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But wouldn’t you say that someone who can perform under pressure be better than someone who can’t?

Sales role comes to mind. Someone doing enterprise sales might get nervous in front of a top executive or a team of executives and their team isn’t there to help. A person who can perform under pressure would be able to handle the situation better.

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No, that's not universally true and certainly shouldn't be a primary trait in many scenarios. In a team of engineers, I really just need the lead engineer to be comfortable talking to leadership. If my leadership is aware of their human skills and intentionally reduces the stress on presenters in that scenario then I can select more carefully for daily skills over the monthly skills. Especially with Juniors, their ability to perform under stress matters far less to me than their ability to humbly learn and grow.

I can't speak to how to hire sales people, but I suppose charisma under stress is a factor. Perhaps reality is the method of the interview should reflect the needed skills rather than some generic method.

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Maybe even more, the need to hire based on the ability to perform under stress is an indicator of office culture, not the quality of the candidate.

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