Do You Know Who Your ‘A’ Players Are?

Jasmine Flowers March 19, 2008

Despite the war for talent and the estimated gap in the workforce in the coming years many companies, instead of sourcing new candidates of out desperation, are taking on a new approach to ensuring top talent or “A” players are recruited and developed within their organization . According to Brad Smart in Workforce Magazine and author of Topgrading, you should “fill your company with the best and you’ll be the best. Specifically, keep the employee roster filled with 90 percent ‘A’ players and your company can accomplish anything.” Smart proposes a simple formula for “topgrading” in your company and avoiding hiring pitfalls.

1. Pinpoint the specifics of the job – At times companies conduct interviews for jobs that haven’t been clearly defined

2. Use rigorous, in-depth interviews – Ill prepared interviewers who spend more time talking then asking the right questions often undermine the purpose of the interview process

3. Tandem interviewers and a rating scorecard to match a candidate to the open position – Managers may be desperate to fill a position and hire someone that they know doesn’t meet all of the qualifications but hope for the best

4. Thorough reference checks – Interviewers can sometimes like the candidate so much, become bias and fail to check references

These steps sound pretty simple but Smart believes “simple can be deceiving” because hiring can always go wrong and when it does companies pay the cost, literally. A survey conducted by Right Management found that the “average cost of a bad hire was 2 ½ times the person’s salary, including recruiting, training, and severance costs and lost productivity.”

Using the “topgrading” method, these hiring faux pas can be avoided by identifying the “B” or “C” players and either moving them to jobs where they can be trained to become “A” players or fire them. Although this sounds a bit harsh, I agree with this methodology. Why wouldn’t you want to weed out those that spread complacency and mediocrity throughout the office or avoid spending money on hires that turn out to be poor performers? In a time when finding a quality candidate is tight, I would think having a process in place that strives for perfection by ensuring accountability and standards would be ideal for any company.

Posted in HR Consulting, Human Resources, Recruiting, Recruiting Consulting, Retention, Sourcing, Workforce Planning, Workforce Management