What do you think of Barbara Corcoran's hiring ideology?
Barbara Corcoran, one of the judges of ABC's Shark Tank, believes that persistence and hard work trump an impressive resume. When she's hiring, she looks for people who have the right attitude instead of the right resume. She, herself, was not a great student growing up and had to work her way up from low-paying jobs. Now, she looks for people who embody the same determination and persistence.
What do you think of Corcoran's ideology? Is it a little bit too idealistic? Or does this offer legitimate hope for those who may not have as impressive a resume?
One could argue that getting the "right resume" does involve a lot of persistence, hard work and having a good attitude. The reason most people who go to top schools, top companies etc. and have the right resume is because they possess exactly those characteristics.
That being said, there is obviously a lot of merit in judging people qualitatively as opposed to just ticking boxes which a lot of people on WSO seem to like doing (eg. Target > BB > MBA business schools ">M7 MBA > MF PE)
Easiest way to signal the right attitude quickly is through a resume. Interviews, even if they last a whole day, don't lend enough insight into an person's level of persistence and determination.
I wish her good luck in judging those personality attributes accurately in an interview setting. Shouldn't be hard to fake being persistent and having a good attitude while you are auditioning for a job. It's a bit harder to fake your entire body of work (aka your resume).
On the surface, I agree that it's important to look beyond brand names on a resume and see what people are really like. However, once I think more about her statement, I realize that to get to the personality evaluation stage (e.g., a phone or face-to-face interview), she'd need to filter candidates by their resume. And here, the kid who worked at Burger King for 2 summers and has a 2.8-3.0 GPA (low-paying job, not a great student like Barbara) probably has a resume like this:
Of course, if we're assuming that she's looking at candidates purely from resume drops, then, like another poster said, it's very easy to fake being a hard-worker (or whatever trait you want to portray) once you get an interview. Plus, the kids who would get interviews in this scenario probably had solid resumes to begin with.
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