Hire Talent Quotes

In most cases being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way.

If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position hire the best writer. it doesn't matter if the person is marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever, their writing skills will pay off. That's because being a good writer is about more than writing clear writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. great writers know how to communicate. they make things easy to understand. they can put themselves in someone else's shoes. they know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate. Writing is making a comeback all over our society... Writing is today's currency for good ideas.

A pretty girl with butterfly clips in her dreadlocks put her hand on his arm. “You were amazing,” she told him, her voice fluting. “You have the reflexes of a striking snake. You should be a stuntman. Really, with your cheekbones, you should be an actor. A lot of people are looking for someone as pretty as you who’d do his own stunts.” Alec threw Magnus a terrified and beseeching look. Magnus took pity on him, putting a hand on the small of Alec’s back and leaning against him. His attitude and the glance he shot at the girl clearly communicated my date. “No offence,” said the girl, rapidly removing her hand so she could dig in her bag. “Let me give you my card. I work in a talent agency. You could be a star.” “He’s foreign,” Magnus told the girl. “He doesn’t have a social security number. You can’t hire him.” The girl regarded Alec’s bowed head wistfully. “That’s a shame. He could be huge. Those eyes!” “I realize he’s a knockout,” Magnus said. “But I am afraid I have to whisk him away. He is wanted by Interpol.” Alec shot him a strange look. “Interpol?” Magnus shrugged. “Knockout?” Alec said. Magnus raised an eyebrow at him. “You had to know I thought so. Why else would I agree to go on a date with you?

He came back up with a brighter smile. "And I'm proven right, again! You guys should hire me for this talent I have. Mom, I bet you have a better sex life with that Garrett dude than you did with dad." "Logan!" He turned towards James. "And dad, I bet your sex life is pretty good with Analise. She strikes me as the slutty type." "Logan!" He grinned broadly. "And David…I don't know you that well, but you strike me as conservative. You're only going to be with a conservative woman, maybe one that looks exotic though. I can tell you have control issues. You don't like anyone who is wilder than you, probably why you had problems with your ex, huh? As for the current one, she's hot under the covers, but I don't know if you want her to be." He shook his head in sympathy. "You might want to take care of that.

If you have an employee with a great attitude but no training or skills versus one with a poor attitude with some education or training. Take the employee with the great attitude for they can be trained. Poor attitude is like a tumor. It can spread. Attitude is harder to change than someone's skills level. - Strong by Kailin Gow on Hiring Good People and Casting Good People

In most cases being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way. [...] Contrary to what I believed as a little girl, being the boss almost never involves marching around, waving your arms, and chanting, "I am the boss! I am the boss!

Talent is indispensable, although it is 'always' replaceable. Just remember the simple rules concerning talent: Identify It, Hire It, Nurture It, Reward It, Protect It. And when the time comes, Fire It.

When you come across real talent, it is sometimes worth allowing them to create the structure in which they choose to labor. In nine cases out of ten, by inviting them to take responsibility and control for a new venture, you will motivate them to do great things.

A good attitude is worth as much or more than any skill or talent. In hiring, people with good attitudes should be prioritized.

Don't hire someone who has a bad attitude. One persons bad attitude can wreak psychological havoc on a team of employees.

We became the most successful advanced projects company in the world by hiring talented people, paying them top dollar, and motivating them into believing that they could produce a Mach 3 airplane like the Blackbird a generation or two ahead of anybody else.

Passion is so key in leading and creating excellence that I will hire passion over education and talent every time.

Hire people who are smarter than you are—whose talents surpass yours—and give them opportunities for growth. It's the smart thing to do and it is a sign of high personal humility.

Don't hire someone whose values don't align with the companies values. They'll cost more than they're worth.

Sometimes, to ensure that a talented individual will work for you, or will stay working with you, you need to be flexible. Money is not always the great motivator here. Talented people want a good salary, of course, but surprisingly often they are more attracted to new opportunities and challenges.

Resume's are incapable of holistically communicating a candidates value.

In most cases being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way. In other cases, to get the best work out of people you may have to pretend you are not their boss and let them treat someone else like the boss, and then that person whispers to you behind a fake wall and you tell them what to tell the first person. Contrary to what I believed as a little girl, being the boss almost never involves marching around, waving your arms, and chanting, “I am the boss! I am the boss!

Great teams are not created with incentives, procedures, and perks. They are created by hiring talented people who are adults and want nothing more than to tackle a challenge, and then communicating to them, clearly and continuously, about what the challenge is.

One of the causes of unhappiness among intellectuals in the present day is that so many of them, especially those whose skill is literary, find no opportunity for the independent exercise of their talents, but have to hire themselves out to rich corporations directed by Philistines, who insist upon their producing what they themselves regard as pernicious nonsense. If you were to inquire among journalists in either England or America whether they believed in the policy of the newspaper for which they worked, you would find, I believe, that only a small minority do so; the rest, for the sake of a livelihood, prostitute their skill to purposes which they believe to be harmful. Such work cannot bring any real satisfaction, and in the course of reconciling himself to the doing of it, a man has to make himself so cynical that he can no longer derive whole-hearted satisfaction from anything whatever. I cannot condemn men who undertake work of this sort, since starvation is too serious an alternative, but I think that where it is possible to do work that is satisfactory to man’s constructive impulses without entirely starving, he will be well advised from the point of view of his own happiness if he chooses it in preference to work much more highly paid but not seeming to him worth doing on its own account. Without self-respect genuine happiness is scarcely possible. And the man who is ashamed of his work can hardly achieve self-respect.

Human resource management begins in elementary school. You can’t expect to hire a 21 year old or a 40 year old or a 60 year old and magically with good training, replace the programming they received in K-12. This is why businesses should invest in early education.

Human resource management begins in elementary school. You can’t expect to hire a 21 year old or a 40 year old or a 60 year old and magically with good training, replace the programming they received in K-12.

