Using Moneyball's Recruiting Strategy In Your Company
The recent film, Moneyball, is based upon actual events in 2001 – 2002. Moneyball shares the fascinating story of the Oakland Athletics and their general manager, Billy Beane’s passionate effort to put together a competitive team relative to clubs like the NY Yankees but with limited financial resources.
The primary storyline of Moneyball is that the collective wisdom of baseball players, managers, coaches, and scouts is subjective, biased, and often wrong. Statistics such as stolen bases, runs batted in (RBI), and batting average were typically used to gauge the future potential of players. This was/is flawed reasoning.
Beane meets Peter Brand, a Yale University economics graduate with innovative ideas on how to assess the value of an individual ball player. Prior to Brand’s approach, scouts relied on their experience and intuition, which was biased. Brand’s statistical strategy selected players based almost exclusively on each player’s on base percentage (OBP) and slugging percentage.
In other words, Brand identified a statistical model that predicted exactly what contributed to a successful baseball player and team.
As a result of this statistical approach, Beane and Brand pulled together a team of undervalued players for the Oakland Athletics with high OBPs. These undervalued players were not on the “radar scope” of scouts because each player had something that made them less valuable from a traditional scout perspective.
The scouts were looking for "pretty players," while Beane and Brand were looking for players who could get on base and score runs. As you can imagine, the scouts and team manager did not support the new strategy.
As I watched Moneyball, I saw parallels to how talent is typically selected in Corporate America.
Over the last decade, my team has been using a statistical approach to identify top talent that predicts they will do a job well – particularly sales people. The approach used by my team to help organizations find top talent is much like that of Beane and Brand’s approach to finding the top baseball team. Like the two, we also run into a roadblock within organizations much like the scouts and team managers were to Beane and Brand, except our roadblock is called HR.
The scouts and team managers of the Athletic’s were very stuck in their old ways and unwilling to try a new statistical approach. HR is also stuck in their old ways and refuses to hire based on statistical evidence. HR is stuck in their traditional biased ways when it comes to selecting talent – even in the face of obvious statistical data suggesting their way allows low performers to get on the "bus".
My question to you is, “Do you have an objective employee selection program that cuts past human bias?” There are multiple studies demonstrating that the interview process is inherently biased. Human beings are inherently biased. HR is human, they are biased too.
The only effective way to id
entify top performing talent more consistently and to reduce the potential for human bias is to develop a Job Benchmark. When a validated personality profile test is used to identify the core Behaviors, Values, and Attributes necessary to do the job well, better talent is identified.
The approach used by Beane and Brand in Moneyball led them to wins. It also led the Boston Redsox to a World Championship when they adopted the approach the following season. If you want your organization to WIN, you have to remove human bias from the hiring process by using validated personality profiles to find the right person for a job.
