Electronic Arts hiring honcho Brett Sparks offers a startling piece of advice for job applicants who believe success is based on exuberant self-promotion: Be humble.

Surely the human-resources director with the Vancouver-based gaming company jests. What does humility have to do with painting a compelling picture of your passion in a cover letter, resume or interview?

Sparks is all for passion. But as a workforce gatekeeper for a large employer, he wants applicants to show sustainable passion. That means being able to admit mistakes, learn from them and, as a wiser human being, move on to the next challenge. "We place a high value on learning," Sparks says in an interview. "Integral to learning is humility.

"You've got to have a decent degree of humility and self-awareness to learn from mistakes."

Applicants who advance to the interview stage with Sparks can count on being asked to identify their biggest goofs. He has found that question divides applicants into two groups--those who struggle to come up with examples of missteps, and those who quickly identify gaffes, what they learned from them and how they would handle things again.

"I find it pretty hard to believe that any candidate, in any industry, is so perfect that they haven't had some screwups--or at a minimum, that in hindsight they wouldn't tweak some things or approach them differently the next time around," Sparks says.