Research: Trying to Pick the “Best of the Best” Is the Wrong Approach

In selecting the most creative people or ideas to hire or implement, many organizations use multi-step processes that winnow the initial pool to a group of finalists and then select “the best of the best” from the finalists. Research conducted in which the authors were involved found that such an approach may be a waste of time and resources and that the experts trying to pick the winners from the finalists agonize and can’t really determine the clearly superior choices. A better approach might be: keep the selection criteria for identifying talent or potential relatively broad, don’t try to select the best of the best and instead use other criteria such as diversity or cultural fit, involve experts early in the process, and create a community of winners that includes all finalists.