Perhaps you employed someone and you later found that they don't quite meet the role requirements; they somehow don't fit. Or, you moved someone into a new role and they just didn't perform as well as they used to. Here's how to avoid such mismatch between the person and the job.

In the UK, we get the idea that our staff need to be technically trained, but we have little or no understanding that the job of 'manager' is neither innate nor obvious. It can't just be learned by trial and error. Simply, we don't train our managers and, as a nation, this lack of management training is killing us. Here's what to do.

On BBC Radio 4, Margaret Heffernan, the writer and entrepreneur, mounts an attack on the idea that talent is a good predictor of future performance - and hence it should not be used in recruitment selection. Her article is a good listen but a bit muddled. Here we clarify and suggest that talent is not the useless thing that Margaret Heffernan suggests, but a multi-dimensional set of characteristics about each candidate that need to be known before making a job offer.

Hiring managers are faced with young people seeking apprenticeships and employment without previous experience in the mainstream workplace. So what should hiring managers do to judge which young person will perform well in the role? Since vocational identity predicts performance, hiring managers should listen to the young person's story.

So what jobs to recruit to next? Increasing staff numbers is a scary prospect. No manager wants to get it wrong. You can't guess. You've no precedent. You can't ask a friend because all firms are different. You must model the company and evaluate each option for its effect on the company and it's KPIs. And it becomes all the more difficult when considering indirect roles like sales people, marketers and other support staff. They could drive the firm to light speed. It's always a tough call.

The UK’s academic institutions are not turning out enough software engineers. Demand dramatically exceeds supply. This exemplifies the problem in many domains in the UK. So how do hiring managers find specialists? The key thing is to hire those with the right profile to contribute and learn. Profiling of personal characteristics and search for those must take precedence over high-level statements like ‘must be proficient in coding in MS.NET’. Coding and other specialist competencies can be learned.