Talent management has undergone a massive overhaul, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Working environments, business priorities, and new technologies have been adopted with prodigious urgency. Hiring and onboarding have become substantially remote activities. In January 2020 — before Covid had even become a pandemic — the World Economic Forum called for a global reskilling revolution, and firms now require different skills of their workforces, including resilience, adaptability, digital, design, and interpersonal skills.

These changes have been a challenge for job candidates and employers alike. But I believe that there’s a simple way to bring some much-needed clarity and guidance — one which adds value all the way along the employee lifecycle, from hiring to managing performance.

The secret is to ask of people a simple question: How do you learn?

This is not about simplistic learning preferences (such as schedules and modalities) or broadly discredited learning styles (such as being a visual or aural learner). This is about an individual’s personal system for updating, improving, and sharing her knowledge and skills. Does the job candidate you’re considering have such a system? And, for that matter, do you?

This may be the most pertinent question one can ask of a current or future employee. Future performance of the individual is just as much a function of high-caliber, systematic, intentional skills development as it is of past achievements and qualifications, the traditional fare of job interviews. And the capability and much of the value of a company is, in turn, a function of the collective skills of its workforce.

Lifelong learning is now roundly considered to be an economic imperative and “the only sustainable competitive advantage.” Job candidates and employees who consider, update, and improve their skills are the high performers, especially over the longer term. Pressing ourselves on the question of how we learn brings a hard, pragmatic edge to the important but nebulous notion of growth mindset.

Let’s consider the question’s application to two key stages of the employee lifecycle: hiring and performance management.

Hiring and getting hired

Suppose the question were asked by default during the screening process. Convincing answers would indicate high levels of curiosity, organization, and method.

As a hiring manager:

• Take care to be inclusive and open-minded about what counts as learning. This is partly to be able to appreciate cultural and personal differences. It’s also to recognize that there is a dizzying proliferation of content from which one can learn: courses, books, people, poems, performance support tools, songs, films, conversations, observations, reflections, memories, and more. How does the candidate go about making sense of all of this? How does she face up to content overload? How does she select what’s most relevant and then slice, dice, and digest it in a way that improves her feeling of fulfillment and level of performance over the long term?
• Ask the candidate about something they’ve recently learned and how they could apply it in the role for which you are considering them.
• Be prepared to have the same question be asked of you. Show an awareness of the skills deemed to be of particularly high value at the firm — this is typically a list of 20 to 100 skills, behaviors, and values, defined with care.

As a candidate:

• Ask about the learning culture and facilities for learning at the firm. This will help understand more about the environment you may be walking into, and will help demonstrate your interest in learning to your prospective employer.
• Don’t wait to be asked about how you learn. Volunteer your convincing answer at the right moment in the conversation.
• Be prepared to answer any and all of the above questions for hiring managers.

* * *