Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World

In general, be wary of candidates who use a lot of negative words; it is a sign of possible future troubles and lack of cooperativeness in the workplace.

Garett Jones, has written an entire book on this topic, called Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More than Your Own, and in that book he stresses how intelligence can have a nonlinear positive effect. That is, smart people can feed off each other and make each other better, within companies and even within nations.

Daniel has also found it useful to pay attention to any particular strategies candidates seem to use in order to maintain focus and generate good answers (he calls these strategies “triggers,” analogizing to the way athletes, for instance, prime themselves with mental triggers to maintain good form during a performance—a weightlifter, for example,

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.

the idea of hiring conscientious or hardworking individuals is hardly a novel one, so if there are any qualities that are reflected in the going market wage for an individual, you would expect conscientiousness and being a hard worker to be among them. Conscientiousness, in essence, is too easily and uniformly valued in the marketplace.

In some cases, a phenomenon known as “winner’s curse” may mean that you end up overpaying when you get into bidding wars. If a number of companies are bidding for the same worker, the company most likely to win is the one that overvalues that worker and ends up paying too much. Even when the winner does not overbid relative to quality, the resultin

As an employer, you can take advantage of other people’s prescriptive stereotypes. If a woman, or for that matter a man, has a personality trait that the marketplace finds not entirely desirable, a potential arbitrage opportunity, as well as a chance to undermine stereotypes, arises from hiring women with those traits.

There are some people who, when they speak, no matter what the topic, seem to draw you into their own worldview, almost like an act of magic, like you are stepping into a movie, TV show, computer game, or graphic novel of their making. This can be a sign of their energy and creativity.

This curiosity is about models, frameworks, cultural understandings, disciplines, and methods of thought, the kinds of traits that made John Stuart Mill such a great thinker and writer. A more recent example is Patrick Collison, CEO and co-founder of Stripe (and also an active writer). His content can draw from economics, science, history, Irish cu

In essence, skinless scouting games boost variety at the expense of precision. You can engage a broader set of actors working on other things to send you their deal flow in exchange for value. This is a good idea if your filtering costs are low. Conversely, if deal costs are high, you might want to consider some element of risk. Either financial ri