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Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World

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Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World

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Overview

The art and science of talent search: how to spot, assess, woo, and retain highly talented people.

How do you find talent with a creative spark? To what extent can you predict human creativity, or is human creativity something irreducible before our eyes, perhaps to be spotted or glimpsed by intuition, but unique each time it appears?

Obsessed with these questions, renowned economist Tyler Cowen and venture capitalist and entrepreneur Daniel Gross set out to study the art and science of finding talent at the highest level: the people with the creativity, drive, and insight to transform an organization and make everyone around them better.

Cowen and Gross guide the reader through the major scientific research areas relevant for talent search, including how to conduct an interview, how much to weight intelligence, how to judge personality and match personality traits to jobs, how to evaluate talent in online interactions such as Zoom calls, why talented women are still undervalued and how to spot them, how to understand the special talents in people who have disabilities or supposed disabilities, and how to use delegated scouts to find talent. Talent appreciation is an art, but it is an art you can improve through study and experience.

Identifying underrated, brilliant individuals is one of the simplest ways to give yourself an organizational edge, and this is the book that will show you how to do that. Talent is both for people searching for talent and for those who wish to be searched for, found, and discovered.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250275813
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/17/2022
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	225,157
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

TYLER COWEN (Ph.D.) holds a chair in economics at George Mason University. He has authored many books—including The Complacent Class and Big Business—and writes the most read economics blog worldwide, Marginal Revolution. Tyler is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, has written regularly for The New York Times, and contributes to a range of newspapers and periodicals.

DANIEL GROSS is an entrepreneur and investor. At 18, he was accepted into Y-Combinator, the youngest founder ever at the time. He founded Cue, an AI-powered search engine, which was acquired by Apple in 2013. In 2018, Daniel founded Pioneer, a search engine for the millions of “Lost Einstein’s” — extraordinarily creative people around the world who have the talent, but lack opportunity.

1 Why Talent Matters 1

2 How to Interview and Ask Questions 21

3 How to Engage with People Online 56

4 What Is Intelligence Good For? 79

5 What Is Personality Good For? Part One: The Basic Traits 98

6 What Is Personality Good For? Part Two: Some More Exotic Concepts 122

7 Disability and Talent 148

8 Why Talented Women and Minorities Are Still Undervalued 171

9 The Search for Talent in Beauty, Sports, and Gaming, or How to Make Scouts Work for You 205

10 How to Convince Talent to Join Your Cause 229

Acknowledgments 245

Appendix: Good Questions 247

Notes 249

Index 269

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

03/28/2022
Spotting talent is a talent itself, according to this thoughtful guide from economist Cowen (The Complacent Class) and entrepreneur Gross. Most businesses miss out on excellent would-be hires because of their “bureaucratic approach” to searching. To spot candidates with great potential, the authors recommend ditching interview questions that elicit canned answers, and opting instead for “larger picture” questions such as “Which of your beliefs are you least rational about?” There’s advice, as well, for interaction online now that the “talent search has become more global”: in Zoom interviews, leaders should remember that they’re “looking at distorted filters.” (Someone being too loud, for example, may just be unsure “how sound is reproduced in virtual meetings.”) On diversity and inclusion, Cowen and Gross write that minority candidates face extra challenges: women who are perceived as “aggressive,” for example, earn less than men who are (which, to remedy, the authors recommend giving the “non nice girl” extra consideration). Their point that one should get beyond one’s biases to spot talent is well made, and their unconventional suggestions actionable. Managers looking to shake up the interview process will find this worth a look. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Talent is what happens when two brilliant and profoundly iconoclastic minds apply their imagination to one of the hardest of all business problems: the search for good people. I loved it.”
—Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author of The Bomber Mafia and The Tipping Point

"Talent is everything—whether in investing and building startups, or in other creative endeavors. Between product, market, and people, I've always bet on the last one as the biggest predictor of success. But while talent may be everywhere, it's unevenly distributed, and hard to 'find.' So how do we better discover, filter, and match the best talent with the best opportunities? This book shares how, based on both scientific research and the authors' own experiences. The future depends on this know-how."
—Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz

"The most important job of any leader is to find individuals with a 'creative spark,' and the potential to discover, invent and build the future. If you want to learn the art and science of spotting and empowering exceptional people, Talent is brimming with fresh insights and actionable advice."
—Eric Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Futures and former CEO of Google

"Two of the premier talent spotters working today, Cowen and Gross have written the definitive history of identifying talent. Anyone who is interested in innovation, entrepreneurship, or the roots of America's start-up economy must read this book."
—Christina Cacioppo, CEO and co-founder of Vanta

"I do not know of any skills more worth developing than the ability to find exceptional undeveloped talent. I have spent many years trying to get good at that, and I was still astonished by how much I learned reading this book."
—Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI

"Talent is a provocative tour of the considerations and assumptions that go into hiring."
—Time

"[A] thoughtful guide … Managers looking to shake up the interview process will find this worth a look."
—Publishers Weekly

"A useful and entertaining map for companies looking toward a creative future."
—Kirkus

"[A] compelling and thought-provoking guide to finding great people."
—Forbes

"Talent presents new insights into the process of hiring. … In an era of information overload, Cowen and Gross have provided a useful book to remind us that if talent is rare, as it surely is, the ability to spot it may be equally exceptional."
—City Journal

From the Publisher

2022-01-18
Why recruiting creative people is the primary difference between a company that thrives and one that merely survives.
Cowen, a professor of economics and bestselling author of The Great Stagnation and other bestsellers, and Gross, a venture capitalist in the tech field, have been consulting on this issue for many years. Establishing the creativity of a job applicant is different than determining technical skills, and the authors provide advice about interview questions. They suggest focusing on what the person does in their nonwork time. Personality, they note, is revealed during weekends. Another good one: “What are the open tabs on your browser right now?” The aim is to assess the applicant’s thought processes and willingness to embrace new thinking. In fact, the interview should be more of a free-flowing discussion then a structured Q&A. In an intriguing chapter on the use of IQ and personality tests, the authors point out that such metrics can be helpful, but their limitations should be understood. Creativity appears in odd places, and Cowen and Gross advise employers to cast a net wide enough to catch candidates from historically marginalized communities. Some creative people can be cantankerous, even anti-social, so there might be a need to design work-from-home or similar arrangements. Fit the person to the job and sometimes the job to the person. Along the way, the authors offer an interesting exploration of how recruiting talented women differs from recruiting talented men—and how male interviewers should allow for their own biases. In the concluding chapters, the authors deal with the issues of retaining creative people. The key is to keep them stimulated and challenged, with rewards and recognition that are appropriate to each individual. All this takes effort and time for the employer, and recruiting and managing creative people can be more art than science. But in the end, as the authors show, the returns are often well worth the investment.
A useful and entertaining map for companies looking toward a creative future.

Kirkus Reviews

Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World

Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World

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