Here's What Buffalo Wild Wings' CEO Looks For In Every Job Candidate

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Buffalo Wild Wings CEO Sally Smith.

If you want to impress Buffalo Wild Wings CEO Sally Smith in a job interview, you have to be competent, passionate, curious, and willing to "take out the garbage."

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Smith recently told Adam Bryant of The New York Times that these are the four things she looks for in all job candidates.

"I assume that you're competent, but I'll probe a bit to make sure you know what you're talking about," she told Bryant. "And then I'll say, 'If I asked the person in the office next to you about you, what would they say?'"

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Then, to see if a candidate is passionate about something, she'll ask: "What do you do in your free time?"

"If they're passionate about something, I know they're going to bring that passion to the workplace," Smith explained.

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Next, she looks for curiosity. "If you're curious and thinking about how things work, you'll fit well in our culture. So I'll ask about the last book they read, or the book that had the greatest impact on them," Smith said.

And then in her final assessment, which she uses to determine whether a candidate is willing to "take out the garbage" - or do "what it takes" - Smith asks for specifics about jobs or projects that went really well, and ones that went off the tracks. "You ask enough questions around those and you can determine whether they're going to need a huge support team," she said.

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