How Experienced Is Your Recruiting Team?

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For both baseball and business fanatics alike, the 2011 movie Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, tells one of the greatest underdog stories of our time. Based on the best selling book by Michael Lewis, the movie begins with the Oakland Athletics struggling to compete in the unfair game of Major League Baseball. The team’s GM, Billy Beane, requests a budget increase to acquire the top talent needed to win but is denied. If that isn’t troubling enough, his veteran team of scouts are resistant to his new ways of recruiting talent.

Losing Stinks

What can a decade old movie like Moneyball teach you about recruiting top talent? Well, it may actually depend on your recruiting team’s experience and compete level. You see, Billy Beane was an intense competitor who hated losing top talent to the competition. His goal was to win, not keep the status quo. So before he reexamined his recruiting process, he redefined his recruiting problem. Only then did Billy look for better solutions. Check out this pivotal scene where Billy finally gets to the root of the problem after listening to his scouting team’s typical babble.

Problem Refined

Change Stinks

Unlike in the movie, you may not need to implement a new recruiting system or completely break from traditional best practices. But perhaps you need to refine the problem you’ll trying to solve in 2021. Or perhaps you need to readjust your team’s competitive and creative vibes in 2021. One thing is for certain, you must think differently. For example, Billy’s new system added more data-driven insight and less reliance on traditional key performance indicators on players. Ask your recruiting team if their current system could benefit from such changes. If so, be aware of the roadblocks to business change. As the clip above reveals, the biggest are discomfort and fear. Over the years, perhaps previous recruiting team’s have similar discomfort when asked to think out of the box.

Recruiting Today

As it turns out, Billy Beane’s new analytical system has actually become the foundation of many successful sports teams and businesses. However, despite the power of analytics, it’s up to you, as the recruiter, to look in the right places and analyze the right KPIs. In the end, Moneyball resonated with not only the competitor in each of us but the pathfinder looking to inspire or manage institutional change.

Just like high-priced players don’t determine a team’s MLB season, high-priced talent doesn’t determine your brand’s success.  The key to both winning games and building brand value is finding the undervalued or underutilized talent that consistently outperforms their peers. In our next blog post, we’ll describe how to find these brand MVP’s in 2021. Most importantly, we’ll help you think differently about talent acquisition heading into the new year.

Next Steps