CEO of $661 million-company reveals a trick to identify whether job seekers are 'doers' or 'talkers'

Omar Asali, the chairman and CEO of $661 million eco-focused packaging company Ranpak in the US, isn’t keen on hiring smooth talkers. he believes that employees who are too self-promotional are a red flag because they usually look out for themselves, rather than their organisation.

“You always have to be careful with people that are very smooth talkers and very promotional,” Asali, who’s been running Ranpak since 2019, told CNBC Make It. “I’m not hiring people because their presentation skills are phenomenal. I’m hiring them typically because I need certain tasks and certain jobs done.”

And that's why the 53-year-old New York-based CEO has an "insightful" prompt to use during the recruitment process to identify whether a candidate is a "talker" or a "doer". Being the head of a large company, Asali isn’t always involved in every single hiring decision, but he does hire “very senior executives”. During the interview, he asks candidates to tell him 10 words that immediately come to mind that describe who they are. Most people respond quickly, and the cuff answers can highlight aspects of their professional and social personality more effectively than anything they’ve prepared in advance for the interview, Asali told the publication.

“The more honest they came across — the more sincere they came across — the more I enjoyed the conversation. You would be surprised with people I hired that were pretty open and vulnerable about things about themselves," he said.