Recruiting / 46 percent of skilled hired fail within 18 months because of attitude

Mark Murphy, the chief executive officer of Leadership IQ, a leadership training and management consulting firm, has some sobering news for small businesses and startup companies that are getting ready to bring new hires on board in 2012: Nearly half of them are going to fail before hitting their second anniversary and most of the time it isn’t because they don’t have the right skills — it’s because they don’t have the right attitude. (Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor)

In his new book “Hiring for Attitude” (McGraw-Hill, 2011), based on three years of research on 20,000 new employees, Murphy details a new approach for choosing high performers with the right attitude to thrive in your company’s culture. He recently shared some of his key concepts with BusinessNewsDaily.

BusinessNewsDaily: What’s wrong with the way most companies hire people?

Mark Murphy: When most managers talk about hiring the “right people,” they mean ‘”highly skilled people” who can do the tasks of the job. But when our research tracked 20,000 new hires, 46 percent of them failed within 18 months, and 89 percent of the time it was for attitudinal reasons and not skills.   It’s not that skills aren’t important, but when the top predictor of a new hire’s success or failure is dependent on attitude, then attitude is clearly what we need to be hiring for.   By fail, we mean these folks got fired, received poor performance reviews, or were written up.  The attitudinal deficits that doomed these failed hires included a lack of coachability, low levels of emotional intelligence, motivation and temperament.

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via Small Businesses Should Hire for Attitude | There isn’t a skills shortage—it’s an attitude shortage that’s hurting companies | BusinessNewsDaily.com.