Building Teams – Recruit “10x” Talent (“Force Multipliers”)

Building great companies requires building great teams – one of the keys to that is knowing how to identify great Talent (i.e. not merely talent but capital-T “Talent”).

What I mean by great Talent is really what I call the “10x” people who are the force multipliers.

I have used the 10x way of thinking about Talent because I usually like to think about sales or marketing initiatives in terms of this – if we have limited time and resources then will this particular initiative produce 10x result? / Is this more of a marginal contribution or a real 10x ROI?

It’s the same for 10x people.  It’s better to have one 10x Talent on your team (especially in a management role) than several average people.   The 10x employee will produce results that are above and beyond. They work smarter + harder.  They have the IQ and EQ and the knowledge plus the ability to identify how to move the ball forward 10x.

Many companies don’t really know how to find 10x people.  Worse yet, even if the 10x person came to an interview and looked the company recruiting team straight in the eyes, the company folks may not even understand that they are looking at a 10x Talent.  It’s unfortunate but true – I’ve even recently learned that someone turned down a former colleague and a friend of mine for a VP role which, in my opinion, is a huge loss, total miss – they just didn’t know what “great” looks like and didn’t realize that they had a one of a kind Talent that they could’ve brought on board.  Total fail.

Another issue is that even if you are one of the CEOs, CROs or VPs of Sales or Marketing, or someone on a company recruiting team – let’s assume that you know what “great” looks like and you’ve identified a 10X person. How do you attract them to your team?  Here is another thing I’ve seen before that is not very rational in my view.  I’ve seen companies attempting to recruit an exceptional great employee but then they do poorly at recruiting, show bad recruiting habits, not making a great effort to attract them, not moving fast, or lastly give the candidate an offer that is below market or at market (why not just go 15% above if you want a person who will produce 10x ROI for you – isn’t that already a huge return on your investment).  Don’t be that company.  Great people are hard to find, hard to recruit, hard to identify and hard to attract.  If you already found them and were astute enough to identify them, don’t fail on attracting and getting them. That last part is truly the easiest one.

What else? How do recruit 10x people? How do you identify 10x Talent and make sure you don’t miss out and don’t fail to recognize them?