I once worked for a company that claimed:
“We only hire the best!”
– Interesting, did you know you shared a science park with Oracle, Google, Sun, GE and Yahoo?
So we have at least half a dozen companies (and probably more like twelve-dozen the world-over) where managers also claimed to “only hire the best”.
Somebody has to be stretching the truth here.
Now admittedly, some of the staff there really were spectacularly good but much like any other large company, most others were just good, some were average, and staff on the ground questioned the continued existence of the occasional one or two hangers on.
But this isn’t all bad news. In fact if you really only hired the best, chances are it’d be like casting a film where the entire cast are Oscar winners and everyone wants best supporting and lead titles. On paper it might look fantastic but I guarantee your production will be a complete nightmare and the end result would be pretentious and expensive!
Here’s an article by Kris Dunn I read a few years ago that really brought home to me how damaging the “only the best” approach can be when 80% of the time you simply need to get stuff done. (apologies if the formatting on the linked article is off).