How You Learn is Much More Important to Employers Than Being the Perfect Fit.

Lately, when making hiring decisions, Emory and Adam have been paying more attention to candidates’ learning agility and less attention to the idea of a “perfect fit.” The strongest candidates stand out not by being the most polished, but by being the most adaptable. And they ask good questions. Really good questions, like:

• “When did you start noticing that shift?”

• “If you could change one thing about how the team operates, what would it be?"

Basically, I’ve found that people who lean into curiosity help build stronger cultures. Research backs this up: meta-analytic studies link agility with both leader performance and potential, and organizational research from Korn Ferry shows teams with agile leaders achieving ~25% higher profit margins than their peers.

This is especially important in times of change. And change is everywhere right now across companies, industries, and geographies. The strongest candidates I saw this year tend to:

• Ask thoughtful, clarifying questions

• Show (not tell) how they collaborate

• Demonstrate comfort with ambiguity

Which has led us to reflect on hiring systems…

If you're in an interview and present yourself as a lifelong learners, builders, and problem-solver, the interviewing team will be much more likely to hire you. Rather than someone who is a perfect fit on paper, you will give yourself an advantage as being an actually engaged employee.

Our last piece of advice here is to treat interviews less like validation exercises with transactional back-and-forth questioning and more like working sessions with real problem-solving. Brainstorming sessions can be more predictive of if the employer will be a good fit for you than a series of behavioral questions.

I’m curious what you think and what your candidate experiences are. Feel free to message us and tell us what's on your mind re: interviewing and trying to be a good candidate!