Yearly Archives: 2022

hire for work ethic

Hire for Work Ethic and Attitude and Train for Skills

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One good strategy for dealing with the lack of skilled employees is to hire for work ethic and attitude and train for the skills.


Many people would jump at the chance to learn new skills to keep them employable in the future. You can even offer a perk to pay for tuition in a special course to attract them to your firm. Many companies like Amazon and Walmart are doing this as a tactic to lure new recruits. To do this you need to use tools to better understand the learning potential, the behavioral traits, and the motivational interests when it comes to working.


I use the Step One Survey II and the PXT Select, both from Wiley to do this. The Step One Survey gives me feedback on the candidates’ integrity, substance abuse (US only), reliability, and work ethic. These are measured on a scale of 1-9, 9 being the best.

The PXT Select measures a person’s thinking style, behavioral traits and motivational interests. The person’s scores are matched to a performance model specific for each job.


This is where things get interesting as you can match the person to a multitude of performance models and help predict future jobs where the person can excel. That is provided they can learn the skills fast enough for the needs of the organization.


Below is a graph of someone who we recently had go through the PXT Select. The performance model is the shaded area on each scale, and you can see the percentage of fit for the job for each category.


This person was hired for a warehouse worker job. But you can see that his thinking style is above the performance model for the job. This shows he may become bored over time with the routines of the job.

His behavioral match for the job is good but there are some areas where he is outside the performance model. Independence is one and manageability is another. This tells me that he prefers deciding on his own how he should get the job done and would not work well for a controlling style of manager.

The interest section shows that only one of his top three interest areas are inline with the performance model for this job. He is motivated by mechanical or physical type of work where he can use his creative interests to solve technical problems or fix things.


An insightful manager could have him work in the warehouse job and see how he performs and fits with the company. He can use the information from the PXT assessment combined with observation to plot a career path for him and develop a long-time dedicated employee.


This is the power of having the right information to make strategic decisions on who to hire and not just find someone with the skills and experience to do the job now. This example clearly shows that Brett has the capacity to learn new skills quickly and especially those where he can use his creative and technical interests in working with his hands.


What I am describing here is a strategic approach to hiring that can be used anytime and not just when there is a lack of skilled workers available. Want to test run the PXT Select? Request a free trial now.


filling your open jobs

An Effective Approach to Filling Your Open Jobs

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Jobs are hard to fill at the time of this writing and companies are going to extreme measures to hire employees. A trucking company in Oregon was offering a $30,000 signing bonus for truck driver hires. Other companies like Walmart and Amazon were offering to pay college tuition fees for their employees. Not all companies can compete with these types of incentives especially small medium size companies.


Time to shift the hiring approach to focus on training candidates rather than hiring for skills. This is not possible for all jobs of course but it can for those that do not require higher education and years of experience such as engineering and programming.


The fast food has been doing this for years especially McDonalds’ who is famous for providing great training for students that for many was their first job.


Hire for Learning Potential

When screening resumes, we normally look for the knowledge and skills that are required for the job. But when that talent is in short supply look for people that can be trained for the job.


Hire for Attitude and Personality

Attitude towards work and having the right personality traits for the job are always important and even more so when you are hiring people who you plan to train and have them develop the skills for the job.


Hire for Interests

When someone is highly interested in the tasks of the job, they will want to learn what is required so they can perform well.


The above three criteria, learning ability, attitude and personality, and interests are best determined in people using assessments. Along with resume information, references and interviews, assessments provide a more complete and objective view of the person. I use two assessments with my clients. The Step One Survey delves into the candidate’s past and provides a perspective on their work attitude, such as work ethic.


filling your open jobs

The PXT Select assessment measures thinking style, behavioural traits, and work interests. The candidates scores are matched to a performance model specific to the job. This type of psychometric assessment is known as a total person assessment.


As technology continues to transform the workplace through automation that replaces many manual labor and repetitive jobs, companies need to consider hiring people they can train for the job rather than searching for skills that may not even exist. This is like retooling the workforce and because these changes are coming so fast, companies that want to survive and thrive in the future will need to find people that are ready to embrace change and learn the skills that will bring them new employment opportunities.