Should You Hire for Attitude or Experience?

You should hire for attitude and train for experience — and if your interview is still 80% questions about what someone has already done, you have the ratio backwards. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and since March 2020 my team has built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US. Here is the pattern almost nobody says out loud: your best employee probably had the worst resume in the stack. That young kid you took a chance on, the one running your whole crew now — you didn't hire their experience. You hired their attitude. Then you went back to the next interview and spent forty minutes asking about experience.

Why does your best employee usually have the worst resume?

Your best employee usually had the worst resume because a resume measures the past and attitude predicts the future. A resume tells you where somebody has been, who employed them and how long they stayed. It cannot tell you whether they will own a mistake, whether they will flag a problem before it becomes expensive, or whether they will stay late because the crew is short. Those are the things that actually decide whether a hire works out.

Every business owner I meet has a version of this story. The person with the thinnest resume who turned into the backbone of the company. The one everybody else passed on. And almost everybody files it under luck. It isn't luck. It's evidence that the interview measured the wrong thing and got a good outcome by accident. Do that often enough and you'll also get the opposite by accident, which is what most bad hires really are. I've written before about what a bad hire costs when you never defined who you were looking for.

So why is your interview still 80% about experience?

Your interview is still 80% about experience because experience is the easy thing to ask about. The resume hands you the questions for free. Tell me about this role. Why did you leave. What software did you use. How many people reported to you. You can run that interview cold, with zero preparation, and it feels productive because the candidate talks for most of an hour.

Behavior is harder work. You have to decide in advance which behaviors your business actually needs, write questions that get at them, and then sit through silence while somebody thinks. Most owners don't skip behavioral interviewing because they disagree with it. They skip it because nobody ever built them the questions, so they default to the document in front of them.

What does an 80/20 interview actually look like?

An 80/20 interview spends 80% of its time on behavior, culture and chemistry, and 20% on experience. In a 60-minute first interview that's roughly five minutes to open and set expectations, about thirty-five minutes on behavior, ten minutes verifying experience, and the rest for their questions and next steps.

The important shift is what the experience portion becomes. It stops being exploration and becomes verification. You already know from the resume what they claim to have done. Ten minutes is plenty to confirm it's real, recent and relevant to your business. The other thirty-five minutes is where the decision actually gets made — and if you've never structured a first interview this way, the three-step hiring process I use is the frame it sits inside.

Which behaviors should you actually be testing for?

Test for the behaviors that show up in your business every single week: ownership, coachability, how somebody handles pressure, and how they treat people who can't do anything for them. Not a generic list of values off a poster — the four or five behaviors that separate the people who thrive in your specific environment from the ones who quietly stall out.

This is why the interview can't be designed in the interview. You define those behaviors before anyone is scheduled, at the same time you build the ideal candidate profile. If you walk in without them, you will grade on how much you enjoyed the conversation, which is a polite way of saying you'll hire people who remind you of yourself.

How do you ask a behavioral question without getting a rehearsed answer?

Ask for a specific event that already happened, then stay quiet and keep following it. The difference between a question that works and one that doesn't is almost always the tense. "What would you do if a project started slipping?" gets you a candidate's theory of themselves. "Tell me about the last time a project slipped on you" gets you an event, with dates, names and consequences attached.

Then keep pulling. What did you do first. Who did you tell. What did they say. What did it cost. What would you do differently now. A prepared answer survives the first question and starts to come apart by the third, because rehearsed stories are thin — there's no detail underneath them. And when the candidate stops talking, don't rescue them. The silence is part of the question.

Does experience still matter at all?

Yes — experience still matters, but it belongs in the 20%, and for some roles it belongs before the interview entirely. A licence, a ticket, a designation, a certification: those are screening criteria, not interview criteria. Filter for them when you review applications so that everyone who reaches the interview already clears the bar and the interview is free to do its real job.

Where experience is a preference rather than a hard requirement, be honest about what you're actually buying: ramp-up speed. Somebody who has done the job before will be useful sooner. That's a real advantage and it's worth something. The question is just how much. Six weeks of extra ramp-up is a cost you pay once. A bad attitude is a cost you pay every day for as long as that person stays, and it doesn't stay contained to them.

What happens to your hiring speed when you flip the ratio?

It gets faster, not slower, because a behavior-first interview makes the decision obvious. The delay in most hiring processes isn't sourcing. It's indecision — a fourth round, then a fifth, because nobody in the room can articulate what's wrong with a candidate who looks fine on paper. That feeling usually is a behavior concern. It just has nowhere to go when the interview never named the behaviors.

At CPG Recruitment, building the process around defined behaviors instead of resume archaeology is a large part of how we cut average time-to-fill from 68 days to 37 across the industries we serve. The disagreement still happens. It just happens on the scorecard, in week one, instead of after round five.

How do you keep an 80/20 interview consistent across your team?

Write the questions down, ask every candidate the same ones, and have each interviewer score independently before anybody talks. Consistency is what turns a set of opinions into a comparison. Without it, the last candidate interviewed has an advantage over the first for no reason other than memory.

The independent scoring matters more than people expect. If the most senior person in the room speaks first, everyone else's read quietly reshapes itself around theirs, and you end up with one opinion wearing four hats. Score first, then discuss. If your standards have been drifting from hire to hire, this is usually where it shows up.

Want help designing an interview that actually predicts performance?

If your interviews are still built around the resume, that's a fixable problem and it doesn't take a new hiring system to fix. My team at CPG Recruitment designs interview processes for business owners across Canada and the US — the behaviors worth testing, the questions that get at them, and the scorecard that keeps four interviewers honest. You can get in touch with me directly here, or read the CPG Recruitment take on the same question in what an interview should actually measure.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should you use the same 80/20 split for every role?

Not exactly — the split moves with how much of the role is technical, but it moves less than most people assume. For a senior technical hire you might run 70/30. For a frontline role where you are training the skill anyway, 90/10 is defensible. What shouldn't happen is the flip, where experience takes the majority of the interview, because that's the conversation the resume already had with you.

How long should a behavior-first interview take?

Forty-five to sixty minutes for a first interview is enough, as long as it's structured. Longer interviews rarely produce more signal; they just produce more conversation. If you find yourself needing ninety minutes, that's usually a sign the questions weren't decided in advance and the interview is being designed live.

Who should sit in on the interview?

Whoever has a yes or a no on the final decision, and ideally somebody who will work alongside the person day to day. Two or three interviewers is the practical range. What you want to avoid is a decision-maker who never met the candidate but reserves the right to veto at the end — that is the single most common reason a hiring process quietly restarts at week six.

What if a candidate has the right attitude but nobody on the team is sure?

Go back to the scorecard and find out which behavior the hesitation attaches to. "Not sure" is almost always a specific concern that hasn't been named yet, and once it is named it's usually testable with one more focused conversation or a practical exercise. If nobody can attach the hesitation to anything at all after that, it's bias, not signal, and it should not be the reason you pass.