Personality and the job seeker

There was an interesting snap-shot in today’s issue of USA Today which I read over an under-cooked “All American” Skillet breakfast at the Holiday Inn North of Boston. I guess I shouldn’t complain too much about the breakfast, after all it was complimentary. One of the ironies of travelling; the more you travel, the more points you get to encourage you to travel in your spare time too. Trading-in my allegiance for a complimentary breakfast was a deal I was willing to make on an empty stomach.

Enough about breakfast. The newspaper was reporting a survey conducted by Accountemps. It noted a change in workers attitudes from 2004 through 2009. According to the survey, the perceptions of those elements that are most important to your next job have changed as follows:

Industry knowledge -21%

Technical ability -6%

Certification -4%

Personality +30%

I can assume the people who found employment in the last while have noticed that knowledge of the industry is significantly less important now than it was 5 years ago. Does this make sense? I think it does. Even though we’re in a recession with accompanying layoffs, there is still high demand for people with particular skills. These skills include social media guru, environmental officer, electrical power engineer, etc. Jobs which either didn’t exist or for which there was no demand five-years ago. I often speculate that the jobs that will be in high demand five-years from now haven’t even been invented yet, so the fact that industry experience has dropped considerably is not surprising.

Technical ability dropping 6% is a surprise, but then, the drop was small. I could speculate that the reason technical skills are less important is that many design and manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas.

The requirement for professional accreditation or certification having dropped is also a surprise. Here again the drop is minor. The unfortunate element of this statistic is that many of the re-training programs which are promoted and funded by the Government focus solely on certification. There is a drop-in centre for unemployed knowledge worker that focuses almost exclusively on providing on-line certification programs. The findings presented in the survey suggest those people who spend the period of unemployment focusing exclusively on re-training and re-certification should not make it their sole focus.

I am not surprised the personality elements have increased so much over the past five years. During my unemployment I was the director of the “hire tech | higher tech" (www.2ht.ca) program. This program, which was run entirely by volunteers, was unique in its approach to finding jobs for knowledge workers. One of side-effects of the program is that it forces you to examine your personality. Do you work well with people? Can you hold your side of a conversation? Can you complete a coherent thought on a complex topic? I remember one hiring manager telling me the importance of cultural fit. He said “I can teach a smart person how to program in Java but I can’t un-teach him about being a jerk”.

The increased emphasis on personality is consistent with the accompanying drop in technical skill and industry intelligence. As I mentioned earlier, many of the positions being staffed today didn’t exist a couple years ago so nobody has extensive skill or experience in this field. What would make a difference to a hiring manager looking to staff these positions? How about a positive attitude? Maybe the ability to learn, educate and evangelize. Gone are the days when a guru could spend years in the lab inventing stuff with little interaction with the outside world. Hermits may produce radical technology, but boosting that persona isn’t going to make it in today’s industry.

You can read the full study here (www.accountemps.com/PressRoom?id=2538). What do you think about these results? Is there another message to the unemployed hiding in the data? Please leave a comment, below. You can also tweet me, I’m Tim_Warland.