A former Amazon exec who just raised $4 million for her startup reveals why she only hires 'relentless' candidates
- Startup job candidates should be able to solve problems on their own, without handholding from their manager.
- That's according to Jaleh Bisharat, cofounder and CEO of the clean beauty platform NakedPoppy.
- Other executives agree that being willing to take initiative will help you advance in your career.
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If you want to work at a startup, you shouldn't need a lot of handholding from your manager.
The best employees at small but fast-growing businesses are able to take ownership of projects, spot errors when they pop up, and address them autonomously.
All that's especially true if you're applying for a job at the clean beauty platform NakedPoppy, whose founders - Jaleh Bisharat and Kimberly Shenk - announced in July 2019 that they'd closed a $4.1 million seed round.
Bisharat, NakedPoppy's CEO, told Business Insider that she's looking specifically to hire "people who will turn over every stone to solve a problem."
Before launching her own company, Bisharat held executive roles at big-name organizations like Eventbrite and OpenTable. She was vice president of marketing at Amazon in the late 1990s.
NakedPoppy was born out of Bisharat's frustrated attempts to find clean makeup and skincare products - those that are sustainably sourced and free of harmful chemicals. Today, NakedPoppy customers get help finding those products, which are all algorithmically matched to their precise skin tone.
With any new NakedPoppy hire, Bisharat said, she wants to feel that if that person couldn't accomplish something, "nobody could, because they're so resourceful and so creative and so determined and relentless that they will solve any problem."
Bisharat explained why doggedness is important in startup hires. "Most companies hit their hiccups and their tough points," she said. "The question is whether you have the team that can learn from and adjust to the market, adjust to the learning, and be sure it's solving a problem that customers really care about."
Being an autonomous problem-solver may get you promoted, too
Even executives at more established organizations say they seek candidates who take initiative - and who don't stop until they get the job done.
Traci Wilk, senior vice president of people at The Learning Experience and a former HR exec at Starbucks, previously told Business Insider that she's most inclined to promote someone who's "willing to step up and be a leader and say, 'OK, I'm going to take this challenge" - for example, volunteering for a project in another department - "and I'm going to either go off and do the research on my own or I'm going to help others.'"
Meanwhile, an anecdote in Dale Carnegie's 1948 book "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living" illustrates just how much bosses value independent problem-solving. Leon Shimkin, who was then a general manager at publishing house Simon and Schuster, told Carnegie that he'd devised a way to cut meeting times by 75%: He informed his team that they couldn't present any problems unless they'd first tried to think of a solution.
Read more: Becoming a 'big picture' thinker is one of the best ways to succeed at work. Here's how.
Building a team of problem-solvers is crucial to a startup's success
An employee's ability to solve problems independently doesn't appear to be a function of raw intelligence.
As Joe Folkman, president at the leadership consultancy Zenger Folkman, writes in Forbes, his research on 6,000 individual contributors and 76,000 managers pointed to five skills underpinning problem-solving prowess: technical expertise, a desire to innovate, an understanding of the organization's overall strategy, drive and tenacity, and exceptional interpersonal skills.
As for NakedPoppy, Bisharat said building a team of problem-solvers is essential to a startup's success. "When you start a company," she said, "there's some risk there. But actually, the biggest risk is in not assembling the right team to see their way around every corner."