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I Hire Theater Majors

I hire people with no technical experience and get them roles leading technical development. I hire theater majors and turn them into devs.

That sentence makes some people uncomfortable. It sounds like a liability. Like I’m taking unnecessary risks with my business, my clients, my reputation. But I’ve been doing this for years, and it works. Not despite the unconventional hires. Because of them.

The Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong

Most hiring processes are designed to minimize risk. You look for credentials, relevant experience, a trajectory that makes sense on paper. You want someone who’s already done the job so you don’t have to teach them.

But credentials measure what someone has already been given the opportunity to do. They don’t measure capability. And capability without opportunity is everywhere. It’s just invisible if you only know how to read resumes.

I run an 18-person company. We do technical work: policy development, emergency management consulting, systems that actually have to function when things go wrong. Either you can do the job or you can’t. Stakes are real.

And some of my best people came to me with backgrounds that would have gotten their applications filtered out at any traditional firm. Theater. Music. Career changers in their thirties who’d never written a line of code. I hired them anyway. Then I developed them. Now they lead projects.

I Didn’t Learn Math Until I Was 25

I should tell you my own story here, because it explains why I hire this way.

I wasn’t a prodigy. I wasn’t tracked into advanced programs. I didn’t go to a fancy grad school. I got rejected from the fancy grad schools. Multiple times. The traditional path wasn’t available to me, not because I lacked ability, but because I lacked the credentials that would have signaled ability to people who only know how to read credentials.

I didn’t learn real math until I was 25. Not because I couldn’t. Because no one had taught me, and I hadn’t had the time or context to teach myself. Once I actually engaged with it, I was fine. More than fine. But for years, my transcript made me look like someone who “wasn’t a math person.”

Now I write the standards. I was President of NASEMC for four years. Led three cohorts of board members. Helped build it from a working group into a standalone institution. The work I do now influences policy at the national level.

None of that shows up on my undergraduate transcript. None of that was predictable from my early career. If you’d evaluated me at 24 based on conventional signals, you would have passed. You would have been wrong.

What I Actually Look For

If I’m not looking at credentials, what am I looking at?

People who care.

That sounds soft. It isn’t. Caring is the hardest thing to teach because you can’t teach it. You can teach someone Python. You can teach someone how to write a policy memo. You can teach someone how to run a meeting, manage a project, communicate with clients. Those are skills. Skills can be acquired.

But you cannot teach someone to give a damn. Either they show up with that, or they don’t.

The theater major who spent four years building sets, running tech, and solving problems in real time so the show could go on? They care about execution. They understand that things have to actually work, not just look good on paper. They’ve operated under pressure. They’ve collaborated with difficult people toward a shared goal. They’ve done invisible work that no one applauds because they understand the whole thing falls apart if someone doesn’t do it.

I’m also looking for persistence. Not the performative kind where you talk about hustle and grind. The real kind, where you’ve done something hard for a long time even when no one was watching, even when it wasn’t glamorous, even when you weren’t sure it would pay off.

And curiosity. The willingness to say “I don’t know” and then go figure it out. The ability to get interested in things that aren’t immediately exciting because you understand that expertise is built, not born.

If you have those three things, I can work with you. I can develop you into someone who leads technical projects, even if you’ve never touched the technical domain before. The rest is training.

The Sally Duncan Principle

Sally Duncan was my professor in grad school. She had every credential you could want: tenure, publications, the whole academic pedigree. But what made her exceptional wasn’t the credentials. It was how she showed up.

She could have coasted on prestige. Instead, she treated every office hour like the most important meeting of her day. She stayed late to help first-generation students navigate systems that came easy to everyone else. She pushed back against department politics that would have made her life easier to accept. She had simply decided that this work was worthy of her full attention.

Sally taught me something I’ve never forgotten: the meaning isn’t in the job description. It’s in the person who shows up and decides this matters.

Some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with came from backgrounds that would have gotten them filtered out of traditional hiring processes. They found their way in through side doors, through persistence, through someone taking a chance on them. And once they were in, they outperformed people who’d been groomed for the role since college.

