Talent Stacks
An antidote to the pitfalls of searching for the 'perfect candidate'
Hey Everyone!
Happy Tuesday, and welcome back to The Gunn Show. Hope you had a fantastic week as always.
It was officially “bye week” on my end for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, we said “bye” to Arizona and the 2024 Minor League Baseball Season as we officially wrapped up Instructional League on Friday. As the last on-field item of the year, Instructs serves as the bookend for a long summer and with it in the rearview mirror we now turn our attention to prepping for 2025. It was a fun and productive camp for us, but I know myself and the rest of our staff are looking forward to the opportunity to re-charge at home with family and friends over the next few weeks as the off-season officially begins.
Secondly, the Vols were idle on Saturday for their first bye week of the season, meaning we got to sit back and watch all of the carnage that took place in Week 5 of the college football season. It was a Saturday to behold with great games across the board, including a couple of upsets that should pay dividends for Tennessee down the stretch of the season if a College Football Playoff opportunity is still on the table as we head into December. Sometimes graphics are more suited to capture situations than words themselves, so with that in mind here I present to you what it felt like to be a Tennessee fan this weekend:
Now, onto something I will try to capture in words for this week’s edition.
With Monday marking the final day of the 2024 Major League Baseball regular season (and sadly, the end to the World Series title defense for the Rangers), many of us are now moving onto an equally important time of the year - the offseason. It is a time to re-coup and recover, but also one of the most important periods of the calendar as the decisions made over the next 5 months are critical in laying the foundation for success in 2025 and beyond. Trades will be made and free agents signed as clubs look to bolster their rosters.
And yet while the player personnel side of things garners much of the public attention, there is a less public but equally important game being played behind the scenes - hiring season. October and November are the two busiest months of the year from a staffing standpoint as clubs look to bolster their rosters of employees - whether that be from a front office, scouting, analytics, or on-field coaching perspective.
I’ve been fortunate enough to see both sides of this period - both as a prospective applicant nearly 7 years ago and as someone now responsible for helping man the entry ports for the people that we bring into our organization. As such, I always find my mind consumed this time of year with hiring and interviewing as we try to continually refine our processes to ensure we are bringing in the best possible people to join our group. I’ll be frank - when I was first put into the position where I was responsible for interviewing and hiring people, I had approximately zero idea what I was doing. And, to be even franker - that might actually be generous. I was grossly overmatched from the start and knew it - in less than a one year span I went from being the one submitting 30+ applications to one of the ones responsible for reviewing them.
That flip in responsibilities kicked off a long journey of learning of which I am even now just in the mid-stages. I read books, studied research articles, and built templates - all with the goal of mastering the craft of interviewing and hiring as best I could. And while I’m not going to sit here and claim that I have anything figured out, I do think I’ve learned a good deal on how to navigate the process.
So over the next couple of newsletters, I’d like to make an attempt to put pen to paper on some of the lessons and mental models I’ve found to be useful in the process. Partly as an attempt to crystalize some of my own thoughts on the matter, but also in the hopes that someday these ideas may help someone that finds themselves in a similar “oh shit” position to where I was five years ago.
We’ll start with the mental model that sits at the top of the list for most useful frameworks when thinking about interviewing, hiring, and developing talented people.
I call them ‘Talent Stacks’. Let’s dive in.
- CG
PS - As you’ve likely noticed, this edition of the newsletter is being sent on a Tuesday rather than on the normal Sunday cadence. The reason behind it: as I started to dive into Talent Stacks this weekend, I realized I had a lot more to say than I initially thought. So I decided to take the time to give the topic it’s proper focus and say it right rather than saying it rushed. I think the resulting piece ended up being worth the wait.
Thinking On - Talent Stacks
When I first started hiring, I was under the illusion that it was a simple process, akin to a math equation where all you have to do is make 1+1 equal 2.
My initial stance was that hiring is a basic match making game, one where the process would differ based on the organization or position but in which the goal was ultimately the same: find the person most suited to succeed in the job you are looking to fill. And just like any game, I thought, hiring should have a clear strategy or roadmap for winning. So I set out to figure out what that was.
