What 48 national squads, months of preparation, and decades of sports science can teach every organisation about building a team that truly performs.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off this week – the first edition to feature 48 teams, spread across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It is the largest football tournament in history. As with every previous World Cup, the team that lifts the trophy will almost certainly not be the one with the most individually talented players on its roster.

Despite having Zinedine Zidane, France did not win in 2002. Despite having Cristiano Ronaldo, Portugal did not win in 2016. Argentina had to wait until 2022—forty years after their previous title – before the pieces around Messi finally came together. Individual brilliance is necessary but not sufficient. The difference between a squad of stars and a high-performance team is something deeper, and organisations outside football have struggled to build it for decades. 

So what do national teams actually do in the months before a World Cup to create something that works? And what does it look like when it does?

What a national team actually has to build

Each team at this World Cup can name up to 26 players, including three goalkeepers. Those 26 players come from different clubs, different leagues, sometimes different countries, different cultures, different playing styles, and different conceptions of their own roles. They have spent the season competing against each other. They have approximately two weeks together before the first match.

The challenge is not talent; the challenge is cohesion – building, in a compressed timeframe, the shared understanding, trust, and role clarity that club teams develop over months and years.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup will test not only teams’ tactical systems and physical preparation but also the maturity of their science ecosystems – with interdisciplinary collaboration evident from squad selection to player load management across up to eight matches. The environmental conditions – distances between cities, climate, travel schedules – add pressure for which no club season prepares players. Success, researchers note, depends on how effectively players transform uncertainty into opportunity, and variability into a source of resilience and creativity on the pitch.

That is a sentence that applies equally well in a boardroom.

The science of squad selection – it is not just about the best players

Watch closely when a national coach names their squad and you will notice something: the best player in a given position does not always make the cut. Form matters. Fitness matters. But so does something harder to quantify – how a player fits into the specific dynamic the coach is trying to build.

Brazil, for example, are trying to build a team around the speed, technique, and intelligent movement of their attacking players – not a traditional striker – supported by a strong midfield duo driven by Casemiro’s leadership.

That is not just a tactical choice; it is a team design decision: which combination of roles, personalities, and working styles produces the best collective output?

The use of positive language is crucial, both internally and aloud. While individual players need to develop internal skills to recover from setbacks and avoid spiralling, teammates should also offer encouragement in these moments. The psychological infrastructure of a team – how members communicate under pressure, respond to setbacks, and distribute leadership – is as carefully designed as the tactical formation.

What the preparation actually looks like

The months before a World Cup are not just about physical preparation; they are about team construction. Here is what the best national programmes do – and how this maps onto an organisational context:

The numbers that make this a business conversation

These are not football statistics; they are from Project Management Institute research and Fierce Inc. workplace studies. The dynamics that determine whether a national team wins a World Cup are structurally identical to those that determine whether a product team ships on time, whether a sales team meets its targets, or whether a leadership team survives a reorganisation.

The difference is that football coaches take these dynamics seriously enough to measure, design for, and invest in them before the tournament begins. Most organisations wait until something breaks.

What makes a team a team – the six roles

In football, every position on the pitch serves a distinct function – and no team wins with eleven strikers. The same logic applies in organisations. Research behind ZortifyTeam identifies six fundamental work roles that every high-performing team needs:

Every great football squad has players who naturally fill each of these roles – the creative midfielder, the defensive anchor, the vocal organiser, the quiet influencer. When a coach selects their squad, they are not simply choosing the best twenty-six players. They are designing a system of complementary roles.

Most organisations assemble teams by function and seniority. The question of whether the combination of personalities and working styles actually produces collective intelligence – or collective friction – is rarely asked until it becomes evident in the results.

What this World Cup will actually test

The 2026 World Cup’s vast distances between cities and increased number of knockout games will create conditions teams have never encountered before. The teams that navigate this best will not necessarily be the most talented. They will be the most cohesive – those who have built trust, role clarity, and collective resilience to perform well under conditions they did not fully anticipate.

That is the test. And it is the same test your organisation faces every quarter.

The best team does not win. The best-built team does.

ZORTIFYTEAM

Discover which roles your team is missing

ZortifyTeam maps the six fundamental work roles across your team – showing you where you have complementarity, where you have gaps, and what to do about it.

Prof. Dr. Florian Feltes

Prof. Dr. Florian Feltes is co-founder and co-CEO of zortify and a forerunner in AI-supported HR innovation. Together with his team, he develops intelligent personality diagnostics and helps companies identify the perfect candidates—without expensive assessments and without bias. His vision: a world in which every company can effortlessly form high-performance teams and create work environments that allow human potential to flourish.

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Amazon Connect Talent has just launched. It can conduct AI voice interviews around the clock, score every candidate, and provide recruiters with a dashboard of results. Here is what it actually means for HR – and what it gets dangerously wrong.

Amazon does not enter markets quietly. When AWS announced Connect Talent in April 2026—an agentic AI platform that conducts structured voice interviews, scores candidates, and delivers hiring recommendations without human involvement – it sent a clear signal: AI is no longer merely assisting recruiters; it is replacing parts of the process entirely.

