On the surface, there’s no reason talent leaders shouldn’t be able to find top talent. Thanks to a sputtering economy there are more candidates in the job market than ever. So why is it so hard for companies to find the right people?
A glut of job candidates in the marketplace doesn’t necessarily mean those candidates are suitable for open positions. Further, the number of available candidates requires skill and resources to find the right fit. According to research from the Human Capital Media Advisory Group, the research arm of Talent Management magazine, while qualified candidates are seemingly more available than ever, some 58 percent of organizations surveyed still struggle to find top talent for many high-skill and technical positions.
Not everyone agrees on the lack of top people, however. In his article “The Skills Shortage” on page 19, Wharton professor Peter Cappelli argues there is no talent shortage. The problem is, companies don’t want to pay the salaries top talent can demand, nor do they want to invest the time and dollars to identify and develop high-potential candidates. Research indicates this is a valid point. Only 33 percent of companies surveyed indicate their talent acquisition programs are fully integrated with other talent management functions, such as performance management and learning and development. Without that integration it can be tough to bring a recruit in need of specific skills development up to speed before the employment relationship sours.
Hiring for attitude and then training for skill isn’t a bad strategy. Appropriate development options are not always costly, and most of the resources needed to bring a new recruit up to speed can be found within a company’s talent and learning departments.
If full-time options aren’t available, timely or feasible, many organizations increasingly make use of the large and flexible contingent workforce. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, since June 2009, staffing firms and temp agencies have added 557,000 jobs, or 54 percent of all jobs created.
To be effective, it’s up to talent acquisition leaders to use the right blend of internal and external resources to meet their current and future needs with a cost-effective approach to sourcing that will produce right-fit employees when needed.
Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill
About a year ago, former Southwest Airlines CEO Howard Putnam received a call from a long-time colleague seeking advice on how to best handle a problem employee. “Howard,” the woman said. “I have an employee on staff who is unethical.”
“How old is he?” Putnam asked.
“Thirty-five,” she replied. “How do I change him?”
“You fire him,” Putnam said. “If someone is still unethical when they’re 35, you’re not going to change him, so don’t waste your time on him.”
Some managers might consider that a harsh assessment, but if anyone knows talent acquisition and retention, it’s Putnam. After joining Southwest in 1978, he established his role as CEO by clearly defining the organization’s vision, then figuring out the best way to approach the airline and mass transportation business.
He also led Southwest’s efforts to develop a culture to support its vision and industry. In a stressful and competitive environment, everything had to revolve — and evolve — around ethics and integrity.
“Once you hire that way from the managerial level, the leadership level and then extend it to the front-line people, it takes away 90 percent of your problems,” Putnam said.
“Hire attitudes, develop the skills” became the Southwest mantra, and Putnam said that is one of the reasons the airline has become an industry leader and experienced decades of consistent profit growth.
Mark Murphy, author of Hiring for Attitude, said Southwest and companies such as Apple, Google and Ritz-Carlton are great organizations to illustrate that idea, despite the attitudes and activities at each being quite different. There is no “right” attitude for success, but “89 percent of the time, if a new hire fails, they fail for attitude, not for skills,” he said.
Skills have become commoditized, Murphy said. If large labor pools trickling over from countries such as India and China aren’t enough, the current U.S. unemployment rate of roughly 9 percent has led to an abundance of skills. “We can find the skills anywhere we need them,” he said. “The real issue right now is finding the people who are going to actually fit in our organizations and in our cultures.”
To find the right people, companies need to ask more of the right questions, Murphy said. The right questions — such as “What are those unique attitudinal characteristics that set our company apart from everybody else?” and “Who succeeds and who fails in our culture?” — are asked at the macro level and often can be found internally in the attitudinal profiles of employees who already have succeeded or failed in the organization. Hiring managers just have to target candidates who fit the successful profile.
On the other hand, leaders often ask the wrong questions at the micro level, Murphy said. “When you’re hiring for attitude, a lot of the old-school hiring methodologies are just horribly ineffective. They’re not designed for this new world.”
Interview questions such as “Tell me about yourself” and “What are your strengths and weaknesses?” are no longer enough.
Traditional employment interviews focus on resumes, credentials and the kind of presentation a candidate makes in the moment. For some, these factors are less important than whether the desired attitude for a specific position has played a central or visible role in a candidate’s career path and achievements to date.
“I think this is a primary mistake HR professionals make in talent acquisition,” said Joseph Bohling, senior vice president and chief human resources officer for Aflac Inc. “They see the resume of a rising star and subconsciously commit before conducting the due diligence to find out if the attitude of the candidate matches a willingness to immerse him or herself into the company culture.”
This immersion is what Southwest pioneered with its “brown shorts” approach, where potential employees were asked to don the airline’s trademark brown shorts to assess whether their attitudes were a good match for the company’s culture. By evaluating candidate responses, Southwest got a clear indication of attitudinal fit in a much different way than, say: If you could be any of the Seven Dwarfs, which would you be?
“I need to see evidence of those attitudinal characteristics — of those brown shorts, whatever they are — all the way through,” Murphy said.
--talentmanagement
One can learn a lot of Southwest! Thank You!
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