The Talent Challenge - Tyler Cowen

Okay, thank you very much for everyone. First of all, happy new year for everyone. Second, many, many thanks to Professor Tyler Cowen to be here with us. For us, it's an honor to have you with us. As I told you, most of us like to accomplish most of the topics that now we're taking in terms of management, and your recent book Talent that you wrote with Daniel Gross is considered, in fact, a very interesting book. Professor Tyler Cowen is a well-known economist. He writes for New York Times, right? Also for Bloomberg. He has a very well-known blog that is Imaginal Revolution. I think some of the people that are here know also very well. And the idea today, it's to start this discussion with something that I think is very, very important for all of us, for our organizations, for our countries, for our regions, that is the time that that talent. So as usual, Professor Tyler Cowen will speak about 20 minutes, 35 minutes, the time that he thinks it's the best one. And then we are going to have a discussion between all of them so that we can have here 1 hour, 1 hour and 10 minutes discussion. Professor Tyler Cowen, it's your time. Thank you very much again.

Thank you for the introduction. First, my co-author Daniel Gross. He's sorry that he cannot be here. Daniel is a venture capitalist and he is off doing deals for artificial intelligence, but he sends his regards.

Okay.

So Daniel and I started this book now, I think it's more than 4 years ago, almost 5 years ago. We met each other and we decided we had this common interest and how do you find talent. So I'm an employer in my university. I direct a nonprofit. We have about 200 employees. Daniel hires people for his firm. He invests in them for venture capital. I run a project called Emergent Ventures that makes grants to promising young people. So he and I separately have been practicing talent evaluation really for most of our adult lives. And then we met each other. We just kept on asking each other questions, talking. We set up a WhatsApp channel to trade ideas, questions, research papers we were reading. And after doing this for about a year, we decided this should be a book. So we just started writing, and now it's a book. The book came out in May in the United States.

Okay, okay, please.

