EP332: 4 Hacks to Improve Your Odds of Success - Kyle Austin Young, Writer & Strategy ConsultantEP332: 4 Hacks to Improve Your Odds of Success - Kyle Austin Young, Writer & Strategy Consultant
The Recruiter's Recruitment Podcast
Lysha Holmes talks with Kyle Austin Young about treating success as a numbers game, from mapping risks to improving the odds. The conversation applies this framework directly to recruitment, hiring choices and career decisions in the industry.
38:02•13 Jul 2026
Stacking the Odds: Kyle Austin Young on Smarter Success and Sharper Hiring
Episode Overview
- Map every goal into a success diagram that shows what must go right and what could go wrong.
- Avoid mentally averaging confidence across steps; multiply the probabilities to see your real odds.
- Use creativity to remove or reduce specific risks, thereby increasing the overall chance of success.
- Anchor hiring decisions in clear organisational goals and assess candidates by how they impact key risks.
- Sequence your goals so higher-probability wins make harder ambitions more achievable later.
“What is the goal? What’s everything that has to go right to achieve that goal?”
What makes a success story feel achievable rather than mysterious? This chat between host Lysha Holmes and strategy consultant and writer Kyle Austin Young gets straight into that question for recruiters, founders and hiring managers. Kyle shares how two unexpected layoffs from senior roles pushed him into fractional work and, eventually, a decade-long consulting career. Along the way he noticed a pattern: “Every goal that you’re pursuing has two hidden numbers attached to it.
There’s your probability of success and your probability of failure.” From there, his “numbers game” approach – now captured in his book *Success Is a Numbers Game: Achieve Bigger Goals by Changing the Odds* – was born. You’ll hear Kyle break down his idea of a “success diagram”: mapping everything that has to go right for a goal, then spotting where things might go wrong.
His marathon training example makes the maths feel surprisingly simple, and slightly uncomfortable – those 70% sure steps can still add up to a predicted failure. The useful bit is what comes next: using creativity to remove or reduce the risks so the odds of success climb. For the recruitment audience, the conversation really hits home when Kyle turns this into a hiring tool.
Instead of vague wishes like “good communicator” or “punctual”, he suggests starting with the organisational goal, listing what must go right to achieve it, and then asking of each candidate: which risks do they reduce, and which might they increase? He also shares four paths to success – luck, playing the odds, choosing higher-probability goals in a smart order, and what he calls “probability hacking”.
Between his story of landing a department director role at 21 with a beard, spiral-bound turnaround plan and shared reading list, there’s plenty of practical food for thought. If you’re serious about improving your hiring decisions or your own career moves, are you ready to stop hoping for the best and start changing your odds?
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