How to Hire for Character Before You Hire for Skills

Most hiring processes are built around skills first. A job posting lists required experience. A resume gets screened for keyword matches. Technical ability drives most of the early conversation. Ellis Winstanley, the owner of Austin restaurant and bar El Arroyo, built his hiring approach in the opposite order.

Winstanley shared his framework in a past conversation with recruitAbility CEO Nad Elias. He evaluates every candidate against three criteria, in a fixed order. Technical skill is deliberately last.

What Does It Mean to Hire for Character First?

Winstanley’s first filter has nothing to do with a resume. He looks for whether a candidate will, in his words, “do the right thing when presented the opportunity not to when nobody’s looking.” That is a test of character under low visibility. It is not a test of stated values in an interview answer.

This matters because character gaps rarely show up in an interview. They show up months later, in how someone handles a mistake or a disagreement with a coworker. They show up in a moment where cutting a corner would be easy and unnoticed. Rethinking culture fit in hiring often means looking past surface-level likability toward exactly this kind of evidence.

Why Motivation Comes Before Technical Skill

Once character clears the bar, Winstanley looks at motivation. He wants candidates who genuinely want to accomplish something, not people who are simply collecting a paycheck. That distinction shapes how someone shows up on an average day, long after a new job has stopped feeling exciting.

Motivation is also easier to sustain than skill is to teach under pressure. A motivated person with a gap in technical ability tends to close that gap over time. A skilled person with no real investment in the outcome tends to do the minimum required. That holds true no matter how capable they look on paper.

Why Technical Skills Come Last, Not First

Skills and job-relevant knowledge still matter. They come third in Winstanley’s process for a specific reason. As he put it, extensive expertise becomes irrelevant if a candidate fails the first two criteria. A highly skilled hire with character problems tends to create conflict with colleagues and clients. That kind of damage can be difficult to undo.

This does not mean skill is unimportant. It means skill is the easiest of the three qualities to evaluate. It is also the easiest to develop after someone is hired. Character and motivation are harder to assess, and far harder to change once someone is already on the team.

What Happens When Skill Outranks Character

Plenty of hiring mistakes trace back to this exact ordering problem. A candidate with an impressive resume gets hired quickly, because the skills are easy to verify and the process wants to move fast. Months later, the same candidate has alienated half the team or cut corners with a client, and the damage is already done.

By that point, the cost is not just the bad hire. It is the time spent managing the fallout, repairing client relationships, and eventually restarting the search from scratch. Evaluating character first does not slow hiring down for no reason. It prevents exactly this kind of expensive, delayed discovery.

How Do You Actually Evaluate Character in an Interview?

Character is harder to test for than a skills questionnaire, but it is not untestable. Asking about specific past situations, rather than hypothetical ones, tends to surface real behavior instead of a rehearsed answer. How did a candidate handle a mistake they made? What happened the last time they disagreed with a manager?

A clear recruiting rubric helps make sure every candidate gets asked these same grounded questions. Otherwise, character evaluation is left to whatever the interviewer happens to think to ask that day.

What This Framework Gets Right About Hiring Order

The broader lesson from Winstanley’s approach is about sequencing, not about ignoring skill altogether. Evaluating character and motivation first means a hiring team rarely gets far into a search with someone who will eventually cause real damage. No amount of skill can offset that later.

Assessing candidates well already means looking past resume-level signals. Winstanley’s framework takes that a step further. It makes the order of evaluation deliberate, instead of defaulting to whichever quality is easiest to screen for first.

Building This Into a Repeatable Process

A three-part framework only works if it gets applied consistently. It cannot depend on a hiring manager remembering to ask about character on a good day. Building it into standard interview questions, scorecards, and reference checks turns a good philosophy into an actual practice.

A real hiring process for senior and specialized roles should reflect this same ordering. Character and motivation get evaluated early and deliberately. Technical skill gets assessed once those first two questions already have answers.