I began like most managers and companies: by creating a standard job description with a list of desired ‘attributes’ or ‘qualifications’ - the things that myself, my coworkers, and our organization deemed to be essential components to success for the roles we were hiring for. From there I scripted out a series of questions meant to unearth those questions through conversation, ones I would ask in interview settings with candidates and subsequently ‘grade’ their responses on a hand-crafted rubric. My thought at the start was that by creating a clearly defined process up front with a logical series of steps, I would make the decision easy on the back end. With enough candidates screened and the right questions asked, I couldn’t help but make the ‘right’ decision and hire the ‘best’ person when push came to shove. Or at least so I believed.
But the more I went through my roadmap, the more I kept running into a specific issue: each role would have hundreds of applicants and dozens of interviews, but for some reason I was never able to find the person that checked every single one of the boxes. I was looking for the perfect candidate, but was never able to find them. And even after re-checking and updating every layer of the process - from the qualifications to the questions to the grading system and everything in between - I kept getting the same outcome. It took me some to figure out why.
Over time I came to see the issue wasn’t with the process itself, but instead with my expectations of what the process would uncover: the perfect candidate. The one that satisfied every condition, had all of the prerequisite skills, and fit every qualification to a T. I was searching for gold, but doing it like a fool. I was looking for the perfect candidate when the truth is that the perfect candidate doesn’t exist.
It was a harsh truth to learn, but one that has paid dividends since. Because once I came to the recognition that I would never find the exact fit for whatever role I was hiring - the perfectly cut square peg for the square hole - I recognized that I needed to start looking at the process a little bit differently.
Those early experiences forced me to go back to the drawing board. I realized I needed to go deeper and question many of the assumptions I had made on what a good hiring process looked like on a number of avenues, but especially on one in particular: I had to re-think what it meant to be ‘skilled’ in the first place. A couple of observations from two distinct industries helped me gain a better understanding.
The first came from a nearby place - the field. One of the most remarkable parts about competitive athletics is that ‘talent’ comes in all shapes an sizes. Tall or short, fast or slow, big or small - it is a unique feat of human performance that no two players are exactly alike and thus there is no singular path to success. Each sport has it’s own version of this talent distribution, such that you can define a bucket of ‘top performers’ and find a highly diverse group of players that constitutes it. Take baseball, for example, and the juxtaposition of Aaron Judge next to Jose Altuve. Or perhaps football, with Tyreek Hill and his 5’9” frame in the context of physical WRs like DK Metcalf and AJ Brown.
What sticks out like a sore thumb when you start putting players next to each other is that their on-field accomplishments often resemble each other more so than their skills do. Said differently, the outcomes might be the same but the path to getting there can take many different routes. As an example, Hill and Brown are 1st and 4th respectively over the last three seasons in total yardage, and yet they get there in completely different ways - Hill is a burner that creates major problems for defenses by simply outrunning them, while Brown relies more on physicality combined with explosiveness to create separation and rack up yards after the catch. The ultimate point is this: player performance is the emergent result of various complementary abilities that blend together in order to create a valuable skillset, but there is no perfect recipe. Instead, there exists an infinite amount of possible combinations that can lead to successful outcomes and successful players. The same can be said for staff.
A second parallel analogy to this concept from on the field can be found off of it - by borrowing from the technology industry and their concept of a ‘tech stack’. For technology companies, a tech stack refers to the combination of software, tools, frameworks, programming languages, technologies, and more that are used in combination with each other to create a high functioning operation. They are the key components both on the back-end and front-end of impactful companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and more, and share a few key attributes:
They are interdependent, meaning that each of the technologies in a stack work together to create a seamless experience;
They are customizable, meaning that the company can pick and choose different components based off of their needs; and
They are tailored, meaning that no two tech stacks are likely to be the same as different companies possess different goals.
