More Bad Advice Here on LinkedIn About Hiring Job Applicants

At least once a week here on LinkedIn, I read a post often with thousands of Likes and hundreds of reposts encouraging readers like me to hire people based on their character or their work ethic and NOT based on job applicants’ education, experience, and expertise.

What this means is that hiring managers are being asked to ignore whether or not an applicant has the skills and training to actually do the job.?Instead, they’re encouraged to give people a chance by hiring individuals who don’t meet the minimum day-one job requirements.

I have four main objections to hiring based on work ethic or character or enthusiasm or motivation to succeed or tenacity.?

The first objection involves the idea that it is difficult and potentially it may be impossible to find an objective way to measure traits such as motivation during a job interview.?In other words, the hiring manager doesn’t know the individual is actually highly motivated, but they have an idea or an impression that they’re highly motivated based on what was said in the interview.

My second objection to throwing out minimum job requirements in favor of largely subjective impressions about things like tenacity is more pragmatic. Here's a thought experiment:? What if you have three job applicants and all of them say or describe to you that they are tenacious.??How would you measure that? ?How would you differentiate in an interview setting between them?? Is being more tenacious always better??If one candidate is less tenacious but more enthusiastic, is one more important than the other??How much more important, and why is it more important?

My third objection relates to the job applicants who didn’t tell you about their work ethic or how enthusiastic they are about this position.?Instead, they talked about their accomplishments and experience and education and qualification and fit.?Perhaps these applicants even provided examples demonstrating their subject matter expertise rather than describing their motivation to succeed.?

If you hire based on motivation or some other factor that’s difficult to quantify, here's another thought experiment. Is giving the job to someone else (a) fair to the highly qualified candidates and (b) is that the best hiring decision you can make and if so, why is it the best decision?

My fourth objection is that this is always framed in these posts as an either / or situation.?Either you hire someone fully qualified or your hiring decision should be based on an assessment of some character trait.?The reality is they’re not mutually exclusive.?

You can and you should hire based on qualifications including education, experience, and expertise combined with motivation and work ethic and enthusiasm and character and tenacity.?

It’s not either or, it’s both.?What’s my advice??

1. Hire for both
2. Be wary of strangers, including me, offering advice to you on LinkedIn.