Talent - by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross
Date read: 2023-04-22How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)
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How to find creative talent. Most of the recommendations are ones that I've heard of and use already (e.g., ask deeper questions, ask them to give stories and for their opinion). Contains a few good questions and the importance of a company to always be looking for great talent.
Contents:
My Notes
These days, our very favorite interview question is this one: “What are the open tabs on your browser right now?”
We both find during interviews that “downtime-revealed preferences” are more interesting than “stories about your prior jobs.”
Try to learn the practice habits of the person you are interviewing, as it will reveal one aspect of their approach to work.
In most of the studies on this subject, interviews were more effective for higher-level jobs.
Interviews also play a crucial role in recruiting candidates and helping spread a positive impression of you and your company, even in cases where you don’t end up hiring the person.
Get Candidates Telling Stories About Themselves Rather than Reciting Facts or Canned Answers A simple question designed to elicit a story, such as “What did you do this morning?,” is a good way to begin to get to know a person without being threatening.
Go to a coffee shop or restaurant. Take a walk or sit on a park bench. This can happen mid-interview, or you can hold the entire interview there. In any case, the different setting allows you to see how the candidate responds to unexpected change and can ease the move to a more conversational exchange.
The new setting also gives you the chance to ask the candidate more questions for which they won’t have a stock answer: “What do you think of the service here?” Or “Do you usually find rooms to be so noisy?”
Here are a few somewhat more unusual questions we recommend:
- “What are ten words your spouse or partner or friend would use to describe you?”
- “What’s the most courageous thing you’ve done?”
- “If you joined us and then in three to six months you were no longer here, why would that be?” Or ask the same question about five years down the line as well and see how the two answers differ.
- “What did you like to do as a child?” This gets at what they really like to do, because it harks back to a time before the world started bossing them around.
- “Did you feel appreciated at your last job? What was the biggest way in which you did not feel appreciated?”
If you are going to ask achievement-oriented questions, avoid the ordinary by continuing to ask for successive instances of candidate success until the respondent can’t come up with any more.
“Which of your beliefs are you most likely wrong about?”
Here is another useful question used by Peter Thiel: “How successful do you want to be?”
Another set of meta questions reverses the tables. Try this one: “What criteria would you use for hiring?” Again, you are testing an individual’s understanding of the job, of him- or herself, and of the interview process itself.
A variation to the question, "What questions do you have for me?": “During the middle of this discussion, we chatted about [a very particular project]. What questions do you have about that project?”
Questions to ask the candidate's references:
- Is this person so good that you would happily work for them?
- Can this person get you where you need to be way faster than any reasonable person could?
- When this person disagrees with you, do you think it will be as likely you are wrong as they are wrong?
- Social presence - Understanding of how the person interacts with others and projects a self-image.
- Information richness - The ability of the in-person interaction to indicate more about how a person walks, shakes your hand, greets others entering the room, and so on.
- Full synchronicity of back-and-forth - The rhythm and patter of your interactions, the nature of the pauses, the speed of the convergence of understanding, how well you coordinate on who is due to speak next, and so on.
“We have all committed mistakes in the workplace, as have I. What is an example of a mistake you have committed but did not come to regret for a long time?”
“When have you experienced great regret in the workplace and why? How much were you at fault in that interaction?”
If you are looking for inventors, IQ is by far the most significant of all the measurable variables we have.
Among this high-IQ group, that is a steeper pay/IQ gradient than we find for the population as a whole. That steeper gradient at the top is consistent with our view that intelligence probably matters most for the very high achievers.
The data for that population show that personality and conscientiousness matter most at the bottom of the distribution.
If you are hiring one person into a relatively mature institution, intelligence and other features of talent will matter much less, while ability to fit in will matter more.
If you are creating a start-up, or otherwise building an institution from scratch, and hiring a whole team, various markers of talent—including intelligence and cooperativeness—will matter much more.
While intelligence is, of course, a good thing, Marc argues that, all other factors equal, the more important qualities in a hire are drive, self-motivation, curiosity, and ethics.
The disadvantages of solely relying on the Five Factor theory personality assessment: One of the most important questions about an individual is how that person’s behavior varies across different contexts, and if anything, Five Factor theory discourages you from looking too closely into that matter.
Another problem is that personality traits are difficult to measure. One sorry truth about personality psychology is just how much the key variables usually are measured simply by asking people about themselves.
One prominent result in this data set was that conscientiousness really mattered for earnings. The men who measured as one standard deviation higher on conscientiousness on average earned $567,000 more over their careers, which measures as 16.7 percent higher average lifetime earnings.
