Dak Prescott Brock IT HiringHiring the best IT and technical talent has some analogies with professional football. Football fans in Texas are familiar with Brock Osweiler and Dak Prescott in the 2016 season. Neither was the best in the NFL. Neither was the worst. There is no question, Dak was better.

Not just better for what he did on the field, but let’s do a quick Moneyball© metric on them.

 

  Dak Prescott Brock Osweiler
2016 QBR 81.5 55.3
2016 Salary $ 545,848 $ 12,000,000
$ per QBR point $ 6,698 $ 216,998

Houston paid $217K for every QBR point while Dallas paid $6.7K. Big difference.

If some measurement were available to predict their performance, do you think Houston would have wanted to have done that?

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be one for the NFL. But what about for your IT talent?

Flop IT Hire

Every IT department, development team, infrastructure group we’ve seen has the same thing happen. There are always those 2-3 people that are the go-to individuals. They get more work done. They help others get more work done. When others spend days trying to find a fix, they can do it in hours. Do they have superior tech skills? Usually, but that’s not why they are so good. What sets them apart is their problem solving skills.

Some of us are more capable of getting to the root causes and finding options better than others. Don’t get us wrong, knowing some nuance about the memory impact of Stack vs Heap variables has its place. Having the problem solving skills to know if it matters counts for more.

Too often we evaluate a potential IT hire based on “technical trivia”. While it shouldn’t be ignored, we should also evaluate one’s ability to solve problems. We constantly tell our customers, “Instead of having those 2-3 go-to people, wouldn’t you rather have 4-5?”

At Decide Consulting, we evaluate a person’s problem solving capability through our Conclusive Hiring process. It is an assessment to specifically measure one’s problem solving skills. Contact us today to find out more.