Passion is so key in leading and creating excellence that I will hire passion over education or talent every time. I prefer to have both, but given a choice I will take passion. La Rochefoucauld once said, “The most untutored person with passion is more persuasive than the most eloquent without.

As a young cartoonist, Walt Disney faced many rejections from newspaper editors who said he had no talent. One day a minister at a church hired him to draw some cartoons. Disney was working out of a small rodent-infested shed near the church. Seeing a small mouse inspired him to draw a new cartoon. That was the start of Mickey Mouse.

Human resource managers should practice mindfulness and self-reflection, acknowledging their limitations and biases. It should not be the case that all or most human resource managers think the same way, look the same way, and decide the same way - because the inevitable result of that monotony is an even more disturbing monotony of opportunity.

Despite all the heartaches, tears and misunderstandings, you can still attract and retain top talent.

being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way.

You hire the best people you can possibly find. Then it's up to you to create an environment where great people decide to stay and invest their time.

We can never fall short when it comes to recruiting, hiring, maintaining and growing our workforce. It is the employees who make our organization’s success a reality.

Too many managers over-emphasize the short-term needs of the job minimizing the organizational need to continually raise the overall talent level of the company.

Hiring a talented teacher or coach is the closest the rich can get to buying their children talent.

It doesn't make sense to hire good people and tell them what to do; we hire good people so they can tell us what to do.

Assess people based on their capacity for growth, development, or future success, not their past failures.

Taking for granted the growth of his empire, he hired talented people as found, not as needed.

His goal was to be vigilant against " the bozo explosion" that leads to a company's being larded with second rate talent: For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The best airplane flight, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average one. What I saw with Woz was somebody who was fifty times better than the average engineer. He could have meetings in his head. The Mac team was an attempt to build a whole team like that, A players. People said they wouldn't get along, they'd hate working with each other. But I realized that A players like to work with A players, they just didn't like working with C players. At Pixar, it was a whole company of A players. When I got back to Apple, that's what I decided to try to do. You need to have a collaborative hiring process. When we hire someone, even if they're going to be in marketing, I will have them talk to the design folks and the engineers. My role model was J. Robert Oppenheimer. I read about the type of people he sought for the atom bomb project. I wasn't nearly as good as he was, but that's what I aspired to do.

I run Venture for America, a nonprofit organization that recruits dozens of our country’s top graduates each year and places them in startups and growth companies in Detroit, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Providence, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and other cities around the country. Our goal is to help create 100,000 new US jobs by 2025. We supply talent to early-stage companies so that they can expand and hire more people. And we train a critical mass of our best and brightest graduates to build enterprises and create new opportunities for themselves and others.

In science, there is something called a “jackpot effect,” where a male scientist hires women in his lab early in the development of a certain field, and these women hire other talented women, and, as a result, the field ends up with an unusually high number of women. Something like this was at work in cryptanalysis. A few key women proved themselves gifted, early on; a few key men were willing to hire and encourage

No partnership, for that matter, would have hired me, or anyone remotely like me. Was there ever any correlation between an ability to get into, and out of, Princeton, and a talent for taking financial risk?   At

The modern incarnation of Silicon Valley has strayed significantly from this tradition of collaboration with the U.S. government, focusing instead on the consumer market, including the online advertising and social media platforms that have come to dominate—and limit—our sense of the potential of technology. A generation of founders cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of lofty and ambitious purpose—indeed their rallying cry to change the world has grown lifeless from overuse—but often raised enormous amounts of capital and hired legions of talented engineers merely to build photo-sharing apps and chat interfaces for the modern consumer.

Unscripted, unedited, and wholly authentic people are almost universally admired, especially if they have flaws, are not afraid to make live, red-blooded mistakes, and rather than trying are busy simply being. Which is something you should consider hiring a tattoo artist to script across the palm of your hand: Be, Don’t Try. “Oh my God, I can’t do that. I would totally mess up.” You better pray to the corn god that you do. Messing up is how you tell other people, “It’s okay to like me, because I’m just like you.” Everybody feels a bit like a dented can inside. Even the slickest, most polished person you can think of is more aware of their shortcomings and flaws than their talents and gifts.

We’ve all met people with great talent but little energy. Sadly, they never live up to their expectations. Others of average talent, but with extraordinary energy, often achieve success beyond all expectations. That’s why self-motivation is so important.

Since Madam Conk makes impermissible use of such things as the happenings at Azuma Bridge; since she hires underlings to spy and eavesdrop on us; since she triumphantly retails to all and sundry the products of her espionage; since by the employment of rickshaw-folk, mere grooms, plain rogues, student riff-raff, crone daily-help, midwives, witches, masseurs, and other trouble-makers she seeks to trouble a man of talent; for all these reasons even a cat must do what can be done to prevent her getting away with it.

I learned that Bill himself has long appreciated the importance of competencies other than talent. Back in the days when he had a more direct role in hiring software programmers at Microsoft, for instance, he said he’d give applicants a programming task he knew would require hours and hours of tedious troubleshooting. This wasn’t an IQ test, or a test of programming skills. Rather, it was a test of a person’s ability to muscle through, press on, get to the finish line. Bill only hired programmers who finished what they began.

Newsweek never hired women as writers and only one or two female staffers were promoted to that rank no matter how talented they were...Any aspiring journalist who was interviewed for a job was told, "If you want to be a writer, go somewhere else--women don't write at Newsweek.

The insistence is on merit, insinuating that any current majority white leadership in any industry has got there through hard work and no outside help, as if whiteness isn’t its own leg-up, as if it doesn’t imply a familiarity that warms an interviewer to a candidate. When each of the sectors I mentioned earlier have such dire racial representation, you’d have to be fooling yourself if you really think that the homogeneous glut of middle-aged white men currently clogging the upper echelons of most professions got there purely through talent alone. We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in wilful ignorance. Opposing positive discrimination based on apprehensions about getting the best person for the job means inadvertently revealing what you think talent looks like, and the kind of person in which you think talent resides. Because if the current system worked correctly, and if hiring practices were successfully recruiting and promoting the right people for the right jobs in all circumstances, I seriously doubt that so many leadership positions would be occupied by white middle-aged men.

