Many of the hiring conversations I've had this year arrive at a similar nervous question, after some skirting-the-issue diversions: if the models can write the specs, the code, the deck, and the analysis, what exactly are we hiring for now?
I've had my answer for most of the 15 years I've run Made In Tandem, and it fits on a post-it. ERIK: empathy, resilience, improvisation, and kindness. The 4 things we screen for beyond whatever skills a role requires. The rubric got a person's name because it describes, well, a person. Nobody ever wanted to work for a company because of their skills matrix.
For most of that decade and a half, ERIK was the tiebreaker. Skills got you to the interview but ERIK got you to the offer. Then the last few years happened, and the machines absorbed a remarkable share of the skills column. The syntax, the first drafts, the production volume, so much output. They didn't touch anything on the post-it. So use of the tiebreaker has become more necessary.
E is for empathy
Agents build exactly what you say, at ever increasing speed and confidence (and often actual accuracy). That moves the scarce step in all knowledge work to internalizing what people mean, which is and always was an act of empathy. The developer who used to walk over to a co-worker’s desk with a thoughtful question was running empathy in production; we just called it requirements gathering. In today’s world specification is async empathy that comes with a deadline and a short half-life.
You can hear it in any conversation. The engineer with empathy asks about the invoice dispute before proposing a solution or a schema. They restate your problem better than you could, and you feel seen and understood before anything gets built. That feeling is not a soft outcome. It is the leading indicator of the right thing getting built.
R is for resilience
The tools now rewrite themselves every few months and the roles rewrite themselves annually. This turns resilience from surviving the occasional hard project to metabolizing continuous change without becoming cynical or brittle. Because brittle becomes resistant to change, the very nature of the beast today, and cynical just gives up.
And, resilience should never be measured in hours. A 60-hour week doesn't build the reserve; it depletes it. The resilient people we’ve hired protect their lives outside work with the same discipline they bring to it, and you can spot them by how they narrate change, with curiosity about what it makes possible instead of grievance about what it disturbed.
I is for improvisation
I trained as a classical pianist, so I'll say this with some earned humility: improvisation is not the absence of preparation. It is what deep preparation sounds like when freed up to explore. A jazz player improvises over changes they know cold; without the fundamentals, wandering is just confident noise. The music works because the structure holds and all the players are equipped with the right tools and skills. Practice makes improvisation.
That's the decade we're in right now. The rehearsed parts of the work increasingly belong to agents, and the humans tackle the moments where improvisation is the only option: the requirement that contradicts itself, the model release that moved the frontier mid-project, the client whose real problems don’t surface until a third of the budget is spent. People with improvisation in them find these moments utterly delightful because it lets them exercise those muscles. It's also why the person leading every MiT engagement is called a Conductor. The job is keeping an ensemble of humans and agents aligned on a mission while the room keeps changing.
K is for kindness
Kindness is at the end of the list for more reasons than building a clever acronym. It carries more weight than anything else on this list. Blame-free teams are the only teams that will tell each other the truth about failures, and honest failure records are how an organization's learning becomes cumulative. And it leads to postmortems that end in a lesson instead of a culprit.
It shows up in smaller but no less significant ways too. Kindness to the next person who reads your code. Kindness to the keeper of the spreadsheet you're retiring, who gets promoted to owner of its replacement rather than displaced by it. Kindness to the client's team, who lived inside the system you were hired to change and know things about it you don't. Active kindness compounds and so does its absence. If you can’t be kind, then nothing else on this list matters.
The tiebreaker became the job
From my first post on this topic, none of the traits on this list have changed. But their market value did because the skills column became something you can rent with tokens and every model release makes it cheaper. It makes the important attributes for team members ever more important: empathy for people, durability under pressure, finesse when the plan runs out, and care for the humans in the system.
So, what's left to hire for? The post-it. It was always the post-it; the machines are making that really hard to miss in 2026, and it's still exactly what we hire for at Made In Tandem. Interview for it, become it, and count on it appreciating while everything else on the resume depreciates.