Welcome to For Leaders, your go-to source for essential leadership insights and perspectives shaping today's world.

In this week’s newsletter:

• Strategic Summaries: Key insights and takeaways on the importance of identifying great talent

• The For Leaders Podcast: ApplyBoard CEO Meti Basiri

• Words of Wisdom: A powerful leadership quote to inspire

• Leaders’ Library: What we’re reading this week

A curated community of leaders.

Strategic Summaries

A weekly roundup of the most interesting, useful and thought-provoking articles to help you be a better leader. This week we’re focusing on identifying great talent.

Updating hiring tactics. This article sheds light on why the old way of hiring will not prepare companies for the future, and what the new way forward is.

Our take: For leaders to build a high-quality team, it requires the ability to recognize talent before others do or where others don’t. 

The idea of the best candidate being the one who fits in now is considered outdated. While most hiring managers look at past performance indicators, hard skills, and technical expertise to best match their job description, it’s wiser to look to the future.

What is the organization’s long-term strategy? And what skills will be needed to get there? The key is to balance your short-term needs with your long-term strategy.

Key takeaway: The World Economic Forum predicts that 65% of jobs today will not exist in 15 years. Therefore, skills that can be taught (e.g. hard skills) are becoming less important than soft skills like learnability and emotional intelligence. 

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The Peter Principle. Although satirical, there’s some foundational truth to this concept. 

Our take: The Peter Principle is the title of a 1969 book about how people are promoted within organizations. 

The authors posit that employees are hired for their past performance to fit into a current job. When they succeed, they’re promoted to a new position that requires different skills. 

If they lack those skills, they become incompetent and, if not, they’ll continue being promoted until they reach their respective level of incompetence. Meaning, most jobs are filled by incompetent people.    

Key takeaways: If this concept is true, then it can be fixed by devaluing the importance of “climbing the ladder.” Instead, provide incentives to people who are great at their jobs so they’ll continue excelling in their current positions. 

Or hiring people who are good at learning new things, thus promoting them without them reaching the aforementioned incompetency.

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Out with the old. This article gives us three new rules for identifying the best talent. 

Our take: Similar to the above articles, hiring for “fit” is now considered outdated. 

• Rule one: Instead of matching skills, the new way of identifying talent is hiring for diverse perspectives and backgrounds (and then allowing employees to express different views), leading to more creative solutions.

• Rule two: Instead of hiring to fit the job description, select for and help develop cognitive agility, emotional intelligence and adaptive learning.

• Rule three: Instead of using complementary sources in the interview process (e.g. structured interviews and psychometric tests), use dynamic interactional sources like game-based and AI-enabled assessments to increase predictive insights.

Key takeaway: Changing your mindset about talent, from skills-based to seeking and enabling adaptability in employees, will better serve you in our quickly-changing work landscape. 

🎧 For Leaders: ApplyBoard CEO Meti Basiri

Meti Basiri and his brothers were frustrated with their experience studying abroad. So he created ApplyBoard to help others have a smoother process.

His vision to use the transformative power of education to foster global unity is inspirational.

In this episode, Meti shares key insights on:

• Remote vs in-person work and how it affects collaboration, innovation and flexibility

• The importance of having a diverse and inclusive business ethos

• How his business vision includes his passion for global responsibility

Words of Wisdom

One weekly, impactful quote for leaders.

Leaders' Library

Every week, we share an interesting long-form piece of content to contemplate.

Today, we’re reading Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success by Adam Grant.

It’s our natural tendency in the West to focus on the individual drivers of success. We value ambition, hard work and creating our own successes. 

The author flips this premise on its head and puts forward the notion that success is actually dependent on our interactions with others.

His research-based argument helps us understand why some people rise to the top while others can’t seem to stay afloat. And it comes down to our willingness to give and work collaboratively, smashing the myth of greed being the key to success.

A positive and hopeful read to start off the year. 

Thanks for reading! We’ll see you next week with more powerful leadership insights and inspiration.