Hiring for Potential: What Should Employers Assess Beyond Direct Experience?

Direct experience is often the easiest thing to assess on a CV, which can make it tempting to treat it as the deciding factor in a hiring decision. However, a narrow focus on previous job titles or sector background can cause employers to overlook candidates who would perform exceptionally well, given the opportunity.

Hiring for potential does not mean disregarding experience altogether. It means being clear about which requirements are genuinely essential and which qualities are more likely to predict long-term success, even where a candidate's background does not match perfectly on paper.

What Hiring for Potential Really Means

Hiring for potential is not about taking a risk on someone underqualified. It is about recognising that experience is one indicator of future performance, but not the only one, and sometimes not the most reliable one.

A candidate with slightly less direct experience but strong judgement, adaptability and motivation may outperform someone who matches the specification closely but lacks the underlying capability to grow with the role.

Transferable Capability

Many of the skills that determine success in a role, such as stakeholder management, communication, organisation and problem solving, are developed across a wide range of functions and industries.

Employers who look closely at how a candidate has applied these capabilities elsewhere, rather than only where they applied them, often discover a broader and more interesting pool of genuinely suitable people.

Learning Agility

Learning agility, the ability to pick up new information, systems and ways of working quickly, is increasingly one of the strongest predictors of success in a changing role or business.

This can be explored at interview by asking candidates to describe a time they had to learn something unfamiliar quickly, and what they did to get up to speed. The answer often reveals more about future performance than years of directly comparable experience.

Motivation and Judgement

A candidate's motivation for the role, and the way they approach decisions under pressure, are difficult to capture from a CV but are often central to whether someone thrives once in post.

Employers can explore this through structured questions about past decisions, the reasoning behind them, and what the candidate would do differently with hindsight. Candidates who can reflect honestly on their own judgement tend to bring that same self-awareness into a new role.

Environment and Culture Fit

Potential is also closely tied to environment. A candidate who has thrived in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial business may not necessarily suit a highly structured, process-driven organisation, and the reverse is equally true.

Rather than treating culture fit as a vague, subjective impression, it is worth asking candidates directly about the environments in which they have performed best and asking for specific examples, rather than general statements of adaptability.

When Direct Experience Remains Non-Negotiable

None of this means direct experience should be disregarded. For certain regulated, technical or highly specialist positions, specific prior experience may genuinely be essential from day one, and there may be limited scope to develop it on the job.

The key is distinguishing between requirements that are genuinely essential and those that are simply preferable. A useful test is to ask whether the requirement could reasonably be learned within the first three to six months, with appropriate support. If so, it may be worth treating it as a development area rather than a barrier to hire.

Balancing Potential and Experience in Practice

The strongest hiring decisions often combine both. A candidate with the right foundational experience and clear evidence of transferable capability, learning agility and sound judgement is usually a lower-risk hire than one who matches the specification exactly but shows little evidence of either.

This balance becomes particularly important in growing or changing businesses, where the role itself may evolve significantly within the first year, and the ability to adapt may matter more than experience of the role as it exists today.

How VWA Can Help

At VWA, our Consultants work with clients to identify which requirements are genuinely essential and where there is scope to consider candidates on the basis of transferable capability and potential, rather than experience alone.

Our research-led approach also allows us to look beyond an immediate applicant pool and identify strong candidates from adjacent backgrounds who may bring exactly the qualities a role requires, even where their most recent title does not match precisely.

If you are recruiting for a role where the right person may not have an exact match on paper, speak to our team about how to assess potential alongside experience.