Looking to build an A-Player Team? Looking to join a team of A-Players? The following is a collection of notes and quotes from research and philosophies on attracting, hiring, and retaining A-Players. The content below was first shared internally, as a resource document in our hiring and recruitment efforts.
In the spirit of knowledge-sharing, we believe valuable information deserves to be shared.
We expect both employers and job-seekers to derive value from the curated notes. For those hiring, building an A-Player team is the difference between success and failure. For those looking to be hired, the information below will help you gauge if you’re an A-Player, or secumbing to the illusory superiority bias.
With that said, let’s start with the most important quesion:
Are you coachable?
Stop Trying to Motivate Your Employees
Q: What is the correlation between “If I like a person, will they perform well?”
A: ZERO.
Q: What was the difference between top performers and low performers in their interview ratings, and who do you think got better ratings in their interviews?
A: The LOW performers.
BIAS: We often hire because they are like us. They are our mini-me version.
How To Master Recruiting
The most important thing for any CEO and leader to get good at: RECRUITING
It’s very hard to find any school, university course, or MasterClass on this topic.
Leadership comes down to two things:
- Setting the right (the best) team for your organization
- Help those people achieve the results that are going to make them successful in that particular role
Mads co-founded 20 companies. His thoughts…
I don’t consider myself as an entrepreneur or a CEO. I consider myself a recruiter. That’s it. My job, and my role, is to find the right people. If I select the right people, my life is really really simple. If I don’t select the right people, my life is very complicated.
We all know the costs when we get it wrong.
- US Department of Labour: A bad hire loses their employer 30% of their salary.
- McKinsey: The difference between average performance and top performance is 67% productivity, and bottom-line profit.
Specifics
- We try to hire ourselves
- We try to hire people who can do everything
- We also like to hire people who are worse than ourselves
- We make quick decisions
We choose in a couple of minutes, sometimes seconds, then use the remaining time to confirm our bias. - We hire for single positions instead of hiring for team composition (fit)
As a CEO or leader, you don’t need to be the smartest person. You don’t need to know more about the subject than the people who work for you. As long as you can find and select the right people.
Three things to hire for:
- Will the person be able to do the job?
Will they be successful and deliver the outcome that you want? - Will the person fit our culture?
Will they be able to fit into the culture you’ve built? - Will we fit the person’s life?
Will we be able to fit their lifestyle, family, career?
Three things you need to be good at:
- You have to be able to identify the right needs.
– What does the person have to be good at to succeed in this position?
– Needs-identification is where most people go wrong; identifying the right needs for the job.
– Be careful not to try and look for a person that’s good at everything. - You want to have the right questions and the right tools to figure out the data for those needs.
– How do you answer the questions if the person fits those particular needs?
– For example: You want to hire someone that can build strong relationships. What questions should you ask? What tools do you need to assess? - You want to have the right interpretation of the information.
– For example: You assess an answer and ponder whether “this person have drive or not?” This is an interpretation question. Interpreting that correctly becomes very important, and oftentimes where people go wrong.
Trade-offs
You are making tradeoffs between different things. For example, you are looking for someone with empathy. However, the person may have a hard time making decisions because they are too empathetic to others.
Three things to look for:
A person consists of three different things:
- 🫀 A Heart
EQ, personality, and talents. - 🧠 A Brain
IQ, ability to learn and comprehend information and leverage that information. - 🧰 A Toolbox
Past experiences, education, work experience, etc.
Most companies start with #3:
The candidate’s experience. We start with: The Heart. Who do we look for in a person? We are true believers of: Hire for talent, train for skills methodology.
The second thing we look at is whether they have the IQ to understand and leverage the information.
The third thing is we look at their resume.
Finally, we look for ways to test the above. You can do interviews, questionnaires, and assessments. What you’re really looking for is, can they do the job? The best thing you can do is take the person, and have them do the job for a couple of days. You’d be surprised that people will come for a day, even a week, to do the job, regardless of how senior they are. That’s the best way for them to get a feel for the company.
