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. Prioritizing skills over attributes ensures you can hire team members with the right abilities to thrive in a specific role.
However, while more than 80% of employers say they take a skills-based approach to hiring, focusing on skills alone may not be a good idea.
The 70-20-10 model has proven that only 10% of learning comes from formal or traditional schooling, while 70% happens in the flow of work (experiential learning) and 20% through interactions with others (social learning). Employers focusing on skills alone may be backsliding as many employers feel that college graduates “feel” less risky..
But you will have to adapt as the skills IT team members need are constantly changing. 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.
The Current Job Market Landscape: Hiring Challenges
The IT job market has changed significantly in recent years. The competition for top talent is increasing in an environment where every company faces significant skill shortages.
Worldwide, 75+% of companies struggle to find skilled workers today. Losses by 2030 mean more than 85 million jobs could go unfilled because there aren’t enough skilled people to take them resulting in about $8.5 trillion in unrealized annual revenues.
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. Resumes offer a stunted insight into a candidate’s potential, focusing solely on their achievements.
A more comprehensive approach to analyzing 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.
The Case for Skills-Based Hiring
Skills-based hiring, which involves prioritizing candidates based on their abilities, does have value. Deloitte research found that companies that take a skills-based approach to hiring are 63% more likely to achieve the results they need from their teams.
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.
This can reduce the risk of unconscious bias in hiring and lead to benefits like:
- 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 organization a competitive advantage in the IT industry.
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.
Even during high-profile tech sector layoffs in 2023, a Deloitte survey found that nearly 90% of tech industry leaders said that recruiting and retaining tech talent remained either a moderate or major issue, with challenges related to the tech workforce outpacing challenges related to fostering innovation, driving productivity, and integrating new technology
However, there’s a risk to focusing on skills alone, particularly when 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.
The Benefits of Prioritizing Attitude and Potential
Skills are undoubtedly important in any role, but they can’t accurately predict a person’s chances of success in your organization 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.
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.
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.
Balancing Skills and Attitude: The Hybrid Hiring Approach
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 prioritizing 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.
- Minimize unconscious bias in your hiring decisions, such as using structured and standardized interview questions and blind resume screening.
- Focus on great time management or communication skills.
- Emphasize a need for growth mindset
- Commitment to continuous learning.
- 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, behavioral 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.
Commit to Continuous Development
Finally, ensure you have a strategy for continuously developing your new IT team members:
- Set clear goals: Having clear goals is an important part of IT management.
- Encourage teamwork: Teamwork can boost productivity and make employees feel more engaged.
- Align employee development with organization goals: Consider employee satisfaction and how training and development can help the company achieve its goals.
- Build company culture into onboarding: Help new employees understand the company’s values, mission, and vision.
- Encourage open communication: Open communication can help build trust, foster collaboration, and identify areas for improvement.
- Implement DEI initiatives: Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives can help build a strong team culture.
- Promote collaboration: Emphasize the importance of working together to achieve common goals.
- Onboarding: Start onboarding before the first day, clearly outline expectations, and understand the new hire’s needs.
- Training: Customize training for each employee, embrace experiential learning, and offer on-demand support.