If your employees care enough about your business and product, you don’t need them to be visionaries.
There’s a fallacy that you have to be incredibly qualified to get a job today. Businesses are buying into it all the time, requiring higher and higher standards of achievement from their employees to do the most basic of tasks.
There are internships now that require previous experience as an essential criteria for any applicants. Unpaid internships that you have to be over qualified for. How crazy is that?
The fact is that the job market has become less and less friendly to raw passion. It doesn’t count for much anymore to be passionate about your work or to care deeply about the products and services you’re working with.
It doesn't count for much to be a person who truly believes in what they do. Because for many companies, all that matters is awards, trophies and grade point averages.
Here’s Why That’s The Wrong Way To Hire.
You don’t need your employees to be incredible applicants. You don’t need them to be the next Steve Jobs who just happened to get his start working at your company. What you need is a group of people who love working for you and love what they do.
These are the people who are going to stay late when they need to, come in early when they need to and work hard every day – because they need to.
These are the people who are going to contribute to a positive workplace and an amazing company culture that turns your business into a community – or better yet, a family.
If you hire people who are passionate, you are hiring people who are loyal. They won’t spend 20 minutes every morning shopping around job sites looking for the next big thing that will make them more money than you can offer.
They’ll be long term employees and team players who will stick with your company no matter what happens.
There’s something to be said for believing in people, beyond the way they appear on paper. Looking beneath the surface and finding what it is that makes every applicant tick, and determining whether or not they’re a person who can bring passion to their role and to your company.
You may not have employees who are going to be a step ahead of your competition every time, and you may have employees that need to learn, and try and work harder. There is nothing wrong with that. As long as your business is made of people who have passion and who want to work for you, everything will be okay.
I can tell you one thing. When it comes down to it, the most important test of an employee is not whether they ran extra curricula activities at University and won an award for it. It’s whether they can help you stay excited about your business, by finding excitement and passion in it themselves.
