Hire for Outcomes and Habits, Not Skills

Hiring checklists fail when they screen for skills and experience rather than for the ability to drive outcomes.

That’s the difference between screening for “managerial skills” and screening for “can lead our sales team to achieve this outcome this year and this other outcome next year.”

This is particularly true when roles require not only knowing what must be done, but also doing it day after day, even when it is uncomfortable, urgent, or based on incomplete information.

Outcome-focused hiring checklists

A key change that will improve your hiring almost immediately is to switch job descriptions from what the ideal candidate must know to what outcomes the ideal candidate must be able to achieve (and what situations they must be able to navigate).

Poor job descriptions focus on skills, certifications, and experience. It’s not that these should not be part of a job description. It’s that they are table stakes. Most of the interview process should focus on whether candidates have the ability to use their skills, certifications, and experience to drive outcomes.

Screen for the hard-to-teach

Skills are usually the most learnable part of the job. With enough study and a few months, a motivated person can acquire most product or tool knowledge. That is why skills often predict so little: if almost any competent person can learn them, they cannot separate the candidate who will succeed from the one who will not.

What separates them is what cannot be easily taught: for example, how they behave when the work gets uncomfortable. You want salespeople who keep making calls even when they are low on energy, and managers who do not procrastinate hard conversations.

Hire for habits, not skills

Imagine you spot a great candidate, except they are lacking a key habit. It is tempting to assume you will be able to coach the missing habit once they start. However, this is often not the case. As I show in my essay on incentives and habits, incentives are amplifiers of existing habits, but cannot substitute for them. A bonus motivates a senior salesperson who has already demonstrated an ability to sell, but does little for someone who has never built that habit.

Hire for the outcome, then over-index on the hardest task

First, in the job description, instead of writing “must know X, Y, and Z,” write “must be able to drive outcome A and successfully navigate situations B and C.”

Then, over-index on the single hardest task of the role. Every role has one disproportionately hard task, and it is usually where the outcome is won or lost. For a technical salesperson, the hard part is not the technical knowledge. It is handling rejection, asking directly, and putting up the volume of attempts the numbers require. The technical knowledge is learnable through study, whereas the required habits are rarer and much harder to teach.

Hire the person who is strong at the hardest task, even if they are only average at the easy ones. The easy ones, by definition, can be built later.