"Hire for attitude, train for skill." "Look for potential, not just experience." These phrases have become recruitment shorthand, and for good reason. As skills become the currency of hiring and roles reshape faster than job descriptions can keep up, the case for looking beyond a candidate's track record is strong. But there is a quiet problem underneath the slogans: when we say we are hiring for potential, how do we actually assess it? Too often, "potential" becomes a feeling in the room rather than a measured quality, and that is exactly where fairness and quality start to slip.
This post moves past the familiar debates and offers structured, defensible ways to assess two of the most useful markers of potential at work: learning agility and adaptability.
The pressure is real and it is not easing. According to SHRM's 2025 Talent Trends research, more than two thirds of organisations (69%) are still struggling to fill roles . At the same time, the definition of the job itself keeps shifting. SHRM found that 28% of organisations now require new skills for full-time roles, with 47% updating existing roles to include these skills.
When roles change this quickly, hiring purely on past experience becomes a weaker bet. That aligns with long-standing evidence on selection. One widely cited analysis of decades of research found that years of experience predicts performance at r = .18, and the relationship plateaus after 5 years on the job. In other words, experience tells you less than we assume, and it tells you almost nothing after the early years.
This is why the conversation is shifting from pedigree to capability and potential. LHH's analysis of 2025 hiring trends notes that from the organisational need to right-skill to individuals' desire to develop, skills have emerged as a common theme across their research. We have explored the practical side of this shift in From Credentials to Capability: Making Skills-First Attraction Actually Work.
Learning agility is not a vague personality trait. It refers to a person's desire and ability to learn from experience and to then apply their learning to other situations. That capacity matters most precisely when someone faces a situation they have not seen before, which describes most of modern work.
The evidence is worth taking seriously without overstating it. Research suggests learning agility may be a better predictor of manager success than previous management performance; one of the best predictors of success in a management position may not be previous management performance, as traditionally expected, but rather one's level of learning agility. Studies of high-potential identification point the same way: learning agility was found to be a better predictor of being identified as a high potential than job performance.
A note of honesty is important here, because this is where hype creeps in. Some researchers argue learning agility overlaps heavily with cognitive ability and openness, cautioning that learning agility assessments correlate approximately r = .40 to .60 with cognitive ability tests. The practical takeaway is not to abandon the idea, but to treat learning agility as one signal among several rather than a magic measure.
Here is the trap. Because potential is about the future, it cannot be directly observed, so we infer it. And when we infer, unstructured judgement fills the gap with assumptions about who "seems like a leader" or "will fit in." Left unchecked, "high potential" quietly becomes a mirror of who already holds power in the organisation.
Structure is the antidote. The strongest evidence in selection favours consistency over gut feel. Meta-analytic research shows structured interviews nearly double the predictive validity of unstructured ones, reduce bias, improve candidate satisfaction, and save interviewer time. Structure does not make hiring cold or mechanical. It makes it fairer, because every candidate is assessed against the same criteria in the same way. We covered the broader mechanics of this in Bias in Hiring: Identifying and Overcoming It and, for internal talent, in Spotting Potential Without the Guesswork: Fairer Ways to Identify Future Leaders.
You do not need a proprietary label to assess potential well. You need structure, evidence and consistency. Consider combining the following.
1. Behavioural questions anchored to real change. Ask candidates to describe specific past situations where the ground shifted under them. The point is not the story itself but what it reveals about how they respond to the unfamiliar. Agile learners tend to show three habits: they research and gather information, they actively seek feedback, and they self-reflect to check whether they are on the right track. Probe for evidence of each. Score answers against a shared rubric rather than a general impression.
2. Work samples and job-relevant tasks. Give candidates a realistic slice of the work, ideally something with a degree of ambiguity built in. Work sample tests sit among the strongest evidence-based selection methods, and they let you watch adaptability in action rather than take it on trust. How a person approaches a problem they cannot fully scope is far more telling than a polished answer to "how do you handle change?"
3. Structured interviews with behavioural anchors. Standardise your questions and your scoring. Reserve consistent judgement, because structured interviews sit at the top of the validity hierarchy while unstructured conversation drifts toward bias. The discipline of asking every candidate the same core questions is what makes comparisons fair.
4. Validated assessments, used as one input. Reputable psychometric and cognitive measures can add signal, particularly around general mental ability, which remains a strong predictor of performance and learning. The key word is combine. Schmidt and Hunter's foundational work showed that combining cognitive ability with other structured selection methods significantly improves predictive accuracy; pairing a cognitive ability assessment with a structured interview produces composite validity above .60. No single tool should carry a hiring decision on its own.
A practical caution: candidates still want to be seen as people, not scores. LHH's research found that many candidates value the human expertise of a recruiter to see their true potential beyond skills and experience. Structure the assessment, but keep the humanity in the process.
Hiring for potential is not a soft alternative to rigorous selection. Done well, it is more rigorous, because it forces you to define what you are looking for, gather real evidence, and apply the same standard to everyone. The organisations that get this right will fill critical roles from a wider, fairer pool, and they will build workforces that keep learning as the work keeps changing.
So the question to sit with is this: in your current hiring process, could you show a rejected candidate exactly how their potential was assessed, and would that explanation hold up as fair? If the honest answer is "not quite," that is the most useful place to begin.