One good strategy for dealing with the lack of skilled employees is to hire for work ethic and attitude and train for the skills.
Many people would jump at the chance to learn new skills to keep them employable in the future. You can even offer a perk to pay for tuition in a special course to attract them to your firm. Many companies like Amazon and Walmart are doing this as a tactic to lure new recruits. To do this you need to use tools to better understand the learning potential, the behavioral traits, and the motivational interests when it comes to working.
I use the Step One Survey II and the PXT Select, both from Wiley to do this. The Step One Survey gives me feedback on the candidates’ integrity, substance abuse (US only), reliability, and work ethic. These are measured on a scale of 1-9, 9 being the best.
The PXT Select measures a person’s thinking style, behavioral traits and motivational interests. The person’s scores are matched to a performance model specific for each job.
This is where things get interesting as you can match the person to a multitude of performance models and help predict future jobs where the person can excel. That is provided they can learn the skills fast enough for the needs of the organization.
Below is a graph of someone who we recently had go through the PXT Select. The performance model is the shaded area on each scale, and you can see the percentage of fit for the job for each category.
This person was hired for a warehouse worker job. But you can see that his thinking style is above the performance model for the job. This shows he may become bored over time with the routines of the job.
His behavioral match for the job is good but there are some areas where he is outside the performance model. Independence is one and manageability is another. This tells me that he prefers deciding on his own how he should get the job done and would not work well for a controlling style of manager.
The interest section shows that only one of his top three interest areas are inline with the performance model for this job. He is motivated by mechanical or physical type of work where he can use his creative interests to solve technical problems or fix things.
An insightful manager could have him work in the warehouse job and see how he performs and fits with the company. He can use the information from the PXT assessment combined with observation to plot a career path for him and develop a long-time dedicated employee.
This is the power of having the right information to make strategic decisions on who to hire and not just find someone with the skills and experience to do the job now. This example clearly shows that Brett has the capacity to learn new skills quickly and especially those where he can use his creative and technical interests in working with his hands.
What I am describing here is a strategic approach to hiring that can be used anytime and not just when there is a lack of skilled workers available. Want to test run the PXT Select? Request a free trial now.