How to attract and recruit A players into your organisation.

Brad Smart is the author of the book Topgrading https://www.topgrading.com/ and a thought leader on how you attract, recruit and retain top talent into your organisation. His insights below are from a recent Blog he posted for the Gazelles Growth Institute and contain some great lessons for recruiting top talent and A players.

Whether you own a boutique company, run a huge conglomerate, or manage a department, hiring issues are probably not uncommon in your world. Most managers mis-hire at least three people before they land their high performing A-Player! Each mis-hire can prove to be costly not just in monetary terms but also in wasted time and effort.

You probably want to spend more time helping your A-Players achieve even more, but chronic low performers are taking up too much of your time and your high performers’ time, dragging down your entire organisation.

Trying to coach the low performers rarely works — other than to create more frustration. Most managers live with 25% high performers (A-Players), about 50% “adequate” performers (B-Players), and 25% poor performers (C-Players).

So despite your best efforts in hiring, how does this still happen?

• Recruiters are not presenting quality candidates.
• Almost 50% of resumes contain lies — C-Players hype their resumes to look like A-Players.
• Your competency (“behavioral”) interviews are not very revealing.
• Reference checks are generally worthless.

How can you consistently get to the A-Players? Topgrade!

 Topgrading In A Nutshell

I started Topgrading Inc. because I was appalled at the poor hiring results of almost all companies. Most companies rely on ineffective hiring methods — the use of personality tests and behavioral interviews, both of which are easily faked. They do not address the 3 biggest reason for poor hires: dishonesty, unrevealing interviews, and poor verification (worthless reference checks).

Topgrading solves all these problems:

1. Letting candidates know THEY have to arrange reference calls with former bosses, a simple but effective truth serum built into our methodology, assures honesty. Low performers just drop out, knowing they can’t get bosses to talk with you.
2. A thorough chronological Topgrading Interview covering every job is extremely revealing, in part because candidates know they will arrange reference calls with bosses.
3. Reference calls (arranged by the candidate), to verify that everything the candidate said was true are conducted. This is the very best form of verification imaginable.

In short: Topgrading delivers honesty, the most revealing interviews, and solid verification — thus helping you hire A-Players 90% of the time.

What’s An A-Player

The term A-Player has been tossed around a lot and causes a lot of confusion. I’ve broken down three of the most useful definitions for you:

An A-Player Is A High Performer:

Most managers can relate to the term “High Performers” without much explanation, however bear in mind that their definition of a high performer might be a lot higher (or lower) than yours. 

Just a quick note though: many companies think that A-Player refers to someone highly promotable. Topgrading defines A1s as promotable 2 levels, A2s promotable 1 level, and A3s not promotable.

A-Player Is Rated An Excellent Or Very Good Performer

How do we know this? Our methodology has a “truth serum” built in. Candidates for hire are asked to guess how every boss would rate their overall performance on a scale of:

• Excellent
• Very Good
• Good
• Fair
• Poor

Across hundreds of companies and several decades, we’ve learned that A-Players consistently get rated as “Excellent” or “Very Good” by their previous bosses. Being rated “Good”, is not enough.

An A-Player Is In The Top 10% Of Talent

If you are a company hiring dozens or even hundreds of people for a job like Store Manager, then this is a practical definition for your company: Someone in the top 10% of talent available for any job, at a given salary level.

What Are A-Player Competencies?

Topgrading Interviews reveal all the important competencies for the job. 

A-Players Tend To Be:

• Smart, intellectual and business savvy
• Driven to succeed; passionate about success
• Trustworthy
• Consistent high performers
• Adaptable to adjust to many different personalities
• Surround themselves with high performers
• Very hard workers
• Resourceful; overcome obstacles
• Effective leaders
• Down-to-earth, well-grounded, self-aware, humble

We’ve analyzed over 20,000 reports following Topgrading Interviews of managerial candidates, and one competency stands out as the most important, the uber-competency: RESOURCEFULNESS

A Players have resourcefulness in spades. They are resilient and don’t give up, and when challenged by opportunities or seemingly hopeless setbacks, they look for ways to overcome.

A Player CEOs show resourcefulness in all aspects of their job. A Player stockers in grocery stores constantly tell their department managers their ideas for stocking more efficiently and for serving customers better. Anyone mediocre in resourcefulness is just doing the basic job and taking a paycheck.

How To Attract Your A Players

In order to find your A Players, you’ll need to have at least 30-50 candidates to pick from. So here are a few methods to recruit this number of candidates. 

1. Recruit from your network of A Players. A Players usually know other A Players. Your company should be offering terrific monetary and appreciation awards for A Players who refer A Players.
2. Ensure your company LinkedIn profile is 100% up-to-date and advertise open positions on LinkedIn.
3. Use Social Recruiting, notably Linkedin, but to a lesser degree (and only for low level jobs) Twitter and Facebook.
4. Make the Careers section of your corporate website exciting and attractive. If you’ve received honours such as being listed among the “Best Companies to Work For” in your area, brag about it.
5. Advertise on major and/or industry specific job boards; Indeed and ZipRecruiter aggregate job boards and are the leaders. You will be sure to receive many resumes from them, so use the Topgrading Snapshot to narrow these down to the resumes that are most likely to be A-Players.
6. For high-level positions, engage an executive search firm, but require it to use Topgrading methods; its reports should show failures, not just successes, and what bosses will say are candidates’ weaker points, not just strengths.

This article was posted as a Blog on the Growth Institute website https://www.growthinstitute.com/ and with many thanks for bringing such powerful insights on Topgrading and recruiting A players to our attention.

Neale Lewis is a Certified Gazelles Coach and Scaling Up expert. www.nealelewis.com