The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else

Anders, a journalist who covered venture capital and business for the Wall Street Journal, investigated how organisations that must find exceptional performers actually do it. He reports from Army Special Forces selection, Facebook's engineering recruitment, Teach for America, professional sports scouting, venture capital, orchestra auditions and surgical residencies.

The argument is that conventional hiring optimises for the absence of flaws, which selects for candidates who are broadly acceptable and rarely outstanding. Organisations that find exceptional people do the opposite. They first define which capabilities actually determine performance in the role, then accept serious weaknesses in every other area. Anders calls this the jagged resume, and he argues that the best candidates are frequently rejected by conventional screening because their record contains something disqualifying.

He identifies specific practices. Auditioning candidates on real work predicts better than interviews. Selection processes that create genuine stress reveal how people behave when tired and uncertain. Looking in places competitors ignore produces cheaper talent, which is why Special Forces recruits from unlikely backgrounds and why some venture investors back founders without pedigree. He also argues for taking the second look at candidates the process rejected, and for treating talent development as part of selection rather than as a later stage.

The evidence is reported case studies rather than data, and the selection of cases is not systematic. The book does not engage seriously with the industrial psychology literature on selection validity, which supports structured interviews and work samples and is more sceptical of the intuitive judgement some of his subjects rely on. Facebook's recruiting practices as described are also now dated.