I have a terrific client who owns an award-winning kitchen and bath design firm. When Bill and I started working together, he had recently created the position of showroom sales manager—and promptly hired then fired three people for the role. What was the problem?
When Bill hired these people, he was looking for a "hunter" who would prospect for new business. We created an A-Player Profile for the position and realized that this skill was much less important than the ability to close sales and manage kitchen remodelingjobs. None of the three employees who were hired (and subsequently fired) had any projectmanagement skills or experience. They could prospect for new business, but they couldn'tcomplete quality projects. As a result, they did a poor job for their clients and failed to generate strong referrals. While they had sales skills, they did not have the right skills for this sales position. In other words, Bill had intentionally hired people who could not do the job!
You can't consistently hit a goal if you don't see it clearly. Bill is an example of a successful person who fell into a common trap. He couldn't hire great people because he had not taken the time to define what it meant to do the job very well. He needed to identify an A-Player Profile for the key roles in his company. For this showroom sales manager position, the A-Player Profile was someone who could convert walk-in prospects into clients and manage the details of product pricing and project management. Once Bill defined this profile, his hiring results improved by leaps and bounds. He stopped losing time, wasting money, and squandering opportunities because of sub-par hiring decisions. Knowing exactly whom he needed in the role helped him to avoid making the same mistakes over and over. The same can be true for you and your business.
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A-Player Principle: Companies "intentionally" hire the wrong people all the time. If you're not clear on what makes someone an A-playerin a role, you are destined to make very expensive hiring mistakes.
Sometimes it makes sense to pay top dollar for a new employee. In other situations, however, you want to be a "value investor" by recruiting and hiring talented people who are underrated in the market. Either way, you have to know who you are looking for by developing a clear picture of your A-Player Profile. Then you are ready to out-recruit your competition. At the end of this chapter, I will lead you through the process of determining an A-Player Profile. First, let's look at some success stories.
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A-Player Principle: Find a large pool of people who have the basic skills you are looking for, interview a lot of them, and hire the best. That is a simple formula for consistently hiring A-players.
Supplies Network used classified advertising successfully early on, and it has grown from revenue of $70 million in 1999 to approximately $400 million today. To find the right people to support and fuel this progress, the company's recruiting strategies have developed as well. Today, the company relies more on referrals and less on advertising, but it still knows exactly what kind of person it's looking to hire. Senior Vice President of Sales and Operations Barney Kister, introduced in Chapter 1, starts from the premise that although there are a lot of good people out there, you have to work to find them. He tells us, "If you want an organization of top-notch people, you have to invest time in building it. It's just like getting into top physical shape. You don't work out one day per week; you create a habit of working out three, four, or five days per week. Building a team of great people is the same way." If you have a vision of the A-player team that you want, you have to work every day to create it.
As a result of this commitment, Supplies Network interviews a lot of potential salespeople—whether there happens to be a position currently open or not. In Barney's words, "We interview people all the time. We never try to hire just to fill a position. We are continually looking for good people to add to our team. Like everyone else, we have attrition, and we always want to know people who can fill those holes."
Barney also understands that most of the people he interviews are not A-players. When he does uncover a superior salesperson, he hires him or her on the spot. "When I find great people, I hire them whether or not I have an opening. I often tell people when I hire them, 'I have no idea what you will end up doing for us, but we will work it out in the next month or so."'
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A-Player Principle: Just because people went to the "right" schools or worked for big companies in your industry does not make them A-players. Don't follow the herd when it comes to recruiting. Instead, define the profile that works in your unique environment.
Companies like Supplies Network and Doorway Rug know their A-Player Profile and use it to cast a wide recruiting net. Then they cull through countless job applicants to find the A-players. In contrast, companies that lack an A-Player Profile don't focus their recruiting efforts and often don't interview enough candidates. I get calls all the time from companies that want me to assess two finalists for an open position. The conversation goes like this:
Eric: "So Janet, you have narrowed it down to two candidates for this position?"
Janet: "Yes."
Eric: "How many candidates did you interview in total for this position?"
Janet: "Two."
Eric: "Janet, without looking at any testing results for these candidates, I can already give you my recommendation. Between Candidate One and Candidate Two, I really like Candidate Three."
If you want to hire better employees, you must interview more people. Supplies Network, for example, did a great job of expanding its candidate pool by advertising for customer service people when in fact it was hiring salespeople. The company knew how to separate true salespeople from order takers in the interview process. It also interviewed job candidates constantly, even if it did not have a position to fill. Taken together, these tactics allowed Supplies Network to avoid the classic mistake of interviewing only one or two people for a job and then wondering why a new hire is mediocre.
If a salesperson talked to only one or two prospects, he would not be surprised that his sales results were terrible. As a recruiter, the same principle applies. You must talk to more qualified people.
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A-Player Principle: Hiring is a numbers game. The more qualified people you talk to, the better your chances of making a great hire. Tap into a large pool of qualified candidates, weed out most of them, and then select the best of those left standing.
Like Supplies Network, Doorway Rug used its A-Player Profile to increase the effectiveness of its job postings. Instead of advertising for the position in the sales section, it advertised in the restaurant section. This unlikely approach worked; many of its best salespeople applied for the position when they had intended to continue waiting on tables. Once the company knew its A-Player Profile, this was the only logical way to publicize it.
