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

Talent is the result of a collaboration between economist Tyler Cowen and Venture Capitalist Daniel Gross and it reflects their careers with a focus on how they both go about finding talent in their respective careers. While a lot of the advice is still worthwhile for those hiring for their business, expect to be doing some selective application of the ideas in the book.

Talent provides some brilliant practical advice, with detailed ideas for running interviews, an interesting section on optimising interview questions with examples, and a timely guide to interviewing remote candidates. I particularly liked one of the proposed interview questions “What are the open tabs on your browser right now?” as a clever way to get an insight into how a candidate uses their free time and what is interesting to them.

I was also particularly fond of the chapters on Disability, Women, and Minorities, which highlight the benefits that can accrue to an organisation through a more diverse workforce. They also provide practical tips on how you can modify your talent search and hiring process to better accommodate more diverse candidates. This is an area that is underexplored in other books I’ve read on this topic so I especially appreciated it here.

Unfortunately, Talent also strayed off into more philosophical territory that’s less valuable. In particular, it spent far too much time exploring the five-factor theory and its dubious benefits.

Talent is petty short and I appreciate that way it avoids lengthy diversions into stories and examples. These appear far too often in ‘advice’ style books and make the books longer than they need to be. It was a bit of a slug to read, with some dense sections that hammer on a point longer than I thought was necessary.

Overall Talent is a useful book that I would recommend to anyone involved in the hiring process or who has interested in improving their ability to spot talent. It’s a quick read and had more than enough valuable ideas to make it worthwhile.