Jeff Hunter
Founder & CEO, Talentism. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutivetalentism.com ↗
Prior to founding Talentism, Hunter served as Head of Recruiting at Bridgewater Associates and held talent leadership positions at Electronic Arts and Dolby. He advises startup leaders on navigating organizational complexity using his Talent Architecture and Clarity frameworks.
1shows
1appearances
27statements
0resolved
0supported
0contradicted
Everything Jeff Hunter said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Human job assessment is worse than random in many cases
“We're actually very bad at assessing human beings for jobs. Actually worse than random in many cases”
Workplace failure is rarely due to laziness, stupidity, or character flaws
“When we see somebody else fail, you know, fail to achieve a goal, et cetera, we tend to describe that failure to ourselves in terms of failures of intelligence or character or motivation. But from my perspective and spending decades, you know, working with oth…”
Most companies treat culture statements as recruiting marketing, not management tools
“Most organizations put up these culture statements that are like, I think they're marketing statements in effect, like they care more about how it works in recruiting than they actually are using it as a way of managing the company.”
Managers use generational stereotypes as lazy excuses for poor management
“I think most managers really struggle to be good at their jobs. To be a good clarity manager, really hard especially in the midst of a lot of unpredictable change. And so, when stuff starts going squirrelly on you, you're gonna reach for any convenient narrati…”
Most job candidates do not actually know what they are good at
“Most human beings when they're applying for jobs actually don't know what they're good at. They know what skills they have, or at least people have told them they have. They know what jobs they've held, but they actually don't know what they're good at.”
Only two interventions substantially increase confidence and success in hiring
“The only two things I've ever seen that really substantially increase your confidence in hiring are two things. One is taking the extra time to, with the manager to actually understand the specification as we talked about. Huge amount of, it really is worth th…”
First-time hiring managers for a specific role lack valid intuition
“If you're a hiring manager and you've never hired anybody before, you've never hired anybody of that particular responsibility or role type, you're not going to do it well. You're not. You're going to be blind to all sorts of things. You don't have any sort of…”
Interviewers should never ask job candidates for their opinions
“You don't ask people in an interview for their opinion on things, because opinions are often born of confusion. It'll sound, could sound great or sexy in the moment, but then, you know, wasn't really germane to like how they do their job day to day.”
Recurring employee delivery failures always stem from manager communication flaws
“If you, if you're in a situation Where you're like, you know, I've talked to the, I keep talking to my employees, and they keep not getting what I'm saying, and they keep, ah, you know, messing up and not delivering on time. A, that's not about them, that's ab…”
Firms without disciplined learning cultures are essentially banking on luck
“It's a culture that gets demonstrated by the leader, that gets lived by the people and that in absence of that, you're, you know, I think you're basically banking on luck.”
Companies fail to unleash employee potential due to broken foundational beliefs
“The reason most companies don't unleash the potential of their employees, the potential of their management, the potential of their leaders is not because people don't have the right skills or they don't have the right they don't have the right knowledge. It's…”
Decoding mental models requires tuning into physical sensations over rationalizations
“Then I think what you have to do is you have to get beyond the rationalization to the physical experience. What I mean by that is when we are interacting with the world, we are having a sort of whole body experience with that interaction. We feel things. So wh…”
Viewing your workday as a series of experiments reframes daunting problems
“If you think of your work day as a series of experiments, as opposed to a series of tasks or a series of projects or half dues or whatever, Then you realize you orient because of the very word and nature of the word experiment. You realize that you're there to…”
Confusion is a necessary tool to learn and update mental models
“Confusion is indicative of the fact that you are having an experience that's different than what you expected. And that confusion is necessary to start to make sense of the world yourself and the connection between the two.”
Most interpersonal accusations stem from confusion rather than clarity
“Most accusations are not an act of clarity. Most accusations are an act of confusion.”
Managers must be system designers and clarifiers, not task doers
“Management is the act of achieving goals through the work of others. You know, managers are not people that actually are supposed to be doers. They're supposed to be designers and they're supposed to be clarifiers.”
Fast-growing companies commonly suffer from a lack of explicit goals
“What we find is it's very common for people not to be explicit about their goals. It's very common for the executives not to be explicit about their goals. It's very common for the managers. Everybody just sort of shows up and works on the thing that's present…”
Improvement is impossible without a structured organizational feedback loop
“Most organizations do not make a clear statement of what the employee can expect with regards to the quality and frequency of feedback and how it will be delivered. And yet, if you don't have a feedback loop, you cannot improve.”
Leaders with firing authority hold the keys to employees' psychological safety
“And when somebody has higher fire authority,
Over another human being or set of human beings or promote, demote authority over those human beings.
They are actually have the keys to that human being psychological kingdom.”
Unexplained leadership actions force employees to invent their own narratives
“And if a leader
It was just a human being and confused day in and day out does something and isn't explicit about why they're doing something.
Then it will become interpreted and probably interpreted based on the degree of trust in that leader, either overtly …”
The chances of finding an extraordinary hire are roughly one in five
“As somebody who's run large recruiting organizations that have hired thousands and thousands of people, yeah, I would say that the chances that you're gonna find somebody who's extraordinary in a position is about one in five.”
Fast-growth managers often abandon new hires immediately after they start
“So what you see a significant amount of time is a manager is in pain. They rush the hire. They once the person's in place, it's a relief. Like the pain is gone. Somebody's doing the job and the manager disappears. So that's the behavior pattern you most often …”
Culture onboarding requires continuous diagnostic feedback, not annual reviews
“So you have to be explicit in watching the outcomes of attaching a bad outcome to culture, and that's where the real learning happens. It's not just giving them the statement, and it's definitely not waiting for a year-end performance review. And saying, oh, b…”
Exceptional positive feedback contrasts explicit standards with observed superior outcomes
“What great looks like is you'll sit down with a person and say, you know, here are my expectations. Here's what my standards were. Here's what I thought. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. Here's what I experienced. I just experienced you doing some…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jeff's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Talentism | 1 | 27 | — | full record on the Knowledge Project → |