“If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you hire an amateur.”
-Anonymous
What Resumes Don’t Show:
You’re hiring. You’ve put the ads out and the resumes are piling up on your desk. The hundred or so applicants have similar education, experience, and they all claim to be the candidate who will “wow” you.
How do you decide? You can compare the courses they’ve taken all you want, but you know there’s an X-factor that their resume simply doesn’t show.
How will they blend with your workplace culture? What will their mood be every morning and will they want to learn something new every night? You’ll probably hire based on their accumulated skills and industry knowledge. Their resume gives you that.
But what attitude will they bring to work everyday? Will they develop habits to continue to mature into their role? Or are they a set of skills that will add nothing to morale and not develop alongside the company?
The 4 Corners of KASH
About the KASH Box
(Credit To Barb McEwen, Master Executive Coach with 20/20 Executive Coaching)
Using KASH is easy. Draw the grid on a full sheet of paper. Plan for a slightly longer interview process, and make point form notes in each corner throughout. It will take time to train our ears to listen for things other than Skills and Knowledge, but as soon as you learn to identify the cues they leave about their Attitude and Habits, you’ll become a more efficient at hiring.
The whole person arrives at work everyday, not just their skills and knowledge. KASH is a tool for evaluating candidates, and employees, beyond their resumes. There are 4 components:
- Knowledge: Everything the person knows from a lifetime of accumulated learning. It’s one of the first things we look at, but tells us absolutely nothing about how that person will perform.
- Skills: How well they perform specific tasks. As employers, we tend to hire based on who fulfills the highest number of necessary skills.
- Attitude: How will they approach their tasks? Will they inspire others or drag them down? This is the hidden second half of Skills. The most important of the 4 Corners, Attitude is also the hardest to quantify from a resume.
- Habits: What does this person do repeatedly and overtime, and will he or she build habits in order to excel at their role. The previous 3 Corners represent a person at a moment in time. Habits is how we gauge how that person will develop over time.
Here’s an example. The job you’re hiring for requires expert level use of Microsoft Excel. The resumes in front of you will show you who has deep Knowledge of Excel and Microsoft Office and who has taken the courses to develop the Skills that your company needs.
What the resume doesn’t tell you, is if they will perform their skills grumbling and gossiping, or if they will jump into it, mentoring others along the way. Skillset is the first step, but Attitude determines the application.
Excel is constantly changing. Will they change with it? Will they develop Habits to be constantly learning and adapting to new software. If you want to switch programs, will they fight tooth and nail or will they adapt with the company?
Why KASH?:
Hiring the wrong person is a massive waste of time and talent. Even if we don’t quantify the loss of morale and enthusiasm a failed hire brings, the average training costs of replacing someone are sobering:
- 16% of annual salary to replace a high turnover, low paying job
20% of annual salary for mid-range positions - A whopping 213% of annual salary for highly educated positions. For example, to replace a CEO making upwards of 100K, expect to pay about $213,000 once all the bills are in.
In an ultra-competitive economy, picking the right person is vital. An hour spent brainstorming a KASH box can save your thousands, or tens of thousands, in wasted time and energy.