The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

I've hired a bunch of people in my time, and I've learned this: Hiring a "B" player is easy; hiring an "A" is much tougher. So, I'm always looking to understand how to find that haystack needle -- the person who's going to help lead my little organization into places I hadn't even considered. After all, most of us aren't making widgets any more, but we're paid to think and create.

Frankly, that's why I love this book. Anders, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor, takes us into hiring environments we never would see -- the U.S. Army's Special Forces, Facebook's puzzlers, a casting director. There's fun story-telling here (I love how the hiring director of the Special Forces provides exhausted soldiers with too few pieces of chicken at the end of the day to see how they will work together).

More importantly, with a palette that colorful, Anders teaches us critical ways of viewing potential hires. While some of the info he gleans isn't all that new (i.e. appreciating failures), most of The Rare Find is filled with smart, fresh tips. My favorite is the "jagged resume," which takes us to the heart of the modern, thinking economy. Anders shows how smart managers recognize the elements a potential hire has garnered from detours, missteps, even vacations. Each of those nuggets contributes to how the best, most thoughtful hires will bring critical skills to a new job.

My copy of this book is filled with underlines and dog-ears. Don't ask to borrow it -- I'm keeping this one.

I wasn't sure I would enjoy reading "The Rare Find." Yes, the subject matter--finding remarkably talented people overlooked by others--interested me, but I was concerned the book might present a one-size-fits-all recipe for success. I also wondered just how interesting author George Anders could make the topic. Well, to get to the point, my concerns proved to be unfounded. I not only discovered this book to be very useful and informative, but quite interesting, too. It's a real page-turner.

I suppose I should have known better. Having read Michael Lewis' "Moneyball" (which I recommend) about the use of innovative approaches in finding exceptional baseball players overlooked by most major league teams, I should have realized that the topic can be made compelling. Like Lewis, Anders has woven the real-life stories of people and organizations into his discussions of what works in finding rare talent.

For example, when the U.S. Army's elite Special Forces look for those soldiers who will become effective Green Berets, they don't simply look for the most exceptional cases of physical strength and endurance. Physical capabilities are essential, of course, but they aren't necessarily enough. It turns out that watching small teams of Special Forces candidates try to move an old, rusted trailer a few miles can be very revealing about the leadership, persistence and flexibility components of the job. As the reader of this book becomes engrossed in the descriptions of the soldiers' efforts, through their stories the reader learns something about finding the key components of success.

This book is literally one seemingly unique (yet pattern-forming) story after another. There's the story of the remarkable success of the University of Utah's legendary graphics team, composed in large part of people who didn't fit well elsewhere. There's the story of how innovative organizations like Facebook found creative ways to compete with much larger companies that could devote countless hours to interviewing potential employees. For example, faced with the need to rapidly scale up their company, Facebook created innovative programming challenges ("puzzles") that it posted on its website. These puzzles were not like the famous brainteasers reportedly used years ago by big software companies (for example, "How many gold balls could you fit in a Boeing 747?"). Rather, Facebook's puzzles took hours of creative, innovative programming, and that's exactly what they were looking for. Unsurprisingly, they found a number of overlooked people in unexpected places, like Portland, Maine, for example. Indeed, a central message of this book is that exceptional talent doesn't always look to be quite so exceptional, until you look much closer.

The stories just keep on coming. Some involve people you may have heard of, like Yankees relief pitcher Mariano Rivera, Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling, or country singer Taylor Swift. These exceptionally talented people were not obvious stars from the beginning. Their stories are fascinating, and through them the reader continues to learn about the process of finding rare talent. Some of the organizations described by Anders, like Teach for America or Johns Hopkins Hospital, are also well known, and their stories about finding exceptional talent are also compelling. There's more--much more--but hopefully you can see how the author has used a lot of research regarding rare individuals in order to weave a compelling narrative. If the subject of finding rare talent interests you, this book is worthy of your consideration.

George Anders sets himself the goal to show his audience how to discover what he calls the "Rare Find" before somebody else discovers him/her. For this purpose, Mr. Anders comes up with a process that is articulated around three premises:
1. Widen one's view of talent;
2. Find inspirations that are hidden in plain sight; and
3. Simplify one's search for talent.

The candidate's core character is central to this quest. The nine character traits that matter the most to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) when choosing new agents are a good template to be used in this quest. These nine character traits are initiative, perseverance, compatibility, discipline, trainability, judgment, loyalty, leadership, and maturity. Mr. Anders often touches on these personality traits when he examines how the best talent recruiters from the public and private sectors proceed to find these rare "birds" that make all the difference between success and failure. Mr. Anders relates the experience of recruiters from the Green Berets, the music industry, new start-ups, multinationals, or hospitals, to name a few sectors of activity.

In summary, Mr. Anders gives some useful tips to his readers to broaden their horizon while being systematic in their search for the "Rare Find" that is too often hidden in plain sight.