Who: The A Method for Hiring

Metadata

• Title: Who: The A Method for Hiring
• Author: Geoff Smart and Randy Street
• Book URL: https://amazon.com/dp/B001EL6RWY?tag=malvaonlin-20
• Open in Kindle: kindle://book/?action=open&asin=B001EL6RWY
• Last Updated on: Sunday, March 10, 2019

Highlights & Notes

The most important decisions that businesspeople make are not what decisions, but who decisions. —JIM COLLINS, AUTHOR OF GOOD TO GREAT

• listo para el taller de manana!

What refers to the strategies you choose, the products and services you sell, and the processes you use.

Who refers to the people you put in place to make the what decisions. Who is running your sales force? Who is assembling your product? Who is occupying the corner office? Who is where the magic begins, or where the problems start.

Ultimately, who failures infect every aspect of our professional and personal lives.

“Your success as a manager is simply the result of how good you are at hiring the people around you.”

Who mistakes happen when managers: • Are unclear about what is needed in a job • Have a weak flow of candidates • Do not trust their ability to pick out the right candidate from a group of similar-looking candidates • Lose candidates they really want to join their team

These who mistakes are pricey. According to studies we’ve done with our clients, the average hiring mistake costs fifteen times an employee’s base salary in hard costs and productivity loss.

Peter Drucker and other management gurus have long estimated that the hiring success rate of managers is a dismal 50 percent.

What most managers do not know is that who problems are also preventable.

Decide to make better who decisions, and you will enjoy your career more, make more money, and have more time for the relationships that matter most.

“One of the hardest challenges is to hire people from outside the company. One of the basic failures in the hiring process is this: What is a resume? It is a record of a person’s career with all of the accomplishments embellished and all the failures removed.”

“Otherwise smart people struggle to hire strangers. People unfamiliar with great hiring methods consider the process a mysterious black art.”

knowledge and ability to do the job are not the same thing.

Suitors are more concerned with impressing candidates than assessing their capabilities.

At the bottom line, all these voodoo hiring methods share an assumption that it’s easy to assess a person. Just find the right gimmicks, pop the right quiz, and trust the scattered chicken bones to point the way, and you’re certain to have great hiring outcomes. Beyond that, we’re all prone to certain cognitive traps. We want to make quick decisions to get on with things. We like to see people as fundamentally truthful. We wish that it were so, but one of the painful truths of hiring is this: it is hard to see people for who they really are.

What is an A Player? For one thing, he or she is not just a superstar. Think of an A Player as the right superstar, a talented person who can do the job you need done, while fitting in with the culture of your company. We define an A Player this way: a candidate who has at least a 90 percent chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only the top 10 percent of possible candidates could achieve.

You want to be great, and A Players have a 90 percent chance of accomplishing what only 10 percent of possible hires could accomplish.

• Scorecard. The scorecard is a document that describes exactly what you want a person to accomplish in a role. It is not a job description, but rather a set of outcomes and competencies that define a job done well. By defining A performance for a role, the scorecard gives you a clear picture of what the person you seek needs to be able to accomplish.

Source. Finding great people is getting harder, but it is not impossible. Systematic sourcing before you have slots to fill ensures you have high-quality candidates waiting when you need them.

• Select. Selecting talent in the A Method involves a series of structured interviews that allow you to gather the relevant facts about a person so you can rate your scorecard and make an informed hiring decision. These structured interviews break the voodoo hiring spell.

Sell. Once you identify people you want on your team through selection, you need to persuade them to join. Selling the right way ensures you avoid the biggest pitfalls that cause the very people you want the most to take their talents elsewhere. It also protects you from the biggest heartbreak of all—losing the perfect candidate at the eleventh hour.

“I think the fastest way to improve a company’s performance is to improve the talent of the workforce, whether it is the ultimate leader or someone leading a divisional organization. It just energizes the company and leads to positive things.”

Scorecards describe the mission for the position, outcomes that must be accomplished, and competencies that fit with both the culture of the company and the role.

The first failure point of hiring is not being crystal clear about what you really want the person you hire to accomplish.

