Employers looks for a 'spark' when considering new hires, promotions

A spark is needed to run every engine including your own. If you're looking for a job, promotion or a career change, your most important asset is your spark. When employers see no spark, they assume there is no engine.

To show you how important this concept is for you, consider these comments by two CEOs at recent confidential roundtable meetings.

"I can tell whether a person really wants a job by watching how they walk through the parking lot, or how they interact in our lobby."

Another CEO said, "The single biggest problem we have with applicants is no history or evidence of desire to learn or awareness that we have to make more revenue from their work than their wages and benefits cost."

Most disturbing is the number of CEOs who said people are late for interviews or have little respect for schedules and attendance post-hire.

There are hundreds of jobs going unfilled with employers willing to train (and even remediate basic skills) if only they could find people with that spark.

Does that seem unfair or arbitrary?

Put yourself in the shoes of a small employer. Your business is growing but no one can say for how long. You can ask current employees to work overtime or you can hire more people. When you hire, the costs of recruiting, paying, benefitting, training, re-training, counseling, possible firing/layoffs and ever-growing government mandates are very high.

Unless applicants can show a small employer there is a spark to learn, to work, to produce, to cooperate, to grow, to overcome and to prove they know why they were hired, the cost of a bad hire is too great. This is an oversimplified but common reason why many jobs go unfilled. These employers have been burned too many times and are now more selective.

What about skills?

A spark is necessary to learn real skills, but more importantly, to put them to use. The CEOs told me stories of applicants trained by community colleges in the technical aspects of a skill or career (say, nurses assistant), but not sufficiently assessed of their suitability to the career. The softer aspects of the role, such as caring for the patient's emotional needs, were lost in the process. The spark critical to success in that role was missing and could not be taught.

The best way to see if you have the spark needed by a company or industry is to ask for honest, blunt assessment by friends and professionals. In the same way a business might use a "360 degree" review to seek opinions of those working with or for a particular employee, find a way to see yourself as others see you. Do mock interviews with an HR professional, ask your best friend how you come across to strangers or take an assessment tool to help you understand your traits and preferences. Use that knowledge to show your spark to an employer.

Small employers are the economic engine of our present and future. Show them how to use your spark to grow their business.

Bruce Clarke, J.D., is president and CEO of CAI, a human resource management firm with locations in Raleigh and Greensboro. CAI helps organizations maximize employee engagement while minimizing employer liability.