Intellectual curiosity is the most important success predictor from my point of view

Professionals who are hesitant to hire candidates from outside their industry are ignoring a fundamental truth: people learn. Job-specific tasks and industry knowledge are both highly trainable. However, there’s a major predictor of job success that is neither trainable nor teachable.

When I hire myself, I always ask what drives you? Intellectual curiosity is the most important driver for success from my point of view. I always hire potential people with intellectual curiosity over industry experience, and so far, I have not failed. But the few times I have been persuaded to choose someone with industry experience, I have missed, and that person has become a wrong recruitment.

Intellectual curiosity refers to an individual’s genuine interest in learning – not just about a particular subject, but about a wide variety of topics and ideas. An intellectually curious individual is the type of person one would describe as having a love of learning.

People who have an intellectual curiosity is also fast learners. People with only one significant industry experience, are often too ingrained in the industry way of doing things that it might become difficult to see things in a new perspective. This is often because they have not learned anything other than one industry standard and have not need to take in new perspectives. Albert Einstein once said that “‘insanity’ was ‘Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting to achieve different results”.

By contrast, people who thirst for knowledge and have the capacity to quickly master new information – regardless of their familiarity with a certain industry are a major asset for an organization. Curious people are more likely to improve themselves by pursuing formal learning opportunities, sparking conversations with other professionals and seeking out new challenges. In today's market where changes must take place faster and faster to adapt to new competitive situations and business models, you need employees who are able to be forward thinkers. People who have an insatiable drive for learning about people, their situation, problems, and successes, they’re more likely to bring innovative new strategies and ideas to the table. These are the kind of employees that every organization needs more of in order to survive tomorrow's competitive situation. Yesterday's winners are rarely tomorrow's winners. We have good examples of this like Kodak, Nokia just to name a few. The winner of tomorrows competitive situations is the organizations who can make use of the intellectual curiosity of their employees with thoughts on cutting-edge approaches to familiar problems and ways to stay ahead of competitors. Too often we see that companies are not able to utilize the company's intellectual capital. Which just means that the business is on its way into the history books like many before them. If you want to succeed, make sure you bring in people with different perspectives and you have to be challenged as a leader.

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