The search for talent has become a global phenomenon. As Marc Andreessen noted in a 2014 interview for New York Magazine: “our companies are desperate for talent. Desperate. Our companies are dying for talent. They’re like lying on the beach gasping because they can’t get enough talented people in for these jobs. The motivation to find talent wherever it is is unbelievably high.”
The need for talent in the workforce, and the development of talent in the education sphere, however, is not always aligned. As an example from the US, a new report on best practices for gifted education based on research summarized from the National Working Group on Advanced Education convened by The Fordham Institute provides excellent points for supporting gifted and talented learners that have been known for decades. And yet, in education policy, they are often still neglected. University talent search programs have even been closed due to a lack of support for talented kids in the US.
The reality of the need for talent in the workforce, however, means that even if schools and universities fail to select for and develop talent appropriately, companies will find a way to get the talent they need. This often has taken shape for tech companies and graduate STEM programs through immigrant talent, but it also increasingly is through supporting younger talent through programs outside of school.
I recently had the opportunity to talk to 18-year-old Jannik Schilling of Entrepreneur First—a talent investor, which supports exceptional individuals to build technology companies, and expert in talent and entrepreneurship. Jannik is a former Atlas Fellow and current graduate student at Minerva University. He enrolled in a German university at age 13, but, like many entrepreneurs, didn’t find the traditional academic path appealing. Now, he works to find people globally who might be the next Steve Wozniak.
Why are talent searches increasingly being conducted outside the education system?
Jannik Schilling: Rise for the World, the Thiel Fellowship, the Atlas Fellowship, The Knowledge Society, and Entrepreneur First, to just name a few, are examples of a new generation of modern talent searches that have arisen from the corporate and philanthropic space.
It is important, however, to understand that talent searches sampling from the right-tail of the skill distribution are not a new phenomenon. In fact, the Chinese Civil Service Examinations from 650 CE to 1905 were early examples of talent searches to fill high-level government posts.
The last century featured two major academic talent searches, the more contemporary being The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY). Both were initiated and conducted by university professors. Talent search programs at Northwestern and Johns Hopkins Universities are based on this model.
Many of the new generation of talent searches are housed outside of universities, are more domain-specific, and tend to sample from a younger population.
This may be because universities may no longer be the most effective setting for fostering certain forms of exceptional talent. Alternatives to traditional school settings are proliferating and are arguably becoming more attractive to talented students, as the new initiatives show they can create exceptional outcomes. An example is the Thiel Fellowship founded by investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel who also articulated some scepticism around the usefulness of universities for smart and ambitious individuals. Similarly, economist Bryan Caplan argues in his book The Case Against Education that the core function of universities in the 21st century might primarily be signalling and certifying talent.
Talent searches like SMPY—currently led by David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow at Vanderbilt University—showed that you can identify a concentrated pool of individuals at age 12 or 13 of which many will achieve eminence in their diverse chosen fields decades later. This has not gone without notice from the private and philanthropic sector as many organizations understand how exceptional talent is disproportionately important to create intellectual and technological progress. As elite human capital is, by definition, more scarce than any other human resource, there is more competition and innovation to secure just this talent.
What have you learned about talent from your work at Entrepreneur First?
In 2001, David Brooks argued in his essay “The Organization Kid” that college students had internalized that in order to be successful they needed to check many boxes, like participating in the right extracurriculars and having the right SAT score. As these students enter and later graduate college, many students behave similarly and continue ticking different boxes, like getting a high GPA, being the president of a university club, or getting the right internships. All with the idea in mind that they will have more options at some point later down the line, not necessarily because these checklist items are valuable in and of themselves.
Consequently, one of the most pressing challenges for talented college graduates at some point is translating their general talent into specific real-world outcomes. Sure, one could just get a job at a prestigious firm. But at some point in one’s career, it is no longer sufficient to optimize for future optionality and one needs to commit to work on a specific problem. This is even more important for aspiring entrepreneurs which need to have contrarian views and often work on ideas that might look stupid to others.
In terms of entrepreneurial talent, I think too often people assume that aspirations are a fixed quantity that cannot be changed. But in fact, aspirations change all the time through the peer groups one finds oneself in, one’s parents’ expectations, and environmental factors. Many extraordinary students I encounter think they are deemed to be a consultant or a scientist. Many think they cannot become an entrepreneur because they were not born as one. But nobody is born as an entrepreneur, there are skills that can be learned as a founder. There certainly are traits that predict entrepreneurial success but many talented individuals that might have the potential to become great entrepreneurs never attempt to start their own company. They do not know what could have been.
Speaking of specific traits, it seems like general reasoning is generally undervalued by most. But, though important, cognitive aptitudes are not sufficient as there are certain traits that are mildly related to cognitive aptitudes which are crucial as well. Things like determination or ambition. If you analyze the biographies of exceptional individuals, you often see that they had many traits that helped them succeed, agency among them.
How can corporate and philanthropic talent searches improve scientific research on talent?
All these new programs are unique experiments in talent selection and development that are occurring outside of the traditional academic educational research space. Companies and funders have greatly varying needs for talent and run, accordingly, different programs. As most of these talent searches have some form of designated outcome expectation, their talent identification and development are more specific than the traditional academic talent search model.
The new emerging programs offer an opportunity to investigate the relative importance of developed general reasoning, specific cognitive aptitudes, and other capacities for various domains of success, different treatment effects of educational programming, and the future of talent allocation and development. As certain talent searches target younger talent, it will help us understand the interrelation between developed reasoning, success, and other factors like achievement ambitions, perseverance, or curiosity as well. It could also help improve understanding of the consequences of human reasoning capacities in society and may even lead to an improved understanding of the mind itself.
Data on these selection and development systems could be available as longitudinal studies like the early years of SMPY in a few years. These studies could be conducted across many domains and by many different groups who are selecting people in various parts of the world. This will provide not only the opportunity to examine replication, it may also provide insights into identification and development procedures that might be helpful to gifted and talented coordinators or those in practice.
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