Talent Rules

"I'll know it when I see it."

How often have you said that about your area of expertise or your One True Love?

When we conduct strategic workforce analysis or we examine business processes, how often do the discussions around employees center on qualifications, skill sets, strategic business decisions, or 'hire-to-retire' cycles? That's right, nearly all the time.

But when we think of people who do the work -- make the latte, create the stage effects, sell the penthouse apartment, close the deal, win the race, sew up that hole in your child's heart, land the fighter jet on an aircraft carrier, or come on be honest -- you -- we talk about talent.

Talent rules.

Competency models are good for outlining minimum acceptable behavior. Ironically they were originally developed at the US Office of Personnel Management in the 1990s to describe sets of knowledge, skills, and abilities that reflected outstanding performance, but along the way they too have been degraded to reflect either management fads -- "grit," anyone? -- or the lowest level of performance we can accept in this job. (And no, recruiting at 'elite' colleges does not change that).

Talent rules.

Talent is about exceptional performance, not minimal performance. The demands of the business of cybersecurity in the age of AI make it more so. Do the thought experiment: if you put minimally qualified personnel -- but they're competent -- up against bots and hackers and increasingly sophisticated insider threats, what's going to happen?

Answer: check out our monthly litany of the hacked feature!

Talent rules under two conditions. First, it rules when everyone in the role must be minimally qualified. Second, it rules when exceptional performance matters. In a world gone by where labor markets were different, talent always ruled -- and we personally did studies with theme park personnel, automotive parts store employees, hedge fund managers in Europe and Africa, etc., to prove it. We propose that in the early 21st century organizations have upped their HR game to the extent that all employees meet minimum qualifications, and the result is that most performance predictors now are (to use a technical term) attenuated: everyone gets an A.

The flip-side of that is that many organizations are bad at measuring performance; it's the evil underside of 'everyone gets an A' as in teachers can't figure out A from B from C work. When they measure performance meaningfully, they find that talented people outperform less talented people.

In short: when outcomes matter, as they do in cybersecurity, talent rules.

Ask us how we can help you hire for what rules: cybersecurity talent.