The Qualities of a Good Employee

Knowing what makes a good employee is crucial to hiring and maintaining a productive staff. When you’re looking for new hires or advertising new job roles, you’ll need to know exactly what you’re looking for in prospective candidates.

Of course, a candidate’s academic achievements and professional qualifications are going to be important. There are a number of jobs roles which require a specific certification, so candidates will need to meet these requirements in order to be a viable option. However, identifying a good employee is about more than just confirming their qualifications and certifications. In fact, a good employee tends to have a number of other attributes, such as…

Good Communication Skills

Whether you’re hiring someone for a customer-facing role, a managerial position or an IT helpdesk, their communication skills are going to matter. Effective employees are able to communicate with others easily, in both written and verbal form. In fact, an inability to communicate with others effectively can be highly damaging in a business environment.

For people who work in client or customer-facing roles, the importance of good communication is clear. A sales consultant will need to build rapport with consumers or clients, for example, sell your products or services and retain that individual as a customer in the future, all of which requires superior communication skills.

However, any employee who is going to flourish in a workplace environment should be able to communicate well with others, regardless of whether they’ll be interacting with consumers or clients. By ensuring a candidate is capable of relating to other people and is able to communicate ideas effectively, you can increase the chances of hiring the right person for the role.

Reliability and Honesty

Some employees will have more responsibility than others, but all your employees should be unfailingly honest and utterly reliable. Trusting employees is important in the workplace, and your staff will soon notice if their management doesn’t have faith in them.

Knowing an employee will be in the workplace at the relevant times and being able to rely on them to produce high-quality work on a consistent basis is extremely valuable for companies, and it’s not something you can necessarily teach. Similarly, employees who are honest about their mistakes and who are willing to take responsibility for their errors are preferable to candidates who try and shirk responsibility or blame other people when things go wrong.

Whilst family emergencies and illness may prevent an employee from attending work from time-to-time, their reliability will shine through in how they convey this information to you and how they set about rescheduling their work.

Organizational Skills

Depending on the job role you’re advertising, candidates may be required to have varying levels of organizational skills. However, keeping an eye on the bigger picture and hiring for the future can be a cost-effective way of cultivating great staff. If a candidate has impressive organizational skills, they may be able to use these on a larger scale in the future, for example.

Even if the current role only requires a candidate to take on the responsibility of organizing their own work schedule, superior organization skills will mean they will be able to manage their workload effectively, keep on top of deadlines and deliver work consistently, therefore increasing their reliability in the workplace.

Employees who are continually disorganized tend to be the same members of staff that miss deadlines frequently, hold up projects and cost the business money. In addition to this, employees who are routinely disorganized may let colleagues down when it comes to team or company-wide projects, and this could have a damaging effect on the workplace atmosphere.

Conversely, candidates who exemplify their organizational skills during the recruitment process are likely to bring these same skills into the workplace and your company will, therefore, have the benefit of them.

Emotional Intelligence

Although you’ll want to hire employees who are intelligent in terms of academics and business, the importance of emotional intelligence shouldn’t be overlooked. If employees are able to empathize with others and connect with them emotionally, it can help to foster good business relationships and can be extremely valuable for the company.

Similarly, employees who are intelligent in terms of creativity will be able to bring new ideas, processes, and plans to the table, and help your company to be more innovative than its competitors.

Assessing a candidate’s intelligence isn’t just finding out about they know or what qualifications they’ve obtained. Evaluating what type of intelligence they possess is crucial in determining what type of role will suit them best and where they can be most effective. Indeed, recognizing that intelligence comes in different forms is the first step to hiring a diverse staff, whose members complement each other perfectly.

Ability To Listen

You may want employees who are able to take the initiative and work under their own steam, but being able to actively listen is a vital skill in the workplace. Employees who refuse to listen or who fail to take requests, instructions or advice on board, are typically doomed to failure. Difficult to manage and unwilling to learn, it is often employees who refuse to listen to their colleagues and managers who find it hard to perform well in the workplace.

Whilst having the ability to listen to feedback and employer guidance may seem like an obvious attribute, it’s one that many candidates are lacking in. Throughout the recruitment process, set tasks to evaluate a candidate’s listening skills, so that you can assess whether they’re likely to respond well to instructions, feedback, and other people. Those who have superior listening skills are often adept at working well in sales, HR or marketing environments, so they could have a big impact on your company’s turnover.

Hiring The Right Staff

Learning how to identify good employees is one thing, but finding them can be a little bit tougher. In order to get the right candidates in front of your interview panel, you may need some expert help from a company like SCOPE Recruiting, who have specialist recruiters with in-depth industry knowledge and expertise. Once you have a decent pool to choose from, it’s far easier to make the right decision.

It’s always worth taking your time to find the right people because as you can see from the information above, the right employees can make a huge difference to the success of your business; hire the right staff and the rest will simply fall into place.