On hiring - A-players and the folly of the ideal candidate
If you're at a startup delaying hiring looking for perfect, you're causing your company unnecessary harm.
Every startup leader I’ve ever advised or worked with has always wanted to hire the best.
They wanted an ideal candidate that can do everything and anything. Experts in the domain, the technology, the process, the company stage, and a representative of all of its values. They wanted someone who could hop into any challenge, context, or circumstance and absolutely crush it with little to no support or course-correction.
To support this, they would define a hiring strategy around this ideal. They’d issues directives and make statements like:
“Hire only the best.”
“Hire only people we are all extremely excited about.”
“Hire excellent people and get out of their way.”
“Hire without compromise.”
“Hire the cream of the crop.”
“Hire A-players.”
A-players. Whenever I asked these leaers to describe their A-players, what they really described was their perfect candidate - the everything for everyone, all at once. No flaws. No weaknesses. All strength. Pure, perfect fit. They wanted the “purple squirrel” or “unicorn” of candidates. In most cases, at a discount, too.
Intentionally or not, this drive for perfect forced a hiring process where candidates had to meet two near-impossible criteria:
These candidates had to be great at everything. Any problem the company has, any situation the team is in, any obstacle presented - the A-player is expected to be able to already have the knowledge and the experience, be able to speak to it, and perform with excellence and achieve amazing outcomes.
If they can’t, they by definition aren’t an A-player, and should be rejected. Multiple rounds of interviews from a cross-functional group had to be done to assess their skills comprehensively to these exacting standards.These candidates had to have no weaknesses. Any red flag or yellow flag during the hiring process was a reason to reject the candidate. The best of the best by definition could not have any compromises.
Therefore, it had to be a unanimous decision to hire by the committee.
In short - the candidate has to be perfect.
This single expectation has caused many startups to suffer, unable to find people they needed to deliver their product or achieve their outcomes. People got frustrated at extended hiring with no movement, missed opportunities as a result of a lack of resourcing, and the feeling of getting stretched thinner and thinner. It was an insidious path to burnout and churn. Most of the time it didn’t result in hiring A-players - just people who could talk like them.
All because of the desire to hire perfect A-players.
Hiring for perfect
Let’s suppose that there is a person out there that meet the leader’s expectation of perfection and they can seemingly can do it all.
What then?
Think about it just from the lens of a candidate that is truly exceptional in every way:
They can get any compensation they want. Why would they join your startup? Are you offering far-above market compensation to attract them? Is there some ridiculously high chance of a major liquidity event? Are you going to give life-changing amounts of equity or salary? If you’re early-stage, probably not.
They can join any kind of company they want. Is your company doing interesting, exciting, bleeding edge things? Are you on the cutting edge of the latest and the greatest? Are you solving some intractable problem? Most products are CRUD apps, and aren’t going to usher in the next global paradigm.
They can join any culture they want. Are you going to give them the autonomy and resources to do what they want to do? Do you have amazing, industry-leading people already that they want to work with? Chances are slim.
They can work towards any purpose they want. Is your mission and culture outstanding beyond any other company? Is your company branding something they want to see on their resume? Are you saving lives, or doing something that gives meaning and intent?
Every negative answer to these questions increases the time it takes to hire. Why would they join your company? What gives your startup the competitive edge in their hiring relative to other companies?
That’s not even factoring whether these folks are in your network, the precise timing of hiring these candidates required since they are rarely between jobs, or the question of whether your company can even properly assess their perfect skillsets in the first place.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to find amazing, talented perfect candidates. It’s just that the deck is stacked against you. If hiring these folks is going to be the foundation of your hiring strategy, at minimum you’re greatly extending the time it takes to hire - often by a factor 5x to 10x. A position you could have hired in a month or two might take a year to find.
If you’re hiring at a startup, you likely don’t have that much time. You need people delivering and executing now for opportunities that are immediate. The longer you wait, the higher the cost. It’s not just the cost of interviewing - it’s the cost of doing nothing - the opportunity cost which is so critical to startups.
Yeah, you might get lucky and find the perfect candidate. However, “being lucky” is not a strategy. Startups shouldn’t base the foundational strategy of their hiring on someone they’ll only find through luck.
