We live in a world of bad hires. Almost every day, you feel the effects of an ill-advised choice made by someone else.

* You get poor service at a store or a bank.
* Your favorite sports team loses yet again.
* Your office is drowning in gossip and conflict.

Being on the receiving end of poor hires is bad enough. It’s worse if you’re the one who actually does the hiring. When you’re a business owner, a sports team executive, school admissions officer, or a store manager, your decisions matter. Mistakes carry a heavy cost. Money and prestige ride on what you do. Every time you make a choice, you shape your team’s future — and your own.
Here’s the scary truth about hiring: Choosing the right person is so hard. And choosing the wrong one is so easy. Sports helps to show this.
In the 1999 baseball draft, the St. Louis Cardinals landed Albert Pujols, who became one of the top hitters in the game’s history. But it took the Cardinals until the 13th round to select Pujols! More than 400 other players were drafted before he was. The vast majority of those players, including many taken by the Cardinals themselves, never played in the major leagues. Pujols had sat there, a superstar in plain sight, unseen by all. An invisible gem.
Pujols has never forgotten.
“It’s a chip on my shoulder that I will have for the rest of my career, until I’m done wearing a uniform,” Pujols said in a 2016 interview with sports writer Alden Gonzalez. “I still think about it.”
With those very words, Pujols shows what makes hiring so hard. Some people, like Pujols, use a snub as motivation. Others let rejection and failure beat them.
But learning how each person will react takes time. Time that organizations do not have.
Starting with this post, the focus of TotalGamePlan will shift from the mental game to a different game, namely, how to spot the invisible gems.
How do you look past the resumes, interviews and other shiny objects and see what’s inside a person — the toughness, focus and motivation that other organizations may miss? Would spotting gems be art? Science? Is it even possible?
Learning to spot invisible gems would make all the difference to your team and to your career. Because choosing the right person is so hard. And choosing the wrong one is so easy.
Please send me your favorite story about a hire — a hire that went bad in a hurry, or a hire that turned out to be a gem.
May your next choice be great!