Kevin O’Leary has a new hiring rule that sounds almost absurd until you realize how much work now lives on Zoom and Slack. The “Shark Tank” investor says if a candidate’s internet connection glitches during the hiring process, he will stop considering them and send the resume to the trash. In his view, bad WiFi is no longer a minor annoyance, it is a red flag about how seriously you take your job.
His warning lands at a moment when remote and hybrid work have turned home networks into mission-critical infrastructure. When someone like O’Leary, who has built a career on scrutinizing details, says your router can cost you a job, it is worth unpacking what he really means and how job seekers can respond.
Why Kevin O’Leary treats bad WiFi as a hiring dealbreaker
Kevin O’Leary has never been shy about blunt hiring criteria, and his latest line in the sand is your internet connection. He has said that if a candidate’s video call is plagued by frozen screens, lagging audio, or repeated drops, the resume “goes straight in the garbage,” because he sees that as a basic failure to prepare for professional life in a digital workplace. In his telling, the message may sound harsh coming from a business leader who is comfortable showing up to meetings in pink pajama pants and flip-flops, but he argues that connectivity is non-negotiable when he decides who gets hired, a point he has underscored in detailed hiring comments.
From O’Leary’s perspective, a bad connection is not just a technical hiccup, it is a signal about judgment. He expects candidates to anticipate that a video interview is high stakes and to test their setup in advance, whether that means upgrading a router, finding a better room in the house, or even booking a quiet co-working space. When someone fails that basic test, he reads it as a lack of seriousness about the role and about the people whose time is being wasted, which is why he is comfortable treating poor WiFi as a filter rather than a forgivable accident.
Inside his broader list of resume red flags
O’Leary’s frustration with bad WiFi fits into a longer list of resume red flags he has been spelling out in interviews and on social media. In a recent clip shared to Instagram, he laid out “Key Takeaways” for candidates, starting with the expectation that they show up to virtual interviews with a stable connection and a quiet, professional environment. He pairs that with a hard look at the document itself, scanning for sloppy formatting, vague job descriptions, and unexplained gaps that suggest the candidate has not taken the time to present a clear story about their career.
He is equally skeptical of resumes that show a pattern of quick exits. O’Leary has said that when he sees a candidate jumping from job to job every few months, especially over several years, he treats that as one of the fastest ways to get a resume “in the garbage.” In his view, a long list of short stints suggests a lack of resilience, poor cultural fit, or an inability to deliver results, and he has criticized Gen Z workers who “love to job-hop” as underestimating how negatively that looks to hiring managers who value stability, a stance he has repeated in criticisms of job.
What his WiFi rule reveals about modern work
When O’Leary draws a hard line around connectivity, he is really talking about productivity and respect for time. He has described how a choppy call derails the flow of a meeting, forces people to repeat themselves, and drags a 30 minute conversation into an hour of frustration. In his view, that is not just inconvenient for the hiring manager, it is a preview of what it would be like to rely on that person for client calls, internal standups, or investor updates, which is why he treats a glitchy first impression as a preview of future inefficiency, a theme he has linked to his own productivity habits.
His stance also reflects how remote and hybrid work have blurred the line between personal and professional infrastructure. A decade ago, a hiring manager might have shrugged off a dropped call as a technical fluke. Today, when entire teams operate on video platforms and cloud tools, O’Leary expects candidates to treat their home network the way previous generations treated a pressed suit or a polished pair of shoes. He has argued that workers need to ditch outdated habits and embrace the tools and setups that actually make them effective, a point he has tied to broader advice that “workers need to ditch job” patterns that slow them down, which he has discussed in talks on efficiency.
How O’Leary’s own habits shape his expectations
O’Leary’s intolerance for technical sloppiness is easier to understand when you look at how he runs his own schedule. He has credited a productivity hack he picked up from Steve Jobs for helping him manage a crowded calendar of television shoots, board meetings, and investment reviews. The core of that habit is ruthless prioritization: he focuses on a small number of high impact tasks each day and eliminates anything that wastes time or adds friction, whether that is a bloated meeting agenda or a call that keeps cutting out, a philosophy he has described in detail in discussions of his.
That same lens shows up in how he talks to students and early career professionals. In a widely shared clip from a talk in Nov, O’Leary told a room of future MBAs that “most of you, two-thirds of you in here, are going to become consultants” and “will never make any decisions of consequence,” challenging them to choose between a life of “well paid mediocrity” and the riskier path of building something of their own. The message, delivered in his trademark deadpan, was that real impact requires uncomfortable choices and a willingness to be judged on results, a theme he has amplified on his TikTok channel.
What job seekers can do about the WiFi test
For candidates, the practical takeaway is not that every dropped frame will ruin your career, but that you should treat your tech setup as part of your professional brand. Before a video interview, that means running a speed test, restarting your router, and closing bandwidth-hungry apps like 4K Netflix streams or large game downloads. If your home connection is unreliable, it might mean taking the call from a library study room, a co-working space, or even a quiet corner of a friend’s apartment with better service, so that the hiring manager never has to think about your signal strength instead of your answers, a point O’Leary has stressed in warnings to job.
It is also worth remembering that O’Leary is not just reacting to a single frozen frame, he is reacting to patterns. He has described the familiar scenario where faces stop moving, audio cuts out, and the dreaded “unstable connection” message appears in the middle of a crucial point, sometimes right at the very end of a conversation when decisions are being made. From his vantage point, that kind of disruption is avoidable with planning, and when it happens in a hiring context, it competes with other red flags like chronic job hopping or vague accomplishments. Candidates who want to stay out of his mental trash bin need to treat connectivity, clarity, and consistency as part of the same package, a standard he has reinforced in recent interviews.
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