Why Curiosity Is the Most Underrated Skill in Recruiting

Resumes tell you what someone has done. The questions they ask tell you how they think.

I have been recruiting for 25 years and I still pay more attention to how a candidate shows up before the interview than in it. The interview is important. But by the time we are sitting across from each other, I already have a read on them.

You can see it, if you know what to look for. And I look for it from the very first interaction.

It Starts Before the First Meeting

When someone reaches out to me, whether through a shared connection or because they saw one of our postings, I am already clocking whether they did any research before we got on the phone. Did they look into who I am, what Schechter Reed does, or what kind of roles we typically place? Or did they show up expecting the conversation to do all the work?

People show up to those early conversations without doing any homework more often than you would think. And that tells me something. Not necessarily that they are a bad candidate. But that their default is to react rather than prepare. That is an underrated signal, and it is one I take seriously.

The ones who did the research show up differently. They ask something specific. They reference something they actually looked up. That preparation is not about impressing me. It tells me how they will approach everything else: a new client, a new manager, a role they have never held before.

That is the first indicator of someone’s curiosity level. And it shows up before I have asked a single question.

The Power of a Thoughtful Question

I always prep candidates on the importance of asking good questions in their interviews. Not the questions they think they are supposed to ask. The questions they actually want answered.

There is a difference. You can tell by the questions people ask whether they have thought carefully about the role, the company, and what they still need to understand. Everybody can ask the basics. But the candidates who ask something specific, something that shows they have been turning the role over in their mind, those are the ones I remember. A thoughtful question tells you more than a polished answer ever will.

I had a client who asks every candidate two things: what are you reading and what are you watching? It sounds casual. It is not. The answer tells you what someone is curious about when nobody is watching. People get apologetic about it, like they need to have the right answer. But that is the point. Own what you actually read and watch. It says something about where your mind goes.

Another client gave me one of the best interview exercises I have come across. They present candidates with a scenario and ask them to come up with the questions they would need answered before they could execute on it. Not the solution. The questions. Candidates who generate sharp, specific questions in that moment will do the same thing on the job, before they make a decision, before they recommend a course of action, before they hire someone themselves. That is a great exercise in testing someone’s curiosity.

I had a candidate recently who was asked what kind of chess player she was. Her answer: I am not one. Whether that ended the conversation or not, I thought it was a great question. It is unexpected. It pulls someone out of their prepared answers and asks them to think on their feet about something they did not see coming. That is what curiosity looks like under pressure.

Why This Is About More Than Interview Prep

Before I get on a call with a new client, I know their company. I know their industry. I have thought about what I want to understand and why. That is not just preparation. It is exactly what I am looking for in the people I place.

I think about curiosity the same way my clients do when they are sitting across from a candidate. Did this person do the work before we got here? Did they think about what they did not know yet? The recruiter who walks into a client meeting without having done that homework is asking the client to do all the work. That is not a partner. That is a vendor.

The candidates I place at Schechter Reed are not always the most credentialed people in the room. They asked the better question. They did the research before they were expected to. They come to every conversation ready to understand something they did not know before.

You can screen for experience. You can verify credentials. You can check references. But the kind of curiosity that drives someone to prepare before anyone asks, to ask the question no one else thought to ask, to want to understand not just what but why, that is what determines what someone actually does with the job once they have it.

Curiosity is hard to fake in an actual conversation. That is why I look for it before we ever sit down.

Resumes show history. Curiosity reveals what comes next.