Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2021. Its data come from a CNBC interview in December 2020, including the executive’s more than seven years at YouTube, a team of more than 300 people and Pamela Lipp-Hendricks’s role at JPMorgan. Current positions may differ.
In more than 7 years working at YouTube, Kelly Merryman has become very clear about the qualities she looks for in candidates joining the company, and none of them can be spotted on a CV by a human resources director.
Merryman oversees a team of more than 300 people in the United States, Canada, Latin America and Brazil. As an executive she has made many hires over her career, and not only at YouTube: before working for the Alphabet-owned company, she worked at Netflix. At both companies she looked for the same things in candidates.
The 2 qualities a candidate should have
Above all, Merryman looks for energy and curiosity in job candidates, as she acknowledged in an interview with CNBC.
The word she used in the interview was “horsepower”, which suggests intensity, vigour and drive; here we’ll simply call it energy.
She believes these two qualities can’t be trained. Everything else can be taught, she explained, and a large part of her company’s culture is about teaching new employees: they are in the business of learning, and she embraces that. She welcomes the opportunity to bring in new people, train them and teach them something they didn’t know so they can bring great ideas to the table.
Unlike many other skills you can put on a CV, energy and curiosity are two qualities that don’t require a degree or an advanced level of education, but they can make a big difference to how someone performs in their job.
According to Merryman, in an interview you can identify energy by listening to how someone talks about their work and their ability to move and adapt to new environments.
Curiosity is easier to identify: you only have to listen to how someone thinks creatively about the things they already know or want to learn.
In fact, one of the qualities that shone brightest in the genius Leonardo da Vinci was precisely curiosity.
See also: Richard Branson: don’t hire a CV, hire a personality
What questions does she ask candidates in a job interview?
Merryman says that in every job interview she likes to ask candidates what they would change if they were at the company today. She also likes to ask them, as YouTube users, what experiences they wish they could have on the platform that they don’t have today.
These are two open questions that give candidates the chance to be creative and show what they think and how they think. As Merryman adds, if you have that curiosity, it’s because you’ve actually already spent some of your time thinking about these things, and not just for the job interview.
As at YouTube, curiosity is one of the main qualities many executives look for in new employees, including JPMorgan’s head of executive talent management, Pamela Lipp-Hendricks.
This JPMorgan executive said that one of her favourite job interview questions for spotting a candidate with this quality was asking them where they get their ideas from.
See also: 2 basic rules that will greatly improve your CV
And more and more, companies that want to grow need new talent that wants to innovate, especially at a time when everything becomes obsolete very quickly and you have to keep constantly moving so as not to fall behind.
To move in this new environment you need constant innovation, and to achieve constant innovation you need creative talent. And the most creative people tend to be the most curious.
See also: This is the perfect CV, according to recruitment experts
Featured image: Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
