Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?

Ep 647: Selection Strategies From A Navy Seal Commander

Soft Skills, Hard Skills, Attributes, Traits, Competencies—these words sometimes get used interchangeably when we talk about assessment and team building. As the momentum around skills-based hiring increases, it is important to know what we really mean when we talk about skills generically and how exactly we are measuring someone's ability to do a particular role. My guest this week is Rich Diviney, founder of The Attributes. Rich is a former Commanding Officer in the US Navy SEALs, where he was responsible for assessing and selecting the elite of the elite for the famous SEAL Team Six. He now speaks and writes about the use of attributes in team building and hiring. We had a fantastic discussion about the difference between skills and attributes in the context of hiring and development. We also discuss my somewhat surprising results from taking Rich's attributes test. In the interview, we discuss: Identifying the elite of the elite for SEAL Team Six The difference between attributes and skills Understanding how people react in times of stress, challenge, and uncertainty How do you measure and assess attributes? Are soft skills and attributes the same thing? Can you develop attributes? The difference between perseverance, resilience, and tenacity What are companies getting wrong when it comes to skills and hiring? The "Dream Team Paradox" When AI takes over skills, attributes become even more critical. What does the future look like for hiring and managing talent? You can get 15% of The Attributes Assessment by using the code RECRUITING15 Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Duration:: 34m
Broadcast on:: 20 Oct 2024
Audio Format:: other

My guest this week is Rich Diviney, founder of The Attributes. Rich is a former Commanding Officer in the US Navy SEALs, where he was responsible for assessing and selecting the elite of the elite for the famous SEAL Team Six.

He now speaks and writes about the use of attributes in team building and hiring. We had a fantastic discussion about the difference between skills and attributes in the context of hiring and development. We also discuss my somewhat surprising results from taking Rich's attributes test.

In the interview, we discuss:

Identifying the elite of the elite for SEAL Team Six

The difference between attributes and skills

Understanding how people react in times of stress, challenge, and uncertainty

How do you measure and assess attributes?

Are soft skills and attributes the same thing?

Can you develop attributes?

The difference between perseverance, resilience, and tenacity

What are companies getting wrong when it comes to skills and hiring?

The "Dream Team Paradox"

When AI takes over skills, attributes become even more critical.

What does the future look like for hiring and managing talent?

