Part 1: Skills vs Traits in Hiring: 5 Ways to Balance Performance and Potential
Table of Contents
The talent pool in London and Cambridge is enormous, but not every strong CV makes a great accountant, engineer or social media manager. Effective hiring is a competitive advantage, and the worst hires come from bad hiring processes. But what is better?
This article focuses in skills vs traits: Skills (competencies) are the knowledge and behaviours needed for a role. Traits are innate characteristics like personality and natural. The best is to mix them: skills-based hiring for today, traits for long-term potential.
Skills vs traits: Skills
They are the observable knowledge and behaviours required for the role (e.g., problem-solving, communication, teamwork, leadership). They can be learnt, trained, and assessed.
- Pros: they are objective, reduce bias and are very useful in fast-changing sectors where practical skills matter more than a specific degree or past role.
- Cons: they focus too much on visible, past actions, so it can be more difficult to assess the innate future potential.
Skills vs Traits: Traits
They are more stable intrinsic characteristics. For example, being a “people person”, determined or curious. They shape how a person learns, reacts and evolves across contexts.
- Pros: Can help spot candidates who will be a great long-term fit.
- Cons: it is harder to measure them objectively, assessing them can lead to bias if not carefully done. They require valid psychometric tools and expert interviews to be measured correctly. They are harder to teach.
The Best Hiring Process
Traits are who you are; skills are what you do. They’re complementary, not opposites. Traits often manifest through skills. For example: a collaborative person (trait) will demonstrate teamwork skills (competency).
That is why a balanced approach is best. Starting with a skills or competency framework to ensure the candidate has the needed knowledge to perform; and then using traits to assess their potential for growth and learning capacity.
But How Does This Hiring Process Work?
1) Define 6–8 role-critical competencies
The first step is to define the skills needed to be successful in the role. You can do this by reviewing the job description or looking at reality: What are the challenges they will face in their day-to-day? What skills will the person need to address them? A Salesperson, a Lab Assistant and an IT Support Analyst will all need different skills. Having that clear will help be precise in our selection. Don’t select too many, 6 to 8 is more than enough.
2) Design assessments for each competency
Use structured interviews, role-plays or dynamic activities to gather evidence. Score with a 1–5 anchored rubric that describe what each level looks like. (E.g., If you are trying to assess teamwork, design tasks that get the candidates to collaborate on something together).
3) Do competency-based interviews
Train managers to run competency-based interviews that test skills:
- Ask the candidate competency-based questions to assess ways of behaving: to ‘explain’, ‘tell’, or ‘describe’ their own experiences. E.g., Can you tell me about a time you had to make a difficult decision at work?; Walk me through the last time you did a project in a group; Tell me about the last time you had a problem during the service, what did you do?
- Many candidates will answer with the STAR method. Explaining the Situation, Task, Action and Result. Remember to ask follow-up questions to get into more detail: What results did that action or event have? Why did you make that decision?
- Give constructive feedback even if the candidate is not successful. This will help build your brand’s reputation as an employer and will ultimately help you attract valuable talent.
Remember to score answers based on behavioural signs (actions, decisions, outcomes) instead of confidence or charm.
4) Layer in a few job-relevant traits
Select trait that will probably lead to success in your context (e.g., service orientation, stress tolerance, openness to new experiences). Assess via valid psychometric tests. E.g., Personality inventories like the: NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-3), which measure traits of personality in non-clinical settings.
Do not use these results as your only source of information to decide. Treat traits as hypotheses, not decision criteria: only value them when evidenced through behaviour in the interview, exercises or past actions. Used correctly, traits might help you break ties when you encounter two similarly skilled candidates.
5) Decide with a number, not gut feel
Register your results. Use anchored rating scales tied to the indicators (e.g., 1–5 with examples for each level would look like). 1–2: vague/irrelevant/incorrect, 3: relevant example; clear actions, 4: complex context; measurable outcome, 5: high difficulty; good result.
Skills vs Traits in Hiring
Competency-based hiring puts evidence first: what someone can actually do, not just what’s on their CV. Many employers who use it report shorter time spent during hiring and lower costs, alongside better role match, diversity and inclusion and outcomes (E.g. 34% see higher engagement and 22% report lower turnover) 1. Combining that with trait-informed hiring (job-relevant personality dispositions such as conscientiousness, curiosity or stress tolerance), will get your hiring stronger. So it is not skills vs traits after all, they are complementary. Skills prove performance today; but traits on the other side can signal potential for tomorrow. Together, they make hiring more effective, reducing staff turnover, and improving engagement and morale.
At Clement Mind, we provide evidence-based support for recruitment processes from the psychological point of view.
