The ostensible aim of this book is to give advice for those in positions of power to hire better talent. However, Cowen and Gross really just give useful tips for both spotting talent, as well as cultivating more talent in yourself and in others. They begin, “For both of us, the search for rare, transformative talent is so important…. Status-seekers focus on maximizing attention from the perceived elite. Idea-seekers, on the other hand, want to advance knowledge and stimulate curiosity, speaking to the entire room and holding the attention of the group. Intrigue is their reserve currency, and conjectures are often framed as questions, not statements…. Talent search is one of the most important activities in virtually all human lives…. But finding this talent is itself a creative skill, akin to music or art appreciation…. It is the understanding of context that breeds alertness to talent.”
One of Cowen’s favorite questions to begin an interview is, “What are the open tabs on your browser right now?” This is not your everyday ice breaker. He claims, “In essence, you are asking about intellectual habits, curiosity, and what a person does in his or her spare time, all at once…. The question of spare time is a critical one. The very best performers don’t stop practicing for very long, and if you hear or sense that a person doesn’t do much practicing and skill refining in his or her spare time, they probably are poorly suited to assume a top position or to meet very high expectations…. Think of practice habits as one path toward continuously compounding learning and performance…. We both find during interviews that “downtime-revealed preferences” are more interesting than “stories about your prior jobs.””
When conducting an interview, Cowen and Gross suggest sniffing out what motivates the candidate. “Whom is this person responding to or used to performing for? Whom do they view as important to impress? Their parents? A particular peer? High school friends? A former boss? This is revealed at moments when they disclose some angles of their past successes and failures rather than others…. Be alert for the distinction between those who are stuck in their past and those who learned from it but are moving forward and seeking to expand the sphere of people they can impress.”
Cowen and Gross suggest throwing the interviewee off balance with unique questions in a frank style. “Do not be afraid to let a question hang in the air after you ask it; hold the tension as a way of making it clear that you expect an answer, and a direct answer at that…. If you are going to ask achievement-oriented questions, avoid the ordinary by continuing to ask for successive instances of candidate success until the respondent can’t come up with any more…. Ask it again. And again. And again, until the candidate can’t come up with any more answers…. The first time you ask this question, most candidates will draw upon their preparation. Sustained repetition, however, will get the person out of prep sooner or later, usually sooner. The previously cached answers will be exhausted, leaving time for the real meat. You will then see the depth of the candidate’s intellectual resources and emotional resilience.”
The pair also suggest going meta in one’s questioning. “Which of your beliefs are you least rational about? What views do you hold almost irrationally? These questions ask the respondent to give an account of their own self-awareness…. That is what we mean by “meta”—that the person is considering their own thought world from the viewpoint one level higher, more general, and more distant. You are testing their facility with ideas and also how readily they can identify alien viewpoints…. You are pulling the person into the human mode, into the self-awareness mode, into the awkwardness mode, and into a bit of weakness.” Other questions in this vein are, “Which of your beliefs are you most likely wrong about? [And] the most brutal of all the meta questions is: How do you think this interview is going?”
Another field of fruitful inquiry is judging a person’s own ambition. “How successful do you want to be? [Or] how ambitious are you?” Obviously, this has a lot to do with self-awareness as well. “The degree of a person’s ambition is pretty valuable to know, and it gives you a clear sense of their potential upside. It also offers you a sense of a person’s self-knowledge and of how they present and defend that self-knowledge when they are in an unexpected situation.” They do give this caveat, “As always, be aware of your cultural context.”
Online interviews require a different skillset and expectations. “With an online interview it is much harder to use body language and eye contact to bond and establish trust…. Screen calls can be relatively impersonal…. It is likely that the interviewee will find it harder to take risks…. When interviewed, often we start an anecdote or story and rely on implicit visual feedback to encourage or discourage us from proceeding further…. So interviewees will often be more boring, risk-averse, and homogenized…. When you use distance communications you are missing out on at least three distinct sources of knowledge: social presence, information richness, and the full synchronicity of back-and-forth…. The online medium raises the influence and stature of people who can get to the point quickly.”
