The CEO of Barstool Sports says she measures job candidates' responsiveness by texting them at odd hours on the weekends

pulse

July 17, 2017 5:51 PM

In a recent New York Times interview, Barstool Sports CEO Erika Nardini said she texts candidates at odd hours to gauge responsiveness.

Barstool Sports CEO Erika Nardini will text candidates at odd hours to gauge responsiveness. You get three hours to respond.

If Erika Nardini is going to hire you, first she wants to know you're committed to your job — even on a Sunday at 11 a.m.

Nardini is the CEO of the sports and men's lifestyle site Barstool Sports. In a recent New York Times interview, she detailed her process for vetting job candidates. After saying she was a "horrible interviewer" because of her impatience, she explained a unique process for gauging potential hires' interest in the job.

"Here's something I do," she said. "If you're in the process of interviewing with us, I'll text you about something at 9 p.m. or 11 a.m. on a Sunday just to see how fast you'll respond."

The maximum response time she'll allow: three hours.

"It's not that I'm going to bug you all weekend if you work for me," she said, "but I want you to be responsive. I think about work all the time. Other people don't have to be working all the time, but I want people who are also always thinking."

The policy tracks with some of Nardini's other beliefs about work-life balance. In her Times interview, she said she valued work ethic to the extent it matters "more than most anything," and that young people new to their careers should get comfortable with discomfort.

"It's really great to feel uncomfortable," she said. "And you change so much as a person from that."

A 2016 survey of roughly 5,000 employees by Project Time Off and the market-research firm GfK found that millennials were most likely to consider themselves "work martyrs," or people who rarely take time off from work in pursuit of career advancement.

The survey also found that millennials were most likely to demonstrate pride in their unfailing commitment to their jobs: While only 26% of Gen Xers and 20% of baby boomers wore the "work martyr" title as a badge of honor, 35% of millennials did.

Read the full interview at The New York Times »

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