What do you recruit? This is a question that tends to crop up time and again at various interactions. The question actually tends to verify my recruiting attitude. Do I recruit attitude or skill? I must confess that this question had set me thinking and I found that I had indeed struggled with this question for a long time as I presume do many others.

When a vacancy happens and the ad to fill that space goes out, our mailbox fills up with CVs written with various degrees of appropriate pitch about the respective candidates’ skill sets. Everybody goes all out proving why she or he is the most suitable candidate for the job. Invariably, the applications are all about their competence.

For a recruiter, however, the challenge is to lay out, from his of her point of view, the constituting elements of competence. In order to do that most of us scale the CVs on skill and experience. Suitability boils down to choosing the one who ranks the highest on that scale.

In doing so, do we open ourselves to a very high degree of disappointment later? If we look back and see how many times we have been disappointed with our recruitment choices, we would realise the faults in such a process. Despite our reluctance to accept our own gaps in the attitude toward recruitment, we must admit that a disproportionately higher weight is placed on skill over attitude.

What does it lead to? When skill is the only criterion in any process of recruitment, it tends to relegate the team to the backburner and creates the possibility of killing the team itself. Let us ponder about it a bit.

When someone joins a team, he is not only assumed to have the requisite skillsets to take up the job – that’s what we have already checked through an elaborate process of recruitment tests. But on joining if it’s found that while he is a greatly skilled one, yet finds it extremely difficult to gel with the team, what do you think will happen to productivity? It doesn’t require a great deal of understanding to guess that the teamwork would suffer.

Furthermore, in the fast changing nature of today’s business, skills need constant upgradation or can be trained. Training attitude to a candidate who is lacking seems a more uphill task.

So if asked the question, what is it that I recruit, my clear answer is, “why attitude of course. That’s the top most criterion.”