What tech stacks allow for is a sort of ‘picking and choosing’ process, where you as a company can first assess your needs and then pick from a suite of tools that can service them. As it turns out, the interdependence with which they operate and their subsequent customizability are both critical features, as they give companies flexibility to adapt as new problems arise over time. Tech stacks do not remain stagnant so much as they evolve over time, meaning that companies can add or subtract components as needed based on the demands of their specific industry. Is your site performance struggling with increased traffic? Change the programming language that underlies it. Will AI transform the way your business operates? Find an AI agent that you can plug directly into your operation that will enhance the way customers interact with your data.
Zooming out and putting these two ideas - variable talent sets and tech stacks - together, we get the mental model I’ve come to rely on the most in the hiring process: Talent Stacks.
The way I think of them is the following: rather than focusing solely on individual skills, Talent Stacks emphasize the combination of various complementary abilities, character traits, and experience that blend together in order to create a unique and valuable person. They resist the urge to treat skills in a check-box, “you have it or you don’t” type manner and instead recognize that skills exist on a gradient - meaning you can have differing levels of ‘proficiency’ depending on the area. But they do not only look at skills in isolation - instead, they also look across the full combination of those skills to understand how those traits interact and overlap to create the entirety of the skillset. By looking both at individual ‘talents’ and the subsequent stack they form, Talent Stacks give us a dual model that can be applied to both individuals and - as we will see in a moment - teams.
I’ve become fond of the Talent Stacks model because it serves as a direct response to the recognition that there never has been and never will be a perfect candidate for any role. Instead of trying to find the perfect peg for the hole in the board, they give us more flexibility throughout the hiring process by acknowledging we are not only hiring a person but also a complementary set of skills. They encourage us to heed the lessons we’ve seen from both athletes and companies alike - that there are a multitude of ways to be successful in a given role with many different possible combinations of talents that can give rise to that success.
An analogy here can be helpful. Say I gave you a 1000 piece LEGO kit, and asked you to build a dragon. Depending on how the pieces fit together, you could have hundreds or even thousands of ways to build your mythical creature of choice - but you would take them and do your best. Now suppose once you finished I asked you to build that dragon again, but to make it better - more vibrant, more detailed, more imposing. The lessons you learned in that first trial would come in handy, as you’d then have a detailed idea of both the pieces you were working with and how they fit together. But since this dragon needs to be better, you would take those LEGOs and put them together in process that is distinct from the first. You might satisfy those conditions by choosing to prioritize some shapes in certain locations, or by putting specific colors next to each other. Your roadmap would be different, but in the end the result would be the same - a dragon made of 1000 (or less) LEGOs. Two different processes to get a similar, yet slightly different result.
Talent Stacks work in the same was as a LEGO set, where each skill is a block that you add to build a unique structure. Some blocks are foundational, like basic communication or problem solving abilities, while others are more specialized or advanced, such as being able to code in a specific programming language as a computer scientist or throw good batting practice as hitting coach. Like the components of a tech stack, these blocks can be rearranged or added to over time as different challenges and opportunities are presented - in any way you want. But the ultimate key - and why it is essential to think of talents as a stack rather than in isolation - is that the skills must be complementary to each other in some way. Like our LEGO blocks, it is critical that individual talents fit together neatly so that they can enhance each other - or else the totality of the skillset will suffer.
When we look at hiring through the lens of Talent Stacks, some valuable insights emerge - both at the individual and team levels.
In regards to the individual, a key lesson is that a person’s stack at a given point in time will not necessarily be the same stack that will exist into the future. This is because talents, in general, are cumulative - when you come pre-programmed with a certain skill, it is not likely that you will lose it in the future in the same way that you will not simply forget how to ride a bike. Talent Stacks thus recognize and appreciate the opportunity for growth, such that a given candidate’s stack can evolve over time as they enhance strengths, shore up weaknesses, and add new capabilities to their skillset.
