How to identify talent: Five lessons from the NFL draft
https://behavioralscientist.org/how-to-identify-talent-five-lessons-from-the-nfl-draft/
Yet, if there is one consistent yet underappreciated principle for making good hires, it is that process beats technology. It turns out that best practices in hiring have much in common with what psychologists have preached for decades.
The best teams have philosophies and policies that firmly guide the draft process. There are few organizations capable of doing that consistently, and it’s a real advantage for those who can.
#1: Understand Your Goal
To paraphrase Lewis Carroll, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. An easy way to flub a hire from the beginning is to skip asking exactly what it is you’re looking for. People often don’t understand their decision objectives, but the most successful sports teams are clear about their goal and don’t stray from the principles and attributes they’ve established.
#2: Keep Your Judges Apart
Don’t let people talk to each other or see other’s opinions before providing their own, expose the candidate to judges in different ways and at different points in time, and bring people with different perspectives into the process. More independence is often the biggest improvement an organization can easily make in their hiring process.
#3: Break the Candidate Into Parts …
For a more reliable evaluation, you need to break the objective into component parts and evaluate them separately. Daniel Kahneman recognized the importance of this step years ago when designing performance evaluations for the Israeli military and has advocated for them since.
#4: … and Bring Them Back Together Mechanically
If your hiring rankings aren’t perfectly replicable, you have noise in the process; if you have noise in the process, you’re more likely to take bad candidates and pass on good ones. Replicability is a referendum on your process. – The single best way to reduce noise is to aggregate opinions mechanically.
#5: Keep Score
The trick is to capture those judgments and track them over time to learn how predictive they are. This applies to all judgments. Hiring is best thought of as a forecasting process, and the only way to improve forecasts is to map them against results and refine the process over time. By doing this, teams learn which tests matter most, which questions are more informative, and which scouts are best with each position on the field.
Many organizations don’t bother keeping score, because the payoff is delayed; it can be years before enough data arrive for reliable insights. The kind of foresight and humility required is exactly what distinguishes good management.