Great talent isn’t so hard to find if you know _____ to look. What word do you think belongs in that blank space? The word where? Because we all know looking in the right places is key to finding whatever it is we want. Right? Instead, how about using the word how? Author George Anders writes in his new book The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else great talent isn’t hard to find if we know how to look.
Some disclosure here. I didn’t come across the book organically. Instead, my retained search firm friend Lars Leafblad shared his notes from the book with me via Scribd, following the book’s release in October. You can see the notes here if you like.
Lars and I have been engaging in an ongoing dialogue about how to tweak, evolve and improve the interview process, with the end result obviously ultimately improving the eventual hires.
“As an interviewer, challenge yourself to view the candidate’s resume as a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ story, and probe most deeply where the chapters end and begin in their story,” said Leafblad in response to my question abut what thoughts the book triggered. “What options has a candidate had at each career change? What decision(s) did they make? Why? What did they learn?”
At the beginning of The Rare Find book, Anders delves not into the interview process itself, but rather into the resume end of the interview pool. He cites the story of Todd Carlisle, now Director of Staffing at Google, but initially “staffing programs manager” at the company.
Carlisle was the first of what is now a 25 member People Analytics team at Google. The People Analytics team (which is staffed by psychologists, OD professionals, business analysts, and ex-consultants) is responsible for creating trustworthy analysis about people at Google that will inform business decisions at all levels of the organization. He works on performance management, retention, employee engagement, and organizational development practices.
At the time Carlisle started working at Google, 75,000 resumes were streaming into the company every week, and his gut told him the same old way of reading those resumes wasn’t going to identify the great talent.
So, as Anders describes below, Carlisle turned that model upside down. Literally.
“He became known as the man who read resumes ‘upside-down.’ Now when Carlisle pulls up a resume on his laptop – which tends to happen dozens of times a day – he begins by tapping the ‘Page Down’ key a couple of times until he reaches the final entries. Then he scrutinizes the loose ends of candidate’s bios. ‘I want to know their stories,’ Carlisle explained to me one morning. ‘I want to know what these people are all about.’”
It might be a new take for many of you to use a person’s passions, interests, avocations and personal accomplishments as the way to figure out what they’re about, as opposed to the more traditional education and work experience tact.
Leafblad echoes Anders’ and Carlisle’s sentiment that too often the “long tail” of a candidate’s resume is overlooked.
Do you spend time checking out those “loose ends” on a resume, or asking about them in an interview?
Do you spend time checking out those “loose ends” on a resume, or asking about them in an interview?
Anders opines that for the right job, these are not peripheral details, but rather “might be powerful insights into someone’s character or on-the-job potential.”
We can all recount those job interviews instances where we feel like the interviewer was really getting to know us in an insightful way, and similarly, other times where we knew none of our true personality or potential was coming through.
In fact, Anders argues that for all of the advances in technology that recruiters and HR pros have at their disposal today, our ability to spot top talent is getting worse, not better.
“How bad is it?” asked Anders in a Harvard Business Review blog on Today’s Biggest Talent-Management Challenges. “Talent-management consultant Marc Effron hardly raised eyebrows when he unveiled a fresh survey with the following sober statistics”:
- 18% of companies claim to be winning the war for talent
- 72% portrayed it as an endless struggle in which they were neither gaining nor losing ground
- 10% declared that the war for talent was winding down in defeat for their enterprise
What do you think? Do you feel as if you’re winning the war to find the best talent? The rare find in fact? Has technology helped or hurt the process? Has your power of intuition become lost or diminished?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m not completely sure how I feel about this. Going by this, employers would only see I’m active outdoors and teach students how to write. Interesting article, considering Google is a very innovative company. This turns everything upside down on its head.
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Thanks for commenting Gretchen. You bring up a point that I should have clarified in my post. The book is certainly not about how Google did it, and how Google hires, and how Google scans resumes. The author of the book merely chose Google as a starting place when writing about how successful organizations pick people and build teams. The book also looks at athletes, artists, entertainers, finance, IT, soldiers, teachers, doctors and the public sector to delve into the subject of best performers and how they can be spotted. I do believe the book contains some disruptive thinking, but it is not about Google.
Gretchen, I think Google is used as a primary example because they are a highly social and engaged company who is constantly in the media spotlight(and saying Google repeatedly might be good for Google search, I don’t know). People in the industry are just that, people and people are inherently voyeuristic. Give them the personal goods at the beginning of a resume. Fill in your qualifications beyond the initial grab. Candidates must learn to adapt to the job market. So many applicants merely just want a job but my main focus is NOT in just filling slots. I want the people that I place to be a good fit in the company environment. A company I work with needed an IT person. They needed him/her to have all the right qualifications but be able to speak to people without all the tech talk. The position would be integrated amongst more than one department so patience and willingness to explain things was also needed. The ideal candidate would “work well with others” – a people person – an optimistic go-getter who works with and for the team rather than a selfish superstar who doesn’t do things that aren’t their jobs – you know the type. I looked at many resumes but the one that stood out and got the job was the one that had a website(It was a template with pictures and used plug ins). I went to it and they offered video, a scrolling sidebar of qualifications and an organic canvas with drawings of things that the person enjoyed outside of work. When I scrolled down, I was shown how work and life emerged for the applicant, how the person was passionate and dedicated to their work. It was a really neat self made site. I would share the link but I know they wouldn’t want that. Job seekers will have to step it up from paper. If they choose not to send/create a multimedia resume, their resume in paper format should be visually AMAZING. Staffing for the dinosaurs will work for dinosaur companies but staffing companies need to train from within to adapt to a highly social and engaged world of business.
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