This article is from Salary.com and the title of this post is from them and NOT from me. They came up with $134,121 for stay at home moms and $85,876 for working moms (the “mom” portion of their efforts).

The breakdown of weekly jobs performed by mom are quite entertaining. I enjoyed the 3.5 hours per week of being a psychologist. Clever.

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Good article from vault.com titled Answering the Weaknesses Question. I want to take a different tact on this article’s main point. First, if you are using interviews as a second step qualifier in your hiring process, an article like this one ought to give you pause. The article is a deep analysis of strategies to answering an interview question many companies use today.

But back to the point – Jerry Houser illuminates a great truth which is the title of this post. His further comment is just as insightful, “Strengths and weakness are situational. You have to know how to read your environment and use or moderate your skills in context.”

I want to divert from the gist of the article to apply Mr. Houser’s comments to writing an effective employment ad. More specifically, an effective sales employment ad. We track many ads and consistently see skill descriptions that would take 3 different salespeople to complete.

• Must be a strong cold caller and offer superior customer service
• Outgoing personality with excellent attention to detail
• Driven self-starter with team mentality

None of these examples are egregious errors, but they present both sides of a strength. A strong cold caller tends to be less adept at customer service. Typically an outgoing personality does not have as much focus on details – their focus is on people. You get the point. Ads written in this manner create incredibly difficult hurdles for hiring. Prioritizing the critical needs of the position and then writing the ad allows for a better fit when assessing candidates for the position.

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This article from CareerJournal.com speaks to a common problem – good hires who are a bad fit for the position. There are many variables within a minimally structured hiring process. To simplify the equation, either the position was not clearly defined or, more likely, the employee’s skills, style and motivations were assumed or unknown during the hiring process.

From the article:

“Employers are well-schooled in how to eliminate jobs or fire poor performers. Yet they often don’t know what to do with people who are doing their work passably, or even better, but aren’t suited for the job, for reasons ranging from personal chemistry to mismatched skills.

In that gray area, employers often fumble, either keeping people on because they don’t know what else to do, or seeking evidence of poor performance — even when that isn’t the real issue.”

The real danger here is a subtle lowering of performance standards. This approach leads to accepting mediocrity which can dilute a high performance culture. The best solution is to use a reliable, repeatable hiring process that identifies the position’s needs and the candidate’s abilities.

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