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.
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
A useful and entertaining map for companies looking toward a creative future. --Kirkus
###
Tyler Cowen (Ph.D.) holds the Holbert C. Harris chair in economics at George Mason University. He is the author of Discover Your Inner Economist (2007), Create Your Own Economy (2009), the New York Times bestseller The Great Stagnation (2011), An Economist Get Lunch (2012), Average is Over (2013), and a number of academic books. He writes the most read economics blog worldwide, marginalrevolution.com. He has written regularly for The New York Times and contributes to a wide number 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.