You can get 15% of The Attributes Assessment by using the code RECRUITING15

Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Support for this podcast comes from Smart Recruiters. Smart Recruiters is your all-in-one platform for faster, smarter hiring, making recruiting easy and effortless. Smart Recruiters are making some big changes, revamping their user experience, adding AI features and refreshing the UI. I know from experience that they truly are a company that really values the recruiter and the practitioner. They understand the intricacies, of the recruiting business and this has always been reflected in their functionality and customer support. So it's exciting to hear that they're making a bunch of updates. If you're ready to be part of the future of talent acquisition, head over to SmartRecruiters.com and find out what they're up to. Trust me, your team and your future hires will thank you. There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mind and all the ages of history. Hi there, welcome to episode 647, a recruiting feature with me, Matt Alder. Soft skills, hard skills, attributes, traits, competencies. These are all words that get used sometimes interchangeably when we talk about assessment and team building. As the momentum around skills-based hiring increases, it's important to know what we really mean when we talk about skills generically and how exactly we're measuring someone's ability to do a particular role. My guest this week is Rich Dovini, founder of The Attributes. Rich is a former commanding officer in the US Navy Seals who was responsible for selecting the elite of the elite for the famous Seal Team 6. He now speaks and writes about the use of attributes in team building and hiring. We had a fantastic discussion about the difference between skills and attributes in the context of hiring and development. We also discussed my somewhat surprising results from taking Rich's Attributes test. Hi Rich and welcome to the podcast. Well thanks Matt, good to be here. An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do? Sure, yes I'm Rich Dovini. I am an author and former Navy Seal. I was in the Seal Teams for about 21 years and wrote a book about human performance which came out in 2021 and now we go around and help individuals and teams become better and more high-performing with our kind of our unique performance approach, centering around attributes. Fantastic stuff and I've read the book and it's kind of an absolutely fascinating account of attributes and what you do with them. Give us a little bit more of the backstory. Tell people what you used to do when you were in the Navy Seals. Yeah so I mean I went in in in '96 and of course you know Seal training as as many people now know is some of the some of the toughest in the world. So when in '96 our class we think we started with 170 candidates and we graduate with 38 so that's about average in terms of in terms of attrition. It's about 85 to 90 percent attrition and went you know obviously the first few years in the early in the late 90s there's nothing going on. After 2001 September 11th obviously things got very busy and I ended up deploying many times to both Iraq and Afghanistan. I also served for almost half of my career at Seal Team Six which is kind of one of our elite commands. No one really knew what that command was until until of course we got bin Laden but I was there and I ran the selection and assessment there as well to include and also commanded a squadron there but it was during that time frame I really began to deconstruct and really dive into what A) what what makes up high performing teams and B) what kind of makes up performance in general and began to really think about how to articulate what's going on when individuals and teams are in fact performing and one of the things that happened to me as I was running this this very difficult Seal Team Six training is that the leadership really wanted me to better articulate why guys weren't making it through and why guys were making it through and it was it was going to be more complex than just saying a guy couldn't shoot very well or couldn't couldn't skydive very well it just didn't that seemed disingenuous it seemed just not the answer and that's when I really began to bifurcate the difference between these attributes and skills and and subsequently began to look at those in training and then when I got out of the Navy recognized that businesses and organization teams were having the same problem kind of articulating these qualities that are very hard to see and measure sometimes and so that's why I wrote the book and and has been the impetus of all the work we're doing now. I think one of the interesting things about reading that part of the book was what you kind of developed this because the people that you were selecting were already kind of the elite of the elite and it was kind of give feedback about what the difference was between between people who already have very high levels of skills wasn't it? It was yeah and you know you're talking about a at this particular command we were getting guys from all over the right with the other Seal teams who were who were already outstanding they had outstanding performance reviews they you know early promotion all that stuff all the great stuff and yet some of them and we were yeah we were getting a 50% attrition rate which of course is okay I mean any selection course implies attrition but wasn't what wasn't okay was we were we weren't able to say why guys were a triting and when you tell a guy with that level of competency and experience he can't shoot very well I mean that's a guy who's probably shot more rounds than most people in the military right so it's it's disingenuous to them it's disingenuous to us and of course the leadership starts to ask some very difficult questions and so so what I recognized was actually we weren't in fact looking for these these visible skills we were actually looking for these qualities that told us that these certain individuals either had what it took to do the particular job we needed to do or did not have what it took and and that's really what what became the um the beginning of kind of defining these things you know quite deliberately I suppose just to clarify for people what do