It’s time to embrace your quirks: why radical transparency is the key to attracting and hiring the right talent
As the economy tightens, fear of recession looms, interest rates increase, and unemployment reaches record lows, organizations are forced to evaluate their budgets to determine where efficiencies can be realized. In other words, many talent teams are being asked to do more with less.
While some organizations are letting people go, and others are simply scaling back their hiring efforts, the truth is that organizations are still hiring, but specifically for critical roles. It’s more important now than ever to ensure that organizations place the right people in the right roles and equip them with the tools and resources needed to deliver maximum impact. These conditions demand a more transparent and immersive approach to sourcing candidates — one that gives them a true sense of their ability to thrive within the quirky nuances of your organizational world.
When layoffs happen, it’s not just low performers who lose their jobs.
For companies that are hiring during economic downturns, this means that there can be an abundance of good talent available. However, poor performers also lose their jobs, meaning that less-desirable talent is abundant, too. How can organizations make sure they are getting the best talent available from that diverse pool? It’s not easy. Candidates (and hiring organizations) paint themselves in the best possible light, making it hard to distinguish between a qualified candidate who might be good for the role and one who doesn’t have the skills you need. Anyone that has used a dating app is familiar with this dynamic, and has likely experienced the frustration that comes when an illusion obstructs someone’s true potential.
Reading between the lines of a job description
It is tempting to think, “There’s good talent in the job market, so it should be easy to identify people who have been successful in similar roles at other organizations. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.” There are two problems with this logic, however. Firstly (as discussed), while there are plenty of good fish in the barrel, there are also a lot of not-so-good fish. Secondly, one’s success in one organization does not guarantee success in a very similar job at another organization: context matters. It’s not enough to simply describe the expectations of the role and then evaluate people against those expectations. While doing so correctly can help identify candidates with the right experiences for the job, such an approach ignores the more nuanced aspects of the job not included in the description.
Consider the following example:
A client recently partnered with BTS to help them evaluate candidates being considered for placement into the role of president for their largest business unit. There were two frontrunners being considered, both of whom were strong contenders with track records of great success. However, the key difference between the two candidates was that one sought independence from the executive leadership team, seeing them as stakeholders who should be brought in only at critical milestones for input and oversight. The other candidate sought to partner very closely with the executive leadership team, looking to them for detailed guidance on the future direction and strategy of the business unit.
Without knowing anything about the context of the situation, the reader may believe that the former candidate — the “independent” one — was better aligned with the role of president. The reality, however, was that the executive leadership team expected to play an active role in the business unit, and had wanted to be closely involved in major decisions impacting the business. Whether this was the right approach for them or not, it was the reality of the situation. Based on our assessment of both candidates, BTS painted two pictures for the executive leadership team, one of what the future would look like if each of the two candidates were selected for the role.
The decision for the executive leadership team was easy. Nowhere on the role description was the phrase “Must run all major decisions affecting the business past the executive leadership team for approval,” but this was critically important. The point is simple: The best person for a job in one context is sometimes very different from the best person for the same position in another context. Again, context matters.
Your organization’s culture, values, ways of working, systems and tools, and mission all demand something unique from your people. These organizational truths are just as deterministic of a candidate’s success in a role as the job description. With so much talent available in today’s talent pool, how can you find the few special people that will build upon the precious foundation you’ve built for your business?
Meeting time-to-productivity expectations
Let’s examine why your hiring practices might not be ready for today’s realities. If your hiring process was created during a period of unfettered growth, high demand, and mass hiring, today’s economic landscape may strain or even break that system. During periods of high growth and demand, organizations scale fearlessly: they hire extra people with the expectation that not everyone will work out. In this setting, new hires receive leniency and patience when figuring things out, and the impact of a bad hire is diluted by the near-constant onboarding of new employees.
In today’s reality, organizations are hiring fewer people, and those new hires are under tremendous pressure to be productive as soon as possible. There is less tolerance and patience from leadership for poor hiring decisions. We see this explicitly in the tech industry today, particularly within go-to-market teams.
For example, take the comments Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently made in an internal Slack message, as reported by Business Insider: “We don't have the same level of performance and productivity that we had in 2020 before the pandemic. We do not.”
Later, Benioff stated during a call that nearly all of Salesforce’s “annual contract value was being delivered by 50 percent of sales account executives.” In the face of more highly-scrutinized hiring decisions and raised expectations for time-to-productivity, talent teams must be more confident than ever that they are finding those who are already trained to succeed and thrive. This requires a new set of tools, or at least a new mindset.
