Ex-Meta and Google executive reveals the no. 1 'green flag' she looks for in job seekers

At Meta, Jennifer Dulski led a team of several hundred people, she wrote on LinkedIn. She had worked with the tech giant for two years. (Image credit: AFP)

Jennifer Dulski has worked with tech companies for about 25 years and during her stints at Meta and Google, she hired a lot of people. “I’ve hired many, many people in my career,” she said. “Probably thousands of people.”

Now, the CEO and founder of Rising Team has opened up about the characteristics she seeks in a candidate. “Adaptability and the ability to bounce back from obstacles is probably the No. 1 thing I look for,” she told CNBC Make It.

According to her, being adaptable in the workplace is critical.

“Especially these days, every other day is a re-org and a global pandemic,” Dulski said, adding that there’s also “the arrival of gen AI” to consider. At a time when companies are constantly having to rethink how they function in the face of new challenges and with new technology to adopt, workers have to be “able to get back up again when you get knocked down,” she said.

To figure out if job seekers have these qualities, Dulski asks about their lives before they started working.

“I can see those patterns in people’s early life,” she told the publication. “People, for instance, who did not have a straight path to college and managed to go to college anyway, that is navigation of obstacles which will be really useful inside most companies where I have worked.”

Dulski added that the same is true for people who decided they wanted to be an expert in a hobby as a kid and figured out how to go about it.

That kind of ability to push forward even in the face of obstacles, “that’s the green flag for me,” she concluded.