Three Steps to Calibrating Talent for Fit

When I was in elementary school, I became frustrated working on teams selected by a numbering system. Some people understood the project goals and got to work. Others focused their effort on destroying what we built or picking fights. Some simply goofed off.

I would come home discouraged and explain my experience to my Dad. He listened patiently, then said, "It's hard to soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys." So often in life, we are randomly selected to work together. Clearly some people are of the same caliber, while others were not. It is nearly impossible to perform at your highest level when working on teams where everyone is not an eagle.

How do you calibrate talent? As the CEO, how do you make sure the team you put together consists of eagles?

Here are 3 steps that help:

1.  Identify core values you want your team to share.
2.  Identify 6 key goals you want to accomplish by adding to your team. Ferret out what accomplishments your candidate needs to have met or exceeded, for example, running a $50 million division versus a $5 billion division.
3. Identify 4 key attributes in your current team that makes them successful in your company. For example, how do they manage tough situations? How do they communicate vision for their teams? Is there a bias towards execution or building consensus before execution?

A good professional recruiter helps you identify these personal attributes and prioritize them. Armed with this information about your context, the recruiter can identify and present only candidates who meet or exceed your criteria:

• The recruiter knows people and the entire pool you are looking at. It's easy for us to calibrate talent. The best recruiters remember great talent, and often keep them top of mind.
• Good recruiters then vet people for "fit". We know whether someone will work well with you, and only send the right people your way.

Our job is to know the universe of talent in the C suite and to calibrate that talent. To be sure we have a list of A Talent ( eagles), we not only dig into our network, we also continue to identify, source, and screen talent for each and every search, providing you fresh talent for each role we are hired to help you fill. This ensures you get new - and likely unfamiliar - candidates to assess on your own. We make it possible for you to hire the very best talent available.