86 Percent of Hiring Managers Say the Right Personality Beats a Skills Gap

New survey results from Express Employment Professionals and The Harris Poll, reported by HR Dive, found that 86 percent of more than 1,000 US hiring decision-makers said the right personality could outweigh a candidate's skills gap. At Metaintro, we read hiring research for what it changes about how you prepare rather than for reassurance, and this finding is more actionable than it first appears. It does not mean likeability beats competence. It means the specific traits employers are screening for are not the ones most candidates practise, and they are assessed in places most candidates do not think of as the interview.

What did the survey actually find?

The headline is that 86 percent of over 1,000 US hiring decision-makers said the right personality could outweigh a skills gap, which the researchers connected to the growing weight employers place on soft skills. The survey also asked what employers are actually looking for, and hiring managers and job seekers agreed on the traits that carry the most value. Those are reliability, honesty, adaptability, flexibility and self-motivation.

That list is worth pausing on, because none of those five is a personality in the social sense. There is no mention of charisma, extroversion, humour or being pleasant to be around. Every one is a behavioural reliability trait, meaning a prediction about how you will act when nobody is checking. Work ethic and willingness to learn came through as especially important in the same poll. The gap between what candidates think "personality" means in a hiring context and what employers are measuring is the single most useful thing in this research, and it is the same gap explored in the complete soft skills guide.

It is also worth noticing that hiring managers and job seekers agreed on the list. Disagreement between the two sides is the usual finding in surveys like this, and it is normally where the practical advice comes from, since candidates optimise for the wrong thing. Here the two groups converge, which means the problem is not that people are aiming at the wrong traits. It is that they are describing those traits rather than evidencing them, and description is exactly what a structured interview is designed to discount.

How do hiring managers actually assess personality?

Through four channels, according to the survey. Informal interactions, situational questions, behavioural interview questions and reference checks. Three of those four are places candidates routinely under-prepare, and one of them is not even understood as an assessment.

Informal interactions are the walk to the meeting room, the small talk before the call starts, the exchange with the receptionist and the tone of your emails to the recruiter. Candidates treat these as the parts around the interview rather than as part of it, and hiring managers explicitly do not. Reference checks are the other under-managed channel, since most people nominate whoever is convenient rather than whoever can speak precisely to reliability and adaptability, which is why choosing job references that actually get you hired is worth more attention than it usually gets. The two structured channels, situational and behavioural questions, are the ones you can rehearse directly, and the STAR method guide covers the format most employers expect those answers to take.

The balance between these four channels also explains something candidates find baffling, which is being rejected after an interview that felt like it went well. If the formal conversation is only one of four inputs, a strong hour in the room can be outweighed by a lukewarm reference or a chain of slow, careless emails during scheduling. Nobody tells you that is why, because employers rarely give that level of feedback, so the interview gets blamed for a decision that was made elsewhere in the process.

Why are employers weighting this more heavily now?

Because the technical failure mode has become expensive and visible. A TestGorilla report released last year found that 78 percent of employers surveyed had hired a candidate with strong technical skills who ultimately did not fit well into the company because of a lack of soft skills. When more than three quarters of employers have personally made that mistake, the screening naturally shifts.

The second driver is the pace of change in the work itself. If the tools someone uses will be different in eighteen months, a hiring manager is buying the capacity to relearn rather than the current skill set, which puts adaptability and willingness to learn ahead of a specific proficiency. A Graduate Management Admission Council report released earlier this year pointed the same way, finding rising employer demand for emotional intelligence, grit and management capability specifically in an era of AI use at work. The same logic sits behind research showing adaptability now beats experience for career growth. Work on personality and job performance from bodies such as the American Psychological Association has pointed in a similar direction for decades, which is that conscientiousness predicts performance across almost every occupation studied while most other traits are job-specific.

Bob Funk Jr., chief executive, president and chairman of Express Employment International, put the employer view directly in a statement: "Every employee has an effect on the workplace beyond the responsibilities listed in a job description. The right personality can build trust, make change easier to navigate and raise the standard for how a team works together. That is why employers see personality as more than a hiring advantage. It is representative of the business culture."

Does this mean you can skip the skills?

No, and reading it that way is the trap. The finding is that personality can outweigh a gap, not that it replaces the requirement. A gap implies you meet most of the bar and fall short on part of it, which is a very different position from not being able to do the job. The survey is telling you what happens at the margin between shortlisted candidates, not what gets you shortlisted in the first place.

The practical reading is about which gap to worry about. If you are missing one tool or one certification but can demonstrate the underlying capability and a track record of learning quickly, that is a survivable gap and this research says employers will often take you anyway. If you are missing the core competence of the role, no amount of reliability closes it. Knowing which of those two situations you are in determines whether you apply anyway or spend three months fixing it first, and the AI skills gap and what it means for your salary is a useful check on where the hard requirements are currently hardening. The formal competency requirements for most roles are documented publicly, and the office and administrative support and other occupation pages set out what is genuinely required rather than what a job advert asks for aspirationally.

