How To Consistently Hire A-Players
A startup is best described as a group of people who believe in a plan to build a better future. No matter how ingenious the plan is, having the right people to execute is crucial for your success.
That’s why Steve Jobs was well-known for his obsession with only hiring “A-Players” and considered it the most important task for a CEO. But how do you recognize “A-Players”? and why is it so important to hire them?
“According to studies we’ve done with our clients, the average hiring mistake costs 15x an employee’s base salary in hard costs and productivity loss. Think about it: a single hiring blunder on a $100,000 employee can cost a company $1.5 million or more” — Who by Geoff Smart and Randy Street
To answer these questions, two of the best in the industry; Geoff Smart and Randy Street, developed the A-Method and published it in their book Who, to help you consistently (systematically) hire only A-Players. Here is how you do it.
🏋️ Who is an A-Player?
First of all, you need to clearly define what do you mean when you say “A-Player”. A very concise definition is “Someone who has at least 90% chance of achieving outcomes that only the top 10% of possible candidates could achieve while fitting with the culture of the company”.
This clearly shows why the A-Player of one company in one role can be a B or C-Player in another and brings us to the first step in the A-Method; Developing a Scorecard.
A scorecard is a document that defines for a given role how an A-Player looks like by clearly stating the following
- Mission: Why does this role exist?
- Outcomes: Lists the achievements that have to be reached and not just actions to be done. This excites A-Players and intimidates B&C-Players.
- Competencies: Lists both the competencies needed to achieve the outcomes as well as competencies of the company to ensure cultural fit. For example, if the role needs negotiation skills, do you have a culture of aggressive negotiation or soft negotiation? This changes the profile of the ideal candidate.
🌊 Generating a Flow of A-Players
Now that we have defined what our ideal candidates look like, it is time to find them. According to interviews done by the authors of the book, 77% of the top managers interviewed mentioned referrals from their business and personal networks as one of the top talent sourcing methods they use.
But what can you do if you are just starting your entrepreneurial journey or if you do not have a large network? Here is one of the most powerful tricks to exponentially grow your network of A-Players.
First, you have to understand that you should be constantly sourcing great talent whether you currently have open positions or not. As Steve Jobs famously put it in his guest lecture at MIT in 1992, it always took him around a year to win the best talent over to his companies. So, you never want to wait till you desperately need someone to start sourcing!
Second, you can start now by thinking hard about who do you know that can be classified as an A-Player? Think as broadly as you can; it can be an old classmate, someone you met at a student initiative back at university, or someone you casually met at a party and struck you as brilliant.
Once you have a list of 5–10 people you consider as brilliant, add a 30-minute weekly block in your calendar, where you call one of them for the next 5–10 weeks. You can keep the conversation casual, just tell them that you think they are great at what they are doing and since you are always on the lookout for great talent, you wanted to catch up with them, tell them about what you are doing and get to hear about their career interests and what they are passionate about.
Most people would be incredibly excited at the opportunity to express what they are passionate about and how they would like their career to be! Listen carefully and at the end of the conversation don’t forget to ask them, “Now that you know what I am doing. Who are the most talented people you know that you think would fit in my company?”
Talented people know each other and they would gladly recommend each other. Keep building your list and commit to having at least one call per week.
By the time you have a job opening, you should have had a large talent pool already. The question now is, how do you select the right candidate from all the applicants?
Equipped with your scorecard, you should now perform the following four interviews.
🖥️ The Screening Interview
This should take just about 30 minutes on the phone. Your goal here is to quickly filter out B&C-Players and choose who you want to be spending time with during the next interviews. You should be asking the next four questions:
- What are your career goals?
- What are you really good at professionally?
- What are you not really good at or not interested in doing professionally?
- Who were your last five bosses and how will they rate your performance on a scale from 1–10 when we talk to them?
You are looking for people who talk with passion about topics aligned with the role and not those who just echo everything on your website. You also want candidates who would rate their work consistently above 7.
Finally, if you notice the candidate is not answering truthfully when asked about their weaknesses, you can always tell them, “if you get further in the process I will need you to set up reference calls with former peers, so what do you think they will say about your weaknesses?”
By saying will instead of would, you show your intention to actually perform the reference calls, which will force the candidate to answer more truthfully.
🙋 The Who Interview
Your goal here is to get the person to tell you their story. First, you should help them divide their career into chapters. Each chapter can be a job or a group of jobs that took place in a 3–5 years timeframe.
Then you start walking with them through their career chronologically while trying to find repeated patterns in their path. For each chapter, you should be asking the following questions:
- What were you hired to do?
- What accomplishments are you most proud of?
- What were some low points during that job?
- Who were the people you worked with?
- Why did you leave that job?
Success leaves clues and this is the goal of this interview. You want to see if the candidate throughout their career were always pulled to better positions due to their performance or pushed out due to the lack thereof. Do they tend to outperform expectations? Are they a joy to work with or do they always wreak havoc in their teams?
A-Players tend to talk about outcomes linked to expectations for the job. B&C-Players tend to talk about people and events they enjoyed. So always listen carefully to how they describe their previous experiences.
For a CEO level, this interview can take between 3–5 hours, for an entry-level around 90 minutes. The length of this interview forces you to be very picky in the screening interview and choose only those in whom you see big potential.
🔎 The Focused Interview
Based on the competencies and outcomes of the scorecard, we create multiple focused interviews. So for example, you would create a focused interview on sales and innovation and another focused on building a team and listening to others.
This is to better assess the candidate's different skillsets and should be conducted by different interviewers.
🪞The Reference Interview
For higher managerial positions, it is recommended to conduct 7 reference interviews; 3 past bosses, 2 colleagues or customers, 2 subordinates. In each interview you should ask the following questions:
- In what context did you work with them?
- What were the biggest strengths?
- What were the biggest areas of improvement back then?
- How would you rate their performance from 1–10?
- The person mentioned they struggled with ____ can you tell me more about it?
- Example: “The person said that you might say that he was disorganized. Can you tell me more about that?” This will encourage former peers to open up and speak honestly since the comment is coming from the candidate themselves.
🥂 Seal The Deal
By now you have found the best candidate and you are in love. But how do you make sure that they end up choosing you? Talented people do not need to work for you and they have a lot of options.
Depending on your company’s size and the candidate’s situation there are different things you can offer them. However, there are five main things that talented people usually seek:
- Fit: Being passionate about your company’s mission. People love contributing to a bigger goal, if they are A-Players their time is their biggest asset. Make sure they find your work valuable.
- Family: The candidate’s family has to be convinced about the move to a different place. Try to win them over.
- Freedom: Candidates need their autonomy in the new role.
- Fortune: You should also highlight the financial upside for achieving targets.
- Fun: Describe the work environment and personal relationships candidates will make.
Congratulations 🎉 you are now equipped with a step-by-step method to ensure you hire the best rockstar team for your company!
Originally published at http://omarhedeya.com on January 10, 2022.
