The 3 Attributes to Look for in Top Talent When you find a candidate where these traits intersect, hire them, even if a position for them doesn't exist yet.
By Andrew Miller •
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One of the things that great companies do is they hire the best people. These successful companies aren't afraid to recruit the best candidates from other organizations or pull talented people from other industries. There are three attributes that are most important to an organization when hiring: attitude, competency and mindset.
Attitude. An employee has a passion for the organization and what it is trying to accomplish and is excited about being a part of the organization.
Competency. An employee has the right skills and capabilities to do his or her job, or has the ability to learn the right skills.
Mindset. An employee understands the value of collaborating with peers and comes to work every day looking for ways to improve the performance of the company and increasing the impact he or she can have.
Related: Want to Avoid a Hiring Crisis? Follow These 4 Steps.
See the visual below of my ACM Model that shows the perfect intersection of those three attributes:
Here are the issues if your candidate doesn't fall into the sweet spot in the center:
1. Good attitude and strong level of competence, but the wrong mindset. The candidate will be focused on his or her own goals and accomplishments and will not be willing to collaborate to improve the performance of the company unless it benefits them personally.
2. Right competency and mindset, but the wrong attitude. The talent will leave because they have no loyalty for the organization or connection to what it is trying to accomplish.
3. Preferred attitude and mindset, but a low level of competency. You will suffer productivity loss. Even though the employee might be a great person and have great energy and passion for the organization, they don't add any value because they don't have, and can't learn, the required skills.
Related: 5 Attributes to Look for in High-Performing Employees
4. The right mix of attitude, competency and mindset. With this mix, you achieve profit maximization. This happens because every employee you hire is adding value to the organization on a consistent basis.
You'll notice that I didn't mention experience, and that is for good reason. When you find a great talent who is passionate about what your organization is doing, experience doesn't matter. Great people can decipher what they need to learn in order to be successful. Twenty five years in the same industry or with the same company is not necessarily a good thing. It's much harder to unlearn what you know then learn what you need to know.
Even if you don't have a specific role in mind, when you find someone who has all three attributes, hire them. Find a role for them. You can create a new role if you need to because they will contribute tremendous value for your organization.
However, if any one of the three attributes is missing, employees will not last very long with your organization. You will be hiring the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Integrate the search for these three attributes into your hiring process and you will attract better people and make better hiring decisions.
If you want to know if your hiring efforts are yielding the right results, ask yourself this question, "Are we the company that people line up to work for or rush out the door to leave?"
