Hiring managers may consider a long list of criteria when interviewing candidates — but IBM executive Corinne Sklar is laser-focused on one trait.
“I’m looking for people who are not going to ask for permission; they’re going to drive their strategy,” Sklar told Business Insider at Monday.com’s Elevate event on Wednesday.
Prior to joining IBM, Sklar was the chief marketing officer of Bluewolf, an IT service and consulting company that IBM acquired in 2016. The vice president and managing director of Salesforce at IBM said she’s hired thousands of employees throughout her career and has one go-to question she asks candidates.
“The one question I’ve always asked people, literally for 20 years, is: Tell me how you first made money?” Sklar said, adding that she’s gotten “hilarious” responses from people over the years.
Sklar said she loves the question because it helps her evaluate if someone is a go-getter and not waiting around for a degree or a job to get started.
The executive said she still remembers hiring a candidate who spoke about the newspaper route he took when he was young. She said it showed he wanted to make money early on, and in general, she’s assessing if a candidate is “out there to win.”
Sklar said part of the reason she’s so set on hiring hustlers is because she considers herself one. At seven years old, Sklar said she went door to door to sell 25 cent bookmarks for Halloween that she had drawn. When one woman complained that the bookmark was made of construction paper, Sklar offered to laminate it for 50 cents.
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“I always wanted to be a business person,” Sklar said. “And I was always a boot-strapper. My dad was an entrepreneur.”
Her bootstrapping attitude is also evident in her approach at work. Sklar said the best advice she ever received was to “pick up the phone.” Even in the digital age with AI tools readily available, she said the skill is still valuable and helps her cut through office politics.
Sklar isn’t alone in valuing self-motivated employees, and that trait may be more critical than ever in the AI era.
Salesforce’s AI executive Jayesh Govindarajan previously told Business Insider that having agency is “far more important” than learning to code, which has traditionally been a core skill for tech workers to know.
With companies like Salesforce building systems that can automate an increasing number of tasks, he said employees need to identify problems and have the drive to get them solved.