The A-Players, G.O.A.T.s, superstars—however you describe the best employees on your team, you’re going to want to find them, hire them and keep them.
Learn how to hire good employees—like, really good employees—with this ultimate guide to creative hiring strategies for enticing better people into your business.
It can feel like everyone has a horror story of working with someone really difficult/rubbish/borderline psychotic/lazy (go on, what’s yours?). But what about the really amazing people who bring a team together and unlock new potential in a business? We’re talking about the A-players, the really good candidates who perform consistently well in a job, whether it’s seamless project management, natural leadership skills or putting in the extra graft in the lead up to a deadline.
“A small team of A-plus players can run circles around a big team of B and C players.” - Steve Jobs
A-players are the secret to a stable and productive work culture. They are the star employees who make everything else run more smoothly. High performing employees also inspire a more creative and proactive outlook in others around them, having a positive knock-on effect of encouraging other staff members to stay in companies for longer.
So, A-players are great, right? They sure are, but they can be slippery fish to keep in your net. The best employees have a lot of options, and can easily go elsewhere (hello, headhunters). So how do you retain good employees, as well as attract them? In this article, we’ll look at exactly how to do this, as well as:
01 - What Are the Advantages of Hiring High-Performing Employees?
There’s a secret to good business, and it’s not keeping expenses low or introducing Pizza Fridays at the office. It’s simple:
To keep your business profitable, stable and productive, you just need to hire good people.
It really is as black and white as that. Get good people—and particularly good team leaders—on board, and it will be plain sailing. And another thing to keep in mind while we’re at it:
To keep your business profitable, stable and productive, you don’t need to hire lots of people, just a few really good people.
If you can find and recruit A-players, you’ll find that you won’t need to hire as often or as broadly, and your whole work culture will be much more pleasant to work in to boot! Other advantages of hiring A-players include:
Bringing in exceptional talent, ideas and capabilities into your business.
Lowering costs on hiring more widely, and sidestepping any ‘revolving door’ effect of quick staff turnover.
Boosting the productivity, creativity and motivation of other team members (the Pull-Up Effect).
Building in long-term loyalty to your teams, with staff less likely to jump ship as long as the A-Player remains at the company*.
*Yup, there’s a catch—there’s an art to retaining A-Players, but we’ll come on to that.
02 - How to Find Good Employees
In theory, finding great talent should be a whole load easier now we have online recruitment resources to hand, allowing us to view a whole library of potential candidates.
However, the sheer volume of candidate profiles available online, coupled with the difficulty of assessing whether someone has really achieved what they say they have, has made hiring the best employees surprisingly difficult.
3 out of 4 UK businesses (74%) say hiring has become harder in the past five years, according to an Indeed survey of 1000 employees and 1000 hiring professionals.
An intriguing reason for this? 66% of the candidates contacted in the survey said that companies could do a better job of reviewing their skills and experience before contacting them. In other words, employers and recruiters aren’t doing their research (or lack the tools to do so), and are wasting time reaching out to individuals who don’t fit the job spec, let alone the A-player mould.
How to Interview A-Players
Luckily, there are some new tech tools on the block to help businesses find good employees faster. Smart background screening takes the bare-bones information you can find on LinkedIn to a new, in-depth level, helping you see exactly who will be the right fit for your team.
You can see LinkedIn as a bit of a shot-in-the-dark platform—no doubt all the A players you want to entice into your company are on there, but you often need to misfire a few times to find them.
With an AI screening tool like YOONO you can search for an individual, generating a complete background report that covers their social media presence, educational background, employment history, as well as useful additions, such as endorsements, skills and financial connections.
YOONO gives you a much fuller picture of someone than any other platform can, helping you find those hidden gems, the A-players who give work their all and volunteer at dog shelters at the weekend (yes, really!).
While many hirers might see background screening as a way of simply assessing if somebody is legitimate, the clever way to use screening checks is to see these as a way of identifying hidden gems in your candidate list. People who have special talents that will bring additional value into your business, or personality traits that will make running a team altogether smoother and more enjoyable for everyone.
Smart screening is your secret tool for finding A-Player traits that aren’t listed on a CV.
03 - How to Keep the Best Employees
So you’ve found your star employee, and kept the deal sweet with regular promotions and rewards. But is that enough to keep your A-Player around?
Unfortunately, the answer is a straight-up no. Sure, keeping your best employees content with adequate pay certainly helps (see below), but the best workers in your company will need a lot more than financial incentive to stick around for the long-term. Here are three ways you can keep better employees around for longer:
Pay a competitive salary, and frequently increase it. The very best employees will be subject to ongoing headhunting offers, promising enticing salaries with different companies. A-Players don’t tend to be driven by money alone, but they are often highly driven by ambition and status. When a rival company offers them a higher salary than what you are offering, this flatters the employee and can easily lead to a grass-is-greener mentality. And once that sets in, you’ve lost their attention (and loyalty). The best way to think about A-Players is that you could be otherwise hiring a team of 4 or 5 B- and C-Players in their place. So pay them accordingly.
Offer ambitious climbing potential. A-Players are the best employees because they have high drive and ambition to succeed, for both the company they work for and themselves. To tap into this desire to succeed, you need to create an ‘open world’ for your most valued employees, in which they can climb the ladder, explore different potentials in their job role and build more autonomy into their job along the way. This way, they’re less likely to seek climbing opportunities outside of your company.
Go beyond conventional ‘perks’. How to find the best employees for your company is rarely a case of offering gym memberships and free lunches. While these traditional company perks are beneficial for boosting team morale and staff retention, A-Players need extras that lie outside of the usual list. Ongoing training, skill-building opportunities and networking events will tap into the driven nature of these top employees.
How to Lift C- and B-Players to A-Player Status
Of course, A-Players have to come from somewhere. These successful and driven individuals were all, at one time, interns or assistants, eager to learn and get somewhere in their career. Spotting the potential for A-Players can be as close to home as within your existing team, and it’s important to pay as much attention to lifting current employees up as it is to recruit from the outside.
Organising collaborative events or optional training opportunities is a great way to see who has the ambition to succeed, and who will go above and beyond the usual 9-to-5. Promoting talented workers to mentoring or leadership roles can channel these ambitions into something much more exciting, and you might find you have an A-Player right in front of your nose after all.
Building Your Best Ever Team with A-Players
Perhaps you think sports analogies are a little old-hat when it comes to business, but there really is value in thinking strategically when it comes to recruiting talent for your team. Some of the world’s most successful companies, including Apple, Google, Netflix and Meta, have all used the A-Player formula to build teams from the ground-up, with exceptionally talented individuals at their core.
The best employees strike the perfect balance of personal ambition and a willingness to serve the interests of the company, and with the right incentives it is possible to retain these A-Players for a long time.
In this article, we’ve looked at different strategies for finding, recruiting and retaining the best employees, including smart screening to find people with hidden value for your business, and interviewing candidates with desirable answers in mind. And remember, your next best employee might be within your company already, so it’s always worth taking a fresh look at your existing team before you hire externally, too.
