September 2003

April/May 2006

Innovation Tips

…ideas for building collaborative innovation

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Getting the Right People—Hire for Attitude

Have you ever watched “The Apprentice” on television? Donald Trump is often prominently featured telling someone “You’re fired!” In reality, these people were never really hired.

Trump could take some tips from Southwest Airlines. Southwest has been one of the most successful organizations in America, largely because of the way people are treated…and hired.

Southwest doesn’t hire for skills or experience; rather, they hire for attitude and train for skill. Southwest has a notoriously offbeat culture full of energy, humor, team spirit, and self-confidence. They search daily for people who could fit in with that culture. When they find them, they train them well and develop their skills.

Their hiring criteria are simple but intangible: they want people who are zealous about customer and company, who have "a sense of mission” about their work.

To find the right people, they look for special qualities in unconventional ways. Their interviews can be as offbeat as their culture.

They have developed questions that generate a personal “coat of arms”—a statement that gets to the heart of a person’s passion. They elicit stories about using humor, special personal achievements and guiding principles.

Their quest is not so much to find out what the person can do as to discover who the person is. Like the old saw, they don’t care how much a person knows; they just want to know that the person cares.

This longstanding practice of their “People Department” in hiring for attitude and training for skill has served them well. The company consistently gets the highest industry ratings for virtually all of the critical performance measures—on time arrival and departure, customer satisfaction, baggage handling, and profitability.

While Donald Trump is firing, Southwest Airlines is still hiring.

Note: This issue inaugurates a new publication schedule for Innovation Tips. We will be producing Innovations Tips in groups of three. Each series of three articles will pertain to a common theme.

The theme for this first series—April/May, June and July—is “Getting the Right People.”

The next series will start with August/September and run through November. The third series starts with the December/January issue and runs through March.

We hope you like the new format. Your comments and suggestions are always welcome!

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This Innovation Tip was based partially on an article at www.fastcompany.com/magazine/04/hiring.html
entitled “Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill”