The 10 Smartest Things To Look For In Every New Hire

If you’re hiring a new member of your team, congratulations. You have a business that is thriving enough to need more hands. But be prepared, as the shortage of highly skilled workers means finding and retaining quality, creative employees, which can be pretty tough.

According to a 2017 Creative Group study:

• 41% of surveyed advertising and marketing executives say it’s challenging to find creative talent today.

• 52% of advertising and marketing executives say they are concerned about retaining their current creative staff in the next 12 months.

For any company, especially companies that do creative work, the people you hire are your most important asset. So how do you hire the right ones (and avoid the wrong ones)?

It can be easy to become overly focused on things like previous employers, degrees and awards — the stuff that may pique a hiring manager’s interest during the applicant-screening process. But in my decade of experience hiring people for our creative agency, I’ve learned that the key to hiring the right people is starting with a clear understanding of the attributes you want in a new hire: the values, characteristics, personality traits and beliefs that will make them an active agent, not a passive employee.

When you hire someone, you aren’t just adding a body. You are introducing a new element to your culture, your work and your skillset. They will become a conduit for your company’s vision and values, and they will influence — and be influenced by — the people around them, for better or worse. That’s why finding people with the right foundation is everything.

After hiring many roles, both successfully and poorly, I’ve distilled the 10 traits that I think are most important for a new hire — beyond their resume.

1. Hunger: Experience is important and necessary for most roles you hire for. However, you don’t want people who have already accomplished everything and are just looking to coast. The best people want to grow, no matter where they are.

2. Humility: Accomplishments are impressive, but they become less so if someone constantly brags about them. You want to hire team players who want everyone to get the glory (and don’t leave passive-aggressive notes in the kitchen about how the dirty dishes in the sink inconvenienced them). Also, look for people who understand the difference between humility and false humility. To quote C.S. Lewis, real humility is someone who “will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.”

3. Intelligence (Intellectual And Emotional): Book smarts are good. Street smarts are better. Both are ideal. The best employees have not only the technical ability but also the intuition and common sense to get things done — without oversight — under what are sometimes very stressful circumstances.

4. Self-Awareness: Self-awareness is vital when interacting with other people, whether it’s clients, coworkers or colleagues. Understanding your actions and how they are interpreted and make others feel, is often the difference between being someone who is a pleasure or a pain to work with. The good news is this trait is pretty easy to assess in an interview.

5. Curiosity: An unknown source once said, “Knowledge is having the right answer. Intelligence is asking the right question.” To grow, improve and work more efficiently, you need people who are interested in challenging old paradigms, testing, experimenting and learning. That all comes down to interest and curiosity. Great hires will proactively ask questions and seek out information to make the right decisions or suggest new ideas.

6. Scrappiness: Our company was a bootstrapped startup founded by three broke 20-something guys, so scrappiness is built into our DNA. But it’s an employee trait that benefits any organization. You want people who can get stuff done when things aren’t easy, who can always find a way and who don’t need you to hold their hand.

7. Resilience: Failure and frustrations are inevitable in creative work — even on a daily or weekly basis. People who have defied odds, made interesting career switches or taught themselves new things already come equipped with demonstrated resilience. When you go through a rough patch, as every company does, you’ll be grateful that you have people who are willing and able to weather a storm or two instead of jumping ship at the first sign of difficulty.

8. Flexibility: People who are willing to embrace change, who can dig in and help others out — even when a task isn’t technically in their job description — are the secret to helping a company evolve. At our company, we have many people who’ve held several different positions, some of which span across multiple departments, in just a few years. Their flexibility and knowledge benefits each new team and makes us stronger as a whole.

9. Kindness: No one wants to work with an unpleasant person — even if that person is highly capable. Note, however, that being kind is different from being nice. According to Merriam-Webster, “nice” is defined as: “1. pleasant; agreeable; satisfactory. 2. fine or subtle. 3. fastidious; scrupulous.” The same source defines “kind” as: “having or showing a friendly, generous, and considerate nature. Affectionate; loving.” Being nice is fine; being kind is absolutely necessary.

10. Passion For What We Do: A truly successful company, no matter the size, is full of people who are invested in the cause, vision and values. Even if you’re a small operation without the same financial resources as your competitors, the only way to build a healthy, happy organization is to hire passionate people who share your vision.

To quote Shafqat Islam, the CEO of NewsCred, in the company’s public culture document, under the “People” section, he writes: “This is the only thing that matters — we can screw up in everything else, but if we hire the best people, things will work out. A great team with a bad idea can still execute and make it work. A bad team with a great idea will fail every time.”

 

Read the original article.

Source:
Ritchie J. (6 December 2017). “The 10 Smartest Things To Look For In Every New Hire” [Web blog post]. Retrieved from address https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/12/06/the-10-smartest-things-to-look-for-in-every-new-hire/#30d66c776704

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