Someone hijacked my LinkedIn
(or: the week someone hijacked my LinkedIn to hire a VP of Ops)
This past Wednesday I was minding my own business, deep in Unique Stays systems and data, which, if you knew me, you'd know is my happy place.
Then the LinkedIn notifications started.
"Hi Anastasia, I came across the VP of Operations opportunity at Unique Stays and…"
I was puzzled. Then intrigued. Then I thought it was a joke.
So I asked one of the applicants to send me the job post, and there it was, live on my company profile.
Beautiful. Except I never published it. I wasn't hiring for that role at all.
But someone was.
Whoever did it understood something I think about a lot: a convincing surface takes minutes to fake. What's underneath takes years to build — and that gap is the whole game, in hiring and in hospitality both.
The surface gets attention. The substance earns trust.
When I checked my LinkedIn settings, there it was: another session, logged in from a location that wasn't mine. I changed my passwords (the ones I'd thought were plenty strong), double-checked my two-factor authentication (already on), and started digging into how this happened.
Over on Reddit, I found other people describing the exact same thing.
It was contained quickly. The frustrating part was that a couple dozen people had spent time applying to a job that didn't exist. I replied to each one.
Their messages, though, stirred up a half-asleep memory.
Back to my days at a mortgage company, when I could get hundreds of resumes in a matter of days.
So maybe this week's letter found me through that small bump.
Here's a tip I learned managing teams inside a large organization: how to find the diamonds in the rough.
Because if you're standing in front of a project, whether it's a vacation rental, a micro-resort, or a full-blown development, you're going to need a team. And the team is usually the reason some projects sink while others rise.
A quick backstory for context
*I am changing the actual names for privacy reasons.
It's July 2023.
I'm leading analytics at a large mortgage company, in the most intense and alive stretch of my career so far.
My team and I built the data models, reports, and dashboards.
Every KPI for nearly every department: sales, ops, marketing, government reporting, board slides.
For most of the time our team existed, we reported to our then-CFO, let's call him Sam.
Our data team was tiny — you could feed all of us with one pizza. Sam called us a SWAT team, and he wasn't wrong. To this day they're the best group I've worked with, and we're still friends.
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Come with me down memory lane
And so, it's the evening of July 6, 2023. I'm wrapping up my work when a call comes in. It's my direct report, a data analyst I'll call John, telling me he was resigning.
I felt that bittersweet ache. Deep sadness, even shock, at losing someone irreplaceable.
And at the same time, pride for him: he was starting a new chapter, one that would soon become an entrepreneurial journey.
We had less than a month to replace my irreplaceable John.
We posted the role on LinkedIn and everywhere else, and within days we had 800+ resumes.
The obvious problem with 800 resumes is that it's 800 resumes.
The less obvious problem, the one experience had taught me, is this: the best candidates sometimes don't have the best resumes.
That's what nagged at me reading those applications. A few dozen people had trusted a surface — a title, a logo, a clean listing — and the surface was hollow. Which is exactly the mistake I spent years learning NOT to make from the other side of the table. Because in hiring, the polished resume is the surface. And the best people are almost never the most polished.
What I was actually looking for
When I hired, three things mattered most to me, in this exact order:
Integrity
The ability to learn fast
Drive, the spark, the fire, call it what you want
After that, roughly an 80/20 split between skill and heart.
But miss the first one and the other two don't matter. A fast learner with drive and no integrity is just a more efficient problem.
You can't measure integrity directly in an hour, so I read it through proxies — how honestly someone handles the small stuff.
Punctuality is integrity with time.
The way someone asks and listens is integrity with words.
The self-rating question, integrity with their own ability.
I'd ask each candidate to rate themselves 1 to 10 on Excel, Power BI, and SQL. Then, based on their number, I'd ask a follow-up question designed to reveal whether they'd rated themselves accurately, oversold themselves, or sold themselves short.
