Hiring is one of the most consequential decisions small and medium-sized business owners make, yet many are doing it by gut. Few have a dedicated HR function, a structured interview process or a clear framework for assessing whether a candidate can actually do the job. But in a small business – where every team member has an outsized influence on culture, output and morale – making the wrong hire can be devastating.
As Managing Director of recruitment agency EST10, Roxanne Calder has spent years analysing what separates high-performing candidates from those who merely fill a seat in the office. She has identified 7 key traits that jobseekers need to make themselves employable in the modern workforce:
- a thirst for knowledge
- resilience
- interpersonal skills
- self-awareness
- optimism
- dependability
- confidence
“None of us have all of these. We’ve all got gaps in certain areas,” Calder says. “You might have someone who is fabulously task oriented, but their communication and EQ skills need to be worked on.” Her book, Employable: 7 Attributes to Assuring Your Working Future, teaches jobseekers how to fill skills gaps, while providing employers with a framework for spotting well-rounded candidates.
Why One Bad Hire Hits Small Businesses Harder
The need for cultural fit within SME workforces amplifies hiring mistakes, Calder says. A 100-person company can potentially absorb a poor performer across layers of management and systems, but a 10-person team has no such buffer. Workload, morale and client relationships are inevitably affected.
A recruitment mismatch proves costly whether the person stays or leaves. “If you’ve got a team of 10 and you lose one person, that’s 10 per cent of your workforce,” she points out. Hiring a replacement compounds the cost, with replacing a worker estimated to cost between 50 and 200 per cent of their annual salary.
Calder empathises with SME owners. “We’re a small business. I would rather not hire anyone than hire someone I’m not 100 convinced about. I’d rather do the work myself,” she says. “A lot of business owners are operating like that. They would rather do the work themselves than risk a poor hire.”
Of course, she says, many business owners are already squeezed for time due to compliance and admin burdens and don’t have the capacity to take on more work or to devote time to rehiring. She believes a hiring framework offers small businesses a way to hire with greater confidence rather than avoiding the decision altogether.
Candidates Should Be Curious And Resilient For Growth
Two of Calder’s seven traits – knowledge, resilience and adaptability – share a common thread. Each reveals whether a candidate is motivated to grow or would be content to coast.
She links knowledge with curiosity and says this is easy to test in an interview setting. She looks for evidence of self-directed learning, particularly in candidates stepping into senior roles. “One of the ways of seeing if someone has that thirst for knowledge is how much they’re investing in themselves. What are they doing in their own time? Have they done research about the company beforehand? Was it more than the cursory first page on a Google search?”
A commitment to continuous learning is also a sign of adaptability, Calder says. This is particularly evident now in how candidates relate to AI. She recommends employers go beyond asking “What do you know about AI?” in interviews to see how willing candidates are to embrace change. “People think AI at work is a technical skill, like, how do I use the fax machine or the photocopier and when you go home, you don’t have to worry about that,” she explains. “But if you just pigeonhole AI and don’t have it in your daily life, you’ll be left behind.”
Resilience demands a different line of questioning. Calder says interviews can quickly identify candidates with incompatible benchmarks for stress. “I always ask for an example of something that they’ve worked through or struggled through, and it’s interesting the answers that will come through,” she says. “Their idea of a tough time might have been something that was hard for a week, whereas what I’m looking for is something that was 6+ months.”
‘Soft Skills’ Are Hard To Measure But Crucial For Success
The remaining traits are so-called ‘soft skills’ and personal characteristics that Calder believes are becoming increasingly valuable. Interpersonal skills, self-awareness and confidence, optimism and dependability are hard to automate and can also be hard to find.
Calder has observed the soft skills gap widening among younger candidates through her experience speaking at schools and universities. “They might be digital natives and tech-savvy, but they can be socially awkward, don’t want to put the webcam on, are not able to articulate what they’re thinking for fear of being judged,” she notes. “The digital skills might be there, but if they can’t communicate with people, if they can’t influence, if they can’t take feedback, we will have a big problem.”
Optimism, meanwhile, is frequently misunderstood. “Optimism isn’t that Pollyanna effect of everything’s hunky dory all the time,” she says. “Optimism is seeing the other side of something and being able to see the silver lining.” Framed that way, it becomes a problem-solving capability, not a personality quirk, more in line with resilience. “It’s not being delusional. It is thinking or having faith in the ability to keep going and moving forward.”
Confidence is the trait Calder acknowledges is hardest to build. She recommends journaling as a development tool for anyone in the workforce, whether they’re employees or employers, because it allows people to better understand their strengths and weaknesses. “It can develop a self-awareness so that you can start to see patterns,” she says. “Especially if something goes wrong and you’ve had a bad experience, if you’re able to journal and note it down, and then you start to see, ‘Hang on, this has happened before, same scenario.’ You start to reflect and take responsibility and ask how could this have changed? What role did I play? That’s where your confidence can increase.”
Dependability is the trait Calder says underpins all the others. Without it, those qualities become empty talk or unfulfilled promises, so employers need to know the candidate is someone they can rely upon. While hard to gauge during a job interview, she says there are ways to assess dependability during the hiring process: promptness of communication and attention to detail; a history of seeing projects through to completion; and pointed questions during reference checks.
For SME employers navigating a tight labour market, that dual function, a filter for hiring and a framework for development, may be the most practical takeaway of all.
Calder believes the 7 employable traits apply beyond the hiring process. “These are not just employee skills, they’re leadership skills,” she maintains. SME owners using them to guide hiring may find they reveal as much about themselves as they do about their candidates.
