Candidate has great skills, ideal experience and strong references? Well done, you’re half way there.

If you made a new hire today, there is a 46% chance that they will be gone in 18 months. This statistic, which is alarming enough in itself, is compounded by the fact that 89% of these failures will be attributed to attitudinal factors. Put simply, half the people you hire will not survive in the job you gave them, mostly because they have bad attitudes.

Now a bad attitude may conjure up images of laziness or insubordination, but there are other more common faults that fit into this area, including a lack of coachability, emotional intelligence or motivation.

Turnover in the modern workplace is a major problem for productivity and where failure occurs, it is only occasionally due to a lack of hard skill.

Ask anybody with hiring experience, in any sector, anywhere in the world and they will tell you that the best way to lower turnover and increase tenure is to hire the right people in the first place.

What this recent study (the basis of Hiring for Attitude - a new book from business coach Mark Murphy) suggests is that far too many employers are basing their hiring practices on simple check lists of hard skills, at the expense of a genuine assessment of a person’s suitability. The result? A short term success that spells long term disaster.

Talascend hires thousands of people every year, for our own staff and for our customers. What everyone here will tell you first and foremost is this…

The interview is the most important part of the entire hiring process.

Here are our five tips for getting it right.

1.       Don’t duplicate the role of the resume and references.

Let the resume and references establish the candidate’s skills and credibility. If they claim to be academically qualified, capable of a specific role technically and that they have worked in the role for five years at these two companies, then – If it all checks out via transcripts and references – it’s a safe assumption that they can do the job, so you don’t need to focus too much time on their hard skills.

2.       Move quickly to the important part

You’ll want to spend a short time satisfying yourself that their track record is deserved, but once you have, move quickly on to the soft skills that are going to determine whether they succeed or fail with you. How will they behave within a team? (and most importantly your team.) What motivates them? (and are their needs consistent with what you can offer?) How are they likely to respond to pressure?

3.       Don’t be awkward asking personal questions

 It’s easy to understand why interviews tend to focus heavily on hard skills; it’s much safer territory for the interviewer and interviewee. Tell me about your experience using the new ABC software. How much time have you spent conducting site reviews?  These are a lot less awkward to ask than questions that drive at emotional intelligence and very few hiring managers have had the training they need to conduct a rounded interview. 

4.       Get Help

There are a number of great resources available to navigate this terrain. There are templates available online, your HR department is likely to be very helpful. There are also external devices like psychometric profiles, which some employers swear by. Staffing agencies that you work with will be happy to help you; it's in their interest for your interviews to go well – ask them what they can offer.

5.       Act now, before the next 46% doomed hire joins you

Whatever you do to address this issue, do it sooner rather than later. We all understand what 46% turnover means for our teams, projects and businesses. 

We can all do better than this; we simply have to do better if our operations are to thrive and grow. Your next coin-toss hire could be sitting in your building right now. 

Education, not legislation, is the key to lower healthcare spending.

In 2005, the British chef and media personality Jamie Oliver launched a highly successful campaign to raise awareness of the poor quality of food being served in British schools. The result was to transform the way Britain thinks about school food, delivering healthier, balanced meals and most importantly, educating children early about the benefits of eating properly. Oliver himself was awarded an MBE by the Queen (a civilian medal of honor for service to the country.) His approach has been used with great success across Europe.

Then he came to America.

You can watch the details of Oliver’s treatment at the hands of US school employees he met and the US media in general on YouTube (‘We don’t want to eat lettuce all day, who made you king?’) sufficed to say he was shot down in flames from minute one, and he returned home having failed completely.

Recent discussion about the growing cost of healthcare delivery remains focused on the level of investment necessary to keep the nation healthy, but to endlessly debate legislation and government investment misses the long term issue entirely.

The spiraling cost of healthcare in the US may be the direct result of defensive medicine, malpractice and government mandated programs like EHR, but there is no question where the real answer to reduced health care spending lays – healthier people.

It is education and not legislation that is the real answer.

The British chef and campaigner for healthy food 

in schools suffered a series of media beatings.

When Jamie Oliver was sent packing so emphatically by a firmly united front of American education workers, local media and national TV personalities, this country missed a major opportunity to start the move toward lower healthcare costs. 

Regular exercise, healthy eating and the limitation of obviously dangerous practices like smoking and heavy drinking are the keys to lower spending. This begins and ends with personal choices. The earlier we begin to encourage these choices the better.

One of the many reasons David Letterman gave Jamie Oliver (a long time friend of his incidentally) for why he would fail was the power of fast food chains. They’re not going anywhere, he says.

A typical McDonalds in London

McDonalds is not going away, but it can be forced to evolve. In the UK, it has. Gone are the gaudy red signs and plastic furniture, in favor of subtle dark green and high-spec leather chairs. Salads are not an after thought, they are a key part of the menu, as are many other healthy choices. You can still get a Big Mac if you want one, but McDonalds knows its future success depends on delivering more healthy options because they are simply what the consumer wants.

We the people are in charge of what fast food chains serve. We have the power in the long term to reduce the cost of healthcare in this country through the way we live. It’s happening in other countries, we could make it happen here.  

This would dramatically shift the debate about healthcare spending.