Mark Murphy is the author Hiringfor Attitude, as well as the bestsellersHundredPercenters and HARD Goals. The founder andCEO ofLeadership IQ, atop-rated provider of cutting-edge research and leadershiptraining, Mark has personally provided guidance to more than100,000 leaders from virtually every industry and half the Fortune500. His public leadership seminars, custom corporate training, andonline training programs have yielded remarkable results forcompanies including Microsoft, IBM,GE, MasterCard, Merck, AstraZeneca,MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Johns Hopkins.

In this interview, Mark talks about why so many new hires failso quickly, why soft skills are so important now, how the hiringlandscape is changing, and more.

Why do so many fail within the first 18 months of takinga job?

When our research tracked 20,000 new hires, 46% of them failedwithin 18 months. But even more surprising than the failure rate,was that when new hires failed, 89% of the time it was forattitudinal reasons and only 11% of the time for a lack of skill.The attitudinal deficits that doomed these failed hires included alack of coachability, low levels of emotional intelligence,motivation and temperament.

Are technical and soft skills less important thanattitude? Why?

It's not that technical skills aren't important, but they'remuch easier to assess (that's why attitude, not skills, is the toppredictor of a new hire's success or failure). Virtually every job(from neurosurgeon to engineer to cashier) has tests that canassess technical proficiency. But what those tests don't assess isattitude; whether a candidate is motivated to learn new skills,think innovatively, cope with failure, assimilate feedback andcoaching, collaborate with teammates, and so forth.

Soft skills are the capabilities that attitude can enhance orundermine. For example, a newly hired executive may have theintelligence, business experience and financial acumen to fit wellin a new role. But if that same executive has an authoritarian,hard-driving style, and they're being hired into a social culturewhere happiness and camaraderie are paramount, that combination isunlikely to work. Additionally, many training programs havedemonstrated success with increasing and improvingskills—especially on the technical side. But these same programsare notoriously weak when it comes to creating attitudinal change.As Herb Kelleher, former Southwest Airlines CEO used to say, “wecan change skill levels through training, but we can't changeattitude.” Read the complete Forbes blog interview.