I've hired a lot of people. And the ones I got wrong had one thing in common: they were extremely good at something that stopped mattering.
The ones I got right had one thing in common too. They asked better questions than I did.
What's the pattern?
For most of the industrial century, hiring for skills made sense. The skill lasted. A machinist in 1950 was a machinist in 1980. Schools were built as factories for those skills, which I write about in Radical Next: humans in, worker bees out.
Then skills started expiring. The technical stack I built my first company on in 2010 is gone. The tools I used at my third are quaint. If you hired me for what I knew in either year, you'd have a problem by the next.
What didn't expire was the wanting to know. The four skills I keep coming back to are creativity, critical thinking, discourse, and discernment. Not one of them is a tool. Every one of them is a way of approaching a tool you haven't seen yet.
Curiosity is the engine behind all four. And you can see it in an interview in about ten minutes, if you're looking.
What should leaders do now?
So, three things.
Ask what they taught themselves lately. Not a course. Something they went after because they couldn't stand not knowing. The answer is worth more than the resume.
Watch for questions. A candidate who asks nothing about the actual work is telling you something. One who asks something you hadn't thought of is telling you more.
And hire for the next tool, not the current one. Any skill you can name today, you can also teach in a month. Curiosity you can't teach in a year.
Skills get you through this year. Curiosity gets you through the next ten. Hire for the decade.
When did someone last ask you a question in an interview that you couldn't answer?
Related: Should you unlearn faster than you learn?
- Sam Rad, Radical Next (2025), Knowledge and Education chapter, on essential human skills.
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