Assessing Critical Skills in a Sea of Leadership Buzzwords
Your candidate is buzzword compliant, but do they have the critical skills needed to drive results?
Hiding Behind Buzzwords
Hiring exceptional talent has always been hard. Few leaders can stand the test of time, adapt to new environments, keep up with technological advancements, see where the puck is going, and inspire their teams and customers in the most uncertain of times.
Leadership burnout is at an all-time high, rising to 56% last year, and hiring managers are confused about what "critical skills" are needed to achieve success in this rocket ship moment of AI. Candidates, on the other hand, are scrambling to keep up with technology advancements, trying to understand what’s useful and what’s not, and are hiding behind a sea of buzzwords as they go through interviews, trying to navigate what is most important to the CEO or hiring manager.
How do you assess? How do you determine what is most critical? How do you determine who’s real?
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Here’s what we’re seeing on the talent landscape
Most leaders are scrambling. They’re drowning in tech stacks, AI tools, and new platform launches, with no clear direction on what’s signal vs. noise.
People fear change. Even high-caliber leaders are staying put out of caution. Trust in current teams outweighs the perceived risk of starting over somewhere new.
CEOs are questioning their bench. There’s a real moment of reckoning happening—do we have the team to get us there, not just here?
AI will change everything—but not yet. Most tools are nascent, messy, or over-promised. What’s needed is adaptability, not just tool fluency.
Track record matters. CEOs want leaders who’ve done it before, but who are still close enough to the work to roll up their sleeves.
So with all of that, how do you define what’s truly critical in a hire, and not chase some mythical unicorn?
8 Tactics to Identify and Assess Critical Skills
1. Start by defining your moment, not the role
Don’t default to a job description. Instead, ask: What is this moment in our company’s evolution calling for? A turnaround? A scale-up? A pivot? Critical skills shift depending on the context.
Use a “moment mapping” framework to define your company’s current inflection point, and then align competencies to that. This will help you zoom out from the job title and ask: What phase of growth or change are we in, and what kind of leader does this moment demand?
2. Look for “translators,” not just tech-savvy leaders
You don’t need a CTO-level expert in every role, especially in sales and marketing positions. You need someone who can translate emerging tech into business value, and someone who knows how to implement change inside an organization.
When interviewing candidates, ask them to walk you through a time they introduced new tech to a team that either bought in or resisted it. How did they translate value? How did they get buy-in for the investment? What broke?
3. Prioritize cognitive agility
With the landscape changing weekly, the most curious leaders, who have the ability to learn, synthesize, and make decisions fast, are the most valuable leaders.
It is important to use case-based interviewing to understand more about your candidate. Give them a real challenge you’re facing and ask how they’d approach it, not just hypothetically, but step by step. Be thoughtful about what case study you are pushing forward, and recognize that the candidate is interviewing you as much as you are interviewing them.
4. Assess “hands-on” through storytelling
Everyone says they’re hands-on. But the proof is in how they describe their work. Listen for specifics around what they personally did, where they got their hands dirty, and what they pushed to the team to achieve.
Ask specific questions like, “What’s the last thing you personally built, fixed, or launched that had a visible impact on your team or organization. And what did you own vs. farm out to others?”
5. Don’t confuse charisma with competence
I always say, “sales people sell and marketers market”. Many recruiters shy away from hiring growth leaders because they are so hard to assess. It is important to remember that confidence in a room doesn’t always translate to traction in execution. Great leaders make teams better, not just rooms louder.
This is where reference checks are critical. Make sure to have background discussions with former team members or leaders, asking them what changed when your candidate showed up. What did they improve? Where did they struggle? Go deep with background references to truly understand the leader you are hiring and the impact they can make for you.
6. Measure pattern recognition, not perfection
Remember, no candidate has ever done your job before. But they may have seen enough similar plays so that they can adapt. Look for leaders who can connect dots across industries, teams, and revenue cycles. Shy away from anyone who states they “have done it before”.
A good question to ask when interviewing is “Tell me about a time when you entered a business model you hadn’t worked in before. What did you recognize quickly? What took longer? Where were you wrong? How did you pivot?”
7. Test for durability
Burnout is at an all-time high, and so is pressure. We are in volatile times on a number of fronts, and hiring a leader who has stamina, self-awareness, and the toolkit to pace themselves and their team is essential to success.
Ask your candidates how they reset themselves and their team when they are under pressure. Do they actually know how to do this? Do they remain clear-headed in the storm, or do they push themselves and their team until they break? There are good third-party testing tools to support your evaluation here.
8. Calibrate ambition to the job
Too many CEOs get wooed by a leader who has a big resume, with big logos, and a long-standing track record. But every company and position has different needs. Some positions need builders, and some need transformers. These skill sets and personality traits are not always transferable, and sometimes the position in the company requires skills that don’t align with the tenure and ambition of your candidate. It is important not to get fixated on a candidate’s resume vs. matching your candidate’s work, ambition, and skillset to the business stage and need.
Don’t hire a candidate for where the company will be in five years. Hire leaders who can act on the opportunity today, are excited about the role they will take on, and are willing to do what the job actually demands.
The bottom line about critical skills
Critical skills aren’t static. They’re contextual, layered, and deeply human. You don’t need perfection. You need someone who understands the terrain, can build trust quickly, and is built for this moment.
Evaluating a candidate can never be done simply by reading their resume or looking at their LinkedIn. Going deep during the interview process to understand how your candidate thinks, how they adapt, and how they show up under pressure, married to the critical skills needed for this now moment, is what will make for a successful hire.
Talent + Tech
A weekly roundup of leadership, tech, and talent
WHAT TO READ:
A leadership crisis is looming as executives are more burned out. Executive burnout is rarely talked about and mostly frowned upon. Great leaders are supposed to navigate through tough times, show resilience, and support their teams, but executive burnout is growing, which is leaving less talent that has the experience and desire to lead during these tumultuous times.
WHO TO FOLLOW:
Dora Vanourek is an executive coach and former leader at IBM and PWC. Follow her on LinkedIn for very smart and very real tips on leadership, burnout, and finding success.
START TO LISTEN:
Jocko’s Podcast. I often am heard saying, “Building a business is like going to war, who do you want to be in the foxhole with?” Jocko Willink is a former Navy SEAL and leadership expert. His podcast gives frontline advice on how to adopt a more disciplined and effective approach to leadership and life.