Years into the industry’s swing toward skills-based hiring, the pendulum is swinging back. A new survey of U.S. hiring managers finds personality, not the resume line items, deciding who advances past the first interview, who gets a second look after an imperfect skills match, and who moves up once they are hired.
The data behind the swing back
Ninety-one percent of U.S. hiring managers now say a candidate’s personality matters as much as their skills, and 86% say the right personality can outweigh an outright skills gap, according to a survey of 1,006 U.S. hiring decision-makers conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of Express Employment Professionals. Job seekers feel the weight of that judgment: 94% say employers have evaluated their personality somewhere in the hiring process, most often through the parts of an interview that were never meant to be graded.
Sixty-one percent of hiring managers say informal moments, small talk before or after the formal questions, the tone of a follow-up email, how a candidate treats front-desk staff, are their most common way of reading personality. That judgment forms fast: 87% of hiring managers say they can tell from the first conversation whether a candidate will succeed at the company, including 38% who strongly agree. On the other side of the table, 61% of job seekers say they actively worry about how their personality comes across in an interview, on top of everything else they are supposed to be proving.
What “personality” means in practice
Hiring managers and job seekers converge on a fairly narrow list of traits: reliability (valued by 66% of hiring managers and 65% of job seekers), honesty (63% and 58%), adaptability (55% and 51%), flexibility (54% of both groups) and self-motivation (54% and 46%). Six in 10 hiring managers now call work ethic absolutely essential, up from 54% in the spring of 2025, alongside 59% for dependability and 57% for willingness to learn. None of that shows up in an applicant tracking system’s keyword match.
The generational split is notable. Gen X and baby boomer hiring managers are more likely than Gen Z and millennial ones to believe they personally embody these traits, and baby boomers are more likely than every other generation to believe employers value each trait on the list, except flexibility. That gap matters for a workforce where younger managers increasingly run the interviews.
Why this reads as a correction, not a discovery
Personality-based hiring never actually disappeared during the skills-based hiring push of the past several years, it went underground, assessed informally instead of structurally, while HR teams built AI-driven skills matching into applicant tracking systems and leaned on keyword parsing to widen candidate pools. Screening tools built to surface skills have their own blind spots, and this survey suggests employers never actually stopped grading candidates on fit, they just stopped calling it that.
The consequence, once a hire is made, compounds. Ninety-four percent of hiring managers and 91% of job seekers say personality shapes how an employee’s performance is perceived on the job, not just whether they got hired in the first place. And 99% of hiring managers believe a positive, approachable personality can directly accelerate someone’s career, a view shared by 90% of job seekers. That is a bigger claim than “likeable people get hired.” It says likeable people get promoted faster than their output alone would justify, which is exactly the kind of pattern that reshapes who reaches the middle of an organization and who gets stuck below it.
What it means for the HR leader
If personality assessment is happening anyway, informally, inconsistently, and mostly through unscored moments like small talk and email tone, the HR leader’s job is to bring it into the open rather than pretend the process is purely skills-based. That means auditing where “culture fit” judgments actually get made in the funnel, training interviewers on what a legitimate personality signal looks like versus a similarity bias in disguise, and deciding whether structured personality assessments, which 37% of job seekers report already going through, are a fairer substitute for the gut read that 87% of hiring managers say they trust from the first conversation.
“Every employee has an effect on the workplace beyond the responsibilities listed in a job description,” said Bob Funk Jr., CEO, president and chairman of Express Employment International. “The right personality can build trust, make change easier to navigate and raise the standard for how a team works together. That is why employers see personality as more than a hiring advantage. It is representative of the business culture.”
For teams still calibrating skills-based scorecards, the practical move is not to abandon them, it is to stop treating them as the whole evaluation. Pair the structured skills score with a structured, bias-checked read on the traits that show up on both sides of this data: reliability, honesty, adaptability. Score the small talk, or leave it out of the decision entirely. What the survey makes clear is that it is already shaping outcomes either way.
Where the risk sits
The same data that makes the case for weighing personality also makes the case for guarding against it. If 87% of hiring managers believe they can read a candidate’s fit within the first conversation, that confidence is doing a lot of unaudited work, and “gut read” is close kin to affinity bias, the tendency to rate people who remind an interviewer of themselves more favorably. The generational gap in the survey, where older hiring managers rate themselves and their peers higher on the same traits younger candidates are being judged against, is a warning sign, not a footnote. A personality signal that correlates with age, background or communication style more than with actual job performance is not a better hiring tool than a keyword filter, it is a differently biased one wearing a friendlier face.
Job seekers, for their part, are already adapting to a test they were not told they were taking. Nearly all of them, 94%, believe employers evaluate personality during hiring, and 61% say they actively manage how they come across as a result. That is coaching behavior aimed at a target with no published rubric. Employers who want the benefits this survey documents, better retention, faster ramp-up, stronger team cohesion, without absorbing its risks need to make the personality evaluation as visible and defensible as the skills one already is.
Source: Express Employment Professionals