While delivering consistently good customer service requires work and alignment across your entire organization, a good place to start is your support team. It's important to hire people who genuinely want to help your customers succeed — and to pay rates that are attractive to skilled professionals.

We will ultimately live in a perpetual data-driven talent edition. Everything you create will be measured and tracked by others through comments, share, and likes. Your work will come up on the radar of potential employers and clients, and the data will tell them if you are worth talking to or hiring.

Companies that live in such a zero-sum world don’t “earn market share” from a competitor, they “conquer the market.” They don’t just serve their customers, they “capture” them. They “target” customers, employ a sales “force,” hire “headhunters” to find new talent, pick their “battles,” and make a “killing.

The technology has proven so valuable that SpaceX’s competitors have started to copy it and have tried to poach some of the company’s experts in the field. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s secretive rocket company, has been particularly aggressive, hiring away Ray Miryekta, one of the world’s foremost friction stir welding experts and igniting a major rift with Musk. “Blue Origin does these surgical strikes on specialized talent* offering like double their salaries. I think it’s unnecessary and a bit rude,” Musk said. Within SpaceX, Blue Origin is mockingly referred to as BO and at one point the company created an e-mail filter to detect messages with “blue” and “origin” to block the poaching. The relationship between Musk and Bezos has soured, and they no longer chat about their shared ambition of getting to Mars. “I do think Bezos has an insatiable desire to be King Bezos,” Musk said. “He has a relentless work ethic and wants to kill everything in e-commerce. But he’s not the most fun guy, honestly.

Defining a job candidate who is a "cultural fit" is about the person being open minded, looks for the positive in others and knowing that life is too short to focus on differences. When interviewing someone, I ask them to describe something they are proud of and why. The best answers are a challenge they overcame using a unique approach.

We didn’t assemble a mafia by sorting through résumés and simply hiring the most talented people. I had seen the mixed results of that approach firsthand when I worked at a New York law firm. The lawyers I worked with ran a valuable business, and they were impressive individuals one by one. But the relationships between them were oddly thin.

Bezos dismissed those objections and insisted that to succeed in books as Apple had in music, Amazon needed to control the entire customer experience, combining sleek hardware with an easy-to-use digital bookstore. “We are going to hire our way to having the talent,” he told his executives in that meeting. “I absolutely know it’s very hard. We’ll learn how to do it.

We became the most successful advanced projects company in the world by hiring talented people, paying them top dollar, and motivating them into believing that they could produce a Mach 3 airplane like the Blackbird a generation or two ahead of anybody else. Our design engineers had the keen experience to conceive the whole airplane in their mind’s-eye, doing the trade-offs in their heads between aerodynamic needs and weapons requirements. We created a practical and open work environment for engineers and shop workers, forcing the guys behind the drawing boards onto the shop floor to see how their ideas were being translated into actual parts and to make any necessary changes on the spot. We made every shop worker who designed or handled a part responsible for quality control. Any worker—not just a supervisor or a manager—could send back a part that didn’t meet his or her standards. That way we reduced rework and scrap waste. We encouraged our people to work imaginatively, to improvise and try unconventional approaches to problem solving, and then got out of their way. By applying the most commonsense methods to develop new technologies, we saved tremendous amounts of time and money, while operating in an atmosphere of trust and cooperation both with our government customers and between our white-collar and blue-collar employees. In the end, Lockheed’s Skunk Works demonstrated the awesome capabilities of American inventiveness when free to operate under near ideal working conditions. That may be our most enduring legacy as well as our source of lasting pride.

Hollywood was all about. Hollywood was merely a specialized bank—a consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed that product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium. The goal was to find products that would keep on making money forever, long after the talent had been paid off and sent packing.

The #1 demotivator for talented people is having to put up with bozos, as Steve Jobs would call them. Nothing is more frustrating for A Players than having to work with B and C Players who slow them down and suck their energy. In that sense, “The best thing you can do for employees — a perk better than foosball or free sushi — is hire only ‘A’ players to work alongside them. Excellent colleagues trump everything else,

The cabby left, muttering under his nose. "What's he muttering about?" Mr. Goliadkin thought through his tears. "I hired him for the evening, I'm sort of...within my rights nows...so there! I hired him for the evening, and that's the end of the matter. Even if he just stands there, it's all the same. It's as I will. I'm free to go, and free not to go. And that I'm now standing behind the woodpile--that, too, is quite all right...and don't you dare say anything; I say, the gentleman wants to stand behind the woodpile, so he stands behind the woodpile...and it's no taint to anybody's honor--so there! So there, lady mine, if you'd like to know. Thus and so, I say, but in our age, lady mine, nobody lives in a hut. So there! In our industrial age, lady mine, you can't get anywhere without good behavior, of which you yourself serve as a pernicious example...You say one must serve as a chief clerk and live in a hut on the seashore. First of all, lady mine, there are no chief clerks on the seashore, and second, you and I can't possible get to be a chief clerk. For, to take an example, suppose I apply, I show up--thus and so, as a chief clerk, say, sort of...and protect me from my enemy...and they'll tell you, my lady, say, sort of...there are lots of chief clerks, and here you're not at some émigrée Falbala's, where you learned good behavior, of which you yourself serve as a pernicious example. Good behavior, my lady, means sitting at home, respecting your father, and not thinking of any little suitors before it's time. Little suitors, my lady, will be found in due time! So there! Of course, one must indisputably have certain talents, to wit: playing the piano on occasion, speaking French, some history, geography, catechism, and arithmetic--so there!--but not more. Also cooking; cooking should unfailingly be part of every well-behaved girl's knowledge!

