Scaling Talent Mass

Things that scale are things that have magnitude — the thing gets bigger or smaller in numerical while retaining its fundamental nature. Mass, energy, temperature, and time all scale. Leaders, like you, often ask how to scale human capital through hiring.

My ideas for hiring center around looking for unseen or skills undervalued by the market thereby increasing the diversity of your teams and you seeing gains from this approach. The quantity that we’re scaling is experience. You’ll see that a simple process, it’s not novel, for identifying experience gaps can help you find talent that increases your team’s ability to create useful outputs.

Step 1 – SWOT

Start by mapping your team’s experience by using a SWOT analysis. High-level and from the perspective of your team’s capabilities, map out your team’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Example:

Strength	Weaknesses	Opportunities	Threats
Creativity	Analytical Rigor	Outbound communication campaigns	Lack of engineering/mathematical/systems thinking

Step 2 – Process Map

Go to the individual level and begin thinking about how each member of your team contributes to your SWOT analysis. What is it about how they take inputs, process them, and convert them into usable outputs that makes your team especially creative, or makes you think the lack of systems thinking is a threat to the team?

Team Member	Strength	Weaknesses	Opportunities	Threats
	Creativity	Analytical Rigor	Outbound communication campaigns	Lack of engineering/mathematical/systems thinking
Person A	Support: Previous experience as a creative.	Risk: Only recently developed complex data experience and statistical thinking.	Support: generates lots of ideas for ways to re-engage clients.	Support: Previous experience working with systems and designing systems.
Person B	Risk: Skeptical by nature, not as strong at generating new ideas. Great at preventing the creatives from running wild.	Support: Tons of experience analyzing complex data sets and creating statistical models.	Support: Previous experience running A/B tests on digital marketing campaigns.	Risk: As good as they are at analyzing data, often misses the big picture. Myopic in their thinking.

Step 3 – GAP Analysis

Step back and look at the developing matrix. Ask yourself these questions:

1. What risks could be turned into strengths with the right addition to the team?
2. What opportunities are you unable to capitalize on due to missing skills or experience?
3. Where are you already strong and likely have a hiring bias?

Step 4 – Start the Journey

Instead of looking for “good fits” seek out candidates with experiences and product functions that complement your existing team and address specific gaps.

When interviewing candidates, ask how they process problems. Maybe, in the call, give them a problem to solve with you. See what it’s like to collaborate in real time. Look for talent that can make outputs that convert your team’s weaknesses into strengths thus scaling up experience.

Real Life Story

A firm hired me to build out a scaled customer success team from scratch. I completed steps 1 and 2 and concluded that our team was high on process, high on drive, and low on creativity. The generative people on the team were skilled at taking what already exists and making something from that. We didn’t have truly generative people.

In my network, I knew someone skilled at designing and building large experiences. Their process for converting inputs into usable products was a function of creating customer journey maps for cruise vacations. How is that like scaled customer success?

The same steps required to develop a customer journey are the same steps involved in designing a cruise journey. And, the cruise journey has to be written and executed in a way that anybody from around the world could execute it — that means it must be simple and scalable.

That person is now the manager of the Digital and Scaled program. They built on an office hours program that grew to becoming hugely popular. They developed email onboarding campaigns that increased adoption. On paper this person would have been passed over — the market undervalued them. My firm was smart to hire them, and now they’re a significant contributor.