Hiring for Heart: What a Dutch Plumber Teaches Us About the Personality Economy

28 April 202628 April 2026Leave a comment

While much of the debate around the Personality Economy focuses on tech founders, AI engineers, and media entrepreneurs, one of the clearest real-world examples comes from a thirty-person plumbing and installation business in a small village in the south of the Netherlands. Martijn Verspeek runs Installatiebedrijf Verspeek in Valkenswaard, and his new book “Goeiegast” (roughly:
“Good Guy”), co-written with journalist Eddy Buiting, has been the number one management book in the country for more than a hundred days.

What is a village plumber doing at the top of a management bestseller list? The short answer: he hires for personality, and everything else follows.

No salary talk. Still a waiting list.

When Verspeek interviews a candidate, he doesn’t mention what they will earn. He doesn’t ask for a list of certificates or push them through a standardised assessment. He simply tries to find out whether the person in front of him is a goeiegast or a goeievrouwke (a good guy, a good woman). Someone with the right attitude, humour and character.

The result is the kind of number every HR director quietly dreams about: a waiting list of more than thirty people who want to work there. In an industry that spends every conference complaining about the shortage of skilled technicians, a small company in Brabant has people queuing up, without knowing what the job pays.

“I think it’s perfectly normal to have a bit of love for your employees. The whole country is moaning that they can’t find people, and then I walk into companies where the director has a parking space right next to the front door while the rank and file get soaked when it rains.”

Why this fits the Personality Economy

The argument behind the Personality Economy is that once AI and digital tools make knowledge widely available, the scarce resource is no longer what you know; it is who you are and how you work with others. Verspeek makes the same argument from the other side of the labour market. Technical skill can be taught; a sense of humour, reliability, and genuine care for a customer cannot.

Elon Musk, from a very different corner of the economy, put it bluntly in a 2023 interview:
“The biggest mistake, in general, I’ve made, is to put too much of a weighting on someone’s talent and not enough on their personality. I think it actually matters whether somebody has a good heart, it really does.”

A Tesla founder and a Brabant plumber do not agree on much, but on this they seem to agree completely. Verspeek’s choices line up almost point for point with the traits Steven Bartlett and Simon Sinek describe in earlier pieces on this site:

Attitude over credentials. Verspeek hires people who fit the culture and trusts his team to teach them the trade.
Trust over control. There are no rules, only agreements. Monteurs drive identical vans, but every driver fits out the inside exactly as they like.
Relationships over transactions. Formal performance reviews are replaced by what he calls kampvuurgesprekken (campfire conversations) in which people talk like adults instead of being “judged” once a year.
Continuity over maximisation. He deliberately caps the company at around thirty people and aims for long-term health rather than growth for its own sake.

The PSV-inspired changing room is the most quoted detail; every employee has their own chair, their own locker, their own photograph on the wall, and work clothes that are washed by the company with their name on them. It is a small, almost silly thing. It is also a very precise signal: you are seen as a person, not as a pair of hands.

A sceptical look

It would be too easy to turn Verspeek into a poster for “hire for attitude and the rest sorts itself out”. A few honest objections:

Scale matters. Running a thirty-person family business in one region is very different from running a thousand-person company across several countries. Some of what works here works because the company is small on purpose.
Technical skill still matters. An installation engineer who is lovely but cannot wire a heat pump safely is a liability. Attitude is the filter, not the substitute.
“Culture fit” has a dark side. Hiring people who feel like one of us can quietly turn into hiring people who look like one of us. Any company copying this approach has to ask honestly who ends up on that waiting list — and who never applies in the first place.

Verspeek is well aware of the “small and on purpose” advantage. He says so himself in the book. That honesty is part of why the story is convincing rather than preachy.

What to take away from this

The Personality Economy is often framed as a response to AI: if the robots know everything, humans compete on character. Verspeek arrived at the same conclusion through something much older — a Brabant farmer’s common sense, as the Dutch would say. Look after your people, and they will look after your customers. Hire for who someone is, and worry about the certificates later. For HR, that points to a few practical shifts:

Rewrite the job interview around behaviour and values, not around the CV.
Replace the annual review with shorter, more honest conversations; campfires, not courtrooms.
Invest in the small signals (the changing room, the van, the name on the jacket) that tell employees they are individuals, not headcount.

