By John Dowling, Guest Blogger — LearningWithoutScars.com
Guest writer John Dowling writes on the conundrum we face when considering whether to hire or not to hire as he weighs what matters more: skill or attitude.
Herb Kelleher and Simon Sinek have been quoted saying, “You don’t hire for skills; you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills.” I believe most of us would agree with the above statement. At least in theory, if you are a hiring manager, most of you would like to say that you always hire for attitude and not just skills. The statement sounds great, but is it true in reality? Some jobs require some skills: heavy equipment technician, accountant, and engineer. There are such things as skilled labor, skilled jobs, or skilled trades. We would all agree that a candidate must have certain skills to succeed in a position.
What about experience? We talked about skills and attitude, but what about experience? How does experience weigh in on your decision to hire a candidate? We would all agree there’s a difference between a journeyman technician with 20-plus years of experience and a technician who just graduated from college. I need to get to the point: what should we look for in the candidate in the hiring process? And how important are skills, attitude, or experience? To keep things simple, at least for this blog’s sake, we could include experience under skills. Moving forward, we can discuss how important skills and attitudes are in the hiring process.
As mentioned, many of us would say we do or strive to hire for attitude. If we’re honest, most of us probably hire for skill over attitude. Why would we go against a principle, that is, to hire for attitude over skill, something that we believe to be true?
