Matching the Right People to the Right Jobs

As managers, how many of you have hired someone with the requisite 10 years of experience only to find that this time period represented a series of bad performances repeated 10 times?

How then, do you know which of your candidates has what it takes and which ones are only interview stars? After assessing over three million applicants for more than 25,000 companies, we found that about 70 percent of current employees are not doing the job best suited to their talents and potential.

Looking at people in terms of who they are rather than what they have done becomes a far better way to ensure successful hiring. It’s all about matching the right people to the right jobs. When people are matched to jobs on the basis of their inherent personality attributes and motivations, they are far more likely to succeed than if experience and background are the deciding factors in the hiring decision.

Long term unemployment doesn’t equate to laziness

While many companies are bouncing back from their hiring freezes and unfortunate layoffs, there are still large number of qualified candidates who have found themselves unemployed for extensive periods of time, and are still actively looking to re-enter the workforce.

Our studies at Caliper over the past 50 years indicate that many people who have not been able to secure work due to unemployment possess the personality, skill set, and motivation to succeed in various roles. However, many managers negatively label unemployed people as unmotivated, unskilled, irresponsible, or lazy and exclude them from consideration.  In today’s economy especially, we need to move beyond this thinking.

It’s also bad business. The fact is that many people are not unemployed due to incompetence or poor performance. Companies who found themselves downsizing to stay afloat very well may have let go of high-level employees with experience and potential that would be valuable at any other company.

Skills can be taught—motivation cannot

Gold medalist basketball player Paul Schulte is the epitome of motivation, with his mantra, “Life is too short not to give it your all.” After a terrible car accident, Schulte was confined to a wheelchair. For any other sports enthusiast, this may have been the end of a dream, but for Schulte, it was just the beginning.

Four years after his accident, some friends tried to coax him to play wheelchair basketball. At first, unsure that it would be fulfilling, he resisted. When he eventually checked it out, he thought, “Here’s a challenge. I knew I would lose for a while; but I also knew  I was going to learn a lot and get better.”  Seven years later, he made his debut in the Paralympic Games, where he was the U.S. wheelchair basketball team’s youngest player.

For Paul, self-discipline is his trump card—that, and his determination, persistence and focus.  “Success is focusing on what you have rather than what you don’t have,” he explained. “In my life, there were 10,000 things I could have done before my disability. Now there are only 9,000. You’ve got to focus on your opportunities and let the rest go. The only thing I could change about my situation was my attitude.”

This translates directly to the business world. Determination, motivation, and a desire to succeed cannot be stifled by a physical disability. Bringing someone into your organization who has faced these challenges head-on can bring big rewards to your company if the individual possesses the attitude needed to succeed. Skills can be taught—motivation cannot.

Give welfare recipients the opportunity to break the cycle

When assessing the potential of individuals who are trying to make the transition from welfare to the workplace, you can’t rely on their experience to paint an accurate picture of their potential. Since most people trying to make the transition from welfare to the workplace do not have extensive work experience, they have traditionally found themselves trapped in a revolving door.

But consider for a moment that 55 percent of current sales professionals have absolutely no ability to sell. What’s more, 25 percent have sales ability but are selling the wrong product or service, and only 20 percent are doing precisely the right jobs for themselves and their companies. These employees, invariably, are the ones who make 80 percent of all sales.

Most welfare recipients, for a number of reasons, have not had the opportunity to play to their strengths. In this sense, job matching cuts right through superficial background factors to uncover strengths that have been buried under the debris of discrimination and the welfare cycle. Once uncovered, training could be specifically applied to maximize those strengths and relate them to the functional requirements of the job.

Most people want the opportunity to get off welfare. Those who have that inner drive can turn it into goal orientation in the workplace. By throwing away the “experienced only” model and instead assessing talents and applying training to match those talents to appropriate jobs, we may finally have an opportunity to break the welfare cycle.

The recession that we’ve all experienced may, in a strange way, enlighten management to a different way—a non-traditional way—to look for talent. If companies are willing to think about a new, more creative way to hire, the possibilities are endless. By finding ways to asses the real competencies of an individual, turnover will be reduced and more importantly, the batting average of hiring top performers will be substantially increased.