The Worker every Company Wants but Never Asks For

When is the last time you looked on your internal job board, saw a post on Linkedin, or maybe actively looking for a job? Chances are, a lot more people are doing just that right now with COVID-19 having so much of an affect on companies revenue streams. COVID-19 has forced many companies to innovate their customer delivery and internal processes. This is actually a good thing, but even though not all jobs will be coming back, unfortunately. there has been almost no focus on innovating the hiring process, or re-hiring process.

Most likely, some of the tasks that were traditionally handled by people have been automated or changed in a way to reallocate their purpose. Reallocation of duties have shown management that, maybe not anyone, can perform that task, but close to that. The close part is, that businesses believe they are unique and that they have something special so, even though you may have experience performing a certain task, there is a specific adjustment needed.

This poses the questions, if over 80% of a businesses process or task can be taught to anyone or automated, and every business process is unique, why are the majority of job descriptions so task oriented and experience oriented.

Let me switch gears for a second. As a project manager for a service company, I was working on a multi-billion dollar project and was managing very large teams. I was hiring 5-10 people a week at times. There were some positions that required specific certifications and years of experience, but beyond that and other positions that did not, I would always look for people that had core values and morals. additionally, I was looking for someone who was motivated to learn and improve and did not have all the answers. In my experience, it was better to have someone on my team that would question things than to merely accept the first answer given as truth. Now don’t get me wrong, I did not want to employ agitators either, but that is where the core values came in.

Traits Companies Want in Their Employees:

• Passonate
• Self-Motivating
• Hard Worker
• Committed
• Full of Integrity
• Focused
• Team Player
• Safety Oriented
• Goal Oriented
• Customer Centric
• Results Driven

These sound great and you will actually find a lot of these woven into the description of open jobs. You could even argue that the interview process is way to validate these traits and to ensure you hire someone that will positively effect your business. However, I would argue that you fail to include people indirectly qualified for the job at hand.

In the same way Henry Ford said “If I were to ask people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”, managers don’t tend to know what they need from a hiring perspective. And frankly, just because you hire people, doesn’t actually make you a good interviewer.

Technology is no longer the barrier to success just how knowing is no longer the barrier to getting a job. Knowing is the easy part, learning is the easy part, applying is where things tend to go wrong.

If you want to change your culture and your company long term, start focusing on people and empowering them with intelligent skills, emotional skills, critical thinking skills. This will be more impactful than anything else you do.