The Secret Sauce

By Frank Mulligan ñ Accetis International, Talent Software & Recruit China

For many pundits, thought leaders and regular citizens talent seems to be those elements of a person that we cannot see but that seem to explain the fact that they can get certain things done. Things the rest of us mere mortals have great difficulty with.

We can see and measure candidate intelligence, so thatís not talent.

We can see and measure their skills, so thatís not talent either.

We can see a lot of other things like training, experience, completed projects etc.

but because they are all clear and measurable, theyíre not talent either.

In the end what we have left is that talent is the secret sauce that the employee or job candidate is holding back from us. Sneaky candidates!. Itís the thing that Tiger Woods has when he hits the ball, or Yao Ming has when he throws a basketball. Indefinable, impossible to understand and unmeasurable.

Or so we are led to believe.

The problem with the talent-as-a-God-given-gift paradigm is that it ignores the fact that Tiger Woodís father started training him when he was 6 years old. It ignores the 100ís and 1,000ís of hours of training that Yao Ming put in back in China before he made it big in the NBA, and the fact that he is over 7 feet tall.

Not surprisingly, all of these issues are measurable.

Interviewing
When we look for talent in the hiring process it is common to hear line managers say that they will know the secret sauce when you present it to them. Theyíre not sure what that means but they will know it when they see it. When the right guy walks in the door they will know they have found their ëperfect candidateí. Then they will tell the Recruiter what talent means, because then they will know. Itís odd that they can never define it beforehand.

But the indefinable can be defined if we look a little deeper. For example, personal impact can seem to fall into the category of secret sauce because it is so subjective. But when you break it down it just means the person is handsome/beautiful, well-dressed, symmetrical, tall, well-shaven, has good posture, dilated pupils and so on.

Those who have strong personal impact give us the instant sense that they are capable. They may not be truly capable but they will give clients the same feeling that we get, and we are looking for personal impact here, not mechanical reasoning skills. In practice, we are not going to measure the various components of personal impact but we could.

The same applies to that perennial favorite, leadership. This is a characteristic that we all find difficult to define precisely because we donít even know if it is a trait that people already have, or one that emerges when needed. But if we can agree the traits that we want in our leaders we can look for people who show strengths in these areas.

A list of such strengths would include issues like communications skills, authority, command, innovativeness and so on. Use a scale 1-5 and a behavioural interview and you are half way to getting an exact measure of leadership. For other issues the methodology would be much the same.

In the end talent is simply the things that professionals can deliver each and every day, as opposed to what has been bestowed upon them. All of these things are measurable.

Just ask any sports coach.

Email frank.mulligan@recruit-china.com
Frank Mulliganís blog - english.talent-software.com