The CEO of the job site Indeed says there are two questions he asks prospective employees in every job interview.
Like most businesses, by the time interviewees make their way to Chris Hyams, they have already gone through a vetting process with other leaders in the company. This process allows them to look at candidates skills and experience before Chris learns more about them.
Hyams has been the CEO of Indeed since 2019 and is estimated to have a net worth of around $45million (£35m) to $55m (£43m), according to Cloudflare. If there’s anyone you’d want to take interview advice from, it’s the person at the top of the world’s number one job site.
He told CNBC: “It’s funny, the more I do this, the less I’m looking for specific knowledge or experience. The most important thing is curiosity and adaptability, not necessarily what you’ve done.”
Hyams attempts to investigate these two ‘soft skills’ by asking two thought-provoking questions in every interview he conducts. The first is: “What are you insanely curious about?” Or, similarly: “What do you care deeply about?”
The second question he shared was: “Tell me a story about when you were really, really sure about something and found out you were completely wrong.” Hyams explained that these answers don’t even need to be related to work life, saying that he’s more interested when it’s not.
“If you can spend 45 minutes talking about baking sourdough and the 57 different recipes that you’ve tried, the experimentation with temperature and hydration…When people have that intense curiosity…it’s just a question of, ‘What else can you fall in love with?”, he added.
The CEO shared that similarly, he’s always looking for candidates who can switch gears in the incidents when their plans fail, and they own up to it afterwards. In agreement with Chris, other business leaders Mark Cuban and Jennifer Hyams identify adaptability as a crucial job skill.
“Anyone who’s never wrong, or anyone who will never admit they’re wrong, is going to be tough to work with. Because everyone’s wrong at some point.” Chris shared. There is another creative way in which the Indeed CEO measures success in a candidate, which involves completely ignoring their CVs.
Typically, Chris admits to not looking at interviewees CVs but instead likes to draw a conclusion based on what the jobseeker tells him. He doesn’t want to be influenced by what he read on a piece of paper, CNBC reports.
“It’s really important for me to try to eliminate as many preconceived notions and just assess a person…. As much as I’d like to think that I am rational and open-minded, I have biases,” he admits.
He went on to confess that he believes “everyone has biases”. “I have biases for and against certain schools, certain degrees and certain companies that, no matter how much I work at it, you know, these are just old patterns that I recognise,” he said.
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