So I'm just going to outline a few of the ideas in the book, not all of them, just a few select ideas. But I'd first like to make the point the book is mostly written for the United States or North America, so neither Daniel nor I is claiming that all the same ideas hold in other countries. It will depend on your country. I've been to Portugal 4 times. I love visiting Portugal. But I don't feel that I have any expertise in how your culture works. So we view our book as a kind of guide to get people to start asking questions. It is not a series of final answers, right? So just keep that in mind. It's a, it's a guide for learning how to ask better questions. So one topic we start the book off with is just the importance of talent evaluation. The more and more we have a service economy, producing is not about having a lot of steel or big factories, but it's about hiring talented people or getting talented people to come to your country, or it really is mainly about what economists call human capital. If you look at United States economic growth over the last several decades, a lot of that economic growth just comes from using the human capital of women better than we used to do. That's one of the major reasons the United States has grown wealthier, is just women not only entering the labor force but getting better and more productive jobs. So talent is something almost all of us should care about, no matter what your particular job might be. And you don't have to be a boss. Let's say you're being hired. Well, you actually care about the talent level of your boss, right? You want to work for a talented boss, not an incompetent boss. So people everywhere in the chain should care about this talent problem. Daniel and I also saw there's no single book out there that is a systematic guide for how to think about talent, how to think about hiring. At least not in English, so we set out to write that. Our opening chapter turns to the topic of interview questions, so we thought we would put one of the most fun chapters first to get readers involved. So Daniel and I have noticed when you actually talk to people about the other interviews they have, mostly they are bored. It's like a big bureaucratic exercise. They get the same questions. They give the same answers. Everyone comes prepared for the same questions. So in the United States, for instance, a very common interview question is, "Could you tell us about a mistake you made in your previous job and how you fixed it?" Now, in principle, that's not a bad question. In principle, it's actually a pretty good question. But the thing is, everyone is ready for it. So everyone comes with a prepared story or anecdote about a mistake they made. It's never so big a mistake that they look like a total idiot. They have their story, how they fixed it. You're really just testing for whether or not the person prepared for the interview. You're not testing for anything real about that person. So Daniel and I have tried to come up with questions where it's very hard for people to fake the answer, very hard for people to prepare. So one question we like to use is simply the following: What are your open browser tabs right now? That is, I'm sitting at a laptop, I have browser tabs open. Oh, I would guess it's about a dozen of them. And if you know what my open browser tabs are, it gives you a pretty good window into what I do, how I think, what I read, what kind of writer am I. So I can tell you my open browser tabs now. It's Bloomberg. I write for Bloomberg. It's my blogging software on WordPress. I write a blog. It's Twitter. ChatGPT is an open browser tab for me. Every day I ask ChatGPT questions and try to figure out how it works. Two different essays about artificial intelligence are an open browser tab. My regular email, my Gmail. And if you know my open browser tabs, in a way, you know my life. So I have an open browser tab for the NBA, professional basketball. I'm going to a game this evening. And I want to read about it in advance. So if you ask a person, what are your open browser tabs? And they tell you, it's a look inside what the person does or how the person thinks. And it's very hard to lie in answer to that question. Because if you make up an open browser tab that you know nothing about, and the interviewer asks, what do you think of that one? You know, you look like a fool or an idiot or a liar. It's also a question— I mean, people are starting to prepare for this question as the book becomes better known, but most people are not ready for this question. So you get an answer that's very genuine or very authentic. Obviously, like all interview questions, the better known it is, the less effective it becomes. So I've even started some interviews. I meet the person or I get on the Zoom call. I don't even say anything. And the person says, "These are my open browser tabs." Now, to that extent, it's a less effective question because someone has prepared and they thought about what open browser tabs does Tyler want to hear. So questions need to be recycled, regenerated. You need to find new ones. Another question I like to ask people is the following: What is it you do that is comparable to how a classical music concert pianist practices scales. Or you could make it about a soccer player. What is it you do to practice? What is it you do to improve yourself? Very simple question. I've used this for years. It is remarkable to me how many people do not have a good answer to this question. Maybe they're not doing anything to improve themselves, or maybe they've never thought about it systematically. But then you're learning something about that person. They still might be a good hire. They still might be highly skilled or smart or hardworking. But if they're not working on improving themselves, you should infer that what you see is what you get. And maybe they won't improve much anymore. So it's just a spontaneous question. You toss it out. What are you doing to improve yourself? Again, usually you will learn a lot from the person's answer. If someone asks me that question, and I now get it all the time, one thing I say is I practice writing every single day— Saturday, Sunday, my birthday, Christmas, every day of the year I write something just to keep fresh and active as a writer. The other thing I would say is right now I am trying to teach myself how neural nets and artificial intelligence models work because I think they will be very important. It's something I'm trying to do to improve myself. I may or may not succeed, but from the answer, one hopes the other party can see, well, you're really working on improving yourself in some way. If I'm interviewing someone to be a CEO or maybe leader of a nonprofit or somehow a boss or a major figure— those are not most interviews, but Often when I give grants, I'm giving grants to people who want to start a new organization, usually a nonprofit. And I have a favorite question for them. It's a very simple question. It's so simple it sounds stupid, but I think it's again a hard question to fake if you're not ready for it. I just ask the person, how ambitious are you? Or an alternative version is, How much are you going to succeed? Most people are not ready for this question. They're ready for all kinds of queries, but the simple, how well will you do? How well do you want to do? What is your ambition? I have found the people who are not ambitious actually cannot articulate very well what it is like to be very ambitious. And you just hear something in the tone of their voice, something in the lack of conviction, that maybe they're not that ambitious. Now, for some hires, lack of ambition is fine, but again, if someone is proposing that they lead an organization and they're not ambitious— I was once, uh, on a job committee hiring someone to be a professor at my university, and I asked the question, I said, How ambitious are you? And you know what the answer was? The person said, I want to publish a few papers and then get tenure. I thought that was a terrible answer, like the worst answer possible. Like, yes, you do need to publish some papers as a professor. You should want to get tenure. But your true ambition should be, well, I have this wonderful idea and I want to bring it to the world, right? Publishing papers is just a means to that end. So it's a very revealing question for potential leaders, just to ask them that. But the general principle behind all of these questions is you don't want the conversation to be too scripted. You don't want to simply test for the other person's preparation. You want it to become an actual dialogue and get a sense of what are people like as individuals. The best interviews are the ones where you really care what the answers are, because you as interviewer are engaged in the conversation. Not boring. So that's just a little bit from the chapter on