006. Why companies’ obsession with “top talent” sabotages great hiring – and how to do better.

Sep 06, 2023

This week, the topic is something I’ve never seen discussed before – The problem with the often-used term “Top Talent.” I'm curious if others share these thoughts, and would join me in throwing this outdated concept out the window and brainstorming a better alternative!

Silicon Valley is obsessed with the term “top talent.” Founders, operators, and investors constantly refer to it in discussions about scaling, and so do HR tech companies, agencies, and vendors in their endless promises to help you hire “top talent.”

The problem is, the term “top talent” is a thought-terminating cliché – something we’ve all gotten used to saying, without examining what it really means. In fact, new challenge: every time you hear the phrase from here on out, ask, “What do you really mean by that?” In my years of working on recruiting strategy with top startups, I’ve found that most don’t have an immediate answer. Tearing away the layers of abstraction will reveal the principles underneath (or lack thereof).

The problematic premise of the term “top talent” is that that talent can be categorized in an overly simplistic binary – top talent vs. not. This way of thinking has bled so deeply into our corporate standards and best practices, contributing to so many problems in hiring. Find below an analysis of the concept, how it hurts both companies and candidates, and an invitation for us to collectively move on from the idea of “top talent.”

Why isn’t “top talent” a thing?

Hot take: “Top talent” doesn’t exist.

Implied in the term is that there is an “objectively superior” pool of people that all companies should be fighting to hire. But there is no “best” of anything for all companies, especially people: Candidate A can be an amazing performer at Company X but struggle when placed in Company Y, and vice versa with Candidate B.

Great hiring means consistently finding a great employer <> employee fit. This entails taking a large number of variables into account: industry, company size, geography, job level, compensation / rewards, management styles, motivation/mission fit, culture, remote status, etc. Working through these – strengthening the company’s value proposition and evaluation criteria – is the essence of great recruiting work. (This is what my company, Workflow, partners with startups on!)

This simplistic view of candidate fit is wishful thinking – there is no magical top 10% that you can tap into with the right tool or search algorithm. Holding onto this concept makes great hiring much less likely, you'll be too focused selecting for attributes that aren’t important to your open roles, and overlook positive attributes that fall outside stereotypes of “Top Talent,” which is based on someone else’s criteria.

The term “top talent” is not only unrealistic, it’s harmful

Let us count the ways:

1. Subscribing to the idea of “Top talent” typically means over-reliance on pedigree

In the early days of my recruiting career, I constantly heard executives say things like, “We should hire some engineers who worked at [AppAmaGooBookSoft]” or “We will only consider candidates from Stanford/Harvard/Yale.” But shiny logos on a resume don’t automatically make for a great candidate. (I’ve interviewed enough Xooglers to know.)

Think about it – even if you yourself have worked at a “top talent” organization in the past, was every single coworker truly a “top” performer? I doubt it, because no HR department is immune to fielding endless complaints about employee performance issues, no matter how prestigious the company brand.

The most successful hires for a startup often lack prestigious pedigrees. I’ve seen this time and again in my years of recruiting – and if you’ve been at it long enough, I bet you have too. True hiring excellence means letting go of the fantasy of being a “top talent” organization, and building the internal muscles to spot and cultivate true talent that comes in unexpected forms.

2. “Top talent” stereotypes are based on biases

In 2018, Amazon’s “secret AI recruiting tool” came under public scrutiny when it was revealed that for 10 years, it had been rating applicant resumes with serious bias – penalizing women-identifying candidates by downgrading mentions of womens’ colleges and activities. They weren’t trying to create an obviously faulty tool, but it was the result of the AI model perpetuating the status quo of men dominating technical roles in its training data. Hopefully, in the year 2023, I don’t have to spend too much time explaining why this is bad!

The idea of “top talent” that exists in our heads may not be generated by a computer model, but is often problematic in the same way. When we skip the work of actually defining what we mean by top talent, stereotypes fill in the gaps – and in most cases, this means bias towards majority groups like able-bodied, white, cis-gendered male candidates from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, whether they’re actually the most qualified or not.

(As an aside, the term “culture fit” has fallen out of favor for creating similar problems with bias – it’s too vague to be helpful, and is typically used to justify biased decisions. In other words, “culture fit” is an excuse to reject candidates, and “top talent” is used to advance them.)

3. "Top talent” ideology pressures individuals to conform and suppress their true strengths

When companies become too focused on “top talent,” the hiring process becomes mechanized around ranking on an extremely narrow set of criteria, which in turn trains candidates to conform. This perpetuates the cycle where candidates feel forced to perform, rather than showing their authentic selves and focusing on mutual fit.

It’s kind of like dating apps – the reality is, there are all kinds of variables that make for a good match between two people. But in the world of swiping, choice is overwhelming. And unless you’re the kind of person who has done a lot of inner work and has the experience to know exactly what you’re looking for, you’ll likely to fall into the trap of filtering on over-simplified criteria: e.g. “I only date men over 6 feet tall” (which leads to those under 6’ getting dejected and cynical over time).

If someone's ideal lifestyle is to live on a farm, but they’re getting constant messages that being a desirable partner means showing off a swanky NYC penthouse, they will feel the pressure to conform. Then they never get to meet their potential perfect partner, waiting for them out there, dreaming of idyllic farm life. (sounds like the plot of a Hallmark movie?) My definition of a “perfect 10” is different than yours, and that’s a good thing.

Down with “Top talent,” in with ___?

Company builders know the importance of hiring – that’s why founders, operators, and investors are constantly talking about it. But the next step is to approach the work head-on, instead of hoping for a shortcut. And so the idea of “top talent” persists – that some kind of “objective” ranking of humans is possible.

Objectivity is an impossible goal. Chasing it is a distraction and temporary salve that helps us feel like we’re getting the “correct” answer in the face of overwhelm by volume, and having to make decisions about other humans without the safety of certainty.

Instead, hiring well is all about embracing the subjectivity: figuring out what is needed for your context and who is going to be a good match. This means re-examining our wishful thinking of landing “top talent” and instead, Doing The Work to look for…. “Target talent”? “Perfect fits”? Curious to hear your votes / more suggestions :)

It’s an exciting time in the recruiting space, where builders are finally recognizing that much of “best practices” are rooted in 1950s HR – and are looking for ways to modernize and actually get strategic about hiring. That will be the topic of next week’s post, so look out for that – In the meantime, watch out for casual uses of the phrase “top talent” around you, and if you’re at a startup that’s already ready to take that more ambitious approach to hiring, my inbox is open :)

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Jennifer Kim is the CEO/Founder of Workflow, an education and consulting company that trains the next generation of startup leaders on all things Recruiting, People Ops, and DEI. Through its flagship program, the HireEd Accelerator, Jen and her team have taught hundreds of startup leaders to make hiring a competitive advantage. Previously, Jen was Head of People at Lever and was Advisor to dozens of top startups. She is also a Venture Partner at Symphonic Capital, and is known for her hot takes on tech industry and culture as @jenistyping.