Latest / Hiring & Firing with Fexingo: Recruitment, Performance, and Workforce Decisions / Why Hiring for Curiosity Beats Experience
Transcript
- Lucas: So you've got two candidates for a senior marketing role. One has ten years of experience at three well-known brands. The other has three years at a small agency but spent their weekends building a side project that didn't go anywhere. Who do you hire? Luna: If I'm being honest, I'd probably lean toward the ten-year veteran. That's what most hiring managers do, right? Lucas: Exactly. And that instinct is exactly why a lot of companies end up with teams that can execute yesterday's playbook but can't figure out tomorrow's. Today I want to talk about a company that flipped that logic on its head — and it paid off. Luna: I'm intrigued. Which company? Lucas: A mid-size B2B software firm called Vervant — about eight hundred employees, headquartered in Atlanta. They were struggling with a bad hire rate of nearly 30 percent for roles that required adaptability: product managers, sales engineers, customer success. Luna: Thirty percent is brutal. That's almost one in three. Lucas: Right. And when they dug into the data, they found something surprising. Their best performers — measured by manager ratings and retention — weren't the ones with the most relevant experience. They were the ones who scored highest on a simple curiosity assessment. Luna: A curiosity assessment? Like a test? Lucas: More like a structured interview protocol. Three questions designed to measure intellectual curiosity, not domain knowledge. They asked things like, 'Tell me about a time you learned something completely outside your field and how you applied it.' And 'What question about our industry do you think nobody is asking?' Luna: Those are good questions. They force a candidate to show how they think, not just what they've done. Lucas: Precisely. And the results were dramatic. Over the next two years, Vervant brought on about 120 hires using this curiosity-first filter. Their mis-hire rate dropped from nearly 30 percent to 18 percent. And the new hires performed better in roles that required cross-functional collaboration. Luna: Eighteen percent is still not zero, but that's a big improvement. Why curiosity, though? What's the mechanism? Lucas: There's actually a growing body of research on this. A 2022 study from the University of Michigan looked at over three thousand employees across industries and found that curiosity scores predicted supervisor-rated performance better than years of experience did — even when controlling for cognitive ability. Luna: That's pretty compelling. Curiosity is essentially a proxy for learnability. Lucas: Exactly. In a fast-changing environment, the person who's eager to figure things out is more valuable than the person who already knows the old way. And here's the kicker — Vervant also found that curiosity was more evenly distributed across gender and racial lines than traditional experience-based metrics. Luna: So it's not just a better predictor — it's also a more equitable filter. That's a double win. Lucas: It is. But I want to be careful here. I'm not saying experience is irrelevant. For highly technical roles where you need a specific skill set — say, a senior cloud architect who needs to know AWS inside and out — experience still matters. But for a lot of roles, especially in fast-growing companies, experience is a lazy proxy for competence. Luna: So what does this mean for the average hiring manager listening? They can't just wave a wand and add a curiosity test. Lucas: They can actually get started pretty simply. The Vervant team shared their three-question framework publicly. The first question is about a time they learned a new skill outside work. The second is about a question they've been wondering about in their field. The third is about a failure that taught them something unexpected. Luna: And how do you score that objectively? It can't just be a gut feel. Lucas: They used a simple rubric. A score of one to five on depth of exploration, quality of reflection, and whether the candidate connected it back to their work. They trained interviewers to look for evidence of genuine curiosity — not rehearsed stories. Luna: I like that it's structured. Too many companies try to assess culture or curiosity in an unstructured way and end up hiring people like themselves. Lucas: That's exactly the risk. And Vervant's data showed that before the change, their hires were disproportionately from similar backgrounds — same schools, same industries. After the curiosity filter, the diversity of their new hires increased by about 25 percent. Luna: That's a concrete outcome. Let's talk about one more angle — what about candidates who are curious but lack baseline competence? How do you balance that? Lucas: Vervant handled that by using a minimum competence threshold. For each role, they identified three to five non-negotiable technical skills — things like proficiency with a specific software or understanding of a core process. If a candidate didn't meet that threshold, they were screened out. Only then did they apply the curiosity filter. Luna: So it's not curiosity over competence — it's curiosity after competence. Lucas: Right. The idea is that you need both, but most companies over-index on experience and under-index on curiosity. Vervant just rebalanced the equation. Luna: I think a lot of listeners might wonder — can you really assess curiosity in a 45-minute interview? Or do you need something longer? Lucas: Vervant's approach took about 20 minutes of extra interview time. They added it as a separate round after the technical screen. But some companies have experimented with take-home assignments — like asking candidates to research a topic and present a one-page summary. That can reveal curiosity even more clearly. Luna: So you're looking for people who go beyond the bare minimum. Who actually enjoy learning for its own sake. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the kind of person who sticks around and grows. Vervant also saw a 15 percent improvement in one-year retention for hires made through the curiosity filter versus their old process. Luna: That's a huge ROI for just adding three questions. You know, this reminds me of something I read about how some of the best companies hire for potential rather than pedigree. Lucas: It's a shift that's been happening slowly. But Vervant's case is one of the cleanest examples I've seen of turning that philosophy into a measurable process. And on that note — speaking of things that add value — we only have time for one more quick thing. Luna: Go ahead. Lucas: If these conversations have helped you think differently about hiring — even just a little — a small group of listeners already supports the show through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That's what keeps this entire thing ad-free and independent. Luna: Yeah, it honestly makes a huge difference. Means we can keep drilling into these real-world cases without any sponsor influence. Lucas: So back to curiosity. One thing I want to emphasize: this isn't a gimmick. It's backed by data, and it's replicable. If you're hiring right now, try it on your next role. Just swap out one of your standard behavioral questions for a curiosity question and see what you learn. Luna: I'm going to try that. My favorite one from Vervant's list is the question nobody is asking. That really separates people who are just preparing answers from people who actually think. Lucas: Good one. And if you get a candidate who asks you a genuinely thoughtful question back — that's usually a strong signal. For next time, I want to look at a company that completely eliminated the resume from their hiring process. Not just de-emphasized it — banned it. Luna: That sounds radical. I'm already skeptical and curious at the same time. Lucas: Perfect combination. We'll dig into that next week.