Matthew T Grant

I’m still trying to figure this out. When you ask web professionals and the people who recruit or hire them to evaluate the importance of the various attributes used to distinguish one Web candidate from another, you get some strong agreement – both groups are in accord that work experience and a specialized skill set are the most important attributes – but you also get some interesting disagreements.

To whit, personality/cultural fit is only important to 90% of web professionals, while it’s important to a full 98% of employers. I’ve made my views on the fit issue crystal clear, so I won’t repeat them here, but I will say that, in the staffing industry, there’s an old saw that goes, “Hire for skills, fire for fit.” In other words, fit definitely impacts on-the-job success. So why the gap?

There are two things I mentioned in my last post on this subject that may explain why web folk view “fit” as, if not totally unimportant, then, at least, less important.

First of all, web professionals want flexible work schedules and the ability to work from home (87% see it as important when considering a new job opportunity). Could it be that “fit” declines in importance when you realize that you won’t actually be working directly with others in a particular environment?

Secondly, as we discovered, 43% of working web professionals plan on looking for a new job within the next 12 months and another 35% say they would consider making a move if the right thing came along. It makes sense that fit is going to matter less to you if you’re a short-timer, then if you’re settling in for the long haul, right?

So much for my speculation on this topic. How sound do these explanations, er, sound?

Note: I’ll probably be mining the research on the state of the web profession we conducted with Monster for a while here. If you’d like to dig into it yourself, please do so and then feel free to share your insights.

Image Courtesy of freeparking.