How Smart is Smart Enough When You’re Hiring?

If you can’t seem to figure out why your brilliant newcomers are not panning out, you’ll need to take a step back and examine what actually makes someone successful in a career.

I can’t tell you how many resumes I’ve looked at in my life. The quantity was so much, and I was admittedly so bad at it, that I eventually outsourced hiring to one of my staff, who has since blown me out of the water (not that the bar was high to begin with). It wasn’t that I was bad at hiring, per se, but that I often got bogged down on the same irrelevant traits many hiring managers do: job experience, academic experience, and “achievements.” I knew this wasn’t the right way to do it, but I couldn’t seem to get out of my own way. In the years since I took that step, I’ve made it a point to dive into research and journalism on this exact topic, since finding good people is one of the most difficult parts of running a business. It’s quite evident that many of us are simply looking at the wrong traits when predicting who will have the most success in a potential new role.

This topic recently got me thinking about our society’s obsession with shortcutting everything, but specifically with regards to making a selection during an application process, whether it’s higher education, the job market, or anything else. It’s incredibly difficult to judge someone you haven’t met, so the shortcut is, “who is the smartest,” or “who has already done this exact job elsewhere”? The Atlantic recently published a longform article that digressed into a piece of literary history that perfectly illustrates a part of this modern shortcutting problem. In a 1998 book titled Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, anthropologist James C. Scott talks about a 19th-century German initiative to make the country’s lumber industry much more efficient and productive. Seeing how difficult it was to cut down forests, what with all the root structures, underbrush, wildlife, and fauna surrounding each tree, scientists decided to plant their own forests. They had neat rows of trees, planted simultaneously, with no underbrush, no wildlife, and no other plant species to get in their way. They figured that by creating these man made forests, the upkeep, maintenance, and eventual felling of these trees would be much easier and produce much more lumber than they were currently seeing.

For a while, this worked quite well, and they saw an instant improvement in German lumber production. However, what they quickly realized is that a healthy forest needs all of those other elements in order to survive in the long-term. What their shortcutting actually succeeded in doing was creating a monoculture in the forest, where there was nothing to support the main resource. A forest needs the underbrush to protect its roots and provide valuable nutrients. It needs trees of different ages so it can support itself through different generations. It needs the wildlife to help fertilize its growth. After a while, the man made forests became unhealthy, eventually succumbing to their own design. Because of this, the Germans established a new word in their language: “waldsterben,” or “forest death.”¹ The Germans attempted to create an academic shortcut, forcing the forest to stray from its natural cycle. But it was precisely that natural cycle that gave the forest its health in the first place.

ChatGPT prompt for waldsterben

This story reminded me that humans have always emphasised shortcuts, and in modern times that shortcut has been to judge someone by their intelligence and cognitive abilities instead of other, more important traits. For example, the public school system is now so focused on standardized testing, rather than actual learning, that America is now outranked in education by numerous other major economies. Look at the process for trying to get into college: SATs, ACTs, a college essay, your GPA, and then some. Is the person with a higher SAT score automatically going to be the most successful person in school? Colleges might state that there is a correlation between standardized test scores and college performance, but those are also the same colleges that correctly preach that correlation does not imply causation.² Perhaps most pertinently, many of you have seen the ridiculous requirements needed to apply to certain jobs that should not have any prerequisites at all. A quick web search for positions in my region shows that you need prior experience for a position in customer service, working on the floor of a retail store, or as an office assistant for a dentist. How is someone supposed to get experience if experience is required for the most basic, entry-level jobs? We’ve created a Catch-22 that is incredibly difficult to break free of.

What’s even more infuriating about this is that there is actual research showing how worthless most of these cognitive traits are. Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell once wrote about Hunter College Elementary School in New York, a place where the only way to get in is to score in the highest percentile of a standardized test. The goal of Hunter was to find future professional superstars by grabbing the most intelligent children in one of the world’s premier cities. Yet, years later, there were few home runs. The graduates were generally successful and happy, but the program wasn’t designed to churn out a bunch of happy people – it was designed to find future Nobel Prize winners, world-famous scientists, and whatnot. Intelligence alone can’t predict that.