you see is the difference between an attribute which is what you're kind of identifying and working with and a skill yes so so the quick the quick definitely the quick distinction is skills are not inherent to our nature so in other words none of us are born with the ability to ride a bike or throw ball or in the military case shoot a gun we're trained to do those things we're taught to do those things um skills direct our behavior in known and specific environment so here's how and when to throw a ball ride a bike or shoot a gun and then finally um skills are very visible which means they're very easy to assess measure and test you can see how well anybody does any one of those things you can put scores around skills you can put statistics around skills you can put skills on resumes which is why we often get seduced by skills when we're picking teams or hiring because they're the easy button they're easy to see and measure the problem with skills is they don't tell us how we're going to show up and stress challenge and uncertainty because in an unknown environment it's very difficult if not possible to apply a known skill and so this is when we lean on our attributes attributes on the other hand are inherent to our nature in other words all of us are born with levels of patience uh adaptability situational awareness now we can certainly develop attributes over time and experience but you can see levels of this stuff and very small children um anybody who has kids or who are as who has dealt with small kids uh will agree with me when I say there are one and a half year olds who are patient and there are one and a half year olds who are impatient so there's a nature nurture element to attributes the other thing about attributes is they don't direct behavior they inform our behavior they tell us how we're going to show up to a to an environment or a situation so for example my son's levels of perseverance and resilience informed the way he showed up when he was learning the skill of riding a bike and he was falling off a dozen times doing so and then finally because they're difficult to see they're very difficult to measure and test and assess how can you how can you measure someone's levels of patience or adaptability so but the idea is they show up the most visibly and viscerally during times of stress challenge and uncertainty um and and if we're if we're ignoring attributes in our performance picture we're ignoring a huge if not the most important piece of what it takes for us to perform um and and i would just i would just offer this quick quick story uh you know in terms of just relating to seal training to kind of describe this i was i was told this by an older seal you know in this happened years ago but he said that one day a kid showed up to navy seal training and he walked into the instructor's offices and said i want to be a navy seal and the uh instructor said uh okay well you have to do a swim test and he gets it okay fine so they took him out to the pool i mean it was an easy test 50 meters so 25 meters to one end 25 meters back the other end uh so this kid gets all ready to go he jumps into the pool and he sinks right to the bottom of the pool when he jumps in and he starts walking across the bottom of the pool to one end he touches the the end and he walks across the bottom of the pool back to the other end and he comes up he's gasping for air nearly drowning and the instructor looks at him says what the hell are you doing and the kid you know who's still catching his breath looks at the instructor and says i'm sorry instructor i don't know how to swim and at that point the instructor pauses and he looks at the kid and says that's okay we can teach you how to swim and so the the idea is why did the instructor say that and he said that because he knew that if this kid had the qualities the attributes to show up to navy seal training and he didn't know how to swim he had everything inside of him that we needed for him to be a navy seal teaching him the skill of swimming was going to be the easy part and so this is what we're talking about when we're talking about attributes so there's there's qualities about human beings that tell us they have what it takes to do the job not not necessarily they know how to do the job but they have what it takes to do the job and that's extremely important in any team or performance environment obviously you're really stressing the the importance of it but you also said that they're very difficult to measure so how do you measure and assess attributes well yeah that's uh so so one of the ways is we we built this assessment tool you know that's one way however absent the assessment tool the best way to kind of measure those or actually see them uh is during times of stress challenges and uncertainty so when we're in environments where the plan doesn't go as as predicted the you know what hits the fan everything goes into chaos this is when the attributes come to the fore and we can start seeing in ourselves and each other how much or how little we have of certain attributes we can see how adaptable we are or how little patients we have or so on so forth and so so the best way to see them is when there's there's stress challenge and uncertainty inserted into an environment which can be done by the way even in a hiring process you can you can you can tweak hiring processes to to insert a little bit of stress challenge and uncertainty doesn't have to be over the top it doesn't have to be Machiavellian or illegal but uh but you can you can make the environments uncertain a little bit uncomfortable and you're going to start to see these attributes rise to the fore and that's kind of the best way you can start to see them no absolutely and i suppose to to illustrate this to everyone listening i actually took your i took your test so i did your assessment you kindly gave me access to it and uh it was it was fascinating it was fascinating for me i mean i've done lots of tests of this kind over the last sort of few years or so but there were there were a few things in this that i thought was really interesting so i suppose the background the kind of attributes that i scored highest for didn't surprise me because i have a fairly unconventional job that i've created for myself and it's kind of