For as long as we can all remember, hiring has been built around resumes detailing previous experience, qualifications, job titles, and technical skills. But in a world where jobs are changing faster than ever, the skills that seem essential today can quickly become obsolete tomorrow. Hard skills are perishable, but durable skills like adaptability, problem-solving, and teamwork are now the real predictors of long-term success.
So, how can companies move beyond outdated hiring practices and focus on what really matters? And what does this shift towards durable skills mean for hiring managers and job seekers looking to future-proof their careers?
My guest this week is Caitlin MacGregor, CEO and co-founder of Plum. Caitlin is a massive advocate for hiring based on durable skills and the science behind this. She shares why resumes are no longer enough and why focusing on durable skills could be the key to long-term success for employers and employees.
In the interview, we discuss:
• What are durable skills?
• Why do they ensure while hard skills are perishable?
• The science behind this
• Innate talent, drivers, and drainers
• Using accurate assessment data rather than inaccurate resume data
• How to elevate durable skills in the hiring process
• How to identify key behavioural indicators at a time when jobs are changing so quickly
• How should individual think about their durable skills?
• What does the future look like?
Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Follow this podcast on Spotify
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Resumes and technical skills have long defined hiring. But what if we’ve been measuring the wrong things? Hard skills fade, but durable skills like adaptability and problem solving predict long term success. So why are companies still stuck in outdating hiring methods? And how can they shift to what really matters? Keep listening to find out more. So support for this podcast comes from Plum. Plum is a revolutionary workforce solutions provider that knows when people flourish, business thrives. With their powerful platform Plum Thrive, you can unlock science based data to help you measure and match human potential to job needs. Plum Thrive provides personalized career insights, improves quality of hire and and creates high performing teams from a single simple to use platform. Want to learn more? Visit www.plum.io and discover all the ways that Plum can help you thrive.
Matt Alder [00:01:25]:
Hi there. Welcome to episode 678 of Recruiting Future with me Matt Alder. For as long as we can all remember, hiring has been built around resumes that detail previous experience, qualifications, job titles and technical skills. But in a world where jobs are changing faster than ever, the skills that seem essential today can quickly become obsolete tomorrow. Hard skills are perishable, but durable skills like adaptability, problem solving and teamwork are now the real predictors of long term success. So how can companies move beyond outdated hiring practices and focus on what really matters? And what does this shift towards durable skills mean for hiring managers and also job seekers looking to future proof their careers? My guest this week is Caitlin MacGregor, CEO and co founder of Plum. Caitlin is a massive advocate for hiring based on durable skills and the science that sits behind this. She shares why resumes are no longer enough and why focusing on durable skills could be the key to long term success for employers and employees. Hi Caitlin and welcome to the podcast.
Caitlin MacGregor [00:02:46]:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited for our conversation today.
Matt Alder [00:02:49]:
It’s always a pleasure to have you on the show. Could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do for people who may not have come across your work before?
Caitlin MacGregor [00:02:58]:
So, my name is Caitlin MacGregor, I’m the CEO and co founder of Plum and I’m really passionate about helping people reach their true potential and that’s why I built Plum. I’ve taken Best in Class Industrial Organizational Psychology and were able to measure people’s durable skills, their talents like innovation, communication, execution and use that across the entire employee life cycle from hire to retire so that we allow people to flourish so businesses thrive.
Matt Alder [00:03:27]:
Let’s dig straight into that. Tell us more about durable skills. What are they and why are they so important?