An important corollary here is that allowing for upside in the long term gives us the ability to make compromises in the short-term. The backdrop of the imperfect candidate naturally necessitates that we make sacrifices, picking and choosing certain high index skills at the expense of others. Talent Stacks allow us to do so, and in turn place a high priority on determining the traits that you as a manger believe to be the most easily teachable or developable. The best case scenario thus becomes identifying and acquiring people with talent stacks that are highly proficient in skills that are difficult to improve, while being willing to sacrifice in areas you know you are uniquely positioned to enhance as a group.
But where things get incredibly interesting is when you take the concept of Talent Stacks and start to apply it to building a team. Fortunately the concept scales neatly to this level because teams are by nature combinations of individuals - and thus combinations of individual Talent Stacks. So in the same way that one person will have their own stack, your team will have one too - one that represents the combination of all the skills brought to the table by the people in it.
At the team level, Talent Stacks are freeing in a number of ways. First and foremost, they give you flexibility by way of synthesis. Rather than relying on a single person to fill multiple existing gaps in your group’s skillset, Talent Stacks instead provide an avenue to plug your holes by leaning on a diverse combination of individuals. Because talents are frequently ‘plug and play’, any gap in knowledge or skill that your team possesses can quickly be filled by hiring the right person with that trait already present in their stack.
Take the example where your group is lacking two hypothetical skills, “A” and “B”. From a traditional hiring vantage point, there would be a strong inclination to look for a singular candidate that brings both of those skills to the table - a “two birds, one stone” type hire. But the challenge with that line of thinking comes when we move from theory and start dealing in the realm of probability: the more individual skills we are looking for in a single person, the less likely that candidate is to exist in the first place. Add on top of this another consideration - what if A and B are two traditionally uncorrelated skills, such as data analysis and emotional intelligence? Now you are no longer looking for a candidate - you are looking for a unicorn instead. Good luck.
But when this problem is viewed through the lens of Talent Stacks, you now have a solution. Rather than hiring one person to plug both holes, you can instead hire two: one person that indexes highly on Skill A, and another that indexes highly on Skill B. This is a much safer - and realistic - bet than putting all of your eggs in one basket. And there is something beautiful that comes as a result.
Up to this point, we’ve mostly discussed how the Talent Stacks model can help us ‘patch up’ the overall skillset of a group at a point in time. But there is an important piece that this lens neglects - namely, that like a recipe from the kitchen, teams involve a healthy dose of “mixing” - of responsibilities, of personalities, and - especially - of skills. Given this fact, we can start to see that Talent Stacks are not only valuable to teams in the short-term but also carry heavy freight for the long run.
Because not only does adding various talents to your group’s stack benefit the team itself, the interoperability present in teams means that there is also a major carry over effect to the individuals already within it. As you bring in new skillsets to your group that were priorly lacking and your team members interact over time, you’ll notice an important “rub off” effect of one person on the others. And as that new member interacts with pre-existing ones, a bi-directional growth process occurs - they begin to teach others in your team the skills they possess, thus raising not only the floor of your overall team but also enhancing the skillsets of their teammates. The same phenomenon also occurs in reverse - the priorly present team members teach the newcomer their skills, thus helping them grow as they assimilate to the team.
As such, we can now understand why the complimentary nature of Talent Stacks is so crucial to pin down. Returning to the analogy of a recipe, you need flavors - ie skills - that pair well together so that each can enhance the other. If they don’t fit together, the taste that comes out on the other end is all but certain to be a little ‘off’. In order to get the recipe of Talent Stacks right, there has to be a base level of compatibility to both the people you bring into your team and their subsequent skillsets. You need to walk the line of similarity and uniqueness deftly in order to create the right blend that both enhances the full stack of your group while also allowing the people within it to grow as individuals.
Now, this letter has gone on long enough. But in zooming back out to think about Talent Stacks as a whole, I am hopeful that you can now see why the model carries so much power in my mind. It serves as both an antidote and an elixir, a solution to the common pitfalls of searching for the perfect candidate and a mechanism through which we can create teams that enhance the value of all those within it. There are few more impactful frameworks that I use to guide my hiring and team building process, and I am hopeful you’ve taken some things from it that you can blend into yours.
