Can You Really Hire Grit?
Why perseverance, ownership, and resilience matter more than what's in the briefcase
By Adam Tully
Most hiring decisions begin with a review of what someone carries in their briefcase. Their resume. Their experience and personality. While these things matter, they rarely tell the full story of who someone truly is.
In other articles, I have written about the importance of hiring based on core values. Values matter because they get to the heart of the person you are bringing into your organization. They help protect your company's culture and ensure you surround your team with people who share a common mindset and purpose. When values align, organizations become stronger places to work. Collaboration improves, teams trust each other more, and that culture often extends to how your clients, partners, and vendors experience you.
At Better Talent, grit is one of our core values. We believe perseverance, personal ownership, and the ability to bounce back from adversity are essential traits in the people who help organizations grow and succeed. In this article, I want to explore why grit matters so much in today's rapidly changing world and how you can intentionally identify it during the hiring process.
The qualities that determine long-term success in an organization rarely live in the briefcase. They live in how someone responds when things get hard.
Defining Grit Before we talk about how to hire for grit, it helps to define what we are actually looking for.
Grit is the combination of perseverance and passion applied consistently over time toward meaningful, long-term goals. It is closely tied to resilience, the ability to absorb setbacks, adapt, and keep moving forward when progress feels slow or uncertain. At its core, grit is sustained determination paired with personal ownership.
Most leaders say they want to hire people with grit. But here is the problem. Grit does not appear on a resume. It is not something neatly packaged in a list of certifications or job titles. It reveals itself in stories, in scars, and in persistent effort over time. It shows up in the moments when quitting would have been easier, safer, or more logical, and someone chose to continue anyway.
The real question is not whether grit matters. It does. The question is whether you know how to recognize it when you see it.
Humility: Where Grit Begins Before we can talk about perseverance, we have to talk about humility. Because staying humble is not just a byproduct of grit. It is the beginning of it.
Grit does not start with toughness. It starts with honesty. The honest acknowledgment that the path is harder than expected. That you have more to learn than you realized. That the gap between where you are and where you want to be is real, and closing it will require more from you than you originally planned to give.
That moment of honest reckoning is humbling. And it is precisely there, in that humbling, where grit either takes root or it doesn't.
The only way to truly get back up is to do so with humility.
When life knocks us down, we are given a choice. We can protect our ego, deflect the difficulty, and find somewhere else to direct the blame. Or we can let the fall teach us something. We can acknowledge what we didn't know, what we should have done differently, and what we are going to do about it now. That second path requires humility. And honestly, it is the only path that leads back up.
This is why humility and grit are inseparable. Perseverance without humility is just stubbornness. It is the person who keeps pushing in the wrong direction because admitting they were wrong feels worse than continuing to fail. Real grit, the kind that rebuilds after setback and compounds over time, requires the willingness to be taught by difficulty rather than hardened by it.
The people who demonstrate the deepest grit are rarely the ones who never struggled. They are the ones who struggled, were genuinely humbled by it, and chose to rise with that humility still intact. The hard season didn't make them defensive. It made them better.
That combination, humility first, then perseverance, then ownership, is what real grit looks like from the inside. And when you understand that, it changes how you hire for it.
Why Grit and Resilience Matter More Than Ever Modern work environments demand resilience in a way they simply did not before. Markets shift faster. Technology evolves constantly. Priorities change. Remote and hybrid work requires people to bring their own internal motivation every single day without someone standing over their shoulder.
In those conditions, the people who succeed are not always the most polished on day one. They are the ones who keep showing up, keep learning, and keep adjusting even when the conditions are not ideal. Grit fuels that resilience, and resilience is what sustains performance over the long haul.
The "Good" Mindset Few people have captured the spirit of grit more powerfully than retired Navy SEAL commander Jocko Willink. In his widely shared YouTube video simply titled "Good," drawn from an episode of the Jocko Podcast, Willink describes his one-word response to every setback, failure, or obstacle his team would bring to him.
