I will be posting daily excerpts of Hiring Secrets of the NFL, by Isaac Cheifetz, Catalytic1 Executive Search, over the next three weeks leading up to the Super Bowl. Please feel free to discuss how the concepts apply to today’s NFL, and business.
Every year, football fans dream that their team will draft the next JJ Watt or Julio Jones. Some years they are rewarded with stars, some with stiffs. The NFL drafting process is at least as sophisticated as the corporate hiring process these days, with psychological assessments, IQ tests, breakdowns of college performance and examinations of physical ability.
How can football teams and companies maximize the chances of selecting future stars? This book is an attempt to define the rules of success for talent selection in the NFL and corporate ranks.
The origins of this book are interesting. It did not require much research or interviewing, but sprung nearly fully formed based on my work and interests over the course of my career. I am an executive recruiter, a headhunter, who has spent twenty years experience consulting to advanced technology businesses on executive search, organizational design and strategy.
As for sports, I was a rabid fan in high school and college, but as the years went on found myself following sports less and less. Hockey, baseball, and college basketball each fell to the wayside. Even my NBA obsession dimmed, as the NBA draft came to resemble a High School prom. Yet my fascination with the NFL draft grew. Between recruiting calls, I found myself surfing web sites dedicated to NFL Mock Drafts and prospect evaluations several hours a week, first in the months before the draft, and after a couple of seasons, all year long.
Occasionally I would admonish myself for wasting time. Why not choose to analyze balance sheets in my spare time, like Warren Buffett? I hardly watched NFL games on TV anymore, yet was fascinated by the interplay between pre-draft projection, draft selection and career performance.
One day it hit me: trying to predict the performance of NFL prospects feels familiar because it has so much in common with my day job, helping companies hire executive talent. I specialize in searches for executives who can help companies in rapidly changing industries, particularly those attempting to leverage Information Technology for strategic advantage. The business model and/or position are often new, and predicting success is even more difficult than usual.
Football has much in common with the corporate world. Success in both results from complex plans aggressively and precisely executed. In both, it is challenging to select personnel with the appropriate balance of raw ability and accomplishment, and difficult even to conclusively define what experience is critical to success in the position. Yet mistakes are costly in both football and corporate human capital.
The corporate talent selection process has more in common with football than with baseball or basketball. As described in Moneyball, Peter Lewis’s bestseller on the Oakland A’s, a baseball player’s statistics are easier to define, lending themselves to analysis more than the human talent selection and assessment process in business, or football. The NBA is a poor analog to the corporate world, because in the NBA superstars are indispensable and rare. The concept prevalent in football and business that no one person is indispensable doesn’t apply as much in the NBA. Teams do win championships without a Shaq or Michael Jordan, but they are the exception.
Of course, there are significant differences between the NFL and business. A business career can easily span 25 to 40 years, while NFL careers are far shorter. Even stars rarely play much more than twelve years, and careers are routinely ended by injury.
Using football as a metaphor for business organizations has limitations, given the violence inherent in the game, and the ruthlessness with which personnel decisions are made.
This book is about how to build champions, in football and business. The first eight chapters each focus on a critical success factor for selecting talent in the NFL and its application in business. The final chapter outlines a model for applying these principles in business to improve the efficiency, speed and results of corporate hiring.