Our friends at Farm Equipment, recently conducted a poll about what characteristics agriculture companies find to be of most value when hiring potential employees and the answer may surprise you!

The poll included the following 5 categories for individuals to vote on:  

• Previous Work Experience
• Personality/Attitude
• Adaptability
• Grit/Tenacity
• Problem Solving Ability

While all extremely important traits for your employees to have, here were the final results:

That’s a whopping 63 votes for personality and attitude! Do your past or current job postings mention anything about an applicant’s expected personality or attitude? We’ve written in the past about how to hire the right people and how to attract and retain workers, but how does personality and attitude play into the hiring process and are you making it a priority in your recruiting process?

Why did Personality/Attitude win?

While experience is clearly important, being able to mold employees new to the field to the way that your dealership operates and functions can be a huge asset long-term for the dealership. New employees with little experience can come in as a clean slate and are ready to learn and absorb as much information as possible, versus someone who might be stuck in his/her ways or feeling he/she knows everything there is to know already. That directly ties into an individual’s personality! He/She needs to be open to learning new things, or a different way of doing things, with a positive attitude, otherwise no matter how much experience the individual has, his/her onboarding into your dealership might not go so smoothly.

In regards to adaptability, it makes sense it’s another strongly sought after trait in employees. Employers want their team to be able to adapt to any situation that might be thrown their way in a professional and efficient way. However, it could be argued that if someone has a positive personality or attitude, he/she will most likely find a way to adapt to the scenario he/she is in with a customer.

In relation to the above, grit/tenacity and problem solving go hand in hand with adaptability. It’s understandable you want a team member that will take initiative to solve a problem and be persistent about finding the answer. Again, all of these things could be related back to the individual’s personality. It’s hard to teach grit and tenacity, but is easy to help someone build his/her problem solving capabilities if he/she has an attitude driven by persistence and success!

What does this all mean for the hiring process?

All of the traits listed in this poll are important for a potential hire to have! Take a moment though and think about how his/her personality came off in your interview and how it could impact these other areas. Should you really be focusing more on the personality of each hiree in the recruiting process in order to get the best fit employee for your dealership?

For example, we’ve talked a lot to our dealers about our CWS culture here. It’s an environment of collaboration, fun and above all passion and commitment to the customer. We have multiple rounds of interviews that a potential hire goes through with a variety of team members, not only to get an idea of their experience, but also whether his/her personality fits into the CWS culture we’ve worked hard to create!

Ensuring that a new hire’s personality fits the mold of your dealership’s culture will not only contribute to the success of that employee, but also the success of the greater team.

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What do you think the most important trait or characteristic is when you’re hiring a new employee at your dealership? Leave your thoughts in the comment below!