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So why does a company hire a person?

It isn’t to have more people around. The goal of any company isn’t to rack up its number of employees. In fact, the goal of most companies is generally the exact opposite to that, to have the fewest employees possible it needs to be successful.

Less and less do companies hire because they need a very specific task done. In the days of old, companies would hire someone to do the same task over and over again, like hammering the same nail to connect the same two parts all day long. Most of those jobs now are automated, as employers have found cheaper and often more productive alternatives to humans for that work.

No, to understand why employers hire, instead of just using a piece of software or a robot, one first has to understand the unique value proposition a human has. What is it? Well, really it has everything to do with our brain, and our unique ability to conjure up creative solutions to complex problems.

An employer hires a person because their unique value proposition, i.e. generally their ability to think, fixes a business problem they face and there are no other cheaper or more effective alternatives.

For example, a company hires a marketer because they face a business problem: a lack of customers. The marketer’s job is to increase the amount of customers anyway they can, whether it be through email marketing, social media, publicity stunts, etc. The marketer’s job is to constantly solve a problem – in this case getting more customers – that cannot be solved by a machine.

Because most of the jobs that require minimal thought have become or soon will become automated, the jobs that are left require someone who is creative, can learn quickly and is always willing to adapt to new problems thrown their way. So the question therein lies for the employer: how do you figure out who those people are?

The answer is not to look at a pile of resumes and select the two or three best to bring in for an interview. The answer is to screen all candidates through an interview, perhaps best done using a program like VoiceGlance, and ask them challenging questions that reveal those candidates’ line-of-thinking. With that information, companies can discover the employees they really want – the problem solvers – who will lead them to success.