interviews. We have a separate chapter, How Are Online Interviews Different? But let me now talk a little bit about what traits you should look for in hires. And these chapters cover some statistics. So I'll speak a little about intelligence. And I'll speak a little bit about conscientiousness and personality. When I studied this literature, I really was very surprised by some of the things I learned. And the biggest surprise for me is that a person's IQ does not predict their wages very well. So once IQ is above a certain level, IQ and success are not that closely correlated. So people such as myself who are academics, we tend to think smarts are the most important feature. Really not the case, and this you see in the data. So as a person's IQ goes up, their expected wage, it goes up, you know, by less than a standard deviation. Even if a person is much smarter, expected wage per year might go up $10,000 or $15,000 US dollars a year. That's something, but it's not that big a difference. So what really matters is consistency, durability, drive, ability to learn, ability to cooperate, social intelligence of a certain kind. So smart people in particular, they overrate the importance of IQ or intelligence. And that to me was a kind of shocking result. I kept on reading and I thought, well, when I read more papers, I'll see this isn't true. But the more papers I read, the more convinced I became that in fact it is true. With intelligence, there is a very definite threshold effect. So to have a job, say, as an investment banker, you need a certain level of intelligence or you cannot do the job at all. So it's not that intelligence doesn't matter, but for the people who have that level of intelligence or higher, IQ and final success simply are not that correlated. So do not be too seduced by people who seem to you extremely intelligent. It is one factor. How important it is depends on the field, the kind of job, but don't just think your goal is to hire all the smart people. If they can't work together well, if they're not ambitious, at the end of the day, even with all those smart people, basically you have nothing. That was my biggest personal learning from doing the research behind this book, and it really has changed how I try to hire people and whom I want to hire. When it comes to personality traits, there's a large literature on this. The most general result, which is not at all original to my book Talent, but I'll just present it, is that for most jobs, the most important personality trait is conscientiousness. The person has to show up in the morning. You know, my sister, she works in human resources. I've asked her, what do you look for? She says, someone who will show up. She's joking, but she also means it. A lot of people these days, they don't in fact show up for work. So conscientiousness is important, but for your really top, most important hires, they will have much more than conscientiousness. And what I like to look for is their ability to read social situations and understand how the hierarchies work in those social situations. So if they're trying to climb a ladder Are they trying to climb the right ladder? So there are brilliant people, hardworking people, but their big ambition is to be number one in the world at some computer game. Maybe for a few games you can turn that into income, but overall it's not a great ambition. You want people who understand the social dynamics of your workplace and they can figure out how they will fit in and add value. So when I'm interviewing people, what I like to do is to get them talking about social situations. You can ask people about a movie, about a play by Shakespeare, anything. Just get them talking about something they're familiar with. I've asked people about, you know, the movie Star Wars. I'll say, in Star Wars, who is the best judge of talent? Is it Darth Vader? Is it Luke Skywalker? Is it Obi-Wan Kenobi? I don't really care what their answer is. I care how they think about it and how they are able to express or explain why they might think, oh, Yoda. Yoda is the best judge of talent, whatever the case may be. Or you ask them about, you know, Romeo and Juliet. Well, what was the mistake they made? You know, is there some alternate path where they might have managed to marry each other? What went wrong? Just get them talking about interpersonal relations in a way where they cannot prepare in advance with their little stories about what they did on their last job. So this ability to perceive and understand social hierarchies and then to figure out which are the hierarchies they ought to be climbing. Uh, two other points I'll mention and just say a little bit about Before we get to questions, sometimes business leaders, nonprofit leaders, they ask me, what's the single thing I need to do to do better bringing in talent? And I make the following point to them. I say, it's important to be able to choose talent and to search for talent, but the real way to succeed is to have talent searching for you. And this relates to the importance and significance of decentralized mechanisms. So in advance, ex ante, how much is your company investing in what I call its soft reputation? What people say on Twitter, what people say to each other, WhatsApp conversations about your company or your institution. How many people are out there talking you up? As a place to work, a place to be. So the number one thing you can do is not just think of yourself as the talent searcher, but think of potential workers as people searching for you. And you want the decentralized mechanism on your side, not working against it. So it's really not about, oh, here's 10 resumes in front of me, which one is the best? That's important, but it's about which 10 people are going to send in their resumes. And on any given day, it will never seem that important to be building out your firm's network of soft contacts. It's never an emergency. It never seems like the critical fire that needs to be put out. But if you believe in the importance of talent, in fact, that is what you should be doing in advance every day, thinking, who is looking for me? And what can I do to make that a higher quality pool of people, the people I want to be hiring or working with, or maybe starting a business with? So that, I think, is the single most important piece of talent advice, is just to flip the problem in that way. There's also a chapter of the book— I'll close with this discussion— and it has to do with hiring women. Which is a fraught and somewhat controversial topic, but I think in general men often make poor decisions when they're hiring women, and these are what I see as the two most important biases. And these biases, they might result from explicit prejudice and sexism, but I think they're present most of the time whether the man is an explicit sexist or not. I think simply most men behave this way no matter how good their intentions. The first bias is this: when you ask men to estimate the smarts of women, even smart men, they tend to underestimate how smart the smartest women are. They also overestimate a bit how smart the less intelligent women are. So the distribution, it gets more bunched in the eyes of the men. If the woman is pleasant to the man, the man might think too highly of her. But the very, very smartest women, they simply tend to be undervalued by men. You can see this in experimental studies. It is consistent with the anecdotal evidence I see in front of me. So if you are a man doing hiring, I would just stress, be aware you probably have this implicit bias that you fail to see how intensely remarkably smart the smartest women are who cross your path. The second bias I see, again, is both in the data and my anecdotal observations, is a lot of men hiring, they put too much weight on the woman's personality and women who seem to them just a little bit difficult, they tend to think are very hard to work with, even when personality may not in fact be so much of an issue. So when it comes to personality, the male evaluators, they tend to spread that variance. They think the pleasant women are really, really nice, and they think the women who are not so evidently pleasant are just really hard to work with. So again, if you're a male evaluator, Uh, just worry a bit less about personality, I would say, and just realize you're not always such a good judge of who is easy to work with and who is not. Another general piece of hiring advice is, when possible, have a woman or more than one woman on your hiring committee, because they will see things that often the men do not. Those are just some very basic points from my book Talent with Daniel Gross. And I think now we move to questions. I thank you all for coming and listening, and feel free to ask about, you know, anything you would like, talent or otherwise. And I thank my hosts also for having me.

