Authors Mike Sarraille and George Randle are military veterans and both are in high positions with EF Overwatch, an executive search and talent advisory firm. Sarraille has extensive experience in Special Operations and Joint Special Operations Command. Randle is also VP of Global Talent Acquisition. Contributing author Dr, Josh Cotton has designed scientifically valid candidate selection practices of the US Navy SEALS and is an expert in talent assessment and employee effectiveness. As a team these men have ‘the talent’ at the highest level to share about employee selection!

The authors open their definitive book on assessing talent with a Note: ‘The Talent War is hard. There is no manual to follow. And there is no such thing as flawless execution in this endless fight. But with a few key principles and strategies, you can win this war and lead your organization to victory. Both of us have dedicated our lives to talent acquisition and talent management in one form or another, and we’ve humbly and often embarrassingly made every mistake along the way. We know most military and business leaders share the same sentiments and same scars. This book is drawn form the many battles we have both won and lost during this war for talent…The Special Operations community has morphed into a world-class case study in talent acquisition and talent management…’ Opening that door onto a new way of consideration makes this new book invaluable to all employers and businesses.

In this revelatory book, the techniques of recognizing and capturing ‘talent’ is placed in the military context – and that works exceptionally well: we discover how the most judiciously selected Special Ops personnel are assessed and selected to those posts that require the highest level of screening and performance. The key ingredient – Talent – ‘It's the hidden asset that never shows up on the balance sheet, despite being the driver for a company's true value. And now, in this hypercompetitive business environment, the war for talent has never been more important, or more complex. Of eight hundred CEOs and six hundred C-suite executives polled in 2019, the overwhelming majority cited the ability to attract and retain top talent as their number one concern.’

Enlightening information and valuable advice for all businesses, this well written book includes poignant photographs to underline the content, making for a fascinating view of how to assess, attract and secure talented people. Grady Harp, December 20

I stumbled across this new book while researching selection and assessment. So synchronicity was at play. It turns out that Mike Sarraille and Jocko Willink served with a good friend of mine whose triple thumbs up “Good To Go” bumped THE TALENT WAR to the top of my massive reading heap.

I read it through in one day.

Yes, it’s that good.

BLUF: I have a long standing interest in specialized selection programs. I’ve been very fortunate over my polymathic career to work with the designers of many high level selection programs. This book is a milestone as it details for the non-military audience the specific processes that produce elite military special operators. The authors do a fantastic job in making that information accessible to the lay audience, business leaders, and human resource professionals.

I was recently asked to consider ways that selection and assessment might be improved, and how a “creativity and out of the box thinking” mindset culture could be fostered within an existing body of highly experienced and combat-hardened special operators.

So finding this book at this time was a stroke of great good luck. This book is an extraordinary resource for anyone examining the issues involved in attracting talent, or looking to export these hard-won, battle-tested concepts of military selection into their world whether it’s business, the arts, or any endeavor that requires high order talent.

Some random takeaways:

Manage your expectations and open your mind. Talent doesn’t always look like what we expect or have been taught to expect. This is a huge insight for managers/leaders — the toughest guy in an organization may be a sweet faced kindly old man with gray in his hair and lines in his face, not the uber-athlete straining at the bit to prove he’s better than everybody else.

Look for character, train for skills. Start with the human and what they are like at their core, rather than what skills they bring to the table. They make an excellent point about the SOF model — no one comes into SOF selection as a SOF operator with the skill set. They learn that in training and with their unit AFTER they’ve demonstrated what KIND of human they are.

A GREAT list of attributes that make up desired character:

Drive

Resiliency

Adaptability

Humility

Integrity

Effective Intelligence

Team-ability

Curiosity

Emotional Strength

One challenge I see upon completing the book is that of educating leadership and key management anywhere, from existing units to business structure, on the long term cost benefit of maintaining a comprehensive selection, assessment, training and feedback structure. It’s expensive in dollars and skilled manpower hours, and is a challenge to this day even in the units that fostered and brought up the leaders who wrote this. Even more of a challenge translating it to a business structure focused on dollars and revenue.

Selection is an expensive program and there’s always the challenge of what to do with the potentially valuable people who don’t make the cut. One friend described himself as a member of the “second most elite unit — DELTA selection wash-outs” — he’d been invited, got to selection, failed, went on to be a superstar elsewhere because he didn’t let the failure break him down.

There really isn’t any good answer to the expense issue other than education, through seminars, books, and lots and lots of case studies tied to the metrics that matter for business: revenue and return on investment. That education should focus on reaching existing leadership to open their minds to the paradigm of finding, motivating and retaining the top talent in their field whatever that might be.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the science of enhanced human performance, as FINDING the right people is just as critical a piece as improving the performance of the people you have.

The Talent War: How Special Operations and Great Organizations Win on Talent by Mike Saraille, George Randle, and Josh Cotton is a solid bit of advice and strategy on how to get the best people in the best positions in order to get the best results from the team for the betterment of the business. The idea behind this work is that the strategies used by the United States Special Forces can be used in most business models in order to find the best talent and leadership so that the business will see the most success in the short and long term. There are several key components to this that are given in great detail in the book, as well as key traits the business should look for in those they are seeking to recruit including drive, integrity, and strength.

