What do you value more in a candidate: education, experience and/or attitude?

Not a straighforward question, Steve - in many ways it's all three and will to a great extent depend on the nature of the role you are looking to fill. If it's a software developer vacancy for example then education and experience are above behaviours and attitude. In other roles qualifications may be a compliance need and therefore essential.

But if pushed and we were talking about a generalist/management role, I would rank in order of importance:

- Attitude and Behaviours (how they approach the role and how they undertake it)
- Experience (evidence of performing in a similar role, or a role that would be a good foundation)
- Paper qualifications

Hi Steve

I would agree with the ranking Robert has given these 3 things.

I am a "millennial" or "Gen Y" (as they like to label us) who when looking at options for leaving school was more or less constantly told by my teachers "if you want to get a good job you must go to university" or "oh you'll need a degree if you want to do that" - this of course resulted in myself and many of my friends opting to go to university after college to study our various choices, and by the time we graduated the country was in the middle of a recession and we found that our degrees were more or less completely pointless in trying to get a job. An extreme example yes, but what got myself and my friends into work was the fact that we were willing to work and learn.

I think that education is of course important and in some roles a necessity (I wouldn't want to see a doctor who had never studied medicine and the human body for example) but for most roles a good attitude will definitely take first priority for me closely followed by experience.

Thanks for sharing Steve - an interesting read and a shame that they have had to report on the gender and race pay gap.

I would rank them in the same order as Robert (attitude, experience then qualifications).

I agree with the other answers. While they're all important, attitude is the one element that is hardest to add if it isn't there to start with - your new starter can get more experience or qualifications (and with certain types of attitude may want to do both), but shifting their commitment or approach to their work would be much harder.

What is harder about this though is the potential for bias and subjectivity to influence recruitment decisions unfairly. Measuring "attitude" is much less objective, and we're all much more likely to make assumptions about attitudes based on our own.

As ever, it needs to be a mixture of things.

I completely agree. "Recruit for attitude and train for skill" has always been a pretty good mantra. In my own experience attitude is the hardest thing to try to change.

Working in a software company I mainly recruit software developers. For me personally, I value experience and attitude equally. From experience I have found that someone can finish uni with a 1st class honours which don't get me wrong is very impressive, however, that does not mean they are going to be the best software developer. Following the initial CV review, we ask all candidates to take part in a coding challenge and this is where I have seen people, who, on paper should be brilliant but haven't been able to complete the challenge or even come close to the answer. Attitude is also so important as we are a small globally distributed team. If someone doesn't have the right attitude it can have a huge impact on morale. I agree with Nina when she wrote that attitude is hardest to add if it is not there to start with.

If you have 100, or 150 candidates (not uncommon) then you will never see the attitude of 95% of them as they will be shortlisted out based on qualifications and/or experience....

My order of precedence is:

1. Mandatory qualifications. There are roles in businesses that simply cannot be undertaken without the bare minimum. Gas engineers have to be qualified gas engineers. Drivers have to have a driving licence. Directors have to have not been disqualified from being directors!

2. Experience. We are a small, FMCG business and can't always afford to waste time on someone getting up to speed.

3. Attitude. Can easily swap places with the previous. We would love to recruit more on attitude than experience, but it's hard to test at interview.

4. Everything else.

Agree strongly with Robey, and would include in «experience »

- proven application of necessary skills and knowledge »;
- a relevant context in which the experience has been obtained.