Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2022. The figure that more than 90% of companies need to change their talent strategy comes from a PwC CEO survey that predates 2022, so the year and exact figure may differ from current data.
More than 90% of companies have acknowledged that they need to change their strategy for attracting, hiring and retaining talent. This problem makes them less competitive than companies that are doing a better job of it. Human resources departments keep getting it wrong when looking for candidates. The reason could be that many companies struggle to track performance properly.
One mistake companies often make is looking for the best possible candidate (although they rarely manage to identify that person in a job interview), when that isn’t always what’s best for the success of the company as a whole. Simply put, companies need to learn to hire better. How can they do it?
Hire using Moneyball, not Frankenstein
In a knowledge-based economy, workers can contribute to a company in many different ways. Imagine for a moment a tech company with three really competent product managers: Pablo, Miguel and Raúl.
Pablo’s strength (his key to success) is his data-driven approach to understanding customers’ needs; Miguel’s strength lies in his approach to designing products that catch customers’ attention; and Raúl’s strength is leading teams efficiently. As long as these three managers do their jobs well, their employer will be happy and will give them the freedom to work however they like.
The problem comes when the employer wants to hire a fourth product manager. To hire this fourth candidate, the job requirements inevitably include what Pablo, Miguel and Raúl already have. In other words, they look for a candidate who ticks all the boxes of their current product managers, instead of one with a unique skill (a unique superpower).
This was always a battle I had with Human Resources in the past. When it came to hiring salespeople for my sales teams, I personally didn’t want the department to hire them for me, because they rarely hired good salespeople. There was a set of requirements common to everyone. They valued a university degree, several years in a similar sector, even languages. From my experience in sales, those requirements alone could rule out more than 80% of professional salespeople. The Human Resources department was so focused on finding a competent employee that it forgot to look for the most important requirement in a candidate: that they like selling. They forgot to look for the most obvious superpower: knowing how to sell.
A highly educated guy with more technical knowledge than any other salesperson was no use to me if he was only in sales because he hadn’t found anything better to do. When you’re trying to build good sales teams to cover Spain, it would be idiotic to require foreign languages from candidates by default. Well, they did.
The Moneyball approach to recruiting talent
While baseball players could contribute to a team in different ways, Billy Beane changed the way he went about signing players. Beane put together a roster in which each player could be considered mediocre by traditional metrics. Each of those players, however, made a unique contribution to the team.
First, Beane drastically reduced the number of criteria on which a player was expected to excel. He did, in effect, sign mediocre players, but each one was tremendously good at a single metric. Even if the players fell short on many other dimensions, one player’s unique talent, added to another player’s unique talent, turned a team of generally mediocre players into an excellent team.
When you hire, don’t look for requirements: look for superpowers and unique skills that add to the superpowers and unique skills of the rest of your employees. Only then will you have a team of “superheroes”.
See also: 3 job interview questions recruiters should stop asking
See also: This YouTube executive looks for two qualities in candidates, and neither is on a CV
Featured image: Jason L. Gohlke, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
