Curiosity in recruitment is having its gold rush. Books arrive in quantity, neuroscience research keeps finding that curiosity improves memory and learning, and the word has started appearing in job advertisements everywhere.
You will recognise the phrasing. A marketing role asking for creativity, initiative and curiosity. An engineering role where intellectual curiosity and methodology will let you handle complex systems. A maintenance technician role where responsiveness, curiosity and a service mindset will be your assets.
So has curiosity simply replaced our old friend motivated and dynamic, or has it become a subject in its own right? The answer matters, because one of those two is worth building a hiring process around.
| The claim in the ad | What the process actually screens | The shift that transforms |
|---|---|---|
| Curiosity in recruitment, as advertisedCuriosity now appears in job advertisements across every function, from marketing through to maintenance. It arrives alongside creativity and initiative, in the slot that motivated and dynamic used to occupy. | Proven skills for a jobSelection then measures demonstrated competence against a fixed role. A non-linear career reads as instability, an outside passion reads as a distraction, and the candidate who asks about moving functions later reads as uncommitted. | Recruit it rather than install itMaking an incurious person curious is extremely difficult, so hiring people who already are makes more sense than training. The markers are visible on any CV, and the difficulty sits in trusting them enough to make the offer. |
How Google recruited with a question
A mysterious billboard appeared alongside Highway 101, the road running from San Francisco towards Los Angeles, right at the level of Silicon Valley. Coincidence? I doubt it.
The billboard with no name on it
The message read: the first ten-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e, followed by dot com. No logo, no company name, no explanation.
Three ways existed to get past it. You were a mathematician. You were curious, so you went and researched prime numbers and Euler’s number, the mathematical constant worth roughly 2.71828. Or you were lazy, so you typed the question into a search engine and waited to see what came back.
Options one and two got you to the answer, 7427466391, and a website carrying a second puzzle. Congratulations, you have reached level two, it said, before setting out a sequence of five values with the last one missing and a login to enter it against.
Solve that one and you arrived at a page inviting you to send in your CV, and possibly to be hired by Google.
Option three, laziness, left you at the door. The people who had solved it and worked out that a job sat at the end held off publishing the answer for several days, which kept both the incompetent and the incurious outside.
Running a company on questions
The campaign was not a stunt disconnected from the organisation behind it. Eric Schmidt, chief executive at the time, described the culture in one line: we run this company on questions, not answers.
Interview questions followed the same logic. One I have seen quoted asks whether you have ever found yourself unable to stop learning about something you had never encountered before, and how and why you kept going.
The question does two jobs at once. It identifies whether somebody holds what Carol Dweck named a growth mindset, and it separates people who were curious because the job required it from people who were simply curious.
That second distinction is the one worth stealing. Almost any candidate can describe learning something under obligation, and very few can describe learning something nobody asked them to learn.
Curiosity and empathy, the two engines of innovation
Tim Brown, who led the design firm IDEO, described looking for T-shaped people, using the letter to explain that he wanted depth and breadth in the same candidate. The vertical bar carries the expertise that contributes to the creative process, and the horizontal bar carries the ability to collaborate across disciplines.
What the horizontal bar is actually made of
Two ingredients make up that horizontal bar. Empathy lets a person imagine a problem from somebody else’s position. Curiosity lets them collaborate with other disciplines enthusiastically, to the point of taking up those disciplines themselves.
The people who perform and create best are therefore not the ones with the strongest skills alone. They are the ones whose curiosity pushes them to explore, ask questions, understand and collaborate. I have worked through the full model, its contested origins and what flattens it in my article on T-shaped skills.
What IDEO listens for in an interview
To find these people, IDEO pays attention to how a candidate talks about their last project, with applications arriving largely through referral. Somebody who puts forward only their own contribution risks lacking the breadth to take an interest in anything beyond their own job.
The candidates who interest them most describe how they took part in a group while paying attention to other people’s work. That is a listening test rather than a question, and it costs nothing to add to an interview you are already running.
Field note
The answer Howard Schultz gave me in Sydney
Some years ago in Sydney I had the chance to put a question to Howard Schultz, who built Starbucks. I asked him how he managed to recruit people who smile, given that every service business in the world says it wants exactly that and very few of them get it.
His answer took about two seconds. By recruiting people who smile.
I have used that line in workshops ever since, because the room always laughs and then stops laughing about four seconds later. The joke works by pointing at something an entire industry spends money avoiding. Organisations build training programmes to install a disposition they screened out at interview, and they do it because the disposition is hard to measure and the qualification is easy.
Making an incurious person curious is extremely difficult, and hiring somebody who already is costs nothing extra. Before commissioning any programme to develop curiosity, look at what your last twenty hires had in common, because your selection process has been answering this question for years without being asked.
How to find curious candidates
Curious candidates are not hard to identify. The hard part is trusting them enough to hire them, particularly if you are filling a job rather than recruiting for work. Four markers do most of the identification.
Four markers on any CV
Each marker is visible on an ordinary application, and each one is routinely read as a negative by a process built to match proven competence to a fixed role.
- Their career is not linear, and you can see them following whatever interested them at the time in each role. Ask why they changed job and field, to establish whether those changes were chosen.
- They have a passion outside their job. Work out whether it connects to the roles they have held, whether it has evolved over time, and whether it is driven by wanting to understand.
- You can use a curiosity assessment, which turns an impression into six scores and gives you something to discuss rather than to judge.
- The simplest marker of all: wait for the candidate’s own questions about how the role will evolve and what a move into a different function would look like.
