Every hiring manager has sat in the room where one candidate could do the job on Monday and the other would be a pleasure to work with, and had to pick. The usual advice is "find the balance", which is true and useless. The better answer is that the balance is different for every role, and the job of a hiring process is to decide it before the candidates arrive rather than argue about it afterwards.
The two things you are actually assessing
Technical skills are what the person can do now: the pricing model they can build, the claims they can handle, the systems they can run, the qualification on the wall. They are the easiest thing to assess and the easiest thing to over-value, because a CV lists them and a test confirms them.
Fit is whether the person will do the job well here, with these people, in this way of working. Done badly, fit means "people like us", which is how a business ends up with a team that agrees about everything and notices nothing. Done well, it means the handful of behaviours the role and team need: how someone handles pressure, ambiguity, feedback, a customer who is angry, a deadline that moves. Those can be defined, asked about and evidenced, which is what separates fit from a feeling.
Decide the weighting per role, in advance
The decision that matters is how much each one counts for this role, and it should be written down before anyone is interviewed. For each role, list the three or four technical requirements that are non-negotiable and the two or three behaviours the role and team need. Give each a weight that reflects how hard it would be to fix if it were missing. Score every candidate against the same list, with the evidence for each score written down next to it.
Then read the scores in two ways. The total tells you who is strongest overall. The floors tell you who is not a hire at all: someone brilliant on fit and below the line on a non-negotiable skill, or the reverse. Setting the weights in advance is what stops the decision drifting towards whoever the interviewers liked most, and it makes the process fairer to the candidates who interview less smoothly than they work.
When to hire the skills and select for fit
Some skills take years, carry regulatory responsibility, or cannot be supervised while they are learned. An underwriter with authority, an actuary signing off reserves, a claims handler on complex injury, a compliance lead. For those roles you hire the skills, because the cost of a gap is a bad decision the business is liable for, and you select for fit among the people who have them. The fit assessment still matters, arguably more, because a technically strong hire who cannot work with the team is expensive to remove. What getting it wrong costs is in the hidden costs of a bad hire: the REC put the cost of a poor hire on a £42,000 salary at more than £132,000 back in 2017, and 85% of HR decision-makers admitted to having made one.
When to hire the attitude and train the skills
Other skills can be taught in weeks or months, and the role forgives a learning period. Here the calculation flips. Insisting on the skills narrows the pool to people who already have them, which in a tight specialism means paying a premium to move someone from a competitor who will move them back. Hiring for aptitude and attitude and training the skills opens the pool to people who have never worked in insurance, and in our experience they tend to stay, because you were the company that gave them the start.
This is the basis of Recruit-Train-Deploy. Our sister company FlarePeople does it for insurance pricing: it finds STEM graduates, ex-military people and career returners with the aptitude and attitude for pricing, teaches the technical skills, the tools and the sector in a ten-week academy, and deploys them to insurers on an initial 24-month contract with the option to take them on permanently. The client gets someone productive from the first week and selected for how they work, not only what they know. How it works is in Recruit-Train-Deploy for insurance pricing.
The general point holds beyond pricing. Contact centre roles, claims handling at first notification, underwriting support, most operations roles: the question to ask is how long the skills take to learn and what a mistake costs while they are learned. If the answers are "months" and "manageable", hire the attitude.
Fit to the working policy, not only the culture
There is a third thing worth assessing that most hiring processes skip. In our 2024 survey of 116 UK insurers, employers said that hiring people who fit their working policy, not only their culture, was part of making hybrid working succeed, and that not everyone wants hybrid or remote working even though most people want the choice. What the survey found is in flexible working in insurance: what 116 insurers told us.
For a hybrid or remote role, fit includes practical things: can this person manage their own time, communicate well in writing, ask for help without being in the same room, and do they want this working pattern rather than tolerating it? For a fully office-based role, the reverse. These are questions you can ask directly and evidence from past roles, which makes them fairer to assess than a sense of whether someone would be good company on a Thursday.
Fit is not sameness
The risk with any fit assessment is that it becomes a way of hiring people like the people already there. The difference between culture fit and culture add, and how to assess fit in an interview without that happening, is in start-up hiring: grow faster by hiring for fit. How to keep the whole process fair is in building an inclusive workplace begins with your hiring. The short version: define fit as behaviours the job needs, ask every candidate the same questions about them, score against written criteria, and have more than one person score. If a fit criterion cannot be written down, it is not a criterion.
Where Vermelo comes in
We screen against a scorecard agreed with the client before the search starts: the non-negotiable skills, the behaviours the role needs and the working pattern it runs on, each weighted for that role. Candidates arrive with the evidence for each score, so the hiring manager is comparing like with like rather than impressions. That is how our embedded talent teams work inside a client's process, and for individual specialist hires our sister company Gerrard White works the same way.
Talk to us about the roles where you are not sure which way the weighting should go.
Skills, fit and the hiring decision, answered
It depends on how long the skills take to learn and how much the role forgives while someone learns them. Where the technical skills can be taught in weeks or months, and the cost of a mistake in the meantime is manageable, hiring for aptitude and attitude and training the skills opens up a far bigger pool and tends to produce people who stay. Recruit-Train-Deploy models work on exactly that basis. Where the skills take years, carry regulatory responsibility or cannot be supervised while they are learned, an underwriter with authority, an actuary signing off reserves, a claims handler on complex injury, you hire the skills and select for fit among the people who have them. The mistake is treating it as a rule for the whole business rather than a decision per role.
Decide the weighting before you see a candidate, not after. For each role, write down the three or four technical requirements that are non-negotiable and the two or three behaviours the role and team need, and give each a weight that reflects how hard it would be to fix if it were missing. Score every candidate against the same list, with the evidence for each score written down. Then look at the total, but also at the floors: a candidate who scores brilliantly on fit and below the line on a non-negotiable skill is not a hire, and neither is the reverse. Deciding the weights in advance is what stops the decision drifting towards whoever the interviewers liked most.
Less about being like the team and more about being able to work the way the team works. In our 2024 survey of 116 UK insurers, employers said hiring people who fit their working policy, not only their culture, was part of making hybrid working succeed, and that not everyone wants hybrid or remote working even though most people want the choice. So for a hybrid or remote role, fit includes practical things: can this person manage their own time, communicate in writing, ask for help without being in the same room, and do they actually want this working pattern rather than tolerating it? Those are questions you can ask directly and evidence from past roles, which makes them fairer to assess than a feeling about whether someone would be good in the pub.