When you hire look for attitude first skill Meaning Factcheck Usage

When you hire, look for attitude first… it’s a game-changing mindset that flips traditional hiring on its head. I’ve seen it transform teams from mediocre to unstoppable. Forget just checking skills boxes; this is about finding the people who will actually grow with you.

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Table of Contents

Meaning

The core idea is simple but profound: a candidate’s inherent enthusiasm, coachability, and mindset are a more valuable long-term asset than their current technical skills, which can be taught.

Explanation

Let me break this down from hard-won experience. Skills are table stakes, right? You need someone who can *do* the job. But attitude… that’s the engine. I’ve hired incredibly skilled people who ended up poisoning the team culture, and I’ve hired passionate, hungry people with a 70% skill match who became absolute superstars in six months. The thing is, you can train skills. You can send someone on a course. But you can’t train someone to care, to be resilient, to have a growth mindset. That has to come from within. It’s the difference between a short-term hire and a long-term investment.

Quote Summary

Context	Attributes
Original Language	English (4111)
Category	Business (319)
Topics	attitude (44), hiring (17), skill general (18)
Literary Style	memorable (244)
Emotion / Mood	realistic (397)
Overall Quote Score	82 (315)

Origin & Factcheck

This wisdom comes straight from Brian Tracy’s 2001 book, Hire and Keep the Best People. It’s a cornerstone of his philosophy on building A-player teams. You’ll sometimes see this sentiment attributed to other gurus or even to the old “hire for attitude, train for skill” adage, but Tracy really codified and popularized it in the modern business context.

Attribution Summary

Context	Attributes
Author	Brian Tracy (375)
Source Type	Book (4571)
Source/Book Name	Hire and Keep the Best People (56)
Origin Timeperiod	Contemporary (1712)
Original Language	English (4111)
Authenticity	Verified (4571)

Where is this quotation located?

Quotation	When you hire, look for attitude first, skill second
Book Details	Publication Year/Date: 2001; ISBN: 978-1576751275; Last edition: 2001, Berrett-Koehler Publishers; Number of pages: 112.
Where is it?	Chapter: Hiring Criteria; Approximate page from 2001 edition

Context

Tracy wasn’t just throwing out a nice-sounding line. In the book, he’s talking about the immense, often hidden costs of a bad hire—the drain on morale, the lost productivity, the management time spent on firefighting. Framing attitude as the primary filter is his strategic solution to avoiding that massive overhead and building a team that’s not just skilled, but also cohesive and self-motivating.

Usage Examples

So how do you actually use this? It changes your interview questions. Instead of just grilling them on technical scenarios, you dive into behavioral questions. “Tell me about a time you failed and what you learned.” “Describe a project where you had to collaborate with a difficult teammate.” You’re listening for curiosity, accountability, and optimism. This isn’t just for HR managers; it’s for any team lead, startup founder, or department head building a unit that needs to be agile and innovative. You’re looking for the person you’d want in the trenches with you when things get tough, not just when they’re easy.

To whom it appeals?

Context	Attributes
Theme	Advice (751)
Audiences	entrepreneurs (1083), leaders (2916), managers (505), recruiters (37)
Usage Context/Scenario	corporate culture workshops (8), hiring coaching (1), interview training (5), management talks (1)

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Common questions

Question: Does this mean I should hire a completely unskilled person if they have a great attitude?
Answer: Not at all. It’s a priority, not an exclusion. You look for the minimum viable skill set to do the job, but among candidates who meet that bar, you let attitude be the deciding factor.

Question: How can you accurately assess attitude in a short interview?
Answer: It’s tough, but you get better with practice. Use situational and behavioral questions. Pay attention to how they talk about past colleagues and challenges. Reference checks are also gold for this—ask past employers specifically about the candidate’s teamwork and resilience.

Question: What if I’m in a highly technical field like software engineering or medicine?
Answer: It’s even *more* critical. In fast-moving technical fields, today’s skills are obsolete tomorrow. You need people with the attitude and aptitude to continuously learn. A brilliant coder who refuses to adapt to new frameworks is a liability.