Assessing for a Job That Doesn’t Exist Yet

Same job title, different job?

Five years ago, the Operations Director role in industrial manufacturing was legible. Deep process knowledge, efficient system management, delivery against defined metrics. The person you were looking for had a clear profile, and the assessment was designed to find them.

Today, the same title sits at the intersection of AI-enabled production, net-zero capital decisions, fractured supply chains, and a workforce that is simultaneously shrinking and reskilling. The title has not changed, but the demands of the role certainly have. This example can be repeated over numerous roles and industries so with jobs changing so much, what do you focus on when hiring?

Why success profiles are falling behind

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, drawing on over 1,000 employers across 55 economies, found that 39% of core skill sets held by today’s workforce will be transformed or outdated by 2030. That figure captures the scale of the problem, but not where the problem actually sits.

Most organizations are still assessing people against success profiles that assume the role is stable. The methodology itself is sound - job analysis, competency frameworks, structured exercises: all of them are well designed, and in stable conditions, it works. However, in many industries, especially those under structural change, success profiles are being written against roles that are themselves moving and assessments are hiring for an image of the role that is no longer relevant.

When deep expertise becomes a liability

When selection decisions ask, does this person fit the current role?’ It is a reasonable question, but in a shifting context, it is no longer sufficient, as strong performance within a well-defined system does not reliably predict strong performance when that system shifts. Deep expertise in an established framework is a genuine advantage in stable conditions but in unstable ones, it can become a constraint.

What differentiates people who adapt from those who do not has less to do with specific technical capability and more to do with how they process unfamiliar situations—something harder to measure than competency, but arguably more important.

The same WEM report found that 63% of employers identify skills gaps as the biggest barrier to business transformation. Most of the response to that finding goes into learning programs and reskilling investment, but very little goes into rethinking what organizations select for in the first place. In roles under structural pressure, an expert who built their career on a particular operating model has considerably more to unlearn than someone earlier in their development. The capacity to set aside a proven approach when the situation demands it, is different from being an agile learner. It sits closer to intellectual humility under genuine pressure and many traditional competency frameworks don’t cater for this highlighting the difference between selecting just for performance and selecting for adaptation too.

Three things to examine in practice

Behavioral assessments can help determine how a candidate approaches certain scenarios that can provide a deeper understanding of their role-fit. Here are three examples:

The first is what people do when the rules are not clear. Most structured exercises have a straightforward brief, a defined task, and a scoreable output. What happens when there is no precedent, no obvious right answer? That behavior tells you something a strong performance on a structured role play does not.

The second is how someone handles being wrong. Not whether they make mistakes, but what happens in the moment their initial reading of a situation turns out to be incorrect. Do they update, deflect, or quietly double down? This is observable in assessment settings but often not scored.

The third is whether someone is capable for where the role is actually heading. Not a hypothetical scenario, but a plausible one, grounded in where the industry or organization is moving. The aim is to see how someone reasons when the ground is not solid, not to test their knowledge of the future.

Readiness for what the role becomes

Organizations that invest heavily in assessing whether people are ready for roles as they currently exist have to be careful not to ignore the harder question - whether they are ready to help define what those roles become.

The businesses that navigate the next decade with the most success will not be the ones that perfected their selection criteria to hire the best person to fit the current role, but the ones that have considered how roles will change and hire the people that have the skills to perform in the role regardless of how it evolves.

See how SHL can assess for readiness, potential and fit, so you can build a workforce to perform today and have the readiness and potential to succeed in the future.

World Economic Forum. The Future of Jobs Report 2025. Geneva: World Economic Forum, 7 January 2025.
https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/