Marketing evolution.

Price is competition

Packaging is competition

Promotion, well, is in a way, competition

Distribution is definitely competition

But Purpose... the new P.  That's outside of competition.

How to hire the right person when you have too many candidates?

Okay.  Scenario.  You wanna hire an Account Manager - so it would be someone who's got some level of leadership, a team player, able to decipher complicated tasks from the Account Director which usually comes in the form of a Morse Code and break it into understandable tasks where they and the Account Executive can work on, able to put things together and get it organised and present it back to their boss.

There are 5 candidates.  All Senior Account Executives with similar agency experience and operational skills.  But what you need are 'invisible' skills and they are usually not stated in resumes or extravagantly exaggerated otherwise.

And your enemy is time.  You need this guy like yesterday and interviewing all 5 means you'll have to drown in your own team planning incompetency together with all of your other projects at hand.

So what do you do?

Tick tock tick tock tick tock.

Easy peasy.  Get all 5.  Put them into a room with a two-way mirror (if your agency doesn't have this crazy surveillance room, then a spy camera would do).  You might want to inform them of the camera, in case they found out they didn't get the job, you might get sued to Timbuktu.  So as I was saying, get all 5 of them.  Put them into this room which you can observe them remotely and give them a 30 minutes to an hour task.  Give them a problem of which all 5 will have to agree on a common solution.  Tell them they're free to do whatever they want and you'll be back in an hour to 'hear out the solution'.

Tick tock tick tock tick tock.

Now sit back, relax and evaluate.

All 5 people, and everyone knows only 1 will get the job.  So there is some kind of tension already in the group.  So observe who is the natural leader in the group, who opposes with facts and who without facts, who are the followers, who are the 'whatevers', who are the limelight grabbers, who are the thinkers, who are the idea jotters, who are the yes people, who are the mavericks, who are the smartypants and who are the actual smart ones.

There.

I think you have an ideal candidate in mind already.

;)

Sparks' Open Library Project: Veronika decides to die - Paulo Coelho

"Madness is the inability to communicate your ideas.  It’s as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that’s going on around you, but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don’t understand the language they speak there."

"We’ve all felt that"

"And all of us, one way or another, are mad."

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Sparks' Open Library Project: I Have a Strategy (No You Don't): The Illustrated ...

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