The headlines were predictably enthusiastic. The product is technically impressive. However, before HR leaders rush to adopt it, there are questions worth asking – about what it actually measures, what it overlooks, whether it is legal to use in Europe, and whether Amazon is truly the hiring role model anyone wants to follow.

What Amazon Connect Talent actually does

Amazon Connect Talent uses AI agents to conduct structured voice interviews, administer science-backed assessments, and score candidates consistently, allowing recruiters to focus on strategic decisions. Candidates can interview 24/7 from any device. The platform includes adaptive questioning, a mobile-first candidate portal, ATS integrations, and a recruiter dashboard with transcripts and evaluations.

Starting with an existing job description, AI agents analyse the role requirements and generate a complete interview plan – identifying key competencies, creating structured questions, and building evaluation criteria. Once approved, the system automatically invites candidates to interview at their convenience.

Informed by decades of Amazon’s hiring science, Amazon Connect Talent provides transparency for every assessment, interview, and candidate score, enabling recruiters to retain control over final hiring decisions. During the preview, the platform supports English, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, and Spanish.

On paper, it sounds compelling, particularly for high-volume hiring environments. AWS is explicit that the target is high-volume hiring: seasonal retail, logistics, healthcare staffing, and hospitality. Amazon hired approximately 250,000 seasonal workers in 2025. The product is, in some sense, Amazon packaging its own peak-season playbook.

What it means for HR

Amazon’s new system is designed to conduct voice interviews, assess responses, and produce hiring recommendations independently, rather than merely assisting with CV screening or interview scheduling as traditional recruiting software does. AI is no longer just acting as a productivity assistant; it is increasingly an operational layer that can run workflows, integrate decisions, and manage candidate interactions on an ongoing basis.

For talent acquisition leaders managing hundreds of open roles, the efficiency argument is compelling. Scheduling alone consumes enormous recruiter bandwidth. A system that conducts interviews around the clock, reduces time-to-hire, and delivers consistent scoring across all candidates addresses genuine pain points.

However, efficiency is not the same as quality. Speed is not the same as fit. The most expensive hiring mistake is not the slow hire – it is the fast hire who leaves after six months.

Bersin’s framing is telling: the use case is high-volume, high-turnover hiring. This raises a fundamental question for white-collar HR leaders – is that the problem you are trying to solve?

The dangers nobody is discussing

Is it even legal in Europe?

This is where the conversation becomes critical for any European HR leader considering Connect Talent.

The EU AI Act’s most critical compliance deadline for most enterprises is 2 December, 2027 (originally, on August 2, 2026), when requirements for Annex III high-risk AI systems become enforceable. This includes AI used in employment, credit decisions, education, and law enforcement contexts.

The regulation’s extra-territorial reach mirrors the GDPR. Any organisation, regardless of location, must comply if its AI systems are used within the EU or produce outputs that affect EU residents. A US-based company using AI for hiring that serves European customers falls within scope, even if the AI models run on servers outside Europe.

What does this mean in practice? Under the EU AI Act, AI systems used for employment screening are classified as high-risk. They require human oversight mechanisms, transparent documentation, bias auditing, explainability of outputs, and a Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment before deployment.

Non-compliance exposes both the provider and the deploying organisation to administrative fines of up to €35 million or 7% of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher.

Amazon signed the GPAI Code of Practice in August 2025, alongside Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. This is a transparency commitment for general-purpose AI models. It is not equivalent to the EU AI Act conformity assessment required for a high-risk employment screening system. These are distinct obligations, and Connect Talent currently offers no published conformity documentation for European deployment.

Additionally, Amazon Connect Talent includes built-in audit logging and documentation capabilities, which is a start. However, audit logging and EU AI Act compliance are not synonymous. Works councils in Germany, employee representative bodies in France, and data protection authorities across the DACH region will have direct jurisdiction over whether and how this tool can be deployed.

In summary, Connect Talent is currently in preview, built primarily for the US market, and carries significant legal uncertainty for European deployment.

Is this really something we want?

Beyond the legal question lies a question of values, and it is worth considering that seriously.

A hiring process reflects on an organisation. For most people, the candidate experience is their first genuine encounter with your company’s culture. A fully automated voice interview, conducted by AI at 11 pm with no human present, sends a clear message. Whether that message aligns with what your employer brand intends to communicate is a question only you can answer.

For high-volume commodity hiring, the trade-off may be acceptable. For white-collar roles, leadership positions, or teams where culture fit and personality alignment determine whether someone stays and thrives, automating the human element out of the first conversation is a choice with consequences.

The best outcome in hiring is not a faster decision, but a better one.

Why Zortify is a better choice for European HR teams

The fundamental difference is not speed or scale, but what is measured and what that measurement actually predicts.

