6 TOP Qualities Employers Look For (6 Brain-based Characteristics Employers FEEL From You)
Hey guys! In this post, we’re going to talk about the six things that employers love, six qualities, characteristics that employers feel from you and would love to hire you for.
And none of them are experience OR skills. Of course, those things are going to help you align with the role, but they’re not everything.
So stay tuned.
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The first one is pretty basic. It’s self-confidence.
However, I want to explain what self-confidence really means and how you can embody self-confidence without having to worry about what most people worry about, which is appearing arrogant.
What is self-confidence?
When you have self-confidence, you’re basically instructing people how to treat you OR how to think about you.
And so a lot of my clients, they don’t want to toot their own horn, for lack of better phrasing, because they are afraid they’re going to come off as arrogant in some way.
And I tell them, first of all, if you’re worried about that, just the sheer fact that you’re worried about that probably means you’re, don’t have to worry.
The irony in that.
But self-confidence simply means that you like yourself, you’re proud of your accomplishments, you know you’re good at what you do.
And that you also appreciate other people for their accomplishments and what they do, and you understand that what they do and the strengths that they have are probably going to be different than yours.
You’re open to learning from others, you want to, and you’re just a very pleasant person to work with.
That’s a self-confident person.
The difference between self-confidence and arrogance is that an arrogant person is often acting superior.
It could be subtle, it could be slightly condescending, but the general tone of how they come across is that they believe they’re better than everybody else.
When they believe that, that shows up when they speak, if you’re on the opposite side of the spectrum, where you kind of know you’re good at what you do, you’ve done a lot of stuff, you have a good track record.
But you’re like, “I don’t know how to talk about it,” then you’re not going to have to worry about being arrogant OR coming off as arrogant.
‘Cause what I’ll offer you is that nobody wants to hire the person who’s downplaying their accomplishments and nobody will.
It’s not their job to be like to dig in and ask you all the questions and be like, “Oh, so really you did this. And really this was the impact that you had.”
It’s not their job to do that. It’s your job to show up and just tell them the facts.
This is what I did. This is how it worked out.
I know that I’m good at this. I can help you with this too.
It’s your job to show up like that.
But a lot of people are afraid to because they don’t want to seem arrogant.
And if you’re here reading this post, if you follow me at all, you kind of know that that pattern doesn’t lead you where you want to go, which is probably why you’re not making the money you want to be making.
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The second thing is massive action, resourcefulness.
I find this really ironic because oftentimes, probably you reading this post, are really good at your job, and if you’re given a task OR a project by your employer, you are going to do it.
And you’re probably going to do a very outstanding job of it.
You’re going to figure out how to do it, even if it seems difficult at first.
You’re going to take massive action to get it done. And what I mean by massive action is if you run into a roadblock, you’re going to figure out how to overcome that roadblock and keep going.
And if something doesn’t work, you’re going to try something else.
If that doesn’t work, you’re going to try something else.
And if that doesn’t work, you’re going to talk to somebody else.
And if that doesn’t work, you’re going to look up something else on Google.
You’re very resourceful, and you’re going to figure those things out.
That’s called massive action is just doing things until you get the desired results. You don’t stop in the middle and say, “Sorry, couldn’t figure it out.”
You would never do that. You’d never go to your boss and say that.
You might go to your boss and be like, “I tried all these things. I’m stuck. Can you help me?”
That’s fine.
Depending on who your boss is and if you can do that. I’ve done that before. But you’re never going to go to your boss and be like, “Sorry, can’t do it. Doesn’t work. It’s not working.”
But the irony is that we do that for ourselves in our job search.
You are probably extremely resourceful at work, but when it comes to yourself and what you want, and if you want to up-level into a new, better job, then you give up and you’re like, “Can’t do it. Doesn’t work. Nobody wants to hire me. People won’t respond to me.”
The third is you have to have some trust in yourself.
Depending on where the level of trust you have with yourself is going to indicate the results that you’re going to get and what you really want from you to accomplish.
If an employer is not there, if your manager’s not there, you need to have some trust in yourself to make a decision, even if it’s the wrong call.
That’s where you’re going to need to have your own back.
And this is the same in the job search.
It’s the same when you’re achieving something unknown.
You’re working towards something that you don’t know, you’re facing some level of uncertainty, you’re going to have to trust yourself.
Trust your own judgment, trust your own decision at the moment.
And even if it doesn’t work out, even if it turns out that you could have made a different decision, you need to have your own back and say, “You know what? You did the best you could with the information that you had.”
And you can keep going. You can try again. You can do it again.
