Hire for Traits, Not Skills

Anyone can learn Excel. Almost anyone can be taught to build a deck, run a meeting, or read a P&L. Those are skills, and skills are teachable, trainable, and increasingly temporary.

Traits are something else entirely. And on Episode 15 of Vantage Point, Eli Amdur makes the case that traits, not skills, will decide who ends up in the driver’s seat for the rest of the 21st century.

The argument has an unsettling arithmetic behind it. The superstar you hire today could be your CEO by 2050. That CEO will, in turn, hire the CEO who leads your company into 2099 and beyond. Which puts you, sitting in a conference room reviewing résumés this afternoon, exactly two steps away from the 22nd century. Hiring is not an administrative function. It is the longest-range decision most organizations ever make, and most of them make it on the basis of whichever software package the candidate happened to learn last year.

The Most Fundamental Change Will Not Be Technology

If the first 25 years of this century are any indication, Eli argues, the most fundamental change you will make to your business will not be technology, products, markets, or supply chains. It will be the way you hire and the type of people you hire. And if you are on the other side of the desk, it will be the type of person you are as a candidate.

That claim lands harder when you consider what change itself has become. Change has three intangible dimensions: nature, meaning who creates it; pace, meaning how fast it happens; and scope, meaning how far it reaches. All three are accelerating at once. You cannot hire a static skill set into a moving target and call it a strategy.

Here is the pop quiz Eli uses to make the point. What is the largest population in the world? Not China. Not India. Facebook, with billions of daily users across Meta’s apps. Who, Mark Zuckerberg included, would have predicted that? And note what came with it: a company that surely hired the smartest people it could find, whose founder now spends time testifying before Congress on ethics and privacy. Mastering all the skills in the world is no longer enough.

We still hire mostly left-brain thinkers, the analysts and the sequencers and the spreadsheet people. Daniel H. Pink, in A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, tells us the keys to the kingdom have changed hands. Most hiring processes have not been told.

Where the Research Started

This is not a hunch that arrived last Tuesday. In 2005, the New Jersey Association of Colleges and Employers asked Eli a reasonable-sounding question: what skills do students need for their first jobs?

He went out and surveyed leaders across business, the sciences, government and law, arts and entertainment, sports, religion, education, and the nonprofit world. Somewhere in that process came the revelation that reframed the whole assignment. The real responsibility was not to prepare people for a first job. It was to think about entire careers, then 45 years long and longer now. The work became a presentation he delivered all over: The World in 2050.

By 2010, working with the worldwide HR team of a global manufacturer, the question had sharpened to its final form. Is it skills we are after? Skill sets? Or something more fundamental, like traits?

The 21 Traits, in Four Categories

The research produced twenty traits, grouped in four categories. A twenty-first arrived later, and arrived so naturally that it may be the most important of all.

Dimension. Multi-talented. Broadly educated. Keenly aware. This is the category that argues against the narrow specialist as a default hire.

Resolve. Determined, persistent, committed, purpose-driven, decisive, planned and prepared, accountable to oneself first and to others second, autonomous and independent. Note the order in that accountability clause. It is deliberate.

Character. Optimistic. Empathetic. Democratic in character structure. A team leader with potential for more. Problem-centered outside of self. And a clear, efficient perception of reality, one that changes every Monday morning, which is why the question worth asking yourself on a regular schedule is: what business am I in now?

Creative dissatisfaction. Curious. Creative. Willing to think. Comfortable with ambiguity, uncertainty, and change. Possessed of a non-hostile sense of humor. Creative dissatisfaction is the engine trait, the refusal to accept that the current arrangement is the best available one.

Then the twenty-first: inductive thinking. The ability to figure things out as they happen will surpass in importance the capacity to know stuff. Put plainly, readiness is more important than knowledge. And readiness demands a different way of hiring, because you cannot detect it with a checklist.

Eli walks through all 21 with examples and asides in the episode. It is worth the 22 minutes.

Three Aphorisms Worth Keeping

The episode includes three of Eli’s aphorisms, each of which earns its place in a hiring conversation.

“Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.”

“Price, quality, speed: select any two. You can never get all three.”

“Some things in life are no more complicated than this: get up, dress up, show up.”

The third one is the sleeper. For all the talk of traits, a great many careers still turn on the willingness to be present and prepared.

From Great Minds

Benjamin Franklin: “In wine there is truth, in beer there is freedom, and in water there is bacteria.”

Franklin’s line is funnier than it is trivial. People knew to give the sick beer instead of water thousands of years before anyone could see bacteria through a microscope. They did not have the knowledge. They had the readiness to observe, infer, and act. That is inductive thinking, long before the word became a hiring criterion.

What If?

What if there had been no Thomas Paine? Ask a room of a hundred people who he was and most hands would stay down, yet any list of the ten most important people of the Revolutionary period has to include him. An immigrant from England and an exceptional thinker and writer, he was a pamphleteer. We don’t have pamphleteers anymore; we have podcasters, which is pretty much the same thing. “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country.” His pamphlets sold in numbers that were astonishing for the size of the colonies. Somebody was going to do it? Stuff that good doesn’t go to just somebody. As the saying from the period has it: without the pen of Thomas Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain. That is one hell of a what-if.

Paine is the case study hiding inside the argument. No credential, no institutional position, no skill set anyone was recruiting for. What he had were traits: dimension, resolve, and a very large helping of creative dissatisfaction.

Listen

• 🎧 Episode page: https://eliamdur.com/traits-not-skills/
• 🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/vantage-point-with-eli-amdur/id1896926911
• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033yuddGiSOzbmEk75HLUl
• 🎧 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@VantagePoint-Podcast
• 📬 Email list and site: https://eliamdur.com/

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Vantage Point – the podcast for critical thinkers. We’re not political, just critical.

This episode is supported by Vantage Point’s Executive Sponsor, Stephen Bozer, SVP of Human Health at Flavine. Also supported by Major Sponsor Bergen Volunteers, neighbors serving neighbors across 70 towns in Bergen County since 1966. Also supported by Major Sponsor Kardam Consulting, strategic counsel for the business of making medicine.