Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways
- A resume only tells you what someone has already done, not whether they can learn the job that will exist a year from now.
- Learning velocity, the speed at which someone goes from confused to competent on something new, is a better predictor of future performance than past experience.
Some of my best hires had never done the job before. Their resumes got them in the door, but their ability to learn earned them the offer. A resume is a rearview mirror, and we’ve been trained to read it like a crystal ball. It tells you what someone has experience in until you realize the work you’re hiring them to do a year from now may not even exist yet.
I founded BriteCo in 2017, and building an insurtech company has taught me that the ground keeps moving. Many of the tools our team used two years ago have already been replaced or rebuilt. So when I look at a candidate, I’m asking, “Can they learn this job quickly and learn the next version of it even faster?”
I’ve believed in hiring the person over the experience since the early days of BriteCo, and our hiring has always been pretty unconventional. Experience doesn’t hurt, and it’s naturally one of two things I look at. But the other factor is equally important, and that’s knowing how fast someone picks up what they haven’t done before.
Resumes have a shelf life, and it’s shrinking
A resume says, “I mastered these tools, systems, and processes.” In a field like ours, a specific skill you perfect depreciates the moment you list it, just as how an approach that was innovative in 2020 becomes the minimum standard of today.
This is where over-indexing on pedigree burns you. You can assemble a team of people who know exactly how the work used to be done, then watch them freeze when the work changes. You hired a snapshot of the past, and snapshots don’t adapt.
AI is changing job functions so fast that specific skills matter less than the meta-skill of learning how to learn. Credentials describe what someone has done, and learning velocity tells you how they’ll handle what’s next. So if you have to choose, bet on this predictive skill.
What learning velocity actually means
“We hire people who love to learn” is the kind of thing companies say and rarely test. Learning velocity measures how quickly someone goes from confused to competent when the tools evolve. It describes not only how fast someone absorbs something new but also how willingly they let go of outdated knowledge and how quickly they apply new knowledge to a real problem. Plenty of smart people can learn, but fewer can learn and apply new knowledge in the same week.
The good news is this trait is observable. At BriteCo, a lot of our hiring process is built to surface learning velocity, because we value people who can think on their feet and move quickly over people who just check boxes.
How we screen for it
First, stop asking candidates to walk you through their experience with examples, because that just rewards people who’ve memorized their own resume. Instead, ask them to tell you about something they taught themselves recently without being telling to. How did they start? What did they get wrong? How long before their new skill was useful? You learn more about someone from how they describe learning an unfamiliar tool than from any list of past titles.
Second, present candidates with an unfamiliar problem in the interview and watch how they attack it. Notice whether they ask sharp questions, and whether they’re comfortable not knowing the answer right away or shut down because they’re outside their lane.
Third, use short trial projects where you can, on real work with a deadline. Keep the scope small enough to finish in a few days, and pay for the time. I haven’t found a better signal than watching someone ramp. We’ve hired people whose resumes undersold them and who then outran their better-credentialed peers once our engineering stack changed, because they treated the new stack as a puzzle.
Reference calls can test for learning velocity too. Ask a former manager what the person picked up on the job that they were never asked to learn and how soon the rest of the team was relying on it, and pay attention to whether the answer comes without a pause.
Where adaptability can backfire
I’m not suggesting learning velocity wins every time. In a heavily regulated industry such as insurance, there are roles where deep domain expertise heavily matters, and you don’t want someone learning compliance on the fly. The answer is to stop treating experience as a substitute for adaptability. Ideally, you’ll find people who have both, and when you can’t, you decide honestly which one the role needs. Write that decision down before you open the search, because a strong interview can talk you out of it. What a role needs changes as the company grows, too. A startup and a growth-stage company need different types of people, so be upfront with candidates about the stage they’re joining.
Adaptability also backfires when you hire fast learners and then bore them to death. Once they’ve got the current tools down, they get restless. If your environment is rigid, with locked-down processes and technology that never change, you’ll lose the people you worked hardest to find. Velocity hiring only works if the culture rewards people for relearning the job. Give them the next hard problem before they go looking for it somewhere else.
I’ve said this for years: The right person in the wrong environment still fails. Hiring someone who learns quickly is only half the commitment. You have to give them room to use what they learn. A year from now, the job may look very different, and you’ll be glad you hired the right people
Key Takeaways
- A resume only tells you what someone has already done, not whether they can learn the job that will exist a year from now.
- Learning velocity, the speed at which someone goes from confused to competent on something new, is a better predictor of future performance than past experience.
Some of my best hires had never done the job before. Their resumes got them in the door, but their ability to learn earned them the offer. A resume is a rearview mirror, and we’ve been trained to read it like a crystal ball. It tells you what someone has experience in until you realize the work you’re hiring them to do a year from now may not even exist yet.
I founded BriteCo in 2017, and building an insurtech company has taught me that the ground keeps moving. Many of the tools our team used two years ago have already been replaced or rebuilt. So when I look at a candidate, I’m asking, “Can they learn this job quickly and learn the next version of it even faster?”
I’ve believed in hiring the person over the experience since the early days of BriteCo, and our hiring has always been pretty unconventional. Experience doesn’t hurt, and it’s naturally one of two things I look at. But the other factor is equally important, and that’s knowing how fast someone picks up what they haven’t done before.