Caitlin MacGregor [00:03:34]:
So the best way to think about durable skills is what’s the opposite? It’s the perishable skills. And so in the past we’ve often referred to soft skills as the durable skills and the hard skills as the perishable skills. But, but soft and hard skills, it doesn’t really give us an accurate understanding of the value and especially in 2025, the value we should be placing. Soft skills are often looked at as a nice to have, not a need to have. And the reality is it’s the durable skills that are the traits and behaviors and abilities that are not specific to one job or industry, but they’re valuable across industries, across roles. And those skills like innovation, communication, teamwork, execution, they’re considered durable because they endure in their relevance and usefulness regardless of changes in technology or the world dynamics or job roles. They withstand the test of time. And when you look at industrial organizational psychology, there’s incredibly concrete evidence to show that durable skills is actually what predicts performance and retention. And then the perishable skills, AKA the hard skills, we have seen time and time again in history that those skills change and then all of a sudden what was really valuable is no longer relevant. And I would say if we look rewind six years ago, if we were hiring a software developer, everybody wanted to hire somebody that knew Ruby on Rails and there was only a small portion of developers that knew Ruby on Rails. So they were getting paid a lot. They were really valuable. You know, they’re a scarce resource and everybody was like, I need somebody that knows Ruby on Rails. Well now in 2025, nobody cares if you know Ruby on Rails because it’s completely irrelevant. If we think about, hey, you know, I want an employee to implement Gen AI into our processes. Well, nobody has five years of experience of implementing Gen AI, but do you know what they do have? Innovation, adaptability, execution, communication, teamwork. All of those things are going to allow them to learn on the job and incorporate these very successfully with these new challenges. And so durable skills are really about putting the emphasis on what allows somebody to be successful throughout their career and really allow to identify who’s going to perform best in a role and stay the longest.
Matt Alder [00:05:53]:
Are those skills sort of attributes that people naturally have or could they be things that they developed over time or a bit of both.
Caitlin MacGregor [00:06:01]:
So again, I like to go back to kind of where is the science and research because there’s a lot of, you know, Snake oil and smoke and mirrors sometimes and, and I think it’s really important to kind of ground it in evidence. What the evidence says is that after the age of about 22, 23, about 90% of the population, it is set kind of what those innate talents are. What are those things that get you out of bed in the morning, excited about the work you’re going to do? When you’ve had a really long day, what’s going to make you high five the people around you and go, I just crushed it. I had an amazing day. I feel amazing versus oh my God. I like just need to go to sleep. I need like a four day weekend to recover and I am not looking forward to Monday. Like what is it that drives those things that give you this immense joy and fulfillment? And what are the things that just drain the life out of you? And those things are pretty innate. By the time you’re 22, 23 now, 10% of the population could go through massive coaching or a traumatic life event. You know, can do some deep, deep changing of their soul and they may change, but 90% of people, doesn’t matter if you’re 25 or if you’re 55, if you love coming up with out of the box ideas, that’s going to be a motivator for your whole life. What’s going to change between 25 and 55 is that you may develop compensatory strategies. So those things that drain you, you’ve learned to delegate to other people. You have more resources to delegate to other people. You’ve maybe come up with, you know, compensatory strategies like a set of, you know, frameworks where it’s just doesn’t take as much energy so you’re not as drained. So it’s not that people can’t develop, they can, but those things that are really going to allow them to effortlessly, you know, come to work and do something faster and better and more enjoyable than their peers. That’s what we’re tapping into. We call them drivers and drainers because it’s not about if you’re good or bad at it, it’s does it drive you or does it drain you. And it’s really great to have that self awareness on yourself and understand that as a really important data point as we’re thinking about somebody’s career journey and.
Matt Alder [00:08:05]:
What are employers still getting wrong when.
Caitlin MacGregor [00:08:07]:
They think about skills that they’re focusing on those perishable skills and the way they’re focusing on perishable skills. It’s not that Perishable skills don’t matter. They do. They are just like geography. If I need somebody to come into the office, do they geographically live here? Like it’s a piece of valuable information, just like, you know, compensation? Are they in my ballpark of, you know, can I pay them? Like, if you need somebody tomorrow to be able to do a very specific task and it’s critical that they do it on day one, sure. You want to know have they done that specific thing? But it ends up coming up later. That’s where they’re getting it wrong. Is that what we should be leading with is what are the statistical, most predictive data that will help ensure that this is going to be the right hire or the right promotion or the right succession plan or the right pairing of a team for a project? We should be leading with the data that is four times more accurate than what’s on a resume at predicting performance and retention. And most companies don’t lead with that data. And it’s really amazing when it does. Scotiabank’s a great example of they only used to hire finance and business grads. So they were looking at those perishable skills and that meant they were only hiring from five universities and they were only hiring people from that program. And they were competing with the exact same pool of talent that all the other banks were competing for. So when they get to an offer stage, they were being outbid for, for somebody that could pay a higher salary from a consulting firm and things like that. So they decided several years ago to be very bold and they eliminated resumes for all their campus hires. And instead they have every single candidate as part of their online application complete a plum profile. And they’re using that to say, hey, is this person, you know, really good at communication and teamwork and execution that we need for role A or are they really good in these other, you know, talents that we need for all B? And so what happened is they’re now hiring from 33 different colleges and universities. They are now hiring 40% STEM and arts backgrounds. And as a result of screening in all these people based on those durable skills, they’ve increased their hiring of underrepresented minorities to 60%. They have been able to double retention. And at the 12 month mark, hiring managers say that they would rehire 90% of their hires again. So just phenomenal results. By looking at the pool of candidates through a different lens and starting with long term, if they learn some stuff on the job and I give them the opportunity, how likely are they to be successful? It Stack ranks that pool of people you’re looking at completely differently, but it changes the statistics of being able to be more accurate at hiring those people that are the right fit for the role based on performance and retention.
