Are you looking to hire a unicorn candidate?

As a recruitment consultant in Hong Kong, I often get some pretty interesting requests from employers. 

Everyone wants to hire the best candidates to join their company, but sometimes these requests can be unrealistic. Hiring managers, recruiters and employers in Hong Kong are always looking for the perfect employee to handle multiple tasks. For example, they want a candidate who has marketing experience, plus design skills, who is also good at analytics, has excellent interpersonal skills, speaks three languages, and so on.

Your ideal candidate might be too perfect and might not even exist in the candidate pool yet. So why don’t you create this person instead?

If it’s impossible to find a candidate that exactly meets your requirements, sometimes you might need to widen your expectations and realise that some of the skillsets may be transferable. It might be possible to hire an employee in Hong Kong who does not come with those skillsets but can be trained in order to be equipped with these skills after some time.

Transferable skills

Transferable skills are skills that you acquire and can be transferred to future employment settings. These are usually picked up over time and can be gained from life experience or previous employment. These skills might include things like interpersonal skills, communication skills, leadership skills and organisational skills, all of which, as well as many others, are incredibly valuable to employers, since they show what a candidate can bring to the role aside from professional skills.

For an employee, the more transferable skills they have, the more opportunity they will have to grow within the company as well as in their career in general. Meanwhile, from an employer’s point of view, it is much more cost effective and time efficient to hire an employee who can be trained with these skillsets, rather than waiting for the perfect candidate to come along, as chances are they might not! On top of this, transferable skills will also demonstrate that employees and employers alike are able to adapt to new changes and demands in the market.

The most desired transferable skills are communication, customer service and leadership skills. A good manager can motivate their team to achieve different goals by doing different tasks and thus develop these skills over time.

Scott Thomson

Managing Director, Links International

Tag: Recruitment Consultant unicorn candidate best candidates hiring managers Recruiters employers multiple tasks Interpersonal Skills communication skills leadership skills Organisational Skills skillsets