Okay, Tyler, I think it was a very interesting summary of your excellent book. It's very practical, as you told, and a very guided book. So I will start today with a question, then I will pass to— we have here different kinds of people, people that were in government, people from companies, people from the academia. My question is very simple. Do you know that some years ago Richard Florida wrote a book about the importance of the creative class in the economy? What do you think about this idea of the creative class being important for our companies, for our economy? How do you think it can be more and more energized, as you tell in your book?

Well, I know Dick Florida, I like his book, I think I largely agree with him, but I would say the problem as a hire with his hypothesis is this: his book came out now a long time ago, many people know about this book, The Creative Class is great, but everyone is running after that same class of employees. Oh, they have a degree from a good school. They lived in New York. Now it's Austin, Texas. You know, they, they talk and dress a certain way. On average, those are pretty productive employees, but the whole country, the whole world is chasing after them. And I think to do well, you have to broaden your horizons and be looking for people who do not obviously come across as creative class types. You could call them the uncreative class, but I think in fact they're not less creative than the so-called creative class. So I think just running after the elites, they harm minimizing strategy, but the people who do really well, say in venture capital, are those who find the weirdos who don't seem to fit the well-mannered Richard Florida mode. So I agree, but at the same time, You need to be casting your sights more broadly.

Okay, so I will invite some people to make some questions. We have here Mr. Silva Pineda. Dr. Silva Pineda, you were some years ago a minister for employment, right? Am I right? So you know very well the topic of human people, people employment. Can you make a comment or a question to Tyler, please?

Thank you very much. It was quite interesting. Oh, Professor Tyler Cowen. I'm thinking that—

We are not listening very well, Dr. Tillman. Can you speak a bit louder?

Can I order?

Yes.

I have an idea that the developing talents Through, through, through example. I think to develop the talents, it's necessary to live in an environment that there are other talents. And I think that is the way that I see that a community like a university, for example, is a good example, but also a company. I think that the interaction among people is real fundamental for develop talent. I think that organizations, why they are like strong hierarchy structure, they are not good for develop talent. I prefer the horizontal relations. I want to know what is your opinion about that.

Okay, thank you very much, Tyler. We are going to organize 3 questions, okay, and then We— did you understand the question?

I think I did. So take one or two more.