“In hiring, everything is situational,” he told us, “and no situation is entirely replicable. You are going to need different types of leaders at different phases of organizations.

The scorecard is composed of three parts: the job’s mission, outcomes, and competencies. Together, these three pieces describe A performance in the role—what a person must accomplish, and how. They provide a clear linkage between the people you hire and your strategy.

The mission is an executive summary of the job’s core purpose. It boils the job down to its essence so everybody understands why you need to hire someone into the slot.

For a mission to be meaningful, it has to be written in plain language, not the gobbledygook so commonly found in business today.

You’ll know you have a good mission when candidates, recruiters, and even others from your team understand what you are looking for without having to ask clarifying questions.

“To serve as a visionary leader who helps the bank capture market share from the competition by analyzing the market and devising successful new strategies and product offerings.”

Don’t Hire the Generalist. Hire the Specialist.

All-around athletes are the candidates who walk into our offices bearing impressive pedigrees, polished attire, and admirable accomplishments in a wide variety of roles. They seem to be able to do it all. They speak well, learn quickly, offer broad insights on company strategy, and convince us that they can adapt to virtually any challenge or task the company might place on their shoulders.

If you’ve defined the position correctly from the outset, you should be looking for narrow but deep competence.

The mission should help you find not the generalist who points you to the problem but the very best specialist to help you solve it.

“I think success comes from having the right person in the right job at the right time with the right skill set for the business problem that exists.”

A final caution about mission. You can’t just pull a mission off the shelf and dust it off whenever the position needs refilling.

That’s why scorecards need to be evolving documents, not static ones.

Outcomes, the second part of a scorecard, describe what a person needs to accomplish in a role. Most of the jobs for which we hire have three to eight outcomes, ranked by order of importance.

Set the outcomes high enough—but still within reason—and you’ll scare off B and C Players even as you pull in the kind of A Players who thrive on big challenges that fit their skills.

While typical job descriptions break down because they focus on activities, or a list of things a person will be doing (calling on customers, selling), scorecards succeed because they focus on outcomes, or what a person must get done (grow revenue from $25millionto$50 million by the end of year three).

Not all jobs allow you to quantify the outcome so easily. In these cases, seek to make the outcomes as objective and observable as possible.

The mission defines the essence of the job to a high degree of specificity. Outcomes describe what must be accomplished. Competencies define how you expect a new hire to operate in the fulfillment of the job and the achievement of the outcomes.

Competencies work at two levels. They define the skills and behaviors required for a job, and they reflect the broader demands of your organizational culture. Job competencies are generally easier to list, but cultural fit is just as important.

Try gathering your leadership team in a room and asking this simple question: “What adjectives would you use to describe our culture?” Jot down their responses on a flip chart or whiteboard. It won’t take long before a picture emerges.

Evaluating culture sometimes means removing people who are not a fit.

Like a heart donor and recipient, there has to be a match or the body of the recipient will reject the new organ.

“Part of successful hiring means having the discipline to pass on talented people who are not a fit,”

Scorecards are the guardians of your culture. They encapsulate on paper the unwritten dynamics that make your company what it is, and they ensure you think about those things with every hiring decision.

Scorecards translate your business plans into role-by-role outcomes and create alignment among your team, and they unify your culture and ensure people understand your expectations.

A good scorecard process translates the objectives of the strategy into clear outcomes for the CEO and senior leadership team. The senior team then translates their outcomes to the scorecards of those below them, and so on. Everybody in the organization ends up with a set of outcomes that support the strategy, and competencies that support the outcomes and culture.

Properly constructed and used, scorecards spread strategy through every aspect of your organizational life. Scorecards: • Set expectations with new hires • Monitor employee progress over time • Objectify your annual review system • Allow you to rate your team annually as part of a talent review process

Sure, we all want our employees to be great at everything, but in fact few are, and those who are may well demand higher salaries that make us pay for “features” that we don’t need. Remember, it’s all about the specific skill set you need, when you need it.

Getting great candidates does not happen without significant effort.

They are always sourcing, always on the lookout for new talent, always identifying the who before a new hire is really needed.