What did you learn from that experience and how are you going to proceed?
And also, trusting yourself basically means that you believe that your quality of answer to the question that you need the answer to is just as good, if not better, as somebody else’s.
My clients are pretty brilliant and they might ask me a question and I might be like, “What do you think?”
Because I want to hear their answer first.
And if we stop to actually ask ourselves, your brain has the answer, ’cause that’s what our brain will do.
It will default to answer a question that you ask it.
It can’t help, but not. It can’t help, but answer the question that you ask it. But often we’re looking outside ourselves for the answers all the time.
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And nobody has the answers, but you for you.
People can give you a suggestion.
They can say, “This is what I did. This is what worked for me. Here’s an idea.”
And you can take that into account, but nobody has the answer for you, but you, ’cause you’re the one who’s going to do it, and you’re the one who’s going to need to have your own back, no matter what.
Don’t assume that everyone outside of you has better answers than you do.
Because the more that you do that, the more you train your brain to think that everyone else is smarter than you and everybody else knows better than you.
And then what you’re left with is your self-confidence is not as high as it needs to be.
Because when you trust yourself, you make more decisions, you learn more from those decisions that you make, and you get to up-level in your self-confidence and your experiences.
If you trust everyone else to make the decisions for you, OR you default to what everyone else says.
Then not only do you blame them when something goes wrong but you also you’re like, “Oh, well, I did what she said and that didn’t work.”
You don’t get to learn that lesson. And then you don’t get to build that trust with yourself.
It’s so important that you understand what trusting yourself means and how important that is in your career as a whole.
And that you practice doing it, having your own back, and learning from every decision that you make.
The reason why it’s an employer quality that they would want is that when they’re not there when there’s no manager, they’re going to need you to take a step and make a decision sometimes.
And you’re going to need to stand by that decision and say, “You know what? I did it because of this, and this is what I really thought was right at the moment.”
Sometimes it’s going to be, sometimes it’s not.
And any company worth working for will allow for mistakes and they will want you to make mistakes because that means that you’re moving forward and you become more of a valuable employee when you make mistakes and you learn from them.
And then you can talk about them in future interviews, talk about how you’ve evolved as an employee.
Those are my favorite stories to tell. I messed up. This is what I learned.
This is what made me a better employee.
All right, so the fourth one is forward-thinking.
Are you planning for a few steps ahead?
If you’re working on a project, are you planning for a few steps ahead?
Are you planning the timeline properly?
Are you planning what’s going to need to happen?
Who you’re going to need to speak to, who’s going to need to be available?
Are you thinking in a way that is strategizing what’s going to need to happen in the big picture instead of just working one thing to another?
Called forward-thinking, called risk management, called looking ahead and having the company’s best interest at heart when you do that.
Treating it as if it were your own project and having a metaphorical pair of binoculars and saying, “Okay, what’s coming up? What obstacles could be coming up here? What could I need to plan for?”
And just considering that is going to be a huge quality that they’re going to want to see when they’re interviewing you.
And when you can tell stories that illustrate this, that will strengthen your candidacy immensely.
Number five, my favorite one is a good attitude.
And this might seem basic to you, like a good attitude, whatever, but there is this a Harvard study that they did, and it says that people would rather work with someone who doesn’t know anything, basically someone who’s an idiot.
But has a wonderful attitude than if they were working with someone who was super smart and could do everything but was a huge jerk about it.
Studies show that people would rather work with the person with a good attitude, even if they were an idiot.
If you have a good attitude and you might not have all the experience that the other candidates have, but you have a better, more pleasant, demeanor, and people are more drawn to you, and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I really like this person.”
Then you are still more likely to get the job.
I’m pretty sure that’s how I’ve gotten through my entire career.
Service-based orientation.
I always said to myself I could work in customer service and be happy my whole life, but it just wasn’t going to pay me the money that I wanted.
It wasn’t going to be something that I was going to pursue, but I love customer service.
If I was, say, a server at a restaurant and somebody asked for a glass of water, instead of asking them, “Do you want ice with that? Do you want a straw? Do you want a napkin?”
Instead of asking them all those questions, I’m just going to bring them everything. They can choose what they want, and what they don’t want.
Having that service-based attitude, it’s huge.
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I’ve done that several times in my career where I even had an interview question where somebody asked me, so say they call the firm up. It was a law firm.
They say they called the firm up and they ask if we do wills and estates, and you’re not sure.
What do you say?
And I said, “I would say, yes. We could help them with that for sure. And I would take their information, and then I’d make it my responsibility to get back to them as soon as possible.”
