Hiring has a strange habit of becoming a job in itself. Candidates are expected to summarize years of experience in less than an hour, answer unfamiliar questions on command, establish rapport quickly and appear confident while doing it. Employers then use that performance to predict whether candidates have the skills required to do the actual job.

Sometimes those abilities overlap. Sometimes they do not. Hiring for skills requires employers to define what success actually looks like and give candidates a meaningful way to demonstrate it.

The question for leaders is straightforward: Are you hiring someone who can do the work, or someone who is especially good at getting hired?

Start With What The Job Actually Requires

David Flink, founder of The Neurodiversity Alliance, has spent much of his career examining how people learn and think. Flink, who has dyslexia and ADHD, argues that organizations often focus on what a job requires without spending enough time considering how people successfully accomplish that work.

Workplace systems tend to reflect the habits of the people who built them. A certain communication style becomes the professional one. A familiar schedule becomes the productive one. A particular educational background becomes the expected one.

Flink says leaders should challenge those assumptions by asking, “Does it work for all your people? What talent might you be losing?”

Those questions are particularly useful during hiring. A job description can easily become a collection of familiar credentials rather than a clear explanation of what someone must accomplish. A degree requirement stays because it has always been there.

Removing the degree requirement, however, does not automatically change who gets hired. A 2024 study from Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute found that among employers that dropped degree requirements for certain jobs, the share of workers without degrees hired into those roles increased by only 3.5 percentage points. Across the broader hiring market, the researchers estimated that fewer than one in 700 hires benefited from the shift.

Test The Skill Before Testing Interview Performance

Peter Kant applied that idea when building Enabled Intelligence's hiring process. The AI company specializes in data labeling and technology development and employs a large percentage of people who self-identify as neurodivergent.

When building its hiring process, the company removed requirements that were not directly connected to the work. Instead of starting with education credentials and relying primarily on traditional interviews, candidates for data annotation roles received short training materials. They completed an assessment resembling the work they would perform.

Enabled Intelligence could then evaluate whether candidates followed directions and met its standards for accuracy and speed. Only after candidates demonstrated those abilities did they move to an interview.

“We went into the interview asking how do we hire them, not how do we weed them out. It was really a skills-based and acumen-based initial way of doing it,” Kant said.

That approach is consistent with federal hiring research. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management rates work samples and structured interviews as stronger predictors of job performance than unstructured interviews. Work samples are designed to assess candidates by having them perform tasks that closely resemble the work they would actually do.

Ask Better Questions Before You Hire

Before posting a role, leaders should identify the outcomes that define success and which qualifications genuinely predict them. Then interview questions can explore how candidates approach the work.

Questions to ask internally before the interview:

  • What outcomes determine whether someone succeeds in this role?
  • Are any requirements here primarily traditions rather than job necessities?
  • What parts of the job truly require a specific schedule, environment or communication method?

Better questions that shape the candidate conversation:

  • Tell me about a time you produced high-quality work under a difficult deadline. How did you approach it?
  • What type of work environment has helped you perform at your best?
  • When instructions are complex, how do you organize your work?

The goal is to determine whether candidates can meet the standard while learning how they are most likely to do their best work.

Manage The Result, Not The Appearance Of Productivity

But hiring for skills creates another challenge: Organizations have to be willing to manage people whose effective working methods may look different. Hiring someone who works differently accomplishes little if the organization immediately expects that person to behave like everyone else.

Kant says Enabled Intelligence takes a more metrics-driven approach to management. Employees are measured against productivity and accuracy requirements while having latitude in how they reach those outcomes. Some prefer quieter environments. Others listen to music or audiobooks. Some work better earlier or later in the day.

Managers have occasionally questioned whether those behaviors were hurting performance, Kant said. The company could return to the data instead of relying on assumptions about what productive work should look like.

Not every preference can be accommodated. Enabled Intelligence performs sensitive government work, so some security and in-person requirements are nonnegotiable.

Ask How People Work Before Something Goes Wrong

Flink believes these conversations should happen before a difference becomes a performance issue. “It takes effort to pause and say, ‘Wait, how do you like to get things done?’” he said.

Leaders can ask when employees do their best work, whether they prefer written or verbal communication, and what conditions help them concentrate. Those questions also give employees a way to talk about what they need without framing the conversation as a complaint.

Rather than waiting for a work-style difference to become a problem, leaders can make those conversations part of how teams operate. Maya Enista Smith, executive-in-residence at The Neurodiversity Alliance, said the organization creates what it calls a “user manual” for each staff member. It captures information such as how the employee learns best, prefers to receive feedback and what type of environment helps them excel.

Flink recommends raising the issue early when employees already understand how they work best. One way he suggests starting the conversation is: “I’d love to talk about ways I’ve worked in the past that tend to work really well for me, and to see what might be possible in the culture here.”

The emphasis is on performance. An employee who struggles to process decisions during rapid meetings might explain that receiving action items in writing helps them execute more accurately. Someone who needs uninterrupted concentration could ask for blocks of focus time and explain which work they can complete during them.

Employees do not need to apologize for working differently. They can make the conversation more productive by connecting the request to the work: Here is what helps me perform well. Here is what gets in the way. Here is a reasonable change that could help. Here is the outcome I am accountable for delivering.

Hire For Evidence, Then Manage For Results

Skills-first hiring makes organizational standards more specific. The best place to start is by asking, “If this process did not already exist, would we design it this way today to determine who will succeed in this job?”

Some practices will survive that question easily. Others may turn out to be organizational habit wearing a name tag. The hiring process should help people show that they have the skills to do the work. It should not become a separate job they have to master before anyone gives them the opportunity.