The "New" AI Hiring Skills Are the Ones You Always Needed

Open any hiring feed this year and you'll find a fresh list of skills for the AI era. Discernment. Judgment. Taste. Bob Galen and Josh Anderson think the list is fine. They just think it's old.

The human skills behind every team they're proud of (collaboration, coachability, comfort with ambiguity, a willingness to have the hard conversation) were always the job. AI picked up more of the technical work, and now everyone's noticing what was there the whole time.

Josh walks through how he hired a new squad every quarter at Dude Solutions without the whole thing resting on his shoulders. The team read Debugging Teams together so everyone shared the same picture of a great teammate. Then they wrote interview question sets for each trait and split them across the interview panel. When a hire missed, they treated it like a bug in the system and fixed the process before the next round.

Bob brings his attitude, aptitude, skills ordering, makes the case for working interviews where candidates spend an hour or two with the team, and draws a hard line on coachability. Josh pushes back with the people who've only ever worked for bad leaders and need someone to show them another way. (Bob agrees with him, which annoys Bob.)

They also get into neurodiversity and why "good teammate" can't mean "smiles a lot," why a team needs both the "yes we can" and the "no we can't" voices in the room, and why Josh wants you to hear one thing clearly: technical skill still matters. It's just easier to teach.