The Talgo Blog

There’s no shortage of leadership gurus who talk about the importance of hiring people with specialized skills and expertise. “Specialists over generalists” was a common refrain at my former employer, the renowned leadership advisory firm ghSMART. Peter Drucker has written extensively about the valu...

You may be familiar with the classic airport test: "Is this the type of person I could stand to be around while waiting for a flight?" Etc.

I was recently talking to a friend at a NYC VC about the recent CrowdStrike outage and the ensuring debacle with Delta Airlines at Atlanta airport.

That gave ...

Interview questions play a crucial role in the hiring process, but some common ones don't quite hit the mark. In this post, I'll explain why certain popular interview questions fall short and share some underrated alternatives that can help you find the right candidate more effectively.

Let's start...

As an interviewer you want the most actionable data per unit of time. (Subject to the candidate also having an enjoyable experience.)

If you've ever ran out of time (or run over your allotted time) you know that time is your scarcest resource. 

What if there were a couple of tactics that could get you...

From our academic years onward, each of us spends thousands of hours building our technical or functional skills—the "tools of our trade" as individual contributors (finance, sales, engineering, marketing, law, product development, etc). 

Over time, these personal/individual skills become less and ...

If you’ve done even a modest amount of interviewing, you’ve certainly heard your share of long-winded (and sometimes aimless) stories about big, complex projects or engagements.

You ask a simple question about a key highlight in their last role, and before you know it, you’re 15 minutes into a stor...

I’ve worked closely with dozens of founder-led companies that have fallen on hard times, often in the context of a private equity buyout.

It’s clear when a founder or founding team has failed to pursue a winning hiring strategy. You can see the “scar tissue” from prior bad decisions in the form of ...

I’ve worked with hundreds of organizations to help them build world-class hiring and interviewing practices. Some of the outcomes have been transformative, and (admittedly) some of them have not.  

There is one factor, above all, that determines how good your company can get.  

If this factor is p...

Most interviewers make "depth" mistakes when diving into candidates' stories. Fundamentally, there are 2 kinds of mistakes here: 

1. Not diving deep enough (no substance)
2. Diving too deep (largely into irrelevant areas)

The first point: the majority of your time in an interview should be spent hearin...