He spoke about the horizontal, the horizontal importance of the organization to promote a better standard of talent, right? Okay. We have here Juki Cabasso that is a manager of a very important company here in Portugal. I know that he deals every day with people, with talents. Juki, do you want to make some comment or some question?

Yes, thank you, uh, Shaim. Thank you for the presentation. I have a simple question.

Um, in the—

when I, when I do interviews, I'm used to asking, what have you done professionally wrong that in the past that you make that marked you.

And in the way, as you said before, when you ask what are the browsers open to have the, the person talking with me without preparation. I don't know if you, if you agree with this this view.

Okay, and then a final question before the, the other round. Okay, Tyler, we have now Nuno Santos. Nuno Santos, do you want to make a question also, please?

Thank you, Jaime. Can you hear me?

We are not seeing you. We are not seeing you.

I am, I am in this— I am in the streets. I, I am taking the chance to have a bit of this marvelous lecture and walking a bit Okay, okay. Here in beautiful Lisbon, so I go off camera.

Sorry for the train.

So Tyler, thanks a lot for sharing these beautiful insights with us.

I would like to listen a bit from you on what would you change in the things, or what would you tune if you think about the young— I don't know what's happened. The young people and the future leaders coming now from the next—

Okay, now we can go for the first answers. Okay, there are 3 questions, 3 topics.

Let me take some angles of those and put them together. I think young people in many sectors have a harder time today because of work from a distance. For people who are very senior and well-known, work from a distance is great. You don't have to commute. Everyone knows who you are. You know how your company works. But if you're 23 years old and trying to rise to the top, it's harder to get mentors. It's harder to have face-to-face learning. So I feel that right now we are doing many of our young people a disservice. In any year of this experiment, it will seem okay. But over a 10-year time horizon, we are not developing those young people enough at all. So I am concerned about this. Now, there's the question of do organizations horizontally promote their talent well enough? I think this is exactly the problem we have that we need to do more to encourage young talent in these organizations to spend time together and to spend more time with the senior people. Some groups do this through off-site activities. Again, it will depend what you do, where you are, but I think we need to be more, more careful about this than at least what I observe in the United States. I sometimes give young people two general pieces of advice, I say the first is, what is your small group of peers that you learn from every day? If you don't have such a small group, you will not get that far. Whether it's great scientists, great musicians, philosophers, anything. The people who are truly successful have a small group of friends and peers they learn from almost every day. And when possible, companies should try to provide that for their young and indeed older workers. And the second question is, who are your mentors? You should have multiple mentors. Most will be older, but in fact some can be younger. Who are the people who care how you're doing, try to promote you, try to teach you things? You should always be trying to get yourself a better set of mentors, and your company, your institution should help you in that regard, not just treat it as something they ignore. Then I was given an example of a job interview question. You know, what's a good question? I think it really depends for all of you on Portugal, and I cannot tell you always what is a good question for Portugal, but I would say this: every interview you want 1 or 2 questions that are pretty basic and pretty easy, where you're just testing, did the person prepare for this interview at all in a conscientious manner? And then you want a few questions that are very open-ended, very surprising, uh, not trick questions, but they're going to be difficult questions by their nature. And then you see how creative the person is, how well they can converse with you, how well they can think on their feet, shift gears. And you need both of these. And what in Portugal is a surprise, what is not, is not for me to say, but I think it's that combination that is important in assessing your own interview questions.

Okay, now we go to a second round. Okay, I will invite Karina Oliveira, that is the managing school, a school that is connected with the hospitality and the tourism. Irina, do you want to make any comment or any question to Tyler?

Hi, this is unexpected, but thank you for the opportunity. Hello Tyler, hello Jaime, thank you. I was wondering about this talent question that Tyler was talking about and these questions on job interviews. One of the questions that I'm in the other side of the equation, many employers ask me for help trying to find the best skills and the best students to fit in the, in the, the jobs they have. And sometimes I ask them the opposite: what do you want as a skill? Not only, not only academic skills, but also some other kind of skills. And all of them, they ask me, I want a nice person. I just want somebody that can be here on time, have the open mind to learn, have some commitment with work, and I want a nice person. They know they have the skills because we provide the students with a lot of this kind of expertise, technicians, but they also like a good person. So So is this hard or not to measure in a job interview?

Okay.

I think it's very hard to measure in— I'm sorry, we take a few first?

