Should you hire for attitude or experience? Research shows 89% of bad hires fail on attitude, not skills. Anderson Chong on hiring the right people for your SME.
Every small business owner has done it at least once. You hire the impressive CV. Years of experience, all the right boxes ticked. And within a few months you're wondering how someone so qualified could be so wrong for your business. They can do the job. They're just poison to be around while they do it.
That's the trap. We hire for the résumé and get surprised by the person.
Attitude, almost every time. Hire for attitude. You can't train personality. You can teach someone your systems, your products, your way of quoting a job. You cannot teach someone to care, to show up, to be honest, or to treat your customers and your team well. They either bring that to the door or they don't.
Experience is a head start, not a guarantee. A skilled person with a rotten attitude will cost you more than an eager one who needs training. The skilled one poisons the people around them while the eager one lifts them.
This isn't just my opinion from twenty years of hiring. Research from Leadership IQ, tracking thousands of new hires, found that 46% failed within eighteen months. And 89% of those failures came down to attitude, not technical skill. Coachability, temperament, emotional fit. Not whether they could do the work.
Read that again. Nearly nine in ten hiring failures had nothing to do with skill. We obsess over the part of the CV that almost never causes the problem, and barely test for the part that almost always does.
You can't spot attitude by scanning a résumé. You have to interview for it deliberately.
Stop asking what they did and start asking how they think. Ask about a time they got something badly wrong, and listen for whether they own it or blame everyone around them. Ask what they'd do for a difficult customer. Ask why they left the last place, and listen to how they talk about the people there. Attitude leaks out in how someone tells their own story.
And trust the signals. Most hiring managers admit they saw warning signs during the process and hired anyway. They talked themselves past it because the skills looked good. Don't. The thing that nags at you in the interview is the thing that becomes a problem in month three.
Hiring for attitude is half of it. The other half is making sure even the right person is in the right seat. A great attitude in the wrong role still fails. They're frustrated, you're frustrated, and it looks like a bad hire when it's really a bad fit.
Right people in the right seats. Get the attitude right at the door, then put that person where their strengths actually land. That's how you build a team you can eventually trust to run the place without you standing over it.
One last thing, because it's the flip side of all this. If hiring for attitude is the rule, then keeping someone with a bad attitude is breaking your own rule every single day. We'll deal with that in another post. But if a name came to mind just now, you already know.
Attitude, in most cases. You can teach skills. You can't teach character, work ethic or honesty. Research shows 89% of hiring failures come down to attitude, not technical ability, so weight your hiring decision accordingly, while still making sure the person can be trained for the role.
Ask how someone thinks, not just what they've done. Probe a time they got something wrong (do they own it?), how they'd handle a difficult customer, and why they left previous roles. Listen to how they speak about former colleagues. Attitude leaks out in the storytelling.
Hiring the CV instead of the person, hiring whoever's available rather than who's right, setting unclear expectations, and ignoring the warning signs you noticed during the interview. Most owners admit they saw the red flags and hired anyway.
When the work is consistently more than your current team can handle, when you can clearly define the role and what success looks like, and when the business can sustain the wage from profit, not just a good month. Hire for a defined seat, not just to relieve pressure.
Anderson Chong, Founder of iQuest Consulting and Business by Design.
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