Is Talent a Thing?
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 13 February 2017
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When hiring people, is the concept of talent so ill-defined as to be useless? Entrepreneur and author Margaret Heffernan thinks so and explores what characteristics recruiters might want to look for instead. She argues that we need something new, as good grades and top degrees have proved no guarantee of high performance in the workplace. She talks to the recent head of HR (or "people operations") at Google, the pioneer of the concept of a "growth mindset", and the academic who found people's intelligence increased over the course of the 20th century. She also hears about other measures like "grit", "cultural fit" and how to interview people to find the candidate who is best for the job and the company, rather than the one you like. Producer: Arlene Gregorius.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is TALAND a BBC. |
| 0:05.0 | Thank you for downloading this edition of Analysis. |
| 0:08.0 | Today entrepreneur and former CEO Margaret Heffernan asks, |
| 0:12.0 | Is Talent a thing? Companies try to hire the best |
| 0:16.4 | talent and many of us believe some people are talented and others not, but |
| 0:20.9 | could ability be down to very different qualities instead. |
| 0:25.0 | When I was at school they'd never heard of dyslexia they just thought I was |
| 0:31.0 | stupid and I actually left school at 15 because I was hopeless at school and started a |
| 0:38.4 | magazine to give young people a chance to have a voice and campaign on issues they felt strongly about. |
| 0:44.9 | Richard Branson, now a billionaire businessman. |
| 0:48.8 | I hated school. |
| 0:50.2 | Whoopi Goldberg. |
| 0:51.4 | Well they assumed I was being lazy because I was so smart in other ways. |
| 0:56.2 | There were things I could do and I could remember things and so they knew I wasn't dumb. |
| 1:03.0 | They just thought I was being lazy. |
| 1:05.0 | Something was different about me. |
| 1:07.0 | One of the few people to have won an Oscar, an Emmy, a Tony, and a Grammy. |
| 1:15.0 | I remember my special needs group at school, |
| 1:18.0 | you know, special needs and bottom group and all that sort of stuff. |
| 1:21.0 | Jamie Oliver TV, and entrepreneur. |
| 1:25.0 | But at the same time, I always could cook already at that stage. |
| 1:29.0 | So I didn't really care about that negativity that was going on in my life. |
... |
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