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Counterintuitive Truths About Hiring

1. Clarity on the Role Is the First Bottleneck

Most hiring failures start before the first resume is reviewed. If the role definition is vague (unclear success outcomes, missing cultural context, fuzzy scope), even a flawless interview process won’t save you. You can’t hit a Target you haven’t clea...

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Flying Too High: How to Dive In

 A client said they struggled when candidates stayed “too high level.”
Ironically, their description of the problem was itself high level.

But it got me thinking: there are different versions of "high-level" answers. Here are three of the most common and an easy-to-remember move for each. 

1. Too T...

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A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing

Let’s talk about the most dangerous kind of candidate you’ll ever meet.

Not dangerous because they’re toxic.
Not dangerous because they’re incompetent.
Dangerous because they’re… extremely impressive in the exact ways most interviews are terrible at measuring.

They are:

  • Smart.

  • Articulate

    ...
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Getting Incentives Right For Great Hiring

There is a major disconnect from the statement that many CEOs make (some variant of "Talent is everything") and the reality that we see on the ground. Here are some ideas of how you can make sure you're walking the talk when it comes to great hiring.

  1. Lead by example. Set a personal example of sou
  2. ...
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My Dream Software

What would my dream software look like for helping to scale world-class interviewing and hiring skills to a broad population of growing companies? Not only would it do the following things, it would do them as seamlessly as possible, leveraging the current state of what is possible with AI but still...

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Interpreting Mistakes: 4 Factors

A significant part of our training is getting interviewers psychologically comfortable with asking about a candidate's past mistakes. And giving them the tools to navigate the predictable dodges and decoys that candidates will throw at them. (We give everyone one "free pass" — candidates have been c...

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Be Human: Let Your Personality Show

One piece of coaching advice I've noticed myself giving more and more: relax and allow a bit of your personality to show through.

There are many people I coach who they have great natural EQ and energy when talking with me "off screen" but as soon as we go into interview mode, something peculiar happ...

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Weaknesses are Real

I’ve been engaging recently on LinkedIn and a lot of “experts” love to dunk on “tell me about your greatest weakness” as a particularly terrible question. Here is why they are wrong.

  1. You need past data to predict future performance. Some of this data will be positive (accomplishments, strengths)
  2. ...
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Beware of the Hijack

I recently coached an interviewer who was almost exclusively focused on testing the candidate's strategic problem-solving ability. Here's an example from that session:

Interviewer: “What was your biggest accomplishment at Google?”
Candidate: “Well, I led the creation of this product from a prototype...

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