When I was younger, I thought that the main way that businesses recruited top talent was to offer top dollar for the positions they had available. In my mind, you would get the best people if you offered the best money. I still think that is part of it, but what a business stands for and represents also plays a big roll in recruiting. In addition, training, experience, and opportunity also go into getting top talent to find interest in your organization. I think that anyone interested in improving their business will enjoy this read and find something they can take away from it. Also, anyone who is looking to get into a better position or move from one business to another would benefit from this so they can understand what it is they need to do to get a business to see their true potential.

Talent may not be something you think about quite often, but if you own your own business or are in charge of hiring people from time to time, talent is something that you need to be able to recognize in other people. When you are able to find employees or a team with the talent and skills that you need to get something accomplished, this can be a winning combination. This book talks about this aspect of business and explains how elite military units approach the idea of talent and how they manage it. The best thing about the book is that the information is broken down into small pieces. There are small sections/paragraphs, boxes around the important stuff, charts, and pictures. It isn’t just a flat text that is shoving info down your throat. This makes it easier to understand and read through. Check it out if you are a manager or boss.

The Talent War: How Special Operations and Great Organizations Win on Talent by Mike Sarraille, George Randle, and Josh Cotton breaks down how to attract and retain talent to your organization. In a skillful and thoughtful manner, the authors relay their personal take on recruiting the best talent, a lot of it with a military slant and mindset. The US Special Operations community is certainly an expert on this front, espousing their belief that talent plus leadership equals victory. After all, without recruiting the talent that you need, your organization or business will flounder and never reach its full potential. This is a must-read in one of the most complex business atmospheres ever, talent acquisition is incredibly important, and this book clearly shows you how it should be done. No nonsense, real-world experiences give this book a significant edge over other business books. If you are a decision-maker in your company, this is a must-read. Highly recommend.

Well organized, well written, quick read. I have the Kindle edition. My initial concern was that the book would focus too much on Special Ops without clear application to civilian organizations. The authors fairly quickly helped me overcome that concern. The book observes that character and talent cannot be severed; they are irrevocably joined. Character will grow and overcome obstacles when holding prestigious credentials may not do so.

The authors guide hiring efforts, suggest techniques for staffing hiring groups and offer ways to appropriately examine prospective hires. They also suggest approaches to avoid bias in the hiring process.

But hiring is only the first phase of the employment process. Training must follow and it really must continue for the employee to reach full potential.

The book examines the effects of leadership - both good and bad. Bad leadership expresses itself in high turnover and low productivity. Effective leadership results in productive teams. The possibility of being killed keeps the value of effective leadership more front of mind in special ops, but losing one's job has a lesser, but still significant, effect on the civilian mind.

Implementing even some of the book's recommendations will enhance your civilian organizations' capabilities. I encourage you to read the book.

As a Business owner, or even just a Recruiter, you need to know how to attract, train and most importantly retain the top talent for your field. In an increasingly competitive world, the right talent c an be hard to come by. The three authors take a look at one of the most successful operations in attracting, training and retaining top talent: The US Special Forces. For them, quality over Quantity has always held true and by looking at their recruitment practices, we can glean a lot of beneficial information for our own companies.

I thought this was an excellent book. I have served as a recruiter in small and large businesses and I agree that attracting the right talent for each position is very hard to do. The tips given on how to even approach this from the beginning were very enlightening and helpful. I am sure that I will be able to implement them in my next role.

I picked up The Talent War because I know one of the authors, (Mike Sarraille) and am a fan of his work in the private sector, helping companies understand the value of special operations professionals.

Once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down. This book, more than any I have read before, does an outstanding job of identifying how the U.S. Special Operations community has managed talent to become the most elite fighting force in the world, and how these same principles can be applied in the private sector to drive elite company performance.

One of the most effective aspects of this book is that it is written in a way that literally provides a step-by-step guide on how an organization could adopt these principles, methods, and processes and apply them to create a world-class Talent Acquisition & Management program, and to develop a Talent Mindset.

The steps to develop a Talent Mindset as the authors have laid them out are not easy. And, in most cases, any self-aware business leader who reads this will walk away overwhelmed with the work required to get there, but having the roadmap that The Talent War provides is an incredible first step!

Independently on whether you are the HR partner, the talent manager, people leader or line manager, when you deal with people, their aspirations, ambitions and unique set of qualities, this book is a must-read for you.

Must read if you run a team or you need to build one. For recruiters specifically: THIS. IS. THE. BOOK. Stop hiring simply on experience and hard skills. Instead, choose character and the stuff you can't teach. This book explains how.

While the book is good, there are consistent proofreading and orientation issues with the formatting. Some of the chapters could've been explained a lot more briefly.

The books explains the importance to focus on employees character (ideals, phylosophy, etic code) if you really want to have a solid team at your enterprise... Excellent!!! Thank you very much for share your valuable experience...

Very useful even if you are in a small company but want to make the selection process more robust. Would definitely recommend.