Indeed CEO Chris Hyams takes a creative approach to interviewing job candidates, he says.

Typically, when an interviewee comes to him, their skills and experience have already been vetted by other leaders within the company, says Hyams, who’s been Indeed’s CEO since 2019. So he gets to ask more unconventional, personality-driven questions.

“It’s funny, the more I do this, the less I’m looking for specific knowledge or experience,” he says. “The most important thing is curiosity and adaptability, not necessarily what you’ve done.”

Hyams investigates those two soft skills by asking these questions in every interview he conducts, he says:

1. “What are you insanely curious about?” Or, alternatively, “What do you care deeply about?”
2. “Tell me a story about when you were really, really sure about something and found out you were completely wrong.”

Your answers don’t necessarily need to be work-related. “I’m actually more interested if it’s not a work related thing,” says Hyams. “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?”

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Similarly, Hyams seeks employees who can switch gears when their plan or idea fails, and own up to their failure afterward. Other business leaders, ranging from billionaire serial entrepreneur Mark Cuban to Rent The Runway CEO Jennifer Hyman, also identify adaptability as an in-demand job skill — especially as artificial intelligence increasingly finds its way into workplaces.

“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],” says Hyams.

The Indeed CEO approaches interviews in at least one more creative way: He typically doesn’t look at candidates’ resumes before speaking with them, he says. Instead, he wants to come to his conclusion about someone based on what they show him, without being influenced by what he read on a piece of paper.

“It’s really important for me to try to eliminate as many preconceived notions [beforehand] and just assess a person …. As much as I’d like to think that I am rational and open minded, I have biases. Everyone has biases,” Hyams says. “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 recognize.”

If you interview two people for the same role, knowing that one of them already has a comparable title might accidentally make you favor that candidate, he says. These kinds of biases are what make it difficult for certain groups, like “women, people of color and people with disabilities,” to climb the corporate ladder, Hyams adds.

“One of our core principles at Indeed is this idea that talent is universal, but opportunity is not,” he says.

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