GoKawiilOpinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways The job market is more competitive than it’s ever been — but there’s one rare ability that I always look for in candidates, regardless of the market: intellectual humility.
Being able to hold your beliefs with confidence and remain genuinely open to revising them based on new knowledge, information, data, etc. — a.k.a. intellectual humility — is part and parcel of a growth mindset, which is critical for success in any role or business.
It can be tough to screen for this ability in interviews, but the key is to fixate on how the candidate answers hard questions, and specifically, questions about how they interact with their current teams.
I don’t envy job candidates. In addition to facing a historically competitive job market, they have to walk a nearly impossible line: coming across as accomplished, competent and confident while somehow avoiding being braggy or obnoxious.
I’ve hired a lot of people since I launched my business, and over time, the qualities I seek in job candidates have evolved. Yes, I want people who have the required skills to do the job. But as AI becomes increasingly adept at completing tasks — in some cases, better than humans — I’ve found that what someone can do matters less than how they think.
It’s also true that the candidates who have made the biggest impact at Jotform weren’t necessarily the most technically skilled people I interviewed. They were the ones who could hold a belief loosely; who had the rare ability to be genuinely persuaded by new evidence, including evidence that they were wrong.
Psychologists call this “intellectual humility.” I call it the thing I now look for before almost anything else. Here’s why.
Intellectual humility in context
Psychologists first began studying intellectual humility in the aftermath of World War II. In researching the traits that led to authoritarianism, one characteristic that emerged was the conviction that “one’s own beliefs and attitudes are absolutely correct and that those who disagree are misguided, if not evil.”
... continue reading