BriteCo's Founder Says Learning Speed Beats Resume Pedigree in Hiring

BriteCo's founder says the best hires he has ever made had never done the job before — and their resumes only got them through the door, while their ability to learn earned them the offer.

In an opinion piece for Entrepreneur, the founder of the insurtech company, which he started in 2017, argues that hiring managers are reading resumes the wrong way. "A resume is a rearview mirror, and we've been trained to read it like a crystal ball," he writes. It tells you what someone has already done — until you realize the job you're hiring them to do a year from now may not exist yet.

His argument lands at a moment when AI is rewriting job functions faster than most companies can update job descriptions. At BriteCo, he notes, many of the tools the team used two years ago have already been replaced or rebuilt. So when he evaluates a candidate, he asks one question: "Can they learn this job quickly and learn the next version of it even faster?"

What does 'learning velocity' actually mean?

The core concept in his piece is learning velocity: the speed at which someone goes from confused to competent on something new. It covers three things — how fast a person absorbs new material, how willingly they drop outdated knowledge, and how quickly they turn new knowledge into a real solution. Plenty of smart people can learn, he writes, but fewer can learn and apply new knowledge in the same week.

He's blunt about how rarely companies test for this. "'We hire people who love to learn' is the kind of thing companies say and rarely test," he writes. At BriteCo, he says, much of the hiring process is built specifically to surface the trait, because the company values people who can think on their feet over people who just check boxes.

Skills now depreciate on contact

The framing that should stop recruiters: a specific skill you perfect depreciates the moment you list it. An approach that counted as innovative in 2020 has become today's minimum standard, he writes.

That's where over-indexing on pedigree burns you, in his view. You can assemble a team of people who know exactly how the work used to be done — then watch them freeze when the work changes. "You hired a snapshot of the past, and snapshots don't adapt," he writes. Credentials describe what someone has done; learning velocity tells you how they'll handle what's next. If you have to choose, he says, bet on the predictive skill.

How BriteCo screens for it

He lays out four concrete tactics:

• Ask what they taught themselves recently — unprompted, no instruction. How did they start? What did they get wrong? How long before the new skill was useful? You learn more from how someone describes learning an unfamiliar tool than from any list of past titles, he argues.
• Present an unfamiliar problem in the interview and watch how they attack it. Do they ask sharp questions? Are they comfortable not knowing the answer right away, or do they shut down outside their lane?
• Run short, paid trial projects on real work with a deadline, scoped small enough to finish in a few days. "I haven't found a better signal than watching someone ramp," he writes. BriteCo has hired people whose resumes undersold them who then outran better-credentialed peers once the engineering stack changed — because they treated the new stack as a puzzle.
• Rewire reference calls. Ask a former manager what the person picked up on the job that nobody asked them to learn, and how soon the rest of the team started relying on it. Whether the answer comes without a pause tells you a lot.

When adaptability backfires

He's careful not to oversell the idea. In a heavily regulated industry such as insurance, some roles demand deep domain expertise — and you don't want anyone learning compliance on the fly. His fix: stop treating experience as a substitute for adaptability. Ideally you find both; when you can't, decide honestly which one the role needs and write that decision down before you open the search, because a strong interview can talk you out of it.

Stage matters too. A startup and a growth-stage company need different types of people, he writes, so be upfront with candidates about the stage they're joining.

There's also a retention warning for practitioners. Fast learners get restless once they've mastered the current tools. In a rigid environment with locked-down processes and technology that never changes, you'll lose exactly the people you worked hardest to find. Velocity hiring only works if the culture rewards people for relearning the job — give them the next hard problem before they go looking for it somewhere else.

What does this change for hiring managers?

The practical takeaway is a sequencing change: decide whether the role needs experience or adaptability before the first interview, not during it. As he puts it: "The right person in the wrong environment still fails." Hiring someone who learns quickly is only half the commitment — you have to give them room to use what they learn. A year from now, the job may look very different, and you'll be glad you hired the right people.