Human Resources

Accounting for talent

By Erik Cassano

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The Taylor file

Years ago, Anne Taylor gained an appreciation for just how challenging it can be to hire the right people.

Taylor was in her mid-20s and a partner in a small business.

“I was interviewing people, and one of the other partners in the business said he thought I was making a mistake on some of the people,” she says. “He told me that I wasn’t looking for people better than me. He said, ‘You ought to only be looking for people better than you are.’”

As a young person in the world of business, that didn’t compute for Taylor.

“I found that to be rather a concern for me,” she says. “First of all — having no humility at that age — could I find someone better than me? But I thought that if I did find someone better than me, it would be threatening to me in some fashion.”

Taylor, who is now the managing principal for the 4,800-employee mid-America region of financial advisory services firm Deloitte LLP, says time and experience showed her that personal pride must always take a backseat to the good of the company when hiring. Hiring someone who is better than you doesn’t necessarily mean you need to hire someone who is an all-around superior person. It means that you must recognize your own shortcomings and the shortcomings in the collective skill set of your employees, and then hire to strengthen those weaknesses.

“They might not be better in every way, but they might be better in certain ways,” Taylor says. “That piece of advice is still true. When I look for new recruits, they might bring something that I, even with more than 25 years of experience, might not bring to the table. There might be a knowledge of technology, an energy or just something in their breadth of experience.

“I still always look for that, how are they going to be better than I am, better than we are collectively as a group.”

Here’s how Taylor leveraged that experience to help her find and keep the best people at Deloitte.