There are only three things that matter when hiring people, in increasing order of importance:
- Who they are right now
- Their durable, persistent traits
- How well they can adapt
Who they are right now only matters with short time horizons. If you have a job that needs to be done relatively soon, you don’t want to pay a start-up cost. You also don’t care about the person in the long term, because your long term and their long term diverge. The longer you expect to employ them, the less this matters.
When you do have a long term in mind, there are two things that you want to balance. You want to know what their durable, persistent traits are: deep strengths, deep weaknesses, patterns, preferences, and so forth. While everyone has the capacity for change, few of us change completely, and some kinds of changes are much harder than others. You want to identify people whose durable, persistent traits are generally advantageous and operate at a meta-level, for instance work ethic, integrity, curiosity, and intelligence, and you want to maximize these traits.
Finally, and most importantly, you want adaptability. Over a long enough time horizon, adaptability becomes almost the only trait that matters. That’s because over that time, you can expect pretty much every hard skill to become obsolete and the demands for many soft skills to shift and mutate. You want people who are willing and able adapt to all of that change. But you don’t want them to be too adaptable. If the environment evolves to tolerate laziness, dishonesty, or complacency, you do not want them to adapt. You want them to resist the environment changing that way in the first place and fighting to reverse the change if it does happen. Unlike the meta traits describe above, adaptability has a sweet spot. The value of adaptability increases as adaptability increases but only to a point. After that, the value of adaptability diminishes, because it makes it possible to adapt in ways that may be beneficial in the short term but harmful in the long term. That’s why it’s important not just to have durable, persistent traits, but also for them to be the right ones.