Last week Fernando Mendoza was drafted 1st overall in the NFL Draft.
Back in January, we wrote about Indiana Hoosiers football and the way they chose to build their team differently. Now that the market has caught up, the story is already old. The traits, the arc, the trajectory have all been visible for a while. What once was debated is now obvious to many. What interests us is how that transpired.
The people who identified Mendoza earliest weren’t just watching the same film as everyone else and seeing it more clearly. They were asking a different question. Not just “how good is he?” but “which direction is he going, and how fast?”
Most hiring processes are built around a single question: where has this person been? And a resume typically answers this. It tells you where someone is today: their current title, their companies, their progression. The resume often determines who gets a first call, who clears the initial screen, who ends up in front of a hiring manager.
But in isolation, a resume is simply a point on a graph. It tells you where someone is, not necessarily where they are going. Two candidates can occupy the same point on a graph and be moving in completely different directions.
Conversation is how you find more points on the graph. Not the polished summary of someone’s career, but the actual story underneath it: the moments where something was hard, the skills that didn’t come naturally, the times they were wrong about something and had to change course. Connect enough of those and you stop seeing just one point on a graph. You start seeing a line. And a line tells you something a dot can’t: direction.
In our experience, the people who tend to have genuine trajectory share something that’s hard to put on a resume. They view the world as malleable. Not naively, but in the fundamental sense that they operate as if their choices, curiosity, and effort actually move things. They happen to the world rather than waiting for the world to happen to them.
You feel this in a conversation. It shows up in how someone talks about a setback, a pivot, a skill they had to build from scratch. People with trajectory tend to narrate their careers as a sequence of decisions and lessons. Those without it tend to narrate theirs as a sequence of things that occurred. One tends to predict forward motion a lot better than the other.
The Hoosiers saw it before it was obvious. Before the consensus formed, before the draft boards locked in, they looked past the point on the graph and asked a different question: not where is he, but where is he going? That’s where we think you find edge.
Until next time,
Your Spherion WI & Northern IL team