Figure out how to test for the things that are important to you.
Most people say, “I hired wrong. Let me go try again.” Very few people say, “What did I interpret wrong? Did I ask the wrong questions? Did I use the wrong tools to get the information?
Keep your notes. Regardless of if you hired right or wrong, go back and look at your notes.
Talent 5.0
Recruitment to a New Level
My Purpose
- Help companies internal business and external talent attraction
- Identify candidate-friendly recruitment processes
Quick Facts
- Only 13% of global employees are truly committed to their jobs.
- Turnover rate reaches up to 25% in certain industries.
- Most [organizations] are reactive vs being proactive and strategic regarding talent needs. This leads to rush decisions, leading to 1/3rd of hirings quitting after six months.
Personalities
Personality Traits
A lot can be learned from paying attention to how people behave, speak, and write.
Examples include:
- Extroverts use lots of fun related words, like music and party.
- People with lower emotional intelligence, use negative words like angry and stressed.
- Narcissists love to talk about themselves, and use a lot of “I, me,” and “myself.”
- Poor grammar shows a poor academic education.
- Absence of typos shows perfectionism.
- Emoticons can be a sign of friendliness if the document is informal, or immaturity if it is formal.
- Long emails reflect energy.
- Chaotic emails are a sign of creativity.
- Instant responses show a sign of impulsivity.
- No responses show a lack of interest.
Disengagement
Employee Disengagement
Is it possible to predict when someone’s becoming detached?
If so, how would it impact a company’s retention and recruitment strategy?
How can we help the employee?
Algorithm
Based on emails and chats, looking for keywords and trends based on past behaviour.
Conscientiousness: Linked to success. (Most) Important factor when it comes to employee retention.
The (uncomfortable) truth of HR and leadership development
The truth will set you free.
But first, it will piss you off.
Bogus Models
A handful of bogus HR models
| Model | Description |
|---|---|
| Transactional Analysis | We make our life script in the first three years of life. |
| Spiral Dynamics | Oversimplified model of human consciousness that attempts to categorize complex value systems into rigid color-coded stages. |
| Top-down Performance Goals | Directives imposed by leadership onto employees without input, often leading to reduced engagement, creativity, and ownership. |
| GROW Model | Forces human development into a linear, formulaic approach that often ignores psychological barriers, emotional intelligence, and systemic obstacles, while creating artificial progress metrics. |
| Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs | Arranges human needs in a rigid pyramid from basic survival to self-actualization, failing to account for cultural differences or the non-linear nature of human motivation. |
| Communication Rule | Incorrectly suggests all communication is 7% verbal, 38% vocal, and 55% body language, when in fact the study was extremely limited to specific emotional expressions and never intended to be applied to general communication or business contexts. |
| Situational Leadership | Forces interactions into four rigid quadrants based on task and relationship behaviours, while failing to account for, power dynamics, and the fluid nature of leader and follower development. |
| Grief Model | Training based on the flawed Kübler-Ross Five Stages of Grief model (denial, anger, etc). |
| Myers-Briggs (MBTI) | The US National Research Council has calculated that people taking the MBTI a second time — after only four weeks — present at a rate of 60% as having an entirely different personality type from the first time. (sixteen types of personalities) |
| LIFO | Another ‘population distribution’ theory, looking ‘dichotomous’ (six types of personalities). |
| Insights Discovery | Based on new age paranormalmalism: Information is stored in a parallel universe, in stereotyped psychological archetypes. Insights are then gained through a paranormal process of accessing “color energy.” |
| Brain Dominance Instrument | Promotes a pseudoscientific view of brain lateralization that lacks neurological evidence while potentially pigeonholing individuals into fixed thinking styles that ignore the brain’s actual complexity and plasticity. |
| Enneagram | Based on Sufi teachings, this model promotes the notion of self-fulfilling prophecies, while commercializing ancient spiritual practices into a pop-psychology framework. |
| Belbin Team Roles | Forces individuals into nine predetermined roles, promoting rigid stereotyping that limits professional growth while ignoring the fluid, context-dependent nature of team contributions. |
| NLP | Neuro-Linguistic Programming makes unfounded claims about the relationship between language, behaviour, and neurological processes, promoting manipulative communication techniques and oversimplified models of human psychology. |
