Winners Attract Winners

I agree to this statment for the most part but first you have to recognize the winner from the non-winner and hope you have made the right decision.

Wal-Mart is a company that looks for “niceness” in their employees during interviews; wonder if they ever considered that the person’s niceness was only a façade in the end? So how long does it take before a company realizes that the employees with the “winning” attitude were only putting on a front? I ask this question because many companies believe in the motto “winners attract winners.”
I used to work for a company and their idea of winning talent was being college educated; during the time I was there they brought in one college graduate, then this persons friends followed. Out of this group of 6 that walked thru the door, all of them ran around in the same crowd, graduated from the same college, and lived in the same apartment complex, yet they were completely different in their work ethic. So I question the method of winners attracting winners.

I also believe you can have too many of the same type of person working in the same environment. When too many friends are hired to work along side each other, the work environment is more like high school than business. Therefore I question the motives of some companies only hiring from referrals and word-of-mouth.
In the links below I have included some companies that use this as part of their recruiting technique.

http://www.laneav.com/aboutlane/about.asp

http://www.hrpao.org/NR/rdonlyres/64F5476B-A350-4F56-8741-EBA7DF871F05/0/HRPAOcdnbusiness.pdf