TED Talk:


  • February 23, 2016
  • /   Shannon Nickinson
  • /   training-development

TEDTalk.

Hiring is the most important — and often the most difficult — parts of being an entrepreneur.

In this TED Talk, human resources executive Regina Hartley explains why she believes the best candidate may not be the one who looks best on paper.

"A resume tells a story," Hartley says. "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 takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice. But if your whole life has been engineered toward 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'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.

Take this resume. This guy's parents give him up for adoption. He never finishes 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 percent of the entrepreneurs studied had dyslexia. What's remarkable -- among those entrepreneurs who experience post traumatic growth, they now view their learning disabilityas 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.

The Studer Community Institute hosted “Hiring Talent: Increasing the Effectiveness of Employee Selection” workshop which focused on the importance of a careful employee hiring processes. Due to attendee feedback, the Institute will offer a series of workshops focused on “Selecting Talent.” To view the hiring talent tool kit, please click here.

 

Watch her talk here.

 
Your items have been added to the shopping cart. The shopping cart modal has opened and here you can review items in your cart before going to checkout