Matching skills or matching people?

Matching skills to jobs. Recruitment is as simple as that, right?

Right person, right place, right time, right fit.

That’s what’s at the heart of recruitment. Matching person to company, skills to role, personality to team, team member to team manager.

February is as good a time as any to be thinking about making a match, what with Valentine’s Day and all. And actually Valentine’s Day is quite a good analogy to use when thinking about hiring.

Some people you meet have partners who are very like them. Others are very, very different from one another. Some have shared interests – some not. Some are comfortable where they are, others push each other out of their comfort zone.

The point is – there are no rules. The “match” is subjective and different every time.

So it is in business. What makes someone a good team fit isn’t whether they’re like everyone in the team or not – it’s whether they can work with the team. They might be a force for change or they might boost the existing capability. Depending on the situation, either’s fine. Team building, hiring – they are subjective, complex, unique decisions every time.

Which is why technology can help, but it can’t do the whole job. Technology (whether that’s Tinder or LinkedIn) can provide a route to market. But it can’t make decisions. No-one in their right mind would marry someone on the basis of being a Tinder match – at best they might meet them and see how it goes. No more can AI make decisions about how humans will feel, engage, interact and thrive together. Glorified skills matching is a very small part of the job at hand.

At Vocative, we find the people who use technology to solve our customers’ problems.

Technical skills are important – but they’re a small part of the equation. Having the technical ability to do the job just gets you through the door – the rest is about ambition, perspective, people skills, dynamism, appetite for change, any number of other hard to quantify attributes.

That’s why we work hard to get under the skin of the business and team to really get a sense of how they tick and who might work well with them – challenge them, drive them on, and improve them. And of course we do the same with candidates – to help them find a job that really works for them.

Matching person to person is, when it comes down to it, a human business. There are many tools you can use to help you along the way, but ultimately it’s about people.