How To Hire Better People: Think Contrarian, Not "Best Practices"
Talent acquisition "best practices" force you to work harder, not smarter • To hire great employees, take lessons from online dating ❤️💔 • Part 2/2
In Everything I Know About Interviews, I Learned from Online Dating, you read the ravings of a madman our commentary that online dating and talent acquisition are competitive markets for human relationships. The former is a marketplace for personal/romantic relationships while the latter is for professional/non-romantic relationships (usually, anyway1).
Part 2 (this article) is about putting the mindset of the Contrarian Caves into practice as you perform gatekeeping duties in the Interview Mountains.
In a Competitive Market, All Conventional Wisdom is Radioactive
You run a circus and have been disappointed with the lion tamers you’ve recently hired. Upon hearing a motivational speech from some retired CEO or a Shartford Busyness School professor, you decide to follow the conventional wisdom of spending more time and energy on recruiting top talent. You make your interview process twice as long. No longer will a simple résumé suffice; prospective lion tamers must now run the gauntlet of two interviews, and also demonstrate their whip-cracking and chair-twirling abilities with an actual lion. You, of course, will evaluate from behind a lion-proof screen. This way, the only lion tamers you hire will be top-notch, right?
But wait! The proprietor of the competing circus from across town is also a forward-thinking, big-picture kind of leader who heard the same motivational speech as you! Your competitor decides to spend thrice the energy on hiring talented lion tamers. Worse still, that clever jerk manages to poach your most experienced lion tamer by offering a generous sign-on bonus and industry-leading 401(k) match and complementary lion-maiming insurance. This forces you to quadruple your efforts on employee recruitment, as well as raise the price of circus tickets to cover the cost of benefits and a part-time recruiter.
The candidate pool of top-notch lion tamers has not grown. Meanwhile, both circuses are now spending 4× more time and energy on the zero-sum game of competing for the exact same candidates as before. At least, this is what you heard from old contacts in the industry, because you were fired for spending too much time filling vacancies. While you were following “recruitment and hiring best practices,” you weren’t running enough lion-taming shows to attract crowds and revenue. Oops.
No one ever told you that conventional wisdom (in the context of zero-sum games) are plagued with survivorship bias, did they? Of course not; the Silent Graveyard beneath Leadership Land is very, very quiet. The hiring managers who continue to peddle the 4× strategy had the name recognition or resources to attract top talent…or they simply got lucky. The unlucky ones who followed hiring best practices and failed were exiled from Leadership Land. They’re too busy subsisting on expired cat food to give write books, give TED talks, or dispense advice on how to hire better people.
We’re not saying that you should rush your hiring process along. We’re saying you shouldn’t blindly follow conventional wisdom when you’re playing a zero-sum game. If everyone follows “best recruiting practices” while vying for an unchanged pool of job candidates, the result is a war of attrition that forces everyone to work harder, not smarter.
In the competitive markets for human relationships, it’s a mistake to think that conventional wisdom will give you a competitive edge. The best that recruitment and hiring best practices will do is to save you from extinction. It won’t help you thrive; merely survive. To dive deeper into this point and see how it’s applied outside of talent acquisition, see When Best Practices Produce the Worst Results.
Most people are irradiating themselves with hiring and recruiting “best practices”
Attracting top talent is like trench warfare from World War I: expensive, exhausting, and mostly futile. Whatever progress you make (at great cost) is soon offset by territorial losses elsewhere. If you wage trench warfare well, your reward is more trench warfare, not peace!
Compare that with the hiring process, which is drawn-out, expensive, and exhausting. After spending months to hire a great employee, you soon lose another one to a competitor or to retirement. If you become adept at recruiting best practices, your reward is more recruiting, not “happily ever after”!
You’d think that most people would strive to avoid this kind of futility. In our experience, however, most people follow the Institute of Conventional Wisdom and hope for unconventional success. This is a very common mindset, according to Google search data:
Google Trends shows a similar pattern:
Our Google sleuthing suggests that most people are following hiring and recruitment conventional wisdom, dooming themselves to conventional results. This means you have plenty of room to achieve unconventional results by thinking like a contrarian.
“Could you repeat that? I couldn’t hear you over the smell.”
If the conventional wisdom is to bathe regularly before interviews, then being contrarian means you should never bathe, right? Alternatively, you could enhance your body odor by bathing in perfume! Nothing announces your presence like a billowing nimbus of overpowering fragrance – complete with floral top notes, halitosis-y middle notes, and lingering base notes of armpit fermentation. 🤮
Not following conventional wisdom necessarily means being contrarian, but there’s a catch: there are many ways to be contrarian and wrong and few ways to be contrarian and right. The more complex and fragile your task, the more ways there are to be wrong and the fewer ways there are to be right.