The overwhelming evidence from our field interviews is that ads are a good way to generate a tidal wave of resumes, but a lousy way to generate the right flow of candidates. Other methods include using recruiters and recruiting researchers, although success depends heavily on the quality of the actual recruiter assigned to your search.

Of all the ways to source candidates, the number one method is to ask for referrals from your personal and professional networks.

This is an instance where innovation matters far less than process and discipline.

a full 77 percent of them cited referrals as their top technique for generating a flow of the right candidates for their businesses.

“Who are the most talented people you know that I should hire?” Talented people know talented people, and they’re almost always glad to pass along one another’s names.

People you interact with every day are the most powerful sources of talent you will ever find.

As valuable as outside referrals are, in-house ones often provide better-targeted sourcing. After all, who knows your needs and culture better than the people who are already working for you?

“It takes A Players to know A Players,”

Try including something along the lines of “Source [number] A Player candidates per year,”

By turning employees into talent spotters, everyone starts viewing the business through a who lens, not just a what one.

Hold employees accountable for sourcing people through their networks, and everyone will benefit when talent flows into the business.

One company we know offers recruiting bonuses to its deputies—rewards of up to $5,000 if the company hires somebody the deputy sourced, depending on the level of the hire. Other companies provide incentives to their deputies and turn them into unofficial recruiters with gift certificates, iPods, and other valuable items.

Recruiters remain a key source for executive talent, but they can do only so much if you don’t expose them to the inner culture and workings of your business. Think of recruiters much the way you would think of a doctor or a financial advisor. The more you keep them in the dark about who you are, what’s wrong, and what you really need, the less effective they will be.

“You have to treat them like partners. Give them enough of a peek under the kimono so they really understand who you are as a firm and as a person. Recruiters who do not understand who you are will be counterproductive.”

Being open at the outset, sharing your scorecard, and doing everything else you can to bring an outside recruiter inside both streamlines the process and enhances the results.

Researchers won’t conduct interviews themselves. Instead, they’ll identify names for your internal recruiting team or managers to pursue.

The benefits of this concept are obvious. For minimal cost, companies get a pipeline that taps into a rich source of talent. Even better, hiring the researchers on a contract basis helps maintain a variable cost structure.

The downside with researchers is that they won’t qualify candidates as thoroughly as you might like. That vetting process falls on the internal recruiters or the hiring manager directly.

You can help tailor the flow of candidates to your needs by taking time at the front end to orient recruiting researchers to your culture, business needs, and even management style and preferences.

Suffice it to say that a good system will enable all of the employees in your business to contribute names and other useful information to the company’s database of potential A Player candidates.

The final step in the sourcing process, the one that matters more than anything else you can do, is scheduling thirty minutes on your calendar every week to identify and nurture A Players.

“Sue recommended that you and I connect. I understand you are great at what you do. I am always on the lookout for talented people and would love the chance to get to know you. Even if you are perfectly content in your current job, I’d love to introduce myself and hear about your career interests.”

“Now that you know a little about me, who are the most talented people you know who might be a good fit for my company?”

If you don’t own the process, no one will. Talent is what you need. Focus and commitment will get you there.

traditional interviewing is simply not predictive of job performance.

The best and surest way we have found to select A Players is through a series of four interviews that build on each other. Collectively, these interviews provide the facts you need to rate a person against the scorecard you have developed for the role. The A Players you want will be those who have a track record that matches your needs, competencies that align with your culture and the role, and plenty of passion to do the job you envision.

Instead, the four interviews use the time to collect facts and data about somebody’s performance track record that spans decades.

The goal here is to save time by eliminating people who are inappropriate for the position as quickly as possible.

This means following a common set of questions every time you screen somebody.

This first question is powerful because it allows you to hear about a candidate’s goals and passions before you taint the discussion with your own comments.

Ideally, a candidate will share career goals that match your company’s needs. If he or she lacks goals or sounds like an echo of your own Web site, screen the person out. You are done with the call. Talented people know what they want to do and are not afraid to tell you about it.

You also want to hear the candidate speak with passion and energy about topics that are aligned with the role.

