Three Things I Look for When Hiring

I have spent much of my career hiring, managing, and leading teams. Recently someone asked me a simple question: what three things do you actually look for in a hire?

The answer is straightforward. Not a competency framework. Not a list of qualifications. Three things.

Why perspective matters more than years on a CV

The three things I look for are commercial awareness, communication, and experience. Not in that order of importance — experience is last on the list but first in my mind.

Commercial awareness.

People should understand why a company exists, how it operates, and why it needs to make money. They should see how their role contributes to the whole system – and how taking ideas and turning them into value is the primary goal.

The goal is not to reshape the business around personal preferences — it is to help the business thrive and make it better. Without revenue, little else happens for long. Someone who genuinely understands this treats investment, time, and effort differently from someone who treats the business as a backdrop to their own career. Commercial awareness is essential.

Communication.

Someone can be technically brilliant and still create significant friction if they cannot listen, explain, or adapt to different communication styles.

Most problems in organisations are communication problems. Hiring someone who cannot communicate is hiring future friction — and it compounds. The more senior the role, the more expensive that friction becomes.

Experience.

This is where I diverge from most hiring conversations. When I say experience, I do not mean years on a CV or time in a particular role. I mean lived experience — the kind that accumulates from genuinely varied encounters with the world.

There is a difference between someone who has spent ten years genuinely developing and someone who has repeated the same year ten times. Both have a decade of employment. Only one has a decade of experience. I have met many people with long CVs who have encountered very little.

Contrast that with someone who has travelled and had their assumptions overturned, tried to start a business and failed, volunteered their time for something that mattered to them, raised children, worked across several industries, spoken at a conference, organised a community, gone through a difficult season and come out the other side.

These are experiences. They build empathy, judgment, and adaptability. They create people who see problems in multiple dimensions rather than one.

Experience compounds. Someone who has genuinely sought out varied encounters with the world brings a frame of reference no job description can cultivate. They are more likely to notice patterns others miss, more likely to bring unexpected solutions, and more likely to appreciate that other people's perspectives are valid rather than inconvenient.

When I hire, I hire the person first. Some level of competence for the role is necessary — I am not romantic about this. But I will take a curious, broad, experienced person with a shorter relevant CV over a narrow specialist who has spent a decade doing the same thing, almost every time.

Roles change. Skills are learnable. Perspective compounds — and it is very hard to teach.