The knowledge economy rewarded what you had studied. The Personality Economy rewards how
you treat the people around you. A village plumber has just sold more than a hundred thousand
copies of a book making that point. Maybe it is time the rest of us listened.

Elon Musk’s Dojo 3 Call: Technical Meritocracy Meets the Personality Economy

22 February 2026Leave a comment

Elon Musk posted a strikingly simple recruiting message for Tesla’s restarted Dojo 3 supercomputer project:

“No résumé. No degree. Just send 3 bullets of tough technical problems you actually solved to AI_Chips@Tesla.com (mailto:_Chips@Tesla.com)”

Within hours the post garnered thousands of likes, hundreds of replies, and a flood of speculation. Some celebrated the purest form of meritocracy imaginable; others worried about signal-to-noise ratio or suspected it was mostly performative. Yet beneath the hype lies one of the clearest real-time demonstrations yet of how the Personality Economy is infiltrating even the most elite engineering domains.

Why this format is personality-first (even in hard tech)

Traditional semiconductor/AI-chip hiring pipelines demand:

PhD or elite master’s degree
Years at NVIDIA / AMD / Google TPU teams
Long publication list or patent portfolio
Polished LinkedIn + referrals

Musk’s method discards almost all of those signals in favor of one question: “Show me you have already solved difficult, real problems with AI tools.”

The three-bullet constraint forces extreme conciseness and clarity—skills that correlate strongly with:

Ability to prioritize what matters (judgment)
Capacity to explain complex work simply (communication & emotional intelligence)
Evidence of self-directed learning and iteration (adaptability and learning speed)

These are exactly the traits Steven Bartlett and Simon Sinek highlight when they argue for attitude and learning velocity over credentials. In a world where Grok, Claude, Gemini, and open-source models let anyone accelerate prototyping, the person who can quickly turn vague goals into working silicon or training runs becomes irreplaceable.

Dojo 3 context: why the bar is so high yet so open

Tesla quietly shelved earlier Dojo ambitions after the AI5 chip design wrapped, then quietly revived the program in late 2025 with the explicit goal of building the world’s highest-volume AI training chips. That means Dojo 3 engineers must solve problems at the bleeding edge of:

Custom interconnect fabrics
Extreme power density
Software-hardware co-design for trillion-parameter models
Cost-per-FLOP at planetary scale

Yet Musk is betting that the fastest path to those breakthroughs is not poaching the usual suspects from the usual pedigrees, but casting the widest possible net for people who have already proven they can wrestle hard technical reality using today’s AI assistance.This is the Personality Economy logic applied to frontier hardware: AI has democratized access to simulation tools, code generation, optimization literature, and even architecture exploration. What remains scarce is the combination of grit, pattern recognition, taste in experimentation, and willingness to fail repeatedly until something works. Those qualities do not reliably appear on a CV.

Counterpoints: when pure attitude isn’t enough

Skeptics rightly point out risks:

Volume of emails could overwhelm recruiters (though Tesla likely uses AI filtering + human spot-checks).
Self-reported bullets are easy to embellish or outright fabricate.
Certain chip-design subtleties (e.g., analog layout parasitics, foundry process quirks) still require deep tacit knowledge that only comes from years on the floor.
Team composition needs balance: visionaries + fast learners must be paired with domain veterans who prevent reinventing broken wheels.

The site’s earlier pieces on hiring for attitude consistently note this tension. The strongest outcome is rarely 100 % attitude or 100 % pedigree—it is deliberate complementarity.

What this means for the rest of us

Whether or not you are aiming for Tesla’s AI chip team, Musk’s experiment is a loud signal:

Document your real problem-solving stories now (GitHub repos, blog posts, Twitter threads, short Loom videos).
Practice distilling complex work into three crisp, outcome-focused bullets.
Treat AI as a co-pilot that amplifies your curiosity and persistence, not a magic shortcut.
Build a public trace of how you think and iterate—because in the Personality Economy, your demonstrated character and learning velocity increasingly serve as your primary credential.

