Smart, Hardworking, And Reliable Is Often Enough

I stumbled upon a really interesting article in USA Today recently that got me thinking about employment in the modern age.  The article detailed how many companies are snapping up talented folks even when they don’t have positions available for them.  It got me thinking about how we hire at my W2 job. 

Around three years ago when I was a senior manager in charge of a lot of people and money, I was careful who I hired to work in my office.  I recall trying to fill a vacancy for an important project in one instance and realizing I wasn’t going to find a person with the exact skills I needed.  My team just wanted a candidate to come in and knock my socks off with ambition.  We wanted someone to show that intangible “thing” that assures you they’ll do what it takes.

We interviewed a few candidates and weren’t impressed at all.  Time was ticking.  Then one day a young analyst came in for an interview.  She had a very good resume, but again I wanted the intangibles. 

It went a bit like this:

Me: “We have this big project that’s going to require a ton of data normalization and quite a lot of coding in Python.  Do you know Python?”

Candidate:  (confidently) “No, I’ve been coding in Ruby and Java.  But I’ll learn it.”

Me:  “Okay.  Even though you’d be new with us your position would likely be leading the project.  Do you think you could learn the skills and lead the project at the same time?  It would demand that.”

Candidate:  (even more confidently)  “Absolutely!  I’ll do what it takes I love to learn and I love to lead.  I guarantee you won’t be disappointed if you hire me, guarantee.”

She had a lot of confidence, but it wasn’t cockiness.  It’s impossible to portray the vibe I got from her in a few lines of remembered conversation, but I was blown away, as were the other 4 people on the interview panel.  We assessed the person, the attitude.  The things that you can’t gleam from a resume. 

You just knew that this was a person who was going to do whatever it takes to succeed.  Sure, that’s a pretty bold character judgement to make in what amounted to a one hour interview.  But we were sold.  We hired her and she became one of my superstar employees. 

And she learned Python with ease.

 

90% Of Success…

I’m realizing more and more that being smart, hardworking, and reliable is often enough to get many jobs.  Even jobs you’re not fully qualified for.  This obviously doesn’t apply to professions like being a doctor or architect.  But I’m talking about general “knowledge jobs”, which these days are mostly engrossed in tech.

On paper the employee in my story above was not really qualified for the specific position.  We were looking for someone with Python skills who had led a project before.  We knew it was a stretch, but why not shoot for the moon. 

In the end we took someone who was smart, hardworking, and reliable.  That won the day.  Sure, she had coding skills and that assured us her background was at least in the same arena that the position demanded.  But the key thing I learned is we often get too hung up on demanding prospective candidates be fully qualified for a job.

Look at the amazing job market we have now.  Right now in America the supply of jobs is more than the workforce can meet.  Yes, there are actually more jobs available than those who are out of work.  Employers are clamoring to bring on people, so you would think they can’t afford to be super selective with laundry lists of software skills or programming languages.  But they often are. 

As a recruiter from that NPR article says:

“We understand that you would love to have that perfect employee, but give me a couple of things a successful candidate would look like for this specific job on this shift.  For instance, do these candidates only need to show up on time, get along with co-workers and be able to lift 35 pounds, or do they need to be able to operate a computer?”

Peter Cappelli, a professor at Pennsylvania’s Wharton School says “They’re just asking for the moon, and not expecting to pay very much for it.  And as a result they [can’t] find those people. Now that [doesn’t] mean there was nobody to do the job; it just [means] that there was nobody at the price they were willing to pay.”

He adds, “Wages have not gone up despite all the talk about a tight labor market. And I think most important for the economy, we still don’t see lots of employers being willing to take people in right out of school and train them for jobs”.

These are really salient points.  In my experience, Capelli is right.  You can’t write a position description with a laundry list of skills and expect to find the unicorn that will match it.  Rare is the job these days in knowledge work that doesn’t require picking up new skills along the way. 

Demanding a candidate check a long list of boxes as a requirement to be hired is likely a prescription for a permanent vacancy.

Get Ahead Of The Curve

Employers in the knowledge world often don’t know what they don’t know.  How do you know you need a certain position or not if the very idea that would create it hasn’t been presented yet?  Steve Jobs said:

It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do. 

Jobs went on to explain that once you give good people autonomy, flexibility, and resources, they’ll run with it and figure it out.  You just need to stay out of their way.  And of course bring good people on in the first place. 

In the same article Warren Buffet advises to look for integrity, intelligence, and energy.  Those sound like precursors to smart, hardworking, and reliable.

Getting back to the original USA Today article, should you hire the person with the impressive resume even though you don’t even have a specific position for him or her?  For companies in knowledge work or fields that demand creative output, it could make sense. 

If you know you’re going to need another data scientist soon but might not have the actual position opened yet, it’s probably wise to bring that superstar on board now.  Who knows what great ideas he or she will incubate as a mere result of integrating and seeing how you do business. 

As mentioned in the article, more and more companies are saying “There’s no immediate opening but we’re going to bring you on anyway, the person helps build their job description.”

So where does this leave you as an employee looking to score a job you’re not necessarily qualified for?  Besides the “givens” of having integrity, intelligence, and energy, from my experience in hiring folks who excelled in positions they weren’t qualified for, here’s a few things:

• Be willing to learn.
• You may have to learn very fast. 
• Be confident but humble. 
• Be curious.
• Don’t be afraid to fail (within reason).
• Just show up everyday, work hard, and do it! 

These things don’t sound very difficult, but when put to the test in real life many people fall short. 

It’s 2019.  You could sit down right now and go down a rabbit hole of free or low cost online training classes on virtually any subject in the world, and not come up for days.  Learning has never been cheaper, easier, or more accessible. 

If you’re an employee, go for that job that you think you might not be qualified for.  You can probably learn what you need to know.  And if you’re hiring right now, don’t expect a unicorn every time, consider a hard working learner.