around i kind of around my strengths and my attributes so things like open-mindedness and curiosity adaptability learnability influence they're all things that didn't really surprise me what did though was some of the there were some things in there that i've never kind of considered before so one of them was i had quite a low score for cunning as an attribute which i never kind of i never sort of thought of cunning in a very negative way before but reflecting on it it kind of makes a lot of it makes a lot of sense it does although let me i'm not gonna let you i'm not gonna let you off the hook yet on your top five so let's just talk about this because because it's really it's really important that we uh we understand and the audience understands that that there's no judgment in any of these attributes or how we score on these attributes um it we can kind of think of ourselves as automobiles every human being is an automobile but we're all different types right so one of some of us are jeeps some of us are SUVs some of us are Ferraris um and there's no judgment there because the Ferrari can do things the jeep can't do and the jeep can do things the Ferrari can't do and so these attributes start to lay out in ways that describe us in a very unique and individual way and so what i'd say is that when you look at the way your attributes um kind of uh sus outs in terms of the order what you're highest on and what you're lowest on um your success as a human as an individual in your performance um has hinged on the fact that you're high on some and you're low on others right so in other words there's advantages your low your low attributes have served you as much as your high attributes have served you so so the way we want to explore this is that we ask ourselves some questions we say okay when we look at these high attributes these top five and the reason why we focus on top five bottom five even though we have 41 is because when you look at the top five bottom five you can actually start to uh distinguish some very um uh some very precise behavioral tendencies you know the middle ones are kind of the ones we we kind of are are more easily able to kind of um uh shift between the polarities on um but uh but when we look at your top five the question is okay how has having these in your top five served you and you've already just described a couple ways how it served you um in terms of the way you've you've organized your life the the podcast the job you've created for yourself but the more difficult question and this is really the the art of effective introspection is to say um how has having these as your top five maybe not served you what are some ways that these have not served you and so i would ask you that there are ways that when you look at those top five how they have not served you quite possibly actually um i think um yes things like a massive sense of curiosity is great a lot of the time but um sometimes you perhaps ask questions when you shouldn't be asking questions and you should be getting on with things so right well and i would say let me add to that you have you are so it's a very powerful combination is you have both high curiosity and high open-mindedness which is very powerful in a positive sense because you're someone who goes and seeks new ideas um and experiences and and things but you're also open to things coming at you right so in other words the person who's very high on curiosity but low on open-mindedness that's the conspiracy theorist that's the person who who knows exactly what they want to believe and will be curious to prove themselves right but you're not like that at all so that's a huge advantage but i think you're spot on and again this is not a negative it's just it's just something to be aware of is that sometimes that combination could in fact allow you to actually not focus in on something long enough because you're just kind of like oh you're so you're so excited about the new idea whether it's something you're exploring or something that's coming at you you shift maybe too quickly and so these are just ways we can start thinking about okay how might this not serve me and can i understand that about myself and and maybe dial it down in certain situations yeah no that makes um that makes sense and i think with um the interesting thing about this as well is i have ADHD so some of the things that i was kind of scoring lower i wasn't really surprised that things like persistence and various things like that were kind of scored lower yeah yeah so so let me let's go to the bottom five real quick and we'll just ask ourselves a couple same questions so so looking at these bottom five and you have persistence discernment decisiveness competitiveness and cunning the question is how has having these in your bottom five served you i think this came through when i was sort of answering the questions that might have led to this is you know i tend to be quite group orientated and group focused and really interested in people succeeding as a group rather than competing with people within the group and that was just one of the things that struck me when i was answering some of the questions yeah yeah that's totally true and you know again we don't talk about cunning in a negative way to cunning is just creative problem solving that's what it is now the way we use cunning can be judged you know we can certainly use it in a negative way or we can use it in a positive way but i think you're spot on i would say you know discernment is something that's low for you but but what that means is is you're not necessarily a detail person which means you don't get caught up on details and it allows you to actually move through things at a greater speed um and you can kind of pick goals and kind of go through things and you're not going to worry about details slowing you up right so this is this is an advantage to being a little bit lower on discernment of course now we say okay the the blind spot we have to be aware and by the way i'm low on discernment as well is that sometimes we do miss the details right and so we have to be able to understand that in certain aspects you know it's funny my wife and i are both low on discernment and we run our company but our coo Jenny is she's high on discernment so that that means