Day: August 27, 2014

Finding strong members for your team is one of the most important skills needed to succeed and a recent Harvard Business Review article, “21st Century Talent Spotting” by Claudio Fernandez-Araoz, provides some strong insights on how to optimize your talent search. With skills and competencies now the key to finding employees, rather than past experience, you must become skilled at judging potential. This situation is exacerbated by the rapidly changing nature of the tech and game spaces, what worked yesterday are not necessarily the skills you need today.

In the last millennium, workers were selected for physical attributes which readily translated into higher success at physical labor, from building a canal to fighting a war. Business then evolved to judge candidates on intelligence, experience and past performance. Much work was standardized, so if you were looking for an engineer or an accountant or a CEO, you would find somebody who has already succeeded in such a role and there was a high likelihood they would replicate this success. Then hiring evolved to the competency model, which stipulated that managers (and other workers) be evaluated on specific characteristics and skills that would help predict outstanding performance in the roles for which they were being hired. Hiring managers would decompose jobs into competencies and look for candidates with the best combination of these skills. Continue reading “How to find talented employees”