'We Need A Rock Star' Is Idiotic (And False)

Please God let me get through a week without somebody calling our office to say “We need a real rock star for this job!”

People say they need rock stars. What is a rock star, in real life? A rock star is someone who is a creative genius and smashes up hotel rooms.

Most organizations couldn’t deal with a rock star for five seconds. In the business world, like any subculture, we have our own weenie shorthand. I confess to my part in propagating it — I was an HR person and doled out plenty of spiked lemonade over the years myself.  I was completely sincere in everything I said, but that doesn’t mean I was right.

I was fully on board with 360-degree feedback and so much other HR garbage it makes me sick to think about it now.

When we say “I need a rock star or a ninja in this job!” we delude ourselves. Every job needs a smart and capable person in it. We fool ourselves into thinking that some jobs — the rock star and ninja ones — are so cool and special that we should be very discriminating  about who we hire.

We should shoot for the best, and accept no substitutes!

“Best” in that context usually means smart and hip and fast-talking. We drool over those people and can’t understand why we can’t scoop them up like cranberries in the bog.

We can delude ourselves very badly when we’re recruiting, because of the power surge we feel when we have jobs to fill. We feel that we must have something very special to bestow on the lucky folks we choose to hire! We forget that the talent market is a market. It has its own equilibrium.

We don’t do people any favors when we hire them. Employers have nothing special to dole out to job-seekers, unless they’ve invested the energy to create a vibrant and mojo-fueled workplace.

The talent market is driven by talent, not your juiced-up job description and paragraphs of exciting verbiage about the awesomeness of your company. You care about your business, but why should anyone else care? Why should a candidate care? If your recruiting process isn’t a sales and marketing process, forget about hiring talented people.

The good news is that we don’t have to babble about rock stars and ninjas to hire great team members.

If you build a Human Workplace, amazing people will show up. That’s the natural energetic flow here on planet earth. There is nothing special to it. When people know that you are doing something cool in your company and that you treat people as valued collaborators, you will never worry about recruiting again.

You will never stoop to writing or thinking idiotic thoughts about hiring rock stars and ninjas, either.

Let’s stop talking about hiring ninjas and rock stars and talk about a simple and obvious topic. We can build cultures that will attract awesome people.

Then we don’t ever have to say “I need a rock star in this job!” The assumption will be that whatever you call a rock star or a ninja, you’ll meet tons of those people who are more than qualified and ready and game to work with you.