How to Hire A-Players: Finding the Top People for ... - GIT home page

interview process. Take the time to create these Profiles for key positions
and make sure that you and your people have bought into
them. This will help you to say no to average performers and to
recognize superior performers when you see them.
Capture and Quantify Your A-Player Profile
As I will discuss in Chapter 10, there are terrific personnel assessments
out there that measure both the requirements of a job and a
candidate’s likelihood of being an A-player. If you capture and
quantify your A-Player Profile using these tools, you can then compare
job candidates to the Profile and see their strengths and weaknesses.
These tools make interviewing more focused and effective.
They help you to stay objective about people, weed out those who
look good but lack substance, and focus on A-players you might
otherwise have missed.
Create an Interview Scorecard
Interviewing and the Economic Value of Good Looks 157
A-Player Principle: Define your A-Player Profile before you
interview anyone! Then, capture and quantify this Profile
with a proven assessment tool so you can weed out
mediocre talent and focus on the A-players.
Once you have defined success for the position and created the
benchmark just described, you can quickly construct an interview
scorecard. This does not need to be anything fancy. One entrepreneur
I know has a simple card printed up with the five characteristics
his company looks for when hiring for a sales position. Every
interviewer gives candidates a score from one to five for each characteristic,
as well as an overall score using the same scale. This helps
the interviewers focus on issues that connect with job performance,
judge every candidate according to the same criteria, and compare
their impressions of candidates with those of the other interviewers.