The global workforce is experiencing a unique period. The ongoing challenges of the pandemic on organisations and their teams have tested our ability to withstand uncertainty and disruption, adapt to change, and move forward past setbacks. As a result, as we slowly begin to emerge from what we hope is the worst of the pandemic, many workers are experiencing a collective fatigue and finding themselves on the brink of burnout.
For employers, this means a heightened risk of employee stress, overwhelm and disengagement, as well as lowered performance and productivity, and ultimately, higher rates of staff turnover – a real concern for organisations in a time where workers are harder than ever to find. The circumstances have well and truly given new meaning to the concept of resilience, and shown people how difficult, if not impossible, it is to thrive without it.
As we optimistically look beyond the pandemic, the first challenge for leaders is to enable the recovery of the organisation and its people. A resilient, agile, and mentally healthy workforce is paramount when it comes to withstanding future disruption and change, and while it’s important to rebuild and maintain resilience within your current team, it’s equally as important to look for resilience in new talent.
What it means to hire for resilience
Resilience is often seen as the ability to “bounce back” from setbacks and challenges. But particularly in the context of the workplace, resilience is broader than the survival component of “bouncing back” – it’s the ability to build and maintain connections with others, having a sense of purpose, displaying courage, and showing creative and innovate thinking. For organisations focused on their recovery, it’s important to identify whether a potential recruit is resilient – a skill that will translate to their work performance, how they show up every day, and what they can bring to the team.
Whether it’s on a CV or in an interview setting, job applicants will put their best selves forward in order to achieve their goal of landing a job offer. While candidates speaking to their achievements, beneficial skills, and positive attributes is useful for employers, it will often not identify whether the candidate is resilient.
Resilience is a skill that is often best observed when facing a stressful or challenging situation. When describing times where work ran smoothly during a job interview, employers won’t often see how the candidate handles difficult situations. To hire for resilience, recruiters must know how to ask the right questions and be creative with their recruitment processes.
Interview questions to identify resilience
One approach to identity resilience in a job applicant is to ask targeted and open-ended questions that focus on their response to challenges. A common interview question such as “Name a time you dealt with a challenge at work” is a good starting point. But the difficulty with this question is that candidates tend to prepare answers based on positive examples, such as a work project that was challenging at times but ultimately highly successful. To identify resilience and gain insight into the applicant’s ability to navigate challenges, wording this question in a different way and asking follow-up questions is key.
For example: “Describe a time where things at work have come undone. How did you react to this situation at the time? What did you do to resolve it? How did you move on from this challenge? What did you learn from it?”
These questions dig deeper into the candidate’s experience to provide a better picture of their level of resilience. Asking an candidate to explain their reaction to the situation and how they resolved it helps to identify how they respond to challenges and “bounce back” from setbacks. Being able to learn and move on from a negative experience is an important element of resilience, as is the candidate’s self-awareness and overall outlook on the negative experience itself.
Questions like these can also help identify other components of resilience, including courage, empathy, creativity, compassion, and social connection, which are often listed as soft skills. When it comes to soft skills, however, it’s important to ensure the candidate is being authentic.
Rather than simply asking a candidate to list their soft skills, ask more direct questions about their workplace relationships, communication skills, or a time they’ve used empathy or compassion at work. Their answers will give insight into their ability to connect with others and show compassion, and ultimately identify their level of resilience.
Creative recruitment processes
Outside of a job interview, there are many ways to determine if a potential recruit is resilient. Practical tasks, such as role-play scenarios, are useful ways to see how the candidate would respond to real life situations. Role-play scenarios can show the candidate’s ability to build trusting relationships, practice compassion, and solve problems with innovative thinking. When using this technique throughout recruitment, stick with realistic examples that are within the scope of the role the job applicant has applied for.
An example of a scenario question to identify resilience is to ask the candidate to play the role of a team member who is not meeting their targets. Ask the candidate how they would perceive and respond to this situation. The candidate’s ability to “bounce back” and problem solve, and their outlook on challenging situations will be visible in their answer.
Personality testing, psychometric testing, and resilience testing are all creative recruitment processes that support organisations when it comes to hiring for resilience. These forms of testing allow organisations to understand who the candidate is as a person, how they solve problems, and their response to setbacks.
The broad definition of resilience must be kept in the forefront of employer’s minds when hiring for resilience. With organisations looking to recover from the past two years, and a collective fatigue affecting the workforce, hiring resilient workers is more important than ever. When workers are in a place of resilient energy, they are innovative and creative, and bring their best, full selves to work. In this place of resilience, people operate with purpose in all areas of their life – an energy that is beneficial for both work outputs and team culture.
Stuart Taylor is the Chief Executive Officer and founder of Springfox. Since 2003, Stuart has engaged and inspired more than 20,000 people globally through his workshops, keynotes and conference presentations.
A diagnosis of brain cancer in 2002 led Stuart on a personal journey back to health. Stuart became a strong advocate for incorporating cultural practices into organisations to nurture well-being. In 2003 he founded The Resilience Institute in Australia – now Springfox. His diversity of qualifications in psychology, finance, IT and aeronautical engineering bring a breadth of credibility and perspective to client situations. His purpose is to help people and organisations shift into a more compassionate space in order to reach sustainable high performance.