How to Hire Underqualified Staff with Superstar Potential

 Do you have lots of open positions because you can’t find staff with the right qualifications and experience? Have you thought about hiring someone who is underqualified but who has the potential to grow into a superstar?

If you are not the type of employer who hires for potential and attitude –but while at the same time is struggling to fill posts –it could be an opportune moment to change your resourcing strategy to be able to identify high-potential underqualified staff. Why?

Because we are facing huge talent shortages in many industries, and with 1 million millennials joining the workforce each year, the overall experience level of the candidate marketplace is reducing. On top of this, enrollment in graduate school programs has fallen in the US for the second consecutive year and the UK graduates numbers have fallen by record amounts, so we could also see a decline in graduates in years to come.

This current qualification and experience starved climate suggests that progressive employers can gain an edge in the talent war by mastering the art of hiring high potential under qualified staff, who can then be developed and groomed into superstars. And below I have set out six tips on how to do this effectively.

1. Reduce emphasis on technical job requirements

Of course, there is nothing wrong with having experience and qualification requirements, but research from Leadership IQ shows that attitude factors such as EQ, coachability, temperament and motivation are a more reliable determinant of future success than functional skills. This suggests that employers can actually reduce the emphasis on technical requirements and increase the emphasis on the attitude required for the role and still maintain the integrity of the hiring process. This will make way for underqualified staff in talent starved situations and will have a potentially positive effect on the long-term quality of hire.

2. Establish what a high potential looks like

Look at your high performing employees. What attitudes, behaviors, aptitude and EQ levels do they have which help to make them successful? Were any of them underqualified when they joined? If so, ask yourself what skills and attitudes do they have which enabled them to excel and become a high performer? Use this to build an attitude- based success profile (based on your high performers) and assess underqualified candidates against this success profile to identify those with the potential to become superstars.

3. Effectively identify high potentials during interview

Of course you can assess many of these key attitude requirements of high potential candidates, using behavioral questions, but this would ideally be supplemented with some psychometric tests measuring qualities such as aptitude, ability to learn from experience (learning agility) EQ, leadership style, team compatibility, etc.

Of course, the process of hiring underqualified staff with superstar potential does not stop there. These staff need to enter a learning organization that can groom and support them to meet their superstar potential. This means that your organization needs to ensure it develops an effective onboarding program within which employees are provided with a structured plan of developmental goals and support, which can drive and steer the employee until he or she reaches full competency and high-performing status.