Building a Winning Team by Hiring for Skills, Not Education

When you’re building a winning team, it’s important that you hire people for their knowledge and smarts, not their education and degrees. Too often, businesses require certain educational experiences that either don’t make any sense or mean you miss out on some prime candidates.

If I had to choose between hiring a 22-year-old with a degree in manufacturing technology or a high school dropout who had spent 20 years in a factory making their machines sing, I’d pick the grizzled veteran every time.

When hiring new associates for any operation, focus on these qualities:

• Problem-solving skills: Manufacturing is full of challenges. You need people who can think on their feet and find solutions.
• Adaptability: The manufacturing industry is constantly changing. Your team needs to be able to adapt to new technologies, processes, and market demands.
• Work ethic: A strong work ethic is essential for any manufacturing environment.

Look, I’ve known PhDs who are idiots and people who barely finished who were brilliant. And they proved to me time and again that attitude and aptitude should win out over degrees.

I had a guy who I had hired as a plant engineer named Eric Nichols. He was the least communicative person you could ever come across. If you ever talked to him, the most you’d ever get was a grunt. And the shortest possible one he could muster.

But once Eric latched onto an idea, it was amazing what he could accomplish. Machinery just talked to him, and he understood every word. It was like he was the machine whisperer.

I remember when we were building the new Duoline plant and we ran into so many problems and things we didn’t know how to fix. We would sit on the curb eating a hamburger, wondering why we were dumb enough to even start this project because whatever hurdle we were facing was high enough to derail us completely.

But if it were a machinery problem, Eric would come up with a solution, usually before we were done eating.

Of course, you wouldn’t put him in front of a whole bunch of people to explain anything because he wouldn’t talk. And doing an entire presentation? Forget about it!

He was sort of like Warren Buffet’s right-hand man, Charlie Munger, who is famous for not saying much. Warren does all the talking, and Charlie, when prodded, would say something like, “That’s fucking stupid!”

Eric was a plant engineer because of on-the-job training, but he had no degree. But he had a brilliant mind that could see solutions. If you let him go, he would find the solutions and surprise you with the outcome.

Funnily enough, while he wasn’t the most communicative person, he was the most sought-after. And he became the operations manager at Duoline and did some brilliant work.

He was perfect for the job even though most other managers would have ignored him because he didn’t have a degree and wasn’t an engineer through education. But they would have missed out on one of the best plant engineers and operations managers we could have ever gotten.

That’s why you need to look past a person’s education and look at their intelligence and abilities first.

I’ve been a manufacturing executive, as well as a sales and marketing professional, for a few decades. Now, I help companies turn around their own business, including pivoting within their industry. If you would like more information, please visit my website and connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Photo credit: Deutsche Fotothek (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 3.0 Germany)