Growing Your Career: Why the best hire might not have the perfect resume | Regina Hartley

Modupe Akinola (0:00)

Hey, listeners, we're dropping another playlist this month. And this one is for anyone who's on the job market right now. Making a career change is never easy. But I think a lot of us are finding it especially hard at this moment, because it can feel so impersonal. There are more AI screenings, more trying to connect over Zoom. It's like the human part of the process is slowly getting filtered out. That's where these talks come in. I've picked out a line up full of tricks and tips to help you stay calm, stay true to yourself, and advocate for what you want and need. The job hunt can be opaque, overwhelming, and anonymizing.

So let's shed some light on it together.

Regina Hartley (0:47)

Your company launches a search for an open position. The applications start rolling in, and the qualified candidates are identified. Now, the choosing begins. Person A, Ivy League 4.0, flawless resume, great recommendations, all the right stuff. Person B, state school, fair amount of job hopping, and odd jobs like cashier and singing waitress. But remember, both are qualified. So I ask you, who are you going to pick?

My colleagues and I created very official terms to describe two distinct categories of candidates. We call A, the silver spoon, the one who clearly had advantages and was destined for success. And we call B, the scrapper, the one who had to fight against tremendous odds to get to the same point.

You just heard a human resources director refer to people as silver spoons and scrappers, which is not exactly politically correct and sounds a bit judgmental. But before my human resources certification gets revoked, let me explain.

A resume tells a story, and over the years, I've learned something about people whose experiences read like a patchwork quilt that makes me stop and fully consider them before tossing their resumes away.

A series of odd jobs may indicate inconsistency, lack of focus, unpredictability, or it may signal a committed struggle against obstacles. At the very least, the scrapper deserves an interview. To be clear, I don't hold anything against the silver spoon. Getting into and graduating from an elite university take a lot of hard work and sacrifice. But if your whole life has been engineered towards success, how will you handle the tough times? One person I hired felt that because he attended an elite university, there were certain assignments that were beneath him, like temporarily doing manual labor to better understand an operation. Eventually, he quit.

But on the flip side, what happens when your whole life is destined for failure and you actually succeed? I want to urge you to interview the scrapper.

I know a lot about this because I am a scrapper. Before I was born, my father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and he couldn't hold a job in spite of his brilliance. Our lives were one part cuckoo's nest, one part awakenings, and one part a beautiful mind.

I'm the fourth of five children raised by a single mother in a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. We never owned a home, a car, a washing machine, and for most of my childhood, we didn't even have a telephone. So I was highly motivated to understand the relationship between business success and scrappers because my life could easily have turned out very differently. As I met successful business people and read profiles of high-powered leaders, I noticed some commonality. Many of them had experienced early hardships anywhere from poverty, abandonment, death of a parent while young to learning disabilities, alcoholism and violence. The conventional thinking has been that trauma leads to distress, and there's been a lot of focus on the resulting dysfunction. But during studies of dysfunction, data revealed an unexpected insight, that even the worst circumstances can result in growth and transformation. A remarkable and counterintuitive phenomenon has been discovered, which scientists call post-traumatic growth.

In one study, designed to measure the effects of adversity on children at risk among a subset of 698 children who experienced the most severe and extreme conditions, fully one-third grew up to lead healthy, successful and productive lives. In spite of everything and against tremendous odds, they succeeded. One-third. Take this resume. This guy's parents give him up for adoption. He never finished his college. He job hops quite a bit, goes on a sojourn to India for a year. And to top it off, he has dyslexia. Would you hire this guy? His name is Steve Jobs.

In a study of the world's most highly successful entrepreneurs, it turns out a disproportionate number have dyslexia. In the US, 35% of the entrepreneurs' study had dyslexia. What's remarkable, among those entrepreneurs who experience post-traumatic growth, they now view their learning disability as a desirable difficulty, which provided them an advantage because they became better listeners and paid greater attention to detail. They don't think they are who they are in spite of adversity. They know they are who they are because of adversity. They embrace their trauma and hardships as key elements of who they've become, and know that without those experiences, they might not have developed the muscle and grit required to become successful.