We suggest you push candidates to tell you eight to twelve positives so you can build a complete picture of their professional aptitude. Ask them to give you examples that will put their strengths into context. If they say they are decisive, press for an example of a time when this trait served them well, and remember, you are listening for strengths that match the job at hand. If you see a major gap between someone’s strengths and your scorecard, screen that person out.

If you still find yourself struggling, we recommend that you put the fear of the reference check into the person. You say, “If you advance to the next step in our process, we will ask for your help in setting up some references with bosses, peers, and subordinates. Okay?” The candidate will say, “Okay.” Then you say, “So I’m curious. What do you think they will say are some things you are not good at, or not interested in?” Now you’ll get an honest and full answer.

Your balance sheet on a candidate will be incomplete if you can’t identify at least five to eight areas where a person falls short, lacks interest, or doesn’t want to operate.

Notice the language used in the question: “How will they rate you when we talk to them?” Not “if we talk to them.” When. Candidates will be thinking,

Ask candidates to list each boss and offer a rating for each. Follow up by pressing for details. What makes them think their boss would rate them a 7? Candidates will reinforce and expand upon the list of strengths and weaknesses they gave you in response to the first two questions.

You are looking for lots of 8’s, 9’s, and 10’s in the ratings. Consider 7’s neutral; 6’s and below are actually bad. We have found that people who give themselves a rating of 6 or lower are really saying 2. If you hear too many 6’s and below, screen them out, but be sure to really listen to what is being said.

“I am really looking forward to our time together. Here’s what I’d like to do. I’d like to spend the first twenty minutes of our call getting to know you. After that, I am happy to answer any questions you have so you can get to know us. Sound good?”

you can expand or contract the time you allot based on how well the data you gathered in the call fit the scorecard.

After conducting the interview, ask yourself, “Do this person’s strengths match my scorecard? Are the weaknesses manageable? Am I thrilled about bringing this person in for a series of interviews based on the data I have?” You want to be excited about that possibility. You want to have the feeling that you have found the one.

Only invite in those whose profile appears to be a strong match for your scorecard.

After a candidate answers one of the primary questions above, get curious about the answer by asking a follow-up question that begins with “What,” “How,” or “Tell me more.”

Sample questions include: What do you mean? What did that look like? What happened? What is a good example of that? What was your role? What did you do? What did your boss say? What were the results? What else? How did you do that? How did that go? How did you feel? How much money did you save? How did you deal with that?

The whole point of the screening interview is to weed people out as quickly as possible.

Better to miss out on a potential A Player than to waste precious hours on a borderline case that turns out to be a B or C Player.

It goes a long way toward giving you confidence in your selection because it uncovers the patterns of somebody’s career history, which you can match to your scorecard.

discovered was the power of using data and patterns of behavior for making predictions about how somebody is likely to perform in the future.

“The patterns become clearer and clearer,” he told us, “so it becomes easy to get a fix on exactly what the individual’s strengths and weaknesses are today.

Everybody has strengths and weaknesses. If you want to enhance your predictive capabilities, you have to really understand their story and their patterns.”

It’s a chronological walk-through of a person’s career.

This first question is a clear window into candidates’ goals and targets for a specific job. In a way, you are trying to discover what their scorecard might have been if they had had one. They might not know off the top of their head, so coach them by asking how they thought their success was measured in the role. Build a mental image of what their scorecard should have been. What were their mission and key outcomes? What competencies might have mattered?

Ideally, candidates will tell you about accomplishments that match the job outcomes they just described to you. Even better, those accomplishments will match the scorecard for the position you are trying to fill.

A Players tend to talk about outcomes linked to expectations. B and C Players talk generally about events, people they met, or aspects of the job they liked without ever getting into results.

Our recommendation is to reframe the question over and over until the candidate gets the message. “What went really wrong? What was your biggest mistake? What would you have done differently? What part of the job did you not like? In what ways were your peers stronger than you?” Don’t let the candidate off the hook.

Forcing candidates to spell the name out no matter how common it might be sends a powerful message: you are going to call, so they should tell the truth.

