One of us was among the 600,000 in attendance at this past week’s NFL Draft in Green Bay. It was an awesome experience to see the event come to my hometown (I walked to the draft from my wife’s parents’ house), and a great reminder that the NFL is the undisputed heavyweight in American sports.
While the draft isn’t a perfect corollary to recruitment outside of sports (i.e., I don’t typically see companies select all their new employees for the year in sequential order with competitors over a three-day period…), it’s a great example of trying to find a recruitment edge in a very transparent, liquid talent market. What’s interesting is that even though everyone in the league has access to the same data, the same film, and in the case of the NFL, the same budget (cap), people come to very different decisions on who to select. And what’s more interesting is that given these parameters, team success is not very evenly distributed. Some teams manage to find edge.
This brings us to one of our favorite recruiting books, Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball”, the story of the 2002 Oakland A’s season. With one of the lowest payrolls in the league, Billy Beane, the General Manager, embraces a data-backed approach to player evaluation to find undervalued talent that other teams have overlooked. Funky pitching motions, past-their-prime players, poor defenders. Billy eschewed conventional wisdom and looked past these traits, instead focusing on what really mattered: getting on base and scoring more runs than the other team.
From the movie: “If we try to play like the Yankees in here [the scouting room], we will lose to the Yankees out there.” We’re not all the Yankees (or a more current example, the Dodgers), so don’t try to compete like them. It’s not about finding the best players, it’s about finding the right players. And in a competitive market, those who are willing to think unconventionally are more likely to find talent capable of delivering outsized performance.
Let’s hope that’s what the Packers did this year (apologies to the Bears fans in our readership).
Until next time,
Your Spherion South Central WI & Northern IL team