The knowledge economy rewarded accumulation.

The Personality Economy rewards what you do with what is already abundant.

If three powerful bullets can open the door to one of the most ambitious AI hardware projects on Earth, imagine what the same clarity and evidence could unlock in your own field. What tough technical (or business / creative / operational) problem did you solve lately using AI tools?

Steven Bartlett: The Poster Child of the Personality Economy

20 January 2026Leave a comment

In a world still clinging to the benchmarks of the old Knowledge Economy, Steven Bartlett stands as a loud, successful contradiction to the traditional rules of hiring. Bartlett, a 33-year-old British entrepreneur and the youngest-ever investor on BBC’s Dragons’ Den, recently shared a clear directive for modern leaders: “Hire people who are willing to learn quickly, have a great attitude and work really hard. Don’t just settle for education and experience.”

This philosophy isn’t just a trend; it is the practical application of the shift toward a personality-driven market.

Moving Beyond the “Knowledge” Trap

The traditional Knowledge Economy values specialized skills and degrees above all else. However, as the book The Personality Economy explains, the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and digital tools has made information and technical knowledge easily accessible to everyone.

Bartlett himself is a prime example of this decline in the value of traditional education. His CV lists his education simply as “Dropout”. Despite this, he launched Social Chain AG at 21 and took it public with a market cap of approximately $300 million by the age of 27. His success was driven not by a certificate, but by entrepreneurship, marketing savvy, and social media expertise—qualities that are difficult for machines to replicate.

Why Attitude Wins in the New Economy

When Bartlett argues for prioritizing “learning speed” and “attitude,” he is identifying the core components of the Personality Economy:

Emotional Intelligence (EI): The ability to build relationships and communicate effectively is now a key differentiator in the job market.
Adaptability: As technology automates data analysis and research, the human value lies in being flexible and creative in how we solve problems.
Authenticity: Bartlett’s personal brand is built on being a “media owner” and “media IP” creator. In this new paradigm, individuals are hired for their overall “package” of personality and experience rather than just their qualifications.

A Skeptical Look at the “Attitude Only” Approach

While Bartlett’s stance is compelling, a rigorous analysis requires us to look at the gaps in this logic.

The Measurement Gap: Education and experience provide a measurable baseline of discipline and foundational knowledge. How do we objectively measure “great attitude” or “hard work” during a 45-minute interview without falling into the trap of hiring for “cultural fit,” which can often lead to a lack of diversity?
Domain Necessity: While attitude is vital in marketing or social media, certain industries—like medicine or engineering—cannot yet bypass formal education for “willingness to learn.”
The Burden of Training: Hiring for potential means the organization must have the resources to train. If a company is in a high-pressure “scale-up” phase, it may not have the luxury of waiting for a “fast learner” to catch up.

Preparing Your Organization

Bartlett’s companies, such as Chapter 2, specifically focus on helping companies hire the right people more efficiently. This aligns with the advice for HR professionals in the Personality Economy: recruitment processes must evolve to assess soft skills like creativity and emotional intelligence alongside traditional qualifications.

By focusing on the unique human qualities that AI cannot automate, leaders can build teams that are not just knowledgeable, but truly irreplaceable. Steven Bartlett didn’t wait for the economy to change; he built his success on the very principles that are now reshaping the future of work.

Hiring for Attitude Over Skills

21 March 202521 March 2025Leave a comment

In today’s rapidly changing job market, the debate over hiring for attitude versus skills has gained prominence. Simon Sinek’s assertion, “You don’t hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills,” encapsulates this perspective. This approach emphasizes the importance of inherent qualities over specific competencies, which fits in the Personality Economy.

The Rationale Behind Hiring for Attitude:

Adaptability: Employees with a positive attitude are more likely to embrace change and adapt to new challenges, a crucial trait in dynamic industries.
Cultural Fit: Hiring individuals whose values align with the organization’s culture fosters a cohesive work environment, enhancing collaboration and morale.
Trainability: An individual with the right attitude is often more open to learning and development, making it easier to impart necessary skills.

