How Do You Identify A-player Applicants?

Are you concerned about staffing? We are.

I hear from business leaders every day that their #1 pain point right now is finding talent.

I have seen this in my hiring process as well. We are getting less and less applications, and almost none of them are qualified.

When I was back in Nashville two weeks ago, Robert Herjavec talked about this exact topic.

How do you identify A-player applicants?

His answer surprised me but made total sense.

“Where do you need the A-players?” Robert said, “Because trying to build a team of just A-players is like saying I’m gonna build a basketball team and only hire Michael Jordans. It’s never gonna happen. You are never going to build a large-scale, scalable business with just A-players. Never gonna happen.”

Robert continued, “To build scale, you’re actually gonna have to hire a lot of B-players, and you’re going to have to make decisions about your C-players pretty quicky.”

🤔

In any company, the bulk of the team is B-players – they are nice, they arrive on time, they have a good work ethic, and they are even good at their job. None of these things makes someone an A-player.

A-players have the ability to lead. Your leadership team should be made of A-players who have a “proven ability to build the people underneath them.” But for the 80% of the company that is the heart and soul of the business, you just need B-players.

Another bit of advice from Robert: “You don’t need to hire friends.” You need to hire “people who respect each other and understand the mission and the goal of every person on that team.”

If you are just hiring people you want to have lunch with, you are going to have a hard time scaling your business.

TotalCare IT can help you scale.

If you need an A-player technology advisor on your leadership team, reach out to me today. TotalCare IT has been making technology support and cybersecurity easy for Idaho businesses since 2007. How do we advise you?

• We help CEOs understand their risk tolerance, compliance needs, and liability in incident prevention/response/recovery.

• We guide your leadership team through alignment to data security standards.

• If you have internal IT resources (CIO, Director of IT, etc.), we support and enhance this function with added expertise, bandwidth, and cybersecurity.

• We support your employees with technical services (I.T. helpdesk) and cyber hygiene.

Dedicated to securing Idaho businesses,

Aaron Zimmerman
President, TotalCare IT