What Cricket Selection Meetings Taught Me About Hiring

It’s not just the stats—it’s the fit and future potential.

Selection meetings force people to balance current form, potential and the needs of the wider side. Hiring should do the same, rather than reducing a person's future contribution to how confidently they answer familiar questions in an unfamiliar room.

Cricket leaves plenty of time to think between moments of action, which makes its lessons difficult to avoid. Partnerships, patience and choosing the right ball all have obvious equivalents in team work.

This matters because small choices repeat. What feels harmless once can quietly become the normal way of working.

The useful bit is the rhythm

Sport is useful here because it makes the invisible parts of progress visible. Form changes, confidence moves around, and the result rarely tells the whole story.

I try to notice the conditions before judging the outcome. Was the task genuinely difficult? Did the team have enough preparation? Was the decision sensible even though it did not work this time? That is a fairer review than treating every miss as a character flaw.

A poor result can contain a good decision, and a good result can hide a poor one.

The point is not to turn software into a sporting metaphor at every opportunity. It is to remember that steady practice, honest feedback and good partnerships usually beat a dramatic intervention.

That is not a dramatic conclusion, but useful work is often built from undramatic conclusions applied consistently.