Using strengths

How do we select people that work for us? Do we use the strengths of the people working for us? Or do we try and fit them into boxes that don't really fit in?

I'm going to use some sporting examples to illustrate my point. One is a player called Vampeta, a Brazilian player that played for PSV, my favourite club, for a while and sucked. He also failed at Inter Milan and PSG. He later made it to the Brazilian national team, the strongest in the world, winning the world cup in 2002. Why? PSV and many others thought he was a Right Wing back, turned out his qualities were best used as a defensive midfielder.

Another example is Hedwiges Maduro. A Dutchman who was in the Dutch youth team that won the European Championship. Despite the fact he had a decent career, he never did live up to his potential. Why? As his former coach Foppe de Haan put it, he's just a little too slow to play as a defensive midfielder. So you need to put someone with more speed next to him to compensate that. With a fast player next to him, he can focus on his strengths.

Job crafting

Basically, we need to craft jobs to the strengths of people, and make sure they don't have to use their weaknesses all the time. To give a person example. My last job on a payroll I had to write copy for newsletters and messages for events I was organising. I'm a pretty good writer, but I am terrible at spelling. I was lucky enough that someone in my team was great at spelling and didn't mind editing all the copy. She once said to me:

your copy takes twice as long to edit than your predecessors, but we do have double the attendees at our events. The quality is much higher, but the spelling is terrible.

We need to start using the strengths of people in stead of developing a job and seeing who fits in best. We need to stop putting round blocks in oval shapes holes.

Diversity of thought and character

In order to do this in a natural way we need to start selecting based on diversity. Diversity of character. At one of my jobs a few years ago we did some assessments and one of them was a micro expression that showed preferred tasks and styles.

Turned out the entire HR department, except for three people, had the exact same basic orientation. I was one of the three people that was different mentally. I was considered to be really fast. But only in the things I was good at. As far as I could see my colleagues were really fast, at the things I was terrible at. But since they all had the same basic character, they all loved that part of the work and they were all good at it. So nobody considered themselves to be really good. They were all at the same level. Because they all were also really terrible at the same tasks, those tasks tended to be done poorly and with a lot of resentment. Leading to burn out and failing projects.

A lack of diversity is the main reason we have people do work they resent and are bad at. A divers department can job craft much easier, using people's strengths and compensating for weaknesses. Good assessment tooling, that needs to be used before hiring (or even interview) decisions have been made is essential for a neuro divers population.

Bas van de Haterd is a professional snoop in the world of recruitment and HR technology. He's tested over 25 different forms of new, modern assessment tooling and is willing to test any that will let him. He's also been researching the Digital candidate experience in the Netherlands for over 12 years.

He organises two events per year. Ta-Live (English) andDigitaal-Werven (Dutch)