The all trumping skill – learnability

“The what”

When it comes to senior, managerial and innovation roles, most recruiters and most people hiring new staff into an organisation still seem to focus on the usual things – relevant experience and achievements.

The problem is – if you hire a heavy hitter who has done everything the role entails and then some, most likely this person will have very little motivation to do the job.

They will have capped out their career growth and will struggle to learn anything new at your company, bar a few tweaks.

Resist the urge to hire “the perfect guy/girl” who knows everything there is to know about the job and who could “do it with his eyes closed”.

The perfect candidate, the “A-player” is actually somebody who has 1) huge passion and drive for what your company is doing and 2) can show that they’re great at learning new skills, technology and markets.

The first should be easy to check and if they tweet about it, post on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and other social networks for the past few months at least – they clearly are genuinely passionate about it.

The second is harder to check but boils down to examples of direction shifts in the person’s life and diversity of their career and success’ in the various roles.

For example, if a candidate has worked in banking, real estate and aerospace and stayed for at least a year or two in each and has some tangible delivered results – it’s a very strong indicator of good learnability.

If the candidate can also provide examples of various new skills learned on the job, such as new languages (e.g. switching from MS .NET to Scala on Linux), new specialist software packages such as accounting packages, CAD programs (Autocad, Solid Works Catia, etc) – this is another big plus point, further confirming their learnability.

The opposite of this would be somebody who has been in the same industry from the start, even if progressing in their career. This could potentially (but not absolutely) indicate that the person is not keen on going outside of their comfort zone, learning new skills, looking to grow themselves as a person.

It all depends on the role you’re hiring for, of course.

If you need an office manager or a book keeper for the accounting department, you may not need to find a super star as the work is repetitive and just needs doing.

I do, however think that it pays to hire super stars everywhere. They will make every task, job and project better before they move on and up. The company will always benefit significantly more from their input, even though they may not stay in the same position for more than 6-12 months.

Look out for rising stars, hungry learners and people who ask a lot of questions – all those are strong indicators of a great hire.

There are of course many other aspects to consider, such as self discipline, time management, ability to communicate, accountability, responsibility and others.

But they are mostly common sense traits of most descent and reasonable employees and human beings.

There are also exceptional circumstances when you might want to hire undisciplined geniuses or people with strong personality disorders such as Asperger – to tap into their genius.

There are some very interesting portraits of extreme A-player type geniuses in the recent film “The Big Short”, a very worthwhile watch.

“The why”

Why is it important to hire people with a very high degree of learnability?

The reason is that most projects, and even simple tasks can be optimised, made better – at the very least – and in some cases will require a paradigm shift and a completely new approach.

If you hire people who just stick to what they know, they will get the job done – just. No more, no less. Worst case they won’t.

Whether they get the job done or not and the level of innovation it will bring about will have direct net impact on the company overall.

The outcome may have a small bottom line influence or it may be the make or break in a competitive head to head out in the market.

If you apply this approach to all employees, all these little under or over deliveries will have a large effect in the end.

Look after the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves, as they say.

As for the senior roles and key stakeholders, it will often come down to being able to deliver a complex project at all – or not, ultimately resulting in the company’s major success. Or major failure.