Hire Happy Employees For Best Results

In a post for Forbes, Mark Murphy explains why companies should hire for attitude.

Murphy, author of ‘Hiring for Attitude’ and ‘Hundred Percenters’, goes into why so many new hires fail in the first 18 months of taking a job.

“When new hires failed, 89% of the time it was for attitudinal reasons and only 11% of the time for a lack of skill,” he writes.

Murphy says the attitudinal deficits that doomed these failed hires included a lack of coachability, low levels of emotional intelligence, motivation and temperament.

Murphy also said that most companies don’t assess attitude; whether a candidate is motivated to learn new skills, think innovatively, cope with failure, assimilate feedback and coaching, collaborate with teammates, and so forth.

“Technical proficiency, once a guarantee of lifetime employment, is a commodity in today’s job market,” he writes. “Attitude is what today’s companies are hiring for. And not just any attitude; companies want attitudes that perfectly match their unique culture.”

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He says smarter companies are finding their best people through employee referrals and networking.

“They have started to realize that the high performers they already have fit the attitude they want and that these are the people they should be asking to help find more people just like them,” he writes.

That said, Murphy adds, it seems like candidates should be networking in every way possible—including social networking.

“Job seekers need to ask themselves ‘how can I add value to this person’ and then go from there,” he writes.

For more on future hiring practices, read Murphy’s full post here.