Supporting Evidence:

Person–Organization Fit: Research indicates that employees who align with their organization’s culture tend to exhibit higher job satisfaction and commitment, leading to reduced turnover.
Soft Skills Significance: Attributes such as communication, teamwork, and problem-solving are increasingly valued by employers, often outweighing technical skills in certain roles.Reuters

Counterarguments:

Role-Specific Requirements: Certain positions necessitate specialized skills that cannot be quickly taught, making immediate proficiency essential.
Training Resources: Not all organizations have the capacity to train employees extensively, making pre-existing skills a practical necessity.
Measurability: Skills are often more quantifiable than attitudes, simplifying the assessment process during hiring.

Balancing Attitude and Skills:

While attitude plays a pivotal role in an employee’s success, a balanced approach that considers both attitude and requisite skills is often most effective. This ensures that new hires can integrate smoothly into the company culture while also fulfilling the technical demands of their roles.

Simon Sinek’s perspective therefore highlights the enduring value of attitude in the workplace. However, the optimal hiring strategy may involve a nuanced evaluation of both attitude and skills, tailored to the specific needs of the organization and the nature of the position.

The rise of social skills: A new era for leadership in the Personality Economy

3 March 2025Leave a comment

In today’s rapidly evolving workplace, the qualities that define effective leadership are undergoing a profound transformation. I notice that personality traits are becoming more and more important in the selection of leaders, and expertise less.

For decades, traditional markers of executive success—such as expertise in managing financial and material resources—dominated the criteria for hiring top-level leaders. However, as the world becomes increasingly interconnected and complex, organizations are placing greater emphasis on a different set of skills: social and interpersonal abilities.

The chart titled “Help Wanted: CEOs Who Are Good with People” captures this shift vividly. Since 2007, companies advertising C-suite openings have steadily increased their focus on candidates with strong social skills, while de-emphasizing operational expertise. This trend reflects a broader cultural and economic shift toward what some are calling the “personality economy,” where emotional intelligence and people-centric leadership take center stage.

Breaking down the data

The data, drawn from nearly 5,000 C-suite job descriptions analyzed by Russell Reynolds Associates, compares changes relative to the year 2000. Two distinct trends emerge:

Social skills on the rise: Job descriptions emphasizing social skills have seen a consistent upward trajectory since 2007, now surpassing a 25% increase compared to 2000. This includes qualities like emotional intelligence, collaboration, communication, and the ability to inspire and manage teams effectively.
Operational expertise declining: In contrast, job descriptions prioritizing operational skills—such as managing financial and material resources—have plummeted by nearly 40% over the same period.

The divergence between these two skill sets highlights a significant redefinition of what it means to lead in today’s world.

Why are social skills more valued than ever?

Several factors explain this shift:

The rise of team-oriented workplaces:
Modern organizations increasingly rely on cross-functional teams to solve complex problems. Leaders who can foster collaboration and navigate interpersonal dynamics are better equipped to drive innovation and productivity.
Globalization and diversity:
As companies expand globally, leaders must navigate cultural differences and build inclusive environments. Social skills like empathy and adaptability are essential for fostering trust across diverse teams.
The digital transformation:
Technology has automated many operational tasks traditionally managed by executives. This frees leaders to focus on higher-order responsibilities like vision-setting, relationship-building, and motivating employees.
Employee expectations:
Today’s workforce values purpose-driven leadership and meaningful connections with their employers. Leaders who can engage employees on a personal level are more likely to retain top talent and maintain morale.

What this means for aspiring leaders

For those looking to climb the corporate ladder, this data sends a clear message: technical expertise alone is no longer enough. To succeed in today’s competitive job market, aspiring leaders must cultivate their social skills alongside their technical abilities. This includes:

Developing emotional intelligence through active listening and empathy.
Building strong communication skills to inspire and align teams.
Learning how to manage conflict constructively.
Embracing diversity and fostering inclusivity in decision-making processes.

The rise of social skills as a priority in C-suite hiring therefore reflects a broader societal shift toward valuing human connection in an increasingly digital world. As companies navigate unprecedented challenges—from technological disruption to global crises—the ability to lead with empathy, authenticity, and collaboration has never been more critical.

For organizations seeking transformative leadership or individuals aspiring to lead, one thing is clear: the future belongs to those who are good with people.