In August 2024, I sat in on a CEO summit at Harvard. They asked all 100 CEOs the same question: what’s the biggest constraint in your business? Ninety said people, and listen to the other ten long enough and you realize it was people for them too. Almost none of them had built a real system for hiring the people the whole business depends on.
Your hiring process is failing
In most companies, only about one in four employees is an A-player. You’re running at 25%, and every customer problem, every workaround, every “we’ll just deal with it” is built around that number without you ever deciding it. It forces you and a handful of others to play hero. Think about it: if an operational process in your business failed 75% of the time, you’d drop everything to fix it. Hiring is that process, and almost no founder treats it that way.
Brutal honesty about what an A-player is
An A-player lives your core values 90% of the time and hits KPI-driven goals 90% of the time. They get three or four steps ahead of you: they look at work that’s slow, bloated, or wasteful and can’t leave it alone, so they simplify it, automate it, cut out the dead parts. They make it so you don’t have to be the hero.
You’re hiring for the wrong things
The biggest mistake I see is hiring for experience and skills instead of behaviors and a history of success. Ten or fifteen years in a role tells you almost nothing. People sit in the same seat forever doing the job badly, because we tolerate a mountain of mediocrity. The job isn’t just to do the job. The job is to do the job better. So stop counting years and look at what they actually accomplished. Did they hit goals? Build systems that weren’t there before? Keep getting promoted? That’s the signal you’re hiring for.
Hiring is an ROI, not an expense
Most owners treat a hire as a cost to keep low. Walmart is the poster child: pay near the bottom for mediocre output, then spend your life managing the people problems that creates. Costco pays more, hires higher, and gets more out of each person. Whose problems would you rather have? Costco’s, every time.
That’s one-equals-three hiring, which I took from the Container Store: one great employee beats three good ones, and you can pay that person up to twice the going salary and still come out ahead. Hire fewer people, pay them more. I had a client whose nine-person team carried one real A-player; they didn’t need nine, they needed three. An A-player changes the definition of what’s possible.
The system that lands the A-player nine times out of ten
You can go from landing the A-player a quarter of the time to ninety percent, and one process does it: Topgrading. One caveat: don’t read the book Topgrading; it’s buried in self-promotion. Read “Who” by Geoff Smart, or Brad Smart’s newer “Foolproof Hiring.”
The single best predictor of someone’s future is their past, so you walk through every job on the resume and ask every candidate the same questions, and the moment something’s off, you hear it. A 30-minute “let’s have a conversation” turns into two or three hours. That sounds like a lot until you remember you’ll spend hundreds of times that coaching a B or C player you never should have hired. I’ve used this process for over twenty years, including at Golf Channel, and those teams out-hired everyone around them.
The A-Player Resume Screen
Four things to look for before anyone’s in the room:
- Metric achievements. Self-aware people put numbers on the page, “took this from X to Y.” A resume that’s just a list of responsibilities goes in the do-not-review pile.
- No two-year job hopping. No more than two jobs in the last five years.
- A history of promotion. Below the senior level, people should move up every eighteen months to two years.
- Caution on industry experience. Outside medical, legal, or certified fields, years in your industry run neutral to negative, because you’ll spend the first year untraining bad habits.
For someone fresh out of school, use Patrick Lencioni’s Ideal Team Player process instead; it doesn’t lean on a long work history. We also pulled this screen into a one-page download you can keep by your desk.
Then the hard part: your own team
Getting the right person in the right seat is 51% of everything you do in business. What stops most leaders is that people fight to protect mediocrity: they put their head in the sand, call the daily chaos “fine,” and dodge the hard conversation. As Jim Collins put it, it’s far easier to build something great than to tolerate the mediocrity of the good.
The owners who do the work see it in the numbers. At Nicolson Construction, I asked one leader of a struggling division: if all 25 of your people were like your best one, how many would you need? “Twelve.” They moved on from C-players, raised the pay, and using the right hiring process, A-players went from abysmal to well above 50% in a year, and annual profit rose 1,167%. At Survival Garden Seeds, Jason Spahr took A-players from 44% to 78% in under a year, and first-quarter revenue nearly doubled, up 98%.
Your next 30 days
- Score every leader against the A-player bar: core values 90%, KPI goals 90%. Or use the Netflix version: would you fight to keep that person?
- Run the resume screen above on your next stack, before you talk to anyone.
- Replace your “let’s have a conversation” interview with a structured Topgrading walk through every job on the resume.
- Pick one seat that’s already filled and decide: coach that person up, or move them out.
None of this is complicated. It’s just uncomfortable, and most owners would rather live in the chaos than do it. The ones who do it build companies the rest of us are jealous of.