A more complete picture of the struggle between the Institute of Conventional Wisdom and the Contrarian Caves looks like this:
If everyone follows recruiting best practices, it leads to symmetry between market competitors. Symmetry leads to futility and the talent-acquisition equivalent of trench warfare.
Contrarian behavior creates asymmetry, which leads to success –or– extinction. In winner-take-all scenarios, you end up profiting from asymmetry or becoming a victim of it.
If you can’t figure out how to be contrarian and right, then following recruiting best practices may be preferable to being contrarian and wrong. Operating in survival mode and staying out of the Career Swamp will buy you time to learn how to become contrarian and right.
To Become Contrarian and Right, Avoid Formulaic Thinking
By the time we entered Leadership Land and assumed gatekeeping duties in the Interview Mountains, we already had several years of experience in another market for human relationships: online dating. We’ve never put “X years of online dating” on our résumés, even though the experience was absolutely relevant to hiring great employees.
If you consider yourself the CEO of YourLife, Inc. (you should), then online dating is a global search for a co-CEO who becomes very expensive to fire after passing a multi-year probationary period. This co-CEO can steer YourLife, Inc. into a glorious future, or run the ship aground in the Straits of Conflicting Interests. In online dating, you are an executive search committee of one – and the stakes could not be higher for the well-being of YourLife, Inc.
All those years of online dating taught us valuable lessons that we carried with us into Leadership Land. When we swapped the “online dating” hat for a “hiring manager” hat, we immediately put the following lessons into practice:
Following “best practices” in a zero-sum game usually leads to the worst results.
There are plenty of fish in the sea, but most of them are unpalatable and some are downright toxic. Therefore, the key to finding better partners/hiring better employees is not to maximize the size of the candidate pool but to minimize the number of people whom you need to evaluate.
What’s “contrarian and right” shapeshifts as quickly as mainstream fads come and go.
Let’s talk about that final bullet point. In zero-sum games like dating and recruitment, anything formulaic will necessarily become conventional wisdom over time. Today’s secrets will become tomorrow’s “best hiring practices.”
We won’t offer you too much formulaic advice because there are plenty of self-help books and articles titled “8 Recruiting Strategies to Hire Top Talent in 2025.” Some of these books and listicles offer excellent advice that we don’t need to repeat, and we want our article to stand the test of time. Our contribution will be contrarian tips on figuring out what fashionable people are not doing.
Spy on the competition (AKA the “Undercover Catfish”)
One of the authors of this article is a man who once created an online dating account to pose as a woman. I used the dummy account to gather intel on the competition – other men – and used their messages and profiles to guide what I shouldn’t write in my own. I also learned how to be contrarian and right by observing the men who quickly found partners and dropped out of the dating market.
The “Undercover Catfish” tactic also works in hiring better people. What’s stopping you from creating a dummy profile of your ideal job candidate2? Flesh out this imaginary employee’s profile with the knowledge, skills, and abilities that you’re looking for, then sign up for new job alerts. Use this profile to browse vacancy announcements and recruiter messages from your competitors. Use the intel to guide your own recruiting efforts.
If your templates look like the competition’s, stop using them
We’re lazy. We love templates. They free up time and energy. They put novices and people with poor critical thinking skills on rails, thus preventing them from veering into the realm of “contrarian and wrong.” Templates are great for non-competitive activities, such as enrolling in your organization’s dental plan. Cleaning your teeth doesn’t make other people’s teeth filthier (to our knowledge, anyway).
But when used for competitive activities like hiring top talent, templates are like conventional wisdom: they become radioactive. For starters, templates save time and energy by discouraging critical thinking – thereby tricking you into believing that following “best practices” will lead to the best results! When you enshrine “best recruiting practices” into a template, the job postings and vacancy announcements made from that template look just like everyone else’s. And when your attempts to attract top talent are indistinguishable from your competitors’, they’re completely forgettable.
We’ve gone on many first dates and interviewed many people. Some were extraordinarily good (the “ones who got away”) and some were extraordinarily bad (the toxic bottom-feeding fish we had the misfortune to dredge up). They shared one thing in common: they were memorably unique. More than a decade after we left the online dating scene, we still remember the non-generic people we dated. When we retire, we’ll still remember the extraordinary (and extraordinarily bad) people we interviewed.
In between these two extremes were the forgettable folks whose profiles and résumés vanished into a memory hole within 72 hours. They generally said or wrote the same uninspired things in slightly different ways – almost like they were following a template! If you want to avoid their fate, think twice before you use a template. If you put out forgettable, cookie-cutter job advertisements, you’ll mostly attract forgettable, cookie-cutter people.