Matt Alder [00:11:08]:
And I suppose just digging into the, almost the process aspect of that a little bit further, you mentioned that they’ve kind of abandoned resumes for that, that type of hiring. How else do you do this? How else do you sort of elevate durable skills as part of the recruiting process? What, what do companies need to think about? What do they need to change?
Caitlin MacGregor [00:11:27]:
I mean, I think there’s two areas that often get overlooked. And, you know, I take them for granted that of course every company is doing this. But it’s worth, it’s worth saying, first of all is you’re spending a lot of time making sure the job description has every keyword under the sun. And then you’re using an ATS that’s screening for every keyword under the sun. And what happens there is that it’s keywords against keywords, bots against bot. It’s. It’s a race to the bottom. And it ends up, you know, we know that there’s products like Lazy Apply, where candidates can apply to 5,000 jobs in their sleep. So the more that we are putting up all of these barriers as employers, the more the candidates are finding ways to get through those barriers. And it, it really is this race to the bottom. And, and, you know, so recognizing that that’s a broken system and that this is an opportunity to get out of the keyword game and really look at understanding the human behind the job. And part of that is, yes, a job description is important, but are we really spending time with the hiring panel to identify what I like to call are the KBIS? So most companies are familiar with KPIs key performance indicators. And the whole thing with key performance indicators is that you can’t ask somebody in their job to do everything. You actually have to spend one really thoughtful time to narrow down what are the most important things that you need them to accomplish in order to be successful. Well, the kbis are the key behavioral indicators. We need to spend real time with the manager and the people that are on the interview panel, even potentially some top performers that understand what the manager is looking for and really narrow down what are those kbis for the role. If you have, you know, 10 people that you’re interviewing for the role, you should be measuring them against those kbis. And the way that that comes through at that process is in the Interview, you should be having questions, structured interview questions that reflect which behaviors are most critical for that job. The great thing, you know, is that you, you, the best place to do it is at the very beginning. If you understand your kbis, you should be measuring every single candidate against those kbis versus just where did they go to school, how many years of experience. So putting KBIS as your first filter and then following up in the interview with those structured behavioral interview questions that mirror exactly what that job needs for success. That’s, that’s the holy grail of being able to have it at every level.
Matt Alder [00:13:59]:
Yeah, I mean that makes complete sense, I suppose, just to back it up even earlier than that. So when people are sort of working through and trying to identify these key behavioral indicators, that could still be quite a subjective process, couldn’t it? In terms of people, I think it’s this or I think it’s this. And is there a more scientific way of doing that to really kind of land on what really kind of drives performance and value and tenure?