The ability to define an A-Player Profile can turbo-charge the results of your "help wanted" advertising, whether in traditional or online media. Yes, some unqualified applicants will apply. Deal with it. Salespeople do not protest if a lot of prospects seek them out, even if it means more time spent qualifying. Recruiting is just marketing and sales in different clothes. It's simple: the more prospective job candidates you have, the more great hires you will make.
An A-Player Profile specifies the combination of skills and experience that will make someone a probable A-player in your business. Once you know what this is, you are ready to move into recruiting mode. Ten steps you can take to determine your A-Player Profile are presented next. Take the time to write down your answers.
Define success for this position in two to three sentences. In other words, what happens when someone performs well in the role?
Break this overall picture of success into specific key results: five to seven specific, observable indicators to let you know someone is performing well in this role. Gather input from other people who understand the job. You may find that you want results out of the position that no one has been able to produce to date, which is fine. Part of defining your A-Player Profile often involves refocusing the job itself.
Now, write down the names of all the people who are or have been in the position (not just the A-players). How do the most successful employees go about creating the key results you just described? What steps do they take? What actions do they avoid? In contrast, what do your B and C-players do (or fail to do) that causes their performance to lag behind that of the A-players?
Take your best shot at writing down the skills, talents, and experiences required to create superior results.
Next, ask yourself this question: are the A-players superior because of skills that can be learned easily or because of talents that are difficult—if not impossible—to teach? To the extent that A-players are good because of their natural skills and abilities, you have to recruit people who already have these skills. This is a critical piece of your A-Player Profile and an essential insight that will focus your recruiting efforts.
What are the employment and educational backgrounds of the A-players? Where and how did they develop the abilities that you value so highly? How do their backgrounds compare with that of the B and C-players?
How did each of these employees come to work for you? Where were they working previously?
Based on all this evaluation, where are some likely sources of candidates that you can tap into?
How can you promote the job to these people and begin creating a flow of candidates?
By answering the questions in the last section, you give yourself enough information to develop a picture of what separates the best employees from everyone else. In visual form, define it as shown in Figure 2.1.
At the base of the pyramid for any position are the fundamental job requirements: the things you must do relatively well or get fired.
In the middle of the pyramid are the results that reasonably talented people can accomplish. At the top of the pyramid are the key results that A-players are able to produce. The value created by A-players often towers over everything else listed.
Here is an example of how these three levels of key results might look for a retail store inventory manager:
Doing the Basics
Product is received at the shipping dock.
Product is entered into the inventory system upon receipt.
Physical inventory is stored in the correct places.
Shipping and receiving area is clean and orderly.
Being Proactive
In addition to the basics just listed:
Active communication with the product buyers ensures that the company always has appropriate levels of inventory.
A-Player Performance
In addition to all the above:
Leverage the company's existing computer systems to further automate the inventory management process.
Give sales staff confidence that inventory levels are accurate and products are available to be sold.
Create more efficient inventory turns.
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0A-Player Principle: It is easy to do a job reasonably well. What does it look like to do it extraordinarily well? That's the start of your A-Player Profile.
Once you have defined your A-Player Profile, use it to identify pools of individuals who have the foundational skills needed for the job. Reach out to these people. A well-defined A-Player Profile often allows a business to expand its recruiting net beyond people with industry experience. For instance, I know of a company in the marketing services business that insisted on hiring people with industry experience—despite the fact that its top two salespeople had none. This company's A-players sold beer and printing respectively prior to working for this company.
Companies often believe that they must hire people with industry experience because they cannot afford to invest the time to get a "newbie" up to speed. But hiring people with industry experience often means hiring the people your competitor just fired. You would think that if a company had successfully employed top performers from outside the industry, it would focus its ongoing recruiting efforts outside the industry. But frequently this is not the case. Companies tend to prefer the safety of hiring knowledgeable mediocrity to finding great potential wherever it may be currently employed. Defining your A-Player Profile is the first step to recruiting people with the right talent—no matter what their experience.
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A-Player Principle: The best companies often hire people without industry experience so they can train them right the first time. Though industry experience can be important, qualities like talent and drive are always more valuable than the number of years someone worked for your competitor.
Knowing your A-Player Profile also helps you to define "knockout factors"—those skills and abilities that a job candidate must possess or be "knocked out" of contention for the job. Supplies Network, for instance, knows the profile of its salespeople: assertive, people-oriented, impatient, and somewhat nonconformist. Even with sales and/or customer service background, you are knocked out of contention forthe job if you lack this profile.
The interview process is a negative one for an employer because its primary purposeis to eliminate candidates who cannot or will not do the job. The problem I have seen many companies run into is that, because they have not defined their A-Player Profile, their knockout factors are either far too restrictive or simply don't exist. If your knockout factors are too restrictive, then no candidate will be good enough for you. But if you don't have any knockout factors, your interview and hiring process is uninformed. You try to hire all kinds of people to do a job and make great hires only by sheer luck.
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A-Player Principle: When you define your knockout factors, you know how to eliminate people from the interview process. People who lack these key skills are immediately out of contention; the people left standing get a second look.