Ask yourself: “Am I really ahead of the curve?”
Good advice is never unwelcome, but timing is important.
Let’s say you have a cantankerous mentor who lives as a hermit atop an active volcano. He teaches you an ingenious method to hire better people: figuring out which job candidates possess an incisive mind, and which ones are parroting a generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). If this advice is Cerebrium from the Secret Grottos, then implementing the secret makes you an early adopter and gives you a competitive edge.
Now let’s say you first learned the same ingenious method from a Wall Street Journal or Harvard Business Review article on hiring better employees. These publications are widely read, so the method is no longer a secret – it’s now on the verge of mainstream adoption. Implementing the GenAI defense will put you ahead of the people who don’t read the WSJ or HBR, but that’s about it. Maybe it’ll get you promoted from the Boss Forest into the Middle Management Foothills, but it won’t help you once all of your peers are Type-A testosterrific workaholics who read the same things you do.
By the time a risk-averse, backwater organization formalizes the GenAI defense method as a hiring policy, the secret has been conventional wisdom for a looooong time. Clever job-seekers have already found workarounds to the defense, and clever hiring managers are already formulating new countermeasures. Late-adopting hiring managers will still benefit from the original advice, but only to screen out late-adopting job seekers who are way behind the curve.
“Am I ahead of the curve?” It depends entirely on the quality of your competition. The bar was hilariously low for online dating – we got ahead by spying on the competition, browsing data published by one of the dating platforms, and using common sense. Only you can gauge the level of effort needed to hire great employees before your competitors do – so start spying on them!
The Principal-Agent Problem is Hurting Your Recruitment Efforts
Decades ago, one of us thumbed through an issue of Cosmopolitan (a print magazine targeted at young women) and found some atrocious advice on sex and dating. The dating articles encouraged toxic behavior that virtually guaranteed broken relationships and catfights behind the dumpster of the local Red Lobster. The sex advice, if anyone were daring/stupid enough to follow it, would require a cringe-worthy explanation to the emergency room doctor and an even cringey-er conversation with the OB/GYN later. Our conclusion was that Cosmopolitan intentionally gave horribad advice to gullible readers to sabotage their relationships, thus ensuring they’d continue buying more issues of Cosmo for relationship advice.
For years, we called this the “Cosmo effect” until we learned the technical term for it: the principal-agent problem. Simplify defined, that’s when the interests of the principal (you) don’t align with the interests of the person you hire (agent). Ever notice how your car mechanic always recommends you change your oil every three months or 3,000 miles (5,000 km) but the car manufacturer recommends 12 months or 7,500 miles (12,000 km)? Ever notice how every management consulting report always concludes with “your problem can only be solved with more management consulting services?”
We noticed the principal-agent problem in online dating, and we continue to see it today in recruiting great employees. You (the principal) want to find a suitable match for the vacancy in your organization with minimal fuss; the platform/recruiter (the agent) just wants to get paid. Subscription-based platforms are especially bad; if your agent loses two customers by matching you with a great hire, he’ll put himself out of business if he keeps doing a stellar job. Agents that charge a fee for each vacancy posting or each match tend to be a little better, but their incentive is higher transactional volume; they benefit by prioritizing quantity over quality while you probably want the opposite.
How to reduce agency costs while recruiting talent
Include the direct supervisor in the hiring process as much as possible, but only if that person has excellent judgment in poorly-structured environments. The person who must supervise the new employee has a stronger incentive to hire right than the recruiter who’s only around for the initial match-making. On the flip side, a supervisor who is incapable of making good decisions without resorting to templates might degrade the hiring process, sending it into the Desert of Good Intentions.
Watch out if the agent (recruiter, platform) tries to disavow all responsibility for a failed hire. True, it’s rarely 100% their fault when the market for human relationships produces a bad transaction. But by blaming the defects of market participants instead of themselves, the middlemen are distracting you from how much they skim off the top of each transaction.
Ask your recruiter what distinguishes them from all the other recruiters who are following best practices for hiring top talent. Ask how they intend to break the stalemate of talent-acquisition trench warfare. If they claim that following best practices will get you the best results, you might want to find a new recruiter.
Don’t assume that the most popular websites that offer the greatest number of choices are the best ones. We fell for this trap early in our online-dating days. Eventually we wised up and realized that the websites with the best matchmaking algorithms should have fewer active users because they succeeded in pairing people up! We’ve been suspicious of LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and other hugely popular job board websites ever since. What if they have a huge user base because neither recruiters nor job-seekers can find what they’re looking for? Look for the highest match-making success rate, not the biggest selection of warm bodies!