Yes, I think we make this question. We have here from Paris, Luis Fariña is someone that has a long tradition in the public sector, in the army, in the national security. So Luis, I think the question of talent is quite different in this kind of organizations. But you want to make some comment or some question, Tyler, please?

Yeah, thank you, Jaime. Thank you, Tyler, for your wonderful explanation. And I was wondering, just thinking about it, you talked about essentially about the private sector, but for us in the public sector, I found it's more difficult to recruit talent. And the question is, are we— when we proceed, when we try to get the interviews and people to the interviews and make the questions, I've done a couple of interviews for, for higher ranks, and sometimes it's difficult because in private sector there's a lot of things and motivations that the, the private sector can offer. In public sector, it's quite different. Should we do the capture of talent in private sector and public sector the same way? Are the same procedures applying the same way to get the, the best results? That's the questions I, I, I was wondering to put into Tyler Cowen. Thank you very much.

And now, Tyler, a final question in this group from Jorge Gomes, that is also a teacher in a Portuguese university. So it's a colleague from you in ISEG, that is one of the most important faculty of economics here in Portugal. Jorge, please.

Good evening from Portugal.

And very—

thank you very much for your presentation. It was very interesting with lots of insights that we can take. And it looks like my whole day was spent on talking about talent and onboarding, integration, things like that. So after all—

after so many hours listening to these things, I just have—

I'm just wondering,, relating to the concept of talent and competence in organizations. Do you see any benefits of having incompetent people in our organizations?

Thank you.

Okay, let me get—

so please, first, the question of who is a nice person. I think that's the hardest thing to uncover in most interviews. The easiest thing to uncover, according to the data, is how open-minded a person is. But how nice they are and how they will work with others— almost everyone tries to fool the interviewer, and often they succeed. So to the extent that is important, that raises the significance of interviewing a person's references and not just reading a letter from them. But trying to get the references on the phone. Now, the references, especially in the US, they try to be very polite. They don't want to say things against the person. So you have to make them feel a bit safe and say something like, if I were working with John Smith and I wanted John to be more effective, what are the things I would need to teach John? You need to frame it in a positive way. And if you start getting that feedback implying John is not so nice, then you're starting to learn John is not so nice. And often it will be phrased politely, like, oh, John needs to learn not to be so rough with everyone. Well, okay, but when you hear that 3 times, maybe John isn't nice. So I would say for niceness, you need to go to references. Then there's the question, how is public sector employment different? And again, this answer may differ across countries, and in my country there's of course much more federalism. You know, we have 50 states, a lot of different environments, but overall what I observe is good public sector hiring has succeeded when the environment is genuinely nice and the people there seem happy and are loyal, and also when the public sector employee has created good conditions for working women who may have children and families. And a lot of growth in public sector employment in Washington, D.C.— I live right outside of Washington— has come from women, highly educated women who don't want the same kind of life that a lot of people say have when they work in the tech sector in San Francisco. My wife, if you're wondering, she works in the public sector in Washington, DC. She has a law degree. She could earn much more money in the private sector, but she's actually happy where she is, and I don't think she's planning on leaving that job. So to think differently about male-female balance, work-life balance, and the work environment being supportive in a particular way. Uh, at least in my country, that is much more important in the public sector. The private sector, you always have the option of treating people not so well and just paying them a lot. Public sector, usually you don't have that option, so you need to be more creative. Um, mostly I think this has worked, but of course it's harder. Now, do you ever want incompetent people? Oh, you know, I suppose it depends what you mean by incompetent. The way you phrase the question, I'm inclined to answer no. But I would just say be aware— be, beware of the person who just seems to radiate competence and is not obviously understanding anything about your organization. I found those hires do not work out. People who can articulate what the organization is about and what their role in it might be tend to do well. And people who just talk about how busy they are and how many things they get done, well, that's nice, but I don't actually think it's the best predictor of success. It's often a kind of act. So people who put forward competence as their main thing, maybe I'd even be a little suspicious of that.

Okay, so we go to the next round and then the final one. So we have here Filippa, Filippa Fisch, that works a lot in the health sector and knows very well the IT sector also. Filippa, do you want to make some comment or some question to Tyler?

