When it’s time to look for a job, you know that there are certain things that an employer is looking for. However, what a lot of prospective employees forget is that there are also some qualities and traits that employers absolutely do NOT want to see. If you want to make sure you get hired, you’ve got to be just as good at showing employees you don’t have what they DON’T want to take, in addition to having what they want. Here are a few of the bigger traits.
Inconsistency
This is especially frustrating to employers because it adds such a degree of unpredictability, which can make planning extremely difficult. You may be get along brilliantly with coworkers, inspiring them to greater heights, only to drag everyone down the next day with surliness and snappish irritability. Or you may do amazing work that completely justifies to everyone why you were hired, only to turn around the next week and turn in substandard results that leave everyone baffled.
When you are inconsistent, you are unreliable. And in a working, professional world where people need to count on getting the kind of results they want every time, being inconsistent—regardless of how brilliant you may be—will severely hurt your chances of being considered a good, long term hire.
Greed
Ambition is a trait that everyone wants to see in an employee. There’s nothing more gratifying than to see an employee that is motivated because he or she wants more. However, when ambition turns to greed, things can take a dive very quickly. If you’re only motivated to work by material reward, don’t care about teamwork, or even actively sabotage the efforts of others in order to gain more reward for yourself, this is a fast track to not getting hired.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting a reward for your efforts, but employers want to see people who are committed to the work because they want to do good work. Or they want to elevate the team. If the first and only consideration is “my reward first above all others,” this makes a hire extremely difficult to trust and rely on, especially in crisis situations where the only “reward” may be staying out of trouble rather than advanced, material gain.
Apathy
People that are just in it for the paycheck and have no interest in doing anything beyond the absolute minimum to stay out of trouble may be functional employees, but hardly inspirational. An apathetic employee is easy to spot since the lack of enthusiasm for anything—even hiding that lack—makes itself plainly obvious.
Employers want to hire someone that actually cares. A skilled worker with no motivation to better him or herself professionally, or elevate the work of the company is, in the long term, less useful than an inexperienced but incredibly passionate trainee with high hopes for the future. Just getting by is a recipe for mediocrity, not success, and apathetic people will never deliver excellence, because to them, it’s not worth the effort.
