Catastrophe is a core value: Leveraging failure as a job-seeker or hiring manager

The startup community is obsessed with the idea of failing fast, learning, and adapting. That's a good thing! But when we look to get hired, or we look to hire someone to improve our team, we only ever focus on what our successes were.

Being able to discuss failures -- real failures, not excuses to talk about how you pulled a win out of thin air -- creates a much richer, more genuine picture.

This talk is split between job-seekers and job-givers: my goal is to help put a stake in the heart of sterile, cookie-cutter interviews. That means that both sides need to be willing to embrace their previous failures.

For job-seekers, I'll talk about constructing your failure resume:

• How to acknowledge failures and lessons learned without dismissing that you did indeed fail

• How to use your failure resume to direct your job search

• How to polish your failure resume for public consumption

For job-givers (be you hiring managers or just interviewers), I'll talk about failure as a qualification for a candidate:

• How to talk to a candidate about your failures as an organization

• How to coach a candidate into being willing to be candid about failure

• How to create failure requirements for a job posting

• Other