I was muted, sorry. We were missing this in the Zoom. Thank you, Jaime. Thank you, Tyler. It was a very, very, very good insights, and I got some very good notes for the interviews and very nice clues. And looking right now at this hybrid work that most, most of us are dealing with, and with the young generations, I see that most of the time it's difficult to, in one hand, to understand what are their needs or their goals when they are going to an interview? And also, when we get them into the company, how can we keep up with the pace of putting them motivated and embrace the challenge? So these are my questions or my thoughts for discussing together with you and the rest of the the persons that are in the meeting. So, um, this hybrid work, and as you said before, these younger generations that didn't have the time, and sometimes they finish their, their studies in a hybrid mode or in the remote mode, how do we catch them and how do we engage with them so that we can have different teams and different capabilities inside the companies? Thank you.

Okay, thank you very much. Luis Neves, you are here also with us. Luis has a very important role in an international company concerning IT and talent. Luis, do you want to make some comment or some question to Tyler?

Thank you, thank you, Gian.

Not really, because I joined a little bit later, so I could not listen everything. So I do not have any particular question.

Thank you.

No? Okay, okay, okay, thank you very much. I thought he was from the beginning. Okay, let's try to see if there's still one. I don't know, Raul Philippe is also a teacher in a very well-known school. Do you want to make some comment, Raul, or some question?

Raul Philippe.

Ah, okay, okay.

Thank you, James.

Thank you, Tyler. I was listening to Wishferinha, and thinking that we all have the same problem in the public sector when we are hiring people. So what I try to do is when I'm interviewing them is what can I offer them besides money, because we cannot compete with them in, in the public sector. So just one comment And it is not, it is not enough to say that I've learned a lot from you. So you said that IQ is not the most important thing, that personality is not the most important thing, but somehow I have the notion that the mix of these two items is probably the most important thing to recognize talent. What do you think about this?

Okay, and a third and final question. José Fernando de Novo, do you want to make some comment? You have also experience in hiring and dealing with talent in the international one. I think you are here. José Fernando, are you listening?

Yes, no, Jaime, thank you. I was late, so I was not able to listen to the presentation, so I'm afraid I will be a bit out of context.

I'm sorry.

Okay, okay, no problem. So Tyler, you can answer to these two questions and then we'll have a final group. Okay, thank you.

Sure.

I very much like the way the final point was put, that what's most important is how you coordinate your skills, not any one skill. I think this is very easy to see in a lot of sports, but it's a more general lesson as well. So if you look at basketball, there are some players who are incredible shooters but the main thing they do is shoot. There are some players who are very tall, but that's their main asset, that they're very tall. And you can go on down the list, but the top players, maybe in no one of their skills are they the best. Like LeBron James is not actually the best shooter in basketball, but he coordinates his skills better than the other players do. And you're looking for that in your hires. And that's an intangible thing. It's hard to see up front. But get out of your mind the obsession over a single skill for most jobs. Just try to figure out how does this person put their skills together, and do they understand themselves and their environments well enough that they can improve at doing that over time? So look also for improvement. In coordination? Is the person getting better? Now, the first question was about motivating young people in different ways. I find this a significant problem. I'm not sure I really have new or special answers. At least in the United States, we are right now experiencing a kind of mental health crisis amongst a lot of our young. Young people at higher rates are very unhappy or having problems. I don't know if the same is true in Portugal. I really don't know. But a lot of younger people, I have them as students also. It's much harder to work with them. They're much more nervous. They complain about themselves and others much more. I don't feel I found a solution to this. The first step, I think, is awareness. So I've just tried to train myself out of thinking the current generation is exactly like earlier generations. I don't think it is. I hope we get over this national problem we have, but I just see higher neuroticism amongst young people today. And I'm not the kind of pessimist who always complains, oh, younger people are so terrible. I think they're very skilled. I think they're very good as human beings, a lot can be said on their behalf, but there's some underlying sense of disquiet, and I haven't figured out, you know, what employers should be doing about that.

Okay, now I have another question, Tyler, before passing to other people, that is about the role that people and talent have in the community. So I think that's something that will be more and more important in the future, is try to see that citizens and people that work in an organization must be aware of the role that they have as workers in an organization in the community. How do you see this aspect, and how do you think that in the future, with this uncertainty and complexity that we are living now in terms of social and economic aspects, we can develop more this community dimension, social dimension of the work? Okay, now I would like to see from the people that we have here if eventually— Marifranck, do you want to make some topics? You have also some experience in these areas, especially in the international ones. You always make some interesting comments.

