When you’re reviewing resumes for a job vacancy you probably spend most of your time searching for evidence of candidates’ intelligence, education, experience and technical skills – all the things you think people need to succeed in the modern working environment. But, what about grit?
Today, grit is becoming increasingly recognised as one of the biggest contributors to a person’s success. More specifically, speaking at an Indeed Interactive event in Austin last year, psychologist and author, Angela Duckworth, explained that “grit” is a powerful combination of passion and perseverance.
To hire most effectively in an age of non-stop innovation, it’s important to know what makes grit so important and how to identify candidates who have that special combination Duckworth describes.
What is grit?
According to Duckworth, who has studied the science of high achievement extensively, the most successful people have an ability to keep trying regardless of their past failures or challenges. Meanwhile, their passion is what continues to drive them towards bigger goals.
Grit is also closely related to many of the common soft skills recruiters look for, which can determine candidates’ personal attitudes and behaviours and shape how they interact with others. These include resilience, persistence and a strong sense of purpose – all are important skills for mastering creativity, innovation, entrepreneurialism and feeling truly connected to your work.
Progress, positive influence and great ideas come from grit
There’s no doubt grit can set candidate’s apart, even when they exhibit similar levels of training and experience. After all, the grittiest candidate is most likely to think outside the box and explore multiple possibilities or solutions in any situation.
Because people with grit are goal oriented and willing to put in a lot of hard work to reach their full potential, grit is regarded as a major driving force behind the development of great ideas. For example, a person’s creative and innovative output usually correlates to their meticulous attention to detail, sustained effort and a lot of trial and error on the path to success. Think about James Dyson, he may have invented a vacuum cleaner that would generate billions of dollars, but this wasn’t without trying over 5,000 prototypes before he arrived at his most revolutionary model.
In a fast-paced business environment, candidates with grit are also more likely to demonstrate the type of adaptability required for workforces to evolve with changing economic conditions and market demands. By their very nature, gritty candidates will continuously seek to grow within their role by mastering new skills and improving upon existing abilities.
Gritty people also have the unique ability to convert failure into a sense of encouragement to try harder and learn from mistakes; this makes them a highly influential asset within any team as they motivate others to perform at their best and encourage people to consider fresh ways of thinking.
How to find gritty candidates
So, you know what grit looks like and why it’s important, but how do recruiters and hiring managers identify candidates who have it? Technical skills may be easily quantifiable on a resume, but soft skills usually only become apparent by observing behaviours in real-life scenarios.
Here are some ways you can find out about a candidate’s grittiness in action:
- Ask a candidate about their biggest professional failure. Their response could give you insight into their ability to accept responsibility as well as their learnings. In other words, a candidate who aims to deflect responsibility and doesn’t appear to have any key takeaways from their experience should raise a red flag in your mind.
- Make use of the research. Crafting interview questions based on insights from Duckworth’s Grit Scale could shed light onto a candidate’s level of grittiness, such as asking how often their interests change and how the candidate maintains focus and interest working on long-term projects.
With research pointing to grit as a strong predictor of success, there’s every reason to start seeking candidates who demonstrate that winning combination of passion and perseverance. Implementing targeted strategies to unearth how candidates behave and react in different scenarios might demand more time and focus than reviewing technical skills, but it’s likely to be beneficial to your business’ performance in the long run.
Ricky Fritsch is the Managing Director of Indeed for Australia, the #1 global search engine for jobs. He oversees Indeed’s strong momentum in the marketplace and finds ways to accelerate their revenue growth.
Fritsch has been in the recruitment industry for 11 years, the last 8 of them being the Senior Director of Sales in the US. His speciality lies in leading businesses at Indeed, most recently the sizable Enterprise Sales Business on the East Coast (US), and building and growing relationships with F1000 companies. One of Fritsch’s biggest achievements is being named Indeed Head of Sales for ANZ.