DC Velocity - January 2016

Art van Bodegraven is, among other roles, chief design officer for the DES Leadership Academy; he can be reached at (614) 893-9414 or avan@columbus.rr.com. His website is www.artvanbodegraven.com.

b as ict ra i n i n g

win-win relationships with the company, its employees, and its customers.

That’s right. Only three things out of the many that might be evaluated. It’s a given that any candidate must be functionally qualified for the position in question. Charm is no substitute for proficiency at the moment of truth.

The company’s hiring criteria focus on elements that are integral to corporate values. One is what it calls a warrior spirit, a desire to excel, to be courageous, to innovate, and to stay at it (persevere).

Another is a servant’s heart, being proactive, treating everyone—even certifiable idiots—with respect, and putting others (colleagues and customers) first. The third is being fun-loving, not taking oneself seriously, showing joy, and acting and doing things with passion.

The core of evaluating these is not, even though they are written and are integral to corporate culture and values, to see if applicants agree with them, but to determine if the candidate is already living them.

BOTTOM LINE

How important are these? Important enough that a job will go unfilled until someone with the right fit appears. And these values are baked into performance appraisals and evaluations for promotion.

This is one industry leader’s approach to acquiring and keeping the best talent. The strategy is paying off for it, and no one in its industry vertical comes close.

It’s an amazingly powerful way of getting people who don’t think they have a job, but do have a calling—one they can be proud of.

So, everyone in transition is not going to find a counterpart employer. But they can stand out from the crowd by demonstrating passion, a servant mentality, a sense of humor (forget the one-liners, though), courage, and a tirelessly innovative spirit.

I’ll submit that our profession is, in fact, a calling. To not treat it as such might mean that “in transition” ought to indicate a career change is in order.

one major factor that very few like to talk about, though it’s as real as things get: fit. That is, does the person’s attitude and work style match the workplace’s prevailing culture?

This is not to say that everyone in a company has to be poured from the same mold. There are such organizations, and although they can prosper for some time, they sooner or later collapse because they contain no internal counterbalances.

It’s important to note that the fit
has to be genuine. Too often, the
ther the company nor the candidate
understands the importance of fit,
the eventual day of reckoning can
get ugly.

But when approached the right way, “fitness” tests can be used to enormous strategic advantage. For instance, one company, which will remain nameless, is in its fifth decade of growth and profitability, and has used tests of fit from Day One to get the right people. Its reasoning is simple and clear: The right people will be happy and make their customers happy. The right people will make the company a winner, day after day, every day.