Argument 4: Affirmative action is unfair to white men because it causes them to lose opportunities to less qualified women and people of color. As with argument 3, remember that these are representational goals, of which we are falling far short. When you say that a representational number of women or people of color cuts out more deserving white men, you are saying that women and people of color deserve to be less represented in our schools and our companies and that white men are deserving of an over-representational majority of these spots. We see the disparities in jobs and education among race and gender lines. Either you believe these disparities exist because you believe that people of color and women are less intelligent, less hard working, and less talented than white men, or you believe that there are systemic issues keeping women and people of color from being hired into jobs, prompted, paid a fair wage, and accepted into college.

If you are leading a turnaround and need to assemble a team quickly, it can make sense to hire capable people you know and trust. But in less-urgent situations, the reflex to bring in people you know can easily be interpreted to mean you’re dissatisfied with the level of talent in your new organization. If you need to replace people on your team, the first place to look is one level below. The second best option is to hire people from the outside—just not from your old organization(s).

The modern incarnation of Silicon Valley30 has strayed significantly from this tradition of collaboration with the U.S. government, focusing instead on the consumer market, including the online advertising and social media platforms that have come to dominate—and limit—our sense of the potential of technology. A generation of founders cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of lofty and ambitious purpose—indeed their rallying cry to change the world has grown lifeless from overuse—but often raised enormous amounts of capital and hired legions of talented engineers merely to build photo-sharing apps and chat interfaces for the modern consumer.

Mediocre people are a drag on quality and morale, but they tend to do just enough good work to stick around—managers have a tough time justifying letting them go because there’s no actionable offense. The scent of mediocrity on your team can also scare off talented candidates. Mediocrity is an albatross we tether ourselves to when we don’t give the hiring process our full attention. When you hire, look for skill fit, but don’t make it your primary evaluation criteria. Look for passion, curiosity, selflessness, openness, confidence, communication skills, emotional intelligence, and intrinsic motivation, too. These things can’t be taught—most skills can.

GET BEYOND THE ONE-MAN SHOW Great organizations are never one-man operations. There are 22 million licensed small businesses in America that have no employees. Forbes suggests 75 percent of all businesses operate with one person. And the average income of those companies is a sad $44,000. That’s not a business—that’s torture. That is a prison where you are both the warden and the prisoner. What makes a person start a business and then be the only person who works there? Are they committed to staying small? Or maybe an entrepreneur decides that because the talent pool is so poor, they can’t hire anyone who can do it as well as them, and they give up. My guess is the latter: Most people have just given up and said, “It’s easier if I just do it myself.” I know, because that’s what I did—and it was suicidal. Because my business was totally dependent on me and only me, I was barely able to survive, much less grow, for the first ten years. Instead I contracted another company to promote my seminars. When I hired just one person to assist me out of my home office, I thought I was so smart: Keep it small. Keep expenses low. Run a tight ship. Bigger isn’t always better. These were the things I told myself to justify not growing my business. I did this for years and even bragged about how well I was doing on my own. Then I started a second company with a partner, a consulting business that ran parallel to my seminar business. This consulting business quickly grew bigger than my first business because my partner hired people to work for us. But even then I resisted bringing other people into the company because I had this idea that I didn’t want the headaches and costs that come with managing people. My margins were monster when I had no employees, but I could never grow my revenue line without killing myself, and I have since learned that is where all my attention and effort should have gone. But with the efforts of one person and one contracted marketing company, I could expand only so much. I know that a lot of speakers and business gurus run their companies as one-man shows. Which means that while they are giving advice to others about how to grow a business, they may have never grown one themselves! Their one-man show is simply a guy or gal going out, collecting a fee, selling time and a few books. And when they are out speaking, the business terminates all activity. I started studying other people and companies that had made it big and discovered they all had lots of employees. The reality is you cannot have a great business if it’s just you. You need to add other people. If you don’t believe me, try to name one truly great business that is successful, ongoing, viable, and growing that doesn’t have many people making it happen. Good luck. Businesses are made of people, not just machines, automations, and technology. You need people around you to implement programs, to add passion to the technology, to serve customers, and ultimately to get you where you want to go. Consider the behemoth online company Amazon: It has more than 220,000 employees. Apple has more than 100,000; Microsoft has around the same number. Ernst & Young has more than 200,000 people. Apple calls the employees working in its stores “Geniuses.” Don’t you want to hire employees deserving of that title too? Think of how powerful they could make your business.

I could have hired someone else. Someone less flawed, perhaps, or at least better at hiding it. But none of them would have had the talent you have with flowers, Victoria. It's truly a gift. When you work with flowers, everything about you changes. The set of your jaw loosens. Your eyes glaze with focus. Your fingers manipulate the flowers with a gentle respect that makes it impossible to believe you are capable of violence. I'll never forget the first day I saw it. Watching you arranging sunflowers at the back table, I felt like I was looking at a completely different girl." I knew the girl of whom she was speaking. It was the same one I'd glimpsed in the dressing room mirror with Elizabeth, after nearly a year in her home. Perhaps that girl had survived somewhere within me after all, preserved like a dried flower, fragile and sweet.

These include: the Bar Raiser hiring process that ensures that the company continues to acquire top talent; a bias for separable teams run by leaders with a singular focus that optimizes for speed of delivery and innovation; the use of written narratives instead of slide decks to ensure that deep understanding of complex issues drives well-informed decisions; a relentless focus on input metrics to ensure that teams work on activities that propel the business. And finally there is the product development process that gives this book its name: working backwards from the desired customer experience. Many of the business problems that Amazon faces are no different from those faced by every other company, small or large. The difference is how Amazon keeps coming up with uniquely Amazonian solutions to those problems. Taken together, these elements combine to form a way of thinking, managing, and working that we refer to as being Amazonian, a term that we coined for the purposes of this book. Both of us, Colin and Bill, were “in the room,” and—along with other senior leaders—we shaped and refined what it means to be Amazonian. We both worked extensively with Jeff and were actively involved in creating a number of Amazon’s most enduring successes (not to mention some of its notable flops) in what was the most invigorating professional experience of our lives.