How do you prove reliability in an interview?

With specifics that carry a date, a number and a consequence. Reliability is a claim about your past behaviour, so it can only be evidenced by past behaviour, and the failure mode is describing yourself with adjectives. "I am reliable" tells an interviewer nothing. "I ran the month-end close for eleven months without a missed deadline, including the month our finance lead left" is a fact they can check and remember.

Build one short story for each of the five named traits before your next interview, and structure each around what the situation was, what you specifically did and what changed as a result. For adaptability and flexibility, the strongest material is usually a time the plan changed badly rather than a time you learned something new, because that is where the trait is actually tested. For self-motivation, look for something you started that nobody asked for. These are the answers behavioural questions are designed to surface, and preparing them is the difference between passing that section and improvising through it. Keep each one to about ninety seconds spoken, because the most common failure with a good story is length rather than content, and an interviewer who has to interrupt you to move on has stopped assessing the trait and started managing the clock.

One more thing separates a story that lands from one that does not, which is naming what it cost you. Reliability is only interesting where it was inconvenient, so the version where you covered the close because the finance lead left is stronger than the version where everything went smoothly. Interviewers hear polished narratives constantly and discount them, and a small, specific admission of difficulty is the fastest way to sound like a person describing something that actually happened. The blank sheet of paper interview question is one example of how employers try to get past rehearsed material to the same underlying signal.

What does this mean for your career?

If you are job searching, redistribute your preparation. Most candidates spend the large majority of their time on technical rehearsal and almost none on the four channels this survey names, which is backwards given that 86 percent of decision-makers say the trait assessment can override a skills gap. An hour spent building five concrete trait stories and a second hour spent briefing your references properly will move more outcomes than another hour of technical drilling once you are already at a reasonable standard. Briefing a reference is not coaching them to say something untrue. It is telling them which role you are up for, which two traits matter most and which specific episode you would like them to have front of mind, so that a busy person gives a precise answer rather than a warm but generic one.

If you are further along and thinking about progression, the same traits are what get people moved into leadership, and the GMAC finding about management capability is the signal there. "In combination with layoffs over the recent years plus the rise of required AI skills, experience is no longer enough," Lacey Kaelani, chief executive of Metaintro, told Fortune. What this survey adds is the other half of that sentence, which is that the things filling the gap left by experience are not only technical. Reliability and adaptability are being priced explicitly, and they are among the few attributes that do not depreciate when the tooling changes.

What should employers take from this?

That an unstructured read on personality is the least reliable part of most hiring processes. Informal interactions are exactly where unexamined preference creeps in, because warmth in a corridor conversation is easy to mistake for reliability and correlates with familiarity rather than performance. If personality is going to carry this much weight, it needs the same structure as a technical assessment, meaning defined traits, consistent situational questions and a scoring rubric applied to every candidate.

The specific traits this survey identifies are testable, which helps. Reliability shows up in reference checks if you ask about deadlines and follow-through rather than for a general impression. The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology publishes the professional standards for how selection assessments should be validated, which is the relevant benchmark if personality is going to carry real weight in a decision. Adaptability shows up in a well-designed situational question. Guidance from bodies like SHRM covers how to build that structure, the Harvard Business Review has published extensively on structured interviewing, and the Occupational Outlook Handbook is a reminder that the required competencies for a role are documented and worth separating from the traits you are also assessing. Doing both deliberately is what stops "personality" from becoming a word for hiring people who remind you of yourself.

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People Also Asked

Q: Do employers really value personality over skills?

A: They value it at the margin. In the Express Employment and Harris Poll survey, 86 percent of more than 1,000 US hiring decision-makers said the right personality could outweigh a candidate's skills gap. That describes a choice between shortlisted candidates rather than a substitute for being able to do the job, so the competence still has to be broadly there.

Q: Which personality traits do hiring managers rate highest?

A: Hiring managers and job seekers both named reliability, honesty, adaptability, flexibility and self-motivation as the highest-value traits, with work ethic and willingness to learn also rated as especially important. Notably, none of these are social traits like charisma or extroversion, so preparing to seem outgoing misses what is actually being measured.

Q: How is personality assessed during hiring?

A: Through informal interactions, situational questions, behavioural interview questions and reference checks. That means the assessment starts before the formal interview does and continues after it ends, so how you handle scheduling emails and who you nominate as a reference are both part of the evaluation rather than administration around it.

The traits employers are screening for are ones you can evidence, but only if you know which four channels they are watching. Metaintro indexes live roles and the employers behind them so you can research how a specific company interviews before you walk in rather than guessing. Create your free profile and prepare for the process you are actually about to face.