I’ve Hired Hundreds of People — Here’s the Trait I Look For Before Anything Else

I don’t envy job candidates. In addition to facing a historically competitive job market, they have to walk a nearly impossible line: coming across as accomplished, competent and confident while somehow avoiding being braggy or obnoxious.

I’ve hired a lot of people since I launched my business, and over time, the qualities I seek in job candidates have evolved. Yes, I want people who have the required skills to do the job. But as AI becomes increasingly adept at completing tasks — in some cases, better than humans — I’ve found that what someone can do matters less than how they think.

It’s also true that the candidates who have made the biggest impact at Jotform weren’t necessarily the most technically skilled people I interviewed. They were the ones who could hold a belief loosely; who had the rare ability to be genuinely persuaded by new evidence, including evidence that they were wrong.

Psychologists call this “intellectual humility.” I call it the thing I now look for before almost anything else. Here’s why.

Intellectual humility in context

Psychologists first began studying intellectual humility in the aftermath of World War II. In researching the traits that led to authoritarianism, one characteristic that emerged was the conviction that “one’s own beliefs and attitudes are absolutely correct and that those who disagree are misguided, if not evil.”

The opposite of that, they found, was a person who could hold their beliefs with confidence while remaining genuinely open to revising them — someone who understood that their knowledge was always, on some level, incomplete.

Intellectual humility doesn’t mean you don’t have opinions or beliefs you advocate for; it simply means you also retain a willingness — or better yet, an active interest — in learning new information that may challenge what you thought you knew. For example, I used to be convinced that good employees could thrive in just about any environment — working alone, in teams, at whatever hours were set for them to work. But as my staff grew, our productivity began to stall.

At first, I was puzzled — after all, every person was excellent at their job. But once I started reimagining what I thought I knew, the pieces clicked into place. It turned out that as our team got bigger, we lost some of the camaraderie that made us effective. Once I realized the issue, I restructured everyone into small, cross-functional teams, and I’ve never looked back.

Why hiring for intellectual humility is a must

If you’d asked me a decade ago, I admit that intellectual humility may not have been at the top of my list of traits I looked for in a job candidate. That was probably a mistake — even before the landscape started to shift, it’s always been a powerful attribute.

But the landscape has shifted. AI is now capable of executing many of the tasks we used to hire humans specifically to do — writing, coding, analysis, research. This doesn’t mean the end of hiring humans, but it does mean hiring the ones who can think critically about their roles and challenge their own assumptions.

This is part and parcel of a growth mindset, which is characterized by the idea that learning should be a continuous journey, and that constructive criticism should be viewed as an opportunity rather than an occasion for defensiveness. “In the fixed mindset, everything is about the outcome. If you fail — or if you’re not the best — it’s all been wasted,” explained Carol Dweck, the Stanford University psychologist who developed the term. “The growth mindset allows people to value what they’re doing regardless of the outcome.”

Dweck argues that a growth mindset is a predictor of performance, in that people who believe their abilities can be developed through effort consistently outperform those who treat talent as fixed. Intellectual humility, then, is what makes that possible in practice. After all, you can’t grow from feedback you’ve dismissed or learn from a mistake you’ve rationalized away.

Screening for intellectual humility

It can be difficult to determine someone’s intellectual humility in an interview. Most candidates have been coached to present a confident, coherent narrative about themselves. Anything less may raise red flags, the thinking goes, and no interviewee wants that.

For leaders, the key isn’t fixating on the candidates’ mess-ups, but listening to how they answer the question. For example, if I ask someone to tell me about a time they had to receive difficult feedback, I pay attention to how they talk about the person who delivered it. Was that person cast as a minor villain? Or do they describe them in neutral terms — maybe even with gratitude?

I also like to ask questions about how candidates interact with their teams. Questions like “Describe a time when you had to prioritize the team’s goals over your own ambitions,” or “Tell me about a time when you had to delegate. How did you determine how to best use everyone’s strengths?”

I still want confident candidates who can capably handle the job I’m hiring them to do. But now more than ever, I’m also looking for people who have the humility to embrace what they don’t know, and use it as a starting point for further growth.