How to Hire A-Players: Finding the Top People for Your Team - Even If You Don't Have a Recruiting Department

Introduction: Where Do I Find Great People?

"Eric, where do I find great people?"

This is the question clients ask me more often than any other. "Sure, sure," they say, "I know we should interview more and be willing to train extensively. But how do I find great people in the first place?"

I wrote this book to provide an answer, once and for all, to that question. It is an executive's playbook written for busy managers who want strategies and tactics for building a team of A-players.

What's my definition of an A-player? An A-player is an employee who creates superior results compared to the vast majority of other people who hold the same position in your industry. If you want to build an A-player team, you need to stop trying to turn poor performers into top performers and commit more time to finding and hiring A-players. Then, invest the same leadership and coaching time with them that you used to spend trying to fix your poor performers. You will be amazed at the measurable improvement in results that you see.

Here's just one example of what one A-player can do for a company. Alex and James, principals at an architectural firm, hired me to help improve sales results and staff productivity. Through a lot of intensive work, we freed up Alex and James to sell more business, got the senior architects below them effectively managing projects, and helped the project architects to develop the skills they needed to run their own projects without much handholding. It was a lot of work, but ...