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

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.

The bureaucratic approach, as we define it, seeks to minimize error and loss, and it prizes consensus above all else.

Here are a few somewhat more unusual questions we recommend—again, depending on context—with more questions coming in the section on how to get “meta”: “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 are a few somewhat more unusual questions we recommend—again, depending on context—with more questions coming in the section on how to get “meta”: “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

“looking for the cross-sectional variation.” If you don’t understand when and where a particular claim is wrong, you probably don’t understand the claim in the first place,

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,

Status-seekers focus on maximizing attention from the perceived elite. Idea-seekers, on the other hand, want to advance knowledge and stimulate curiosity, speaking to the entire room and holding the attention of the group.

But there is yet another use of personality psychology: namely, as a way of developing a common language so that you and your team can discuss and evaluate claims about personality. We suggest using Five Factor theory in this manner.

Elon Musk personally interviewed the first three thousand employees at SpaceX because he wanted to make sure the company was hiring the right people.