whenever contracts come through my wife and i don't even look at them we just send them to Jenny because we know we're going to miss stuff but Jenny is going to see it you know because she's high on discernment so so we can sometimes um you know buttress some of our lower or higher ones with teammates so that we're just effectively meshing like zippers and we're actually hitting these things that we all though they're hitting all the attributes we need to hit because it's impossible for us to to be high on all of them and that would be actually detrimental absolutely and there were there were some here which um i would have thought that some of them were the same thing so for example there was tenacity perseverance and resilience and i was kind of higher on tenacity at lower on perseverance and i was you know i was kind of like are they the same thing are they parts of the same thing how how do those sort of those ones that are closely related how do they split down yeah i'm glad you brought that up because i was really very careful and i wanted to be as precise as possible with the uh the entomology of every word and definition and so when you dig into the to the words themselves and the definitions you start to realize that they are actually they are actually in fact different so let's just take perseverance and resilience because those two get conflated quite a bit perseverance is this idea that i'm going to get uh as i'm going i get knocked down seven times i get i get up eight times right every time i get knocked down i get up and i just keep on going it's just kind of this gutting it out thing this no matter how many it's a rocky balboa no matter how many times i get hit i'll just get up and keep going resilience on the other hand is when i get knocked down or knocked off baseline with something good or bad how quickly and effectively can i get back to baseline how how how fast can i get back to how fast can i recover right so so resilience you should think about that that rubber band you stretch that rubber band and then you let it go and it goes back to its original shape that's resilience and so and so someone and the other way we can think about this is these can live independently of each other right so in other words um someone can be very high on perseverance but low on resilience and what that means is that person's just going to go go go but they're likely going to burn out pretty fast uh someone else who's who is both high on perseverance and high on resilience they're going to go go go and they're going to recover as they're going which means they can play the long game very easily so uh so that's how those kind of differentiate and then when we talk about tenacity the one that the the two actually that get conflated a lot are tenacity and persistence um persistence uh and tenacity are two are kind of separate they're almost opposite the persistence is this kind of firm obstinants uh that uh that you are going to stick to the stick to the course because you know if you stick to the course it'll just happen right so i usually i usually relate that to the stone cutter approach that stone cutter is going to tap that stone in the same place over and over again and maybe not see anything for the first hundred taps but that stone cutter knows on the hundred and first or the hundred and second tap that stone is going to crack right that's persistence whereas tenacity is i'm going to try something and if it's not working i'm going to shift approaches so i i often say that's the car mechanic right i'm going to look at the belts if it's not the belts i'll try the carburetor it's not the carburetor i'll try something else each of them can live independently and you don't necessarily want uh one or the other you don't want the tenacious stone cutter okay because that stone will never get carved um and you don't want the persistence car mechanic because that guy will just check the belts and then check the belts and then check the belts again so so they they are a little bit opposite and um and you can kind of sometimes see how they how they map into our into our behavior now that makes sense because i think persistence was my lowest and tenacity was one of my highest so i explains why they they were kind of split like that i suppose that the question from from all of this obviously this is about looking at these things in in context and as you say scoring low on something can be a strength that said how and you we also sort of discussed that these are kind of innate to people as humans can you kind of improve them can you be better at some of these things than you otherwise would yes you absolutely can you can develop attributes uh that you're low on um and there's a couple ways we can look at this you can develop them in other words you can practice and overall increase your your levels of a specific attribute or you can just dial up an attribute or dial down an attribute depending on on what you want to do or depending on your needs or the context of the moment but let's just talk about developing first um to develop an attribute takes three things first of all it takes and understand your knowledge that you need to develop it so you need to know you're low on it uh the second one it takes is a is a motivation need or desire to develop it what what do I mean by that I mean that just like I've said just because you're low on an attribute doesn't necessarily mean you need to develop it in fact developing that particular attribute may be detrimental to what you're trying to accomplish I always kind of joke that the the stand-up comic with too much empathy is going to be a lousy stand-up comic all right so so you have to you have to know you're low on it you have to have a need desire or motivation or reason to develop a development and the third one is is the most important you have to go seek out find environments inside of which you can develop and tease that attribute okay so so if you want to develop your patience for example you have to go find environments to test and tease your patience whatever that might look like for you uh it could be I'm going to deliberately drive in traffic or I'm going to pick the longest line on the grocery store to stand in you know I always say having kids having kids having kids with