The first thing to understand is that just because somebody interviewed well and reference-checked great, that does not mean she will perform superbly in your company. There are two kinds of cultures in this world: cultures where what you do matters and cultures where all that matters is who you are. You can be the former or you can suck. You must hold your people to a high standard, but what is that standard? I discussed this in the section “Old People.” In addition, keep the following in mind:   You did not know everything when you hired her. While it feels awkward, it is perfectly reasonable to change and raise your standards as you learn more about what’s needed and what’s competitive in your industry.   You must get leverage. Early on, it’s natural to spend a great deal of time integrating and orienting an executive. However, if you find yourself as busy as you were with that function before you hired or promoted the executive, then she is below standard.   As CEO, you can do very little employee development. One of the most depressing lessons of my career when I became CEO was that I could not develop the people who reported to me. The demands of the job made it such that the people who reported to me had to be 99 percent ready to perform. Unlike when I ran a function or was a general manager, there was no time to develop raw talent. That can and must be done elsewhere in the company, but not at the executive level. If someone needs lots of training, she is below standard.

Dontchev was born in Bulgaria and emigrated to America as a young kid when his father, a mathematician, took a job at the University of Michigan. He got an undergraduate and graduate degree in aerospace engineering, which led to what he thought was his dream opportunity: an internship at Boeing. But he quickly became disenchanted and decided to visit a friend who was working at SpaceX. “I will never forget walking the floor that day,” he says. “All the young engineers working their asses off and wearing T-shirts and sporting tattoos and being really badass about getting things done. I thought, ‘These are my people.’ It was nothing like the buttoned-up deadly vibe at Boeing.” That summer, he made a presentation to a VP at Boeing about how SpaceX was enabling the younger engineers to innovate. “If Boeing doesn’t change,” he said, “you’re going to lose out on the top talent.” The VP replied that Boeing was not looking for disrupters. “Maybe we want the people who aren’t the best, but who will stick around longer.” Dontchev quit. At a conference in Utah, he went to a party thrown by SpaceX and, after a couple of drinks, worked up the nerve to corner Gwynne Shotwell. He pulled a crumpled résumé out of his pocket and showed her a picture of the satellite hardware he had worked on. “I can make things happen,” he told her. Shotwell was amused. “Anyone who is brave enough to come up to me with a crumpled-up résumé might be a good candidate,” she said. She invited him to SpaceX for interviews. He was scheduled to see Musk, who was still interviewing every engineer hired, at 3 p.m. As usual, Musk got backed up, and Dontchev was told he would have to come back another day. Instead, Dontchev sat outside Musk’s cubicle for five hours. When he finally got in to see Musk at 8 p.m., Dontchev took the opportunity to unload about how his gung-ho approach wasn’t valued at Boeing. When hiring or promoting, Musk made a point of prioritizing attitude over résumé skills. And his definition of a good attitude was a desire to work maniacally hard. Musk hired Dontchev on the spot.

Manhattan Prep started out as one lone tutor in a Starbucks coffee shop. Less than ten years later, it was a leading national education and publishing business that employed over one hundred people and was acquired by a public company for millions of dollars. How did that happen? We delivered a service that customers liked more than what was otherwise available. They sought us out and rewarded us with their business. We hired more people, grew, and kept improving. This process—a new company filling a need and flourishing as a result—is an example of value creation. It’s the fuel of economic growth, and what our country has been seeking a formula for. It’s the process that leads to new businesses and jobs. Value creation has a polar opposite: rent-seeking. In the 1980s, economists began noticing that countries with ample natural resources experienced lower economic growth rates than others. From 1965 to 1998 in the OPEC (oil-producing) countries, gross domestic product per capita decreased on average by 1.3 percent, while in the rest of the developed world, per capita growth increased by 2.2 percent (for an overall difference of 3.5 percent). This was a surprise—if you had lots of oil in the ground, wouldn’t that give you more wealth to invest and thus spur more rapid growth? Economists cited a number of factors to explain this “resource curse,” including internal and external conflict, corruption, lower monitoring of government, lack of diversification, and being subject to higher price volatility. One other possible explanation on offer was that a country’s smart people will wind up going to work in whatever industry is throwing off money (like the oil industry in Saudi Arabia). Thus fewer talented people are innovating in other industries, dragging down the growth rate over time. This makes sense—it’s a lot easier for a gifted Saudi to plug into the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources and extract economic value than to come up with a new business or industry. Does this sort of thing happen in the United States? Yes, you can make money through rent-seeking as opposed to value or wealth creation.

Most exciting, the growth mindset can be taught to managers. Heslin and his colleagues conducted a brief workshop based on well-established psychological principles. (By the way, with a few changes, it could just as easily be used to promote a growth mindset in teachers or coaches.) The workshop starts off with a video and a scientific article about how the brain changes with learning. As with our “Brainology” workshop (described in chapter 8), it’s always compelling for people to understand how dynamic the brain is and how it changes with learning. The article goes on to talk about how change is possible throughout life and how people can develop their abilities at most tasks with coaching and practice. Although managers, of course, want to find the right person for a job, the exactly right person doesn’t always come along. However, training and experience can often draw out and develop the qualities required for successful performance. The workshop then takes managers through a series of exercises in which a) they consider why it’s important to understand that people can develop their abilities, b) they think of areas in which they once had low ability but now perform well, c) they write to a struggling protégé about how his or her abilities can be developed, and d) they recall times they have seen people learn to do things they never thought these people could do. In each case, they reflect upon why and how change takes place. After the workshop, there was a rapid change in how readily the participating managers detected improvement in employee performance, in how willing they were to coach a poor performer, and in the quantity and quality of their coaching suggestions. What’s more, these changes persisted over the six-week period in which they were followed up. What does this mean? First, it means that our best bet is not simply to hire the most talented managers we can find and turn them loose, but to look for managers who also embody a growth mindset: a zest for teaching and learning, an openness to giving and receiving feedback, and an ability to confront and surmount obstacles. It also means we need to train leaders, managers, and employees to believe in growth, in addition to training them in the specifics of effective communication and mentoring. Indeed, a growth mindset workshop might be a good first step in any major training program. Finally, it means creating a growth-mindset environment in which people can thrive. This involves: • Presenting skills as learnable • Conveying that the organization values learning and perseverance, not just ready-made genius or talent • Giving feedback in a way that promotes learning and future success • Presenting managers as resources for learning Without a belief in human development, many corporate training programs become exercises of limited value. With a belief in development, such programs give meaning to the term “human resources” and become a means of tapping enormous potential.

