Jennifer Dulski, CEO and founder of Rising Team has extensive experience in hiring top talent. Her impressive background includes roles as global head of product management at Google and head of groups and community at Facebook. Throughout her career, Ms Dulski has hired thousands of people and when evaluating candidates, she prioritises certain key qualities. While ambition and creativity are highly valued, two traits stand out as essential: adaptability and resilience. In an interview with CNBC Make It, Ms Dulski emphasised that the ability to adapt and bounce back from obstacles is the number one characteristic she looks for in every candidate.
The CEO values adaptability as crucial in today's fast-paced work environment. According to her, constant changes, such as reorganizations and global pandemics, coupled with technological advancements like general artificial intelligence, demand that companies continually reassess their operations. As such, workers have to be ''able to get back up again when you get knocked down,'' she says.
She believes that adaptability enables workers to stay agile and responsive to new challenges. Entrepreneur Mark Cuban also echoes this sentiment, stressing that adaptability is essential for long-term success. "You've got to be able to adapt because everything is always changing,'' he recently told CNBC.
To assess whether candidates possess adaptability and resilience, she asks about their life before they started working. ''I can see those patterns in people's early life. People, for instance, who did not have a straight path to college and managed to go to college anyway, that is the navigation of obstacles which will be useful inside most companies where I have worked,'' she noted.
Ms Dulski feels this principle also applies to people who, from a young age, set their sights on mastering a particular hobby and proactively work towards achieving expertise.
''That kind of ability to push forward in the face of obstacles, “that's the green flag for me,” she added.
