Talent

How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World

By: Tyler Cowen, Daniel Gross

Narrated by: L. J. Ganser

This audiobook includes a bonus conversation between the authors.

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.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press.

©2021 Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross (P)2021 Macmillan Audio

Prefer to Rate Rather than Leave a Detailed Review

Prefer to Rate Rather than Leave a Detailed Review. A few key insights. Could be more succinct.

A welcome perspective on how-to.

I struggled through the statistical sections, but persevered because of rational importance. I enjoyed it.

Good

I liked it. However not every chapter spoke directly to me. I would recommend this to anyone curious about the topic of great tallent.

Musing about Talent

As a recruiter I have read many books and articles on talent. This book brought new ideas on interviewing techniques and what talents might be needed for a range of occasions. I particularly liked the end conversation between the two authors.

Lots of interesting points

Enjoyable read with lots of observations and points that leave you reflecting after putting the book down.

Entertaining but not useful

There was no point in the listen that I was wanting to write something down or a light bulb went off in my head. Its just a deeper look into common sense ideas about what talent seekers should be looking for. If your looking for a niche talent maybe try this book if not just use your own mechanisms for talent searching and learn along the way.

Highly opinionated and extremely haughty

Two people who believe themselves to be the absolute greatest in the world and make numerous purely qualitative claims that are supposed to quantitatively improve your ability to hire people.

Put simply it lacks clarity on why these methods really work any better than everything else or even more so why any of this is better than a trusted person recommending someone they trust for a job. Additionally the book feels like it jumps from random information and opinions to other random information and opinions. Sometimes it'll be discussing an idea only to say "this only applies to X specific type of candidate in Y specific kind of position" and then moments later repeat the same statement but for a different value of X and Y.

In conclusion: not recommended

Surprisingly bad

I read the other negative reviews and was still surprised by how bad this was, despite being a huge fan of Tyler Cowen.

Stale information

I am struggling to push through second chapter. Tough listen. I would try a different book.

I couldn't even finish the book. Lacks confidence.

This is the 1 book out of 50 I've purchased on Audible that I couldn't even finish because it was so slow and lacks any real confidence in what the true methodology is for finding great talent.

If I could sum up this entire book, it would be "it depends", and I don't even think the author is sure of a solid framework to finding talent. It's loaded with blabber. It could be vastly improved with proven statistics and novel insights.