You can’t patch a bad hiring strategy
A hiring strategy that relies on finding perfect candidates has extreme costs;
The process is more expensive, as more time is required and more people are needed to assess
Hiring is much slower, leaving critical gaps unfilled and accumulating opportunity cost
It stretches the members of the interview panel thin, as they continue interviewing on top of their day-to-day and filling gaps that continue to exist and widen
Some leaders try to optimize for these specific individual problems instead of addressing the elephant in the room with their strategy. They try to patch the problems individually:
Hiring is too expensive, so they reduce the number of people on the interview panel. The problem with that is people are on the panel for a reason - removing them likely decreases visibility into skillsets, which makes hiring even more of a gamble.
Hiring is too time-consuming, so they optimize for the schedules of the most expensive people. The problem with this is introduces further delays in meeting and making decisions on hire/no-hire.
Hiring is leading to a late-stage rejections, so they increase the standards earlier in the funnel. The problem with that is that rejection decisions then get made even earlier when signals are still weak, further causing perfectionism to occur.
Hiring is causing the interview panel to get stretched thin, so they reduce the number of focuses they need to have. The problem with that is if you could reduce the focuses without it coming back to bite you, then you probably didn’t need to be doing that thing in the first place. If it’s just going to come back and cause issues to your panel, all it does is create additional hectic cleanup for the team to do later.
None of these solutions address the root of the problem - the expectation of perfection. You see - many startup leaders don’t actually know what an A-player is.
They expect perfect, but “A”-players aren’t perfect.
Note: of course, if you can reduce focuses safely, you should definitely do so. That’s not a hiring issue so much as a strategic decision around the company’s competitive edge of having only a few things to worry about.
The reality of the A-player
As someone who has worked with A-players in their career, I can absolutely tell you they aren’t perfect specimens of humanity.
Amazing, excellent, with fantastic strengths and great impact - but still very much human. Like all humans, they have strengths, but they also have weaknesses.
A-players have weaknesses
Think about what it takes to become an A-player:
Years, maybe decades, spent honing particular skills and crafts
Consistent practice, education, learning, and training
Opportunities for deep and varied experience
Intentional retrospection and introspection to self-improve
It takes a lot of time and energy to be an A-player, not to mention opportunity in itself requires luck in addition to preparation.
To be excellent at an “A-player” level requires focus. Focus, by definition, requires things not relevant to that focus to be ignored. The ignored things naturally won’t be strengths - at best, passable. To even be an “A-player”, it’s likely the person had to have focused on their strengths and thus a small set of skills, highly refined and leveraged.
Very few A-players want to not use their skills. After a lifetime of building excellence, why wouldn’t you want to leverage them?
It’s why you rarely see a star football player also trying to be a movie star while studying astrophysics and building a startup while getting a degree in mathematics. There’s not enough time in the day for most people to become excellent or the top of their field at more than one thing, let alone three. Once they’re good at a skill, they want to keep leveraging that skill and building on it even further. They stick to their strengths and build up the lane they are excellent at for maximum leverage.
Well, except for this guy, who somehow managed to become a Navy Seal, a Doctor, and an Astronaut:
Besides him, I can’t think of many other people who did that.
Examining an A-player
Let’s illustrate with an example. Let’s say we found an amazing technologist - what have they ignored or paid less attention to in order to get where they are?
Perhaps:
they have an ego, or challenges or difficulties working with others (eg. prickly, lower EQ)
maybe they are an expert at a specific thing, but below effective at others (eg. a database expert who has no idea how front-end state is stored)
maybe they don’t want to do grunt work (eg. administrative tasks, or fixing small bugs)
maybe they have deep, deep curiosity into one area but zero interest in others (eg. dives into the internals of the JS compiler but won’t ever write an API endpoint)
maybe they’re bad at keeping track of their work in a way visible to the rest of the organization (eg. communicating or managing their projects)
It doesn’t mean these weaknesses aren’t fixable or even huge issues. It also doesn’t mean to compromise - if teamwork is important, then obviously don’t hire a brilliant jerk.
It just shows that expecting an A-player to not have any weaknesses that will get them disqualified means you’re hiring in the realm of unrealistic expectations.