At the negative extreme, people tell you that one boss was useless, the next was a jerk, and the third a complete moron. Oddly, some candidates fail to make the connection that they are talking to their potential new boss—you. What colorful name will you earn if you hire this person? Being called a moron might be the least of your problems.

Now ask, “What will Mr. Smith say were your biggest strengths and areas for improvement?” Be sure to say will, not would.

Candidates quickly realize they have to tell you the truth because you are going to learn it from your reference calls anyway.

The second part of the fourth question—“How would you rate the team you inherited?”—is applicable to managers. The focus here is on how candidates approach building a strong team. Do they accept the hand they have been dealt when they inherit a new team, or do they make changes to get a better hand? What changes do they make? How long does it take? As a bonus, use the TORC framework on their team.

A Players are highly valued by their bosses. B and C Players often are not. It is an important piece of the puzzle to figure out if somebody decided to leave a job after being successful (an A Player clue) or whether he or she was pushed out of a job by a boss who did not value their contribution (a B or C Player clue). A Players perform well, and bosses express disappointment when they quit. B and C Players perform less well and are nudged out of their jobs or forcefully pushed out by their bosses.

That’s why we long ago learned to suspend our judgment during the interview and get curious.

Instead, walk through the career history chronologically—as the events really happened.

The Topgrading Interview takes three hours on average to conduct. It might take five hours for CEOs of multibillion-dollar companies, or ninety minutes for entry-level positions. The ultimate time depends on the length of a person’s career and the number of chapters you create.

For every hour you spend in the Topgrading Interview, you’ll save hundreds of hours by not dealing with C Players. The return on your time is staggeringly high.

Your career and job happiness depend on finding A Players.

That said, we also recommend that you conduct the Topgrading Interview with a colleague—perhaps someone from HR, another manager or member of your team, or simply someone who wants to learn the method by observing you. This tandem approach makes it easier to run the interview. One person can ask the questions while the other takes notes, or you can both do a little of each. Either way, two heads are always better than one.

You have to interrupt the candidate. There is no avoiding it. You have to interrupt the candidate. If you don’t, he or she might talk for ten hours straight about things that are not at all relevant.

You will have to interrupt the candidate at least once every three or four minutes, so get ready.

It is through maintaining very high rapport that you get the most valuable data, and polite interrupting can build that rapport.

The questions are: 1. How did your performance compare to the previous year’s performance? (For example, this person achieved sales of $2millionandthepreviousyear’ssaleswereonly$150,000.) 2. How did your performance compare to the plan? (For example, this person sold $2millionandtheplanwas$1.2 million.)

3. How did your performance compare to that of peers? (For example, this person sold $2millionandwasrankedfirstamongthirtypeers;thenext-bestperformersoldonly$750,000.)

People who perform well are generally pulled to greater opportunities. People who perform poorly are often pushed out of their jobs. Do not hire anybody who has been pushed out of 20 percent or more of their jobs. From our experience, those folks have a three times higher chance of being a chronic B or C Player.

One of the advantages of conducting the Topgrading Interview in person is that you can watch for shifts in body language and other inconsistencies.

The focused interview is similar to the commonly used behavioral interview with one major difference: it is focused on the outcomes and competencies of the scorecard, not some vaguely defined job description or manager’s intuition.

1. Grow domestic sales from $500millionto$600 million by December 31, and continue growing them by 20 percent per year for the next five years. 2. Maintain at least a 45 percent gross margin across the portfolio of products annually. 3. Topgrade the sales organization, ensuring 90 percent or more of all new hires are A Players as defined by the sales scorecards. Achieve a 90 percent or better ratio of A Players across the team within three years through hiring and coaching. Remove all chronic C Players within ninety days of identification. 4. Create a sales strategy that the CEO approves during the annual planning cycle.

1. Aggressive 2. Persistent 3. Hires A Players 4. Holds people accountable 5. Follows through on commitments 6. Open to criticism and feedback

Regardless of the time spent, each interviewer will bring supplemental data to your decision-making process.

