Ask a hiring manager what makes their best technical person so good, and the answer is rarely just "skilled". It is usually something closer to: they keep learning, they ask better questions than everyone else in the room, and they get genuinely interested in problems that have nothing to do with their job description.

That quality has a name in some hiring circles: wonderment. It is curiosity, applied consistently, over time. And it is one of the hardest things to test for with a standard competency-based interview.

For specialist and technical roles in particular, this matters more than most hiring processes acknowledge. A candidate can tick every box on a skills matrix and still plateau within eighteen months, simply because they stopped being curious about their field the day they mastered the basics.

Why standard screening misses curiosity entirely

Most interview processes are built to confirm competence, not curiosity. Competency questions ask candidates to describe what they have already done. "Tell me about a time you solved a complex problem." These questions are useful, but they test for past performance, not the appetite to keep growing.

Curiosity does not show up in a bullet-pointed CV either. Nobody writes "naturally inquisitive" under their job history in a way that means anything. And keyword-matching software, however well-intentioned, is looking for terms and tools, not mindset.

The result is that many hiring processes filter for people who can do the job as it exists today, and filter out, entirely by accident, the people who would still be good at it in three years' time when the tools, the standards and the problems have moved on.

Concrete signals of curiosity worth probing for

You cannot ask someone directly "are you curious?" and expect a useful answer. Almost everyone will say yes. Instead, look for evidence, the same way you would look for evidence of any other competency.

  • What they read. Not just industry publications, but the specific ones. A software engineer who reads changelogs for tools they do not yet use. A financial manager who follows regulatory commentary outside their immediate compliance requirements. The specificity is the signal.
  • What they have taught themselves recently, unprompted. Not a course their employer sent them on. Something they picked up because a problem annoyed them enough to go and understand it properly.
  • The questions they ask you. A curious candidate will ask about the business, the market, the technical debt, the reasons behind a decision, not just the salary and the leave policy. Pay attention to whether their questions build on your answers or simply move down a prepared list.
  • How they talk about being wrong. Curious people tend to enjoy discovering they were mistaken, because it means they learned something. Listen for genuine enthusiasm here, not just polished humility.
  • What they do outside the obvious scope of their role. A side project, a forum they contribute to, a habit of explaining things to junior colleagues because they enjoy the process of working it out themselves.

None of these signals require a candidate to have impressive credentials. Some of the most curious people we have placed had unremarkable CVs on paper and remarkable conversations in person.

Why this needs a proper conversation, not a form

You cannot get at any of this through an online assessment or a fifteen-minute screening call run off a script. It takes a real conversation, ideally in person, where a skilled interviewer can follow a thread, ask a genuine follow-up question, and notice the difference between rehearsed confidence and real interest.

This is precisely why we do things the way we do at The Appointment Firm. Every shortlist we put in front of a client has been interviewed in person by the partner running that search, not screened by a junior recruiter working off a keyword list. We are not matching CVs to job specs. We are having the kind of conversation that reveals whether someone still gets curious about their field, because in specialist and technical roles, that is often the difference between a good hire and a great one.

Curiosity is a long-term hiring decision

Skills can be taught. Curiosity is harder to install once someone is in the role. If you are hiring for a position where the landscape will keep shifting, and most specialist roles now qualify, it is worth building space into your process to look for it properly.

If you are recruiting for a specialist or technical position and want a shortlist built on real conversations rather than keyword matches, we would be glad to talk it through with you. Get in touch with The Appointment Firm and let's find people who are still curious about the work.