Scouting for Talent

For Sports teams, Talent is everything. It is their competitive advantage, their brand, their marketing, their history, and their future. So of course sports teams invest heavily in their ability to find, attract, motivate and develop talent.

Using competitor research, data analytics, a external-facing talent team, internal performance coaches, and player profiling tools, they are able to evaluate next generation talent globally and to maintain insight into talent at their competitors.

Of course sportspeople are easy to assess from a technical standpoint, even at a rival club; there are hours of tape and statistical analytics available on technical capabilities, strengths, weaknesses and even motivations.

I suspect most of my readers are not Talent Directors at sporting franchises, but it's still possible for the rest of us to take a similarly proactive interest in developing our scouting networks so that our businesses can outcompete their markets.

How to Scout for Talent if you're not a Sports team

We often think of hiring as a reactive process. A new market opportunity opens up, or a team member leaves and job descriptions are written to cover the need. The adverts attract those who are tempt-able at the time and we make a hire from that group.

There's a far more proactive way to do things though, one which, done properly can radically increase the potential quality of hire and can simultaneously build capability within your business by delivering valuable competitor insight as a side-effect.

Tool set:

• LinkedIn (either the free or premium versions)
• Strong relationships with recruiters
• A policy of meeting with your competitors people when they come to market, even if you're not currently hiring
• Feedback from suppliers, customers and non-customers who use the services of your competitors
• Market research including financial analysis of your market space. When your competitors are struggling you'll be able to double down on the advantage by reaching out to their people.

How to discover Talent at competitors

Reach out to competitor employees directly whenever you are hiring. This is very easy to do directly through your Talent team if you have one. If you don't, contact your agency partners and express your desire to see candidates from a list of competitors.

Always make time to interview the competition, even if you're ready to make an offer or not ready to start other interviews. Interviewing competitors is great scouting, free insight and a chance to see what kind of work is going in your marketplace. These interviews can even reveal details of team structure, responsibilities and projects. To get this information any other way would be next to impossible.

When interviewing competitor employees make sure your questions get to the heart of their working relationships - "If we hired you, who would you most want to bring with you from your current company, and why?". This is a great question for many many reasons - it reveals lots about the candidate's character, ability to work with others, understanding of how work gets done, their approach to teamwork and their ability to make logical suppositions. For the scouting purposes though it allows us to identify truly impactful players in competitor hierarchies (and to go after them if needed.)

Be open to bench hiring. If opportunity present you with an outstanding individual with unique insight into your business you need the capacity to bring them onboard to benefit. These competitor interviews are still, at their heart, interviews. You should always be looking for great talent.

Use your agency partners. This is where the value of true partnerships with agencies really shines. Speak to your agencies and ask them directly to get in touch with employees at your competitors when you're hiring. Great recruiters can reach anyone and will work to meet your needs. If your need is to speak to people from "Competitor A" they will focus considerable resources on getting hold of those people for you.

Maintain a target list of key players at competitor companies. Try to work out a simple org chart for the company (have your talent team work with any market insight staff). LinkedIn will give you total numbers and some idea of reporting structure, any of their job descriptions will add further depth to this information. Your talent team can reach out to these people and connect with them too.

Premium tools on platforms like LinkedIn can also give a sense of company churn. Highlighting competitors in the space who are experiencing higher than usual staff turnover can give you an easier path to reach candidates who are motivated to move. Start interviewing these people and you are not only getting early access to motivated (to move) talent, but the business insights stone why people are moving on can be highly relevant to your own commercial or people strategies.

Your Talent team connections to these people will give all kinds of insights - when someone gets a promotion others will have missed out; when someone leaves and their new role is announced on LinkedIn reaching out to them with congratulations and "we're sorry we didn't get a chance to interview you ourselves" is a highly resonant message that will certainly get back to that's person's former colleagues;

Having a Talent team that is well connected within your market has another benefit. Proactive sharing of your business wins by your Talent team will reach all those to whom your talent team are connected (which will now include as many employees at your competitor as possible); the same goes for new roles your talent team actively shares on LinkedIn - these are waved under the noses of your competitors' people.

