Voices
Silicon Valley that my life and
career took an interesting turn.
A recruiter found me and wanted
to introduce me to a hot startup
making something called a workstation. “This is a technologydriven company and your background sounds great. Why don’t
you send me a resume and I’ll pass
it on.” A few days later I got a call
back from the recruiter. “Steve,
you left off your education. Where
did you go to school?”
“I never finished college,” I said.
There was a long silence on the
other end of the phone. “Steve,
the VP of Sales and Marketing
previously ran their engineering
department. He was a professor of
computer science at Harvard and
his last job was running the Advanced Systems Division at Xerox PARC. Most of the sales force
were previously design engineers.
I can’t present a candidate without a college degree. Why don’t
you make something up?”
I still remember the exact instant of the conversation. In that
moment I realized I had a choice.
But I had no idea how profound,
important and lasting it would
be. It would have been really
easy to lie, and what the heck,
the recruiter was telling me to
STEVE
BLANK
HUFFINGTON
08.12.12
do so. And he was telling me
that, “no one checks education
anyway.” (This is long before the
days of the net.)
I told him I’d think about it.
And I did for a long while. After a
few days I sent him my updated
resume and he passed it on to
Convergent Technologies. Soon
after I was called into an interview with the company. I can
barely recall the other people I
I can’t present a candidate
without a college degree. Why
don’t you make something up?”
met, but I’ll never forget the interview with Ben Wegbreit, the
VP of Sales and Marketing.
Ben held up my resume and
said, “You know you’re here interviewing because I’ve never
seen a resume like this. You
don’t have any college listed and
there’s no education section. You
put “Mensa” here,”—pointing to
the part where education normally goes. “Why?” I looked back at
him and said, “I thought Mensa
might get your attention.”
Ben just stared at me for an
uncomfortable amount of time.