What is Talent?

What are you looking for when you are speaking to candidates?

People often ask me: What are you looking for when you’re speaking to candidates? or What is Talent?

I get these questions repeatedly, so I decided to capture everything in one article. Hopefully, this will provide an exhaustive answer to what I consider top talent.

❗ Disclaimer: This is my perspective. It’s an opinion I am imposing on people, and I do not position it as a universal truth. Take what serves you in your journey. Ignore the rest.

Foundational Skill #1. Self-Awareness

At Caseware (my current organization at the moment of writing), we have an award for key employees: the MVP Award. It’s a small coin we give to our most valuable players — people who have created multi-million dollar value for the organization.

Engraved on the coin are three words:

Hungry, Humble, Smart.

Caseware MVP Coin

This framework comes from Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Ideal Team Player. It represents the kind of individuals we seek: people with high intelligence, high energy, and high integrity. I want to unpack this definition further.

Hungry

What is hunger? Being hungry is about being deeply self-aware of your internal drivers. It’s not about extrinsic motivation — money, titles, or accolades. True hunger comes from within. It’s being driven by a clear sense of vision, mission, and purpose. It’s knowing your core values and what energizes you at work.

At its core, hunger is a self-awareness skill. You know what drives you because you’ve reflected on it, deeply. Combined with high life energy such self-awareness becomes an unstoppable force.

Humble

Humility means knowing exactly what you are — and knowing what you’re not. It’s about being authentic, not pretending to be something else. When you have humility, your ego takes a back seat. You prioritize the work, the team, and the mission over…