Just be sure to include competencies and outcomes that go beyond the specifics of the job to embrace the larger values of your company.

Some companies conduct focused interviews as a second round of interviews only after a candidate passes the Topgrading Interview in an earlier round. This enables them to save time if a candidate does not pass the Topgrading Interview, but it does force them to schedule multiple interview days. Other companies do it all in one day.)

Don’t skip the references!

First, pick the right references. Review your notes from the Topgrading Interview and pick the bosses, peers, and subordinates with whom you would like to speak. Don’t just use the reference list the candidate gives you.

Second, ask the candidate to contact the references to set up the calls.

but we have found that you will have twice the chance of actually getting to talk to a reference if you ask the candidate to set up the interview—whether it is during business hours or after hours at home.

Third, conduct the right number of reference interviews. We recommend that you personally do about four and ask your colleagues to do three, for a total of seven reference interviews. Interview three past bosses, two peers or customers, and two subordinates.

The third question is even more powerful when you add the phrase “back then” to the end of the question: “What were the person’s biggest areas for improvement back then?” These two words liberate a reference to talk about weaknesses that existed in the past.

Past performance really is an indicator of future performance.

In the end, you are looking for people who consistently get ratings of 8, 9, and 10 across your reference calls.

Test something the candidate told you by framing it as a question for the reference. For example, “The person mentioned that you might say he was disorganized. Can you tell me more about

Why such false positives? The culprit is basic human behavior. People don’t like to give a negative reference. They want to help their former colleagues, not hurt them.

Um’s and er’s are another code for unspoken problems.

Lukewarm or qualified praise also is likely to signal ambivalence or worse about a candidate.

“Faint praise in reference interviews is damning praise.”

A truly positive reference, by contrast, should brim with tremendous enthusiasm and obvious admiration. It will lack hesitation and hedging. The reference’s belief in the former colleague will come through in how he or she talks about the person. That excitement and spark are the clearest indicators that you are both talking about the same A Player.

The goal of the “Select” step of the A Method is to gather the facts you need to decide if somebody’s skill (what they can do) and will (what they want to do) match your scorecard. This is a person’s skill-will profile. When a candidate’s skill-will profile matches up perfectly with the requirements outlined on your scorecard, your candidate hits the skill-will bull’s-eye.

An A Player is someone whose skill and will match your scorecard. Anything less is a B or C, no matter the experience or seeming talent level.

How will you know when you have hit the skill-will bull’s eye? When (1) you are 90 percent or more confident that a candidate can get the job done because his or her skills match the outcomes on you scorecard, and (2) you are 90 percent or more confident that the candidate will be a good fit because his or her will matches the mission and competencies of the role.

Based on our experience, the major flags during the hiring process include: • Candidate does not mention past failures. • Candidate exaggerates his or her answers. • Candidate takes credit for the work of others. • Candidate speaks poorly of past bosses. • Candidate cannot explain job moves. • People most important to candidate are unsupportive of change. • For managerial hires, candidate has never had to hire or fire anybody. • Candidate seems more interested in compensation and benefits than in the job itself. • Candidate tries too hard to look like an expert. • Candidate is self-absorbed.

You should beware of candidates who need to win to an unhealthy extent because they will be battling you and your colleagues over petty things.

“Adding too much value is easy to look for. If you are talking and you throw out an idea, does the candidate try to add too many of his own ideas to yours? If so, it implies that your idea was not sufficiently good on its own. It is a small indicator of ego gone awry.

“Starting a sentence with ‘no,’ ‘but,’ or ‘however’ during the interview process. ‘Yes, that is a great idea’ is the right answer. ‘No, I agree with you but’ is the symptom of somebody with an overactive ego who might be challenging to work with.

“Telling the world how smart we are. The unhealthy display is taking excessive credit, especially for a leadership role. For the leader, being all about me is bad.

“Making destructive comments about previous colleagues is a huge red flag. Because once this person works for you, he or she will make the same needless sarcastic comments about you!

“Passing the buck. Blaming is always bad. Winners don’t blame.

“Making excuses. Ask people what their challenges were. If they say that their biggest challenges were not their fault but other people’s fault, that shows they do not take responsibility for their performance.

