Change to cultural fit, remove section about weird questions.

Here’s an amazing statistic: out of all new hires, 46 percent fail.

But here’s an even more amazing statistic: of that 46 percent, just 11 percent fail because they don’t have the skills.

A whopping 89 percent fail because of attitude.

The relative success of skills-based hiring is a testimony to how accurately hiring managers and human resources can measure skills. There are a number of tests to assess skill set.

There are not so many to assess attitude.

Skills-based hiring is also successful because it’s easy to pinpoint what skills need to be improved, and then to provide training.

But if you need to improve attitude, what do you do?

How to Improve: Hire for Attitude

One way to improve the dismal 46 percent failure rate is to hire for attitude as well as skills.

But how can you do that? Well, there are two ways.

First, a number of companies having started including crazy, unpredictable questions as part of the interview mix. The reason is to get a sense of the candidate’s attitude.

Google, for example, asks prospective employees how many golf balls fit in a school bus.

People at the Googleplex also set out a thought experiment. The employee is to be shrunk to the height of a nickel, with everything else being proportional. The employee will then be thrown into a glass blender, whose blades will start whirring in a minute. What would the employee do?

The purpose of these questions is to assess attitude. The questions are not designed to be answered accurately. They are designed to see what a candidate does with a question that can’t be answered accurately. Do they go for it and come up with a creative or well-thought-out answer? Or do they say “I can’t possibly do that”?

The latter? Poor attitude.

Second, many companies are identifying employees with great attitudes and asking them to refer friends and people from their network.

The idea is that top attitude performers are likely to know other top attitude performers.

Do you need to assess for skills and attitude? We can help you develop methods and tests. Contact us to discuss your situation today.