5 Thumb Rules to Follow for Outsourcing 3D Character. Outsourcing has become one of the basic requirements of the digital industry. Be it software, websites, architecture rendering or 3D character modelling, companies look forward to outsource these tasks to reliable names. Reason is simple. When it comes to value for money, 3D Art Outsourcing Service stands to be the most viable option as setting up in-house production often isn’t considered a wise ROI choice. But, this necessity has also given rise to possible frauds. There are countless companies waiting to gulp your money in the blink of an eye. There are many more who are ready to lure you with lucrative offers when it comes to 3D character modelling concept. Since not everyone is familiar with the technicalities of this field, companies can easily get trapped with fake promises of giving top notch services well within their reach, only to find out that the whole thing was neither worth their time nor money. However, all the sham can be avoided if companies follow the six thumb rules while Game outsourcing character modelling tasks to animation studios as these will lead them to the right names. 1) Take a Tour of the Website Although you will find expert comments on not to judge a company by its cover, there is no denying the fact that website plays a decisive role in company’s credibility, especially when it comes to art and animation studios. A studio that claims to offer you state-of-art results must first focus on its own. A clean, crisp website with appropriate content can actually say a lot about the studio’s work. A poor design and inappropriate content often indicate the following things: - Outdated and poorly maintained - Negligence towards its virtual presentation - Unprofessionalism - Poor marketing A sincere design and animation studio will indeed feature a vibrant website with all its details properly included. 2) Location Matters Location has a huge impact on hiring charges as it largely decides the price range one can expect. If you are looking forward to countries like India, you expect the range to be well within your budget chiefly because such countries have immense talent, but because of the increasing demand and competition in the field of outsourcing, hiring charges are relatively cheaper than countries like UK or USA. This means that once can get desired expertise without spending a fortune. 3) Know Your Team Inside Out Since you will be spending your hard earned money, you have every right to know the ins and outs of your team. Getting to know the team can assist you in your decision. Do your part of homework and be ready with your queries. Starting from their names to their works, check everything you can, and if need be, go for one-to-one conversation. This will not only help you to know them better, but will also give you an idea of their communication, their knowledge about their work and their sincerity. A dedicated one will always answer you up to the point while a confused one with fidget with words or beat around the bush. 4) Don’t Miss Out on the Portfolio While the website of a studio is its virtual representative, it’s the portfolio which speaks about its execution. Reputed names of 3D modelling and design companies house excellent projects ranging from simple to complex ones. A solid portfolio indicates: - commitment of the studio towards its projects - competency of its team - execution and precision - status of its expertise Apart from the portfolio, some animation studios even feature case studies and white papers in their websites which indicate their level of transparency. Make sure to go through all of them.

As the saying goes, "It's not who you know, but who knows you." How does that relate to getting a job? Lets look at 2 cases where "who knows you" resulted in landing the best job. Keep in mind: The great thing is that you can start right where you are right now! Case 1 In my first teaching job in Mexico in the early 1980's, we were half way through the semester, when the director called me into his office to tell me he had taken a job in Silicon Valley, California. What he said next floored me. "I'd like you to apply for my job." How could I apply to be the director of an English school when it was my first teaching job, all the teachers had more teaching experience than I did, and many of them had doctorate degrees. I only had a bachelors degree. "Don't worry," he said. "People like you, and I think you have what it takes to be a good director." The director knew me, or at least got to know me from teachers' meetings, seeing me teach, and noticing how I interacted with people. Case 2 Fast forward 3 years. After Mexico, I moved to Reno, Nevada, to work on my Master's degree in Teaching English as a Second Language. I applied for a teaching job at the community college, and half-way into the semester, a teacher had to leave and I got the job. I impressed the director enough that she asked me to be the Testing and Placement Coordinator the next year. At the end of that year, I wrote a final report about the testing and placement program. It so impressed the college administration that when a sister university was looking for a graduate student to head up a new language assessment program for new foreign graduate teaching assistants and International faculty, I got recommended. What Does This Mean? From these two examples, you can see that when people see what you can do, you have a greater chance of being seen and being known. When people see what you are capable of doing, there is less risk in hiring you. Why? Because they've seen you be successful before. Chances are you'll be successful with them, too. But, if people don't know you and haven't seen what you can do, there is much greater risk in hiring you. In fact, you may not even be on their radar screen. Get On Their Radar Screens To get on the radar screens for the best jobs, do the best job you can where you work right now. Don't wait for the job announcement to appear in the newspaper. Don't wait for something else to happen. Right now, invest all of you and your unique talents into what you're doing. Impress people with what you can do! Do that, and see the jobs you'll get!

We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees, and continue to weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash. We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner.”21

premium unrelated to its usefulness, like the fund managers earning a fat fee for doing nothing, or the many talented MIT engineers and scientists hired to write software that allows stock trading at millisecond frequencies, then talented people are lost to firms that might do something more socially useful. Faster trading may be profitable because it allows the trader to react more quickly to new information, but given that the reaction time is already seconds or less, it seems implausible that it improves the allocation of resources in the economy in any meaningful way.

