Waiting for that perfect candidate to pop up in your talent pipeline? Unfortunately, such an ideal is more of a pipe dream than a pipeline reality. In unskilled, hourly positions, staffing shortage challenges stack up quickly. Therefore, it’s vital to accelerate your chances of finding a good candidate rather than delaying for a perfect one. But what makes a good candidate? Skills.
One of 2025’s biggest hiring trends is that skills are the new career currency. Skills-based hiring led 90% of its adopters to report fewer hiring mistakes. Even more impressively, 94% of those companies saw their skills-based hires outperform all other hires. What someone can do matters most when it comes to their productivity. However, a current challenge complicates skills-based hiring: 87% of companies are facing workforce skills gaps.
How do you train new hires and overcome the skills gap plaguing many sectors, especially areas like construction, manufacturing, and other blue-collar, labor-intensive roles? Look for a candidate’s potential to learn. A candidate who is open to learning, quick to adapt, and highly motivated is highly trainable. When you train new hires in your workplace’s skills and culture, you have the chance to tailor-make your ideal candidates for that role. In this article, we’ll walk you through the top 5 traits of trainability, how to identify those traits, 5 steps for aligning your training with success, and the extra benefits that training ultimately gives you.
5 Key Traits that Show Candidate Trainability
Soft skills demonstrate a candidate’s desire to learn and readiness at integrating into new standard operating procedures (SOPs) and workplace cultures. When reviewing applications and interviewing candidates, look for words, experiences, and examples that demonstrate one of these five traits:
- Desire to learn motivates a candidate to strive for productivity and knowledge acquisition, putting them at the top of candidates with trainability potential.
- Adaptability makes a candidate flexible in the workplace, quick to adjust to new situations, and capable of effectively handling unexpected challenges.
- Problem-solving lets a candidate quickly identify challenges and analyze and implement effective solutions.
- Critical thinking helps a candidate logically evaluate new information and make informed, impactful decisions.
- Openness to feedback means a candidate who readily accepts constructive criticism and who is thoughtful about ways they could improve.
Remember that candidates are seeking training. The vast majority–92%–of employees see workplace training as contributing positively to their engagement. In the end, they want what you want: to be more productive.
Leverage Pre-Employment Tests to Identify Candidate Trainability
Now that you know what traits to look for, let’s talk through how to find candidates with those traits. Focusing on desire to learn, adaptability, problem-solving, critical thinking, and openness to feedback lets you streamline your talent pipeline to find those soft skills–with the right tools. Pre-employment tests like skills assessments sort through high volumes of applications to find those who exhibit the skills you need: those that indicate the highest trainability potential. Other tests can home in on more specific trainability insights:
- Cognitive aptitude tests highlight a candidate’s learning potential as well as critical thinking, numerical reasoning, and spatial reasoning. They show you how well a candidate might mentally perform in a given role.
- Situational judgement tests provide insights about how a candidate might handle a role’s common challenges and problem-solve. They are especially valuable for demonstrating an experienced candidate’s potential for success in an entry-level job.
- Culture fit tests show how well a candidate will fit into your workplace culture, perform as a teammate, interact with colleagues, and carry your values. They combine well with skills-based tests to provide well-rounded insights about a candidate.
Gathering data on a candidate’s trainability before the interview better prepares you to deep-dive into their motivations, weaknesses, and goals. By utilizing pre-employment tests, you get more knowledge from interviews, giving you better judgement calls for hiring.
5 Strong Steps to Train for Gain
Once you have hired candidates with high trainability, you then have to train them. Good training equals good income. Having a comprehensive employee training program makes your company likely to have up to a 218% higher income per employee and a 24% higher overall profit margin. It’s important to align your training program with success by constructing it with the intention of such long-term ROI. These five steps create a roadmap to align your training with success.
- Give clear SOPs. Giving new employees clear, specific, detailed operating procedures and expectations from the beginning helps align their expectations with yours so that they fit into your workplace culture and replicate productivity in their new roles.
- Tailor your training to individuals. Use a candidate’s hiring data to determine how they best learn and retain new knowledge as well as what they know already so that you can get the most out of your training by focusing on skill gaps.
- Present new information over a period of time. Shorter, focused training that is presented in consumable chunks has a greater lasting impact than dense training and avoids the issue of employees becoming bored, frustrated, or overwhelmed.
- Leverage existing employees’ experience. Veteran employees are storehouses of knowledge and can provide valuable demonstrations, insights, and advice to new employees, making them a huge asset, especially for on-the-job training.
- Provide ongoing support. It’s important to maintain skill growth, emotional support, constructive criticism, and encouragement to employees throughout their time with you so that they always continue to learn and strengthen your team.
What Else Do You Gain from Training?
Training new hires does more than build job-specific skills—it unlocks their full potential. By focusing on what employees could be rather than the limit of what they currently are, you invest in your workplace’s future and maximize the ROI of your workforce.
Training keeps key knowledge alive in your workforce. High turnover threatens the stability of knowledge in an unskilled, hourly workforce when experienced employees leave. When you build generational knowledge between old and new employees through training and ongoing teamwork, you preserve that key experience, upping your productivity and efficiency potential.
Offering training also makes you a more desirable employer. Younger candidates entering the workforce are eager for opportunities to learn on the job. Training is a major factor in job performance, according to 59% of employees, and turns candidates with potential into all-star employees that boost company productivity by 17%. Creating a workplace culture that provides continuous development opportunities encourages retention of up to 90% of employees, meaning that training now combats the risk of turnover later.
Conclusion
You can’t wait for the perfect candidate: you have to build them. Seeking candidates with high trainability and providing them with a training program to replicate the skills of your all-star employees puts you in control of perfecting your talent. Hiring for hourly positions can be challenging, but focusing on the soft skills that show candidates’ potential to learn streamlines your talent pipeline to match 2025’s top hiring trends.
If you’re ready to innovate your talent pipeline and find candidates with the best trainability, HighMatch is the teammate you’re looking for. HighMatch leverages a robust, automated suite of hiring tools that help you make the most efficient hiring decisions. With personalized assessment solutions, we give you key insights to identify candidates with the greatest desire to learn. Utilizing HighMatch’s customizable interview playbooks ensures consistent, deeper insight during interviews, allowing you to holistically evaluate a candidate’s potential and weaknesses. To ensure these tools respond to your unique needs, our team of I/O psychologists collaborates with your hiring managers, empowering you to make faster, data-driven hiring decisions with confidence.
Contact HighMatch today to modernize your hiring process, identify candidates with the greatest potential, and fill your positions with people of potential–saving time, money, and frustration along the way.
