Monologue: Different qualities you need to achieve a job, experience and qualifications...

Good afternoon. I've been asked to talk about the needed qualities to achieve a job.

Finding a job it's a challenge here in Spain. Due to the economic crisis there are lots of people seeking for a job but there are few available jobs. As a result the companies have become more and more demanding when choosing a new employee.

There are many things that can be taken into account when evaluating an applicant:

- Formal qualifications like  degrees, languages and so on.
- Experience in similar jobs to the one which is offered by the company.
- Ability to take an active role as part of a team.
- Intelligence.
- Good skills in communication.
- Aptitude to adapt and learn quickly.
- Others: honesty, hard working, discipline, punctuality, and so on.

It is often believed that applicants who have an academic degree and experience should be hired before than others who lack formal qualification because they are considered more competent to cope with workload. It is thought they are good at making decisions, hard-working people, good team player and so on.

However, many human resources departments consider that they should pay more attention to the potential employees' abilities like the intelligence or their communication skills which could be important when occupying managerial jobs for instance. Or to their physical strength if the job is work is manual.

To sum up, for these companies formal qualifications do not prove capability whereas personal skills do.

In my view, when choosing a new worker, a company should evaluate different aspects depending on the features of the offered job. Besides in the assessment of the applicants, formal qualifications, experience, personality and abilities should be considered in order to hire the best candidate.