Everyone desires to work in a place that affords growth, exposure, conducive work environment and has a very good pay.
But, not every work place can afford this, hereby making the few places that can, a difficult place for people to access as it is highly competitive.
However, the vice president of content partnerships at YouTube, Kelly Merryman in charge of overseeing a team of roughly 300 people across the U.S., Canada, Brazil and Spanish-speaking Latin America has given 2 qualities she looks out for, when assessing candidates.
“There are two qualities that I look for above all else and that’s horsepower and curiosity,” Merryman tells CNBC Make It in an interview.
She explaining why she looks out for these qualities said,
“And I find those are the two things you can’t train. Everything else I can teach and so much of our business is an apprenticeship business and I embrace that. I embrace the opportunity to bring people along to train them, to teach them something that they didn’t know so that they can bring great ideas to the table.”
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Explaining further, she said “Unlike the many different skills and experiences that are listed on a resume, horsepower and curiosity are two qualities that don’t require a degree or advanced level of education. But they can make a huge difference in how someone performs on the job.”
Merryman also revealed how she is able to easily identify these qualities in a person, saying,
“In an interview, horsepower can be identified by listening to how someone talks about their work ethic and ability to move and adapt to new environments and curiosity can be identified by listening to how someone creatively thinks about the things they know or wish to learn.”
That’s why, she says that in every job interview she likes to ask a candidate, “If you were at the company today, what would you change?” And she also likes to ask, “As a user of YouTube, what are the experiences that you wish you had on the platform that you don’t have today?”
Those open-ended questions, she says, give “folks a lot of space to be creative and showcase” what they think. In most cases, she adds, “if you’ve got that curiosity, you’ve actually [already] spent a lot of time [thinking] about that ahead of time.”
Similar to Merryman, curiosity is one of the top qualities that many executives look for in new hires,
“We want people who are going to innovate,” she explained, while adding that with this question she loves to hear how people use external resources to come up with new ideas.
Culled from CNBC
