The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else with George Anders 

How can we sort out the mysteries of talent? Anyone trying to build a great organization faces the same basic challenge, whether we work for a big company, a startup, a Hollywood studio, a hospital, or the U.S. military. We all wonder how to tell really outstanding prospects from ones who look great on paper but then fail on the job. Or, equally important, how to spot the ones who don’t look so good on paper but might still deliver extraordinary performance.

George Anders, author of The Rare Find will pull together America’s best new ideas about how to get talent right. He will guide us through a field that has become needlessly bewildering in recent years. Technology has made recruiting in all fields vastly more sophisticated. Gut instincts have yielded to an endless stream of manuals and seminars. Yet the results are just as spotty as they were in the age of the rotary phone. Better methods are within reach. This presentation will reveal how the U.S. Army finds soldiers with the character to be in Special Forces, without asking them to fire a single bullet. How, at an elite basketball tournament in South Carolina, the best coaches and scouts watch the game in a radically different way from what the casual fan might see.  It introduces a trio of bookish researchers who are applying remarkable new ideas to process of hiring Fortune 500 CEOs.

Drawing on the best advice of these and other talent masters, you will hear powerful ideas that you can apply to your own hiring efforts.  For instance:

•  Don’t ignore “the jagged résumé” -- people whose background appears to teeter on the edge between success and failure. Such people can do spectacular work in the right settings, where their strengths are invaluable and their flaws don’t matter.
• Look extra hard for “talent that whispers” -- the obscure, out-of-the-way candidates that most scouting systems overlook.
• Be careful with “talent that shouts” -- the spectacular but brash candidates whose positive qualities might not outweigh future problems with loyalty, motivation, and team spirit.

GEORGE ANDERS a New York Times-bestselling author and a journalist with three decades of experience writing for national publications. He started his career at The Wall Street Journal, where he became a top feature writer specializing in in-depth profiles. He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for national reporting. He also has served as West Coast bureau chief for Fast Company magazine and as a founding member of the Bloomberg View board of editors. His work has appeared in leading publications worldwide, including The New York Times, BusinessWeek, The Guardian and the Harvard Business Review.