It is said not uncommonly that the most important job a CEO has is to attract and retain talent. This is especially true in the knowledge economy, where the employees are quite literally the most important asset a company has. Yet, in hiring talent, CEOs – and by extension, companies – face an interesting constraint, which is that typically hiring is done only when there is a need to hire for a specific role. Thus, prospective talent is evaluated not generally or holistically, but more narrowly, relative to the requirements of a particular job opening, and this means companies don’t hire as much to maximize its talent pool as to fill an open position.
This model of hiring may make sense for companies that are small and/or rapidly growing: there is always more work to be done than there are people to do it, and therefore you need to hire people who are able to satisfy those specific, clearly defined needs. It seems to make much less sense, however, for more established and larger companies. Yes, it is true that at the margin every company has urgent, specific gaps in the work force that need to be filled with people that have highly targeted and specialized skillsets. But for companies that have already achieved significant scale and financial success, it does not seem unreasonable, on the whole, to presume that they have the vast majority of critical talent already in place. The question then becomes: should the CEO of such a company, in carrying out the role of the chief “attract and retain talent” officer, do any more than simply ensure that the right people are hired for open positions?
Cao Cao was a 3rd-century Chinese warlord who laid the foundation for the Kingdom of Wei that ultimately unified (after his death) all of China, bringing an end to the Three Kingdoms period. He is also one of the main characters in “Romance of The Three Kingdoms,” a historical novel written about the era in the 14th century, the cultural and literary influence of which in East Asia is not incomparable to that of Homeric epics or even the works of Shakespeare in the West. While descriptions of Cao Cao’s primary character traits typically point to immense ambitions for power and ruthlessness as a ruler, what distinguished him perhaps the most from all other similarly ambitious and ruthless warlords of the era was that he had an almost insatiable hunger to recruit talented people. Cao Cao’s admiration for Guan Yu, who was a general under Liu Bei, the ruler of Kingdom of Shu that was competing for regional dominance against Cao Cao and also Lieu Bei’s sworn brother, and all the efforts Cao Cao made to recruit Guan Yu (ultimately unsuccessfully) form one of the most significant plot lines from “Romance of The Three Kingdoms.” Not only did Cao Cao have a knack for identifying talent, but his desire to have them under his wing was so great, he might be said to have been a “collector of talent.”
It seems to me this mindset of “collector of talent” is something CEOs of large corporations today should adopt. Competition for talent among tech heavyweights of Silicon Valley is said to be so fierce, it might even be the most important front on which these companies compete with one another. In such a battle, it would appear to make little sense to limit artificially the frontier upon which to expand a company’s talent horizon to the immediate hiring needs of open positions. CEOs instead should be looking to “collect” talent at all times, on a constant lookout for talented people of all stripes, irrespective of whether or not there are open positions to be filled by such people: collectors do not add to their collection because they “need” to, but simply because there is an object of desire out there to be had, and they cannot help themselves but to collect it.
Now, collecting talent is, to be sure, a fair bit more complex than collecting inanimate objects. When you buy another watch, your existing watches do not object to the arrival of a newcomer. When a company already has a director of sales and if a highly regarded sales leader from elsewhere is brought in, the incumbent may feel threatened. And whether any new talent can work harmoniously with existing talent will always have to be given full and careful consideration. But in a world where nothing is static, a company can never be complacent about anything and must always be in motion on all fronts, including the configuration of its talent pool.
What would such a motion look like in practice? In my imagination, every large company should have a recruiting organization that reports directly to the CEO, tasked with sourcing talent with the aim of evaluating talent generally and holistically, and in line with the vision the CEO has for the company’s values and priorities for the future. Evaluating talent is hard, and not everyone is equipped to do it well; a CEO cannot rely merely on hiring managers to make the critical decision of hiring talent, but should also utilize a centralized team of specialists who can help the CEO spot, evaluate, and recruit talented candidates of all shapes and sizes without the constraints of particular job requirements (or, frankly, personal interests of hiring managers which may conflict with the company’s interests) and figure out where best to place them within the company. Such a team would enable the CEO to put into practice the mindset of a collector, on a vigilant lookout to add constantly to the collection that is the company’s work force because the goal should always be to maximize the talent pool of the entire company. The largest and most successful of companies can certainly afford to do so.