| Forced-Choice Questionnaires | Often leads to entirely opposite selection advice when compared to normative tests. |
| Learning Styles | People have four distinct learning styles. Some are more visual, others are more auditory, others are more kinesthetic. However, like all other primates, our visual sense is the most dominant in literally everyone, as extensive research has established. |
| Alpha Training | You can be more creative by ‘plugging into the universe’. |
| Equicoaching | You can be better with people by getting feedback from a horse. |
| 70:20:10 Model | A learning and development model that presents arbitrary and inflexible ratios for workplace learning (70% experiential, 20% social, 10% formal). |
| Forced Rankings | Forced Ranking (or “stack ranking”) is a destructive performance management system that artificially sorts employees into predetermined performance brackets, fostering toxic competition, destroying collaboration, demoralizing staff, and ultimately damaging organizational culture. |
| Rank and Yank | A demoralizing pattern of firing the bottom 10% annually, promoted by Jack Welch (Former CEO of GE). |
| Rank Order Tournament Theory | Less information sharing, more fraud, lowered group performance, the best people leaving first, and the perception that payment policy is highly unfair. |
| Organizational Constellations | People in a room — through a kind of paranormal or quantum process — can solve big problems. |
Scoring People
In 1996, Kuger and DeNisi had conducted a meta-analysis demonstrating that giving people a score has zero effect on performance. Only in the last decade, have some organizations started to abandon this practice.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Good Models
A handful of good HR models
It doesn’t have to be this way. We know that there exists good HR tools and frameworks.
| Model | Description |
|---|---|
| ProMES | Productivity Measurement and Enhancement System is a meta-analysis that has demonstrated increasing productivity while promoting autonomy within a team and organization. |
| Team Goals | Emerging organically from collaborative group discussion and shared purpose, team goals foster collective ownership and create meaningful objectives that align individual strengths with organizational needs. |
| Learning Goals | Most impactful when focused on mastery and personal growth rather than performance metrics. Individuals are allowed to embrace challenges, learn from failures, and develop new skills, with motivation and psychological safety maintained throughout the learning process. |
| Prosocial Goals | People thrive when they can align individual values with community benefit, creating meaningful impact through cooperation and mutual support rather than imposed directives. |
| Fairness — Salary | Salary transparency, when implemented thoughtfully — with clear compensation frameworks and open communication channels — empowers employees to make informed career decisions while helping organizations maintain pay equity and build trust. |
| Fairness —Voice Behaviour | Voice behaviour thrives when leaders create psychological safety and demonstrate genuine interest in employee input. This empowers employees to share concerns and ideas without fear, leading to improved engagement and innovation. |
| Avoid Social Comparison | While social comparison is a natural human tendency, organizations can minimize its negative effects by focusing on individual growth metrics, celebrating diverse forms of success, and creating a culture that emphasizes personal development over competitive rankings. |
| Recruitment & Selection tests | |
| Intelligence | Intelligence tests, when thoughtfully integrated with other assessment methods and administered early in hiring, provide valuable insights into cognitive capabilities while helping organizations make more objective, data-driven decisions that lead to successful long-term hires. |
| NEO-PI-R / Ocean | Five-factor model (Personalty Dimensions). The OCEAN model helps identify key personality traits that contribute to workplace success, providing valuable insights for team composition, personal development, and role alignment. |
| Hexaco | Six-factor model (Personalty Dimensions). Hexaco expands traditional personality assessment by adding Honesty-Humility to the five core traits, offering deeper insights into ethical behaviour and integrity while providing a more nuanced framework for understanding workplace dynamics and team compatibility. |
| Situational Judgement Tests | When designed with realistic scenarios and clear evaluation criteria, effectively predict job performance by assessing practical decision-making abilities and professional judgment while providing candidates fair opportunities to demonstrate their problem-solving capabilities in job-relevant contexts. |
| Work Samples | Thoroughly review the candidate’s existing portfolio. Ask: Does the candidate’s work align with the type of work that will be required? |
The best option we really have is science and reason.
