility.
Identify how you'll examine these indicators of "potential" in your candidates. For instance, competency-based interviews with situational questions, behavioural interview questions, and personality tests can offer valuable insights.
Peer interviews can also be extremely useful, as they allow different team members to understand how well a new IT employee will fit into or contribute to your workplace dynamic. You could even consider hiring employees on a "trial" period for insights into how well they integrate with your team and their effectiveness in their roles.
Finally, ensure you have a strategy for continuously developing your new IT team members. While you might not be able to change their attitudes, you can improve their potential and enhance their integration into your workforce with group training and coaching sessions.
You can also look into options for improving your staff member's soft skills, such as offering communication and collaboration training resources.
Regardless of the technical skills your team members already have, make sure you're constantly offering access to new development opportunities. Think carefully about the future needs of your business, and offer access to a range of solutions to boost skills in digital literacy, technology, and niche-specific capabilities.
Ultimately, neither skills-based hiring nor focusing entirely on attitude and potential will ensure you can hire the right employees for your IT team. The right results require a holistic approach, focusing on skills, attitude, and potential in equal measure.
With a holistic strategy, you can ensure you're hiring employees who contribute to your company culture, respond well to changing circumstances, and perform well in their roles.
Contact Constant Recruitment today to learn how we can help you make the right hiring decisions based on skills, attitude, and potential.
Looking for your dream IT job or your next star hire? Look no further than Constant Recruitment!
As a trusted IT recruitment agency, we are committed to matching skilled and talented candidates with top-tier employers across the industry. We take the time to understand your unique needs and preferences, whether you are a job seeker looking for a new opportunity or an employer seeking the perfect candidate to join your team.
Our extensive network and expertise in the field enable us to connect you with the right people and opportunities to achieve your goals. At Constant Recruitment, we pride ourselves on delivering exceptional service and going above and beyond to exceed your expectations.
So why settle for anything less than the best?
At Constant Recruitment, we are passionate about connecting talented IT professionals with leading organisations across the UK. The right talent can transform organisations and drive innovation and growth, and we are dedicated to matching the right talent with the right opportunity.
Our founder, Rachel Constant-Taylor, started in recruitment in 2006, the same year her youngest daughter was born. With a background in the IT industry since leaving school, moving into IT recruitment was a natural fit for her, combining her real-world knowledge of working in Tech companies with her love of people. She saw an opportunity in 2012 to create a unique recruitment agency of her own that delivered exceptional service and expertise.
What makes us unique is our commitment to delivering a personalised recruitment experience for both our clients and candidates. We understand that every individual and business is unique, and we work closely with each of our clients and candidates to understand their distinctive needs and goals. This allows us to provide tailored solutions that meet their specific requirements, helping them to succeed in a competitive market.
We recruit better than our competitors by providing a seamless and effective recruitment process that consistently supports both our candidates and clients. We value honesty, integrity, and hard work.
Taking a pride in our ability to connect the right talent with the right opportunity. We are committed to delivering the highest standards of service and expertise.
To our clients we are the trusted partner for all IT recruitment needs