And then the interviewer said, “But what if we don’t do wills and estates, then what?”
And I said, “Well, I’d rather say yes, because if I said, I wasn’t sure, and I was wishy-washy about it, they might’ve taken their business somewhere else. And we might have lost out on a customer.”
That’s my point of view on it. I got the job. They like that answer. They always want to err on the side of, “Yes, we will be able to do it,” rather than, “Oh, I don’t know. I’m not sure if I can help you with that.”
Have you ever been on the phone with somebody where they’re like, “I don’t really know. I’ll have to check. I’m not really sure if we do that,” VERSUS, “Yes, I will absolutely get back to you on that. I’m sure we can help you with that.”
If it turns out you’re wrong, you have to go back, a good attitude can solve anything, in my opinion.
I think it’s gotten me a long way. But anyway, that’s something that I definitely would want to offer you.
Err on the side of service.
Always give more than they expect, always be willing to over-deliver, always be happy to help, always let people learn from you. That goes a long, long way.
Then number six, I call it high E.Q.
This goes back to like the team player thing.
And it’s like, everybody says, “Oh, yeah. I’m a team player.”
But what does that actually mean?
Being an actual team player, like on a sports team means that you’re going to pass the ball to someone else. It means that you’re going to support your teammates.
It means that you’re going to be engaged in the plan so that the team can do well, not just you.
When the team is working together, they can get a lot farther than when just one person is trying to do all the work and take all the credit.
In a work environment, what a team player means is that you get curious when someone says something you disagree with.
You don’t automatically react and get defensive at them and assume they’re wrong.
You get curious. You want to know why they have that point of view and be honestly genuinely open to it and be like, “Maybe they’re right. Maybe they got a point. Let’s hear them out.”
And then, be willing to suggest different things, like, “Maybe we test it. Maybe we test your idea and we test my idea and we see which one is better. Maybe the best idea wins no matter what, no matter whose idea it was.”
And you just let go of that need to be right all the time or need to have your credit, need to have the credit all for you.
And yes, they stand up for themselves and what they need and they voice their opinions, but they’re not afraid of someone disagrees with them because they’re not going to get into a fight about it.
They’re just going to get curious and wonder and have a discussion in a conversation, and they’re going to open that up.
And that’s when a team gets stronger when you can discuss these things, discuss disagreements, come up with the best idea, move forward, learn from each other and then not shame anybody if the idea doesn’t work out, just take the lesson as a team and move forward.
Having that emotional maturity where you’re not reacting and not getting caught up in drama OR your ego.
It’s just you’re results-driven, you want what’s best for the company, and that is more collaborating as a team than it is trying to do it yourself or have your ideas prevail.
And if you’re working with difficult people, that’s even more challenging, but it’s still possible.
Just being open, willing, and understanding of other people while still voicing your own ideas, ’cause that’s what you’re paid for.
Those are the six characteristics that employers really love and would love to feel from you, and I’m sure there’s more than that, but those are the six that we’re talking about today.
And I know that I’ve been through a lot more with my clients, but notice how none of them involve past experience, and none of them involve hard skills.
‘Cause I truly believe your experience does not equal your capability.
And of course, your experience and your skills are going to help you, but they are not everything, and there are definitely things that you need to get the job that is not just your hard skills.
OR your experience because that would mean that everyone with appropriate experience and everybody with proper skills would get hired immediately, and that doesn’t happen, does it?
Oh, one ironic thing I wanted to leave you with too, is all these things that I listed today, the whole six things that employers love are also going to be things that you need to have for your job search to be successful.
If you would like to learn more from me…
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In this training:
- We’re going to go over the opportunities and how to get infinite opportunities, so you’ll never have to worry about where you are getting your next opportunity from.
- You going to find out how to crush your interviews and how to focus on what you can control to nail those interviews.
- Also, how to get a win no matter what, how to feel likeable, so whether they like you or they don’t, how you’re still going to feel intact, and how you’re still going to feel confident in yourself to keep going to ultimately get to your goal.
- We’re going to talk about mastering salary negotiations so that you can make the money that you want to make over the course of your lifetime. We’re talking five, ten years out, what is it that you want to be doing.
- You’re probably thinking pretty small right now if you’re like most people. I want to challenge you to think bigger.
- And the last thing we’re going to talk about setting up your promotion, so, the things you need to be focused on right now in order to get where you actually want to go.
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And remember, the current system isn’t perfect, but you can outsmart it. I’m here to prove to you that you do have what it takes.
I’ll see you next time and I can’t wait!
In Work & Life
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– XO Natalie
