What Employers Are Looking For

February 15, 2012

Interview with Mark Murphy, author of the book Hiring for Attitude: A Revolutionary Approach to Recruiting and Selecting People with Both Tremendous Skills and Superb Attitude [1]

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Mike Carruthers:
In today’s job market employers are not only looking for people with the right skills they’re looking for people with the right attitude.

Mark Murphy:
When people fail on the job, and about 46% of them will, they fail for attitudinal reasons. 89% of people that fail, fail because they just didn’t fit the culture, they weren’t motivated enough.
 

Mark Murphy, author of the book Hiring for Attitude [1]...

And the reason is that when you look at the global labor markets, for example the number of engineers that China and India can produce, it turns out  there’s a lot of skilled people available. And as companies are looking at hiring they’re saying, “Listen, we’ve got the skills what we want to know is take that up another notch and say who’s going to fit into our culture. Yeah you can be a programmer that’s great but can you be our kind of programmer?”

And what does that mean to be our kind of employee?

It means for example if we take 2 companies like Southwest Airlines versus The Ritz Carlton the culture that defines these places are radically different. So at Southwest it’s about their sense of humor it’s about their collegiality – can we get along, can we crack a joke, can we have a little bit fun? Where at the Ritz Carlton a similarly great organization but theirs is not about the sense of humor theirs is ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. If you walk the floors of the Ritz Carlton cracking jokes all day long that’s not going to rise you to the number 1 this is our superstar high performer.
 

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here [2]