CEOs Talk About Hiring and Offer Career Advice to College Students. One Quality Stands Out. Be Curious.

Whether you read on or not, know this, the single biggest quality CEOs look for in job candidates is their ability to learn. Are you a really curious person? If you are, then you are a life-long learner. If you’re not curious, then you won’t learn. For CEOs, curiosity means you are more inclusive, you question more, and you listen. In today’s world, if you’re not curious, you’re dead, because every day is so different from yesterday. CEOs and I suspect other hiring managers, want to know whether you exhibit all the qualities to learn, how important is it to you, and are you willing to spend the blood, sweat and tears to learn.

The following are excerpts from interviews conducted with CEOs by Adam Bryant, New York Times columnist and author.

how do you hire? what advice do you have for college students?

David Kenny, CEO of the Weather Company, parent of the Weather Channel and Weather Underground, looks for people who are optimistic—focused on the future, life-long learners, take risks and know failure.

• What are you curious about? What do you read? What do you do in your free time? What do you want to learn? How do you learn? What are you optimistic about? What are you looking forward to? 

• How many bad decisions have you made? Kenny says, “People who don’t make bad decisions are indecisive and risk-averse. I love hiring people who’ve failed. If they’ve done it once and they learned from it, they’re so much better because they took a risk. They’re much more humble, much more of a contributor to the culture, and they do great things because they learned.”

His advice for college students: “The two lessons are embrace ambiguity and conquer ambiguity. Embrace the unknown. Try something new. Always be learning. You never want to feel like you’ve mastered it. Once you’ve embraced uncertainty, conquer it. Figure out how to turn it to your advantage.”

Lonne Jaffe, chief executive of Syncsort, a software company, wants people who are good storytellers and can quickly adapt to change.

• Jaffe asks candidates to go through their prior successes and challenges and major responsibilities. He listens to learn how good they are at storytelling. Do they seem like someone who’s likely to learn quickly and is able to adapt to change.

• He’ll ask about the decision-making process."Did somebody tell them to work on something, or did they realize that it was clearly valuable? How did they deal with smaller decisions they had to make while tackling the larger questions?"

His advice for college students: “Learn as much as you can about technology and accounting. Those are skill sets that are easily skipped in school, but are valuable in terms of making day-to-day decisions at any level in an organization.”

For Kat Cole, president of Cinnabon, interviewing starts before the conversations—looking for how you interact with people.

Part of the process starts before the conversation. How do you interact with people in the waiting area? Cole asks people to offer the candidate a drink to see if there’s a general gratefulness.

• “Tell me about the closest person in your life who you’re comfortable talking about. What would they say if I asked them, What is the one characteristic that they totally dig about you? What is the one characteristic that drives them insane, and that they would love for you to do just a little bit less?”

Her advice for college students: Be coachable, be a lifelong learner and a productive achiever—that’s about mentoring and helping other while you deliver results.

Phil Fernandez, chief executive of Marketo, a maker of marketing automation software, wants his team to be direct, curious, aware, good listeners with super high communication skills.

• He’ll start by saying, “I’ve read your background and I know a little bit about you. Now tell me about yourself in two minutes or less. Tell me what makes you tick as a person.” Fernandez also asks, “What was interesting about a decision you made?” With these questions, he is determining listening skills, can the candidate elevate what they’ve done beyond simply facts, and a level of curiosity.

His advice for college students: There has to be that sense of always learning, with their eyes open about the world.

Tiger Tyagarajan, chief executive of Genpact, a business process and technology management company says the single biggest quality he looks for is the ability and desire to learn—are you a curious person.

• “Tell me about the toughest situation you’ve faced over the last two or three years where you faced a fork in the road. How did you figure out which path to take? Once you were clear about the path, how did you drive everyone toward that goal? If people disagreed with the direction, what was your reaction? Was it my way or the highway, or were you curious about their point of view?”

• When have you encountered failure, how did you deal with it? Did you learn from it?

His advice to college students: “Stop comparing yourself to others. What’s the point? Compare yourself to what you could be and want to be. As you go through life, just determine what you think is fair for yourself, when it comes to things like pay. I push back when any conversation starts with, “But what about this person and that person?” What do you know about that person’s situation? Let’s talk about you.”

David Ossip, chief executive of Ceridian, a human resources and payroll company, looks for fit, an ability to learn, and team players because you need to get that collaboration to scale the organization.

• What are your interests outside of work, and what would like to do? Ossip is looking for something different or something that really identifies who you are, and that describes the character and perseverance of the individual.

• He’ll ask about challenging situations to learn about work habits, how challenges were faced and how the person persevered through them.

• To get a sense of whether they’re a team player, he’ll ask: “You’re working in a team environment and there’s a problem. You know how to solve it. Do you solve it by yourself, or do you work to try and share with other people on how to solve it?”

His advice to college students:  “The key thing is that you want to be mentored. Many people come out of college and they want to be gazillionaires right away. Some people are lucky enough to do that, but that’s very rare. The key thing is to find the right organization and to get mentored. And choose your mentor well. Choose someone who has been successful beforehand.”