Hiring for Characteristics Instead of Traits Is a Great Way to Hire the Wrong Person
Most hiring decisions fail because we mistake characteristics for traits. Learn why your org keeps hiring the wrong people and how to fix it.
Today’s talent acquisition strategy has evolved into a curious mating ritual with executives, founders, and panels alike scanning candidates for signs of cultural compatibility, linguistic familiarity, and vague “executive energy.” It’s less an evaluation of substance and more an anthropological study in buzzword mimicry.
We’ve reduced hiring to a glorified talent show, where the contestant who can say “cross-functional alignment” gets the rose. The metrics? A smattering of surface-level signals:
“They worked in fintech.”
“They seem polished.”
“They talked about OKRs unprompted.”
And if someone drops “north star metric” into casual conversation, stop the search. We’ve found our next VP.
This is how we get it wrong. Repeatedly. We mistake characteristics as deep indicators of long-term fit while ignoring traits, the actual psychological infrastructure that governs performance across time. And when it inevitably falls apart? We blame “misalignment,” when what we really did was hire based on costume design.
Characteristics: The Mirage of the Moment
Characteristics are the flashy, surface-level features that look impressive in a LinkedIn headline or a chirpy interview anecdote. They’re what’s visible.
A current job title.
A big-name company.
Familiar jargon.
A calm, confident tone in meetings.
All of which tell you precisely one thing: what this person has been doing, not necessarily what they are capable of becoming.
“She’s a product manager at Google” is not a personality trait. It’s a data point. Same for “scaled a team from 10 to 200.” Was that growth organic? Context-driven? Supported by a billion-dollar marketing spend? You’ll never know if you don’t ask. But we rarely do. We assume that these signals reflect deep ability, when they often just reflect a setting.
Because that’s what characteristics are. They’re context artifacts. They grow out of the conditions a person operates in: the systems, norms, power structures, and rewards that surround them. Change the setting, and the behavior often changes too. Sometimes dramatically.
This is how companies end up hiring a person for their ability to execute at scale, only to discover that without the scaffolding of a legacy org, that same person stalls. Or they hire someone because they seemed “decisive” in a rigid culture, and then panic when that decisiveness turns into indecision under ambiguity. The behavior didn’t change. The environment did. The trait was never there.
When you hire based on characteristics, you’re really hiring someone else’s organizational byproduct. And then hoping it magically holds up in your own very different context. It’s not talent acquisition.
Traits: The Things That Actually Matter (So We Ignore Them)
Traits are tragically underappreciated in most hiring processes. Not because they’re irrelevant, but because they’re inconvenient. You can’t skim someone’s conscientiousness in a resume. There’s no LinkedIn endorsement for emotional stability. You can’t filter applicants by “resilience under pressure” or “doesn’t lose their mind in meetings.” These things require effort to understand. They require judgment.
And so companies quietly set them aside. Not explicitly, of course. Everyone says they want adaptable, thoughtful, low-ego hires. But when push comes to shove, most people fall back on what’s observable and easily labeled. They substitute the appearance of readiness for the architecture of competence.
But traits are the architecture. They’re not just psychological trivia from an undergrad textbook. They are rigorously studied, deeply predictive, and terrifyingly relevant. The Big Five: conscientiousness, openness, emotional stability, agreeableness, and dominance, are the closest thing we have to a blueprint for performance over time and across roles.
Traits are what persists when the org chart changes, when funding dries up, or when the roadmap turns into a flaming spreadsheet of failure. A trait-driven hire recalibrates. A characteristic-driven hire short-circuits.
Can traits evolve? Yes, over time. But they don’t perform on command. You can’t cram three levels of openness into someone during onboarding. Traits are what people bring into the room long before you explain the job. And they’re what they fall back on when no one’s watching.
So if you want to know whether someone can thrive in ambiguity, handle hard feedback, or rally a team under pressure, stop reading their CV like it’s an oracle. Start asking better questions. Otherwise, you’re just hiring whoever rehearsed best.