I felt super-frustrated. We’d hired all these talented people and were spending tons of money, but we weren’t going any faster. Things came to a head over a top-priority marketing OKR for personalized emails with targeted content. The objective was well constructed: We wanted to drive a certain minimum number of monthly active users to our blog. One important key result was to increase our click-through rate from emails. The catch was that no one in marketing had thought to inform engineering, which had already set its own priorities that quarter. Without buy-in from the engineers, the OKR was doomed before it started. Even worse, Albert and I didn’t find out it was doomed until our quarterly postmortem. (The project got done a quarter late.) That was our wake-up call, when we saw the need for more alignment between teams. Our OKRs were well crafted, but implementation fell short. When departments counted on one another for crucial support, we failed to make the dependency explicit. Coordination was hit-and-miss, with deadlines blown on a regular basis. We had no shortage of objectives, but our teams kept wandering away from one another. The following year, we tried to fix the problem with periodic integration meetings for the executive team. Each quarter our department heads presented their goals and identified dependencies. No one left the room until we’d answered some basic questions: Are we meeting everyone’s needs for buy-in? Is a team overstretched? If so, how can we make their objectives more realistic?

But there is a golden rule to hiring that cannot be violated: the urgency of the role isn't sufficiently important to compromise quality in hiring. In the inevitable showdown between speed and quality, quality must prevail.

Hiring isn't just about filling positions; it's about assembling a team of stars whose combined brilliance lights up the path to success.

Hiring is a race against time, and every moment lost is a step closer to losing the race for top talent. The brutal reality demands swift decisions.

The brutal reality of hiring is that the best candidates are not just considering your offer; they are evaluating your speed. Slow decisions can cost you the winners.

The first thing he is looking for when he hires someone, he says, is “extreme talent.” He defines this narrowly. He doesn’t want someone who says they love teaching in general; he wants to hear someone identify the specific teaching task they excel at: I love writing out a lesson plan. Or I love working with remedial students. Or I love one-on-one tutoring. “People love to do the thing they are wired to do,” he says. A person can go a long way with a narrow skill set.

Jeff also notes that the talent he hired was probably inappropriate for the transformation. “I hired big tech pedigree leaders—from Cisco, SAP, IBM, and Oracle—but not true entrepreneurs. They thought about scale, not experimentation. I would have done that differently.

About 30 percent of founding CEOs in the billion-dollar group had not worked for anyone other than themselves before. Of those who had, about 60 percent had worked at companies with very well-known brands, like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey. Those “tier-one companies” are famous for their rigorous hiring processes and their tendency to employ the best. Another 28 percent worked at “tier-two companies,” which I define as large and well-known companies that were less sought-after by top talent. Only 14 percent of founders of billion-dollar companies had worked solely at companies that were not well-known brand names.

It seems that what is important is having certain soft skills, like the ability to hire a group of talented people, managing them, building and maintaining strategic connections and partnerships across industries, excelling at sales, and thinking about problems in the right way—rather than knowing the technicalities of a specific industry sector. In

It is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer (two people who don’t know something are no better than one), will tend to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive.

are your career goals? This first question is powerful because it allows you to hear about a candidate’s goals and passions before you taint the discussion with your own comments. You give the candidate the first word, rather than telling the person about the company so he or she can parrot back what you just said. Ideally, a candidate will share career goals that match your company’s needs. If he or she lacks goals or sounds like an echo of your own Web site, screen the person out. You are done with the call. Talented people know what they want to do and are not afraid to tell you about it.

He was a ravenous reader, leading senior executives in discussion of books like Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, and he had an utter aversion to doing anything conventionally. Employees were instructed to model his fourteen leadership principles, such as customer obsession, high bar for talent, and frugality, and they were trained to consider them daily when making decisions about things like new hires, promotions, and even trivial changes to products.

As we dismantle the traditional notions of talent, it's imperative to broaden our lens to include the global talent pool—a vast expanse of potential that, when tapped into wisely, can become a cornerstone of our talent revolution.

Now that we've opened our minds to breaking barriers in hiring, it's time to zero in on a pervasive myth that holds sway over most hiring departments: the 'Perfect Fit'. You've seen it—the job postings calling for someone who fits a particular mold, like a square peg for a square hole. The truth? This notion of a perfect fit is a mirage that can cost you dearly in the long run.

Cultural Transformation is the masterstroke in your Talent Revolution journey. Think of it as the soul of your organization; the vital force that powers every function, every interaction, and every decision. This is where all the pieces come together, forming a vivid mosaic of values, behaviors, and attitudes that define who you are as a company and what you stand for.

Your competitors can gain access to capital, hire away your talent, and steal your ideas, but they almost certainly can't replicate your culture.

When we take a strengths-based view of people, we recognize their dignity. As leaders, one of the toughest jobs we have is to align an individual’s talents with areas of contribution. When we hire an individual, they are making a commitment to us and an investment of their time, energy, and future options in us. We have a mutual responsibility for their success. It is incumbent upon us to explore their strengths with them to find where they add greatest value. And we have to have a relentless commitment to finding that value. If the ultimate conclusion is that the individual’s strengths don’t best contribute to the organization, the loving thing to do is to help them explore where they will. If you honestly believe in the potential of each individual, you’ll embrace that responsibility courageously.

Learning to build teams and hire executive talent is a skill you must master, but it’s not where you should start. Hiring is one of the most expensive, time-consuming, and riskiest tasks you will perform as a business leader, and that’s why it’s vital that you build systems first and teams second, which is exactly what you’ll do when you build your Scalable Operating System.

In hiring black teachers for segregated schools during Jim Crow, a leading southern official, Hoke Smith, made a deliberate decision: “When two Negro teachers applied to a school, to ‘take the less competent.’ ” It was a nakedly creative way to cripple black prospects for achievement. It put black children under the instruction of the least qualified teachers. It passed over the brightest, most accomplished applicants—in fact, punished excellence—while elevating the mediocre in a purposeful distortion of meritocracy. All of this created dissension in the lowest caste over the patent unfairness and worked to crush the ambitions of those with the most talent. In these and other ways, the caste system trained the people in the lowest caste that the only way to survive was to play the comforting role of servile incompetent. The caste system all but ensured black failure by preempting success.