“The excessive need to ‘be me.’ Listen for comments like ‘That’s just me, I’m not organized.’ ‘That’s just me, I’m impatient.’ ‘That’s just me, I don’t include other people in decisions. That’s just the way I am.’ Beware. Somebody who has an excessive need to ‘be me’ is telling you that they are not open to adapt their style to fit your culture or your company and should not be hired.”

1. Take out your scorecards that you have completed on each candidate. 2. Make sure you have rated all of the candidates on the scorecard. If you have not given each candidate an overall A, B, or C grade, do so now. Make any updates you need to based on the reference interviews. Look at the data, consider the opinions and observations of the interview team, and give a final grade. 3. If you have no A’s, then restart your process at the second step: source. 4. If you have one A, decide to hire that person. 5. If you have multiple A’s, then rank them and decide to hire the best A from among them.

The key to successfully selling your candidate to join your company is putting yourself in his or her shoes. Care about what they care about. It turns out that candidates tend to care about five things,

The five areas, which we call the five F’s of selling, are: fit, family, freedom, fortune, and fun.

Fit is by far the most important point to sell.

The better the fit, the higher the likelihood of success.

Fit means showing the candidate how his or her goals, talents, and values fit into your vision, strategy, and culture. People want to make an impact in the world. They want to be needed. They want to be part of something that feels right. Selling fit means showing a candidate how all of these needs will be met when he or she works with you.

“Show that you are as concerned with the fit for them as you are in the fit for you. Ninety-nine percent of your competitors are not doing that. It is a key differentiator. You will be the one who cares enough to see if there is something for them here. Everybody else is concerned with just finding out if there is a match for us here.”

Nobody who is worth anything is going to go into a company where they don’t see real potential with the company and a strong fit with their goals and abilities. The most valuable commodity they have is their time. If they are truly an A Player, they are going to value the potential of the company.”

Focus on selling the spouse, children, parents, and friends of the candidate. They will have a much greater role in the decision for these types of situations. The candidate will look to them for the tough call. Better have them in your camp, or you won’t get the candidate.”

A word of caution as you contemplate all this: be sincere. The five F’s aren’t tools for manipulating people. They are areas on which you will want to focus deep and honest attention now that you have come to the end of the recruiting process.

You need to be committed to the success of the people who are working around you in all their domains.”

A Players have never liked being micromanaged. It runs against their grain—the inherent characteristics that make them standouts in the first place. That’s even more true of Gen-X and Gen-Y A Players.

In reality, great leaders gain more control by ceding control to their A Players.

“A lot of CEOs think the role of the CEO is to be aloof, like a judge in a courtroom,” he told us. “But the role of the CEO is to inspire people, and you cannot inspire people unless you get to know them and them you. Don’t cut corners on that. It takes energy. CEOs are sometimes afraid to be real people. If you want to extract as much value as possible out of somebody in an organization, you have to let them be themselves.

If you know that I am confident in you, you are likely to take more risks, to work a little harder, because you know that I am not going to take your head off if something doesn’t work perfectly. That builds competence. Extend the hand of trust. And occasionally extend the hand of friendship.”

Freedom matters to today’s workforce, and especially to the most valuable among them. A Players want to operate without micromanagement, develop their own leadership styles, and prove their own worth.

Research shows that while money can be a disincentive if it is too low or not linked to performance, it rarely is the key motivator.*2 A raise given today is usually forgotten by tomorrow.

“pay people on a performance basis.” He added, “We have used it here at Allstate very successfully. That gets you good people, people who believe in themselves.”

We endorse this strategy while also recommending that you link variable compensation to an employee’s performance against the scorecard. Scorecards define A performance and provide objective metrics for monitoring it. Linking bonuses to scorecard attainment ensures you pay top compensation only when you get A performance.

“Our people know every quarter where their bonuses are. Bonuses are tied to mathematical goals with eight other goals that are easily identifiable.

We spend more than a third of our time, and probably better than half our waking time, at work. We might as well have fun while we are doing it.

