Different employment criteria

Recently I was multiple times shocked to hear how some people that I know decide on who to hire. It is about what language the person speaks, he/she has to have had many more years work experiences and diplomas so that the diplomas would have to have been studied for during early high school. Then I heard criteria about absolutely minor non-trivial things about why the person should or should not be hired. This is even because the person might be from a small town or has been to a certain school that the person is not being considered for a position. The whole thing was rather shocking. This is for an organisation of between 20 and 30 people.

From someone who employs over 300 people, I have heard the following advice:
Hire people with the right attitude and do not really worry about skills. He mentioned that if he just hired according to skills, that they left pretty soon after and then additional time was needed to hire and train yet again more people which turned out far more costly than training someone with hardly any skills. This was according to the motto: Skills can be acquired, attitude cannot and bad habits cannot really be removed once ingrained.