ManpowerGroup's 2025 Talent Shortage Survey found that 74% of employers globally are struggling to fill roles. In premium and luxury fashion, where the senior talent pool is genuinely thin, the pressure is no different. The response is usually one of two things: hold out indefinitely for someone who meets every requirement, or settle for the best available and hope they find their feet. Neither works particularly well.
There's a third way that consistently produces stronger long-term results. Hire first for the qualities that are hardest to develop. Train for the specific skills you actually need. This isn't a compromise. It's a deliberate strategy, and it starts with understanding why the skills-first approach can be risky.
The problem with hiring only on skills
It's entirely logical to build a brief around technical competency. You need someone who can do the job, so you list the qualifications, the sector experience, the software proficiency. The trouble is that these days skills have a shorter shelf life than they used to.
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect 39% of key skills required in the job market to change by 2030. The candidate whose CV ticks every box today may be poorly positioned for where your business needs to be in three years. In fashion and luxury lifestyle, where digital commerce, sustainability pressures, and shifting consumer behaviour are reshaping every function, that timeline feels optimistic.
There's also the financial reality of getting it wrong. A bad hire costs a lot once you factor in recruitment fees, lost productivity, and management time. In a senior commercial, design, or digital role at a premium or luxury brand, the reputational cost can be harder to quantify and longer to correct.
Hiring for skills alone, without weighing attitude and potential, significantly increases the likelihood of that cost landing on your desk.
What attitude and potential actually look like
Attitude here doesn't mean likability. It means the qualities that determine how someone performs when the brief changes, when the business goes through a difficult period, or when a role turns out to be different from the one described. These qualities can be identified in interviews if we recognise what we need and structure the questions to ask for it.
Research consistently identifies seven observable signals of high potential. They're worth looking for whether you're hiring someone for their skills or in spite of limited sector experience.
Learning agility is the ability to acquire new capabilities quickly and apply them in unfamiliar situations. In a sector where the demands of every function are evolving, this is often more valuable than any specific technical qualification. A candidate who can get up to speed in a new area within weeks will serve a premium fashion business far better than one whose expertise is fixed and narrowing.
Coachability is the capacity to receive feedback and act on it without defensiveness. In premium and luxury fashion, where the pace is fast and the standards are high, people who treat feedback as information improve faster and last longer.
Growth mindset, drawn from Carol Dweck's research, is the belief that ability develops through effort. People with this quality treat setbacks as information rather than failure. They push harder, develop faster, and tend to raise the standard around them. If you haven't read Mindset, I'd strongly recommend it.
Resilience is the ability to absorb pressure without withdrawing. It shows up not in how someone describes a success, but in how they describe something that went wrong and what they did about it.
Emotional intelligence covers self-awareness, empathy, and the ability to manage relationships under pressure. In premium and luxury lifestyle brands particularly, where culture is often everything and the dynamics between creative and commercial functions are rarely straightforward, this quality often determines who delivers and who creates problems.
Initiative is the habit of seeing what needs doing and doing it without being prompted. This is distinct from ambition. It's the day-to-day ownership of outcomes, and it's visible in the smallest things a candidate tells you about how they've worked.
Intellectual curiosity is a genuine interest in understanding how and why things work. Curious people ask better questions, spot problems earlier, and tend to stay engaged in a role over time.
None of these qualities appear on a CV. They need to be surfaced deliberately.
How to find these qualities in an interview
A reliable framework is behavioural interviewing using the STAR method: Situation, Task, Action, Result. Rather than asking what a candidate would do hypothetically, you ask what they actually did in a real situation. This gives you genuine evidence of how they think and behave, not just how they present themselves.
Four questions worth building into every process:
To assess learning agility: "Tell me about a time you had to get to grips with something new quickly and under pressure. What did you do, and how did you apply it?"
To assess coachability: "Describe a time you received feedback that was difficult to hear. How did you respond, and what changed as a result?"
To assess resilience: "Walk me through a situation where something wasn't going the way you expected. What did you do, and what was the outcome?"
To assess initiative: "Tell me about something you identified as a problem in your previous role and decided to address without being asked."
Listen for the quality of thinking beneath the answer. A candidate who can describe genuine learning from failure is showing you a growth mindset. One who attributes every difficult outcome to circumstances or other people, or who struggles to recall a time they received difficult feedback, is showing you something equally useful. What's absent from an answer is often as informative as what's there.
What happens after the hire
Hiring for potential only delivers a return if you invest in developing it. Research shows that 22% of employee turnover occurs within the first 45 days. Onboarding isn't an administrative formality. It's one of the highest-risk windows in any employment relationship, and it's the period when the gap between what was promised and what is actually delivered becomes visible to the new hire.
A structured 90-day plan with clear milestones and named check-in points significantly reduces early attrition. For someone hired partly on attitude rather than deep sector experience, that structure is even more important. It signals that the investment is mutual.
Beyond onboarding, development opportunities consistently rank among the top reasons people choose to stay with an employer. In a market where premium and luxury brands are competing for the same limited pool of senior talent, being known as a business that develops people is a genuine competitive advantage. The brands that will hire most effectively over the next three years are those building people now, not waiting for the right external candidate to appear.
Why this approach is more relevant noW
Automation is replacing tasks, not roles. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that while 92 million roles will be displaced, 170 million new ones will emerge, most requiring distinctly human capabilities. PwC's AI Jobs Barometer 2025 confirms that roles demanding emotional intelligence, problem-solving under ambiguity, and interpersonal influence are growing in demand. The qualities that attitude-first hiring is designed to identify are the same ones that will define effective performance in fashion and luxury lifestyle brands over the next decade.
When you hire someone with high learning agility, strong emotional intelligence, and genuine initiative, you're not making a compromise because the ideal candidate wasn't available. You're hiring the person best placed to handle a role that will almost certainly look quite different in two or three years.
Five things worth doing this quarter
Review your current job briefs. Are they describing the role as it exists today, or the capability your business needs over the next three years? Revise them to reflect both.
Add at least two STAR-based behavioural questions to every interview, focused on learning agility and coachability, and run them consistently across every candidate.
Build a structured 90-day onboarding plan for every new hire, with named individuals responsible for each stage and formal check-ins at 30, 60, and 90 days.
Identify two or three people already in your team who show high potential but aren't currently in any kind of development programme. Start a conversation with them this month.
Work with a specialist recruiter (hello, that’s me!) who's already assessing attitude and cultural fit as part of their process; one who surfaces candidates who'd never appear on a job board and who have been assessed against what the role actually needs to deliver, not just what the last person in it happened to do.
We don’t just work on recruitment searches. Right now we’re helping clients turn job specifications into performance briefs, transforming onboarding experiences, conducting skills assessments and identifying vulnerabilities in existing teams, and training line managers on how to interview effectively. We’re always happy to discuss how you can future-proof your workforce.