Here’s something scary around smarts I’d like to track in the world of recruiting, esp. when it comes to high-flying companies who portray themselves as the place everyone wants to work at. Just how many people does such a company end up rejecting as not smart enough to work for them which a competitor hires and succeeds tremendously?

History is replete with examples of evaluators who said someone was incompetent, unintelligent, unqualified, etc. only to later be seen as a genius with tremendous potential elsewhere.

It never ceases to amaze me how many in recruiting believe that they have found the magic formula that’ll separate the “best and brightest” from the rest. Even if a company could indeed achieve this impossible goal of hiring only the best and brightest, there will still be a kind of ranking order where only 1 person can be declared the “best and brightest” of them all.

In the case of Google, it has been portrayed as a company that values the highly analytical. It also complains from time to time that it can’t find enough smart people to pass all its interviews, worthy of coming onboard. Well, if we’re talking “smarts”, esp. the form of university name-brand school MBA smarts, then what about the 7 Kinds of Smart proposed by Howard Gardner of Harvard?

Gardner contends that too many institutions overvalue the linear, logical, analytical approach to problem solving. Yet many people are able to grasp concepts (including the moneymaking) through other forms of intelligence, including spatial, interpersonal and musical skills.

It’s also incredible to note how high GPA’s are overvalued by some firms. A recent book by Paul Orfalea points out that he graduated 8th from the bottom of his 1200 person senior class in high school. Judges and teachers said this “loser” would never amount to much. It was precisely this kind of early rejection and discarding that prompted Orfalea to find other forms of smart to prove himself. Orfalea did indeed create a company that many people find delightful to work for, that perhaps some of those college students striving for high GPA’s used, a place called Kinko’s. (More details are available in his new book Copy This.)

That to me as a hiring manager is the bigger interest. While so many with the power to hire are overly scared about making a hiring mistake, what about the even bigger scare of preventing the right candidate from slipping through the cracks of an imperfect hiring system, especially one who has other kinds of great smarts, especially street smarts? Scary, eh?!

Thanks Joel :-)

Regards,
Jeremy Langhans