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Here’s the hypothetical situation: a position opens up at your company, applications start rolling in and qualified candidates are identified. 

Who do you choose?

Person A: Ivy League, flawless resume, great recommendations — or Person B: State school, fair amount of job hopping, with odd jobs like cashier and singing waitress thrown in the mix. Both are qualified — but have you already formed a decision?

Well, you might want to take a second look at Person B.

Human resources executive Regina Hartley describes these candidates as “The Silver Spoon” (Person A), the one who clearly had advantages and was set up for success, and “The Scrapper” (Person B), who had to fight tremendous odds to get to the same point.

“To be clear, I don’t hold anything against the Silver Spoon; getting into and graduating from an elite university takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice.” But if it so happens that someone’s whole life has been engineered toward success, how will that person handle the low times?

Take this resume. This guy never finishes college. He job-hops quite a bit, goes on a sojourn to India for a year, and to top it off, he has dyslexia.

Would you hire this guy?

His name is Steve Jobs.

(tedblog)