Your Next Great Hire May Have An Unconventional Academic Background
By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter points out that your next great hire may have had unconventional academic background and where that training may come from.
Background Checks: What Employers Need to Know
You’ve probably noticed that the job market has picked up and that despite what you may be reading in the newspapers or listening to on the news or on the web, it’s harder to find capable people to fill your jobs now. Why this is? There’s many many different reasons and that’s not the purpose of this video. That it is is very apparent.
People have choices again these days in the skilled market areas– – IT, accounting and finance, engineering– – a whole host of areas that involve education, skills and knowledge, as well as, experience. Now if you start holding out for someone with . . . I don’t know . . . Let’s say four to six years of experience, you’re going to be waiting a long time because if you think about it that’s back at the peak of the collapse of the US economy, the European markets, people weren’t getting jobs as beginners, hence, there are very few four to six year people unless they came to the United States from abroad.
Now, I want to encourage you to look at educational background in a different way. You may be looking at what school this person graduated from and that is fine. But you’re also missing out on. If you only do that, you’re missing out on a huge potential market that everyone knows about but it hasn’t quite registered in the job market. And that is the people who are going to Khan Academy, Coursera, a host of other online training facilities where people are picking up skills that aren’t showing up because you know, they’re not university degrees and people aren’t thinking that way.
You can’t convince me that people who are taking lots of courses at these online schools are less capable of than the degreed individuals. If anything, these folks are incredibly motivated. They’re driven to be successful. They want to learn. They want to apply what they’ve learned. They are ideal employees.
No criticism of the ones that attended university. I’m just pointing out the gap in the thinking that you’re not thinking of places like Khan or Coursera or the other online schools and there are many of them. You can see how they rank in Google searches, but think creatively about the motivation of a person based upon the education they’re doing after graduation.
You don’t want to hire people who spent the last couple of years working at Starbucks making coffee for people unless they’re doing something that demonstrates how important launching their career is. You don’t want to hire people who did their degree 25 years ago and have done nothing to update their skills since that time.
You want to be looking for motivated hungry people who are putting their money where their mouth is by investing time, money and effort to keep up-to-date or advance themselves.
It’s not always in the degree. Many times it is, but don’t miss this opportunity.
Focusing on skills could surface 19x more candidates
ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
People hire Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter to provide No BS Career Advice globally because he makes many things in peoples’ career easier. Those things
can involve job search, hiring more effectively, managing and leading better, career transition, as well as advice about resolving workplace issues.
Schedule a discovery call at my website, www.TheBigGameHunter.us
He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 2600 episodes.
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