Finding Amazing Employees

Hello again, everyone. I hope you’re all having a fantastic day. I want to thank you again for joining me for this blog post. Offering small business help is my passion and I love providing sales coaching, business consulting, and other relevant services that make life easier for those in the small business community. I really enjoy sharing things I’ve learned throughout the years that can help you create the kind of business you want.

Today, we’re going to talk about how to think your way into finding amazing employees. And what I want to challenge you to do right now is if you have a company and you’re looking to recruit or add people to your team, think about how an A-Player thinks. In other words, enter the mind of an A-Player.

1.) Enter

An A-Player is someone who is one of the top 10 to 20% out there to fill your job position. So if it’s a $25 an hour position, you’ll want the top 10 to 20% to fill your position. Think about how an A-Player thinks, and I’m going to talk specifically about an A-Player who’s looking for a leadership position in the company. First and foremost, an A-Player does think about company loyalty. If they come to you they will have been working for a while, they stay in positions 5 years, 6 years, 7 years, or more. They have consistency. And I know that’s changing in the market in terms of there’s more people that aren’t staying as long and that’s definitely the trend. But if you’re looking for an A-Player you want someone who has loyalty.

A-Players think about a degree of loyalty to their organization, but not necessarily at the expense of their own career advancement. They’re not going to be blindly loyal, but generally speaking there’s a level of loyalty that A-Players have to the organization if they’re working for an organization that takes care of them in terms of the environment they’re in and making sure that they get paid fairly compared to the market rate, among other things. They’ve been with the company for a while. That’s an A-Player.

Also, when they’re looking for a position an A-Player often already has a position. Now we’ve certainly hired a lot of people that just lost their job or were transitioning out of their job for many reasons, and you can certainly find A-Players in those situations. But usually the best A-Players actually have a job while they’re looking for another job. When they start looking, they’re actually working for the other company and they’re still performing well at a high level while they’re looking for another job. That is an A-Player.

An A-Player also wants to fit into a culture. So when they’re looking to interview they’re not just looking at what the job is, they’re looking at the environment, they’re looking at online reviews, and about what customers say about the company. They’re looking holistically at the company because they want to be somewhere that culturally fits for them, a good place for them to be from an environment standpoint.

2.) Coach

A-Players maybe have a lot of experience and have learned a lot, but they also like training. They like to be coached. In many cases when I talk to business owners they want to find someone who doesn’t need any training and doesn’t need any coaching because they just want them to jump right into the position. But listen, A-Players want to be challenged, they want to be coached, they want to have goals that are challenging, and they like training.

An A-Player also wants to be rewarded based on the results they produce. Results through the growth of what they produce for the company in whatever position they’re in. So as you think about how to attract someone like that, there needs to be some sort of stability in the job from a compensation standpoint but there also need to be extra things involved when they produce results.

Another important thing is that an A-Player wants their voice to be heard, especially in a leadership position they want to be able to contribute and they want their voice and their ideas to impact the results of the company. Oftentimes even in interviews I find many owners that are interviewing or managers that are interviewing talk too much, they don’t listen enough. In most cases you can learn so much, even if you don’t hire a candidate, from what they’re saying and their ideas.

But an A-Player certainly wants to join an organization where they can be heard. An A-Player also knows their market worth. They know the value they have in the marketplace. They already know what fair compensation is they already know what they’re monetarily worth. So A-Players are going to come in already knowing that as they’re interviewing to join your organization.

3.) Pursue

The last thing I’m going to talk about, is an A-Player wants to be pursued. They almost want to be sold, they want to be desired, they want you to go after them and so certainly if you interview you need to ask tough questions, which A-Players like, by the way. A-Players like references, they like reference checks, because everyone in the past will give them glowing references and are excited to say what a great job they did. That’s what A-Players are. But at some point there needs to be some type of transition in that it’s an interview but you’re also selling the company and the dream and the vision of what this person could do in your company and they want to be sold, they want to be pursued, and that means follow-up. Oftentimes many A-Players are lost by many organizations and I can tell you firsthand it’s because people don’t follow-up with them fast enough.

After one interview, time lapses, the owner or leader gets lazy, they get busy and the A-Player, who is being pursued by other companies, gets grabbed. They get acquired by someone else, someone else hires them. So you have to pursue them, you have to treat them like your best client, best potential client, or best potential employee, you really have to pursue them while you’re making sure it’s the right fit. These are all things that are involved in the way A-Players think.

So go out there, think like an A-Player, think differently, hopefully it’ll effect your recruitment and hiring process, take action, massive action, and have fun building your team.