Recruiting Lessons From the Olympics: Learning From Outside Your Box

You will never become a world-class recruiter if you restrict your learning to benchmarking against other similar corporate recruiting functions. Great recruiters can and do learn many things by studying completely different business functions like sales, marketing, branding, supply chain management, quality control, and customer relationship management. In addition, great recruiters proactively try to learn from non-business industries as well, including universities (top student and sports recruiting), political campaigns, and even cloudsourcing initiatives.

Olympic teams are one of the top five recruiting “centers of excellence” that reside outside of the corporate world. The others include professional sports franchises, entertainment production firms, not-for-profit organizations, and the U.S. military. Even firms considered recruiting superstars like Google, Zappos, DaVita, Deloitte, and Microsoft can learn valuable lessons by studying the recruiting process used by Olympic teams. Obviously these “outside your box” Olympic recruiting strategies and tools must be modified to fit your own business situation, but it takes pure arrogance to automatically assume that great recruiting is restricted to the corporate world.