Don’t be like the gullible fools who kept reading Cosmopolitan after getting terribad advice. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…
Other Contrarian Tips For Attracting Talent
These ideas might not stand the test of time if recruiting and hiring best practices evolve to encourage more common sense and less formulaic thinking:
Don’t trawl when you should be spearfishing, and vice versa
Trawling is when you drag a huge net behind a fishing boat to indiscriminately catch seafood. Continuing the “plenty of fish in the sea” metaphor, we often see people trawling when they should take a more targeted approach. Job seekers often carpet-bomb prospective employers with low-effort applications. Employers put out cookie-cutter job advertisements and hope someone special will bite.
On the flip side, it’s weird to see high-effort, expensive, targeted spearfishing methods being used for entry-level positions. Is it really necessary to put a part-time data entry clerk through three interviews, a criminal background check, and an obstacle course with a napalm-spraying dragon guarding the finish line?
Create a self-weeding garden, Freakonomics-style
The standard hiring approach is to gather the largest candidate pool you can manage, then apply a gauntlet of filters until only one candidate remains. This is incredibly tedious in the age of GenAI, and in 2025 it’s no longer legal have candidates fight to the death until only one remains standing. As a consolation prize, why not build yourself a self-weeding garden where other people identify themselves as the problem? The Judgment of Solomon is a classic example. For a more recent example of a self-weeding garden, see the top comment to this Quora post.
By creating a self-weeding garden to recruit talent, you’re devising a way to either:
Have people select themselves out of your candidate pool. If a prospective employee is turned off by the unpleasant reality of a job or offended by an idiosyncratic quirk of the hiring manager, they won’t apply and pollute your candidate pool.
Lay a trap for AI. As of June 2025, our go-to method is to send job applicants to an external webpage. On this webpage, there is a static image (jpg, png, gif, etc.) of handwritten text3 that gives one set of instructions. Hidden behind this image is a paragraph of text (same color as the page background so it’s invisible to humans) giving a different set of instructions. Most AIs will read the entire page contents, follow the instructions in the hidden text, and ignore the image; but a human will follow the instructions they read from the image and never know the text existed. We don’t know how long this trick will last; be sure to test the efficacy of your own AI traps by feeding your trap-laden job advertisements into a GenAI and asking it to generate responses.
Growth mindset vs. fixed mindset
We’ve all heard some variation of this leadership advice:
Hire good people and get out of their way.
Most people interpret “good people” to mean “talented people.” As in, they materialized in your candidate pool with a near-perfect set of knowledge, skills, and abilities. Out of all the keywords people search for, one stands far above the rest: “talent.”
Terms like “talent acquisition” and “hiring talent” invites what Carol Dweck calls a “fixed mindset.” You’re either talented or you’re not. You either have what it takes or you don’t. You’re either a great employee or you kick puppies every morning before breakfast.
Contrast the fixed mindset with the “growth mindset.” You’re searching for a diamond in the rough: someone who lacks the skills to do the job today, but who learns quickly and seems motivated by an inner fire. If you’re willing to polish that diamond until it shines, you can guide them down pathways that you see fit. You’re creating a rising star who will be uncommonly devoted to you. Even if one of you promotes up and away, their loyalty persists across organizational silos.
The growth mentality won’t always work, like if you need a hernia surgeon or a CPA to do your taxes by Sunday night. But in general, we believe that hiring and recruiting best practices focus too much on “talent acquisition” and other vocabulary that encourages a fixed mentality. Maybe we’re biased; we spent most of our online dating years locked in the fixed mentality. We searched for the sexiest, smartest, and (insert positive adjective)-est singles with the fanciest diplomas and biggest bank accounts. And what a miserable experience it was to compete with everyone else seeking the same things.
But when we switched to a growth mentality and started looking for people with whom we could grow together for decades – people with the greatest potential – everything changed. It wasn’t long before we found great partners, dropped out of the dating pool, and started polishing the diamond in the rough.
If you’ve been frustrated with your recruiting efforts, maybe you should try investing in overlooked potential rather than vying for talent like everyone else.
In the months since publication, How to Accidentally Fall in Love with a Coworker [NSFW] and Help! I'm in Love with a Coworker! [Part 1, NSFW] have become two of our most popular posts of all time. The unexpected popularity supports our suspicions that workplaces are full of secret, passionate desires.
Truth be told: lots of things. Creating fake accounts probably violates the ToS/EULA of every app out there. LinkedIn profiles with tons of experience but few connections might look suspicious. Then there’s the ethical question of whether it’s okay to passively deceive people, even if you don’t interact with anyone or string them along.
In our opinion, this level of deception is no worse than blatantly hiring people away from competitors to gain intel about their current operations.
I’d call my handwriting “chicken scratch” but that would be insulting to chickens.