Most businesses won’t tolerate a bad hire for too long, but hiring the wrong candidate can still be damaging. That is why so many businesses look for an experienced staffing agency to help them out. Professional recruiters can help businesses source better candidates, especially for specialized or technical roles.
However, even if you retain very few aspects of the hiring function, the final hiring decision will likely be yours; and for most people, that means assessing candidates based on their experience and attitude. But which of these is a more accurate indicator that you have hired a great candidate? Read on to find out more.
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Should Hiring Decisions Focus More on Experience or Attitude?
There is a very low margin for error in the hiring world today. Businesses need to fill open positions as soon as possible. They also need to fill them with the right people. A bad hire makes a difficult situation even worse. A bad hire can add to your employee turnover costs, hiring spend, and workforce management efforts. On the other hand, a good hire can quickly integrate into their new workplace, and they add value to their role, instead of doing the bare minimum.
All businesses create talent acquisition strategies built around hiring a good candidate. And most give a lot of weight to two particular attributes: attitude and experience. Which one is a better indicator of making a successful hire? Check out the information below for a better idea:
Hiring Based on Experience
A candidate’s experience has conventionally been a very important factor in any hiring decision. The conventional school of thought holds that a candidate’s experience is an accurate indication of competence. Of course, this is true in certain cases. Certain fields and specialties, especially technical or scientific roles, always require relevant experience.
This often involves examining a candidate’s academic experience and credentials. Requiring the right diplomas or degrees is an effective way to screen irrelevant candidates. However, the overall experience assessment can include many other aspects. Recruiters may look at the candidate’s work history. For instance, they could show interest in where the candidate has worked previously as well as the candidate’s accumulated years of experience. In the absence of performance appraisals for a new hire, many conventional recruiters believe past experience is the only real indicator of future performance.
Hiring Based on Attitude
Of course, there are many schools of thought when it comes to recruitment. A newer perspective on hiring directly challenges the convention of valuing experience over attitude. Experience is always an important factor to consider. It can help recruiters determine if the candidate has the necessary technical skills and expertise that a role requires. That said, experience alone does not create a good worker.
Workplaces necessarily require an interface between managers, teams, and even subordinates. Experience adds to a worker’s knowledge of productively managing and navigating these interactions, but attitude reflects on how the worker leverages that knowledge. Take mortgage staffing, for example. It involves dealing with a lot of people. You could hire the smartest and most experienced mortgage professional in the business, but he or she won’t be able to accomplish much if they cannot interact well with other mortgage professionals or customers. However, if the worker has a great attitude and brings a positive outlook to their role every day, you are likely to see much better results.
Attitude vs Experience: Who Wins?
Generally, the answer would be neither or both. Professional experience and working attitude are both very important considerations during hiring. Both can offer insight into whether a particular candidate is well suited for a role at your company. It is important to note, however, that neither can be an ironclad indicator. At best, they can help recruiters and hiring managers to form a general approximation of how well the candidate would perform in the role in the future. You can only measure their actual performance with accuracy.
So, it may be best to keep both in consideration, while including the services of an experienced staffing firm to help make stronger and more successful hires. In general, recruiters should look for, among other things, a good balance between attitude and experience in a candidate interviewing for any given role.
