When hiring a recruiting staff, most people will say that they look for a specific skill or experience in a particular industry. That is the easy part; recruiters that do not understand the job will often rely heavily on those specific skills in their selection criteria because they do not know what they should be looking for. What should they be looking at? There should be a focus on a match between the human characteristics of the job and the candidate pool. Proper identification of the true characteristics of the successful employee in the job is the key to finding the best candidate.

Let’s say you are trying to find a candidate for an isolated, boring, and repetitive job, what kind of person do you need? A type A hyper-creative team player who is also highly disciplined and well educated will not be successful in this role. The type of person who would be best suited for this role would be a loyal, predictable, and dependable person that thrives on routine. In this case, a recruiter should not be looking for someone who has a specific skill because most people can be taught, it is the core personality that needs to fit.

To find the best candidate for each job, recruiters need to fully define the characteristics needed to be successful in the role and then select people based on those. There are of course a few general aspects that should be consistent across all roles: maturity, morality, ethics, and judgment. Outside of these key qualities, each job requires a different type of person and by identifying that personality type you can successfully recruit staff that will be suited for their jobs.