A-players aren’t actually great at everything
Turns out A-players are more like T-players, n-players, or m-players. That is, if you look at a visualization of their skillsets, you see something like this:
A T-shaped person has a broad foundation with a skill spike that represents their specialty. Sometimes, you get lucky and find someone with more specialties. Maybe three, if you’re extremely lucky.
Two or three isn’t anywhere close to “good at everything”. Even the best people in the world can’t do everything themselves at the same level of market-leading excellence.
Instead, an A-player is more accurately described as “great at one or two things, passable-to-fine at most other things”, an important distinction when you’re looking for perfect.
When an A-player does something they are’t great at - surprise: they put in a lot of energy but the outcome ends up not being particularly good. By the definition of many hiring standards looking for perfect - that’s a weakness that would lead to a rejection.
If A-players have weaknesses, and they actually aren’t great at everything, then a hiring process that looks for no weaknesses and strengths everywhere is likely rejecting many talented, high-impact A-players.
How to fix your hiring
By now you should realize that the ideal of A-players and the reality are two very different things.
At this point - leaders need to recognize that the ideal is the problem and fix their hiring strategy.
Stop expecting perfection
Recognize that A-players have weaknesses. A yellow flag during an interview is OK, especially if that weakness can be worked on, mitigated, or even covered by the strengths of others on the team. It doesn’t make them any less an A-player.
In the quest to hire the perfect individual, we often forget we work together as a team. You don’t actually need to have the perfect individual to have the perfect team. Strengths and weaknesses can overlap on a team to cover gaps in individual weaknesses and maximize overlapping strengths.
Teamwork truly does make the dream work.
Be realistic about your needs
Chances are you don’t actually need all of the criteria you’re looking for, particularly if you factor in your stage of growth and the work that you do.
It’s easier to find A-players if they don’t have to be an “A” at a dozen different skillsets, half of which you don’t actually need or are capable of leveraging in your company.
Be realistic. Bump down or discard some of those extraneous ones - especially if they can be taught or covered by others.
Truly assess your needs. Requirements creep in job descriptions kind of just sneaks in - this train of thinking and decisions happens all too often:
We want someone who can deliver front-end code really well.
We also want them to be able to do back-end, too.
Actually - full-stack, with database and data modeling, too.
Well, we do our own deploys here, so they should have dev-ops experience with infrastructure and networking.
We also really want people focused on the user and customer, so really good product-thinking and product-sense as well.
To make that valuable, they should also understand our business, so familiarity with SaaS revenue modeling is a must.
Also - we want someone who can hit the ground running, so they’ll need to know our tech stack exactly.
Don’t forget our industry - they need to have experience in global shipping logistics.
We’ll probably want to expand the team at some point, so managerial experience would be nice so we can have them manage at some point.
Actually, the team they’re on doesn’t have a designer, so some UX experience would be great.
By the end, there’s a laundry list of 30 things that maybe 10 people in the industry fit, of which only 5 are true needs. Be judicious.
Be sure you actually want an A-player
A lot of times, I find that startup leaders have actually conflated an A-player with something far easier to hire for: an adaptable, good-enough generalist.
No one person can be expected to handle deep nuances of everything from security to development to policy to legal to marketing to budgets to logistics to financials to people operations to sales to pricing and everything in-between. That’s perfection.
However, you can absolutely expect someone to pitch in and learn quickly some of the basics in all of these areas. A good generalist can do decent enough for most problems encountered. Groups of generalists can gap fill and build on each other and get you quite far - a team-wide adaptability that is extremely useful for startups,.
While you won’t get the same skill depth from hiring generalists as you would from the truly specialized expertise of A-players, you might not actually need the specialized skillset at all.
Hire B-players, too
For all the talk of hiring A-players, don’t overlook the fact that you can do extremely well with B-players - especially those who have significant unrealized potential.
B-players are decent folks who do a good job. They might not have deep expertise, or a track record of wins, but they can absolutely do well in keeping your company moving forward. One upside is that B-players are also more likely to be generalists - many haven’t even gone down a specialty yet.
It’s also the single-most reliable way I’ve found to get actual A-players into your organization. Hire B-players with high potential and invest in them. It’s easier to hire people who aren’t quite there yet, take 6, 9, 12 months to get them to be the A-players they can be. It is an investment - you need a good learning culture and give space, resources, and time to realize the benefit - but the benefit is massive.
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