Use your marketing and comms teams to drive employer branding with a specific focus around targeting people from your industry. Not only should you be sharing business win success, but also employee narratives and stories of career journeys within the company. Winning and being nominated for "best employer" rewards is great, but sometimes an employee's personal journey can be far more relatable.

If you have built a winning culture and a great team with a shared mindset, your marketing team should help push this news via insight platforms such as Glassdoor and Comparably. Having a defined process encouraging staff participation on these platforms will help build a community interested in working for you, growing your pool further.

Get your sales and customer success teams in on the act as well. When speaking with current or potential customers, ask about their relationships with some of your competitors. As well as the idea of serving your clients more effectively through “borrowing" some of your competitors’ better ideas, they can also talk about which individuals impress them most at your competitors. Finding out who as well as why makes good business sense and helps with the talent Scouting efforts.

Ask around at trade shows, business meetings and dinners. Awards events are particularly good for this. Asking people within your industry about the best people in their supply chains can be enormously profitable, and it is a proactive move that your competitors likely aren't using.

At awards dinners, look at nominees (particularly in individual award categories) as potential future hires, but also take an interest in the team around them and have conversations about how their award came about.

Get your staff involved too, and here's where a good referral program pays dividends, your staff should constantly be thinking about "people like us, who would do well here and add to what we can accomplish". Every time they meet someone like this at these events they should be discreetly passing their details to your talent team to reach out. It's better to treat these introductions as talent team outreach rather than asking people to apply directly. A well-executed headhunting call from your talent team can really have an impact "Your name has come up internally here and I'm teaching out to see if you'd be interested in a discrete conservation about the work we're doing and what a career here would look like". People love to be approached and asked to apply.

Do your market research on companies that are struggling in your sector. There is plenty of talent locked in failing companies and knowing who that talent is, and when and how to approach them is a considerable advantage. It doesn't have to be failing companies - a competitor you beat for a piece of business is tempt-able ("We heard highly impressive things about you from Client X...") This even works with competitors who beat you to the business ("Client X told us the business went to your firm rather than ours specifically because of you") The point is to know where and who and when.

A word on who should make the approaches.

Lots of the techniques above are implementable by anyone within the business. They are time consuming but can produce outsize returns on the time invested. Doing this work well makes all the difference and the "how to" of the work is best handled by a skilled Talent team. Think of that team in a diplomatic or emissary role. Some approaches are better if they are not directly from the CEO (such as attempting to headhunt a competitors' people). Some of the steps above need a dedicated professional with a skill for handling job moves and for having discrete but effective conversations over an extended time period.

If you don't have a dedicated Talent team yet, find a way to utilise someone in the business with these skills (sales or customer success people for example) and if it proves valuable to both is can form a development pathway for the individual and a benefit for the business.

Much of this work relies on contact over time. Just like sports teams you may scout talent for months or years before the timing is right for both parties. Sometimes the window never appears at all and so, as with a sports team, you need multiple prospects from multiple channels to track over time.

Sports teams have dedicated scouting functions for just this reason - it is too large a project for a senior manager or CEO to handle on top of their day job. Investing in a talent function and working with them on what the scouting agenda looks like will mean signing up more of the talent you're after than trying to do it alone.

Summary

It goes without saying that these techniques require your business to have a proactive, growth-oriented mentality. It's also worth mentioning that hiring well from your competitors can only work if you can hire well generally. Just as there is plenty of talent locked up in failing companies, your very best competitors also have plenty of individuals who would not add any value to your business. Get your hiring processes right before you start trying to tempt your competitors best people to join you.

The details above merely scratch the surface of what proactive talent scouting can do for your business. Yet too few companies even take these preliminary steps. Start putting together a Talent Scouting function and you'll transform the story of your business.