Should Athletic Experience Be a Key Factor in Hiring?

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Krissy Manzano: Hello, and welcome to the Blueprint Roundtable. I’m your host, Krissy Manzano, joined by Chuck Brotman and Emily Bell. The Blueprint Roundtable is an ongoing series with our team and occasional guest. In each session, I’m gonna ask the team a simple question related to trends in recruiting talent, and go to market for discussion and debate.

Krissy Manzano: This week’s question, should athletic experience be a key factor in hiring? So the clock starts now, officially.

Emily Bell: All right, I’m gonna jump in. I have a pretty, pretty clear opinion on this one. Being a collegiate athlete myself, I think that there are absolutely skills and behaviors within folks who have played competitive sports, particularly at the collegiate level or above that are indicators of success in sales.

Emily Bell: I think the important thing though, as hiring managers or companies, is to know what exactly you are assessing for. So what skills and behaviors you want to find. Just because someone was an athlete doesn’t mean that they have all of those. So I think still, you know, using it as a indicator to peak interest and take a look at the candidate is great.

Emily Bell: One thing that I’ll say, athletes are really, really good at is the mental game that comes into being good in sales long term, because especially from it being a quarter over quarter type of, what have you done for me lately? Like, you’ll win one quarter and you gotta restart. And also kind of having that mindset of what I do today is going to benefit me four months from now. It’s a mentality that you can have, even if you’re not an athlete. But most people that have played at that level of performance, it’s so ingrained into how they approach most facets of their lives. So, I would say yes, but you have to be assessing for the correct skills and behaviors that are associated with it.

Emily Bell: Chuck, what do you think?

Chuck Brotman: Yeah, no, I mean, I agree. I’ve managed former athletes who’ve made exceptional sellers, and I’ve had former athletes who struggled at sales. I think that the key thing, it almost suggests that instead of, you know, looking for athletic experience as some, you know, proxy for, you know, sales effectiveness or ability to be, you know, talented in any professional role that we commit ourselves as leaders in hiring managers to being curious about people’s backgrounds in general and paths they’ve taken into the professional world and where there are transferrable skills and passions they’ve honed in other pursuits, whether it’s, you know, athletic execution or in other forms of work or in the military or as volunteer community activists, right? There are so many different ways that new people can contribute to society and to the business world. Athletic experience can certainly be valuable. Athletic achievement. I, you know, I’ve known, I work with a gold medalist, right? Ton of respect for folks who’ve been successful.

Chuck Brotman: I really do, by the way. But but yeah, it’s you know, it’s the problem that I’ve seen in my work as a recruiter and going back is when people turn athletic experience into this proxy.

Emily Bell: Yeah.

Chuck Brotman: Certain forms of experience, which ultimately can make it more difficult for those who have, you know, other backgrounds and journeys to get the same access to opportunity.

Krissy Manzano: We’d just like. Box people in so much so we don’t have to do work on people we don’t know. That’s like saying and you all might actually disagree. That’s like saying everyone who went to Harvard is super smart and has high EQ. And I think we all know that’s not true. There’s con I said have come out of it.

Krissy Manzano: Maybe that’s actually, they’re considered smart cuz they can con people. But you know, we always talk about looking at skills and behaviors and there’s a lot of things having been an athlete myself, not a collegiate one. But there’s a lot of things that athletics and sports do really well, and a lot of people get super strong traits from those, which I can absolutely understand.

Krissy Manzano: Like looking at those things, especially if someone was an athlete. But I would say we should be looking for those things regardless of if they’re an athlete or not, right? So if those are things core to your team, someone being an athlete shouldn’t be the reason that you think they would be good at that.

Krissy Manzano: It should be something that’s a part of your hiring process, right? So, I think that’s the piece where it, you know, can be kind of extreme.

Chuck Brotman: Well said.

Emily Bell: Yeah. I would say, you know, sometimes even when people tend to like use classifications or kind of broad stroke generalizations about categories of people, it’s oftentimes, you know, to play it safe. It’s not, you know, it’s like, well, they should have been great at this. They’re, they were an athlete. So it’s like, you know, making sure, like you’ve mentioned Krissy, It’s using that as a potential indicator, but also following through with the standard regimen that is, you know, assessing for all the other things that you’re looking for and identifying, you know, other areas in their life where they also could have been able to develop the types of behaviors that you need for success.

Emily Bell: Yeah.

Chuck Brotman: I mean, ultimately if people can go into interviews with curiosity about talent, curiosity about applicants, and about their backgrounds. Right? With, as you mentioned, Emily, if you have the profile defined and the specific matrix of skills and behaviors that matter for that role in your organization. Recognize that we all have different life paths. There are many things that people have done in this world that are impressive and I have no knowledge of. But if I go into interviews and screening calls with a level of curiosity, I can learn and find opportunity to see transferrable skills and passions and action that could be excellent for my organization and my clients.

Krissy Manzano: Yes.

Emily Bell: You know what’s interesting? Something that just popped in my head was, I will say sometimes I do think it’s the organization knowing that the role is a grind and not having necessarily the willingness to correct some of the challenges that are there. So it’s like we just need to put people in here that can endure it and most likely it’s gonna be people that have endured a lot of other things too. As far as like mental stamina, which is, you know, I think that’s one thing that, like candidates deserve more. People need to come in and also receive from organization, not just come in and serve the greater good. So another thing from it, maybe a different lens, and from an athlete standpoint too, you know, if they’re really narrowing in on that, you know, an indicator for a candidate to maybe ask some questions around company culture and expectations of work life balance. Because when I was an athlete in college that was your life and there wasn’t much else.

Emily Bell: Yeah, exactly. I joke, I retired two years into my four year collegiate experience because I needed to graduate on time and that was not gonna happen if I had to work all of this other scheduling in, along with all my prerequisites. So, yeah, I mean, I think it’s an indicator if they want just people that come from that mindset, it’s great to have hustle mentality, but everybody deserves work-life balance, you know?

Krissy Manzano: Yeah, no, a hundred percent. And I think just in hiring in general, we’ve gotta be more comfortable being uncomfortable with talking to people we don’t know, right? Like, we’re not very great. We have, there’s nothing wrong with earning trust, right. But we’re kind of brutal on people when we’re hiring.

Krissy Manzano: We want them to make us feel great and make us feel so comfortable, and that’s where you get a lot of these biases, albeit unconscious, right? And boxing people and like, oh, they’re an athlete. That makes me feel better. Okay? So everything they say, I’m hoping that’ll make me feel better, that they really can handle this.

Emily Bell: Yeah.

Krissy Manzano: I’m, you know, they’re gonna be set up versus doing that work to understand those processes and those core competencies and skills beforehand, it’s work. It’s not fun work, but when you do it, it’s gonna save you time and time again. Right. So just not boxing people in. I think that’s kind of the theme here.

Krissy Manzano: Right. And being, like you said, Chuck, curious, but. All right, you all. We’re at time. We’re getting close to it.

Emily Bell: Good chat.

Krissy Manzano: Thank you for your input and your views. Hopefully this is helpful for some other people and until next time, we’ll see you later.

Chuck Brotman: Until the next time. Bye everyone.

Krissy Manzano: Bye.​