Okay, thank you, Jaime.

Thank you for the opportunity. I was listening, Tyler Cowen. Thank you for the presentation, great presentation. I have only two questions. I was thinking during this conversation. The first one is quite linked with what Chaim said, is the context of the interview. It means the, the presentation was very focused on the interview and the role of the interview in finding talent, but I would like to listen you elaborate a little bit on the relation between the interview and all the context, how the person is analyzed not only in the interview, but how the interview is related to the other aspects or the other knowledge about the person. That I was very curious. The second question, it's more coming from what you— your presentation as a whole. Is, I think, before, let's say, some decades ago, the recruitment of talent was based in the relation between the person who hiring and the knowledge about the social context, the person, their life, because the communities were more, were smaller and more together. And now there is a kind of commoditization of this relation by interviews, by papers, by data. Don't you think in the future, considering the kind of skills like relationships, critical thinking, behavior, purpose of life, the relation between the recruiter and the recruitee should be more based on a long-term relation and knowledge about the person? Even if you spend lots of time on that, we shouldn't forget this person once in the organization Maybe they will stay there for decades. Then if you, if you have somebody who invests time to know the person, to know what kind of relation they have, what kind of person is, is a good investment to get the best talent and not only based in kind of interviews and data and information. That's the two, the two comments or questions I was very curious and thank you for the good presentation.

Okay, and finally, I would like to ask Fernando Monteiro, that has a long experience in terms of management and dealing with talent and people. Fernando, do you want to make some comment also, or some question, please?

Yes, thank you, Jaime, and thank you, Tyler, for your presentation. It was— I took a lot of notes here, and of course my experience is in multinational companies mostly, but anyway, I think that during all these years Even we have new modern and new more sophisticated means like artificial intelligence to look for the best candidates, to gather all the information that you have some individuals. I think that today, even also the trends, the new trends of remote work, by the way, I completely agree with you, I think remote work is not really— is important to have a balance between remote work and physical work, otherwise people is lost in terms of potential, your future in the company. But these new trends, like really you have said, the gender trend, the race trends, etc., I think there is— continues to have a moment of the truth. And the moment of truth, the internet is the final interview with the employer. And in this final interview with the employer, there's one thing that is really important is the emotion, the chemistry, regardless the competence, the skills, the background, everything. But I think the chemistry and the emotions continue to be very important. And on the other hand, the money that you have to offer as an incentive. And when you speak of money, is the pay, the salary pack that you must offer, this is also very important. So I should like to hear your opinion about this moment of truth.

Thank you all for this talk.

Okay, Carl, so these are the 3 final questions so that we can accomplish the 1 hour that we kept. Okay, thank you very much.

Please.

I will need to go at 2 o'clock, so my answers will be a little brief. I strongly agree the point about chemistry, how important it is. And I think it remains true even in a commoditized work environment. So more and more companies are hiring people they've never met, maybe will never meet. The person might live in India, live in Nigeria, live in Germany. This will only increase. But it's still important that you have people on the ground in those places. They know you, you know them, they recommend you, those soft networks. Of trust actually will become more important as hiring at a distance increases, and that there's some chemistry in some of those connections that's really essential, and it needs to be built in up front. Uh, the point at the beginning about community and the workers— there's a lot of evidence that how well you work with others has become more important over time as a predictor of productivity. So how well your hires work with each other is only going up in importance. Morale is only going up in importance. And the question about wanting to know all the context, you know, behind the interview, I fully agree with that. One piece of context I find very important is just why does the person think this might be a good job for them? Why are they knocking on my door? Why did they come here? What's their motive? What's their theory? About why this might be a good fit. And if I don't know that, I feel very nervous about a hire. If I can't articulate why it might work for them, then I feel I don't know enough. Sometimes you have to make a decision anyway, but then I'm really very uncertain about the judgments. So I would just say thank you to you all. Thank you for listening so carefully. And those of you who read the book, And if anything comes up, you know, feel free to email me. My email is online. I do hope to get back to Portugal soon and maybe someday meet some of you.

Tyler, please tell us when we are coming to Portugal. It will be a pleasure to receive you here. Okay, thank you very much.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Thank you.

Bye-bye. Thank you.

Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Bye, see you.