Fresh off my post yesterday about all of those AmLaw 100 firms that wouldn’t have hired me out of law school comes this bit of advice from StartupNation I’d wish those hiring partners had embraced:

Whenever you need to add a new person to your team, make the decision easy on yourself: just hire the ones who smile.
. . .
Here’s my point ... when you’re making decisions about which humans to select for your team, even if these people will only communicate internally with other team members and not interact with your customer community, you can’t go wrong with smilers! Of course you’ll consider team chemistry/fit (in my opinion, THE most important conventional selection criteria – and I spent 19 years as an executive recruiter helping companies make these choices) and a person’s skill level to do the job at hand, along with lesser important factors as you make hiring decisions. But when it comes down to that ultimate choice differentiator, go with the smile!

At least I’m pretty sure I was smiling at the beginning of the interview.