by Lou Adler, CEO and founder of The Adler Group
This Fortune article describes why your HR tech AI project will likely fail despite what all of the HR pundits tell you. It summarises what Julie Sweet – the CEO of Accenture – has found to be the three red flags when it comes to using AI improperly. It all comes down to looking backwards or forwards and most HR AI-driven tech projects are facing in the wrong direction.
Carol Dweck’s growth mindset work has some eerily parallels. Her work has transformed education and organisational development, yet most companies haven’t applied these same forward-looking insights to hiring. As a result they’re missing the opportunity to use AI to create a competitive talent advantage and to change their company culture in the process.
Even worse, many believe they’re progressive by emphasising skills over experience, not realising this is merely an extension of backwards-focused fixed mindset thinking – just with a different checklist.
This is one of the three red flags Sweet contends is a sure predictor of AI project failure.
The Fixed Mindset Trap: From Experience to Skills to AI
Traditional hiring operates with a fixed mindset, first focusing on years of experience, now on skill inventories. Whether counting years or cataloging competencies, companies still treat human potential as static rather than dynamic.
AI is amplifying this problem for companies with a fixed mindset hiring process. At HR Tech you’ll find plenty of examples of how not to use AI. The biggest one: using AI to maximize efficiency in screening resumes and matching keywords, using 21st-century technology to perfect a 20th-century mistake.
They’re just doing the wrong things faster. That’s a fixed mindset mentality and Sweet’s Red Flag #1!
Shifting to a Growth Mindset Hiring Process is the Key to Measuring Quality of Hire
Having a growth mindset doesn’t mean the person blindly believes they can do anything – it’s someone who has successfully tackled comparable challenges before and has the confidence that can handle bigger challenges in the future.
To spot someone with a growth mindset just ask the person to describe some of the projects they’ve volunteered for and why. If the projects and person are growing in scope tactically and strategically and involve more stretch projects with a broader variety of people in different functions and levels, the person likely has a growth mindset. Then compare their accomplishments, setbacks and learning outcomes to the problems and challenge they’re likely to face on your job. If they’re similar, the person is a strong candidate for the role. That’s Performance-based Hiring in a nutshell.
You can use this some approach to predict Quality of Hire during the interview. Measuring Quality of Hire post-hire involves determining how successful they were handling the challenges, problems and performance objectives of the actual job.
Fixed Mindset Excuse Making
It doesn’t get much simpler than that. Although those with a fixed mindset will argue otherwise.
Consider this. When confronted with change a fixed mindset person defends the status quo, focuses on the budget not the opportunity, says they tried that before and it didn’t work, or says it doesn’t scale or there’s too much friction.
Those with a growth mindset have a different perspective. They embrace change as a chance to innovate, seek out opportunities to expand and improve, and learn from past attempts to find a new path forward, asking “how can we make this work on a larger scale?”
Fixed Thinking Creates Fixed Cultures
Companies with a fixed mindset hiring process create rigid job descriptions with specific requirements, designing processes to eliminate rather than discover. They seek people who’ve demonstrated exact skills, building inventory rather than capability.
This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you hire based on static qualifications, you build a workforce valuing credentials over capability.
Your culture stagnates because everyone was hired to maintain the status quo, not challenge it.
Performance-based Hiring flips this entirely. By defining roles through key performance objectives, it attracts candidates who think in terms of results rather than credentials. This builds cultures where employees focus on delivering outcomes rather than defending qualifications.
Redefining “Qualified” Through Performance
The traditional definition of qualified – right skills, certifications, and background – is obsolete. In rapidly evolving environments, static skill sets poorly predict future success.
Performance-based Hiring redefines “qualified” around one question: Has this person achieved comparable results in comparable situations? This performance-over-skills approach doesn’t just diversify your candidate pool – it identifies those most likely to thrive where adaptability matters more than current capabilities.
AI as Amplifier: Choose Your Operating System
As AI transforms hiring, we face a critical choice. Use AI to do the wrong things faster –screening more resumes for keywords, eliminating more candidates based on fixed criteria – or deploy it within Performance-based Hiring to identify performance potential.
The choice is clear: continue hiring with a fixed mindset or bet on performance and potential over static credentials. Your hiring philosophy doesn’t just determine who joins your team; it fundamentally shapes your company’s DNA and ability to thrive in a future that will be dominated by change.
Permission has been granted from The Adler Group and Lou Adler, author of Hire With Your Head and The Essential Guide to Hiring & Getting Hired, to reprint this article.
About the author
Lou Adler is the CEO and founder of The Adler Group – a training and search firm helping companies implement Performance-based Hiring℠. Adler is the author of the Amazon top-10 best-seller, Hire With Your Head (John Wiley & Sons, 3rd Edition, 2007). His most recent book has just been published, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired (Workbench, 2013). He is also the author of the award-winning Nightingale-Conant audio program, Talent Rules! Using Performance-based Hiring to Build Great Teams (2007). Adler holds an MBA from the University of California in Los Angeles and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Clarkson University in New York.
