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

‘‘Always keep your couch full,’’ something he reiterated so frequently
that his team made fun of him for saying it so much. That’s
when he knew that his message was getting through.
Interview All the Time
Three Steps to Creating an A-Player Team 41
A-Player Principle: When everyone inside and outside
your organization knows that you’re always interested in
interviewing talented people, you have succeeded in
creating an A-player mind-set.
The second step to creating an A-player team is to interview all the
time. If you claim to have an A-player mind-set, you have to deliver
on this by continually (not periodically) interviewing people. Every
business with which I work that has superior recruiting results has
a consistent flow of job candidates through its offices. This does not
mean that you should (or could) interview people every single day.
It works well in most organizations for each member of a leadership
team to commit to interviewing two people per month. If there are
seven people on your management team and you each interview
two people per month, you will have met with 168 potential
employees in a year. Chances are you will find a few A-players in
the process!
Interviewing regularly makes the A-player mind-set work. If, for
example, you want to get into top physical shape but only exercise
intermittently and don’t make any changes to your diet, how will
your results be? Probably pretty lousy. To do things well, we must
do them consistently. Your vision for building a great team has to
show up in your weekly calendar. At some level, recruiting and hiring
is a numbers game: If you interview more people, you will find
more A-players. Every idea in this book is focused on filling your
talent pipeline with a higher number of quality candidates. The
way to take advantage of these expanded pools of talent is to make