Why Companies Keep Getting This Wrong: A Masterclass in HR Self-Sabotage
Companies don’t really evaluate people. They evaluate proxies. And as long as those proxies look familiar enough, sound senior enough, and name-drop the right frameworks, the interview panel nods like bobbleheads in a wind tunnel.
The bar for getting hired often boils down to a kind of corporate cosplay. Reference the right logos. Carry yourself with a whiff of “executive presence,” whatever that even means this week. And suddenly, you’re the front-runner.
But no one pauses to ask the hard question: Are they successful because of who they are, or just because they were carried by the structure they worked in? In other words, are we hiring the actual capability or just importing someone else’s process, stripped of its context?
This is how companies end up recreating their competitor’s org chart, but without any of the operating rhythm, cultural scaffolding, or leadership patterns that made those roles work. It’s self-inflicted mediocrity disguised as best practice.
Why does this happen? Because it’s easier.
It’s easier to go with someone who looks like success than to investigate what actually made them effective.
It’s safer to default to a familiar background than to take a risk on potential.
And truthfully, many stakeholders prefer to hire people who reflect their own professional echo chamber. It feels good. It’s comfortable.
Meanwhile, assessing traits properly takes work. You have to dig beyond the surface, ask questions that don’t have rehearsed answers, check references across different contexts, and then apply actual judgment. It’s rigorous, inconvenient, and time-consuming. Which makes it a tough sell when the headcount clock is ticking and someone’s refreshing the hiring dashboard every six minutes.
The Trait-Driven Future: Hire for What Lasts
Companies that keep hiring based on surface-level characteristics will keep getting surface-level results. The ones that figure out how to assess traits will quietly build teams that outperform, outlast, and outmaneuver their competitors. Not overnight, but steadily. Like compounding interest.
Why? Because the ground is constantly shifting. The tools change. The markets change. The structure of work itself changes. That shiny hire who was perfect for one static role might be irrelevant six months later. And when the dust settles, all you’re left with is a person. The question is whether that person has the mental and emotional infrastructure to adapt.
A trait-led hiring system focuses on what endures. It looks for conscientiousness where execution matters, emotional stability where pressure is constant, openness where ambiguity reigns, and initiative where influence is required. These are foundational.
Now layer on the right characteristic adaptations, like experience in a specific business model or regulatory environment, and you get a complete, context-aware hire. Someone who has the behavioral tools and the environmental familiarity. Not one or the other.
This is the only sustainable system if you care about longevity and performance. Otherwise, you’re playing musical chairs with talent. Hiring based on superficial alignment to this quarter’s strategy and hoping nobody notices when it collapses under change.
Companies with a trait-first approach will make more accurate bets. They’ll match people not just to today’s work, but to the evolving complexity of tomorrow. And eventually, they’ll stop asking why so many of their hires looked great at first but didn’t scale. Because they’ll already know the answer.
They hired for what looked right. Not for what was right.
If you’re under pressure to fill a role fast, it’s tempting to grab whoever looks polished, sounds sharp, and speaks fluent corporate. But if all you’re evaluating is what someone did in a specific setting, you’re hiring a context echo. And that echo fades fast once they’re in a new environment with new rules.
Traits are the difference. They are the consistent, measurable tendencies that show up regardless of environment. When you hire for traits, you’re betting on how someone responds to pressure, adapts to change, collaborates with others, and pushes through uncertainty. These are the things that actually scale. They hold their shape across chaos.
Characteristics still matter. They’re useful, but not dependable on their own. A resume built on past context is just that: past. And unless you’re recreating someone’s old job exactly, it’s not particularly predictive of success in yours.
If you want to build a team that can survive the next five pivots, product relaunches, and quarterly reinventions, then stop being dazzled by someone’s current role. Start being interested in who they actually are.
At StratEx - Indonesia Business Advisory we partner with scaling orgs to identify and embed trait-based talent strategies that work. Contact us to replace gut-feel hiring with evidence-based frameworks tailored to real business outcomes.