The original idea, favored by Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, was that every company should aim for a certain level of turnover, whatever the consequences. The system was rife with perverse incentives. Peers who sabotaged others’ work could save their own jobs; managers might hire less-capable people on their teams to keep from having to fire existing employees whom they favored. Despite the system’s drawbacks, Welch’s influence was so far-reaching that stack ranking was adopted at many of today’s tech giants, where it wreaked havoc on morale and productivity for decades. Eventually, its negative effects became well known enough to make the practice a liability at companies chasing workers whose specialized talents made them scarce, such as engineers. In the mid-2010s, companies including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon abandoned it.

company late at night when sitting on the couch deciding to search for their next career move. It’s the perception in a candidate's mind about what you have to offer as a prospective employer and one of the most critical factors in how an individual decides to approach their job search. What do most people get wrong about employer branding?

Either you believe these disparities exist because you believe that people of color and women are less intelligent, less hard working, and less talented than white men, or you believe that there are systemic issues keeping women and people of color from being hired into jobs, promoted, paid a fair wage, and accepted into college.

At the height of the George Floyd protests, Omar Johnson, a former Apple marketing VP and chief marketing officer for Beats by Dr. Dre, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times. “Dear White corporate America,” he began,… I get it. I know you have the best intentions.… You want to do the right thing. But you just don’t know how. Is that about right? I know it is, because you’ve been calling me. For the past two weeks, several times a day. It’s been the same question: What can I do? He went on to upbraid corporate leaders for failing to nurture Black talent, for failing to include Black people in decision-making, for failing to listen, and ultimately, for failing as businesspeople: “This is a business problem, too. And you fix business problems all the time. So, you got this.” He laid out a game plan. Most notably, “You need to hire more Black people. Period.” Identify, recruit, develop, and elevate talented Black employees. Partner with Black-owned businesses. Believe in the people you hire. Mentor them. “No doubt, it’s daunting,” Johnson writes. “But lean into the discomfort.” And “before you call me again—before you ask me what you should say, or what you should change—I’ll tell you my answer right now: Absolutely everything… See you in the room.

A Very Effective Path Adam Hyder, Head of Technology at Jobvite, a leader in Talent Acquisition software, analyzed Jobvite’s customer data set. Adam found that while referrals make up only 6% of the applicant pool, they accounted for 39.9% of hires

Cynthia Shapiro's take on Self-Talk Cynthia Shapiro, in her wonderful book, What Does Somebody Have to Do to Get A Job Around Here? says: What you’re telling yourself with your inner voice comes through in every stage of your job search process. When you have negative or insecure self-talk constantly running through your head, it will tend to govern the tone of your cover letters, e-mails, phone screenings, and interviews. Cynthia shares how successful athletes visualize getting baskets, making touchdowns, or hitting home runs. Job seekers need to do the same thing. We need to visualize succeeding in interviews, excitedly sharing our achievement stories, and enjoying getting to know hiring managers and their teams. Your self-talk plays an incredible role in your life. If you say anything that sounds the least bit negative, STOP yourself, and say: I’m better than that. I’m capable and talented. I’m going to share my achievement stories with hiring managers and help them understand how I can help them solve their problems.

Hire the right people. “We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees,” he wrote in an early shareholder letter. Compensation, especially early on, was heavily weighted to stock options rather than cash. “We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner.” There are three criteria he instructs managers to consider when they are hiring: Will you admire this person? Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group he or she is entering? Along what dimension might this person be a superstar? It’s never been easy to work at Amazon. When Bezos interviews people, he warns them, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.” Bezos makes no apologies. “We are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about,” he says. “Such things aren’t meant to be easy. We are incredibly fortunate to have this group of dedicated employees whose sacrifices and passion build Amazon.com.” These lessons remind me of the way Steve Jobs operated. Sometimes such a style can be crushing, and to some people it may feel tough or even cruel. But it also can lead to the creation of grand, new innovations and companies that change the way we live. Bezos has done all of this. But he still has many chapters to write in his story. He has always been public spirited, but I suspect in the coming years he will do more with philanthropy. Just as Bill Gates’s parents led him into such endeavors, Jackie and Mike Bezos have been models for Bezos as he focuses on missions such as providing great early-childhood education to all kids. I am also confident that he has at least one more major leap to make. I suspect that he will be—and is, indeed, eager to be—one of the first private citizens to blast himself into space. As he told his high school graduating class back in 1982, “Space, the final frontier, meet me there!

great at what you do. I am always on the lookout for talented people and would love the chance to get to know you. Even if you are perfectly content in your current job, I’d love to introduce myself and hear about your career interests.

1. REFERRALS FROM YOUR PROFESSIONAL AND PERSONAL NETWORKS. Create a list of the ten most talented people you know and commit to speaking with at least one of them per week for the next ten weeks. At the end of each conversation, ask, “Who are the most talented people you know?” Continue to build your list and continue to talk with at least one person per week. 2. REFERRALS FROM YOUR EMPLOYEES. Add sourcing as an outcome on every scorecard for your team. For example, “Source five A Players per year who pass our phone screen.” Encourage your employees to ask people in their networks, “Who are the most talented people you know whom we should hire?” Offer a referral bonus. 3. DEPUTIZING FRIENDS OF THE FIRM. Consider offering a referral bounty to select friends of the firm. It could be as inexpensive as a gift certificate or as expensive as a significant cash bonus.

At the major market level, competition among radio stations is fierce. Battling program directors create format narratives that sometimes instruct announcers to chime like puppets during tailored and precise talk segments. Marionettes don’t win Oscars, but when you are hired as a talent, you are expected to be able to implement this level of precision.

At the major market level, competition among radio stations is fierce. Battling program directors create format narratives that sometimes instruct announcers to chime like puppets during tailored and precise talk segments. Marionettes don’t win Oscars, but when you are hired as a talent, you are expected to be able to implement this level of precision.