For a long time, recruiters relied on qualifications and technical expertise to choose between candidates. But with an increasingly qualified workforce, they are now more likely to take soft skills into account.
As a result, certain candidates who are more inexperienced are drawing on their personality to help them land a job. These workers are known as “personality hires”.
This expression refers to professionals whose main asset on the job market is their interpersonal skills. They might say, for example, that they are good-natured or have a sense of humour that will hit the spot at the coffee machine.
They also pride themselves on their interpersonal intelligence, their ability to take initiative, their creativity, and their adaptability. In other words, personality hires possess the most-sought social-emotional skills in the workplace.
And, if you ask them, that’s enough to make them employable. By surrounding themselves with personality hires, managers help lift the mood in the workplace. These employees bring positive energy to the company, contributing to the wellbeing of their colleagues and, consequently, to their productivity.
“Most organisations believe personality hires can foster a positive work environment or team dynamics, or that they are good for the company brand and reputation,” Carys Chan, an academic at Griffith Business School, told the Australian website ABC.
Personality hires are, in themselves, nothing new. But the idea recently came back into the spotlight on TikTok, where the associated hashtag is estimated to have over 6.6 billion views.
Posts using it feature young employees in fictional situations where their natural charm and friendly attitude makes all the difference. Otherwise, they can take the form of short explanatory videos praising the merits of this kind of attitude in the workplace.
In one such video, user Savanah Cuevas explains that personality hires are responsible for keeping their colleagues happy. “The first two to three minutes of every meeting, you need to be leading the personal conversations, crack some jokes, write some down if you need to.
“Next, you need to be saying hi to every single person. If you know them personally, ask them about their weekend,” she says in one of her videos.
In this sense, personality hires play a role not unlike that of “chief happiness officers”. The latter help to make life in the workplace more pleasant by organising afterwork meet-ups, wellness seminars, and other fun events for staff.
The craze for happiness managers and personality hires shows that companies are increasingly striving to contribute to the wellbeing of their employees.
But corporate happiness must be everyone’s responsibility, not just that of a few employees with sparkling personalities: everyone should feel involved in contributing to a positive working environment, including those in positions of responsibility.