So, what’s an organization to do? How do hiring systems, tools, and strategies need to shift in this new period of economic uncertainty and a world where we are asked to “do more with less”? Here are three considerations for talent teams to evaluate.
1. Firstly, seek a deeper understanding of what traits are needed from candidates for each role:
What does success look like in this new environment? What capabilities and behaviors will help your organization drive future success in an evolving world? How important are attributes like learning agility, being nimble and resourceful, etc., to success — not just today, but also in the future?
For example, in the context of today’s economic uncertainty, skills like empathetic listening, industry-specific business acumen, and articulating value in the language of a CFO are among the most critical capabilities for sales professionals. In the past, these strengths may have been de-prioritized in favor of skills such as executive presence, storytelling, and domain expertise.
2. Secondly, identify the pivotal moments in the daily life of a target role during which those capabilities and behaviors are most critical.
When is a skill like empathetic listening most critical? Is it when a sales professional conducts a discovery workshop, or when they encounter a hesitant buyer’s objections? Whatever these pivotal moments are, they provide clear context for your job candidates to respond the challenges they’ll be certain to face, and you can observe their behavior in such moments.
3. Finally, create the opportunity for observation and immersion into an environment that emulates your organization and the realities of the role.
Day-in-the-life assessments can give candidates insight into the nuances of the organization and role — letting candidates try the job on for size, so to speak. They also give the hiring organization insight into candidates’ capabilities and behaviors. Most importantly, these assessments let them see how candidates will respond to some of the more unique elements of the organization.
After all, both the candidate and the organization are making a very important decision, and it’s imperative they enter an employment relationship with eyes wide open. This is no different than what we expect from any long-term personal relationship, within which one accepts and value the entirety of another — their strengths, weaknesses, flaws, beauty, and quirks. This means that, at some point, we need to be transparent, vulnerable, and honest about what makes us unique. Why should our approach to hiring decisions be any different?
This radical transparency requires a mindset shift for many of us.
Prioritizing honesty and inviting immersion into the quirkiness of both parties is critical to ensuring candidates and hiring organizations make the best decision. In a world where we have to be more confident than ever in our hiring decisions, we can’t afford to gloss over the aspects of our organizations that make us who we are. Isn’t it better to understand the full picture of the individual on the other end of a dating app before you make a long-term commitment.
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Technology choices are often made under pressure - pressure to modernize, to respond to shifting client expectations, to demonstrate progress, or to keep pace with rapid advances in AI. In those moments, even experienced leadership teams can fall into familiar traps: over-estimating how differentiated a capability will remain, under-estimating the organizational cost of sustaining it, and committing earlier than the strategy or operating model can realistically support.
After decades of working with leaders through digital and technology-enabled transformations, I’ve seen these dynamics play out again and again. The issue is rarely the quality of the technology itself. It’s the timing of commitment, and how quickly an early decision hardens into something far harder to unwind than anyone intended.
What has changed in today’s AI-accelerated environment is not the nature of these traps, but the margin for error. It has narrowed dramatically.
For small and mid-sized organizations, the consequences are immediate. You don't have specialist teams running parallel experiments or long runways to course correct. A single bad platform decision can absorb scarce capital, distort operating models, and take years to unwind just as the market shifts again.
AI intensified this tension. It is wildly over-hyped as a silver bullet and quietly under-estimated as a structural disruptor. Both positions are dangerous. AI won’t magically fix broken processes or weak strategy, but it will change the economics of how work gets done and where value accrues.
When leaders ask how to approach digital platforms, AI adoption, or operating model design, four questions consistently matter more than the technology itself.
- What specific market problem does this solve, and what is it worth?
- Is this capability genuinely unique, or is it rapidly becoming commoditized?
- What is the true total cost - not just to build, but to run and evolve over time?
- What is the current pace of innovation for this niche?
For many leadership teams, answering these questions leads to the same strategic posture. Move quickly today while preserving options for tomorrow. Not as doctrine, but as a way of staying adaptive without mistaking early commitment for strategic clarity.
Why build versus buy is the wrong starting point
One of the most common traps organizations fall into is treating digital strategy as a series of isolated build-vs-buy decisions. That framing is too narrow, and it usually arrives too late.
A more powerful question is this. How do we preserve optionality as the landscape continues to evolve? Technology decisions often become a proxy for deeper organizational challenges. Following acquisitions or periods of rapid change, pressure frequently surfaces at the front line. Sales teams respond to client feedback. Delivery teams push for speed. Leaders look for visible progress.
