The Recruiter’s Eye

The role of recruiters in the talent identification process

By Dr Paul Larkin

Professional sport is incredibly appealing. It offers many social, financial and personal rewards and is why young athletes and parents are often willing to do whatever it takes to ‘make it’. However, there are “gatekeepers” along this journey which have a massive influence on the next crop of sporting superstars; these being the recruiter or scout. These individuals are responsible for the identification and selection of youth athletes into professional sporting pathways, and are often heavily scrutinised. By definition, talent identification and recruitment is the process of making informed decisions to select the most promising athletes, with best potential to excel as an elite athlete.

Within business, Simon Sinek created the concept of the golden circles, which describes how people communicate their ideas by starting with the “what” they do and eventually talk about “how” and “why” they do what they do. While in a business model, the aim is to understand why you create a specific product, from a talent identification perspective, we work the opposite way. We know why we are doing something; we want to identify the next sports superstar. We also know how we do it; we watch the athlete’s performance on multiple occasions to form our judgement. However, we have very limited knowledge about what informs these talent identification judgements, and to date, little empirical research has considered talent identification from the perspective of the recruitment staff.

Therefore, we set out to bridge this gap by describing the recruiter’s role within the Australian Football League (AFL) talent identification process, and what information they use to make talent identification and recruitment decisions.

Overall, 12 AFL National Recruiting managers completed a one-hour interview which detailed their experiences and perspectives on the process of talent identification. The data provided four overarching themes (1) The Recruiter; 2) Processes and Practice; 3) Assessment and (4) Selection.

The Recruiter

When considering the recruiter, they indicated they have a long held passion for the sport and have worked within the football environment for an extended period, often starting with part-time talent spotting roles and working through the ranks when opportunities arose. They believed their recruiting skills came from on the job experience. The recruiters indicated they have a clear understanding of talent; how to develop talent, and clear perceptions of vital or required attributes. In relation to these definitions, recruiters believe talent is “the footy skill, the game sense, the ability to play the game, probably a fair bit of decision making”, in conjunction with “a skill that an individual can repeatedly perform that the majority cannot and the ability to execute a series of skills on a consistent basis.”

In relation to the job skills, knowledge and experience are developed over time with the need to be able to make reliable player comparisons, learn from mistakes and understand young people. In addition, the recruiter needs to have strong analytical and observational skills, ability to manage a team, and use information judiciously to inform/change decisions.

Practices and Processes

Informing the practices and processes of the recruiter, where the recruiting strategy which guides day-to-day practice. This can include: the current talent pool, the quality of information networks, and using experts where relevant. One key area is the need to evaluate talent, which is done via game observations, whereby they will watch athletes both at games or via video footage. This process generally commences when players are 16 years old and intensifying through to the under 18 competitions, with a strong focus on the national championships. In general, the process of tracking a player involves watching games and then going back and revisiting the vision from that game (recorded video footage of the game). Overall, drafted players are watched live at least 20 times plus another 20 to 50 on vision (a video recording of a game).

Assessment

When making assessments of players, recruiters summarised it by stating, “we tend to assess each player individually similar to a balance sheet, their assets and their liabilities and can the liabilities be improved and how strong is the asset.” This concept leads to the notion of risk and reward, where the perceived assets and liabilities of a player are assessed. The common industry perception is high draft picks are ‘safe’ options, with later picks perceived to be ‘riskier’ options. Recruiters acknowledge the importance of mitigating risks by assessing character, medical and injury history, social media. Each player is also interviewed by the recruiting team to develop an understanding of the player, their background and family, with additional reference checks from coaches, player managers and school teachers.

From a physiological perspective recruiters assess different attributes such as anthropometric (height, weight), athleticism (speed, power), endurance, medical history and scope to improve. Recruiters also place a large emphasis on game-based skills, including ball winning, kicking, handballing, and marking. Tactically, they consider game sense, consistency of performance, versatility, ability to influence the game, and decision-making. Finally, psychological skills assessed include resilience, work ethic, attitude, determination, character and competitiveness, with the psychological assessment potentially making or breaking the player for some recruiters, “I will never pick a kid if I didn’t think he was mentally up to it, even if he was an enormous talent.”

Selection

Finally, the theme of selection related to the intricacies that inform the actual selection decisions. One key element was the level of competition players were competing at when observed. Recruiters wanted to see players competing at the highest competition level, such as the national championships, where the best of the best are playing each other. Further, a player’s location has an influence on selection. Recruiters determine the advantages and disadvantages of players living and competing in remote locations for instance. There is a perception that country players often have more upside (i.e., the potential for improvement) due to the limited exposure to a professional training environment compared to metropolitan recruits. In addition, player maturity is assessed as many are required to move significant distances from their family once recruited and their readiness to live more independently is considered. Therefore, if two players are of a similar skill level, recruiters are often likely to pick the local player to reduce the later potential for ‘flight risk’ associated with some players.

Finally, recruiters are constantly undertaking a retrospective analysis, youth players are compared directly to how a current elite level player was performing at the same age. Recruiters acknowledge this is not an exact science, but with the increased access to resources and data, they believe they are getting better at identifying the best potential players.

Overall, this study doesn’t provide the answer to all our talent identification questions, but it does start to provide an understanding of the complexities associated with youth athlete talent identification.

Paper Citation

Larkin, P., Marchant, D., Syder, A., & Farrow, D. (2020). An eye for talent: The recruiters’ role in the Australian Football talent pathway. PloS one, 15(11): https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0241307