Book Review and Highlights: "Talent” by Tyler Cowan and Daniel Gross
Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross have put together a guide to help startups seek, attract, and hire undervalued talent. They offer a wide range of counterintuitive tools and ideas to help early stage companies avoid competing with large firms altogether—and still win the war for Talent.
The appendix features a killer list of unique interview questions to ask. But it’s not a cheat sheet—it’s a reference guide. The answers and angles Cowen and Gross seek through their proposed questions aren’t always obvious. The book provides the context.
Overall, this is a powerful tool to help companies with limited resources find and hire A players.
Kindle highlights and key ideas from Talent
if you are looking for a start-up that will hit it big, do something counterintuitive by seeking out people aiming, at least at first, to please smaller and weirder audiences.
Tyler this question for prospective hires: “What is it you do to practice that is analogous to how a pianist practices scales?”
If the person does engage in daily, intensive self-improvement, perhaps eschewing more typical and more social pursuits, there is a greater chance they are the kind of creative obsessive who can make a big difference.
talent search isn’t just about jobs and business. It’s about handing out scholarships, allocating auditions, choosing the right athlete in the draft, opting for the right co-author, and even choosing your friends and partners.
Screening correctly for the overlooked late-career woman, the non-obvious misfit producer, or the hidden genius is your best bet at building a unique, motivated, and loyal team.
We both find during interviews that “downtime-revealed preferences” are more interesting than “stories about your prior jobs.”
“Personality Is Revealed During Weekends.”
There is a striking study of violinists and how they excel—namely, through practice. But do you know what kind of practice is most predictive of success? No, it is not teacher-designed practice; rather, it is practice alone, driven and directed by oneself.
Many very qualified candidates are not that quick on their feet, nor do they speak off the cuff in well-formulated, smooth-sounding sentences, but if they have good content, notice it.
Another set of interview questions that is now outmoded is sometimes called “the Google questions.” Google is famous for the highly analytical questions
“We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time.”
A related and decent interview question is: “Which of your beliefs are you most likely wrong about?” The most brutal of all the meta questions is: “How do you think this interview is going?”
When speaking live, experienced lecturers use all kinds of misdirection, including hand motions, body movements, and charisma, to cover up their blemishes, but on Zoom that is much harder to do.
The more stripped-down the online environment, the more important the individual performance itself, in particular the answers to interview questions. These online interviews are a bit like online speed chess, where all that matters is the quality of the moves—in this case, it’s the quality of the answers.
A walking interview can be more useful and more revelatory than a face-to-face, across-the-table interview. There is somehow more room to explore tangential ideas, and a broader penumbra for topics and the sequencing of a discussion.
we are big fans of “demonstrated preference”—actual life activities and achievements—as the most reliable source of information about an individual.
intelligence is a worse indicator of hire quality if you are considering a sixty-year-old
It is a common result, for instance, that high conscientiousness predicts career success, as do low neuroticism, low agreeableness, and high extraversion. But again, keep in mind that context matters when it comes to most hiring decisions. It is unlikely, for instance, that low agreeableness is a positive for all jobs, and perhaps it is not a positive for most jobs.
But watch for any whiff of less than stellar ethics in any candidate’s background or references. And avoid, avoid, avoid.
about one in twenty workers eventually is terminated for being a “toxic worker.”
We see stamina as one of the great underrated concepts for talent search,
the most successful have a lot more energy and stamina than do others.…
Pessimistic Perfectionism
Happiness or fun-ness is often an input into generativeness, because the people who play around with all of those new ideas typically find it entertaining to do so.
your institutional self-description is not entirely accurate. Again, the big enemy can be you. You need to avoid satisfying your sense of self-importance at the expense of seeing through a more appropriate and ultimately higher-quality outcome.
often when a woman is interviewed by a man, there is less emotional space for her to inhabit in ways that would be considered both appropriate and impressive. With many interviewers, she
talent spotters should pay greater heed to women coming from nontraditional backgrounds and also to women who are late bloomers.
Women partners seemed better than men at detecting deceit or disingenuous founders.
Our first piece of advice—and we mean this for individuals of all races—is not to pretend that you understand race as an issue very well.
One feature of the scouting model is how well it induces scouts to look in all sorts of nooks and crannies for talent.
Most people, if you ask them, will agree on the importance of soft networks, but in terms of actual practice, such networks remain neglected.
Raising the aspirations of other people is one of the most beneficial things you can do with your time.
Don’t underestimate how little people, including your employees and applicants, may think of themselves. There is an ongoing crisis of confidence in many human beings