Review of Talent

Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross have a new book.

Over the last ten years or so I’ve been the final decision for a little less than 20 leadership or senior individual contributor hires. That number sounds low but in reality the role of actual hiring manager means I’m replacing a senior leader on my direct staff or filling a senior growth role (read new organization). So averaging about one to two per year is about right for established organizations. If you broaden the aperture to hires that I’ve been on the “panel” for or had to approve either administratively or as a “senior backstop” because they were in my organization, the number starts to travel into the scores or low three digits. And it gets harder to reflect on hiring performance at that scale. But for the 20 or so, I can recount a pretty complete record.

Most fell into the bucket where they were solid contributors that filled the role and did the job. There were a couple that I would consider trajectory changing home runs. And about the same amount that were regrettable misses. I am just as likely to miss completely as I was to hit a home run. And my most common outcome, using a staff of recruiters, a well-honed hiring process and a long line of top professionals doing their best to get hired at a top firm, is to simply meet the standard.

I’d feel worse about this if I didn’t understand the truth about hiring people. Evaluating talent is hard. To believe you can consistently pick outlier winners through the processes we use to hire people today is a certain level of self-delusion. Moreover, the upstream witling processes we use to get to a manageable candidate pool are built on exclusionary principles and narrow pathways that are designed to eliminate variance. Unfit candidates are variance. But often so are game changers. Not getting a bad hire is a win. But you often end up winning in a way that keeps the truly remarkable out too. And so spending some time on a book by weird talent evaluators is probably a good investment. That’s exactly what Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross’ new book Talent is. So I’ve read it. And I’m going to spend some blog space reflecting.

The book is not an interesting book about talent stories or the nature of talent or some times when talent evaluation went right, wrong or awry. The books is exactly what it claims to be. A manual to show how to evaluate talent better by a couple of people with access to some of the best talent in the world. About halfway through the section on interviews you may find yourself feeling, as I did, a bit bogged down in the detail of how to actually have an interview. It’s good to realize then that the book is not for entertainment. It’s a bit of work. A book about pitching might tell you the story of how Nolan Ryan grew up in a small town in Texas as the youngest of six kids with a slight lisp and how that led to him finding first true love in throwing a baseball. A book on how to pitch won’t care. It will tell you about what your body needs to do in order to throw a baseball. And so a book on how to find talent will have a healthy dose of how to enable a candidate to expose their genius (or lack) to you better. One will find it more interesting if they are legitimately interested in developing the skill.

At Talent’s core is the reality that talent pipelines and hiring processes in the world are as I’ve observed; designed to hand us certain things. Those things are not genius or maniacal energy or extreme accountability. They’re conformity. And within that conformity comes not only mediocre outcomes but a heavy dose of injustice. We don’t evaluate people’s abilities in as much as we match the shape of a need with the shape of a person. Unconscious bias is a thing. But it’s not best met with guilt or self-hatred. It’s met with identifying the details of how one’s bias materializes and honesty about how the differences of people and cultures gets in the way of evaluating skills. How do we think about the problem best?

What types of questions are useful?

How does 5 factor personality type create a common language useful to evaluation?

How much should we care about intelligence?

How can disabilities lead to diversity of thought patterns and perspectives that strengthen organizations?

How can we gain empathy for people from different cultures being asked to decode themselves real time in front of us?

Gross and Cowen don’t tell you what sort of talent you want. So if you’re trying to find that, you won’t. Instead they supply a framework that aims to help you be more honest with determining what you want and then gives you some tools to remove the unhelpful structural scaffolding designed to keep you safe from the outer bounds of success where failure also lives.

For me there are two interesting thoughts the book helped me think through a bit:

The first is thinking about what sort of talent I seek in the domain in which I work. For most of the last 20 years I’ve led large scale technologically enabled teams of high skilled professionals. Think hundreds to thousands of distributed people, connected by technology, delivering a low variance, highly specialized outcome. This is what I did when attached SEAL teams and it’s what I do in the FINTECH domain now.

In hiring for leaders in this space there’s some things we spend time sorting out. Anyone that gets a resume through is smart enough. So, that’s not something I think about. There are a few other table stakes. One needs to know how to use data to make decisions. One needs to understand a bit about how networked technology systems works. Those are pretty low bars in the tech world. But if I really get down to what I want to ferret out, the way Cowen and Gross talk about it, it’s three things.

1-Quick systems learning

2-Limitless energy

3-Deep (obsessive) accountability

I haven’t really been able to nail understanding the degrees to which a candidate possesses those attributes before they’re in the building. You can get a little from a case study on how quickly they identify patterns but not how quickly they figure out how to work within the system live. Everyone has energy in an interview. And you never really know how accountable someone is until they ruin something. Invariably, the trouble spots start with a check in a few weeks in which I hear some dreaded flag phrases.

“drinking from the fire hose”

“it’s a lot to take in”

“it really is a fast paced environment”

My favorite….”this place is crazy.”

I tend to lead teams that work on hard problems. My teams have stopped suicide bombers and delivered never done before complex services at scale. It’s messy business. So some of those statements are certainly some degree of true. But the language and posture are the tell. The new team member hasn’t gotten inside the problem yet. They’re not moving at the same speed as the machine yet (not a problem) and they don’t quite know how to get there (a problem). I don’t expect them to have it all figured out. But I expect them to have a set of principles to guide them and the confidence that they can grind the problem down to the best first step. You see it when it’s missing. And I’m excited to apply some of the learnings from Talent to slide the point of discovery there to the left. What Cowen and Gross confirm is that the bad vanilla interview questions won’t scratch the itch. So what else…?

The second thought comes from the barriers of culture bias. Cowen and Gross go out of their way to stress how the discomfort and awkwardness of moving across norms can serve to mask the true capabilities of deeply talented candidates from differing cultures, genders or backgrounds. While it may seem presumptuous for a 40 something white, straight man to find common space to empathize with negative bias, for me, it’s not. Bear with me….

I wandered off of a C17 from Iraq with SEAL Team One directly into the California based tech world. Which means I went from an all-male, exclusively American community that valued proficiency in violence where it was actually illegal to be gay, to the Valley over night. It didn’t matter at all that my personal beliefs and cultural alignment squared well with my new firm. How could they know? This was years before it was quite so popular to love to hire vets (it’s still not really BTW). And I was scared to death that people thought I was a tortured combat vet or at the very least a closet bigot.

On one of the first check ins I had with a mentor she told me she expected me to be “more of an ass hole”. I was deeply self-conscious of being too direct. I worried about being too hard on my team. I leaned heavily on self-deprecating humor to take off a perceived edge. I dared not express anything that remotely resembled anger or frustration after spending years developing the nuanced skill of being effectively angry as a Naval Officer.

I swung the pendulum too far the other way. And I quickly got feedback that I talked around problems and that people didn’t take me seriously; feedback I’d never received before. I had to dig out of a reputation hole that little to do with tangible outcomes and it probably put me back a year in progression.

We’ll never know if I’d just been myself (direct, intense and decisive) whether or not I would have gotten written off as too difficult or a bad cultural fit. It’s been 12 years now so that’s all water under the bridge. But when Cowen and Gross talk about finding ways to sample that sort of discomfort to build empathy for diverse candidates, that experience came crashing back into my head. And now I’m urgently thinking about how to do the work for candidates to break down that similar but often more pronounced burden. That alone is worth the 243 pages.

I’m also excited for others to read it and think about the value my autistic son might one day have for their organization.

All good things from a worthwhile read.