1. Hire for skills when hiring into an established organization or institution.

2. Hire for intelligence, cooperativeness, and other skills when you need to build something from scratch.

3. If you need to hire a bunch of people quickly, option 2 is best.

I’m often in build mode and find myself opting for #2 more often than not. Based on my experience, #2 consistently produces strong results — very rarely have the people had their roles reduced, and many get promoted into better roles.

Extracted from Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross’, “Talent”