After completing hundreds of successful executive searches, we’ve seen a particular kind of “aha” moment happen time and again. When given the opportunity to demonstrate their skills in relevant business contexts, the candidate with the least familiar elements on their resume often proves to bring the most value to the team.

It’s the good surprises in hiring that tell you you’re doing something right.

Traditional hiring practices favor candidates with easy confidence, familiar career paths, or any number of attributes people mistakenly equate with job success, filtering out less conventional candidates. But a competency-driven approach levels the playing field and allows these “aha” moments to emerge.

When teams have a wide range of perspectives to draw from, they work harder and smarter—that’s what drives business results. And that’s precisely what we emphasize in the search process.

Learn more about the link between diversity, team performance, and a skills-based approach in our Case for Competency-Driven Hiring.

“Diverse perspectives are proven to make teams stronger, but traditional hiring practices methodically eliminate them, leading to an empty exercise that lacks valuable insights. You want the unexpected to happen in hiring.”

— Staffing Advisors President Bob Corlett

Where Traditional Hiring Goes Wrong

It may not be intentional, but traditional hiring practices limit your potential to discover exceptional talent. And it compounds at each step of the process. Here’s how:

  • Job descriptions are usually developed by observing the most recent person in the role or borrowing from similar job postings. But the actual challenges of the position are often quite different.
  • Because the job description is inaccurate or vague, candidates who may or may not be qualified submit resumes without a real understanding of the work.
  • Lacking experience with skills-based interviewing, hiring teams default to scanning resumes for requirements like degrees and years of experience, overlooking candidates who have the right skills but took less familiar career paths. This both narrows and homogenizes the candidate pool.
  • Interviews typically lack appropriate structure, and discussions veer into finding common ground with candidates. Job performance expectations are rarely tested in a data-based, measurable way.
  • Post-interview debriefs with the team tend to focus on personal opinions, such as who the interviewers liked.
  • Organizations take on unnecessary risk, favoring candidates who “fit” their mental picture without objectively evaluating their competencies.

At every step, candidates with familiar credentials or backgrounds tend to advance, while those who could bring fresh perspectives are inadvertently filtered out. With each new hire, the same ineffective cycle continues.

But it doesn’t have to.

What Happens When We Get Hiring Right?

The best searches are full of “aha” moments, when clients see abilities that weren’t visible on a candidate’s resume. Here’s how a competency-driven process unfolds:

  • We dive deep into what drives impact in the role and explore the true challenges of the work.
  • We leverage our team’s expertise across all functional areas and career levels to develop a job description that clearly outlines performance expectations and the potential to make an impact in the work.
  • Top-performing candidates are drawn to that potential, and those who apply have a much deeper understanding of the role.
  • We conduct an intensive research process to surface hundreds more candidates than those who apply through job advertising, expanding and diversifying the candidate pool.
  • We facilitate a competency-driven interview sequence that delivers clear data about each candidate’s abilities.
  • We guide hiring managers to be more inclusive in their thinking and challenge assumptions about who can do the job and the possible paths to learning the right skills. This allows managers to engage with candidates they might otherwise miss.
  • Organizations hire top-performing candidates who enhance their teams with different perspectives and unique problem-solving approaches.

With each new hire, this approach creates a new hiring cycle within your organization’s culture, one that embraces the unexpected and turns surprises into strengths. It allows you to consider a larger, more diverse pool of people while raising the standard for what it means to drive impact in the role.

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