Caitlin MacGregor [00:14:24]:
I mean, let me, let me give a bit of a history lesson in terms of the psychometric assessment space, which is the space that I fall into. And this is all the industrial organizational psychology component. There was two ways historically to get at that data. The old way, which takes about 120 hours per job. So I’m not recommending this old way, just educating because it’s helpful to understand kind of what’s been there historically and that there have been massive leaps and gains in efficiency since. But originally companies would do what’s called an internal benchmark. So they would take 50 to 100 people that do the exact same job and they would have them all take an assessment and then they would look at what makes a top performer different than an average and below average performer. What’s really neat is that if you look at some of the research around trying to understand performance, you end up with great examples. With the Olympics, you know, they realized that all the Olympic gold medalists, they, that all got gold, they all said to themselves they would have visualized themselves on the podium winning the gold medal. So the scientists were like, oh, we figured this out. Everybody just needs to, you know, imagine them being a gold medal winner. But then they found out that the people that got second and third place and not on the podium all did the same thing. So clearly that wasn’t the thing that made them different. So it’s about figuring out what’s that thing that’s distinctly different about a top performer than an average and below average performer. So they would test these 50 to 100 people. But here’s the thing. Everybody would have to do the exact same job. And then it would have to be married with performance data. And the dirty little secret that nobody wants to talk about is how biased performance data is. And the other part is a lot of performance data is actually more about compensation. Who’s the 5% that we’re going to give a, you know, a raise or a promotion to? And what we really need is even, even split. It gets really complicated. I’m getting into the weeds. But it’s a really outdated method because it takes so much time and energy. But also jobs are changing so quickly. Are you kidding me? You want to look at your pool of people for the last three years and decide, Decide. That’s where you want the next three years to be. So it’s, it’s a really, really expensive, time consuming, outdated process. The other way that psychometric assessment companies and industrial organizational psychology and the science was called a job analysis. So those people, the three to eight job experts that are on the interview panel that know what success should look like moving forward, they’d bring in a team of industrial organizational psychologists, IO psychologists, and they would interview them and they would say, what does success look like? It’s almost like an intake for the job. And it’s just, it’s expensive and it’s time consuming. So guess what? It can be automated with technology. So each of those three to eight experts get asked the same force choice questions of what’s most important and least important from a behavioral standpoint. And then we can transparently show if there’s alignment or not and show what the priorities are. And so it’s really beautiful to see kind of that this eight minute survey and are people aligned with each other? And most of the time there is, which is great because you can go into that interview panel with somebody that’s a 99 match and everybody in the panel goes, this person has those innate talents, those durable skills that we asked for. So we know we’re not wasting our time in this interview. And we’re going to use the structured interview to back it up and validate it and double check it. But we know that we’re spending our time and energy on the right people. If for some reason that hiring panel is all over the place and they don’t agree with what the kbis are, well, you just saved yourself a whole bunch of time and you avoided a bad candidate experience where you figured out how to get aligned. And it’s so great with new roles because often as roles are changing or net new roles, people, people need to have a little bit more discussion up front as to wait, do we really know what the KBI’s are? And it forces that, you know, with objective data, hey, we don’t need to have a conversation. We’re all aligned or oh no, let’s pause for a second and have that critical conversation so we can all get on the same page before we waste everybody’s time interviewing these people.
Matt Alder [00:18:33]:
Changing gear just for a second. Obviously, as you mentioned, work is changing, skills are changing, and that has a kind of a big impact on people in their careers. So I know that, you know, lots of people listening may be transitioning jobs or thinking about how they move internally or considering their next parallel career move or whatever that might be. How should individuals think about their durable skills? Are there things that they can develop? Is this company they work for, should they be looking at this in terms of development as well? What’s the situation around that?
Caitlin MacGregor [00:19:07]:
Absolutely. I think day one starts with self awareness. So that’s why we’ve made our product completely free for individuals so that they can take their plum profile right off our website just as a way to empower them to really be the CEO of their own career journey. You know, you own your own personality, you own your own talents, you, it’s because of you, you know, you should own that data yourself first and foremost. So we encourage every single individual to go out and be empowered. You know, think about it like a LinkedIn profile that tells you what you’ve done historically. A plum profile tells you what you could do if given the opportunity. And so starting with understanding that about yourself is really the first step. The second step is really spending the time understanding what drives you and finding and using the words that are there to start to better articulate where you are an asset to the company. Because you’re going to accomplish these things faster than most people. They’re going to come more easily and naturally to you. You’re going to enjoy them more. You’re going to just create a better output because that’s your superpower. That’s the thing that makes you exceptional. And what’s really interesting is that when people find out what really drives them, they often go, yeah, that totally makes sense. But