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Posts Tagged ‘Talent’

How LinkedIn Is Changing Recruiting

Sarah Halzack, writing for The Washington Post, explores how LinkedIn is changing job-searching and recruiting:

As LinkedIn has exploded — perhaps because it has exploded — there has been a major shift in the way employers find new workers. Gone are the days of “post and pray,” a recruiter’s adage for the practice of advertising a job opening and then idly hoping that good candidates swim up to the bait.

Now the process of talent acquisition is something of a hunt.

“We’re really at a point now where all of your employees are vulnerable to being poached. Every single one,” said Josh Bersin, principal and founder of talent consulting firm Bersin by Deloitte.

The change is happening rapidly: A 2013 study by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 77 percent of employers are using social networks to recruit, a sharp increase from the 56 percent who reported doing so in 2011. And among the recruiters using social tools, 94 percent said they are using LinkedIn.

Recruiter Chris Scalia told Halzack that the type of candidates he sees on LinkedIn is also changing. “LinkedIn was always known for where you would go to find that really critical, challenging hire,” Scalia said. “It was never really where you would go for a PC technician or something at the lower end of the career mobility scale. Now I see both. It is completely flooded.”

(HT: The Big Picture)



How Is Keith Olbermann Like a Teenage Brazilian Soccer Stud?

There may be several appropriate answers to the question posed in the headline, but after reading Howard Kurtz‘s account of Olbermann’s split with Current TV in the Daily Beast, only one came to mind.

If you believe Olbermann’s camp — yes, that’s an “if” worth thinking about — the conflict came down to a simple issue: while Current was willing to pay its new anchorman $50 million, it wasn’t willing to spend the money to bring his show up to a professional standard:



Talent Evaluation is Different in the NFL and NBA

The sudden emergence of Jeremy Lin has led people to wonder about talent evaluation in the NBA. Two recent examples — from Stephen Dubner in this forum and from Jonah Lehrer at Wired Science — both take similar approaches.  Both begin with the story of Lin, and then pivot to a discussion of the National Football League.  In essence, each writer argues that talent evaluation in basketball and football is similar.  

In my next two posts, I wish to address why I think talent evaluation in the NBA and the NFL is quite different.



Why Was Jeremy Lin Overlooked, and Should He Get Married?

A reader named Xavier Fan writes:

Would love to see some commentary on the Jeremy Lin phenomenon in the NBA. Is this not a classic Moneyball-style “undervalued player”? Indeed, one of the best parts of the whole feel-good story (and there are many) is how consistently teams and coaches at the college and NBA level overlooked him before his breakout week. Even the Knicks were ready to release him a few days before his first big game against the Nets. Was he overlooked because he didn’t “look the part”? Will this impact how scouts and coaches evaluate players? What is the current status of sabermetrics for basketball?

The phenomenon is indeed phenomenal, and there has already been a lot of interesting stuff written about it (including his overseas marketing potential and an anti-Asian joke-gone-wrong).



The Economics of Tiger Parenting

When my daughter Anna was 7, she told me she desperately wanted a dog. I looked her in the eye and said, “You can have a dog if you publish an article in an academic peer-reviewed journal.” I wasn’t kidding. I really, really didn’t want a dog because I thought it would disrupt our family routine, which included large dollops of what Amy Chua’s controversial new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, refers to as Tiger parenting.



Know Your Scarcity

Fred Brooks, the computer scientist who 35 years ago wrote the still-relevant The Mythical-Man Month, has written a new book, The Design of Design, and Kevin Kelly interviews him in Wired.







Kid Rock

Saw this poster taped to a lamppost in my neighborhood last weekend. There is so much to admire about it. My first thought concerned the talent/practice angle as espoused by Anders Ericsson.
I played in a bunch of bands when I was a kid. Although we were generally dreadful, playing clumpy versions of bad cover songs at poorly attended basement gigs, it was hard to deny that all that very deliberate practice paid off.



What Makes a Singer “Good?”

A recent study found that most amateur singers can carry a tune just as accurately as trained professionals, suggesting that singing may be as universal a human trait as talking. But good pitch doesn’t always mean good music — Bob Dylan, for example, seems to have gotten along just fine without perfect pitch. So what makes a singer “good?” (HT: . . .



Scott Adams Answers Your Dilbert Questions, and More

(Photo: Scott Adams) Last week, we solicited your questions for Dilbert creator and author Scott Adams. Here are his answers. They are great, and so were your questions; thanks to Scott and thanks to you. Here’s what I found most interesting: 1. From his answers, Scott Adams would appear to be a poster boy (poster man?) for the Anders Ericsson . . .



How ‘Talented’ Is This Kid?

A while ago, we wrote a New York Times Magazine column about talent — what it is, how it’s acquired, etc. The gist of the column was that “raw talent,” as it’s often called, is vastly overrated, and that people who become very good at something, whether it’s sports, music, or medicine, generally do so through a great deal of . . .



The Superstar Equation, Disproved?

Levitt and Dubner have written before about the origins of star-making talent. But can the road to pop culture megastardom be calculated as a matter of statistical probability? Back in 1994, Kee Chung of SUNY-Buffalo and Raymond Cox of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology applied an equation called the Yule-Simon Distribution to this question. Their findings were that . . .



Talent Show and Tell

David Shenk, author of a bunch of really interesting non-fiction books including this one on chess, and this one on Alzheimer’s disease, has begun working on a book about talent. In one key regard, Shenk is following in footsteps of, inter alia, Chris Anderson, who used a blog to help develop the content of his book, both called The Long . . .



Freakonomics in the Times Magazine: A Star Is Made

The May 7, 2006, Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine asks a fundamental — but very hard — question: When someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that actually makes him good? This blog post supplies additional research material.



Do You Know Why You Are Good at What You Do?

Our new “Freakonomics” column in the New York Times Magazine asks a fundamental — but very hard – question: When someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that actually makes him good? To find the answer to this question, we turned to Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University and the ringleader of . . .



The sad thing about “Deal or No Deal”

Being a contestant on this show requires no talent whatsoever. You pick suitcases. You decide whether you prefer a riskless offer of money to a risky one. Then you go home with a bunch of money. Along the way, the crowd and your chosen friends scream and cheer like there is great skill in choosing among ex ante identical suitcases. . . .