Superforecasting executive search: The Art and Science of Prediction

Summary (30 second speed read): 

Nurole’s technology offers intelligent search for an intelligent age. It combines techniques used by the world’s best forecasters with crowdsourced candidate recommendations to equip executive search professionals for the twenty-first century. These techniques can be learned by anyone and are proven to improve forecasting outcomes with as little as one hour of training.

Nurole does not replace executive search professionals - it simply works with them to amplify their reach in a fast moving, global world and, by optimising the pool of candidates under consideration, maximise the probability of identifying those who will ensure their organisations succeed. It is another example of the combination of “human plus technology” being far more powerful than either human or technology on their own.

Nurole’s track record of identifying exceptionally diverse candidates who end up being placed evidences the power of the platform. If your executive search firm is not using Nurole, you should question whether they are adequately equipped for twenty first century search. In a world bloated with capital, where getting talent right is the key determinant of success, what sort of organisation can afford for their search firm not to be?

Superforecasting: it’s possible to predict the future more accurately.

Whether in our careers or personal lives, every choice we make involves making predictions about the future: picking a job, picking a partner, getting married, making an investment, setting a strategy, finding a board member or hiring a CEO; we decide based on how we expect the future to unfold. Unfortunately, most experts are not very good at making predictions: research from Philip Tetlock’s twenty year Expert Political Judgement project highlighted that the average forecasting expert is “roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee”. In Superforecasters: The Art and Science of Prediction, he offers two further insights: first, “foresight is a real measurable skill” and, second, foresight “is a product of particular ways of thinking, gathering information and updating beliefs that can be learned and cultivated by any thoughtful, intelligent, determined person”. The evidence supporting Tetlock’s conclusions is strong: funded by the US intelligence community, he identified a group of apparently ordinary individuals with an extraordinary ability to predict the future: reportedly "30% better than intelligence officers with access to actual classified information”. They are superforecasters.

Nurole: superforecasting the search process. 

Nurole applies to the executive search process many of the techniques Tetlock observes being used by superforecasters, in order to maximise the probability of identifying candidates who will ensure success. These superforecasting techniques include:

• Prioritising focus of effort where it can have greatest impact: whether it's an independent director, a CEO, a CFO, CTO or other board level role, Nurole allows search firms to crowdsource ideas from its members at the touch of a button. Nurole’s unique technology flips the search process on its head, empowering pre-vetted candidates to put themselves forward or recommend high quality people from their network as being suitable for a role instead of relying entirely on the search professional having to manually identify candidates and make source calls. This allows search professionals to focus more of their time on assessing high quality candidates who have expressed interest in their role, rather than wasting time simply identifying them or with candidates who may be uninterested or unsuitable.
• Breaking problems into constituent parts: Nurole’s process explicitly deconstructs what candidates will need to achieve in the role to be successful. The result is that organisations are more likely to identify candidates who have exceptional experience and ability to deliver the 3-5 key priorities specific to the role, rather than simply being a good all-rounder.
• Balancing under- and over-reacting to evidence: Nurole helps search teams reduce the impact of their own biases when drawing up the candidate long list: it shifts the search focus towards evidence-based applications; it opens up the search to candidates globally who are sourced via Nurole’s members’ recommendations rather than just candidates and industries that are known to the organisation or the search professional; it allows candidates to engage in the search process based on their latest thinking and availability which might not otherwise be known to the search team.
• Bringing out the best in others and letting others bring out the best in you: Nurole empowers high quality candidates to self-identify themselves and draw attention to what they can bring to a role that might not otherwise have been considered. This is increasingly critical as technology accelerates the pace of change across industries, making it impossible for any single person or organisation to keep up.
• Learning from our mistakes: as Nurole’s platform grows we are learning from our successes and failures; we are rigorously analysing our growing pool of data so the probability of us helping you identify the perfect candidate - if they exist, and wherever they are in the world - increases every day.
• Mastering the “error-balancing bicycle”: Nurole sees the earliest adopters and smartest users of its platform getting better each time they use it. These are the organisations who are serious about finding the best board level talent, hiring on merit, avoiding unconscious biases and driving diversity, rather than just talking about it.

Conclusion

We see extraordinary evidence of the power of Nurole to help search firms succeed through the exceptional diversity of candidates who have been placed. For example, 50% of successful investment trust candidates sourced through Nurole have been women. We have seen three 32 year olds get board seats in recent months, including one who went onto a FTSE 250 board, on account of their ability to offer insight into millennial customers and shareholders. We have seen a search executive based in London find the perfect Colombia-based CEO candidate for a private equity backed gyms business in Spain within 3 weeks of using Nurole, having spent the previous nine months looking without success. We have seen a regulated financial services platform, working with their executive search partner, find their perfect head of business development in the vehicle leasing industry - an area they never thought to look. We have seen a leading family backed industrial organisation working with a search partner to find a non-executive for their board finally hire four candidates, having realised each of the individuals brought something unique, and equally critical, to help them realise their strategic vision.

If your search team does not use Nurole to help you find the best talent for your boards, are you sure they are better than a dart throwing chimpanzee? If you pay peanuts, you will get monkeys. Nurole only works with the best search firms who do not just find candidates, they help ensure the candidates you hire are those with the highest probability of making you succeed. The search firms using Nurole know their clients can’t afford anything less.