The New Rules Of Hiring
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The Long Game
Hiring is changing, and not only for the reasons you would assume.
Google, Apple, and IBM have all eliminated degree requirements for many roles, moving toward assessing what candidates can do rather than where they studied or how their CV looks. The move is partly about equity and widening the talent pool. But it is also logical in the age of AI. When entire job functions can change within a single quarter, a strong CV becomes a less reliable indicator of whether someone will thrive twelve months into a role. The candidate who has done the same thing exceptionally well for five years may struggle more than the one who has had to continuously figure things out in less stable environments.
Skills, adaptability, and potential are increasingly what hiring managers are trying to assess. The difficulty is that none of those things can be neatly packaged on a CV, and most interviews are not designed to surface them either. Interviews tend to reward preparation and presentation, which means the most useful information sits slightly underneath the rehearsed answers.
The questions in this article are designed to create enough space in a conversation to see how someone really thinks beyond the script.
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Structural
Why traditional hiring falls short
Here is a sobering number. Research published in Psychology Today found that job interviews only explain about 9% of the variance in future job performance. Ninety-one percent of what determines whether someone will succeed in a role is missed entirely by the process many companies still rely on.
Part of the problem is structural. Typically, interviews are designed to surface what candidates have already done, not how they think when things change. A prepared candidate can walk through the STAR framework, deliver a polished answer about a challenge they overcame, and give a hiring manager exactly what they expected to hear. None of that reveals much about how they will behave once the role evolves, the team restructures, or the systems they were hired to use become obsolete.
The qualities that actually predict performance in hyper-growth environments, how someone processes feedback, how they behave under uncertainty, whether they can learn something new quickly and apply it without a manual, are genuinely hard to demonstrate through traditional interview questions. They do not show up on a CV either. That is the gap the questions in this article are designed to close.
9 Interview Questions To Screen For Potential
1. “Tell me something you changed your mind about recently”
This question tends to catch people off guard, and that is the point. Admitting you changed your mind means admitting you were wrong about something. In a job interview, where every instinct is telling you to appear confident and capable, most people have not prepared for that. Which is why the answers are worth paying attention to.
Research on intellectual humility consistently finds it is one of the strongest predictors of good decision-making and effective collaboration under pressure. It is also pretty hard to fake in a real conversation.
A good answer has a before and an after. Something the person believed, what caused them to reflect on that belief, and what they did differently as a result. If the story is vague, or the person was essentially right all along and just tweaked their thinking slightly to present themselves in the best light, that tells you something too. People who struggle to sit with having been wrong tend to struggle in environments that require constant change.
Adaptability isn't one trait, it's made up of several distinct qualities. Understanding what they are makes it easier to know what to look for in a hiring conversation.
2. “What’s something you taught yourself recently?”
Learners spend 72% more time on content they actively seek out than on content assigned to them. People learn more when they are genuinely curious about something, which means this question is really asking: does this person have that spark of curiosity, or are they waiting for someone to tell them what to do?
The subject matters less than how they talk about it. Someone who went deep on something adjacent to their role, or outside it entirely, out of pure interest, is showing you something about how they behave when nobody is watching. That tends to reflect their mindset more candidly.
In a role that will inevitably change, the habit of seeking out new understanding before being asked to is worth a lot. It is also one of the things that is difficult to teach once someone is already in the job.
3. “Tell me about a time something did not go to plan”
Great Place To Work's 2025 research found that leaders are prioritising grit, curiosity and resilience over credentials when assessing future performance. Resilience turns out to be one of the hardest things to evaluate in an interview, because most candidates tend to present failure as a growth story with a tidy resolution.
What you are actually trying to understand is what happened in the gap between something going wrong and it getting better. Did the person take ownership or did responsibility slowly migrate to someone or something else later on?
The best answers tend to have a sense of humility and specificity that is hard to fake. Always ask follow up questions to clarify any details that weren’t initially clear. The candidate can describe what they understood about the situation at the time versus what was happening, how they responded once things fell apart, and what changed in how they work afterwards.
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4. “How do you usually respond to challenging feedback?”