Cowen and Gross spend a great deal of time parsing out the Five Factor Personality Theory and how it applies to employment success. They claim, “One of the essential skills in thinking about personality is to be able to take a claim about personality and job and realize how that claim is context-dependent rather than universal.” Another caveat, “Our main enterprise is prediction of talent, and in that sense we can learn something from correlations without always understanding the underlying causal processes.” Age matters too. “Personality traits correlate more strongly with income beginning when workers are in their early thirties, and the correlations peak in strength between the ages of forty and sixty, after which the correlations dwindle significantly.” They cite Marc Andreessen on one major hole in the personality-correlation literature, “Ethics are hard to test for. But watch for any whiff of less than stellar ethics in any candidate’s background or references. And avoid, avoid, avoid. Unethical people are unethical by nature, and the odds of a metaphorical jailhouse conversion are quite low.” Cowen and Gross continue, “This advice is so universal because bad ethics in a workplace can spread like cancer…. In part because of the contagion effect, it seems that the costs of having a single toxic worker are greater than the benefits of replacing an average worker with a superstar worker.” In general, remember that “what predicts well for the median worker is not always what predicts well for the top performers and the stars.” Finally, they argue, “Five Factor theory is useful because it is a “sticky” language, one that your co-workers can readily adopt, share, and eventually innovate upon…. Simply having such a common language in the hiring or talent search process is most of the value in the concept.”
Stamina is one trait Cowen and Gross rate highly. “Many high-status professions, such as medicine, law, and academia, put younger performers through some pretty brutal stamina tests in the early years of their career…. So if we meet an individual who exhibits stamina, we immediately upgrade the chance of that person having a major impact, and that the individual will be able to invest in compound returns to learning and improvement over time…. What you want is a kind of conscientiousness directed at the kind of focused practice and thus compound learning that will boost intelligence on the job.”
Sam Altman suggests, “The rate of improvement is often more important than the current absolute ability.” This is more and more important the younger the hire. Cowen and Gross return again and again to the relevance of compound returns. “You might think that other evaluators already understand the power of compound returns to self-improvement, but there is good evidence that most individuals do not think very effectively in terms of exponential processes…. One of your most significant skills as a talent evaluator is to develop a sense of when people are moving along a compound returns curve or not. So much of personality theory focuses on observing levels or absolute degrees of personality traits. You should instead focus on whether the person is experiencing positive rates of change for dynamism, intellect, maturity, ambition, stamina, and other relevant factors.” Another question Cowen likes to ask is, “What is it you do to practice that is analogous to how a pianist practices scales? Tyler likes to think of many jobs in a way that a professional musician or athlete would find natural…. By asking this question, you learn what the person is doing to achieve ongoing improvement…. You also learn how the person thinks about continual self-improvement, above and beyond whatever practices they engage in.”
Finally, Cowen and Gross have their own list of personality quirks that they find predict well for success. “Sturdiness is the quality of getting work done every day, with extreme regularity and without long streaks of non-achievement. Sturdiness seems to be especially valuable in people working on longer-term projects…. Some will call it ambition, some will call it extraversion, but there’s a certain vitality to individuals that can be striking. They talk quickly, move quickly, and in general seem to be enthralled with life. They run all possible combinations of ideas through their heads, if only to better understand the possibilities. Along these lines, they tend to be high in openness as a personality trait. We call this quality “generativeness.” If you hang around people like this, you are likely to come up with new ideas from your interactions…. Generative people are valuable whether or not you agree with them…. Insecure overachievement, as we call it, is the (somewhat neurotic) quality of never quite feeling comfortable with your output, despite knowing at a deep level that it is good…. Happiness is, in our opinion, an underrated quality to look for in people, at least when it comes to predicting their success. Always having a smile and a sense of amusement can be a powerful quality, ensuring that the person is almost always invited to participate in another endeavor…. The trait of adhesiveness, which overlaps with the concept of a “team player,” is increasingly important as production grows more complex and roles become more specialized…. Social intelligence is at a premium, above and beyond whatever import you might assign to intelligence more generally…. Teams skills add as much to productivity as does the overall intelligence of the group…. One trait we would draw your attention to as especially important is the ability to perceive, understand, and climb complex hierarchies…. Too often people will stick with the tasks they feel comfortable with. If someone is good at identifying, tackling, and climbing hierarchies, it is a sign that they know how to allocate their efforts and that they don’t let their insecurities blind themselves to the larger picture…. Other individuals choose goals that are too large and too indistinct, or which do not have useful intermediate outputs, test points, and checkpoints along the way…. Knowing how to perceive and climb the right hierarchies is one of the most stringent but also most universal tests available. It requires emotional self-regulation, perceptiveness, ambition, vision, proper sequencing, and enough order in one’s activities to actually get somewhere.”
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