Hiring Wisdom: Are You Hiring For Talent, or For Skills and Experience?


Human knowledge is now doubling every 12 months. This means that 50 percent of what you now know will be out of date in a year.
Just to bring it home, let’s imagine you need open heart surgery. How would you like to have it performed by someone who hadn’t learned anything new about the procedure in the past 48 months?
For this very reason, it is no longer about hiring people for their skills and/or experience. Today, it’s all about hiring talent.
So, what’s the difference?
A skill is the ability to do a particular task, like the ability to drive a truck, design a building, or fly a plane. Talent, on the other hand, is the ability to learn new skills and/or dramatically improve upon an existing skill set.
Because of the many rapid changes in the workplace and technology, hiring a skill today is only going to solve a problem in the short run. When you hire talent, those people will be able to move the organization to the next level because they can quickly learn and apply new knowledge. (While you may want to hire a computer programmer who knows a specific language, you would be better off hiring a programmer who has the ability to learn and apply new languages.)
Here are a few suggested interview questions that explore an applicant’s talents:
When Talent is in the ring versus Experience and/or Skills, my money’s on Talent every time.
This originally appeared in Humetrics April 2016 Hiring Hints newsletter.