Here's the story that made me a believer
The very first direct report I ever hired, I'll call her Ann, had a resume that didn't impress me.
Our HR director told me to give her a chance anyway.
She was up against a guy who rated himself almost a perfect score on everything and then couldn't back it up when the questions came.
She did the opposite: she undervalued her skills, but her answers were solid.
Then, in the days after the interview, she taught herself the basics of Power BI and showed me. That was the drive.
I hired Ann. She became one of those irreplaceable teammates.
Today she's a manager herself, doing incredible things at another company, and I couldn't be prouder.
The numbers on her resume told me almost nothing. The way she rated herself honestly, and then went and proved it, told me everything.
Testing for the spark
Later I added another tool, usually for the second round. A week before the interview, I'd ask candidates to prepare a short presentation on the most interesting problem they'd ever solved.
"Most interesting" is deliberately vague. You want to see what they choose. And as they present, you see everything that matters: their logic, their attention to detail, their creativity, and above all, their drive.
That's how I found John. His resume was good, but it was the complexity of his project, and the way he leaned into every detail, that won me over.
Hire with your team, not just for them
One more tip, a little unusual: I interviewed alongside my team. So when we had a promising candidate, I'd schedule a hiring interview with our SWAT team, myself, and the candidate.
I wanted their read: what they liked, what they didn't, and why. Right after each interview, we'd huddle for a few minutes to compare first impressions. By the time we made a decision, the whole team was bought in.
The diamond among 800
So who did we hire to replace my irreplaceable John?
Somewhere in those 800 resumes, after the calls and after the rounds, one candidate I'll call Maya stood up to present the most interesting problem she'd ever solved.
Without question she had the skills, plus complementary ones, which is exactly what I was always hunting for. She was radically honest about something she didn't have to be. And the moment she started, you could feel it: pure excitement for the data, energy coming right through the screen.
By then I'd interviewed enough people to know the difference. I'd watched candidates put on a costume of energy for an hour, and it's always obvious. It never reaches the eyes. Hers wasn't a costume.
I hired Maya. Within her first few weeks, she was already shoulder to shoulder with the team, helping solve problems and moving projects forward. She brought curiosity, ownership, and a genuine excitement for the work. Before long, it felt as though she'd always been part of the team. We'd found our diamond in the rough.
And we'd never have found her if we'd stopped at the polished resumes.
But Anastasia...
Now you might be thinking: sure, Anastasia, but I'm not out here hiring data scientists and analysts.
Most likely not.
But you will need architects, designers, social media managers, and a dozen other people, and any one of them could be your diamond in the rough.
The same way exceptional properties rarely look like everyone else's, exceptional people rarely fit perfectly into everyone's hiring checklist.
In hospitality, I'd add one more thing to the list, maybe the most important one of all, the one that walks side by side with integrity: a big, lionhearted love for people.
It's hard to build a good hospitality business without it, and it is impossible to fake. Everyone sees through the fake version eventually: your guests, your vendors, your partners.
People are far smarter than we give them credit for.
So when you build your team, let the unpolished resumes slide through.
Look past the formatting for the talent, the drive, and the heart. They almost never sit on the surface.
One last thing
That lesson found me through that tiny bump this Wednesday, a pimple of a problem, I should say.
A stranger needed only minutes to counterfeit a job at my company: the title, the listing, the official profile, all of it convincing enough that people showed up with hope. Appearances are always the easy part. That's exactly why they fool us.
But ours is the rare business where the easy part can't carry you. A guest doesn't only read your listing, they walk inside it.
The photos win the booking. The stay writes the review.
You harvest what you built, never what you advertised.
I hope some of this helps someone, whether it's this week or a year from now.
And maybe that's my way of making lemonade out of the lemon that showed up in the shape of a fake job post. Because if even one of you puts a single one of these tips to work for your property or your team, then maybe it wasn't a bump at all.
That's all of today.
Till next week, dear readers.
p.s. Thank you for reading my newsletter. I appreciate each one of you.
