Hire for Trainability, Not Baseline
How fast someone improves matters more than how good they are today
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 91%
Epstein names this the most important idea in The Sports Gene that the conversation hadn't reached: talent at baseline — what you can do before you've trained — is sometimes correlated with your ability to improve from training, but very often is not. Training behaves like medicine, where two people respond differently to the same protocol. Since we routinely judge potential from what we see right now, we systematically misjudge people who haven't yet found training that fits them. His hiring corollary: reserve at least part of your recruiting for what you'd have trouble teaching, rather than filling a square hole with a square peg you could have coached up anyway.
Origin
Epstein's Sports Gene research found trainability itself is a distinct kind of talent; he extends it to organisations via Abbie Griffin's work on serial innovators and a Scottish investment firm that hires for what it can't teach.
Core principles
- 01Trainability is a more important kind of talent than baseline ability.
- 02Two people get different results from identical training.
- 03Define a role too narrowly and you select out your serial innovators.
- 04Organisations that disrupt themselves hire for what they can't teach.
How to run it
- 1
Decide your time horizon first
Separate roles where you need today's knowledge used tomorrow from roles judged on how good someone becomes over years.
Watch out Trainability is the wrong lens if you genuinely need immediate output from existing skill.
- 2
Look for evidence of rate, not level
Assess how quickly the person has developed across roles and functions, rather than their current proficiency.
Pro tip Bartlett reads LinkedIn for speed of promotion and movement between departments as an adaptability signal.
Watch out Measuring trainability is easy for physiological traits, harder and more subjective for bespoke business tasks.
- 3
Hire for what you can't teach
Ask what capability or way of thinking you'd struggle to coach, go find someone with it, and teach them your domain.
Pro tip Baillie Gifford in Scotland goes after specific kinds of thinking and coaches people up on finance afterwards.
Watch out Accept it takes an extra few months to get them going — that's the price of the trait you couldn't teach.
- 4
Leave room for serial innovators to move
Allow internal movement across roles and functions so systems thinkers can keep cultivating breadth in-house.
Pro tip Ed Hoffman's question works here too: what are you good at that we're not using?
Watch out You can't create serial innovators from whole cloth, but you can absolutely stifle them by pinning them down.
In the wild
Abbie Griffin's research describes people who make repeated creative contributions wherever they go: systems thinkers who read more widely than peers, need to learn outside their domain, and appear to flit among ideas.
→ Griffin's writing reads almost as a warning to HR that narrow role definitions select these people out or push them elsewhere.
LinkedIn research across about half a million members found the strongest predictor of who became an executive was the number of different job functions worked across within an industry.
→ Epstein suggested to LinkedIn they build a product letting people narrate why they switched, since the platform rewards clean linear trajectories.
Common mistakes
Judging potential from the starting line
We evaluate people before they've had a chance to find training that fits them, so baseline performance masquerades as ceiling.
Hiring exclusively for the square hole
Recruiting only for skills you could most easily teach wastes the one thing hiring is uniquely good for.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and hiring managers building teams for multi-year horizons.
Not ideal for
Urgent contract or specialist hires where existing proficiency must be productive immediately.
From the transcript
“this Talent of trainability is even more important than Talent at at Baseline”
“when you define a role too narrowly you're making sure you select these people out”
“why should we hire for exactly the stuff that we can most easily teach let's hire for the stuff we want but that we would…”
From the episode
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