Diary of a CEO founder reveals he hired a person with ‘zero’ work experience as she ‘thanked the security guard by name’ prior to the interview

Job-seekers might think that an Ivy League degree or 500 work experience will get them a job, but who they thank when entering an interview could be more crucial than their educational background.

Steven Bartlett, the founder and host of The Diary of a CEO podcast, gave an opportunity to an applicant with a nearly blank CV for this exact reason.

“I hired someone whose CV was two lines. Their experience was zero,” Bartlett explained in a recent. “A big part of the reason I gave her the job was that: She thanked the security guard by name on her way into the building.”

She also continued to prove herself during the hiring process in seemingly minor ways, and those acts of humility got her the job, not her qualifications.

“When she didn’t know something, in the interview she said ‘I don’t know that yet, but here’s how I’d figure it out,’” Bartlett explained. “After the interview, she went and taught herself the answer she didn’t know and emailed it to me within hours.”

The founder took a chance on the inexperienced candidate, and it didn’t take long for it to pay off. Bartlett said that six months later, she has proven to be one of the best hires he’s ever made. “Fifteen years of hiring has taught me that culture fit and character are much harder to find than experience, skills, or education.”

Bartlett’s hiring philosophy is pleasing to entry-level Gen Zers starting their careers without full-time work on their resumes.

The CEOs with their own unique hiring philosophies

It has long been a general rule that the candidate with the best degree, most work experience, and impressive credentials will win in job interview rounds. But with years of successful and failed hires, bosses are going against the norm and seeking talent with human skills, work ethic, and integrity.

David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, doesn’t look for the highest IQ. Instead, he said he’s in the “camp of smart enough” when hiring talent at the $282 billion company. Instead of focusing on educational background, he is drawn to applicants who are in tune with “human elements” such as the ability to connect, be resilient, and determined. Experience is also “greatly underrated” and a “big differentiator for the firm,” Solomon noted. Attending Harvard University or being the smartest in the room may be impressive, but it won’t get job candidates far at the banking giant.

“You have to be smart enough, but the smartest person in the world without a whole set of other things [is] not going to do well at Goldman Sachs, not going to be successful at Goldman Sachs in the long run,” Solomon said on Sequoia Capital’s Long Strange Trip podcast last year. “You can’t teach experience.”

And Danny Meyer, the founder of global fast-casual chain Shake Shack, has his own criteria. To run the company’s 510 restaurant locations smoothly, he needs talent to have a high “hospitality quotient” (HQ) rather than IQ. And he’s looking for six positive signs in Shake Shack talent: integrity, optimism, intellectual curiosity, work ethic, empathy, and self-awareness.

“I really don’t care what your IQ is,” Meyer told ‘s Jason Del Rey at the X4 Summit last year. “What an IQ basically shows is one’s aptitude for learning. What HQ is, is the degree to which someone is happier themselves when they bring happiness to someone else.”

Even the Oracle of Omaha and longtime Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett has refined his own approach. After more than five decades leading the $1 trillion holding company, Buffett has seen professionals without fancy Ivy League degrees succeed. And when planning his CEO succession last year, the investing mogul made it clear: he wasn’t going to look at the education section on candidates’ resumes.

“I never look at where a candidate went to school. Never!” Buffett wrote to his Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. “Of course, there are great managers who attended the most famous schools. But there are plenty like Pete who may have benefited from attending a less prestigious institution or even not finishing school.”