Science is the only method we have invented to overcome our biases and thinking errors. It has allowed us to abandon practices like magic healing or witch burning, and it has given us many benefits like purified drinking water and lately, the Internet.
We don’t have to be scientists ourselves but we can enjoy science.
- Would you accept having surgery by a surgeon who never updates her skills?
- Would you accept taking a drug that doesn’t help, but has a lot of side effects?
- Would you accept it if an engineer lies about his degree as an engineer and builds an unstable bridge?
- Would you dare to fly with somebody who has never been trained as a pilot and fly on this plane?
I think the answer is clear — no.
The damage of using pseudoscience:
If you don’t accept a flawed blood test, you should not accept a flawed personality test, and if you don’t accept bogus cancer therapy, you should not accept bogus coaching.
If we don’t accept bad practices and lies in other fields of our lives, we should not accept them in HR.
Psychology
Psychology is based on biology
We have good explanations like psychology based on biology:
Competition AND collaboration, Derogation of Competitors, Interpersonal Circumplex, In-Group >< Out-Group, Need For Autonomy, Male Risk-Taking, Peer Pressure, Free Riding, Fairness, and many more.
Why The Best Hire Might Not Have the Perfect Resume
Two very distinct types of candidates.
The Silver Spoon
A person who clearly had advantages and was destined for success.
The Scrapper
A person who had to fight against tremendous odds to get to the same point.
A resume tells a story.
A series of odd jobs may indicate inconsistency, lack of focus, or unpredictability… or it may signal a committed struggle against obstacles. At the very least, the scrapper deserves an interview.
If your whole life has been engineered towards success, how will you handle the tough times?
Post Traumatic Growth
Conventional thinking has been that trauma leads to distress. And there’s been a lot of focus on the resulting dysfunction. But during studies of dysfunction, data revealed an unexpected insight: That even the worst circumstances can result in growth and transformation.
Example resume:
- Parents give him up for adoption
- Doesn’t finish college
- Job-hops quite a bit
- Goes on a sojourn to India for a year
- And to top it off, he has dyslexia
Would you hire this guy?
His name is Steve Jobs.
Successful people who have had trauma:
“They don’t think they are who they are in spite of adversity,
they know they are who they are because of adversity.”
Scrappers are propelled by the belief that the only person you have full control over is yourself.
When things don’t turn out well, Scrappers ask, “What can I do differently to create a better result?”
The Best Recruiter at Google
Google created: A self-replicating Talent Machine
+3M applications per year, hire about 700. = 1/428 people who apply get a job.
How do you find, and how do you filter candidates?
Be a “talent magnet.” The best way to attract great employees is by showing off a company culture that encourages new ideas, creativity, and personal growth.
How do you get an A-Player to take the risk of moving to a new company?
Set an incredibly high bar for talent and quality, and never, ever, ever, compromise.
Everyone in the company was focused on recruiting. Our top executives would spend one full day a week or more interviewing, assessing candidates, sourcing candidates, and recruiting candidates.
How do you assess people?
Assess candidates objectively. Science FTW.
Fascinating research shows, even with the best of intentions, our brains conspire to cause us to make bad hiring decisions.
Unconscious Bias
- Recordings of 20-30 minute interviews, by trained interviewers.
- Turned off the sound and showed the interviews to ‘naive observers’.
- Can you predict whether or not the person got hired?
- They showed 30-min interviews, then 20, then less and less.
- How long does a ‘naive observer’ need to be able to make the same assessment as a trained professional?
10 seconds
It takes about 10 seconds for an untrained person to watch an interview, and predict with high accuracy if the trained interviewer will make a hire. What does this information tell us?
