Recruitment

Would you like to massively improve your recruitment success?

 In this series of articles, Gill Best, Language and Behaviour Consultant will give you language tools that will enable you to prepare more effective person specifications, write job adverts that only attract the right people and improve or transform your interview technique.

  Article 1 - Towards or Away From

 Is the job you are recruiting for about achieving goals or solving problems?

 For people to be really motivated at work, and by motivation we mean the thing that makes someone do the job for the love of doing it  rather than just for a pay cheque, it is vital to match a person’s key motivational traits with what the job requires.  But surely, I hear you shout, we are flexible adaptable human beings and we can do a myriad of things as long as we have the skills to do it?  Well, yes and no.  Skills, competencies,  or whatever you like to call them, will certainly make someone improve their performance to the point of “competency” but they will never make someone shine or stand–out unless that skill matches their innate motivational traits.  In essence, skills and competency working to support inherent motivation will lead to excellence.  So, if you want someone to look forward to coming to work in the morning, to do the best job they can, who seems to love their job and is constantly keen to improve and put in that extra effort, you need to get that match between their motivation traits and your job; skills can be taught. 

As I mentioned in my last article there are 14 key motivational and working traits that make the difference between someone being excellent and just okay at a particular job; the one we are looking at today is what we call “towards or away”.

Does your job require someone to come in and fire-fight, problem-solve or improve what already exists?  Or, does the job require someone to create and develop something new from scratch?  For example are you looking for someone to create and develop new business, new products, and new ideas, meet targets, achieve goals, or, do they need to solve clients’ problems, figure out how to make something work, be responsive to customer demands, find a route through that minimises losses?

These two jobs require very different types of motivation.  A person who is “towards”, who is highly motivated to develop new business, create something from scratch, often does not see problems; they are so focussed on the goal they do not anticipate problems and to be quite frank are not interested in them.  They consider anyone who suggests a potential problem as being negative, as getting in their way, trying to hold them back.  They are great at move a company forward and they tend to be good at managing priorities.  Unfortunately, because they refuse to see and problems they are always surprised when things don’t work out.

People who are motivated in this way are likely to talk about achieving, getting, gaining, having, attaining,

 Conversely, someone who is “away from” is great at anticipating problems.  Their motivation is triggered when there is a problem to be solved, when something needs fixing.  If a problem arises, they will drop everything to deal with it and therefore may find it difficult to focus on goals.  .  They tend to be motivated by the pressure of deadlines.  Away from people are great trouble-shooters and can pinpoint possible obstacles during the planning stage of a project.  They are also great at responding to customer’s problems.

You will hear them talking about:  “avoiding, steering clear of, not having, get rid of, exclude, away from.”

So when thinking about the job you are recruiting for, is it a mainly toward job or mainly away from?  Use the language appropriate to the job and during interview, ask about a project they did really well.  Do they talk about developing, achieving, getting and gaining?  Or do they talk about preventing, avoiding, fixing, problem solving?

What happens if you need someone who can do some on both?  Write you job description using the appropriate language for the aspects that require “towards” and the appropriate language for “away” and listen to how they respond to your questions?  People can, and often are, a mixture of both towards and away from.  The skill comes to recognising that and making sure you don’t get some one who is extreme, but who is motivated in the same proportions as the job.

Article 2:  Do you need someone who is responsive to external feedback or someone who can judge for themselves if they are doing a good job.