We Test athletes better than we test candidates
We Test Athletes Better Than We Test Candidates
The gap between how we treat athletes and how we treat candidates
Test an athlete’s vertical jump, hand them nothing back, and never say another word about the number. Do that in any half-decent performance department and you’d be fired by lunch. So why does almost every hiring process in strength and conditioning, sport science, and high performance do exactly that to the human beings applying for a job?
I’ve been on both sides of enough hiring rounds now to have an opinion, and here it is: the process has gone backwards while the demands on candidates have gone up. Send a CV, wait, hope — that used to be the whole game. Now, for an entry-to-mid role, you’re one of roughly eighty applicants filtered by software before a human opens the file. For a high-profile job at a big organization, that number doubles or triples — a hundred and sixty, two hundred and forty people, all competing hard for one seat. And a good chunk of them aren’t casually shopping around. In this industry, people get pushed out of roles for political reasons, for budget reasons, for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they can coach. They’re not job-hopping. They’re trying to get back in the game after something happened to them that they didn’t choose.
The automated first pass — the resume-scanning, the algorithmic sort — I don’t actually have a problem with that part. Nobody can personally read two hundred applications by hand, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty. That stage is impersonal because it has to be.
Here’s where I lose patience. Somewhere past that first cut, you ask a candidate to actually do something — a personality profile, a written challenge, a program design task. Real hours. Real thinking. Often real vulnerability, because a personality assessment asks someone to hand you a piece of who they are before you’ve even met them. The moment you ask for that, you’ve left the automated stage behind. You’ve moved the relationship from software sorting a database to a person doing work for you. And that comes with an obligation.
Think of it the way you’d think about testing an athlete. You don’t run someone through a testing battery, get a number, and file it away without telling them what it means. It’s how the athlete knows where they stand and what to work on next. Putting a candidate through a task or a profile is a test in exactly the same sense. Score it. Report it back.
“The number gets reported back — that’s the entire point of testing.”
For the group who did the profile or the task — usually somewhere around twenty people — a short, personal email explaining why they didn’t progress is a few minutes of work. Five minutes, maybe ten. There is no version of “we didn’t have time” that holds up against that math. It should be non-negotiable.
For the final round — the three, four, five who made it through an actual interview — the bar goes up again. Those people get a phone call. Not a template. A real conversation about why they didn’t get the role, what stood out about the person who did, and what stood out about them that they should carry into the next opportunity. That’s ten minutes of your day for someone who gave you hours of theirs.
There’s a bigger contradiction sitting underneath all of this. Most of the roles we’re hiring for in high performance need someone who can integrate — across departments, across disciplines, across personalities — and who has genuine people skills to do it. Then we run a hiring process that treats those same candidates as disposable line items. You can’t ask someone to prove they’re good with people using a process that shows them none.
The Philosophy Underneath It
I’ll add the philosophy underneath it, and I’m not trying to sound like a preacher about it — I just think it’s true. Treat the least-connected, least-senior person in your hiring pipeline exactly as well as you’d treat the person you most want to hire. Careers in this industry don’t move in straight lines. I’ve had people remember me from a decade ago for treating them poorly, and I’ve had people — this one’s real, not hypothetical — track me down ten years later, now running their own departments, wanting to work with me because of how I treated them back when I had nothing to gain from it. The junior candidate you brush off with a form rejection today might be reviewing your budget in eight years. Or hiring you.
Score the test. Every time.
Send the email. It’s five minutes.
Make the call. It’s ten.
Remember the name of the person at the bottom of the shortlist — because one day, they might remember yours.
