A book that looks at how the top talent pickers across education, sport and business use tools to ensure they get the very best candidates that others will often overlook, and these are techniques we can all use.
In fact there are several good ideas for improving your own performance in your own job now, never mind picking your successor.
Time and again those interviewed came back to selecting on character rather than ability - but how much of our selection process tries to ensure their existing experience matches what we need them to do rather than how they did it!
America. It’s not that we don’t know enough about candidates. Today’s dossiers on serious contenders for a CEO’s job frequently surpass what the U.S. Senate knew about Supreme Court nominees a few decades ago. It’s not that there are too few talented people to fill crucial openings. This is a country in which talent proliferates.Read more at location 640
hire. His advice always flowed from the same starting point. Before you do anything else, he wrote, “Think through the assignment.” That sounds painfully simple. It seems so obvious that many leaders dash past that step.Read more at location 646
that good teaching is not about charisma. It’s not anything magical or elusive. These teachers set clear goals for their students, motivate people (in this case students and their families) to work hard toward these goals, work relentlessly to accomplish them, and constantly assess their effectiveness and improve their performance over time.Read more at location 794
The best experts in any field constantly stretch their horizons so they can do something new. That is how they stay sharp. Nobel laureates do this; great composers do this—and so do the savviest judges of human potential. They refuse to become so habit-bound that familiar customsRead more at location 923
“The best candidates are constantly trying to figure out why they went off the path,” Kiev added. “They’re introspective. They remember every detail. The ones who don’t learn much have hazy memories. They tend to blame external factors. They sound intellectually honest, but they aren’t. Their excuses are plentiful.” In Kiev’s view, the difference between rebounders and evaders is “hardwired into people. If you’re inquiring well, you should be able to get at it.”Read more at location 1078
Consider this admonition from a popular management primer on hiring: Lou Adler’s Hire with Your Head. The author’s number one precept is as follows: “Remain objective throughout the interviewing process, fighting the impact of first impressions, biases, intuitions, prejudices and preconceived notions of success. This way, all information collected during the interview is both relevant and unbiased.” That’s a fine way to pick out a lawn mower. It’s not a great way to choose people.Read more at location 1360
One of Dr. Weiss’s favorite ways of spotting the nonobvious winners is to see how candidates answer a quartet of essay questions that are aimed at drawing out students’ character. Those questions ask students to talk about rewarding experiences, overcoming adversity, areas of pride, and moments of exclusion.Read more at location 1544
Ask audition masters what they are hunting for, and the deepest answers involve subjects’ character. Regardless of differences in the exact ways that talent is expressed, each domain’s underlying quests are strikingly similar: Who tries hard? Who prepares well? Who recovers quickly and calmly from a setback? Who works well with others? Who can size up a turbulent situation and come up with a plan?Read more at location 1627
What the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team wants is remarkably similar to what Johns Hopkins, Facebook, and dozens of other high-talent organizations are seeking, too. The FBI’s list is as follows: Initiative, perseverance, and compatibility.Read more at location 1776
Discipline, trainability, and judgment. Loyalty, leadership, and maturity.Read more at location 1779
Mediocre engineers were seen as silent saboteurs, spewing out flawed computer code that could take years to fix.Read more at location 1877
For a while, Canfield scouted the world of stand-up comics. As he later explained, they are marvelous storytellers. They hone their material relentlessly, so that it connects with an audience. (If they don’t, they become sit-down comics.) And they are keenly aware of audiences’ short attention span, in ways that other narrators often overlook.Read more at location 2041
Menkes started running critical-thinking tests for corporate clients. He wrote a book about his approach called Executive Intelligence.Read more at location 3456
“CEOs who are persistent and proactive get things done. CEOs who are not, do not get things done, even if they are good listeners, team players, etc. And if you do not get things done, the people working for you get frustrated or even leave, particularly the better ones.”Read more at location 3581
Seek out “talent that whispers.” The world is full of overlooked people,Read more at location 3636
Rely on auditions to see how and why people achieve the results they do.Read more at location 3682
To learn the most from an audition, pay attention to more than the absolute caliber of the performance. Concentrate hardest on what you can learn about the candidate’s character.Read more at location 3687
Be willing to pick one trait that matters more than anything. Often the ability to recover from setbacks is what separates people who surpass expectations from those who disappoint. ResilienceRead more at location 3705
Be alert to other invisible virtues, too. Curiosity is also invisible on most résumés yet it is a remarkable talisman in many careers.Read more at location 3714
accomplish. If you choose to champion great talent, you will be picking one of the most altruistic things a person can do. Making the most of the next generation of achievers is akin to parenting, except on a larger scale. The benefits to society are likely to be much greater than the personal gain.Read more at location 3770