In reality, selling is something you should be doing throughout the entire process. Like sourcing, selling requires constant attention.

1. When you source 2. When you interview 3. The time between your offer and the candidate’s acceptance 4. The time between the candidate’s acceptance and his or her first day 5. The new hire’s first one hundred days on the job

“We’d like to spend the first part of this interview getting to know you. Then we’d like to give you the opportunity to get to know us.”

These are A Players, after all. Silence is your worst enemy at this stage. Stay in touch with them on a regular basis. Pinpoint their concerns using the five F’s as your guide. Show them how much they will fit with and contribute to the company. Woo their families. Commit to giving them freedom and autonomy to do their job. Address financial concerns. And involve them in the fun your employees are already having.

We suggest celebrating their acceptance by sending something meaningful, such as flowers, balloons, or a gift certificate. Make a splash.

Finally, the big day comes when your new A Player joins the company. But guess what? You still aren’t done selling. Research shows an alarming failure rate among new hires in the first one hundred days. People get buyer’s remorse during these early months and are tempted to cut their losses. You can mitigate that risk by investing in a strong on-boarding program.

Great leaders are persistent. They don’t take the first no for an answer. They keep positive pressure on the A Players they want until they get them. From the first sourcing call to the last sales call, they never let up.

HOW TO SELL A PLAYERS 1. Identify which of the five F’s really matter to the candidate: fit, family, freedom, fortune, or fun. 2. Create and execute a plan to address the relevant F’s during the five waves of selling: during sourcing, during interviews, between offer and acceptance, between acceptance and the first day, and during the first one hundred days on the job. 3. Be persistent. Don’t give up until you have your A Player on board.

“You’ve got to do whatever it takes when you are sure you have identified the right person. You do whatever you can.” You might not be hiring at a level that justifies a penthouse apartment or a new car. But at any level, persistence pays off.

We asked these leaders what factors contributed the most to business success. They told us that “management talent” was over half the equation. The only other category to draw even 20 percent of the vote was execution. Strategy finished below that, at 17 percent, and external factors—interest rates, for example—still further back at 11 percent.

Get the talent side of the equation wrong, and you will always face rough waters. You’ll spend all of your time dealing with an endless torrent of what issues. Get it right, and you’ll have clear skies, smooth seas, and easy sailing. The right who will take care of all of those issues.

So the differentiation is in execution. And execution is determined by people.

Cast a clear vision for the organization and reinforce it through every communication with the broader team. Try a message like “We are going to win with A Players,” “We will succeed because we have an A Player in every role,” or “Our people will serve our customers far better than the competition because our people are all A Players.” Then back up these words with actions to show how the vision is transforming the team.

Remove managers who are not on board. Captains short-circuit any potential for mutiny by removing those who refuse to build a better team using the method. Of course, they give people every opportunity to succeed before they make this decision, but they do not hesitate once it becomes clear that someone is not going to cooperate.

1. Relevance. Do not reject candidates for reasons that are not relevant to the job.

2. Standardization of hiring process. Use the same process for all candidates regardless of their demographic group.

3. Use nondiscriminatory language during interviews and in written forms. Saying “he or she” or “they” is better than assuming a role should be performed by a man or woman.

4. Avoid asking candidates illegal questions.

The bottom line is this: don’t discriminate. Select people based on whether they are likely to be able to perform a job or not.

So an A Player is someone who accomplishes the outcomes you define in a manner consistent with your culture and values.

A Players get the job done while embracing the culture because the scorecard ensures they fit the culture.

A Players can and do work well together because each understands and is selected for a unique role in the broader context of the team. They don’t get in one another’s way because they are specialists who are particularly good at what they do.

Building a team of A Players means thinking long and hard about your business strategy and contemplating what roles you need to fill to execute it. You might be able to get there with a few tweaks to your existing team, or you could need to make substantive changes.

You can’t take a superstar and train them to have a good attitude. The same is true with CEOs or key executives.”

Who, not what. That’s the path to your career, financial, and personal success.

To figure out the scorecard for what matters in a job, just think about what success looks like for the role and how you could measure it through metrics or observation.