Attitude: Do You Have What It Takes?

It takes time and hard work to get to the front lines. If you’re new in British Columbia, you have to learn how to get out there and sell your skills as well as you can, it’s a wild job market. More often than not, candidates start promoting themselves with listing credentials, presenting technical skills, and talking about extended work experience in a specific field or industry.

Yet is this what employers are seeking at a first glance? albatros-smWhen asked, interview candidates are not sure. Most of them are just starting fresh in Canada.

Ultimately, it is a different culture and your skills may be evaluated and assessed at a different scale. Employers have confessed: they are assessing your attitude. Do you have the right attitude when approaching this new workplace culture?

It is difficult to guess what’s the right attitude as it depends on every specific situation. This requires any job candidate to run a thorough research and become knowledgeable about the organization they are applying with. Every organization/ company will have different hiring selection methods based on their values and plans for future growth. Some people are just lucky to obtain a successful position by being themselves… if they happen to be at the right interview, with the right organization, at the right time, with the right people. One has to agree that there are way too many variables in the above sentence and in 99% of the real life scenarios this actually comes down to hard work.

Are you trying to better understand what employers are looking at when they talk about attitude? A good read I’m recommending here is Mark Murphy’s book Hiring for Attitude (2011). Murphy has tracked over 20,000 new hires over a period of 3 years and he brings in great examples backed with great statistics: only 11 percent of the new-hires fail in their jobs because of a lack of skills or technical competencies! Murphy’s research shows that if a new hire is wrong for a company this happens most of the times due to attitude. When you get your next job interview, keep in mind that some of the questions will target your attitude, implying, as per Murphy, some of the following:

  1. Coachability (your ability to implement feedback from supervisors, colleagues, customers).
  2. Emotional Intelligence (your ability to understand and manage your own emotions and accurately assess other’s emotions).
  3. Motivation (if you have sufficient drive to achieve your full potential and excel in the job).
  4. Temperament (assessing if your attitude and personality are suited to the particular job and work environment).

An employer will be able to identify if you are a low performer looking at characteristics you may not even consider when you prepare for your interview. Someone with great skills and poor attitude may be as well labeled as a ‘talented terror’ and not as a good candidate. Some other candidate may be assessed as a high-performer or as a low-performer just by looking at their choice of words in their answers or by looking at the pitch of their voice. For example, interview answers of a high performer will contain 60% more first person pronouns (I, me, we), while those of a low performer will contain 90% more third person pronouns (he, she, they). Check out Mark Murphy’s book for a fun ride on learning about the right hiring attitude. While the book is aimed at hiring managers, I found it fascinating for someone who wants to have a better grasp of the hiring and workplace culture in general.

Go get them at that next job interview, good luck!

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