In these moments, technology becomes the focal point for action. Not because it is the root problem, but because it is tangible.
The real risk emerges operationally. Poorly sequenced transitions, disruption to the core business, and value that proves smaller or shorter-lived than anticipated. Teams become locked into delivery paths that no longer make commercial sense, while underlying system assumptions remain unchanged.
The issue is rarely technical. It is temporal.
Optimizing for short-term optics, particularly client-facing signals of progress, often comes at the expense of longer-term adaptability. A cleaner interface over an ageing platform may buy temporary parity, but it can also delay the more important work of rethinking what is possible in the near and medium term.
Conservatism often shows up quietly here. Not as risk aversion, but as a preference for extending the familiar rather than exploring what could fundamentally change.
Licensing as a way to buy time and insight
In fast-moving areas such as AI orchestration, many organizations are choosing to license capability rather than build it internally. This is not because licensing is perfect. It rarely is. It introduces constraints and trade-offs. But it was fast. And more importantly, it acknowledged reality.
The pace of change in this space is such that what looks like a good architectural decision today may be actively unhelpful in twelve months. Licensing allowed us to operate right at the edge of what we actually understood at the time - without pretending we knew where the market would land six or twelve months later.
Licensing should not be seen as a lack of ambition. It is often a way of buying time, learning cheaply, and avoiding premature commitment. Building too early doesn’t make you visionary, often it just makes you rigid.
AI is neither a silver bullet nor a feature
Coaching is a useful microcosm of the broader AI debate.
Great AI coaching that is designed with intent and grounded in real coaching methodology can genuinely augment the experience and extend impact. The market is saturated with AI-enabled coaching tools and what is especially disappointing is that many are thin layers of prompts wrapped around a large language model. They are responsive, polite, and superficially impressive - and they largely miss the point.
Effective coaching isn’t about constant responsiveness. It’s about clarity. It’s about bringing experience, structure, credibility, and connection to moments where someone is stuck.
At the other extreme, coaches themselves are often deeply traditional. A heavy pen, a leather-bound notebook, and a Royal Copenhagen mug of coffee are far more likely to be sitting on the desk than the latest GPT or Gemini model.
That conservatism is understandable - coaching is built on trust, presence, and human connection - but it’s increasingly misaligned with how scale and impact are actually created.
The real opportunity for AI is not to replace human work with a chat interface. It is to codify what actually works. The decision points, frameworks, insights, and moments that drive behavior change. AI can then be used to augment and extend that value at scale.
A polished interface over generic capability is not enough. If AI does not strengthen the core value of the work, it is theatre, not transformation.
What this means for leaders
Across all of these examples, the same pattern shows up.
The hardest decisions are rarely about capability, they are about timing, alignment, and conviction.
Building from scratch only makes sense when you can clearly articulate:
- What you believe that the market does not
- Why that belief creates defensible value
- Why you’re willing to concentrate risk behind it
Clear vision scales extraordinarily well when it’s tightly held. The success of narrow, focused Silicon Valley start-ups is testament to that.
Larger organizations often carry a broader set of commitments. That complexity increases when depth of expertise is spread across functions, and even more so when sales teams have significant autonomy at the point of sale. Alignment becomes harder not because people are wrong, but because too many partial truths are competing at once.
In these environments, strategic clarity, not headcount or spend, creates advantage.
This is why many leadership teams choose to license early. Not because building is wrong, but because most organizations have not yet earned the right to build.
This article was originally publish on Rotman Management
IN OUR CONSULTING WORK with teams at all levels—especially senior leadership—my colleagues and I have noticed teams grappling with an insidious challenge: a lack of effective prioritization. When everything is labeled a priority, nothing truly is. Employees feel crushed under the weight of competing demands and the relentless urgency to deliver on multiple fronts. Requests for prioritization stem from both a lack of focused direction and the challenge of efficiently fulfilling an overwhelming volume of work. Over time, this creates a toxic cycle of burnout, inefficiency and dissatisfaction.
The instinctive response to this issue is to streamline, reduce the number of initiatives, and focus. While this is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t fully address the problem. Prioritization isn’t just about whittling down a to-do list or ranking activities by importance and urgency on an Eisenhower Decision Matrix; it also requires reshaping how we approach work more productively.
In our work, we have found that three critical factors lie at the heart of solving prioritization challenges: tasks, tracking and trust. Addressing these dimensions holistically can start to address the root causes of feeling overwhelmed and lay the foundation for sustainable productivity. Let’s take a closer look at each.
