The NFL Draft recently took place amid months of hype, player interviews, private workouts, private investigations, and mock drafts. Teams have made their recent selections and will now proclaim to their fans how ecstatic they are to have landed the players that will help get their team to the next level. General Managers will go out of their way to create excitement, implying, and sometimes even stating that their player evaluation approach was superior to all of the other teams who passed on the players they drafted.<\/p>\n
Of course, time will tell. The players will prove through their performance that they were selected significantly higher or lower than they should have been.<\/p>\n
I can’t help but compare the rigor that major league sports teams use to decide who to employ to how companies handle their selection process. Data-driven decision making has become all the rage in sports. I heard one General Manager state that there is no room in the process for their gut feelings. He said they have quantified the evaluation of every aspect of draftees’ profiles and that they will draft exclusively based on that.<\/p>\n
Which takes this article to the story of George (name has been changed). George was fresh out of school and applied for an administrative assistant position at a bank. This was a time when there was more supply than demand for positions like this and, frankly, you didn’t see many guys in a secretarial role in such a conservative environment. Somehow, George made it through the first stages of the recruiting process and interviewed with department managers, including me.<\/p>\n
It was easy to see that George was a great guy. But in terms of his credentials, he certainly was not the traditional candidate. When we asked him about long term career objectives, he said he wanted to be a landscape architect\u2026which admittedly was a little tough to connect to a banking role. We chalked that up to his ability to dream and his honesty. George was clearly smart, ambitious, and his career had a lot of runway. We believed that George would be a great fit for our organization, our team, and our role. We knew that hiring George would be risky because he didn’t have the track record, but thought that it would come with high reward.<\/p>\n
We were right. We hired George, he did great work, and his career took off. George has not yet become a landscape architect, but he still has time!<\/p>\n
The point is that sometimes we can become obsessed with the things we can measure and forget that a significant part of leadership is to make decisions when the data points are ambiguous.<\/strong> We need to use a blend of the objective and the subjective and make the best decisions we can. As it applies to hiring, the stakes are admittedly high. The downside to a poor hire is significant. That’s why doing your homework and investing time in recruiting is critical. But ‘fit’ is subjective by definition and fit matters a lot. Maybe George’s story would be a good one for the NFL teams to take to heart.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I can’t help but compare the rigor that major league sports teams use to decide who to employ to how companies handle their selection process. Data-driven decision making has become all the rage in sports. I heard one General Manager state that there is no room in the process for their gut feelings. He said they have quantified the evaluation of every aspect of draftees’ profiles and that they will draft exclusively based on that. Which takes this article to the story of George…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":606,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[13,10,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepeopleadvantage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepeopleadvantage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepeopleadvantage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepeopleadvantage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepeopleadvantage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thepeopleadvantage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":613,"href":"https:\/\/thepeopleadvantage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601\/revisions\/613"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepeopleadvantage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepeopleadvantage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepeopleadvantage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepeopleadvantage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}