In his book, Talent Is Overrated, Geoff Colvin hypothesizes that too much emphasis is placed on innate talent when it comes to assessing “great” performers. Providing in depth analyses of world-class talents such as Mozart and Tiger Woods, Colvin theorizes that despite their seeming ease with life’s most challenging tasks, great performers are still subject to the grueling hours of study and practice it takes to accomplish anything worth accomplishing; they just realize a lot sooner than most of us that to be great takes years of disciplined loyalty to a chosen craft. Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers, makes a similar observation and notes that it takes at least 10,000 hours of dedicated, diligent practice in order to become an expert at anything – clearly ability and talent are not things we are born with.

This theory is interesting when placed in an organizational development setting and puts a new spin on how we look at “talent” in the hiring process. Talent is obviously extremely important for all companies due to the fact that the identification, selection, development and retention of key, talented employees are necessary for organizational sustainability and growth – after all without people, there is no organization. It is important to select the “best” employees for key roles, not people who have a fancy school printed under the education section of their resume.

There are many tools available for hiring managers to assess the talents of job candidates, including behavioral hiring methods and hiring/promotion assessments. In the context of Colvin’s theory, it is important to use these methods/tools to ensure the hiring of the right person – do not automatically hire the Harvard Business School grad because of the name brand. Look carefully at a job candidate’s employment history, strengths, weaknesses, culture, background, education, assessments scores etc. and you will be sure to find the most talented candidates for the positions you are filling.