Give The Best (Not Most Credentialed) People A Seat In Your Boat, Says Censia CEO Joanna Riley

The CEO of Censia, a platform built to transform the way companies hire talent, Joanna Riley was named one of the 100 highest-ranking women in technology. She is also an active member of the entrepreneurship community as both an early-stage investor and Chapter Chair of YPO San Francisco Bay. Needless to say, she is called on to do her fair share of public speaking on talent acquisition.

One of her favorite presentations involved playing a little trick on her audience. "We were talking about hiring and assessing credentials, and I put up two 'hypothetical' backgrounds on the screen," she explained in a recent interview. "One of them included an Ivy League graduate who had worked at various big banks and was running an investment fund. The other was a college drop-out who was traveling and dabbling in art. I asked for a show of hands indicating who the audience would hire."

Most of the room picked the banker, of course, which made their embarrassment all the more acute when Riley revealed the identity of the banker as the notorious Bernie Madoff and the artist-wanderer as Steve Jobs– real life examples of the limits of relying too much on those snapshots of human potential we think of as credentials.

"We all want to know how to highlight somebody based on their real talent, not just what jobs and companies and other keywords they cleverly list in their credentials," said Riley, who is earning an MBA at Harvard as part of the school's President Program.

A former elite rower in the U.S. Junior National Team and at the University of Virginia, where she earned her degree in Foreign Affairs, Riley learned early on that who sits in the seats next to you determines your success. As a business leader, this lesson came home to her when she journeyed to 110 countries to ask executives to identify their greatest asset, challenge, and fear.

"It was crazy because 80 percent of the answers across all three questions were centered around people," noted Riley. "Their greatest asset was their people, their greatest challenge was finding good people, and they were afraid that if they did not hire people that could help them adapt and embrace change, the company would not survive."

Riley thinks the answer to these leaders' collective concerns involves continual learning and assessing individuals holistically rather than a bulleted list of experiences. Her thoughts on assessment include such thought-provoking ideas as these:

• Credentials are not everything: "Sometimes the people who are the most necessary to what we're trying to achieve are people who don't necessarily have the best credentials," she said. "We try to look at what they've done and whether we need somebody who can do that in our company."
• Never say quit: Riley has identified three qualities successful entrepreneurs most often exhibit. "They learn from failure. They discover their greatest talent. They don't possess the ability to quit," she explained. An interesting thing to remember the next time you see a candidate with lots of impressive job titles but little longevity anywhere.
• Everyone is a genius: Riley likes to quote Albert Einstein's lesson about the problems that arise when talent and purpose are misaligned. "Everyone is a genius," the G.O.A.T. physicist wrote. "But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

Riley points to herself as a living example of Einstein's Theory of Relative Hire-ability: "Growing up, I did all sorts of 'normal' sports like softball and soccer. I thought I was a bad athlete, but the truth was I just hadn't found my sport. And then I picked up an oar. If you're not good at something, don't quit. Find your strength."