Anders - The rare find: how great talent stands out

How Great Talent Stands Out

GEORGE ANDERS

PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN

PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in the United States of America by Portfolio / Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2011

This paperback edition with a new chapter published 2012

Copyright George Anders, 2011, 2012

All rights reserved

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Anders, George, 1957

The rare find : spotting exceptional talent before everyone else / George Anders.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-1-101-53580-6

1. EmployeesRecruiting. 2. Ability. 3. Gifted persons. 4. Employee selection. I. Title.

HF5549.5.R44A523 2011

658.311dc23

2011020677

Designed by Carla Bolte

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For Betsy, Matthew, and Peter

In early 2005, Todd Carlisle began an experiment. He grabbed a notepad and ticked off twenty factors that might distinguish between hiring great employees and picking the wrong people. His early jottings focused on mainstream data that big companies normally track. Where did candidates go to college? What grades did they muster? How long had they been in the workforce, and so on?

Then Carlisle started popping into executives offices, asking them: What else would you add? His list got bigger. It got weirder. Carlisle didnt mind. Even when there was an outlandish, bite-your-lip quality to someones theories, Carlisle said, Thanks! and logged in the suggestion. Did Eagle Scouts make better employees? How about people who ran their own businesses in childhood? Or people with the single-minded intensity to set a national record in anything, no matter how unrelated to their jobs? What about chess wizards and dodgeball enthusiasts? Carlisle was a human sponge, soaking up every question he heard.

The more the list grew, the more it intrigued people. Nobody important had commissioned this project. Carlisle had dreamed up the idea on his own. Officially, he was just a new guy in human relations with a company laptop and a taupe cubicle. He carried the hazy and not-very-impressive job title of staffing programs manager. But as this affable thirty-year-old kept running around the headquarters of one of Americas most famous companies, powerful people started rooting for him.

One of the companys billionaire cofounders wanted to help out, too. He had emigrated from Russia at age six, settling into a new home in Maryland. By age nine, he was tinkering with a Commodore 64 personal computer that his father had given him as a birthday present. As the two men chatted, Carlisle wondered whether the best employees might have discovered computers at a very early age. That was worth researching, too.

Eventually, Carlisles list topped out at three hundred factors. He had rounded up every business practice, folk saying, and crackpot theory he could find. His company was less than ten years old, yet it already employed nearly five thousand people. By hiring so aggressively from all corners of the world, the company had created a rare cauldron of provocative ideas and remarkable people. It was Carlisles great fortune to be working thereat Googleat just the right time to carry out his project.