When Todd Carlisle pulls up a CV on his laptop — which happens dozens of times a day — the first thing he does is tap the 'page down' button. This takes him to the part of the document where jobseekers list their more offbeat preoccupations, interests and achievements. It is there that he discovers
if a candidate has competed in four Alaska marathons, for example, or had published
three software manuals by the age of 25.
"I want to know these stories," says Carlisle, director of staffing at Google. "I want to know what these people are all about." More and more recruitment professionals are adopting similarly unorthodox approaches in their hunt for outstanding performers as the so-called war for talent heats up. If this battle was hard to win during boom times, prevailing amidst global economic turbulence is even more daunting.
And, over the next few decades, pressures to solve the talent riddle will only intensify, thanks to demographic trends. Britain, the US and Western Europe will experience a considerable ageing of the population due to declining birth rates and the baby boomers' transition to retirement age. In Eastern Europe and Japan, gerontocracies will take hold even faster, to the point that a 45 year old will be regarded as a youngster.
By 2050, according to European Commission projections, Europe may have 48 million fewer people in the 15-to-64 age band and 58 million more people over the age of 65. As such trends play out, seasoned young managers ready to rise into the executive ranks will be unnervingly scarce. Indeed, it's an open question whether there will be enough ambitious 35-to-44 year olds to go around.
All the while, the nature of work is changing in ways that will blindside the unready — but create great opportunities for companies able to
make the most of new priorities. Transformative work (such as manufacturing and mining) is increasingly done by machines, rather than people. The same is true of transactional work (such as data collection, payments and the like). What's flourishing is interactional work (which encompasses deal-making, strategic thinking and creative ventures).
Interactional work is hard to standardise.
It revolves around making sense of ambiguities, and it requires unexpected insights. As James Manyika, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, points out, interactional work can't easily be slotted into traditional hierarchies. Organisations must flatten out their chain of command, so that judgment and imagination can be applied on the front lines.
The rewards for getting this right are vast.
In the same way that modern warfare calls
for 'the strategic corporal' — a relatively low-ranking soldier on an improvised battlefield who can make high-impact decisions on his own — visionary companies stockpile interactional talent at all levels of the organisation. They
know that in many cases they are dealing
with winner-take-all markets, where internet technology and network effects can rapidly
turn small edges into huge ones.
For best results, Manyika and two McKinsey colleagues write, "executives must put aside much of what they know about reengineering — and about managing technology, organisations, and talent to boost productivity. Technology can replace a checkout clerk at
a supermarket but not a marketing manager. Machines can log deposits and dispense
cash, but they can't choose an advertising campaign. Process cookbooks can show how
to operate a modern warehouse but not what happens when managers band together to solve a crisis."
Fortunately, many world-class organisations are cracking the talent code. Savvy practitioners may be working at army bases,
ad agencies, investment banks, big industrial companies, university admissions offices, high-tech startups or Hollywood studios. Each field has its own lingo, customs and history. But they all share common approaches to clearing out the clutter and focusing on what matters most. As explained in my book, The Rare Find, these pioneers make the most of opportunities in
three big areas that others too often overlook.
THE JAGGED CV
One of the high-tech world's greatest talent spotters was a small, skinny man who ran
the University of Utah's computer science department in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During his time there, David Evans recruited
a handful of graduate students who later launched the Pixar film studio, designed the Macintosh computer, and co-founded the Netscape internet browser company.
Ironically, Evans's best protégés had all stumbled before reaching Utah. One failed university classes because he was too busy playing in a jazz band. Another hurriedly joined the navy as a teenager after getting into trouble in his hometown for taunting a teacher. Their CVs were tattered, but they all shared what Evans wanted most: a burning desire to reach the frontier of whatever new field would have them.
This willingness to overlook superficial flaws —
as long as they are offset by a single great virtue — is a hiring hallmark of standout organisations around the world. In finance, Goldman Sachs
is famous for hiring strivers: ambitious young
men and women who grew up in working-class backgrounds and sincerely want to be rich. Linear Technology, one of the world's most profitable microchip makers, loves to hire engineers who were childhood tinkerers, building zany electronic contraptions long before they were old enough to drive. Such characters tend to create the most ingenious chip designs.
Organisations with the confidence to bet on
a single crucial character trait will widen their talent horizons so that they can consider promising candidates that their rivals don't even see. Such prospects needn't have stellar marks or flawless dashes up the company ladder. If the right trait is matched to an organisation's needs, such hires aren't risky at all.
Sometimes intuition alone is enough to
spot the right people. More often, though, organisations turn to formal or informal psychometric testing for fuller insights into candidates' non-obvious strengths and flaws. One impressive example is SAC Capital, the large US hedge fund. For many years, it kept a full-time psychiatrist on staff, Ari Kiev, who assisted in job interviews and investment-manager coaching.
Dr Kiev died last year, but not before his methods were fully vindicated. He was famous for pressing investment-manager candidates about how they had dealt with market setbacks and poor investments in the past. His questions could be distressingly blunt and persistent. SAC colleagues found that Dr Kiev's methods helped them learn more about which candidates possessed the humility and self-knowledge to sort out their mistakes — and which were at risk
of losing millions because of arrogance during adversity. When world stock markets crashed in 2008, SAC's portfolios held up better than most, so that strong results the next two years could fully patch over any losses during the downturn.
blog comments powered by