that’s not how they often describe themselves. It’s not often the thing that they put their hand up on for. Because the things that come easily to us, we often take for granted. We think, well, it’s so easy then it’s not special. And it’s so easy. Why would I brag about it? Why would I talk about it? It’s because it’s easy. But we don’t realize that the things that are easy for us are the complete opposite for other colleagues. That’s the thing that drains them. I love going and speaking in front of an audience and asking about a transformation project or implementing a new piece of technology and you’ll half the room go, oh my God, it’s my worst nightmare. Implementing a new technology stack and other people being like, it’s the most exciting part of my job. So starting with understanding what drives you and drains you and then how to articulate it to others because you’re really doing a favor to your colleagues and to your manager to say, hey, when something like this comes up, I’m your go to person. And that means that a colleague that may be struggling with that thing may come to you for help. It may be that when projects are being divided up, you’re top of mind for that thing that you’re best suited to. So being able to advocate is kind of step two. And then step three is looking at your own development journey and saying what are areas that either you’re strong at and you want to get, you know, even more tools around it and more frameworks and more coaching around it because it’s. You’re already exceptional, so go and be even more exceptional. So if you’re really innovative, maybe you want to take a course on Gen AI because you’re going to absorb it and be able to apply it 10 times faster than the next person and it’s going to give you a huge competitive advantage. And this is a sign to like go all in on this. Or you may say, hey, this thing really I struggle with, I struggle with communication. And instead of constantly feeling like my communication is holding me back, I’m going to now take a course on communication so that I can lean on some frameworks where, you know, at least there’s some guardrails. Even though it’s draining, I’m set up for a little bit more success. So it really allows again you to be the CEO of your own career journey of mapping where you want to strengthen areas in your career development. And then the last stage is that in your plum profile, it’ll actually recommend the type of jobs that behaviorally you’re a strong fit for. So it’s worth exploring and being like, hey, are there any additional career directions or things that might be appealing? It may say that you would be A good software developer and you may be mid career and you’re like, I am not starting over, but maybe we have an example of in our team somebody that has a PhD in IO psychology and saw that they would be a good software developer. So they took a course to learn how to do some coding and it helped them speed up their analysis. They were able to use some of the coding, so they didn’t become a developer. But some of that skill set actually really contributed towards their main job. So it’s a nice way of kind of de risking, hey, if you go and take this course, you’ll enjoy it, you’ll be really good at it and it’ll actually help your work by adding that skill set into your toolkit.
Matt Alder [00:23:37]:
Where can people go to take the assessment?
Caitlin MacGregor [00:23:39]:
Plum.io and it’s free right off the website.
Matt Alder [00:23:43]:
Simple as that. So as a final question, what do you think the future looks like? I mean, how quickly are employers sort of shifting to this way of thinking? You know, what kind of journey are we on? What does it look like when we get there?
Caitlin MacGregor [00:23:58]:
I mean, I think that companies are recognizing that they need to surface the employees within their organization in better ways. I think lots of companies are trying to move to being a skills based organization, but they’re still getting educated in terms of what are the different ways of getting these skills, what are the different ways of surfacing them. So a big part is just building awareness that durable skills are critical and can be a leading kind of way of accomplishing that mission and really highlighting the people you already have. So I think that there’s lots of movement over the last few years on the internal use of using this data. I think that we are going to see in 2025 this resurgence of a lot of hiring and bringing in new talent. And especially when we look at new pools of talent like early careers, there’s a huge opportunity where there’s less and less focus on past experience and where you went to school and things like that. Again, skills based organizations. So I think that there’s this really important time where companies are leaning in now. And I think they’re experiencing the problem of getting so bombarded by with different people applying that they can’t decide who to bring in for the structured interview. So there seems to be more. I think we’re past the really, really, really early adopters and starting to move in that adoption curve where we’re seeing more of the market lean into looking at assessments and measuring durable skills as part of that early filter to help you narrow down who’s worth bringing in for a structured interview. So I think there’s a growing appetite. I think that long term, this is really the way that we can personalize the experience for the candidates and personalize the experience for employees. I think as Gen AI grows to support humans, the more we can understand about the human it’s supporting, the more that we can really fill in the gaps for where people are drained and use genai as a solution to help take some of that draining off of our plates. And so there’s more for what uniquely we’re going to be successful in. So I think that there’s this really great opportunity to just set up everybody for more success as these tools can be brought in to kind of fill in those draining areas for each person. So I think this is we’re at the beginning of being able to find joy in our work, more being more fulfilled in our work because of the combination of better self awareness, better tools on ourselves, and then how to wrap all of these new advancements around us.
Matt Alder [00:26:26]:
Caitlin, thank you very much for talking to me.
Caitlin MacGregor [00:26:29]:
Thank you for having me. This was great.
Matt Alder [00:26:32]:
My thanks to Caitlin. You can follow this podcast on Amazon, Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
