The Business Athlete

Why the best hire on your team might never match the job description

Ask ten hiring managers what they’re looking for and nine of them will describe a resume. Years in the seat, the right logos, the exact tools, the exact industry. Then ask those same ten about the best person they ever worked with and not one of them talks about a resume. They talk about how that person showed up.

That’s a business athlete. It has nothing to do with whether somebody played college ball, although plenty of them did. I’m talking about a way of operating.

Think about how a real athlete works. They show up on the days they don’t feel like it. They watch film of their own mistakes and don’t flinch. They train when nobody’s keeping score, because the score always shows up eventually and they know it. They either like the pressure or they’ve made peace with it. And they’re a teammate first, because you don’t win anything by yourself no matter how good you are. Now picture that person in sales, or operations, or product, or customer success. Same engine, different field.

Here’s why a company should care. Growing companies change faster than their org charts do. The job you hire for in March is a different job by September, and somebody who’s great at exactly what’s in the spec can stall the minute the spec stops being true. The athlete moves. They’ve played a few positions, they’re comfortable not having the answer yet, and they’d rather go figure it out than sit and wait for a playbook. If you’re hiring your first marketing person or your first ops lead, you aren’t really buying a skill set. You’re buying how somebody handles the thing nobody has figured out yet.

And skills are the easiest part to teach anyway. Tools change every couple of years. What’s hard to teach is drive, curiosity, resilience, and how a person treats the people around them when things get stressful. Hire for that and train the rest, and you usually end up with somebody who outgrows the role in the best possible way. Hire only for the exact match and you often get someone who’s perfect for the job you had last year.

So let’s talk about the job spec, because that’s where most of this goes sideways. A lot of them read like a hostage negotiation. Twelve required bullet points, ten years of experience in something that’s existed for six, and not a word about what the job is actually like. An athlete reads that and either passes, or sneaks through because they know they’ll figure it out, and you never find out about the ones who passed. If you want athletes, write for them. Say what the game looks like. Say what the scoreboard looks like twelve months from now and who’s on the team. Tell them what’s messy and unfinished, because athletes love the messy part. Then when you’re interviewing, skip the trivia and ask the stuff that shows up in people. How do they handle a loss. What do they do in the off-season. Who’s the best teammate they ever had and what made that person great.

Now the catch. Athletes are rarely scrolling job boards, because they’re busy playing. Their phones are already blowing up, and they don’t answer a message from a stranger just because the message is well written. Getting them to pick up takes a relationship, and I mean a real one, built before you need anything. That’s the whole game, and it’s the part most hiring processes skip.

Next time you’re sketching out a hire, put the resume down for a minute and think about the best teammate you ever had. Chances are good they weren’t the best on paper. They were the person you wanted next to you when it got hard.

Go find that person.

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