Hiring for high agency, and whether you can teach it
What we mean by agency
Agency is the tendency to act without being asked, and to take responsibility for how things turn out. A high-agency person sees a broken process and fixes it, or finds the person who can. A low-agency person waits for the ticket, and when the instruction runs out, the work stops with it.
Two things often get mistaken for it. Enthusiasm is easy to show in an interview and says little about what someone does on a quiet afternoon with nobody watching. Skill tells you what a person can do, while agency decides what they will do. I think of the two as skill and will, and skill is the easier one to verify.
Psychologists tie agency to two older ideas. Internal locus of control is the belief that your own actions shape what happens to you. Self-efficacy is the confidence that you can pull off a specific task. People strong on both tend to act, and to keep going when it gets hard.
Why it's hard to interview for
Ask a candidate "are you high agency?" and everyone says yes. There's a second problem: agency shows up under ambiguity, and a well-run interview removes ambiguity by design. So I think the standard interview, on its own, is the wrong tool.
How to hire for it
- Ask for stories of unprompted action. Look for "I noticed X, so I did Y". The best answers are ordinary: fixing a flaky test nobody assigned, calling a customer directly to understand a bug, writing documentation because onboarding was painful.
- Listen for ownership. Red flags are wins that are always "we" with no personal part, failures blamed entirely on outside factors, and plenty of detail about process with vague answers about results.
- Test with outcome questions. Give them a small task and watch what they ask first. Someone with agency wants to know who it's for, what done looks like and which deadline really matters.
- Look for things they built before anyone asked. A portfolio made up only of assigned work tells you something (I think it's a weak signal on its own, but a useful one).
- Add a peer interview. People already working in the field, ideally one with high agency themselves, tend to spot the real thing quickly.
- Use a paid trial with an ambiguous brief. Unpaid trials filter out the confident, in-demand people you most want.
These are practitioner heuristics, not validated tests. Use them to gather evidence, and expect some misses.
Can it be taught?
My starting theory was that agency can't be demanded from someone who doesn't have it. On a hiring timescale I think that's mostly right. Telling a person to take more ownership rarely works.
The fuller picture is a little more generous. Locus of control and self-efficacy are both malleable, but they change through experience, not instruction. Marine basic training is the example I find most useful: recruits are given control over a few small situations, learn how good that feels, and the habit builds into a feedback loop. Research in schools points the same way, though the evidence on specific interventions is still thin.
For a company, I think that translates into a few practices:
- Give small, real decisions with real consequences, then widen the scope as people succeed with them.
- Judge the outcome, and not whether the instruction was followed to the letter.
- Resist rescuing. When someone asks what to do, ask what they would do.
- Treat standard operating procedures (SOPs) as defaults to work from, with room to improve them.
- Don't micromanage. One practitioner claims it trains the agency out of a good hire in about 90 days. I wouldn't hold that number tightly, but I think the direction is right.
Where this leaves us
Hire for agency first, because it's much cheaper to select than to build. Then protect it, since the environment you create decides whether it survives. Training it into people who don't have it is possible, but slow, and I'd treat it as a bonus.
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