Mad skills undoubtedly sound better than an applicant simply describing themselves as persistent. But you shouldn’t hire someone just because they say they climbed Mount Everest. How do we put information like this in its proper place so we can make a good decision?
It started roughly two decades ago. Companies in Silicon Valley decided that they would not only revolutionize the technology industry and popularize the internet and its use, but also experiment with new ways of hiring employees that went beyond education and professional experience. The idea itself wasn’t bad, but as with any experiment, some people make mistakes, take unnecessary detours, or encounter unintended results.
In Work Rules!, former Google HR chief Laszlo Bock explains how they refined their hiring process. It took many years and was probably unnecessary—avoidable, even—if they had used proper hiring tools, methods, and processes that were already available.
Some decided to focus on the résumé, but usually on a hidden corner of it, where applicants were asked about extracurricular activities and hobbies:
the so-called “mad skills.”
Mad skills are the sum of personal, cultural, and experiential factors. Climbing Everest, learning to code, building an electric race car or a successful YouTube channel—anything someone is exceptionally good at. What distinguishes mad skills from general abilities is that they tend to be more interpersonal in nature. If someone is friendly, dependable, or has a strong work ethic, we usually list those traits on our résumé as well. These self-declared qualities should always be checked with an appropriate, valid, and reliable method, such as a personality questionnaire.
Photo: Alex Kotliarskyi / Unsplash
Mad skills: as persuasive at first as they can be misleading
Mad skills are interesting by nature, so it is no surprise that startups like to work with this kind of competency. They almost always come with an interesting backstory. What inspired someone to learn Mandarin? Or to earn a black belt in karate? It is also true that traditional skills look rather dull by comparison. Oh, you’re a hard worker. Great…
But sometimes boring means something can be structured, assessed, and applied properly in the hiring process.
There is no question that, among school results and previous jobs, mad skills stand out on a crowded résumé. From a recruitment perspective, however, every interviewer should be most interested in the skills that reveal something fundamental about the applicant’s personality. Learning a new language, for example, suggests that someone is an able learner who can pick up new skills quickly. But it is also worth asking whether they learned something they immediately put to use, or did it purely for fun and never used it.
The idea behind mad skills is that, by drawing an inference from them, you can quickly reach a person’s most defining characteristics. But they can just as easily trap us inside unconscious biases.
We need to make sure we use objective methods to assess applicants’ relevant job skills. A tennis-loving employer may hire someone who once played on their country’s junior national tennis team, for example. But that is exactly when the hiring manager should ask: does this fact genuinely represent a job-related competency in this candidate?
Using mad skills in hiring is currently more of a localized trend, applied in certain industries. In the United States, where admission to the most prestigious schools is fiercely competitive, many schools have used mad skills to distinguish between two students with equally high grades and test scores.
The obvious flaw in such a system is its inability to evaluate decisions neutrally.
Turning something interesting into relevant information
How do you judge a great football player against a great musical talent? What is membership in social clubs worth? Another problem is the lack of research into this selection method. Without it, how can we be certain that the technique is as valid as other, proven methods?
By focusing on mad skills, we are of course trying to jump straight to personality—to reach quickly the fundamental things that separate candidates. Methodologically, this brings us close to unstructured interview questions. There is probably some truth in them, but it can be difficult to identify and compare candidates fairly.
If we feel that we want to include mad skills in our hiring process, we should examine each achievement and try to apply it within a structured framework. If we read that someone managed to climb Mount Everest, while knowing that we are looking for a highly conscientious person, we should ask how they prepared for the journey and how systematically they followed safety procedures every day of the expedition.
As with any general information, these achievements can help us identify better candidates. To keep an extraordinary accomplishment from distracting us, we need to examine its relevance to our everyday work.
Or we can simply use well-established, proven methods that clearly identify the candidates who are an excellent fit for us—regardless of whether they collected race cars or managed to run several marathons in under three hours.
Zsolt Fehér
International HR expert and European Managing Director of Hogan Assessments
Guest authors are external experts rather than members of the Forbes editorial team, and their opinions do not necessarily reflect those of Forbes.