Hard Skills And Experiences Are Nothing.

My work place has been established for 20 years now. It already has organization structure, every job descriptions for every job title, clear work system and work flow, and quarterly KPI for employees to get rewards or punishments. It looked like it has been an established organization. But apparently we always struggle to build strong engagement on employees, so we keep dealing with high turn-over every year. It makes the company can't run fast, it's always in need to search for "the right man on the right place", suitable replacement for every resignation, and hardly maintain good people in the long run. Why is that?

Media company always need a lot of people to run all the works. So many detail works to do in a media company. My father always said that managing a media company is like building a temple. It needs intense detail work and solid team work. Including this company. That's why we have so many employees, up until 250 people to run 15 magazines four years ago. Since we're a local scale company, our hiring power is not as big as a national company. So the result is we have loads of low-level employees. One main character on them: no care and initiative at all for their jobs. So they make us do high drive on jobs, high drive on tasks, leaving "influence" behind to nurture people. So we always naturally manage them by driving them to finish tasks, not too sensitive on giving enough attention, guidance, tap on shoulders, or any other human touches thing. It is indeed exhausting and frustrating.

So what have we learned from this experience? We realize that hard skill isn't the one we're looking for at first. We definitely make a huge mistake on it. We put hard skills and experience first when we're recruiting, up until this 20 years, without realizing that there is one most important thing before that: soft skills. It always has to come first. Why? Because hard skills can always be taught, it just need time. But we can't change people's soft skills or attitude. Care, initiative, and any other soft skills were taught since childhood.

But how can we detect candidate's natural attitude? Finally we've been reminded by a business coach about the ideal recruitment process that we've been taught years ago. We totally forgot that. So now we seriously do the attitude filter first, although it takes us much more energy and time. Because we believe that doing so will result in a better and long lasting candidate for us.