Extraversion also is correlated with higher earnings. Those men who were higher in extraversion by one standard deviation earned, over their careers, $491,100 more.
Ethics are hard to test for. But watch for any whiff of less than stellar ethics in any candidate’s background or references. And avoid, avoid, avoid. Unethical people are unethical by nature, and the odds of a metaphorical jailhouse conversion are quite low.
Conscientiousness is, of the five factors, the single best predictor of overall job performance.
Meta-studies suggest that conscientiousness is less important as a predictor of job success for more complex tasks and for higher-level positions.
We see stamina as one of the great underrated concepts for talent search, especially when you are looking for top performers and leaders and major achievers.
Remember our saying “Personality is revealed on weekends”? Well, a person’s references often have a pretty good idea of what that individual is up to on weekends, or weekdays for that matter. A judgment of stamina in particular may require observation over longer periods of time, and so your skills as an interviewer need to be multifaceted and directed toward the references as well.
Five Factor theory is thus an entry point for talking and thinking about people rather than a comprehensive theory of how much people will earn or a clear formula for assessing their creative value.
If you are hiring an executive, try to discern what they are doing all the time to improve their abilities at networking, decision making, and knowledge of the sectors they work in. In general, how open is a person to absorbing new ideas? Receiving critical feedback?
When testing for team players, see if the person has the skills to dissect and articulate a social problem in an institution and suggest its solution. Example: “Can you give us an instance where you perceived a team problem at work and stepped in to fix it?"
Again, focusing on the “too large,” like focusing on the “too small,” is a sign that insecurities, blinders, and lack of perspective will prevent the person from climbing the relevant ladders of success.
If we consider highly successful individuals, it seems they are very good at being selectively disagreeable when it most matters to be so. At the same time, they also may be wonderful diplomats and cooperators when circumstances dictate.
Tyler sometimes refers to “cracking cultural codes”—how good is the person at opening up and understanding new and different cultural and intellectual frameworks? Does the person invest time and effort in trying to do so? Does the person even know what it means to do so?
If you work for a mid-low tier company in your industry, you need to think especially carefully about what is wrong with the people you are trying to hire. (Sometimes this is called the Groucho Marx effect, as Groucho once stated that he wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member.) Some of them will look great, and they also will do very well in the interview and by other metrics you use. But in that case, you need to start getting nervous. If they want to work with you, maybe there is something wrong with them you haven’t seen yet. Why aren’t they already working somewhere much better?
One striking feature of the research literature is that personality for women predicts earnings with more power than personality for men.
For women, emotional stability measures as a greater factor determining wages, as does agreeableness, which in many studies affects wages negatively for women. That is, the agreeable women seem to earn less, for whatever reason.
All of these results point to the notion of a confidence gap as one of the main differences between men and women in the workplace, especially for higher-level jobs.
When women pitched on mixed-gender teams, the quality of the women’s pitch didn’t really matter at all. It seems the potential investors paid attention only to what the men said.
Another interesting result from the paper is that women are in general better at assessing the intelligence of both men and women. We are not sure why that might be, but it is one reason (among others) to ensure that enough women have feedback into your hiring process.
Anecdotally, we have found that men have a harder time judging the intelligence of women because women often present themselves as more agreeable in an interview setting than men do. The agreeableness may be pleasant to interact with, but it obscures critical judgment and smooths over the transmission of “data” about the intelligence of the interviewee.
One upshot here is that if you are doing talent search, you need to figure out whether the scouting model (search) or the gaming model (measurement) best applies to your endeavor. Most likely you will need some combination of both. Still, the market as a whole is not thinking very analytically about either scouts or games, so understanding this distinction is a source of potential competitive advantage to you.
Scouts = those looking for talent (e.g., modeling or business enviornment). Good scouts typically are masters of networking rather than performance per se. Still, the quality scout still must have an excellent understanding of the topic area, but he or she does not need to have been a star. In fact, having been a star may interfere with the objectivity and judgment of the scout. Top stars too often have a kind of intolerance toward other, different kinds of talent, or they expect too much of prospects too quickly.
Upgrade the "Teach a man to fish" saying: Teach a person how to replace fishing. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Creating your own event is costly in terms of time and money, but it can be an ideal way of raising the aspirations of those you consider talented. You get to control everything, from the invitees to the program to what they will eat for breakfast. Daniel has organized successful events for Pioneer winners, and Tyler has done the same for Emergent Ventures.
But here is the important thing to understand about organizing your own event: the group has to gel. You can raise their aspirations a bit, but the group itself creates most of its own dynamic and its own theater.