developed patience um but but whatever whatever that environment is you can kind of throw yourself into those environments it's going to be difficult it's going to feel uncomfortable and it's going to be it's going to be hard but that's the whole point and so the more you do that in a deliberate basis the more you will develop overall develop an attribute and then I have to say we may not need to develop an attribute we may need to just be aware that in certain circumstances in certain environments we need to either dial up an attribute or dial down an attribute both may be required right you know again well we'll just use patience because it's an easy one you know someone who's naturally impatient may say you know what I need to dial up my patience with my children and they're they deliberately work on doing that okay and they're dialing it up in that moment or whatever moment they need to uh that's a deliberate that's a conscious effort we have to understand that these attributes that were high and low on that happens without us thinking about it it's just it's just the way we are when we need to dial up or dial down one that's when we actually have to put conscious thought um it can happen with one of our high ones um I had a a friend of mine who is uh his number one attribute was humor and the guy is a he's hilarious he's a hilarious guy but he knows that in certain environments he needs to dial down his humor because in certain environments it's not gonna he's not gonna fly right so so I think I think the power of this stuff is that you begin to understand yourself at very deep elemental levels and you begin to take uh you begin to have the ability to take control of your behavior in specific environments and know exactly what you're doing and why translating this across to the world of work in particular um hiring there's a huge amount of talk at the moment about skills based hiring and competencies and attributes and traits and words kind of get thrown around in a way that I'm not sure we always know what we mean or what we're what we're talking about what are you seeing companies getting wrong when it comes to hiring and skills at the moment and what should they be doing better yeah I think I think the the biggest mistake is people they they hire or they build teams based upon skills they certainly predominantly skills and the problem with that is is you create what I kind of defined in the book as the dream team paradox in other words you you build a team you put together team based on the best people and that team typically whatever that is best marketer best graphics designer best lawyer whatever all that those bests uh and then oftentimes what happens is that team actually performs very well when things are going well but as soon as things go sideways or the plan doesn't go as predicted the team often turns toxic and there's a reason for that and one of the reasons is you know I was I'll just uh just kind of give you an aside here I was um I was studying this stuff years ago and I found I came across this guy named Russell O'Kaw Russell O'Kaw was a was uh he had an interesting title or several titles he was a behavioral expert a man our behavioral scientist he was a um leadership and management expert and um and he was also a systems theorist he had all these titles and he used to relate systems theory to leadership and management in a very interesting way and he one of the things he used to say is um he used to be in front of a crowd and he said if I took the best parts of every best automobile out there so so say one automobile has the best carburetor another automobile has the best engine another automobile has the best uh suspension took all the best parts of every best vehicle and put them in the center of the room would I have the best vehicle on the planet and the answer is no because the parts wouldn't even fit together you wouldn't end the vehicle and he used to say that a system is never just the sum of its parts it's a product of their interaction and the same goes with a team a team is never just the sum of its parts it's a product of how they interact and and if we build a team and we haven't focused on these attributes which really drive a lot of our interactions especially during the stress and challenge and uncertainty then we're going to set ourselves up for failure and so I think businesses and organizations need to understand that if they want to hire people and hire the right person the first time we need to start they need to start understanding what attributes they're looking for now skills skills do matter and there are certain I will certainly concede that there are some roles that there are certain skills that are prerequisites of course uh but you don't need to necessarily focus on the best skills person um if you have someone who's pretty good and has all the attributes you need you could basically say just like that seal kid that's your trainee hey you can you'll pick it up you'll learn it then you'll probably your performance will price skyrocket when you do no absolutely and I think that there is a kind of focus on skills at the moment and there's a lot of talk about soft skills so you know not kind of like hard skills where you know you're learning take a coding language or uh you know something something very very specific and I'm thinking that there's probably a crossover between what people are calling soft skills and what are really attributes yeah absolutely so I that's I I often say when people say soft skills or character traits or or these types of qualities I I believe they're talking about attributes I think attributes are actually what we're looking for my um my goal in all of this was to was to generate um or I guess highlight because I didn't I didn't make this stuff up right but highlight a a language of performance that otherwise hadn't been uh been spoken um because what was happening is people were kind of dancing around these terms and it's not really able to define it and so I think attributes in my mind helps define this stuff rather precisely uh and universally what what we found is and and I kind of joke I you know I've taken almost every personality test out there I love I love all of them or most of them I love I think there's some phenomenal ones out there um