Sally also taught me this: people find purpose in work others dismiss as invisible. The detailed, unglamorous, essential work that nobody celebrates. When you find someone who cares about that work as the actual thing, not as a stepping stone, you’ve found something valuable.

How I Develop People

Believing in someone isn’t enough. You also have to develop them. And development isn’t just training. It’s responsibility.

I don’t wait until someone is “ready” to give them real work. That’s a trap. You’ll wait forever. Readiness is a fiction we use to avoid taking risks on people.

Instead, I give people responsibility early. Not recklessly. With support. With clear expectations. With room to fail and learn. But real responsibility, with real stakes, where their decisions matter.

This is uncomfortable for everyone at first. The person getting the responsibility feels like an imposter. The people around them wonder if they can handle it. I feel the weight of having made a bet that could go wrong.

But people rise. Not always. Not everyone. But far more often than the conventional wisdom suggests. When you give someone real ownership of a problem, and you actually let them own it, they develop capacities they didn’t know they had. They learn faster because the stakes are real. They care more because it’s theirs.

I’ve taken people who had never managed a project and put them in charge of complex technical implementations within a year. I’ve taken people who had never written code and developed them into leads on development teams. This works because I’m not just training skills. I’m building people. And you build people by trusting them with things that matter.

The key is scaffolding. You don’t throw someone into the deep end and walk away. You stay close. You’re available for questions. You review their work carefully, especially early on. You give feedback that’s specific and constructive. You let them make mistakes, but you help them learn from the mistakes instead of just suffering the consequences.

Over time, you pull back. They need you less. That’s the goal.

What Leadership Actually Is

I led NASEMC for four years. Three cohorts of board members. I took an organization that was essentially a working group and helped build it into a standalone institution.

Leadership isn’t vision. Vision matters, but anyone can have a vision. Leadership is the willingness to build something with other people, to develop those people, to invest in their growth even when it would be faster to just do things yourself.

When I brought new board members on, I didn’t just give them tasks. I developed them. I helped them understand the work, the politics, the stakes. I gave them real responsibility and backed them up when they took risks. By the end of their terms, they weren’t just executing my vision. They were shaping the organization. Some of them had ideas better than mine. That’s the point.

At my own company, we have 18 employees. If someone needs something, they just ask. That’s the culture. I’ve thought about what would happen if they organized, formed a union. It would complicate operations. Slow us down. Force us to think more critically about decisions we currently make quickly.

But it wouldn’t sting. It’s business. And honestly? Being forced to think critically isn’t the worst thing. The organizations that can’t survive scrutiny probably shouldn’t exist in their current form anyway.

I don’t lead through control. I lead through investment. I invest in people. I develop them. I trust them with responsibility. And then I get out of the way.

The Resume Will Catch Up

The theater major who joined with no technical experience? Now they have technical experience. Now they’ve led projects. Now their resume reflects what I saw in them before anyone else did.

The career changer who took a chance on a completely new field? Now they have five years of expertise. Now they’re credentialed by experience, even if not by degree. Now they’re exactly the kind of candidate that traditional hiring processes would select for.

The gap between what someone is capable of and what their resume shows isn’t permanent. It’s a timing issue. If you only hire people whose resumes have already caught up to their capabilities, you’re always competing for the same pool as everyone else. And you’re paying a premium for people who’ve already been validated by someone else.

If you can see capability before the resume catches up, you get access to talent that other people overlook. You get loyalty, because people remember who believed in them. And you get to do something meaningful: you get to develop people.

That’s the part I actually care about. Watching someone grow into capabilities they didn’t know they had. Watching them become the kind of leader who develops others.

I build teams from the ground up. I hire people with no technical experience, theater majors and career changers, and develop them into technical leaders. It’s not charity. It’s not naive. It’s the smartest hiring strategy I know.

Because I believe in people before their resumes catch up. And I’m almost always right.

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