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Character vs Skills

"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” –Confucius

“Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” –Theodore Roosevelt

"Hire character.  Train skill.” –Peter Schutz

Have you ever notice how the recruitment process being done nowadays?

The first screening is the employer will judging you from your resume, cover letter and GPA

The second screening is they will test your employability skills

The next test is group interview and the last test is direct interview with the vendor

Through this process, skills definitely come first before the character and ethic. Character and ethics become the last or non existent factors to be considered in. No wonder people are so critical and cut throat at work or at school to be recognised for their skills. And we are wonder how the society become so corrupted? 

Hiring competent people with corrupted morale will only bring damage to the society. Low morale people is insider threats for the Governments and the businesses. People who had good character and high ethics would never stand chance and always be in the background. It does not matter how much they love the job and their willingness to learn hard for their dream job, they might not be able to pass the first screening.

Resume and cover letter builders are good business these days. This business guaranteed income come from their big consumer base, the lazy and the desperate. So part of the first screening can be done easily and instantly by money, but how about the GPA? 

The university or any higher education institutions should be all about integrity and independent. But universities nowadays running more like businesses than as the educational institutions through all the ratings involved, research partnerships, the number of international students enrolled, and all the global expansion. I have seen once and have heard many, on how students are able to buy the mark they want from their tutor or lecturer, or they hiring someone to do their assignments, buy exam test, etc. In my observation people with the high GPA might only have the skills and knowledge but lack on the wisdom and emphaty. People who think they are smart would only hear and believe in themselves, and thats how the generation of ignorant and entitled was born. To conclude, the high GPA can be attain either by the hard work or by money. 

So from the first screening, the employer will have the instant, ignorant, lazy, ambitious, desperate, narcissist, high skills, competent type of candidates. 

If the second screening exist, this part is where the company assess the candidates with a bunch of written questions, only people who has the employability skills will pass this stage. Why direct interview is the last stage in many of recruitment process, this is because this step can be very costly and time consuming especially if the vendor has received hundred or thousand of job applications.

The employer should invest in people. It is easier to train skills and harder to find good character employees. How good it is if every government and the company executives are all good character people, the world peace and sustainability might not be too far fetched. However, it's no secret that people with good character and ethics are always the first one to be persecuted when they came to the lime lights. Therefore, the good people often hiding in the background.

However, we ought to not feel despair with the world, treat this wickedness as our opportunity to grow even more as human being, to be different, to be the corner stone. Regardless what the state of our world now, let me close this blog with one of the most epic speech ever made.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed — we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

“Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.”

Martin Luther King 

-28 August 1963-

God bless us all 😘

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