You’re buckling in for an overseas flight in a brand-new Boeing 777. The pilot comes on the PA: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, our flight time today will be six and a half hours at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet. And I should mention that this is the first time I have ever flown a 777. Wish me luck.”
Before setting foot in the real world, pilots, military personnel and disaster response teams use intense simulations to learn how to respond to high-intensity challenges.Why should we place corporate leaders and their teams in situations without first giving them a chance to try things out? The risks are huge — new strategy investments can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. BTS offers a better way to turn strategy into action: customized business simulations.
‘Now I Know What it’s Like to be CEO’
A customized business simulation of your enterprise, business unit or process, using real-world competitive dynamics, places leaders in a context where they step out of their normal day-to-day roles and gain exposure to the big picture. Participants make decisions in a risk-free environment, allowing them to experience critical interdependencies, execution best practices and the levers they can use to optimize their company’s key performance indicators. It takes the concept of a strategy and makes it personal, giving each individual the chance to see the direct impacts of their actions and the role they play in strategy execution.
Leading corporations are increasingly turning to business simulations to help build strategic alignment and execution capability when faced with the following business challenges:
- Key performance objective and new strategy implementation.
- Accelerating strategy execution and innovation.
- Improving business acumen and financial decision making.
- Transforming sales programs into business results accelerators.
- Leadership development focused on front-line execution.
- Implementing culture change as tied to strategy alignment.
- Modeling complex value chains for collaborative cost elimination.
- Merger integration.
Within minutes of being placed in a business simulation, users are grappling with issues and decisions that they must make — now. A year gets compressed into a day or less. Competition among teams spurs engagement, invention and discovery.
The Business Simulation Continuum: Customize to Fit Your Needs
Simulations have a broad range of applications, from building deep strategic alignment to developing execution capability. The more customized the simulation, the more experience participants can bring back to the job in execution and results. Think about it: why design a learning experience around generic competency models or broad definitions of success when the point is to improve within your business context? When you instead simulate what “great” looks like for your organization, you exponentially increase the efficacy of your program.
10 Elements of Highly Effective Business Simulations
With 30 years of experience building and implementing highly customized simulations for Fortune 500 companies, BTS has developed the 10 critical elements of an effective business simulation:
- Highly realistic with points of realism targeted to drive experiential learning.
- Dynamically competitive with decisions and results impacted by peers’ decisions in an intense, yet fun, environment.
- Illustrative, not prescriptive or deterministic, with a focus on new ways of thinking.
- Catalyzes discussion of critical issues with learning coming from discussion within teams and among individuals.
- Business-relevant feedback, a mechanism to relate the simulation experience directly back to the company’s business and key strategic priorities.
- Delivered with excellence : High levels of quality and inclusion of such design elements as group discussion, humor, coaching and competition that make the experience highly interactive, intriguing, emotional, fun, and satisfying.
- User driven: Progress through the business simulation experience is controlled by participants and accommodates a variety of learning and work styles.
- Designed for a specific target audience, level and business need.
- Outcome focused , so that changes in mindset lead to concrete actions.
- Enables and builds community: Interpersonal networks are created and extended through chat rooms, threaded discussions and issue-focused e-mail groups; participants support and share with peers.
Better Results, Faster
Well-designed business simulations are proven to significantly accelerate the time to value of corporate initiatives. A new strategy can be delivered to a global workforce and execution capability can be developed quickly, consistently and cost-effectively. It’s made personal, so that back on the job, participants own the new strategy and share their enthusiasm and commitment. This in turn yields tangible results; according to a research report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by BTS, titled “Mindsets: Gaining Buy-In to Strategy,” the majority of firms struggle to achieve buy-in to strategy, but those that personalize strategy throughout their organization significantly outperform their peers in terms of profitability, revenue growth and market share.
Business Simulations: Even More Powerful in Combination
Comprehensive deployment of business simulation and experiential learning programs combines live and online experiences. The deepest alignment, mindset shift and capability building takes place over time through a series of well-designed activities. Maximize impact by linking engagement and skill building to organizational objectives and by involving leadership throughout the process.
Putting Business Simulations to Work
Simulations drive strategic alignment, sales force transformation, and business acumen, financial acumen and leadership development, among other areas. A successful experiential learning program cements strategic alignment and builds execution capability across the entire organization, turning strategy into action. Results can be measured in team effectiveness, company alignment, revenue growth and share price.
Learn more about business simulations
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