Good.
Didn't get the promotion? Good. Now you have time to get better. Mission got canceled? Good. Now you can prepare even more.
The message is not about toxic positivity or pretending hardship doesn't exist. It is about refusing to be defeated by circumstances outside your control. It is the deliberate choice to find opportunity inside adversity rather than excuses.
Willink takes this further in his work on Extreme Ownership, where he argues that the most effective leaders and team members operate from one foundational principle: no one else is responsible for the outcome but you. Every failure, every shortfall, every missed target is owned completely by the person looking back at you in the mirror.
That idea lives inside grit too. Because grit without ownership is just stubbornness. It is someone who keeps pushing without ever stepping back to ask why the plan isn't working or what they could do differently. Real grit combines perseverance with personal accountability. It is the person who stays in the fight and takes full responsibility for how the fight is going.
When you are sitting across from a candidate, ask yourself: Does this person find the lesson in what went wrong, or do they stay stuck in the frustration of it? The ones who find the lesson are the ones worth betting on.
Grit in a World That Constantly Changes The business environment we are operating in today makes grit more valuable than ever. The economy shifts quickly. Entire industries are being reshaped. AI is transforming how work gets done, and roles are evolving faster than job descriptions can keep up with. What someone knows today may genuinely not be enough tomorrow.
In that environment, the most valuable people on your team are not simply the most experienced or technically skilled. They are the ones willing to adapt, learn, and pivot when the landscape beneath them changes. That requires grit.
AI will automate many tasks, and technology will continue to accelerate the pace of change, but the ability to keep learning and moving forward amid uncertainty is deeply human. People who have developed real grit do not resist that change. They engage with it. They ask questions, try new things, and recalibrate when something does not work. In a world defined by constant change, that is not just a nice quality to have. It is a competitive advantage.
Why Grit Does Not Show Up on a Resume Here is the honest reality. Resumes show outcomes, not obstacles. They list responsibilities, not resistance. A resume cannot tell you how someone responded when a plan fell apart, whether they stayed committed during a difficult season, if they took ownership when things went wrong, or how they handled rejection and ambiguity when it counted.
If you rely on resumes alone, you will consistently overhire for credentials and underhire for the qualities that actually determine whether someone lasts. Hiring for grit requires you to slow down, ask better questions, and listen carefully for patterns in how candidates talk about the hard moments of their careers.
Grit Is Not the Same as Personality It is worth taking a moment to clarify what grit is not, because this is where many hiring decisions go sideways.
Grit is not the same as being methodical, steady-paced, or naturally disciplined. Those traits are connected to personality and behavioral wiring, and they are worth understanding. But a person can have a calm temperament and a highly structured work style and still completely fall apart when real adversity arrives. Personality tells you how someone works. It does not tell you how someone responds when the pressure is on, and the easy path is to walk away.
Grit operates at a different level. It is a commitment of the heart. It is the inner decision that says I will continue even when this is harder than I expected, and I will stand back up after failure and try again. The people who carry that commitment are often the ones who have already been tested by something hard. They have faced rejection, experienced real failure, and endured stretches where progress was slow or invisible. And instead of stopping, they found a way to keep going. That is not a personality type. That is character.
Ownership and Personal Accountability Another defining trait of people with genuine grit is how they handle ownership when things go wrong.
When challenges arise, people who lack grit tend to look outward first. They blame the circumstances, the teammates, the market, the timing, or the leadership. Responsibility gets shifted somewhere else, and the focus moves to explaining what happened rather than fixing it.
People with grit do the opposite. They look inward first. They ask themselves what they could have done differently, what they can improve, and what is actually within their control right now. This idea is captured well in the book The Question Behind the Question, which challenges individuals to stop asking "why did this happen" or "who is responsible" and start asking what they personally can do to move the situation forward.
