Stop Hiring the Resume. Start Hiring the Person.

Google used to reject people for having bad grades. Senior candidates, guys and gals who had already built real careers, real track records, real wins, and Google would still pass because their transcript had a smudge on it somewhere. It took them years to figure out they were doing it backwards. The candidates who actually crushed it once they got in the door weren’t the spotless ones. They were the ones who got dinged for something in the interview, some weakness that made a panelist raise an eyebrow, but whose strengths were loud enough that somebody in the room fought to hire them anyway.

I read a piece in Inc. that laid this out and it stopped me cold, because it’s basically the whole philosophy I built TheCollective around, just with better examples than I usually reach for.

Here’s the one that got me. Lincoln went through three generals before he found Grant. Three guys who looked perfect on paper, no obvious cracks, and none of them could win the war. Grant, on the other hand, had washed out of half a dozen jobs and was working the counter in his dad’s leather shop when the war broke out. He dressed like a slob. He didn’t play the political game. There were rumors he had a drinking problem. And none of that mattered once you put him next to an army, because the guy had administrative skill nobody else had, he didn’t rattle when things went sideways, and he moved forward when everyone else froze. Lincoln knew what he had. Word is when people came to him complaining about Grant’s drinking, he said he wanted to know the brand so he could send a barrel of it to his other generals.

That’s the whole ballgame right there. Strengths and weaknesses aren’t two separate columns on a scorecard. A lot of the time they’re the same trait looked at from two different angles. The candidate who’s never had a rough interview, never had a gap, never had a manager say something less than glowing about them, sometimes that’s because they never took a swing at anything hard enough to leave a mark. You want to know what somebody’s made of, look at what they built when the path wasn’t clear, not how clean their LinkedIn reads.

I see this play out constantly doing executive search. The client wants the unicorn. Ten years in the exact vertical, the exact tech stack, ran a team the exact size they’re hiring for, never had a rocky stretch anywhere on the resume. And look, sometimes that person exists and they’re great. But more often what I’ve found actually moves the needle for a company is somebody with grit. Somebody who’s been in the fire, who’s got real determination, who reads a room and reads people, who’s got the talent and the EQ to walk into a mess and just start solving it instead of waiting for a playbook that doesn’t exist yet. Turn that person loose on a real problem and watch what happens. Nine times out of ten they outwork and outthink the guy who looked perfect on paper, because the guy who looked perfect on paper has never had to figure anything out from scratch. He’s just never been tested.

Billy Beane ran into the same wall with the A’s. Baseball scouts had been doing the eyeball test forever, looking for the five tool guy who could hit, run, throw, field, and look good doing it. Beane and his crew said forget the eye test, let’s look at who actually gets on base, and they built a roster full of guys other teams passed on because they didn’t look the part. That team won twenty games in a row. Twenty. With a roster full of guys somebody else’s scouting department would have cut in round one.

None of this means throw out standards. If somebody’s got a real red flag, something that’s going to hurt the team or put people at risk, that’s not a quirk you look past, that’s a dealbreaker and you use common sense there every time. But a gap on a resume, a school that wasn’t Ivy League, a rough patch a few years back, a personality that doesn’t fit some cookie cutter mold of what a leader is supposed to look like? That stuff you can usually work with, especially if the strength sitting right next to it is real.

Best hires I’ve ever been a part of putting together weren’t the safest picks. They were the ones where somebody in the room said “yeah, there’s a wrinkle here, but look at what this person can actually do,” and everybody had the guts to bet on the strength instead of getting spooked by the wrinkle. Hire the human being. Not the transcript.