Amazon Connect Talent can tell you, more quickly and consistently, how a candidate performs in a structured competency interview. That is useful. However, it cannot tell you whether that person has the self-efficacy to handle ten rejections in a row, the resilience to recover from a setback, the conscientiousness to follow regulatory requirements without supervision, or the risk profile that could make them a liability in a leadership role.

These are the decisions that determine whether your hires stay, grow, and contribute, or leave within twelve months and cost you 200% of their annual salary to replace.

Zortify was created to address exactly this challenge – not from a generic playbook, but from eight years of certified AI and psychometric research. It is designed for the European regulatory environment and validated specifically for roles where personality fit makes the difference between a good hire and an expensive mistake.

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Prof. Dr. Florian Feltes is co-founder and co-CEO of zortify and a forerunner in AI-supported HR innovation. Together with his team, he develops intelligent personality diagnostics and helps companies identify the perfect candidates—without expensive assessments and without bias. His vision: a world in which every company can effortlessly form high-performance teams and create work environments that allow human potential to flourish.

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We have been hiring salespeople incorrectly for decades. Not because we lack talent, but because we have been searching for the wrong qualities.

Imagine the salesperson you would hire tomorrow. You probably already have an image in mind: confident, charismatic, outgoing, quick-witted. Someone who lights up a room and turns strangers into customers before the coffee goes cold.

That image is costing companies millions every year.

The “born salesperson” is one of the most persistent – and most expensive – myths in hiring. It influences who gets shortlisted, who receives the offer, and who leaves within six months. Because the myth feels so intuitive, it is rarely questioned.

Research has been challenging it for over thirty years. It is time the hiring process caught up.

The myth has a name – and a weak correlation

Ask most sales managers what makes a great salesperson, and extraversion is mentioned within the first thirty seconds. The gregarious, people-oriented personality. High energy. Natural conversationalist. Loves being around others.

The science presents a more complex picture. Research on the Five Factor Model of personality and sales performance has found that conscientiousness and openness are positively related to sales outcomes, while extraversion shows no statistically significant relationship. Meta-analytic evidence, spanning decades and hundreds of studies, consistently places extraversion’s predictive value for sales performance at around rho = 0.15. That is modest at best.

To put this in context: this is roughly half the predictive power of conscientiousness, and less than half the predictive power of self-efficacy. The person you overlook because they seemed too quiet in the interview may well be the one who outperforms everyone in six months.

So if it is not extraversion, what actually predicts sales success?

Decades of research – including Zortify’s own validation study —consistently point to five dimensions. None of these are visible in a CV. Most are invisible in a standard interview. All are measurable.

The cost of getting this wrong

This is not an abstract academic debate. Every time a company hires on gut feeling and the wrong profile, the financial consequences are immediate and compounding.

The first-year attrition rate in insurance and financial services structural sales is among the highest of any sector. Research consistently shows that performance and well-being are best ensured when sales personnel can work with their strengths rather than their weaknesses – which means identifying those strengths before hiring, not six months later.

Companies that implement structured, personality-based selection processes consistently reduce early turnover by 25 to 40 percent. Not by hiring better people, but by making better decisions about the people they already have in front of them.

Three traits that appear to be strengths – but are not

Beyond the five positive dimensions, research identifies three behavioural risk factors that require specific attention in sales hiring, particularly in regulated industries. These are dangerous precisely because they can appear to be strengths in an interview.

High narcissism can present as charisma and drive. Manipulative tendencies can resemble persuasiveness. Impulsivity can seem like decisiveness. In the short term, these traits may produce results. In the longer term, they generate customer complaints, regulatory exposure, and toxic team dynamics – the kind that quietly erode culture and cost far more than any individual mis-hire.

Standard unstructured interviews are almost entirely blind to these risks. The Five Factor Model provides important insights into personality traits that work well within sales environments, but capturing the full picture requires looking beyond surface behaviour into the underlying personality structure.

So, does the sales gene exist?

Not in the way we imagine. There is no single trait, no charisma factor, no genetic lottery ticket that determines whether someone will succeed in sales. What does exist is a measurable personality profile – five dimensions that consistently differentiate top performers from early quitters, across industries, cultures, and thirty years of peer-reviewed research.

The good news is that three of these five dimensions are trainable. Self-efficacy, optimism, and resilience can all be developed through targeted interventions, with effect sizes (d = 0.50–0.60) representing some of the highest returns on investment of any HR development measure.

The implication is clear: companies that measure these dimensions at the point of hiring make better selection decisions. Companies that develop them after hiring retain better employees. Companies that do both stop treating turnover as inevitable and start treating it as the preventable outcome it actually is.

Sources

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Das Vertriebs-Gen

The full research behind the five dimensions – with practical recommendations for selection and development. Available in German.

Prof. Dr. Florian Feltes

Prof. Dr. Florian Feltes is co-founder and co-CEO of zortify and a forerunner in AI-supported HR innovation. Together with his team, he develops intelligent personality diagnostics and helps companies identify the perfect candidates—without expensive assessments and without bias. His vision: a world in which every company can effortlessly form high-performance teams and create work environments that allow human potential to flourish.

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