The Skills on Paper Are Not the Whole Story

They had every qualification on the list. Everyone.

The resume was immaculate. The experience aligned perfectly. The hiring manager was excited before the interview had even started. Six months later, that person was gone.

I have watched the opposite happen too. A candidate who ticked perhaps sixty percent of the technical requirements walk into a role and own it within three months. The difference was not on the resume.

When you write a position description, it is worth asking: how many of those requirements are genuinely non-negotiable? How many could be learned on the job by the right person? Most technical skills can be trained. What you cannot train is the person behind them.

The hiring managers I work with tell me consistently what they value right now: energy, curiosity, initiative, genuine team orientation, and the instinct to move toward a problem rather than away from it. These are the qualities that determine whether someone thrives. They are also the hardest things to see on a page.

But they are not hard to surface in a conversation,  if you ask the right questions.

A starting point:

Curiosity: “Tell me about something you taught yourself recently. What made you pursue it?”

Initiative: “Walk me through a time you acted on a problem before anyone asked you to.”

Team orientation: “A colleague was struggling. What did you do?” Then: “Not the team – you specifically.”

Problem-solving: “Tell me about a time you did not have all the information you needed but had to make a call anyway. What happened?”

These are behavioural questions. You cannot rehearse your way through them with a polished story. The answers reveal how someone actually thinks, not how well they have prepared.

A candidate with sixty percent of the technical skills and all the above is not a risk. The skills gap is a training plan.

Stop screening people out on paper before you have had the chance to discover what they are made of.

The human qualities are who they are. Everything else is learnable.