In today’s job market, open positions often draw more skilled applicants than employers have time to consider. However, technical proficiency alone cannot guarantee an employee’s perfect fit with a given organization—a study by Leadership IQ found that 46 percent of new hires fail within the first 18 months.
What causes such a high failure rate and what can clubs do to prevent it? According to Leadership IQ’s study, attitudinal issues were responsible for an overwhelming 89 percent of failed new hires. With the overabundance of competent applicants, employers must carefully screen prospective workers to ensure they are not just technically capable, but also suited to the club culture.
Hiring for soft skills is inherently nebulous, yet there are some key strategies your club can utilize to gauge how a job applicant’s attitude reflects his or her performance potential. To gain the best perspective of an interviewee’s attitude, be sure to:
1. Avoid interview questions that draw canned responses:
Most interviewees will have responses prepared for favorite interview questions such as, “Tell me about your weaknesses.” These responses are often too vague or fabricated to provide useful insight. Instead, pose questions that address specific, real-world challenges your workers face.
2. Keep score: It is important to measure the unique and varied responses of interviewees by a well-defined standard. By creating an answer key for an interview in advance, you can more confidently assess and compare the strengths of different applicants. Test your questions on current high- and low-performing employees in order to best define your rating scale.
3. Pay attention to an interviewee’s wording: How a candidate answers a question can be just as revealing as the answer itself. In analyzing responses from high and low performers, Leadership IQ found significant differences in the language used by the two groups: High performers were 40 percent more likely to describe a past experience with past tense verbs, while low performers prefer to speak in absolutes, with adverbs, and in the future tense. Listen for such clues to see if candidates acknowledge their continuous potential and desire for growth.
4. Make use of referrals and networking: Traditional sources for job candidates don’t typically lend themselves to hiring based on attitude. Fortunately, your club’s current high-performing workers can provide an invaluable resource for finding job applicants with the right disposition. Since these workers possess the attitudinal qualities most valuable to your club, they are often ideal judges of which people in their network would also be an asset to your team.
Source: LeadershipIQ.com, “Hiring for Attitude”