Workers may believe that they need the right connections or flashy credentials to launch their careers. But sometimes, simply saying yes—and leveraging a stroke of luck—can be the most effective way to get a foot in the door. Raj Subramaniam, the CEO of FedEx, for example, got his first job by taking his roommate’s abandoned interview at the shipping giant.
It was 1991, right as Subramaniam was completing his MBA in marketing and finance at the University of Texas at Austin. The Indian-born executive already had a deluge of expertise under his belt, with scientific degrees from both the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and Syracuse University. But no one could escape the crushing job market; during America’s recession around the early 1990s, unemployment climbed above 7%, and hiring dropped as employers pulled back. Subramaniam needed an opportunity—and one serendipitously fell into his lap.
“Jobs were hard to come by, and my roommate at that time had decided to go back to India,” the FedEx CEO said during Fortune’s Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast with Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell. “When I was walking to the apartment, I heard him on the phone; he’s like, ‘No, I can’t do that,’ and he hung up the phone. I said, ‘What’s going on?’ He said, ‘That’s FedEx calling,’ and that it was for an interview. But he has obviously decided to leave the country.”
