INNERGISE!

It has just been announced that a new Youth Contract Scheme worth £1bn has been launched with a view to better equip 16 to 24 year olds to compete successfully in the jobs market and ultimately get into work.

It includes over 150,000 wage incentives worth more than £2,000 for each 18-24 year old an employer recruits, 20,000 incentive payments of  apprenticeships and a further 250,000 work experience placements.

Whilst there will be a key component of the training swayed towards the “how –to” of a role, the focus on live, on-the-job training will also naturally drive the attitudinal skills of participants which in many cases are more important and more valuable to an employer, a concept that was proven to me again just recently.

This week, I facilitated a two day induction training programme for a group of young, green apprentices who were looking at taking their first steps towards working as consultants in the recruitment sector.

A few weeks ago, I ran a similar two day induction programme for another Innergy customer, also in the recruitment sector, but this time with a group of employees who were new to the business but had over three to four years experience each in recruitment and sales.

At the end of each of our programmes we write up a comprehensive report about each of the delegates on the training for their managers, outlining their strengths and weaknesses, areas for further development and ideas for their management on how better to manage and get the most out of them.

We also give them an overall score, out of ten, to help us categorise them against a Vitality Curve (see below), and in comparison to the group average.  The red bars represent the bottom 20% out of the group, the blue bars the top 20% and the green being the middle 60%.

Here are the results from each of the two groups, obviously with their names removed:

Group One (Delegates with three years + experience)

Group Two (Apprentices)

As an exercise, I then took my notes and created a new curve but this time blending the two groups together as one. The results we as follows, with the red columns representing the apprentices:

When I then reflect on the results outlined above, it is fascinating to see that the apprentices, with absolutely no experience at all, were demonstrating skills and attributes equal to those of the more experienced delegates and yet they hadn’t even started in the job yet. So why was that? When I went back through my notes, I noticed that the traits of those top 20% performers on the courses, those I deemed to have the most potential based on our assessments or whom were actually the top performers in the case of the more experienced group, were not only identical but were all linked to the delegates’ attitudes more so than the typical “hard” skills. They included:

• Confident communication skills
• Persistence and a commitment to positive outcomes
• Self belief and respect of their products / service
• Customer centricity
• Continuous activity and perpetual networking

When we recruit new employees for our businesses, especially when we are experiencing challenges in finding good quality talent in our sectors, we should be looking well and truly above and beyond the “how-to” skills of candidates and look predominantly towards their attitudes, which in turn we should benchmark, test and review. Attitudes rather than aptitudes are often the common traits of high performers and yet are often one of the last things (if at all) we assess and measure at interview for new recruits. What are the attitudes of success in your business and how are you currently assessing them when you recruit new employees? If you would like some ideas on how to better test attitudes of new recruits, contact james@innergy.co.uk