Five reasons why this year’s Super Bowl coaches need to read Hiring Greatness

Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Kansas City Chiefs coaches Bruce Arians and Andy Reid have no doubt faced a number of tough decisions during this most unusual NFL season. But those choices could have been just a little bit easier had they only read Hiring Greatness: How to Recruit Your Dream Team and Crush the Competition.

That’s because the book is a gold mine of real-world lessons and practical tools for anyone tasked with evaluating and selecting high-end talent, be they cornerbacks or financial executives. Authors and executive recruiters David E. Perry and Mark J. Haluska are owners of a 99.97 percent executive recruitment success rate earned over thousands of executive searches.

Here are five lessons two of the NFL’s most successful head coaches – and anyone else looking to attract, recruit and retain the best talent available – can learn from Hiring Greatness.

 1)    Everybody is available. Although NFL head coaches and general managers must abide by certain rules to ensure they don’t tamper with other teams’ players, enough shocking trades over the years have proven anyone’s available for the right price. The same goes for the perfect executive. By adopting an abundance mindset and considering every executive as available (barring any hands-off restrictions on the part of your executive recruiter), you’ll end up talking to the best talent available anywhere – and not just those on the waiver wire.

 2)   It’s not just about numbers. It's also about people. Fantasy leaguers look for the gaudiest numbers at every position when building their teams. But real managers know winning teams need chemistry and can’t just be a collection of me-first all-stars. Hiring Greatness teaches talent evaluators to place just as much emphasis on the organizational and cultural “fit” of a candidate as they do on hard skills and achievements.

 3)    Be your own scouting department. Successful talent evaluators and recruiters are notorious research junkies. Whether hunting for offense, defense, special teams, or your next great VP of sales and marketing, you can find almost everything you need to jump-start your search online. For executive recruiters, research using public information from sources like ZoomInfo and LinkedIn allows for continuous identification of high-performance candidates with every search.

 4)    Know who you want before you see them. Just like an NFL team might look for a punt return specialist or veteran player with playoff savvy, recruiters also have specific needs depending on the opportunity in question. Detailed research helps recruiters create meticulous performance profiles on the main types of suitable candidates before meeting anyone. This intelligence allows comparisons of candidate types against each other, and against other variables including company size and maturity, geography, market positioning, and company culture.

 5)    Recognize that all players (and people) have patterns. Similar to how some players don’t fare well on the road or in high-pressure situations, business people also have patterns of success and failure. Start by asking potential candidates about their career, beginning with when they left college all the way to the present. Do the conditions under which your candidate was successful in the past exist in your organization? Listening to their story will give you 95 percent of what you need to determine if they’ll be a good fit.

Assembling a winning team isn’t easy – whether you’re recruiting for personnel on the field or in the boardroom. But your efforts can be more effective if you’ve got a solid game plan. The recruiting secrets in Hiring Greatness: How to Recruit Your Dream Team and Crush the Competition

David Perry - Landing the kind of role that can change your life for the good - forever - doesn't come from playing by the old rules. Nicknamed the "Rogue Recruiter" by The Wall Street Journal, David is one of North America's most sought-after independent executive recruiters. He teaches companies not only how to hire the right executives (and keep them), but also candidates, on how to make business decisions that will shape their careers.