Hire Efficiently and Effectively with Skills-to-Career Matching

How to hire using the AAA method:
Attitude, Attributes and Abilities
(Skills, Experience and Knowledge)

Have you ever wanted a job or wanted to hire a candidate and thought to yourself- I am the perfect fit... this candidate is the perfect fit. That typically happens after hours of time, effort and energy to find, source, qualify and interview. pepelwerk’s method is different we work with our business customers to build their workforce: refining job descriptions and building job profiles to better align business growth, with people needs. Part of that process is learning to transition from a resume data centric recruiting process to a AAA hiring philosophy. In order to do that well, you need to learn how to define the ideal candidate by work attitude, attributes and abilities.

How to hire based on Attitude

Work attitude is about understanding the candidate's attitude towards work, career, the job and how they see themselves in the job market. There is no right or wrong work attitude. The work attitude needs to align with the kind of job, the employer culture and the person’s goals.

How to define Attributes?

What’s the difference between your attributes and your skills? Your attributes talk about quality, your quality and your character that make up who you are. So, an attribute for somebody who wants to get to work on time would be punctuality. If you are a patient person versus an inpatient person, those are attributes to your character. If you actively listen or if you are somebody who has a belief in a certain thing, those are the attributes that also bring additional value to your talent profile.

What interests would your ideal candidate have?

A third aspect of your talent profile are your interests. Your interests are a really important factor for companies hiring to know what because if you don’t want to do something or if you do not have an interest is doing a particular thing, you’re just not going to do it. That’s just the reality of human nature. You have to want to do something. You have to have an interest in doing something. So if you have an interest in animal husbandry and you have a skill of a programmer, you could have a job opportunity within the zoo to create a software program that allows zoo visitors to purchase tickets faster. The combination of your interests, skills, and attributes come together to help you find the work life that you want. And of course that’s really what we’ve designed pepelwerk to do.

What are Abilities? (skills, experience, knowledge)

So what is a skill? A skill is basically something that you can do. You use your hands, your body or your brain to accomplish a task. That’s really it. Figuring out what your skills are you can be hard. When you’re a high school student, you hear from your career counselor that you have to figure out how to create a resume, but how do you write up a resume if you don’t have any experience yet? At pepelwerk, we value your skills over your work history. We think of resumes as personal blogs to highlight accomplishments, not something to that is useful when you’re just starting out and certainly won’t capture your full potential.

Your skills can be anything that you know how to do. You’re a computer programmer, you understand how to wash dishes, you can graphic design, you can use a wrench to fix a toilet. Even if you’re a stay-at-home mom and you want to get back into the work force, you can list project management as a skill. That is a skill that you’ve had to acquire over being a stay-at-home mom.

So, think of the things that you can do physically and mentally to complete a task. Problem solving, attention to detail, or creative thinking are all skills that no one really knows if you have them until you’re put to the test. So, if you don’t really have an idea of what your skills are, especially as you’re going through creating your talent profile, ask somebody! When I’ve read resumes before and then ask “okay, what are your skills?” it really trips people. They’ve been taught to think of themselves in this full sentence, picturesque persona way and used creative writing to put that on their resume.

You Have Choices

Because the unemployment rate is so low, we actually have more choice as job seekers to pick who and what we want to work for compared to when the unemployment rate is high. When more people are unemployed, you have too many people looking for the same job. But when the unemployment rate is low, you don’t have enough people to fill all the jobs that need doing. As a member of pepelwerk, we make sure you’re working and staying relevant no matter what employers are looking for. The focus of so many conversations nowadays is how can we really educate our next generation to fill the jobs that we need as a society? pepelwerk’s answer is by creating a platform that is 100% focused on the skills, attributes, and interests of a person. We’re forcing employers to get out of that whole job description fantasy thing that we’ve just been responding to on job boards, making that connection to skills much quicker, much sooner and with a lot less pain for both sides of the conversation.