Beyond the resume: What qualities (flexibility/accountability) are essential when hiring a new employee?

Ownership is the most important quality for any employee to have, including new hires. There are lots of smart, hard working, good people in the workforce. Very few of them know how to "own" their work whether it be a small task or a larger, strategic initiative. The best way to ascertain ownership capabilities during the interview process is to ask questions about three things:

1. What is the candidate's primary responsibility in their current job? Ask them to strip away all of the extracurricular, perfunctory stuff and focus on the "nut" of the job.

2. What objectives, supported by metrics, does the candidate currently measure success or failure by? You don't want a list of 10 objectives - you want to hear about 1-3.

3. What daily activities does the candidate engage in to achieve those objectives? I often ask this as a veiled question by having the candidate describe a day in the life at their current work.

Hire as many of these owners as you can and really, really good things will happen to your business.

Cultural Fit is very essential.

Execution. There are a ton of people who will take credit for work done by others or who have "owned" or managed projects that they've never contributed to. Making sure someone is results and action-oriented and can actually deliver on what was expected of them is key. Personality traits are important but largely secondary to getting the job done, in my opinion.

The right attitude/personality. Many people can learn a task, but if they do not fit well with their environment, it is a loss. So many times interviewers will be impressed with the candidates education and/or background and are saying to themselves "maybe he'll change, maybe he'll be a better fit than I think he is...". If you are hoping the candidate will change, or that his expertise will be worth the risk, you will most likely regret the decision to hire the person.

All great answers but I want to approach the answers from a different perspective. When you say beyond the resume you are starting with the belief that the resume is a great screening tool. All great resumes are just that great resumes. You are screen based on who can produce the best marketing copy not who will have all of the things list as qualifications in the post above my answer.

I am sure you have learned in real life not to trust most ads, so why would you believe most resumes?. .

Mel, I don't think many (if any), of us believe resumes in their entirety; however, you need to begin somewhere. The resume gives us something with which to begin the process, a tool to vet. Then comes the harder part...interviewing. This is where you will get a much stronger, realistic idea of whether the candidate is the one who will succeed in your environment doing the work you want him/her to do.

I assume you have a list of qualify candidates to consider. Keep in mind that the qualities that make an accountant successful are different from the qualities of a successful sales person. That is a good time to put the resumes aside and ask yourself or the direct supervisor what quality you are looking for in the new employee. What gaps you have in your team (A group of people with a full set of "complementary skills") that you need to fill? Since most good candidates also have good qualities to offer, you should be trying to find exactly what you need to “enhance your team” instead of taking what is available or offered and be vulnerable to a sale pitch. It’s always wise to know your destination before you start traveling.

If you are asking us to choose between flexibility and accountability, I'd say both are equally important. You don't want to hire someone who's open to change but wouldn't own up to the job; or someone who's going strictly by the book without a room for innovation.

Overall, passion is the greatest motivator of them all so I'd go for someone who's passionate about what s/he does.

A resume is a record of history, whether blown up or not...
yet the experience it resonates is simply an echo of repetition.
Traditional employers and recruiters don't understand this,
and this is why they have to develop so many recruiting tools
to verify statistics and stuff. They do not understand
that "not all that glitters is gold" nor do they grasp
that just because one is not from Harvard, he is of a lesser breed
or not because one is from Harvard, he is better than those who are not.
School is just a school, yes they got the training and materials
but there are those who are creative, who are extra-ordinary.

Hire according to elan, learning ability, health and adaptability.

This is @TheGreatLight.

Catherine, I like Scott's immediate response-- ownership, not of the work of others, but of one's own work and responsibility.

Beyond that and even more important to me are a team player and cultural contributor.

The problem here is that very very few understand the dynamics of either of these criteria, and therefore are stumped how to find them.

Really and truly both of these begin long before interviewing starts, with a management team actually defining and creating their culture, and shedding their own delusions about what a team is in order to engineer a true, single entity team.

Once accomplished internally, remember this: With the exception of professional positions (health care, etc.), the mechanics of a position can be taught to most anyone. Attitude and personal conviction, however, must be properly recruited from the start.

Together, let's put the fun back into work!
Belldon Colme
belldoncolme@gmail.com