I love college football, so I watch many of the analysis shows. On a recent one, former Florida coach Urban Meyer was deconstructing a play by Clemson’s star freshman, Sammy Watkins. He pointed out details as Watkins got free, made a catch, eluded a defender, and turned up field.
At that point, Watkins took off and ran away from the defenders. “The rest,” Meyer said as Watkins ran, “is recruiting.” He meant that there are some things you can’t coach or train a person to do because it’s that natural ability thing. Coach Meyer was almost right.
There are some things that Watkins came into the world with. Natural foot speed, coordination, and height are among them. In that sense, it’s not coaching, it’s recruiting.
“But wait,” as they say, “there’s more.” There’s the work ethic that helped Watkins develop his natural gift. And there are coaches and other mentors who supported him along the way.
You can spend time debating how much is nature and how much is nurture or how much is talent and how much is development. Those are great, three beer questions. But, in the end, for an individual football player or any individual person, they don’t matter much.
In the end, when you’re thinking about adding someone to your team, there are several things to consider. There are the measurable things, performance statistics and test scores. There are anecdotal things, like reputation and work ethic which you hear and want to verify.
But there are also things beyond performance stats and reputation. Those things relate to how the person may fit with your team or how he or she will do in your culture. The only way to get a sense of that is in person. It’s the squishy part, the part you can’t get from a piece of paper.
Recruiting and promotion and development decisions all have this soft part. In today’s world, we invest metrics with magical powers. Metrics can give you everything you need on paper. They can help you narrow things down or open things up.
What they can’t do is give you that “gut sense” that every good recruiter and every good manager develop. For that you need to be face-to-face. There’s no substitute.