Research shows that leaders who actively seek critical feedback earn more respect from the people around them, while those who seek only positive validation score lower on effectiveness. Which makes sense when you think about it. Someone who shuts down when they hear something difficult tends to avoid the level of accountability required for success.
Receiving criticism is not a purely rational experience for most people. There is usually an emotional reaction before the rational processing begins, some combination of defensiveness, embarrassment, or the urge to explain before really listening. That is normal. What varies enormously between people is what happens after receiving any given criticism.
The most honest answers to this question acknowledge that discomfort rather than glossing over it. A candidate who says they have noticed they get defensive under pressure but have learned to sit with it before responding is showing you something genuine about their self-awareness. It is a much more credible answer than someone who claims to welcome all feedback immediately and openly, which tends to suggest either that they have not thought about it carefully or that they are protecting their image.
What you are really listening for is whether the person can separate themselves from the behaviour being discussed. Criticism of a decision is not a verdict on someone's character, but a lot of people experience it that way. The ones who have learned to make that separation tend to get more out of feedback, course-correct faster, and build better working relationships with the people around them.
5. “What kind of problems energise you, and why?”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying what he called flow, the psychological state where challenge and skill align closely enough that work stops feeling like effort. His research found that people in flow states think more clearly, sustain focus longer, and produce significantly better work. A global study using the Flow@Work Engagement Survey across 39,000 participants found that willingness and commitment were among the strongest predictors of performance.
People do better work on problems they actually care about. Which sounds obvious until you realise that most hiring processes are reverse-engineered to screen for skills but not values.
Ask this question and pay attention to what happens to the energy in the answer. A candidate who genuinely lights up describing a type of problem is showing you something about how they are wired. That’s the difference between a candidate who will truly shine in a role versus someone who will just fill it.
Flow State describes the optimal mental state where people become fully immersed in a task, balancing challenge and skill to achieve deep focus and high performance. Based on the work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, pioneer of Flow Theory.
6. “What do you think most people misunderstand about your work?”
75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional, according to Gartner research. 84% of employees report high collaboration drag when working across functions. A big part of why is that people struggle to translate what they do, and why it matters, to people who think about the work differently.
Ask this question and pay attention to whether the candidate can step outside their own specialism. A good answer describes the gap between how the work appears from the outside and how it actually runs from inside, the coordination that happens invisibly, why something took longer than it looked, what gets consistently underestimated by people who only see the output. That kind of answer tells you whether they deeply understand their work, not just the outputs they are responsible for. A candidate who focuses too much on achievements probably has not thought much about how their work is perceived outside their own team.
7. “Who do you admire and what do they do differently from others?”
Research on admiration consistently finds that people are drawn to qualities they want to develop in themselves. Admiration is how humans have always learned from each other. Which means who someone chooses to admire, and more importantly why, gives you a clue about what they value.
A candidate who deeply understands their role model rather than listing generic qualities, demonstrates their ability to reflect. A 2025 study found that role models directly shape professional identity and self-determination. In other words, understanding who someone looks up to and why indicates the direction they are working towards in their career.
8. “What’s one thing you would like to get better at this year?”
A 2025 review on self-directed learning found that people who set their own learning goals are more likely to succeed in their careers than those who wait for opportunities to be handed to them. The habit of actively identifying where you want to grow, and doing something about it, turns out to matter more than most hiring processes address. It’s a good sign when a candidate answers immediately and enthusiastically with something specific they are already working on.
For managers and team leaders, the answer also doubles as useful onboarding information. Knowing where someone already wants to develop before they join means development conversations can start with something the person really cares about rather than something imposed on them.
Space
Good interview questions do not neatly predict performance. People can interview well and struggle once they are in the role, and others can interview poorly and become indispensable. No process removes that messiness and uncertainty entirely.
What these questions can do is create a different kind of conversation. One where the information you are collecting is about how someone thinks, learns, and behaves under pressure rather than how well they have rehearsed. Google, Apple, and IBM have already moved away from credential-led hiring for good reason. In environments where roles change faster than ever before, the ability to keep developing matters more than what someone knows on day one.
The questions in this article are not designed to catch anyone out. They are designed to create enough space in a conversation for authenticity to surface.
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8 Interview Questions To Identify Potential