One of the most famous longitudinal studies on intelligence of the last century was by Lewis Terman, who embarked on an experiment now known as “Genetic Studies of Genius.” He tracked over 1,500 children, all with wildly-high IQs, for the entirety of their lives, starting in 1921. Even after he died, data continued to be collected until the last of his “Termites”, as they were known, died as well. But the results of this study were similar to that of Hunter, in that there was little to no difference between these “ultra-smart” subjects and others who were simply “smarter than average.”

What we’ve learned over the years, specifically about intelligence (though it’s generalizable to many other traits) is that it doesn’t matter how “genius” someone is. If you have an IQ of 130, you’re already incredibly intelligent. Being much smarter does not make you more likely to be successful in life. There is a larger difference between IQs of 80 and 100 than there is between IQs of 130 and 180. This works with money and happiness as well. Almost all research on the links between the two find that money is correlated with happiness only up to the point that you have enough money to live comfortably. Then, the correlation disappears. You just need to have enough money. Similarly, someone just needs to be smart enough.

There is some fascinating research done by leadership expert Mark Murphy, who found that when people get fired, only 11 percent of the time it is because of their technical competence – how good they are at their jobs. Nearly all firings are due to attitude, behavioral, or social issues that affect someone’s ability to perform well in a workplace. It wasn’t because they weren’t smart enough. These are known as “soft skills” in academia – how to get along with others, how to efficiently complete a task, responsibility, grittiness, etc. In fact, research suggests that when measured in fourth grade, soft skills are 2.4 times more important than math and reading scores in predicting someone’s future success.

ChatGPT prompt for an image of someone struggling to hire, impressionist style

This makes perfect sense. So much of society is obsessed with precocity and how early a child learns something. But does learning to read at age two make you a better reader when you’re 30? Everyone eventually learns to read – how quickly you do so makes no difference. The same with walking: taking your first steps at an earlier age doesn’t mean you will walk better than others when you’re an adult. Everyone will learn to walk. A child may say their first words months before anyone else, but it makes no difference 20 years down the line. You’re not going to hear, “No wonder he’s got such good charisma – he said his first words at just six months!” That’s preposterous. The true factor in someone’s ability to achieve success is if they can utilize their abilities for their own benefit and for the benefit of those around them.

Which means when you hire, you should first and foremost ensure that someone is smart enough to do the job. Depending on your industry and your processes, that can take many different forms. But once you’ve established that, you should never again care about their experience or abilities during the hiring process. Will the person work well with others? Will they take the initiative to better their skills during their time with you? Will they care about the business or only about their own career path? Will they push through when the going gets tough, or will they give up and walk away? Are they trustworthy?

When I handed over hiring duties in my company, I told the member of my staff that I wanted her to use her years of experience and knowledge of our company culture to find people that would fit. I didn’t care if they’d worked in our industry before, if they had office or retail experience, or even if they went to college. If they could do the job, then I wanted the best people, not the ones with the highest credentials. On her own, she developed a great method to determine who is smart enough to work at our company, and after that, she focuses solely on an applicant’s character. Are they going to show up every day, work hard, contribute positively to our culture, and be a great co-worker to those around them? Perfect, they’re hired.

One of the most famous movie characters of all time, Gordon Gekko, famously said, “Most of these Harvard MBA types don’t add up to dog shit. Give me guys that are poor, smart, and hungry, and no feelings. You win a few, you lose a few, but you keep on fighting.” Putting aside his fictional follies,³ the real-life advice goes, hire for attitude, train for skill. Either way you want to look at it is correct. Find people that are smart enough, then pick the ones whose mindset will make them successful.

1. You gotta love the German language.

2. Shoutout to all my psych professors!

3. And his legally-dubious financial maneuvers.