- We make decisions in ‘thin slices’ of information (in the first 10 seconds)
- We spend the rest of the interview [candidate journey] trying to confirm or deny that hypothesis
Hiring Managers were not allowed to make the hire.
Conclusion: Interviews are not really reliable.
Very few companies look at the initial interview assessment and then go back to track what happens to performance over time, and do the interviews actually predict performance?
The Good News
Fortunately, there’s been over a hundred years of research on selection.
How do you solve the problem of bias in the interview process?
Have very clear criteria upfront. This is not the garbage that goes in the job description.
Google’s Criteria
Four Criteria of a Google Interview
- General Cognitive Ability
– Not test scores, GPAs, or brain teasers.
– The science shows, the #1 predictor of job performance is a job test.
– Alternatively: How well can somebody solve problems? How curious are they? How fast are they in picking new things up? - Leadership
– We’re looking for ‘emergent leadership.’
– We want somebody, who when they see a problem, and is part of a team, they step up. They help solve that problem. Just as importantly, once the problem is resolved, they step back out. They are willing to relinquish power. - Googleyness
– Are you comfortable with ambiguity? We have a very ambiguous environment, doing lots of crazy things.
– Do you have intellectual humility? You’re able to say you were wrong, when presented with new data.
– Can you bring something new and different to our organization? - Role-related Knowledge
– Do you have the skills and knowledge to do the job we’re hiring you for?
If you have the first three attributes, you’ll figure out the rest. You’re likely to come up with a new solution, that nobody else has seen.
Structured Interviews
Consistent and similar questions.
Situational
Hypothetical questions.
Behavioural
Describe a prior achievement. “Give me an example of an incredibly difficult problem you’ve solved.”
Five Key Things To Consider When Looking For The Right People
Five basic elements, five basic criteria for being a right person on the bus.
- The person must share the core values.
- A right person on the bus is not somebody whom you need to manage.
- In key positions, do they have exceptional capability in the areas that the role demands?
- The individual understands the difference between having a job and holding a responsibility.
- If it were a hiring decision all over again, given everything that you know, having worked with this person, would you still hire them?
1. Share Core Values
I’ve had people come to my laboratory and say, “Jim, how do we get people to share our core values?” My answer is always the same. “You don’t. You can’t.”
“If somebody doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong by the time they’re thirty, they probably never will.”
The whole task is to find people who are already predisposed to your core values.
Those who do not have a predisposition to sharing the core values get ejected like a virus, escorted right out the door by the organizational antibodies.
2. Doesn’t Need To Be Managed
The moment you feel the need to manage somebody, or tightly manage them, you’ve probably made a hiring mistake.
Two types of people.
- You guide, you teach, you lead, you provide them with actionable knowledge and understanding, and you help them grow into and even beyond their role. You don’t spend time compensating for the person.
- You spend a lot of time compensating for the person, wasting time managing them into the right behaviours. It takes a lot of energy and puts an ongoing drain on you and the organization.
3. Exceptional Capability
In the seat that they hold, could they potentially be one of the best in the industry, one of the best in the field in which your organization operates?
4. Responsibilities > Having a Job
“Let me put it to you this way. If you were an air-traffic controller and you did a good job, you did all the right things, but the planes still crashed, would it matter?”
The truth is, you have a responsibility that goes far beyond just having a job: the responsibility to worry three steps ahead. Understanding that distinction is one of the crucial dimensions of getting the right people on the bus.
5. Would you re-hire this person enthusiastically?
Apply the following litmus test question: if it were a hiring decision all over again, given everything that you know, having worked with this person, would you still hire them?
—
Lastly, regarding the right people on the bus — you must be fair.
Ask yourself the following question: if you’re wondering about somebody, do you have a bus problem or do you have a seat problem?
It could be that you have a wonderful person on the bus, but you’ve made a managerial mistake and put that person in the wrong seat.
Question No. 1 should always be: Do I have the right person in the right seat, or do I have the right person in the wrong seat? When in doubt, be fair.
