The Seven Decisions in Making a Great Hire: Skills

  1. Skills
  2. Talent
  3. Experience
  4. Personality
  5. Knowledge
  6. Personal Goals
  7. Potential for Long-Term Success

The purpose of this series of articles is to enable employers to make better hiring decisions by understanding exactly what decisions are involved in making a great hire.  Coming to the right decision in making a great hire is making the correct decisions on an  applicant’s talent, skills, knowledge, personality, experience, potential, long-term success, and personal goals for the initial job and for the roles to which that job leads.  In other words, do the applicant and the job a match?

In the first two articles in this series, I discussed talent as a combination of aptitude and intelligence.

Skills are the ability to perform task:  typing, juggling, working equations, flying a plane, driving a nail, creating a document.  The more talent (aptitude and, depending on the skill, intelligence) a person has for a particular skill, the more quickly that person will develop that skill and the more effective that person will become at performing that skill.

Some skills may take time to develop.  Operating a light switch is pretty easy skill.  Operating three switches on the same panel, some people never get even in their own home.

A skilled mechanic may know every instrument, dial, nut, and bolt on a race car but not have the skill to drive the race car around the block.  The most talented race car driver exceeds two hundred miles an hour on intuition.  He has a terrific driving aptitude.  Yet despite being told over and over which direction to turn a bolt (lefty loosey righty tighty), the same race car driver may not be able to remove a tire from that same race car.  The driver may have no talent for mechanical skills.

In making a great hire, the hiring company will test a person’s skills.  The job requires that a person type 80 words per minute with allowance for one mistake every 80 words.   The company has the applicant  take a typing test.  A position requires that a person be able to prepare and deliver an executive presentation, the best hiring companies give the person an opportunity to prepare and deliver an executive presentation.

To close this article and position the next article in the series, it is perhaps best to remember that in making a hire, the hiring company is not looking to hire the most talented, skillful, knowledgeable, charismatic, experienced, goal-oriented person who has the greatest potential to actualize talent and the greatest track record for long-time success for each and every job.  Coming to the right decision in making a great hire comes from examining those seven areas and making the correct decision as to whether the applicant fits for the roles to which that job leads.

The next article will cover knowledge.

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