The Goonies are the Greatest Human Resources Team Ever Assembled

Let's make one thing about The Goonies absolutely clear. Those dumb adolescents would never have gotten One Eyed Willie's secret treasure (a phrase we still can't believe was snuck past the 1980s MPAA) if they hadn't “hired” some outside help. Brand, Andy, and Sloth essentially avert the grisly deaths of four young Oregonian teens (is “spoiler alert” required after this many decades?). Without the three of them, The Goonies becomes a short film about how the FBI found the mangled bodies of four unidentifiable kids while hot on the trail of a notorious crime family as grieving parents lose all their land and homes to an affluent country club. Not the makings of a cult classic.

To his young brother and his friends, Brand is a jaded, unproductive adult, siphoning goods and services from the community. He contributes very little, satisfying himself with frequent workouts, presumable tax evasion, and relying on his neighbors for transportation. It's fair to say he cares for the well-being of his brother, but that's only after he gets chewed out by his mom for letting a bunch of pre-teens outsmart and overpower him.

Empty threats Brand. You've already proven you're physically powerless to affect these children.

But if you think any of those pencil legged dweebs were going to be able to kick through the false-bottomed fireplace in the basement of that summer restaurant/outlaw hideaway, you're dead wrong…just like the federal agent in the hideaway freezer. Brand's dozens of hours of meathead workouts gave him the skills necessary to see a solid floor and decide to go through it.

If you're going out looking for a new hire or an outsourcing firm, do it like the Goonies.

They evaluate you based on what you tangibly contribute to the group. Brand got himself an internship kicking through the bottom of the fireplace and because he succeeded, he was brought into the group.

Now for Andy. She's conventionally attractive, popular, and not poor. We first meet her in the car with Reagan-era bully #346, the son of the man who's trying to demolish the neighborhood. Based solely on these characteristics, if the Goonies' HR department had a round table on potential job candidates, Andy doesn't even get her resume printed out.

But she hasn't been given the opportunity to prove herself yet. When she finally does, she smacks the visor-wearing jock across the face, busts out unexpected piano knowledge, and plays the group’s way into a kickass waterslide. The Goonies took a chance on her by allowing her to stick around and she came through in the clutch, the exact way you'd hope one of your riskier hires would.

Yet, these two can't hold a candle of any size to the ultimate outside hire, Sloth.

The one on the right.

Give that guy a mid-tier candy bar and he's more loyal than a Labrador retriever who's fed T-bone steaks and gets two hours of constant ear scratches every night. He's more effective than using a blowtorch to start a campfire.

Here's a quick rundown of what Sloth does to enable the Goonies' success throughout the movie, despite only being in roughly half of it: survives being locked in a basement by his mother with only 80s television (and not the good parts) to entertain himself, yanks his own iron chains out of a solid stone wall for a candy bar, shares the candy bar, singlehandedly shoulder presses the hydro-infrastructure of a small city, Douglas Fairbanks's his way down an 18th century pirate sail, literally swings to the rescue for people he's never met, beats the snot out of his criminal family members, strings them up for the FBI, and finds a more loving, more accepting family where he'll never be deprived of Baby Ruths.

He's the poster child for hard work and perseverance. He basically found a Goonies apprenticeship with Chunk and achieves beyond anyone's wildest dreams, despite having a resume that would essentially read, "trapped in basement until 35, no college education."

And if you think this post is just us blowing smoke, know that, individually, the members of our marketing team didn't make much traditional sense to hire. Few of us studied anything directly related to business or marketing, and our resumes only qualified us for specific openings in the company. But as we grew more comfortable here, our responsibilities grew to fit our unadvertised strengths and in turn, we grew the company.

Someone hired for content writing might end up doing most of the graphic design. Someone who taught high school could end up launching a brand new facet of the company. The department might look like a rag tag group on paper, but get everyone together, and you end up with a talented, creative team who does consistent, good work for loyal clientele.

Hire and outsource based on what someone could actually bring to the team and the gaps in your existing infrastructure, not what their paperwork brags about.

If you do, you're guaranteed to build a team full of hidden talents who can come at a problem from angles that would never occur to someone who was strictly trained in "acceptable business practices." The Goonies would have been a far different, more boring movie if the kids were all boilerplate copies of each other. The success of their mission is brought about by their ability to bounce mismatched talents and skills off each other, not because they got an online treasure hunting certification.