How to Hire for a Job That No-one Has Ever Done
Some of the most innovative minds in the field of technology have little in the way of formal credentials, with pioneers such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs & Mark Zuckerberg having dropped out of university to hone their respective, innovative, disciplines.
However, despite these high-profile anomalies, of course when searching for the best staff, in particular leaders, it is safe to favour a successful track record over raw talent; isn’t it? We see successful and well-run firms like Zappos achieving success by using a non-credential based approach known as ‘hire for attitude and train for skill’
Although education, experience and other credentials are important when assessing new recruits, individuals with the ability to adapt to disruptions and developments alike can truly shine to the top when given the opportunity.
In developing economies catering for wildly different lifestyle requirements than those of even 10 years previous, businesses are having to conquer the unknown: think connected cars, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, so how do you hire based on experience when there is a several lack of it in this digital revolution?
We are all part of a revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we interact with each other, our working environment, companies, brands and governments. Some call it the Fourth Industrial Revolution, some call it Industry 4.0, put simply it represents the combination of cyber-physical systems (CPS), the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Internet of Systems (IoS).
The Changing World of Business
Independent research body Nimbus Ninety have reported that 65% of businesses that took part in their nationwide survey, said their workforces lack the skillsets to implement the cloud solutions, automation and artificial intelligence required to meet customer expectations in this morphing landscape.
This is a worrying and contradictory statistic considering the revelation by tech consultancy firm Infosys that 76% of entrepreneurs believe that AI and other burgeoning technologies will be essential to their business strategy moving forward.
Ultimately skills in response to emergent tech must be prioritised in order for companies increase their efficiency, improve customer focus and continue to compete. However, this means that employers have been left with a task arguably more difficult than developing and marketing the tech itself; identifying and acquiring people to do the job where no-one has done it before.
The rapid pace of change will result in business model disruptions that will have a profound impact on the employment landscape over the coming years leading to a continuous need for new skills and ideas. Business leaders will need to develop agile and innovative environments to stay ahead of the disruption caused by this revolution.
The Staff of the Future
In order to identify the personnel to drive new tech and take it to market, candidates must not only be assessed on competency and experience, as relevant as that can be against the task at hand, but in terms of the suitability of their behavior and personality too; but how?
As forward thinking as the people they are designed to identify, new evaluation tools are emerging to assist companies in doing just that.
Such tools are based on the latest advancements in neuroscience and differ from other psychometric profiling instruments by employing brain mapping methodology which can objectively profile an individual’s innate behavioural traits as well as their personality to ascertain their suitability.
Further to that, these tools also place particular emphasis on a hopeful’s compatibility with their potential employer using criteria like perception and memory to determine a candidate’s long-term success in a given work environment.
As we see the adoption of cloud services and artificial intelligence continue to grow, psychological litmus tests like are likely to become more important in picking out the minds who are able to practically apply developments in tech to the business world in efforts to make our lives easier.
Now more than ever, business leaders need a strong people agenda in place. ‘Focus on the people, not on the technology’. One of the major aspects that organisations have to be conscious of is the threat to people factor due to the rapid technological advances. Many organisations fall into the trap of focusing their attention on putting the correct IT and processes in place, too often neglecting their people and culture. This is why identifying and building the correct behaviours and attitudes across an organisation will drive more successful outcomes.
Take the Test
Most corporations do not have the facility to do this in-house, therefore need to employ an external agent to manage the process for them.
You can talk to us about our profiling instrument PRISM and how we use it in the recruitment process in order to present our clients with the right candidates for the role at hand.
Our globally reaching executive search consultants not only identify candidates on your behalf but will test them for you too to ensure that only the most suitable reach interview stage. Our candidate profiling process can citied as one of the reasons that more than 90% of our placements stay in their roles for over two years and many go on to promotion.
Talk to us today, we have offices in the UK and America conducting worldwide executive searches across a range of sectors.