my my one complaint about most uh several of the personality tests is that when you take them uh once you get your results you're given a couple colors or a couple numbers or even a few letters that define who you are and the problem with that is that if you're not talking to someone else who knows what those letters colors or numbers means they don't know what you're talking about right so but what I like about the attributes is that is that the language is plain everybody knows what adaptability is everybody knows what patience is everybody knows what you know um you know perseverance is obviously there's a couple distinctions and the definitions but but this is human everyday language and so you can have these discussions around performance and attributes with anybody at any time you don't have to be indoctrinated into um the attributes content uh because it's all very plain English and I do like the simplicity of that yeah absolutely I think that's it's very understandable and also I think the ability to uh see how people might behave in different contexts is um is a very but valuable part of this as well yeah absolutely yeah and and I would say I you know I think I've been fascinated with um Matt is that is that you know ever since I went to seal training it was an ABC lot I've just always been fascinated with who are we at our most raw because it's you know it's those times of stress challenge and uncertainty that our most raw shows up and personality often goes out the window and all this other stuff goes out the window and we're just operating at our very raw cells and these attributes start to help us understand who that person is I feel like I was given a gift going through seal training and then of course spending a career on the teams of understanding myself at my most raw and understanding my teammates at their most raw which which really makes very very effective teaming especially when times of stress challenge and uncertainty arise whatever sort of the top attributes that that you were looking for when you were doing that seal selection well yeah that's a great question um and I would say I would say depending on even the seal even the seal environment right it has has gonna it's going to have a little bit of a different list depending on what you're looking on uh looking for uh you know the our our command there at seal team six one of our primary uh missions was you know kind of hostage address queue style uh you know operations which is going to really uh kind of focus on one's ability to uh be situation aware to compartmentalize the tasks which very rapidly in rapid environments and so so the mental acuity that attributes which are situation awareness compartmentalization task switching uh learnability and discernment um those are in fact probably the most important ones we were looking for but we were looking for them at a very very high level so in other words I think I think most navy seals have them at a nice high level or at least it's certainly a moderately high level at our particular command we were looking for it at a at extremely high level and um and I think some of the folks who couldn't uh couldn't make it through weren't showing us the ability to kind of process uh what we needed them to process in the kind of extreme dynamic and rapid environment that we're asking them to so but we have to understand when we talk about whether it's seals whether it's teachers whether it's sales sales person people every every team every organization every niche is going to have a a unique and specific set of attributes that's that that's required to to make someone successful in that in that niche and that's part of the process um and some of some of the things we help businesses and teams do is figure out what that list looks like and it's a very disruptive time at the moment in terms of how people are thinking about hiring you know we've got the skills conversation we've got AI we've got all kinds of things going on and I suppose making us much more analyze hiring in a way that we probably haven't for a very very very long time with that in mind what do you think the the future looks like how is AI going to impact how do you hope that employers might be managing their talent in five years time yeah well you know it's it's funny I think we're when we when we look at the world today and we actually look at some of our systems some of our systems are unfortunately outdated and just look at our education system for example we're right now we're in a position where we're taking a kid um through 20 years of of education to prepare them for a job the problem is you know we don't know what jobs are going to look like even five years from now and so and so I think one of the things we have to consider is the fact that in today's world especially with AI we are going to find that a lot of our skills based things are going to be uh are going to be able to be done by AI it's going to be taken over by AI which means my thought is we need to focus on attributes even more deliberately because if we want to be the humans that are running the AI we need to have the qualities to adapt to persevere to shift to to move to to make things happen and it's not necessary or to or to or to rapidly learn new skills and it's not necessarily going to be centered around a particular skill and so so I think now more than ever we need to start focusing on these qualities because we're in an environment where we just don't know what it's going to look like two three four five years from now so best we begin to deliberately work on those qualities that allow us to actually operate an uncertainty challenge and stress um and and change because I think that's that's that's probably going to be the buzzword for the next certainly at least 50 years rich thank you very much for talking to me well thank you mad it was a pleasure to be here and I appreciate the opportunity my thanks to rich you can follow this podcast on apple podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts you can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter recruiting feature feast and get the inside track on everything that's coming up on the show thanks very much for listening I'll be back next time and I hope you'll join me this is my show [MUSIC PLAYING]