Hiring for judgment, not just skills
Skills are easy to interview for and easy to overweight. They’re legible: a CV, a test, a portfolio. So we anchor on them. But skills describe what someone can do in situations you can foresee — and most of the situations that actually matter are the ones you can’t.
What carries a person through those is judgment, and it’s the thing I try hardest to hire for.
Why skills decay and judgment compounds
A specific skill is a snapshot. Tools change, stacks change, the problem you hired for gets solved and replaced by a different one. Someone hired purely for a skill is optimised for a moment that’s already passing.
Judgment moves the other way. It’s the ability to make good decisions with incomplete information, to weigh trade-offs, to know which rule to break and when. It transfers across domains and it deepens with experience. A team strong on judgment adapts; a team strong only on current skills has to be re-hired every time the ground shifts.
How you actually see it
Judgment doesn’t show up on a CV, so you have to go looking for it in conversation:
- Ask about a decision, not an achievement. “Tell me about a hard call you made with incomplete information.” Listen for how they reasoned, not whether it worked out.
- Probe the trade-offs they saw. Good judgment is visible in what someone didn’t do and why. People who only describe the upside of their choices usually weren’t weighing much.
- Look for changed minds. “What’s something you used to believe about your work and no longer do?” People with judgment have updated. People running on pattern-match rarely have a good answer.
The trap
Hiring for judgment is uncomfortable because it’s less measurable, so under pressure we retreat to the safety of the skills checklist — it feels objective and it’s easy to defend. But the most expensive hiring mistakes I’ve seen weren’t people who lacked a skill. They were people who had every box ticked and poor judgment about when to apply them.
Skills get someone in the door on day one. Judgment is what makes them valuable on day five hundred, when the situation has changed and there’s no playbook to follow.