🧐 5 Rory Sutherland Recruitment Lessons

If you missed Rory’s packed keynote speech at RecFest or you haven’t read his wacky book on human psychology…

Check out these 5 things he taught me about recruitment.

Lets get into it.

Rory Sutherland on Recruitment

🍟 Hire in Batches, Not Potatoes

When you hire one person, you look for the safest option the “potato” hire.

Potatoes are reliable. Potatoes are versatile. Potatoes won’t surprise you.

But if you hire ten people at once, you stop picking ten potatoes. You take more risks, you choose outliers, and you accept that not all will work out.

The result? Bigger variance and a higher chance of finding exceptional talent that beats the average.

The takeaway: hire in groups where you can. Diversity and originality grows.

👩🏾‍🏭👩🏾‍🏭 The Power of “More Than One”

Research shows that if there’s just one woman in your shortlist, her chances of being hired are slim.

Add a second woman and the odds change dramatically.

The same is true for race, background, or any outlier trait.

Even quirks matter: if you wear a hat to an interview, you won’t get the job, unless you can convince another candidate to do the same….

The takeaway: don’t just add “one” of anything to a shortlist and expect change. Representation works in numbers.

🐝 The 80/20 Explorer Rule

In every beehive, most bees fly to the same food source because it’s safe and proven.

A smaller group do the opposite they head off in random directions to see if there’s something better out there.

That small group is risky, sometimes they come back with nothing. But they’re also the ones who find new food sources and keep the hive alive in the long run.

Hiring works the same way.

Most roles go to safe, proven candidates.

But save some space for “explorer” hires, people with unconventional backgrounds, unusual skills or unexpected career paths.

The takeaway: safe hires keep you steady. Explorers bring the breakthroughs. You need both.

⚖️ Fairness vs Variety

When every candidate is judged against identical rules, the same type of people keep winning.

It feels “fair” but it’s not producing variety.

At Ogilvy, they flipped the process for interns. Instead of looking at CVs, they set everyone the same creative task and judged only the work.

They ended up with a much more diverse intake one of whom went on to create a Cannes-winning Hellmann’s Mayo campaign.

The takeaway: rethink ‘fair’ rules

🎯 Spotting Talent Others Miss

Ambitious middle and upper-class candidates know how to “game” the system:
Family internships, high grades, violin lessons, charity work, private tutoring.

Meanwhile, someone who’s a brilliant backgammon player might be just as talented but never had the chance to tick the “respectable” boxes.

Chasing the “average best fit” usually leads to average performance.

The people who move the needle tend to live at the extremes high variance, unconventional, but with potential to transform outcomes.

The takeaway: if your process only rewards one life path, you’ll keep missing exceptional people who took another.

Book a call here if you want to chat with me about attracting more diverse early to mid level talent.

Until next time 👋🏽

Tobi

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