On Hiring – Seth Godin

Expertise vs Attitude

The typical online job site lists millions of jobs. And just about every one of them is a cry for expertise.

From the title to the requirements, companies hire for expertise.

Logic helps us understand that only one out of ten people are in the top 10% when it comes to expertise. And that means that most companies are settling for good enough. If the organization needs people with expertise in the top decile, they’re going to have to pay far more and work far harder to find and retain that sort of skill.

So most companies don’t try. They create jobs that can be done pretty well by people with a typical amount of expertise.

That means that the actual differentiator in just about every job is attitude. From plumbers to carpenters to radiologists to pharmacists, someone with extraordinary soft skills (honesty, commitment, compassion, resilience, enrollment in the journey, empathy, willingness to be coached… the real skills that we actually care about) is going to outperform.

If this is so obviously true, then why don’t organizations hire for attitude and train for expertise?

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Source: Seth Godin

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Communication: Message Or Mess-age?

M in his daily morning walk takes a couple of shots and sends them out to a few of his contacts. 

Received from him a couple of days ago the above taken from a resort in Neral (Maharashtra) he was holidaying in.

A question rose in my mind.

In turn, I forwarded to a few of my contacts adding my question:

“How does one tell sunrise from sunset?”

Just these words along with the snap. Rather laconic admittedly, but certainly unambiguously – at least I thought so.

Folks were just as clueless. It couldn’t be said one way or the other looking at the snap. One of them ventured to say the answer was in the glow though he did not know what, how…It was/is my theory too.

And then there were a couple, achievers in their career, incredulously asking: “WTH? It depends on you’re facing east or west!”

That’s when it struck – the link between the text and the snap above was in my mind and could be entirely missed out by some.

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