Your Unicorn Is a Red Flag

Unicorn. Ninja. Rockstar. If one of those words is in your job description, Ben Brooks has a translation for you: “We don't know what the F we want.”

Ben has worked pretty much every job in the building. He started renting cars at Enterprise, then moved through Lockheed Martin, management consulting at Oliver Wyman, and SVP of HR at Marsh & McLennan, before putting his life savings into PILOT. He coaches senior leaders and hosts The Lift. He spent most of the bio begging Desiree to make something up so it would feel less like torture.

His big point: companies say talent is everything, then develop leaders like it's a single-player sport. Ask 22 executives to write down what a great leader looks like and you get 22 different answers. The average competency model has 14 or 15 items, which Ben says is about nine or ten too many. Leadership is a multiplier, he says, but if your management fundamentals are zero, so is everything you multiply. And culture doesn't just eat strategy for breakfast. It eats talent for lunch.

Desiree asks why we keep promoting top performers into management with zero support. Ben's answer: “Because we're frickin' nuts.” Ashley adds the baseball version: the best home run hitters don't always make the best coaches, and half of them miss swinging the bat.

Then it gets practical for recruiters. Ashley says candor and kindness are two sides of the same pancake, and explains why she tells candidates on the phone when a role isn't a fit. Ben draws the line between kind and nice (nice is the gift wrap, Ashley adds). Then he lays out the boundary he thinks separates good recruiters from great ones: no resumes and no interviews until the hiring manager can say exactly what they want. Interviewing people is a terrible way to figure out what you want. And if IT built features with no requirements defined, it would look a lot like recruiting.

They also get into coaching beyond the C-suite, why we spend about 90% of our time assessing talent and 10% developing it, and radical candor (care personally first, or it's just obnoxious aggression). They talk about why so many senior hires fail when the organization hires a change agent but doesn't actually want change. Ben's advice: give the new hire a clean apartment, not your mess.

The last stretch is AI. Ben calls it a fog lifting. AI speeds up the work, and that exposes the real bottleneck: nobody knows who's allowed to decide. People, not models, will be the limit on AI rollouts. He also has a plea for anyone automating rejections: if AI turns someone down in one minute, at least wait 24 hours.

In Talent Outside the Box, Ashley asks when a recruiter is allowed to overrule the AI, and says the answer has to be built into the process. Then she walks through the fundamental attribution error: when someone cuts you off in traffic they're a jerk, and when you do it you're just in a hurry. Give the recruiter the same grace you give yourself.

In this episode:

• What a résumé from Enterprise to SVP of HR teaches you about talent
• Why culture eats talent for lunch
• 22 executives, 22 definitions of a great leader
• Why we keep promoting top performers into management ("because we're frickin' nuts")
• Unicorn and ninja job descriptions, translated
• Leadership is a multiplier, so what are you multiplying?
• Why the best players don't always make the best coaches
• Candor vs. kindness vs. nice in the hiring process
• Why recruiters should stop sending resumes until the hiring manager knows what they want
• Coaching isn't just for executives
• Radical candor: care personally, then challenge directly
• Self, social, and situational awareness
• Why senior change agents fail, and how to set them up to win
• AI as an x-ray for culture and decision-making
• Talent Outside the Box: who overrules the AI, and the fundamental attribution error

Resources & Links:

• Ben Brooks on LinkedIn
• Ben on Instagram
• The Lift podcast: theliftpod.com
• Rebecca Hinds on The Lift (the meeting episode Ben mentions): listen here
• PILOT: pilot.coach
• Radical Candor by Kim Scott (Ben references it in the coaching section)
• Tangles, the animated film Ben saw in Lisbon (opening chat)
• Desiree's book, Leadership is a Practice, Not a Personality (out now in all formats)
• Watch Talentless on The HR Channel on Roku and Fire TV
• Join the T-Hive newsletter

This episode's partner: Pin.com, AI-powered candidate sourcing and screening. Use code TALENTLESS for 10% off your first six months at pin.com. We earn a commission when you use our code.