Billionaire CEO shares the no. 1 red flag he sees in employees: 'When they are more into...'

When he conducts job interviews, Todd Graves said he tries to gauge each candidate’s level of passion for the company and eventually hires people who he thinks will be 'intrinsically motivated' to work at Raising Cane’s. (Image credit: Todd Graves, Unsplash)

Todd Graves, the 52-year-old billionaire CEO and guest judge at Shark Tank, recently revealed his pet peeve when analsying resumes of possible recruits. He keeps an eye out for a trend common among most young professionals—job-hopping.

Speaking to CNBC Make It, the co-founder of Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, a restaurant chain with more than 800 outlets, said that his number one red flag when hiring new corporate employees is a resume that shows frequent job changes every two to three years.

“I question that, because it’s like, ‘Are you in it just for you?’” Graves told the publication. He added that job-hopping can make an applicant come across as someone who’s on a “quest for titles". Such candidates also tend to use language during interviews that they think the recruiters want to hear rather than giving authentic answers. These inconsistencies get caught when the candidates are scrutinised across multiple interviews.

“When they’re more into title and control versus teamwork, it’s a huge red flag for me,” the billionaire said.

When he conducts job interviews, Graves said he tries to gauge each candidate’s level of passion for the company and eventually hires people who he thinks will be “intrinsically motivated” to work at Raising Cane’s. He told CNBC Make It that he has observed a “huge correlation to success” for employees when they care about what happens to their colleagues, team and organisation as a whole — rather than focusing solely on their own career growth.

“That goes down to our cashiers and fry cooks in our restaurants,” Graves said.

It's no surprise that Graves looks out for passionate professionals after all, he was so driven about opening his restaurant chain that at 30, he worked 90-hour weeks at an oil refinery in Los Angeles to save money for it.

The idea of a restaurant chain that sold only chicken fingers occurred to Graves when he was in college at  Louisiana State University. He had pitched the idea in a startup-pitching assignment but had gotten the lowest grade.

“If people tell you something can’t be done, it makes you strive so much more to do it,” Graves had told students at Nicholls State University in 2009.