HOW IMPORTANT IS HUMAN CAPITAL?

Every Company invests. Many companies invest in only resources like computers, phones, company car's, workplace fixes, and infrastructure 'WOW' upgrades, all designed to increase profitability.

Very few companies invest in Human Capital. Sure companies provide domain knowledge training, e.g. training you how to do your job better and more efficiently, but very few focus on the Human Capital.

What is Human Capital? This is the innate ability the person has to bring your business/company forward, leveraging the soft or hard skills they posses. Every person has the skills for success built into them, its often just hidden deep inside of them. Some people are incredible at hard skills, but just don't know how to get the soft skills to move forward in their careers. Some people are incredible in 'soft skills' but lack the domain knowledge, 'hard skills', to move forward in one particular area.

The goal of any company is to create revenue. People create the revenue. People are an asset. People are often judged based on a series of skill sets on a resume, their accomplishments in the 'hard skill' area. I believe the ability of a person to add value to the company, to apply their skills, to 'sell' their skills provides a greater asset than any domain expertise.

For example, if you know how to design complex cloud based infrastructure solutions, but don't know how to 'explain' your knowledge, how good is that knowledge?

Personally, I believe there are two types of people, those who want to add value, and those who want to contribute to the goal of adding value. It is the 'value adders' that bring the company together by working with the 'value contributors'.

Successful companies need to bridge the gap between 'Value contributors' and 'Value adders'. This can be done by ensuring candidates have both the soft skills, and the hard skills. Resume selection often filters out candidates with great soft skills, in favor of those heavy on hard skills. There in lies the problem.

Candidate Screening is very important and if done properly can yield tremendous results. This can be difficult for an internal HR team as there are many candidates, not enough time to screen all candidates, and the only measurable qualification is the resume.

Consulting, or staffing agencies, are often focused on finding a 'person', a 'value contributor', but not a 'value adder' or a leader. Often the lack of expertise in either of those area's can hurt a consulting or staffing agencies ability to succeed in that area.

When choosing an external partner, or vendor, it is important to ensure they have the experience (preferable as a 'value adder') in the industry you are looking for. This will help to ensure you are finding the right candidates.

While internally hiring, once a candidate's resume passes the HR system filtering, a human resource representative should screen the candidate's soft skills, ability to communicate their knowledge, the candidates experience handling complicated problems, the candidates philosophy/experience working with and building teams, and the candidates overall phone etiquette.

I believe a candidate with great soft skills and average 'hard skills' will add more value in the long run to a company than a candidate with great 'hard skills' and average 'soft skills'. This is because the ability to work with people, leadership, team building skills are soft skills that can make up for a lack of hard skill. If a candidate is average in hard skills, but very good in soft skills, lets provide him the training he needs to move forward, this can often show results immediately.

How important is Human Capital to you?

Photos courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net