On management: Bad common hiring advice

The common advice "hire for character, train for skills" is usually misleading.

The idea isn't fully wrong; it's just that most people underestimate how difficult and time-consuming it is to develop certain skills.

Let's look at a simple situation.

If you're hiring someone to build distributed systems or a person to maintain a large javascript codebase, and your team depends on it, and the candidate doesn't have those skills yet, you need to know what it actually takes to build those skills.

You are also willing to prepare the environment for them to learn when they join.

So hiring based on some abstract quality isn't usually wise, especially when you're short on resources (time, money).

A better approach is to identify which skills are required and foundational to your team, particularly the skills that take the longest to develop. Then figure out your appetite for developing those missing skills.