Human Resources Blog - Spark Hire

Why Personality (And Not Just Experience) Counts When You’re Hiring

When you’re scanning through resume after resume looking for your next great addition to the team, it’s easy to get hung up on a person’s experience level. You focus on how long they were with a particular organization and look at dates carefully. While you certainly want an experienced person on your team, it’s important that you don’t minimize the importance of a potential hire’s personality when they’re going through the interview process.

Ultimately, an employee’s personality can make or break whether they blend well with the rest of your staff members. It’s easy enough to teach someone how to use a computer program or follow company protocol with regard to clients, but you can’t train someone to be enthusiastic, responsible, and deadline driven. Because of this, it may be time to shift your hiring efforts from focusing solely on experience to looking a little more deeply into what a person is really like.

If you hire someone who’s a bad fit for the company, you may quickly find that they start dragging other employees down. If they’re negative, petty, or overly competitive, an otherwise pleasant work environment can turn toxic quickly. Though they may know how to do paperwork properly or create a killer presentation, if they have no people skills, they end up representing the company negatively. Ultimately, this will end up hurting your bottom line. While you certainly want to find someone with the proper training, don’t get so hung up on how many years they’ve spent in the field. It’s better to hire someone who wants to learn than it is to choose someone who has all of the experience necessary but couldn’t care less about the company.

Unfortunately, when companies are getting ready to bring on a large number of new employees at once, they often ditch looking at personality in favor of quickly scanning a person’s experience. This ends up making company culture unpleasant, and can do real damage to a business as time goes on. Each employee’s personality plays a part in the overall feeling within the company, so just one or two negative people can cause the entire office to become tense and unhappy.

To ensure that your office remains a pleasant place to work each day, focus on a person’s experience and knowledge, but also consider how their personality will blend in with your more veteran employees. Will they become a positive force who inspires others, or will they slowly eat away at the energy within your business?

How much does personality factor in when you’re doing your hiring? Let us know in the comments!

Lauren Levine

Lauren Levine is a copywriter/blogger who contributes to a number of magazines and websites including The Frisky, USA Today, and others. She also authors her own blog called Life with Lauren. She loves cooking, anything on the E! network, and is trying to convince herself that running isn't so bad.