That fourth one costs nothing and almost nobody uses it. A candidate asking where the role goes next is telling you their appetite before you have asked for it, and a great many interviewers hear it as impatience.
Job or work, which one are you filling
This brings us to the distinction between a job and work, and to the choice between recruiting proven competence to hold a job and recruiting possible potential to adapt to the variety of the work.
Both are legitimate and they need different processes. A job that will not change for five years rewards proven competence, and pretending otherwise wastes everybody’s time.
Very few Australian roles now sit in that category, which is why the second approach keeps gaining ground and why the first keeps being used anyway.
Potential, and what it rests on
Potential sounds like a word my grandfather would use, and two forces have brought it back. Refocusing on the attitudes automation cannot reach makes obvious sense. And as roles transform faster, the ability to keep learning and adapting has become worth more than having been the first to do something.
Potential rests on three things, and each of them has an active form.
- Curiosity, the thirst for new experience and new knowledge, with an appetite for feedback, learning and change. Put into action it becomes creativity, the art of finding new ways of doing things under constraint.
- Empathy, a passion for other people and the desire to understand their experience. Put into action it becomes compassion, goodwill accompanied by a willingness to help.
- Engagement, the desire to prove yourself, connect with others and communicate a vision. Put into action it becomes determination, the persistence and resilience to get past obstacles towards difficult goals.
Merck’s own State of Curiosity research, conducted with 23,000 people and published by the company itself, reports that 73 per cent of respondents say curiosity helps them engage more in their work, generate more ideas and share those ideas more readily. Worth reading as self-reported research rather than as independent measurement, and worth reading nonetheless.
Which screening approach fits your role
Three approaches exist for bringing curiosity into a selection process, and they differ in cost, in defensibility and in what they do to your candidate experience. The right one depends on how much the role will change over the next three years.
Three approaches compared
The deciding question is whether you can defend the decision afterwards. Anything that looks like a personality judgement will collapse under a challenge, and anything based on described behaviour will hold.
| Approach | What it measures | Its blind spot | Fits you when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Curiosity named in the ad | Nothing, it is a signal to candidates rather than a filter | Attracts curious applicants into a process that then screens them out | Only alongside one of the two approaches below |
| Behavioural questions | Described episodes of learning nobody required | Rewards candidates who interview well and prepare stories | Most roles, and it is the cheapest defensible method |
| Curiosity assessment | Six scores across the dimensions of curiosity | Becomes a sorting instrument if results reach the hiring manager | Volume hiring, or where the team composition matters more than the individual |
Signals that your process is screening curiosity out
Four signals indicate that your advertisement and your selection are working against each other. All four are visible in your own hiring data.
- Your last twenty hires all came from the same industry, which means relevant experience is doing the deciding.
- Non-linear careers are described as red flags in your shortlisting notes.
- Nobody records the questions candidates ask, so the strongest available marker never enters the assessment.
- Your advertisement asks for curiosity and your position description lists only tasks, which tells a candidate which document to believe.
Know your own curiosity profile before you assess anybody else’s
Curiosity has five dimensions and produces six recognisable profiles, and most interviewers screen for the one that resembles them. Take the free and anonymous curiosity test and find out which profile you have been hiring.
How I can help you recruit for curiosity
I work with hiring teams on the gap between what an advertisement promises and what a selection process rewards. That gap is where curious candidates are lost, and it is usually invisible to the people running the process.
Interview design and assessment debriefs
Interview design rebuilds your questions around described behaviour rather than claimed attributes, and adds the listening tests that cost nothing. The output is a question set your interviewers can actually defend.
Assessment debriefs run the curiosity profiles with the hiring team first, because an interviewer who does not know their own profile will keep hiring it.
Keynotes and HR programmes
A keynote suits an organisation that has added curiosity to its employer brand and changed nothing about how it selects. The Google billboard does most of the work, because it is memorable and it makes an uncomfortable point about what a process is really testing.
Longer work connects this to who is permitted to be curious once they arrive, since recruiting curious people into an organisation that rations curiosity produces resignations rather than innovation.
Conclusion: curiosity in recruitment is a selection problem
Curiosity is a key behaviour, and a considerable number of attitudes and capabilities follow from it. Do not underestimate it, and do not assume that naming it in an advertisement has any effect on who you end up hiring.
Look for the non-linear career, the passion outside work, and the questions the candidate asks you. Then check whether your own process treats any of those three as a positive.
Recruit people who are already curious rather than planning to make them so afterwards. That is the whole of curiosity in recruitment, and it is considerably cheaper than the alternative.
Frequently asked questions about curiosity in recruitment
How do you identify a curious candidate in an interview?
Look for a non-linear career they chose, a passion outside work that has evolved, and the questions they ask you about how the role develops. Ask them to describe learning something nobody required them to learn, which almost no unprepared candidate can fake.
Can you train curiosity, or do you have to hire it?
Making an incurious person curious is extremely difficult, so hiring people who already are makes more sense. What training does change is whether an already curious person is permitted to use that curiosity once they arrive, which is a separate problem.
Is putting curiosity in a job advertisement worth anything?
Only if your selection process rewards it. Naming curiosity attracts curious applicants into a process that frequently screens them out for having a non-linear career, which produces a worse outcome than not mentioning it at all.
What did Google’s billboard puzzle actually test?
It tested whether somebody would follow an unexplained question far enough to reach an answer, with no company name and no promised reward. That is a filter for self-directed curiosity rather than for mathematics, and the people who solved it withheld the answer for days.
