I remember being lined up in the playground at primary school with the team captains at the front of the group, taking it in turns to pick people for the afternoons’ sports (I was usually selected somewhere in the last third). Well, imagine there are 32 captains, and they take it in turns to pick for their team. Now imagine the captain of the worst team picks first, the next-worse team picks second, and so on all the way through to the best. Keep repeating the cycle until everyone is chosen.
Now imagine that you’re the captain. You’ve tracked the growth and performance of every player over the last decade. You’ve analysed it in detail, rewinding and rewatching hours of film of their play, all available online. You’ve watched them compete over a series of strength, speed and athletic challenges and assessed their metrics against others. You’ve spoken to friends and family, past coaches and associates, and to the players themselves. In depth. In detail. Drawing judgements of character.
In short, you have almost perfect information about all the people that are available for selection. It should be almost impossible to screw this up. Especially for the captains of the worst teams, that have the first pick of all the players, the opportunity to pick the best of the best, the blue-chippers.
How confident are you that you will make the right decision and make the right selection?
Because in the workplace perfect information is impossible. Unless you are recruiting your friends, you’ll probably meet candidates over a couple of interviews, maybe three, setting them a task and asking them some questions. If you’ve spent more than two hours with a candidate, who you haven’t known anything about before (apart from some LinkedIn scrolling, perhaps), you’ll be doing well. Even better if any of this involved a face-to-face meeting. What’s your strike rate? How do you grade out over the years? If we assume a normal distribution, there’ll be outliers, of course – those you cut loose during probation, those stars who fly the moment they join – but generally most people will fall into the OK category.
The question remains: is recruiting to our teams any more than a lottery? Not withstanding the challenge of marketing (how we package up our requirements into neatly defined parcels), how much information do we really need to make a good decision? If you are more logical and analytical, perhaps you want lots so you can weigh up the evidence and reach a decision. If you’re more instinctual and emotional perhaps less; you’ll be more likely to trust your gut. What do we under-estimate in this process?
The route to become a professional American football (NFL) player is to be a standout talent at high school and university before being selected by a pro team. It’s this selection process that I’ve described above: 260 places are filled by those deemed the best in college by teams picking in turn, worst to best1. You might think with almost perfect knowledge there would be few screw-ups along the way, but that’s not the case.
Let’s look at examples. Arguably the greatest player of all time was selected 199th overall (Tom Brady). Last year’s losing Super Bowl quarterback was selected last in the draft – a position cheerfully nicknamed Mr Irrelevant. When Hall-of-Fame quarterback Peyton Manning was selected first overall in the draft there was massive debate about whether Ryan Leaf should be selected ahead of him. Selected #2, he famously flamed out after four years2. And current Super Bowl MVP and challenger for Brady’s crown, Patrick Mahomes, was passed up by nine other teams before being selected #10 overall. Given such perfect information, why do teams still get it wrong?
Three clear reasons stand out: context, intangibles and bias. Context is the situation within the team that the player goes to. Will the external environment enable the player to flourish or will they flounder: their development is conditional on the way the team is run, the philosophy of its play, the quality of its coaches, the fit of their talents within the team as a whole.
Perhaps more crucially, what are their intangibles – their internal drive to succeed, to grow, to be the best they can be? We see this in every situation, magnified in sports: the most talented aren’t always the best players. You need more than talent alone: you need to love the game, love the process of improvement. Being a great player or a great person alone is not enough. Do you want a great player with massive talent but who doesn’t love the game or has a questionable character? Do you want a great person that loves the game but is not so gifted or doesn’t see the game instinctively? What’s the appropriate balance between the two? Because let’s be honest it’s your heart and love (of the game) that gets you through the extra mile, the hardest times, when all else fails.
Finally, how much bias do teams have in their decision-making processes? It’s easy to see the halo effect play out whereby officials at a team fall in love with a particular player, for whatever reason, or a particular person. Just like falling in love we can be blinded to faults or red flags. Who’s playing Devil’s Advocate, putting counter-positions on the table?
Each team during the NFL draft3 will select multiple players: nominally one in each of seven rounds. This offers another wrinkle to the process: do the teams take a portfolio approach to recruitment, looking at the whole, or do they see it as a set of one-off choices? This might not seem an obvious consideration but the advantage of the former is that you can mitigate risk by looking at the group as a whole. It allows a team to blend the need to fill glaring gaps within the team with the desire to select the best players available.
Despite all this information the recruitment process remains more art than science. Brady got his chance through an injury to the incumbent quarterback and played for arguably the greatest coach of all time. Leaf went to a struggling team that couldn’t surround him with the talent to succeed – and had challenges of his own to overcome. Mahomes went to a team with a great set of coaches, a clear vision and stability. This isn’t to say that success always follows being in the right place with the right people at the right time, but it definitely helps. It can elevate the performance of some, or – in the wrong place with the wrong people at the wrong time – crush the performance of others.
Given this learning from the NFL, is it little wonder that it can be so hard to recruit the right people for the right role? What, truly, are the odds of making a great selection through our recruitment process? Well, it seems to me we can increase the odds in a few core ways:
- attend to the context and make it one in which new staff can thrive;
- align people with our strategy (mission and values);
- call out and address bias in our processes;
- seek those driven by intrinsic motivation and support their personal growth;
- take a portfolio/cohort approach, recruiting several people at the same time (as opposed to an incremental, single-shot, vacancy-by-vacancy approach).
- learn from every recruitment process.
Perhaps over time we can see the patterns that emerge from these changes and respond to them accordingly.
- Followers of the NFL will know it’s not quite as simple as I set out here, as teams can trade their picks and there is usually a vibrant market on the days of the draft. But as these nuances would distract from the argument, out of necessity I’ve left them out. ↩︎
- https://theathletic.com/4453358/2023/04/27/peyton-manning-ryan-leaf-nfl-draft/ ↩︎
- The 2024 NFL draft is on the 25th-27th April in Detroit and the analysis of every potential player is, as usual, in overdrive: see, for example https://www.pff.com/news/draft-2024-nfl-draft-board-big-board ↩︎
Ian Burbidge 
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