If Character Matters in Hiring, Recruiters Should Spend Their Time Differently
If character and responsibility matter in hiring, recruiters need more time to understand the person. How AI can support basic checks and make room for meaningful conversations.
A recent survey of 1,333 companies across Japan by Teikoku Databank gave me a lot to think about.
Asked what qualities they look for in candidates, the most common response was strong communication skills, at 30.6%. This was followed by a conscientious or honest character, at 29.2%, and motivation, at 28.4%.
Specialized skills and the ability to use AI and digital technologies ranked lower. Among companies that primarily hire new graduates, 31.8% valued openness to feedback. Among those that primarily hire experienced professionals, a sense of responsibility (28.4%) and the ability to take initiative (20.2%) stood out, with clear differences between the two groups.
Of course, this does not mean skills and experience are unnecessary.
It suggests that knowledge and technical ability alone are not enough when it comes to working together.
Can this person communicate well with others? Will they approach their work with integrity? Will they take responsibility for their role and act when something needs to be done?
As a business owner, I understand how much these qualities matter. An impressive résumé is one thing. Feeling confident that you can entrust someone with important work is another.
How Much Time Do We Actually Spend Getting to Know the Person?
This brings me to how recruiters spend their time.
If companies place so much value on character and responsibility, shouldn’t recruiters devote the greatest share of their time to understanding those qualities?
Yet a great deal of work comes before that conversation.
Reading résumés and checking relevant experience. Asking about responsibilities and the scope of previous roles in an initial interview. Discussing salary expectations and work location. Exploring what a candidate actually did to achieve the results listed on their résumé.
Each of these tasks serves a purpose. But I do not believe recruiters need to handle every one of them personally.
When basic checks on experience and requirements take up much of the available time, recruiters are left with only a brief window to understand what they most want to know: the person’s character and approach to work.
That feels like a mismatch between what companies value and where their time goes.
Let AI Handle the Checks It Can Support
Gathering, organizing, and comparing information about skills, experience, and job preferences against defined criteria are areas where AI can help.
What experience does the candidate describe on their résumé? Does that experience meet the requirements of the role? When asked to explain it in more detail, what specific examples do they give?
I do not think recruiters need to repeat the same information-gathering process manually for every candidate.
Delegating suitable tasks to AI can reduce the time and cost involved. The capacity that creates can then go toward direct conversations with candidates.
To me, that is where the value of AI in hiring lies.
Make the Time You Spend Together More Meaningful
If you want to understand someone’s sense of responsibility, simply asking, “Are you a responsible person?” will tell you very little.
What did they do when a project fell behind schedule? How did they respond when their own mistake affected other people? How did they work with someone whose views differed from their own?
Exploring specific experiences can reveal much more about how a person approaches work.
Of course, one meeting will never tell you everything about someone. That makes it all the more important to avoid using the entire interview simply to confirm basic information.
When experience and job preferences have been organized in advance, interviewers can begin with the questions that deserve a closer look. Candidates can spend more time explaining their thinking and how they work, instead of repeating what they have already written on their résumé.
Can you picture this person working with your team? Would you feel comfortable entrusting them with responsibility? And does the candidate want to work at your company, too?
These are the judgments I want people to have time to make through direct conversation.
ZipUpp Helps Create That Time
With ZipUpp, AI can help organize the information needed for résumé screening, conduct initial interviews to confirm basic requirements, and ask follow-up questions about the experience described in a candidate’s work history.
For example, if a résumé says that someone “managed a project,” AI can ask about their role, the actions they took, and what they achieved. It then organizes those responses into information the company can use in its assessment.
Listening to a candidate’s account is different from independently verifying their employment history or achievements against external evidence. Still, it can help employers understand the specifics behind a brief résumé entry before meeting the candidate.
Companies can use these AI-assisted findings and an assessment of alignment with the role’s requirements to decide whom they want to meet next. In second-round and final interviews, they can then use direct conversation to explore character, responsibility, attitude toward work, and how the person might work with the team.
What I want to achieve with ZipUpp is to help recruiters spend their time on the judgments they most want to make themselves.
If companies are looking for people who are honest, motivated, and ready to take responsibility as part of a team, they need to make more time to get to know those people.
Let AI support the tasks it can handle. Then invest human time and resources in the conversations that matter.
That is the role I want ZipUpp to play.