That shift in thinking is grit in action. It does not mean external challenges do not exist. Markets change, teams make mistakes, and systems break down. But the person with grit directs their energy toward solutions rather than getting stuck in the frustration of what went wrong. And when you own the problem, you also own the solution. That mindset is what allows people to bounce back quickly and keep moving.
How to Identify Grit in an Interview So, how do you actually find this in a candidate? The good news is that grit reveals itself when you ask the right questions and listen carefully to how people answer them.
Start by asking about the hard moments rather than the highlights. Instead of asking about strengths, ask about endurance:
What was the hardest professional challenge you stayed committed to? When did you want to quit something but chose not to? What failure taught you the most? What season of work stretched you the most?
How they answer those questions, and specifically whether they own the difficulty or deflect it, will tell you more than any resume bullet ever could.
Look for patterns of commitment over time rather than isolated achievements. One impressive result is not grit. Consistency is. You want to see multi-year commitments, growth within roles, expanding responsibility, and projects that were carried through difficulty rather than abandoned when they got hard.
Pay close attention to how failure gets framed. Resilient people do not avoid talking about failure. They integrate it into their story honestly. If every setback a candidate describes was ultimately someone else's fault, that is a signal worth paying attention to. You want the person who owns the mistake, identifies what they learned, and can show you how they changed because of it.
And listen for humility throughout the conversation, not just in one answer. Candidates who have genuinely been humbled by difficulty speak about it differently. There is a directness and a lack of defensiveness in how they describe the hard parts of their career. They are not ashamed of the struggle. They are honest about it. That quality, more than anything else, is what separates the people who grow from the people who get stuck.
Turning Grit Into a Hiring Data Point Recognizing grit in a conversation is one thing. Building a process that surfaces it consistently is another.
One of the biggest mistakes I see organizations make is conducting unstructured interviews where different candidates get asked different questions, conversations drift based on chemistry, and hiring decisions come down to impressions rather than evidence. When that happens, qualities like grit, resilience, ownership, and humility are nearly impossible to evaluate fairly across candidates.
Structured interviews solve that problem. When every candidate is asked the same thoughtful questions and responses are documented, patterns become visible. You can actually compare how different people talk about adversity, ownership, and learning. The gut feel does not disappear, but it gets grounded in something real.
At Better Talent, this is a big part of how we work with our clients, not just as a software provider but as a true talent strategy partner. We help organizations think through the right questions to ask, the values worth hiring for, and the behavioral signals that actually predict long-term success in their specific culture and roles. Every organization is different, and the traits that define a great hire in one environment can look different in another.
That thinking is also built into our platform. Interview Builder gives hiring managers the ability to create structured interview frameworks, ask every candidate the same carefully designed questions, document responses in real time, and compare applicants side by side. It brings discipline and consistency to a process that too often relies on memory and gut feel alone. When the right strategy, the right questions, and the right structure come together, hiring decisions get clearer and more confident.
Because hiring well is not just a process. It is one of the most important competitive advantages your business has.
Final Thought Most hiring decisions still begin and end with a resume and an interview. And while both matter, they rarely tell you what you actually need to know about whether someone will succeed over the long term.
The qualities that determine lasting success are not found in credentials. They are found in how someone responds when a plan falls apart, when progress stalls, and when the easier path would be to walk away. Grit does not announce itself. It reveals itself in how people talk about the hard moments, in the ownership they take when things go wrong, and in whether they came back from difficulty more open and more honest than before.
When you hire for grit, you are not just filling a role. You are choosing someone who will show up when it matters most, adapt when the environment shifts, and take responsibility rather than make excuses. That is the kind of person who builds something. And that is exactly what separates the people who last from the people who don't.
The most important question in any interview is not what someone has done. It is how they responded when things got hard.
If you have questions about building a hiring process that consistently surfaces these qualities, I would love to connect. Reach out for a free strategy call, and let's talk about how we can help you build a team worth betting on.