At The New Yorker Conference themed Stories from the Near Future, the ever-perceptive Malcolm Gladwell focused on hiring as the biggest challenge for organizations and called it a collective crisis.

In this video of his presentation, Gladwell uses the sports analogy of scouting combine events to talk about the assessment process in hiring. His stories about attending hockey, basketball, and football combines provide insights into how you can do a better job of scouting your talent.

“In order to make that assessment, you feel you need to gather some objective data about who this kid is and what he can do. As much as that makes sense, is it true? Scouting combines are a disaster…”

Unless you represent one of the dozens of professional sports teams in the world, you may ask what does this have to do with hiring assessments? Plenty. It’s all about what he calls The Mismatch Problem:

“It is when the criteria we use to assess someone’s ability to do a job are radically out of step with the actual demands of the job itself.”

How do you deal with the problem and find a solution?

“Wait until they do their job and analyze them when they are on the job.”

Gladwell’s observations align perfectly with the need for a unified approach to recruiting and performance management. Once you are able to gather the attributes of your top performers and translate them into recruiting assessment criteria, then you can mitigate The Mismatch Problem and drive higher performance. “Life has become more complex…We want profoundly different things from workers today than we have in the past” comments Gladwell, “…but the way we hire has largely remained simplistic.”

For a lighter view of The Mismatch Problem, read Peter Norvig’s tongue-in-cheek fictitious performance review for a Patent Clerk Third Class position in the Bern Patent Office: Albert Einstein. It’s a very nice parody, but also a great talent example of missed opportunity and mismatch while demonstrating the real value of performance reviews done correctly.