How deep do you execute ?

Last week, I interviewed two startup CEOs on how important recruiting is to them. They answered exactly the same:

- ”It is the most crucial process in this company.”
- “Without talents we are nothing.”
- “I put a lot of effort into recruiting.”

Both were really conveying how much they took recruiting seriously. But when I jumped into the details of how they executed it, I saw a massive difference. One CEO was hunting talents on Linkedin for months, pulling his friends’ networks incessantly, chatting up engineers at every conference, proposing them coffees with team members and inviting them to one-on-one dinners at restaurants. The second outsourced prospect hunting to a recruiting firm and invested his time in last stage candidate interviews.
How could two people pronounce the same words and execute at such different levels of details ?

The devil lies in the details. This is why university applications always request examples in your letter of intent when you state a quality about yourself. Anybody can say he stands for x values and cares about y goals. But only concrete actions truly show how serious a person is.

Similar words have different meanings for different people.
Break this language barrier by inspecting execution.

I see too little of those execution checks in people’s interactions, in media interviews, in books written. Most of the time, execution is technical — for some, a synonym of boring — so nobody asks about it. Hearing the vision is always more inspiring and draws more attention. This is why I went on a quest to interview CEOs myself. The interviews I saw online always focused on the ‘why’ but did not say enough on the ‘how’. I was not satisfied. Nobody explained step-by-step how early stage recruiting was executed. It quenched my first to hear it first hand.

Look into how things are exactly done.
Look into the level of detail in your execution.
Is it enough ?